e common school and
denominational colleges, scattered themselves throughout the region and
left a deep impress in all these States. The conception was firmly fixed
in the thirties and forties that the West was the coming power in the
Union, that the fate of civilization was in its hands, and therefore
rival sects and rival sections strove to influence it to their own
types. But the Middle West shaped all these educational contributions
according to her own needs and ideals.

The State Universities were for the most part the result of agitation
and proposals of men of New England origin; but they became
characteristic products of Middle Western society, where the community
as a whole, rather than wealthy benefactors, supported these
institutions. In the end the community determined their directions in
accord with popular ideals. They reached down more deeply into the ranks
of the common people than did the New England or Middle State Colleges;
they laid more emphasis upon the obviously useful, and became
coeducational at an early date. This dominance of the community ideals
had dangers for the Universities, which were called to raise ideals and
to point new ways, rather than to conform.

Challenging the spaces of the West, struck by the rapidity with which a
new society was unfolding under their gaze, it is not strange that the
pioneers dealt in the superlative and saw their destiny with optimistic
eyes. The meadow lot of the small intervale had become the prairie,
stretching farther than their gaze could reach.

All was motion and change. A restlessness was universal. Men moved, in
their single life, from Vermont to New York, from New York to Ohio,
from Ohio to Wisconsin, from Wisconsin to California, and longed for the
Hawaiian Islands. When the bark started from their fence rails, they
felt the call to change. They were conscious of the mobility of their
society and gloried in it. They broke with the Past and thought to
create something finer, more fitting for humanity, more beneficial for
the average man than the world had ever seen.

"With the Past we have literally nothing to do," said B. Gratz Brown in
a Missouri Fourth of July oration in 1850, "save to dream of it. Its
lessons are lost and its tongue is silent. We are ourselves at the head
and front of all political experience. Precedents have lost their virtue
and all their authority is gone. . . . Experience can profit us only to
guard from antequated delu