A curious feature of the way many honest men looked at the West was their inability to see how essentially transient were some of the characteristics to which they objected.  Thus they were alarmed at the turbulence and the lawless shortcomings of various kinds which grew out of the conditions of frontier settlement and sparse population.  They looked with anxious foreboding to the time when the turbulent and lawless people would be very numerous, and would form a dense and powerful population; failing to see that in exact proportion as the population became dense, the conditions which caused the qualities to which they objected would disappear.  Even the men who had too much good sense to share these fears, even men as broadly patriotic as Jay, could not realize the extreme rapidity of western growth.  Kentucky and Tennessee grew much faster than any of the old frontier colonies had ever grown; and from sheer lack of experience, eastern statesmen could not realize that this rapidity of growth made the navigation of the Mississippi a matter of immediate and not of future interest to the West.

    Failure to Perceive Truths Now Regarded as Self-Evident.

In short, these good people were learning with reluctance and difficulty to accept as necessary certain facts which we regard as part of the order of our political nature.  We look at territorial expansion, and the admission of new States, as part of a process as natural as it is desirable.  To our forefathers the process was novel, and, in some of its features, repugnant.  Many of them could not divest themselves of the feeling that the old States ought to receive more consideration than the new; whereas nowadays it would never occur to anyone that Pennsylvania and Georgia ought to stand either above or below California and Montana.  It is an inestimable boon to all four States to be in the Union, but this is because the citizens of all of them are on a common footing.  If the new commonwealths in the Rocky Mountains and on the Pacific slope were not cordially accepted by the original Thirteen States as having exactly the same rights and privileges of every kind, it would be better for them to stand alone.  As a matter of fact, we have become so accustomed to the idea of the equality of the different States, that it never enters our heads to conceive of the possibility of its being otherwise.  The feeling in its favor is so genuine and universal that we are not even conscious that it exists.  Nobody dreams of treating the fact that the new commonwealths are offshoots of the old as furnishing grounds for any discrimination in reference to them, one way or the other.  There still exist dying jealousies between different States and sections, but this particular feeling does not enter into them in any way whatsoever.

    The East Distrusts the Trans-Alleghany People.