Thus the Middle States had a great mission to perform in uniting and holding together the more extreme sections. In the development, after the Revolutionary War, of the country west of the Alleghanies, this harmonizing influence of the Middle States was very conspicuously shown in the creation of the great commonwealth of Ohio, and only to a less degree in the making of a number of other States in what has now come to be called the Middle West—the region that produced men of the type of Lincoln and Grant, and that joined with the old Middle States in later crises to preserve the Union and fuse its elements into a homogeneous nation. No communities in the world lend themselves more profitably to the study of history than these which are described in the present volume. Concrete illustration aids no less in the study of history than in that of the physical sciences; and these towns of the Middle States illustrate not only the more recent tendencies that have marked the course of human history, but also lead us back by easy stages to an insight into conditions of an earlier time. For example, the survivals of the Dutch _régime_ in New York quicken a sympathetic interest that greatly aids the comprehension of the international career of the Netherlands. On the very day when these remarks are written, the larger news of the world—that which is history in the making—concerns itself with two widely severed scenes of early Dutch colonization. From Paris comes the decision of the Venezuela arbitration tribunal, involving principally the material and legal facts as to the extent of Dutch exploration and settlement in the same general period as the Dutch colonization of New York. The relations of the Dutch and English in successions and exchanges of jurisdiction on the northern coast of South America can only be understood in the light of the history of the settlements at the mouth of the Hudson River. In like manner the conditions of Dutch settlement in South Africa in the middle of the seventeenth century are best comprehended in connection with the story of contemporary Dutch colonization in America. The Knickerbockers of New York and the Boers of the Transvaal are of common origin,—a fact frankly recognized by the Holland Society of New York in its expressions of sympathy with the Dutch element in South Africa in its struggle against fate.