from the native element furnished by the Old Northwest. The original
Populists in the Kansas legislature of 1891 were born in different
States as follows: in Ohio, twelve; Indiana, six; Illinois, five; New
York, four; Pennsylvania, two; Connecticut, Vermont, and Maine, one
each,--making a total, for the Northern current, of thirty-two. Of the
remaining eighteen, thirteen were from the South, and one each from
Kansas, Missouri, California, England and Ireland. Nearly all were
Methodists and former Republicans.[238:1]

Looking at the silver movement more largely, we find that of the Kansas
delegation in the Fifty-fourth Congress, one was born in Kansas, and the
rest in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Maine.
All of the Nebraska delegation in the House came from the Old Northwest
or from Iowa. The biographies of the two Representatives from the State
of Washington tell an interesting story. These men came as children to
the pine woods of Wisconsin, took up public lands, and worked on the
farm and in the pineries. One passed on to a homestead in Nebraska
before settling in Washington. Thus they kept one stage ahead of the
social transformations of the West. This is the usual training of the
Western politicians. If the reader would see a picture of the
representative Kansas Populist, let him examine the family portraits of
the Ohio farmer in the middle of this century.

In a word, the Populist is the American farmer who has kept in advance
of the economic and social transformations that have overtaken those
who remained behind. While, doubtless, investigation into the ancestry
of the Populists and "silver men" who came to the prairies from the Old
Northwest would show a large proportion of Southern origin, yet the
center of discontent seems to have been among the men of the New England
and New York current. If New England looks with care at these men, she
may recognize in them the familiar lineaments of the embattled farmers
who fired the shot heard round the world. The continuous advance of this
pioneer stock from New England has preserved for us the older type of
the pioneer of frontier New England.

I do not overlook the transforming influences of the wilderness on this
stock ever since it left the earlier frontier to follow up the valleys
of western Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont, into western New
York, into Ohio, into Iowa, and out to the arid plains of western Kansas
and Nebraska;