This is indeed the great problem of the place and time.  If the next generation be well prepared for their work, ambitious of good and skilful to achieve it, the children of the present settlers may be leaven enough for the mass constantly increasing by immigration.  And how much is this needed, where those rude foreigners can so little understand the best interests of the land they seek for bread and shelter!  It would be a happiness to aid in this good work, and interweave the white and golden threads into the fate of Illinois.  It would be a work worthy the devotion of any mind.

In the little that I saw was a large proportion of intelligence, activity, and kind feeling; but, if there was much serious laying to heart of the true purposes of life, it did not appear in the tone of conversation.

Having before me the Illinois Guide-Book, I find there mentioned, as a “visionary,” one of the men I should think of as able to be a truly valuable settler in a new and great country,—­Morris Birkbeck, of England.  Since my return, I have read his journey to, and letters from, Illinois.  I see nothing promised there that will not surely belong to the man who knows how to seek for it.

Mr. Birkbeck was an enlightened, philanthropist, the rather that he did not wish to sacrifice himself to his fellow-men, but to benefit them with all he had, and was, and wished.  He thought all the creatures of a divine love ought to be happy and ought to be good, and that his own soul and his own life were not less precious than those of others; indeed, that to keep these healthy was his only means of a healthy influence.

But his aims were altogether generous.  Freedom, the liberty of law, not license; not indolence, work for himself and children and all men, but under genial and poetic influences;—­these were his aims.  How different from those of the new settlers in general!  And into his mind so long ago shone steadily the two thoughts, now so prevalent in thinking and aspiring minds, of “Resist not evil,” and “Every man his own priest, and the heart the only true church.”

He has lost credit for sagacity from accidental circumstances.  It does not appear that his position was ill chosen, or his means disproportioned to his ends, had he been sustained by funds from England, as he had a right to expect.  But through the profligacy of a near relative, commissioned to collect these dues, he was disappointed of them, and his paper protested and credit destroyed in our cities, before he became aware of his danger.

Still, though more slowly and with more difficulty, he might have succeeded in his designs.  The English farmer might have made the English settlement a model for good methods and good aims to all that region, had not death prematurely cut short his plans.

I have wished to say these few words, because the veneration with which I have been inspired for his character by those who knew him well, makes me impatient of this careless blame being passed from mouth to mouth and book to book.  Success is no test of a man’s endeavor, and Illinois will yet, I hope, regard this man, who knew so well what ought to be, as one of her true patriarchs, the Abraham of a promised land.