In those Western States where women have assumed the burden of citizenship they seem to lose none of their zeal for art, literature, and music. Equal suffrage was established in Colorado in 1893, and the passing pilgrim cannot fail to be struck by the lack of self-consciousness with which the women of that State discuss social and political questions. The Western woman is animated by a divine energy and she is distinguished by her willingness to render public service. What man neglects or ignores she cheerfully undertakes, and she has so cultivated the gentle art of persuasion that the masculine check-book opens readily to her demand for assistance in her pet causes. It must not be assumed that in this land of pancakes and panaceas interest in “culture” is new or that its manifestations are sporadic or ill-directed. The early comers brought with them sufficient cultivation to leaven the lump, and the educational forces and cultural movements now everywhere marked in Western communities are but the fruition of the labors of the pioneers who bore books of worth and a love of learning with them into the wilderness. Much sound reading was done in log cabins when the school-teacher was still a rarity, and amid the strenuous labors of the earliest days many sought self-expression in various kinds of writing. Along the Ohio there were bards in abundance, and a decade before the Civil War Cincinnati had honest claims to being a literary centre. The numerous poets of those days--Coggeshall’s “Poets and Poetry of the West,” published in 1866, mentions one hundred and fifty-two!--were chiefly distinguished by their indifference to the life that lay nearest them. Sentiment and sentimentalism flourished at a time when life was a hard business, though Edward Eggleston is entitled to consideration as an early realist, by reason of “The Hoosier Schoolmaster,” which, in spite of Indiana’s repudiation of it as false and defamatory, really contains a true picture of conditions with which Eggleston was thoroughly familiar. There followed later E. W. Howe’s “The Story of a Country Town” and Hamlin Garland’s “Main Travelled Roads,” which are landmarks of realism firmly planted in territory invaded later by Romance, bearing the blithe flag of Zenda.