the Gulf, overflowed the Alleghanies, and borne back the new life of the mighty West towards the rising sun. The first great emigration under the auspices of the new American republic was from New England to Central and Western New York. The New York of the Revolution was the valleys of the Hudson and the Mohawk; and there an order of society had been established as aristocratic as Virginia itself. The country was chiefly parcelled out among its Dutch, English, North-Irish, and Scotch landholders, while great masses of tenantry were little in advance of the present poor whites of the South. As a consequence, New York was full of Tories during the war; and many a blatant copperhead of Manhattan and the Catskills, during the last six years, has only voiced the principles of his tory or cowboy grandfather. Such a country as Eastern New York, at the beginning of this century, was no home for the eager youth of Yankeeland, whose faces were set toward the great West. The Albany Dutchman smoked his pipe with placid wonderment on the stoop of his Pearl Street gable-ender, as he beheld the mysterious procession of emigrant wagons creeping towards Schenectady; and to-day, in Albany, the valley of the Mohawk goes by the name "Out-West." The Yankees struck Central New York at Utica, and flowed on in a resistless torrent, till they filled the whole inviting region to the Pennsylvania and Canadian borders on the south and north, and the Lakes upon the west. Western New York is New England amplified and mollified by the rich and varied life of the greatest American State. It is more decided in its progressive American tendency than any portion of New England, save Maine, Vermont, and Eastern Massachusetts: indeed, Connecticut has been kept in an enfeebled, half-neutral condition, by this prodigious drain upon her youthful radical population. While the people of Western New York are lacking in the fine literary culture and English style of refinement so much prized in Boston, they have a weight of manly and womanly character, a breadth of thought and feeling, especially in public affairs, and a swinging onward movement almost unknown east of the Hudson. It is the grandest people in these United States, and has sent forth, and is still sending, more men of mark to the West than all other portions of the Union. With one hand it holds the chief American city from rushing to swift perdition, and with the other it grasps the new West. Here, on the first camping-ground of the Western emigrant, was struck the key-note of our new American order of character and social affairs. From Western New York the tide of Western emigration skirted Lake Erie, throwing out an affluent down the western slopes of the Pennsylvania and Virginia Mountains, greatly changing Pennsylvania and Western Virginia. Here it is largely mingled with Scotch, Irish, Southern, and Pennsylvania elements. It has marched irresistibly along a path, almost identical with the fortieth parallel of latitude, to the Pacific, and there turned the flank of slavery and barbarism in California and Kansas, each of which was in succession the political Five-Forks of the slave power. In this way, Northern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, were largely peopled. Though blended somewhat through all these regions with a scattering emigration from the South, and in certain localities almost a new Ireland or Germany, the Northern radical element has always been the foundation of society in this region. From Eastport to St. Paul, one general type of the American character prevails, above the fortieth parallel of latitude. The inhabitants of this region, though in different states of progress and culture, represent all the essential attributes of that grand middle-class of Great Britain, to which free society owes its greatest debt of gratitude. It is the most intellectual people in the world; though its intellect has so far been chiefly occupied in regions of industrial, political, and social life. It bears within its latent deeps the new literature, philosophy, science, art, and religion of the republic. It is laying broad foundations for the education of the whole people, and its University of Michigan excites the admiration of Harvard itself; while its magnificent foundation of Cornell University, at Ithaca, awakens great hopes of 1 1 something new in our university life; and in Oberlin, Antioch, Galesburg, and other rising colleges, it is solving the problem of the united university education of the sexes. From this region went forth the early movement against slavery, and its vote was united for Fremont in 1856. In religion it occupies the liberal wing of every American Church. Out of it came the theological and philanthropic agitation which divided every great American Protestant Church, save the Episcopal, before 1860. Every good idea moves through our human life dogged by a black shadow; and it is not strange that this most progressive, intellectual, and energetic order of Northern society should be exposed to all the dangers of radicalism in its most extreme and varied forms. This region of our country has given birth to a multitude of excitable and unbalanced spirits, who have published their opinions in perfect freedom during the last twenty-five years. The system of popular lectures, the press, the convention, have given every facility to this class of agitators; and the lively interest of the masses of the people has always secured a large hearing to every public teacher who did not add to his radical extravagance the conservative grace of stupidity. The prolonged agitations in the churches have also bred destructive fanaticisms and desolating scepticisms, which have alarmed many good men for the existence of the Church itself. The political life of this district is never stagnant; for every month some new monster makes the sea of popular opinion "boil like a pot of ointment." Business is perpetually sounding the deeps and scaling the heights of speculation. And even the family is assailed by strange theories of marriage, which threaten to dissolve society itself. There is no doubt that the charge of the whole world is true, that this portion of America is the battle-ground of all possible and impossible theories of human affairs. But the enemies of the radical North, in their estimate of its tendencies, fail to discover the grand, distinctive characteristic of this remarkable people, - its deep faith in the spiritual and moral side of human life. There never was a 1 people on this earth who believed so firmly in the spirituality and immortality of man, the justice and perpetual providence of God, and the eternal distinction between right and wrong, as this. They inherit this faith from their ancestors, the noble middle-class of Great Britain, who represent the most profound religious faith of the northern European races. This faith is a part of the spiritual furniture of every nativeborn Northern boy or girl. It may be dormant for long periods in whole classes or communities: indeed, the intense activity of the mental and executive faculty often gives it no opportunity to awake. Our people love to think, discuss, and work, for the pure enjoyment of the thing. Hence people whose volume of life is smaller, and whose religious sentiments lie nearer the surface and are more easily excited, declaim against us as a prosaic, materialistic, and irreligious race. But let some deep and searching experience penetrate below the region of thought and work, and unseal the deep fountains of his native faith, and this Northern man starts up, a hero, a reformer, a martyr, or a saint. The gorgeous ritualism of the old European churches is now but a thicket of thorns which he overleaps, or tears through on his swift flight to his God. His intellect is kindled by the great fire below it, and flashes a startling light into the face of every accepted theory of life, in complete faith that all truth can bear the strongest illumination. He knows himself too well to fear the full indulgence of his head and hands, while his soul takes hold on the everlasting realities. This faith in spiritual things is at once the fountain of perpetual life, and the protecting providence of the Northern people. For want of it, the South, and all southern nations, are vibrating continually between the wildest fanaticisms, and utter despotism. A South-Carolina secessionist, an Italian priest, an Austrian nobleman, knows by experience the danger of free thought among his own people. They see how a new idea maddens the popular mind, and speedily ultimates itself in a social anarchy, the very image of the infernal world. They suppose a people which thinks so intensely and freely as the radical North must be in a state of spiritual, social, and civil delirium. But they do not know this great Northern soul, that, amidst its fiercest flames, is cooled by breezes from that high zone of life where God and man abide together. This portion of the United States is not only the home of radicalism in theory, but of the finest order in actual affairs. When its people have come to the end of their speculations, and begin the real work of life, they throw away nothing essential that has been gained by the toils of the past. They are deliberate in legislation, firm in administering justice, and practical in all their ideas. Mr. Phillips argued twenty years to persuade this people that it was a sin to vote and hold office under the government of the United States. He was the most popular orator of the North; but we never heard of an Abolitionist who was not glad to hold any office that Father Abraham could be induced to give him. Jackson Davis, the trance "media," and the advocates of every form of no-religion, have had the field clear to do their best; but there is no community that can be kept out of the churches when a saintly and eloquent man stands in the pulpit: and the Northern Church was never so active and really influential as now. Business, education, amusement, domestic and social life, are all moving towards a firmer basis. The pecuniary honesty, the solid learning, the domestic purity, the abiding cheerfulness of this republic, are emphatically to be found north of this line of demarcation. There is more gross sensuality in the homes of the poor Southern emigrants in Southern Indiana and Illinois, than in all the country above the fortieth parallel of latitude: indeed, most of the disorders, spiritual and social, in this region, can be traced either to Southern or European emigrants from lands of civil and religious despotism. It is true that, socially, this region of the West is still somewhat crude, unformed, and stern. The aristocratic society of the South-west, including as it did but few elements of social refinement, ripened far more quickly; and, ten years ago, was the most attractive west of the Alleghanies. But it built on a class and not on man, and went down into the awful gulf of rebellion, from whose smoking deeps now |