owa and Illinois seem to
have broadened men's views and fertilized their ideas. Said Stephen A.
Douglas: "I found my mind liberalized and my opinions enlarged when I
got out on these broad prairies, with only the heavens to bound my
vision, instead of having them circumscribed by the narrow ridges
that surrounded the valley [in Vermont] where I was born."

Speaking to an Iowa audience, Governor Kirkwood once said: "We are
rearing the typical Americans, the Western Yankee if you choose to call
him so, the man of grit, the man of nerve, the man of broad and liberal
views, the man of tolerance of opinion, the man of energy, the man who
will some day dominate this empire of ours." How prophetic!

Nowhere did the West exert a more marked influence than in the domain of
Politics. It freed men from traditions. It gave them a new and a more
progressive view of political life. Henceforth they turned with
impatience from historical arguments and legal theories to a
philosophy of expediency. Government, they concluded, was after all a
relative affair.

"Claim Rights" were more important to the pioneer of Iowa than "States
Rights." The Nation was endeared to him; and he freely gave his first
allegiance to the government that sold him land for $1.25 an acre. He
was always _for the Union_, so that in after years men said of the
Commonwealth he founded: "Her affections, like the rivers of her
borders, flow to an inseparable Union."

But above all the frontier was a great leveler. The conditions of life
there were such as to make men plain, common, unpretentious--genuine.
The frontier fostered the sympathetic attitude. It made men really
democratic and in matters political led to the three-fold ideal of
Equality which constitutes the essence of American Democracy in the
19th century, namely:

Equality before the Law,
Equality in the Law,
Equality in making the Law.

The pioneer of the West may not have originated these ideals. The first,
Equality before the Law, is claimed emphatically as the contribution of
the Puritan. But the vitalizing of these ideals--this came from the
frontier, as the great contribution of the pioneer.

IV

SQUATTER CONSTITUTIONS

It may seem strange to class the customs of the pioneers among the early
laws of Iowa. But to refer to the "Resolutions" and "By-Laws" of the
squatters as political Constitutions is more than strange; it is
unorthodox. At the same time History teaches that in