rom his
benevolent acceptance of the world as it was to stout-hearted, though
soft-voiced, accusations brought in the name of Tolstoy and the Apostles
against human inequality however constituted; had--to end the list of
instances without going outside the literary class--Hamlin Garland for
its principal spokesman of the distress and dissatisfaction then
stirring along the changed frontier which so long as free land lasted
had been the natural outlet for the expansive, restless race.

Heretofore the prairies and the plains had depended almost wholly upon
romance--and that often of the cheapest sort--for their literary
reputation; Mr. Garland, who had tested at first hand the innumerable
hardships of such a life, became articulate through his dissent from
average notions about the pioneer. His earliest motives of dissent seem
to have been personal and artistic. During that youth which saw him
borne steadily westward, from his Wisconsin birthplace to windy Iowa and
then to bleak Dakota, his own instincts clashed with those of his
migratory father as the instincts of many a sensitive, unremembered
youth must have clashed with the dumb, fierce urges of the leaders of
migration everywhere. The younger Garland hungered on the frontier for
beauty and learning and leisure; the impulse which eventually detached
him from Dakota and sent him on a trepid, reverent pilgrimage to Boston
was the very impulse which, on another scale, had lately detached Henry
James from his native country and had sent him to the ancient home of
his forefathers in the British Isles.

Mr. Garland could neither feel so free nor fly so far from home as
James. He had, in the midst of his raptures and his successes in New
England, still to remember the plight of the family he had left behind
him on the lonely prairie; he cherished a patriotism for his province
which went a long way toward restoring him to it in time. Sentimental
and romantic considerations, however, did not influence him altogether
in his first important work. He had been kindled by Howells in Boston to
a passion for realism which carried him beyond the suave accuracy of his
master to the somber veracity of _Main-Travelled Roads_, _Prairie
Folks_, and _Rose of Dutcher's Coolly_. This veracity was more than
somber; it was deliberate and polemic. Mr. Garland, ardently a radical
of the school of Henry George, had enlisted in the crusade against
poverty, and he desired to tell the unheeded trut