nor do I overlook the peculiar industrial conditions of
the prairie States. But I desire to insist upon the other truth, also,
that these westward immigrants, keeping for generations in advance of
the transforming industrial and social forces that have wrought so vast
a revolution in the older regions of the East which they left, could not
but preserve important aspects of the older farmer type. In the arid
West these pioneers have halted and have turned to perceive an altered
nation and changed social ideals. They see the sharp contrast between
their traditional idea of America, as the land of opportunity, the land
of the self-made man, free from class distinctions and from the power of
wealth, and the existing America, so unlike the earlier ideal. If we
follow back the line of march of the Puritan farmer, we shall see how
responsive he has always been to _isms_, and how persistently he has
resisted encroachments on his ideals of individual opportunity and
democracy. He is the prophet of the "higher law" in Kansas before the
Civil War. He is the Prohibitionist of Iowa and Wisconsin, crying out
against German customs as an invasion of his traditional ideals. He is
the Granger of Wisconsin, passing restrictive railroad legislation. He
is the Abolitionist, the Anti-mason, the Millerite, the Woman
Suffragist, the Spiritualist, the Mormon, of Western New York. Follow
him to his New England home in the turbulent days of Shays' rebellion,
paper money, stay and tender laws, and land banks. The radicals among
these New England farmers hated lawyers and capitalists. "I would not
trust them," said Abraham White, in the ratification convention of
Massachusetts, in 1788, "though every one of them should be a Moses."
"These lawyers," cried Amos Singletary, "and men of learning and moneyed
men that talk so finely and gloss over matters so smoothly to make us
poor illiterate people swallow the pill, expect to get into Congress
themselves! They mean to get all the money into their hands, and then
they will swallow up all us little folk, like the Leviathan, Mr.
President; yea, just as the whale swallowed up Jonah."

If the voice of Mary Ellen Lease sounds raucous to the New England man
to-day, while it is sweet music in the ears of the Kansas farmer, let
him ponder the utterances of these frontier farmers in the days of the
Revolution; and if he is still doubtful of this spiritual kinship, let
him read the words of the levelers and secta