In addition to his comments on this great social question, Flint throws much light on general conditions in the young West. He studies the spectacular drama of the camp-meeting revival not only from the point of picturesqueness, but of educational and religious development. He realizes the need of the people for education, but appreciates the provisions made therefor in public lands. Throughout the West he finds the saving remnant--people of culture and refinement, who welcome strangers with hospitality, and are laboring to erect a worthy civilization in this newest community. The social equality everywhere evident among whites pleases him, and he remarks not unkindly upon the general dislike for personal service that characterizes the ambitious West. His satire on the excess of the honorary titles of “major,” “colonel,” and “judge,” as well as upon the readiness with which the “land of liberty” is vociferously proclaimed, is gentle and kindly. But all these features of Flint’s work are secondary to his economic study. Not only did he prove himself a wise and trained observer, but he was a scientific economist, and had come to the United States for research material. At each stage of his travels he sets forth the ratio between prices and wages, explains the industrial aspects, and the prospects for emigrants. Already, he tells us, nearly all the best land of Kentucky and Ohio is taken up. Settlement is flooding Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, where cheap lands are yet available. He shows the sanitary disadvantages of this newer, more reeking soil, as against the possibilities it offers to the emigrant to secure the profits of his own industry. With keen indignation he condemns the unsound banking system of the West, deprecates the booming of town sites, and the “log-rolling” in state legislatures. But in the face of criticism, and as though eager to forestall unfavorable judgments, he contrasts American conditions with those of Great Britain, with no undue favor for the latter, reminding his English readers that here are no boroughs to monopolize business interests, no clergymen to control education, no nobility to exact special privileges. “I have never heard of any parson who acts as Justice of the Peace, or who intermixes his addresses to _the Great Object of Religious Worship_, with the eulogy of the Holy Alliance.... The farming interest has no monopoly against manufacturing: nor has the manufacturing any positive prohibition against the farmer.” Free industry is the dominating factor of American life, the keystone of its prosperity.