It is a fact which bears striking testimony to the masterful qualities of the native American character that in the Western States, notwithstanding a vast foreign immigration, the dominant element is of the old colonial stock. The fortunes of the West are guided by emigrants and the descendants of emigrants from New England, the Middle and the border States, and while adopted citizens, nearly all of a desirable class, are in a majority in many parts of the West, most of the western men and women also, of national fame, can trace an American pedigree for several generations. There are notable exceptions to this rule, but they only illustrate the rule. This condition is due not to any inferiority on the part of the immigrant population to the average of European nationalities--for, barring Russia and some southern countries we receive the cream of European manhood--but to American heredity, to the inheritance of those endowments which qualify for leadership in a nation of freemen. The western American is more aggressive and progressive than his eastern cousin. Just as the New Englander retains many of the expressions and some of the ways which have become obsolete in Old England, so the native settler of Kansas, of Iowa, of Nebraska, and even of the nearer States of Ohio and Illinois, is more like the New Englander of half a century ago than those who have remained on the ancestral soil. He has the old Puritan love of learning, and from the humble colleges in which his more ambitious children are educated go forth the Joshuas and the Davids of our American Israel. The total yearly expenses of one of those western colleges would hardly equal the salary of the chief of a great university, but presidents of the United States are graduated there. The western farmer reads and thinks, and perhaps in that clear western air, as he ploughs the sod of the prairie, and reaps the harvest on his rude domain, he sees farther into the future than his brother of the East. Right or wrong in his political views, he is at any rate honest in them, and if his convictions seem to partake sometimes of the fervor of the crusader, it should not be forgotten that the spirit of Ossawattomie Brown yet lives in the land which he saved for freedom; it should not be forgotten that nearly every western homestead has its grave in the battlefields of the war which made us one people forever. Making due allowance for that good-natured raillery which is one of the spices of existence, it may be truthfully said that anyone who laughs in earnest at the West calls attention merely to his own shallow conceit. Intelligent people in the East are studying, not ridiculing the West. * * *