At pioneer picnics one finds the family reunion on a larger scale. The whole township and county has for the time become related. It is the day of days, a sentimental tournament with handshaking as the most popular pastime. Organized in the rugged primitiveness of the early part of the 19th century by men who were first to settle in the vicinity, the pioneer picnic has been perpetuated, until to-day it is linked inalterably with America’s development. It has weathered the passing of the nation from an agricultural to a great industrial commonwealth. It has stood the gaff of time. And so it goes on for ever, a tradition of the small town and the farming community. While it has been divested almost entirely of its original purpose, it serves to bring the politicians in touch with the “peepul.” Grandiloquent promises are made for a day from the rostrum by a battalion of “Honourables”--and forgotten both by the “Honourables” and the public intent upon dancing and walking aimlessly about the grounds. The politicians smile as they continue to preserve their heroic pose, and the “peepul,” satisfied that all is well with the world, turn to various gambling devices that operate under the hypocritical eye of the sheriff and to the strange dances that have crept up from the jungle, for it is a day filled with the eternal spirit of youth. There is ingenuous appeal in the fair samples of the yokelry present. There is a quiet force beneath the bovine expressions of the boys. The soul of America--an America glad to be alive--is being wonderfully and pathetically manifested. No shams, no superficialities, no self-conscious sophistication are met. Merely the sturdy quality of the true American civilization, picturesque and haunting in its primitiveness. The county fair belongs in the same classification as the first-settler picnic. It is the annual relaxation by farmers and merchants from the tedious tasks of seeing and talking to the same people day after day. It offers them a measure of equality with the people in the city with their excursion boats, their baseball games, their park sports. And they make the most of their opportunity. They come to see and to be seen, to risk a few dollars on a horse race, to admire the free exhibitions in front of the side-shows, to watch with wide eyes the acrobatic stunts before the grandstand; to hear the “Poet and the Peasant” overture by the band, proud and serious in a stand of its own.