and reform agitations!
To the historian they have often seemed to be mere curious side eddies,
vexatious distractions to the course of his literary craft as it
navigated the stream of historical tendency. And yet, by the revelation
of the present, what seemed to be side eddies have not seldom proven to
be the concealed entrances to the main current, and the course which
seemed the central one has led to blind channels and stagnant waters,
important in their day, but cut off like oxbow lakes from the mighty
river of historical progress by the mere permanent and compelling forces
of the neglected currents.

We may trace the contest between the capitalist and the democratic
pioneer from the earliest colonial days. It is influential in colonial
parties. It is seen in the vehement protests of Kentucky frontiersmen in
petition after petition to the Congress of the Confederation against the
"nabobs" and men of wealth who took out titles to the pioneers' farms
while they themselves were too busy defending those farms from the
Indians to perfect their claims. It is seen in the attitude of the Ohio
Valley in its backwoods days before the rise of the Whig party, as when
in 1811 Henry Clay denounced the Bank of the United States as a
corporation which throve on special privileges--"a special association
of favored individuals taken from the mass of society, and invested with
exemptions and surrounded by immunities and privileges." Benton voiced
the same contest twenty years later when he denounced the bank as

a company of private individuals, many of them foreigners, and
the mass of them residing in a remote and narrow corner of the
Union, unconnected by any sympathy with the fertile regions of
the Great Valley in which the natural power of this Union, the
power of numbers, will be found to reside long before the
renewed term of the second charter would expire.

"And where," he asked, "would all this power and money center? In the
great cities of the Northeast, which have been for forty years and that
by force of federal legislation, the lion's den of Southern and Western
money--that den into which all the tracks point inward; from which the
returning track of a solitary dollar has never yet been seen."
Declaring, in words that have a very modern sound, that the bank tended
to multiply nabobs and paupers, and that "a great moneyed power is
favorable to great capitalists, for it is the principle of