Such men impress a consequence upon objects around them. Their family carriages look wise and venerable—heirlooms embalmed by generations gone. They drive horses that think and know who and what they are—and who live and die under the protection of their masters. Their church-pews blaze in crimson—are piled with cushions, arrayed with stools, and tables, and books, with two pillows and a foot-stove in the corner, for the old lady of seventy, who wheezes and takes snuff.
Perhaps, reader, you have met just such a New England character. He never moves below a line in society—a line as arbitrary with him as 36° 30'. He had a broad face, double chin, heavy nose, wide-brimmed hat, and buff vest, filled with ruffles. You have heard him deliver his opinion upon a question of public policy, or public morals—his voice slow and sepulchral—his manner heavy, almost melancholy—made impressive through the aid of a gold-headed cane, with which he occasionally beats out the emphatic portions of his homily. Perhaps you attempted to make a suggestion yourself—if you did, you recollect the frown, the reproof that came down upon you, from those cold, gray eyes of his, and perhaps the shock you inflicted upon the timid around you, from your impudence.
This class do not, by any means, constitute the backbone of New England. The enterprise that breaks through her mountains, upheaves her valleys, and sends the iron horse on its way—creates the roar of machinery that reverberates among her hills—grasps with, and battles for, the public questions of the day—pours a tide of life and energy into everything around—which makes itself felt through the long arms of commerce in every part of the world, and whose touch electrifies every mart—this enterprise is born, and quickened, and sustained somewhere else. These men are the mere spectators of all this bustle. They are rather drag-weights upon it—the acknowledged conservative army of "masterly inactivity."
These conservatives are not without value, but they can only exist in a fixed state of society. They are the work of ages, and cannot be created in a breath. No such characters can be found in the western world. The roots of such a growth lie away back among the Puritans. One can smell Plymouth Rock, Cotton Mather, Bunker Hill, and indeed the whole revolutionary war, in the very production. Pedigree associations, musty ideas, which lie scattered everywhere, and yet nowhere in particular, are the foundation of this kind of aristocracy; all of which is submitted to by custom and habit.
What if an attempt should be made to build up such a society in a new country? Where would we begin? There is no past to hallow and dignify the present; and without a past to draw upon, and anchor to, an aristocracy would be all afloat. The past of Puddleford, so far as my researches go, ends in the Pottawatomie Indians—a little later in Longbow, Turtle, and Bates. This is the extent of our resources; and no one has been yet found who was willing to go into that kind of business on such a capital. Money, so often the foundation of pretension, is widely diffused, in very small parcels. Historical local incidents there are none. The conquest of the country was by the axe and an indomitable spirit. There was no blood nor brimstone used. The pioneer's little family of sinewy children was the army that entered it, and took possession of the soil.
But the people of New England, I said, were assorted. The man of business, the merchant, the mechanic, was a merchant, a mechanic, in the same place, the same building, perhaps forty years ago—and his whole life is one of order and system. He lives by rule—is as fixed in his sphere as the conservative in his. His income for the future can be calculated from the past. His duties are foreseen and provided for. Domestic expenses so much; support of the gospel so much; charity so much; pleasure so much; which, deducted from income, balance, so much. Here, again, is the fruit of a fixed society. The creditor of a New England merchant knows where his customer will be next year—at his old post, or dead.
How is it in a new country? Not one resident in ten is permanently located. Every man expects to remove somewhere else, at some time. Here is no association, no tie, to bind him to the soil. The pioneer is but a passenger who has stopped over night, as it were, and he holds himself ready to push forward at the blow of the trumpet. Villages, and even whole townships, change inhabitants in short periods, and other men, with other views and habits, step in and take their places. Where does the merchant creditor find his western customer of last year? Sold out, perhaps, to Mr. A., and Mr. A. sold to Mr. B., and Mr. B. to Mr. C. Mr. C. pays all arrearages, and Mr. A. and B. are boating on the Mississippi, or "ballooning" in some fancy speculation on the north shore of the Oregon.
While the great West suffers from a want of the virtues that attend a fixed society, as it undoubtedly does, it does not find itself obliged to contend against its prejudices. There are no arbitrary lines drawn, based upon mere ideas—no venerable fictions in the way. Custom, habit, society, immemorial usage, hang no dead-weights upon the young and ambitious. All start from the same line, the prize is aloft in full view, and he who first reaches it creates his own precedence.
If there is no past to hallow and chasten the people of a new country, no permanent present to hold them to one spot, so in one sense there is no future. There is no locality that is adorned and beautified for coming years—no spot designated to become venerable to posterity—no tree nursed and protected in memory of him who planted it—no ground consecrated for the burial of the dead. Houses are built, localities adorned, trees planted, cemeteries erected, but they who fashioned all this do not abide with them—they are ever on the march, and the stranger takes possession of the memorials they leave behind; and if posterity should attempt to collect the works of such an ancestor, it would find them scattered over the circuit of states.
We have attempted, in a plain way, to draw a comparison, very briefly, to be sure, between a fixed and an unfixed society. Both have their advantages and their disadvantages.