sions."

"The yoke of opinion," wrote Channing to a Western friend, speaking of
New England, "is a heavy one, often crushing individuality of judgment
and action," and he added that the habits, rules, and criticisms under
which he had grown up had not left him the freedom and courage which are
needed in the style of address best suited to the Western people.
Channing no doubt unduly stressed the freedom of the West in this
respect. The frontier had its own conventions and prejudices, and New
England was breaking its own cake of custom and proclaiming a new
liberty at the very time he wrote. But there was truth in the Eastern
thought of the West, as a land of intellectual toleration, one which
questioned the old order of things and made innovation its very creed.

The West laid emphasis upon the practical and demanded that ideals
should be put to work for useful ends; ideals were tested by their
direct contributions to the betterment of the average man, rather than
by the production of the man of exceptional genius and distinction.

For, in fine this was the goal of the Middle West, the welfare of the
average man; not only the man of the South, or of the East, the Yankee,
or the Irishman, or the German, but all men in one common fellowship.
This was the hope of their youth, of that youth when Abraham Lincoln
rose from rail-splitter to country lawyer, from Illinois legislator to
congressman and from congressman to President.

It is not strange that in all this flux and freedom and novelty and vast
spaces, the pioneer did not sufficiently consider the need of
disciplined devotion to the government which he himself created and
operated. But the name of Lincoln and the response of the pioneer to the
duties of the Civil War,--to the sacrifices and the restraints on
freedom which it entailed under his presidency, reminds us that they
knew how to take part in a common cause, even while they knew that war's
conditions were destructive of many of the things for which they worked.

There are two kinds of governmental discipline: that which proceeds from
free choice, in the conviction that restraint of individual or class
interests is necessary for the common good; and that which is imposed by
a dominant class, upon a subjected and helpless people. The latter is
Prussian discipline, the discipline of a harsh machine-like, logical
organization, based on the rule of a military autocracy. It assumes that
if you do not crush your o