e stock carried with it a habit of community life, in contrast
with the individualistic democracy of the Southern element. The
colonizing land companies, the town, the school, the church, the feeling
of local unity, furnished the evidences of this instinct for
communities. This instinct was accompanied by the creation of cities,
the production of a surplus for market, the reaching out to connections
with the trading centers of the East, the evolution of a more complex
and at the same time a more integrated industrial society than that of
the Southern pioneer.

But they did not carry with them the unmodified New England institutions
and traits. They came at a time and from a people less satisfied with
the old order than were their neighbors in the East. They were the young
men with initiative, with discontent; the New York element especially
was affected by the radicalism of Locofoco democracy which was in
itself a protest against the established order.

The winds of the prairies swept away almost at once a mass of old habits
and prepossessions. Said one of these pioneers in a letter to friends in
the East:

If you value ease more than money or prosperity, don't
come. . . . Hands are too few for the work, houses for the
inhabitants, and days for the day's work to be done. . . .
Next if you can't stand seeing your old New England ideas,
ways of doing, and living and in fact, all of the good old
Yankee fashions knocked out of shape and altered, or thrown by
as unsuited to the climate, don't be caught out here. But if
you can bear grief with a smile, can put up with a scale of
accommodations ranging from the soft side of a plank before
the fire (and perhaps three in a bed at that) down through the
middling and inferior grades; if you are never at a loss for
ways to do the most unpracticable things without tools; if you
can do all this and some more come on. . . . It is a universal
rule here to help one another, each one keeping an eye single
to his own business.

They knew that they were leaving many dear associations of the old home,
giving up many of the comforts of life, sacrificing things which those
who remained thought too vital to civilization to be left. But they were
not mere materialists ready to surrender all that life is worth for
immediate gain. They were idealists themselves, sacrificing the ease of
the immediate future for the wel