The wide region called Mississippi, embracing the present State of that name and also Alabama,—the latter no longer apprehending any new petticoat insurrection in Mobile from the descendants of the insurgents of 1706, which with French slowness in swelling the census had only in ninety-five years become two hundred and fifty, and these balanced by an equal number of blacks,—this Mississippi region, now separated from Georgia, was put into that pantaleted territorial condition in which a community finds itself, like a young girl-lady at sixteen, who goes to school, lives at home, is governed partly by herself and partly by her parents, acquires pocket-money from the old people, and notions from circumstances, and drifts vigorously on through an unsettled perplexity into an early and settled independence. Such in this year of grace 1869 are Arizona, Dakota, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Washington, whose quickly doubling populations are rapidly pursuing their education through a university where sharp, practical studies are urged with bullet speed; mining silver, gold, and lead by day, and spending most of it in gambling saloons by night; rolling their residences on wheels from one ranch to another; practising high gymnastics with the Indians, by a method better than Dio Lewis’s; taking frequent lessons in bar-rooms, and pretty sure to make and be a mark for some one in every quarter. It may not be beneath the dignity of history to state that, while the new century was inoculated with _virus_ taken from various sources, pure and impure, political, monetary, and social, its first year witnessed the earliest introduction of vaccination for small-pox in this country, to which it worked its way four years after its first discovery by Edward Jenner in England. Of course it first took near Boston, where it has since continued to break out in various eruptions, whose vesicles, always surrounded by a rose-hued areola in the eyes of home nurses, it never allowed any one but itself to puncture. Meanwhile, however, the political crust, broken and cracked in 1797, again heaved anew; muttered thunder rolled off from the press; party lava reddened the sides of the political Vesuvius, over whose cindered lips soon poured the hot melted streams of rage, which left, as they cooled, nothing of the late Federal party but scoria and ashes. The first Adams was banished from his much-loved Presidential Eden, and a flaming sword with many blades—alien law, sedition act, personal desire for office, supposed sympathy with England, and suspected antipathy to France—was set at the door, turning every way, and prohibiting his return any way. CHAPTER V. THE CHIEF AMERICAN PRODUCTIONS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.