If New England is slow and methodical, she is strong. She moves in close phalanx upon any public question or duty. The very bonds of habit which pervade all, and all alike, concentrate and intensify her action. Her people act in a mass towards one point. They strike through organizations which are gigantic and reverend with age. The Church gathers the energies and means of the benevolent. Public opinion is harmonious about public ends. And this very fixedness of society enables its members to push forward with a unity and strength almost omnipotent.
In a new country, as we have seen, action is individual and ends are individual; men are unorganized. He who goes forward with axe in hand to hew his pathway to competence and respectability, is governed by few relics of the past. He breaks away, in time (too completely perhaps), from old associations, some of which were trammels, being the mere result of usage, and some of which he ought to cherish for their intrinsic excellence. He looks forward to a country and people in the future (somewhere in the future; locality is nothing), and he hurries on, with fury almost, to reach the destination of his dreams.
The people of the West are called a fast people. How can they be otherwise? Their very necessities drive them. They cannot fall back upon any prop; they can move onward without limit. It required, half a century ago, the labor of a generation to sweep off the forest, and plant cities and villages—but all this is accomplished in half of that time now. Pioneers grow more expanded in their views. The father of the pioneer of to-day grew into consequence as a heavy landed proprietor upon a farm of forty acres—his son can hardly satisfy his ambition with six hundred—and that is always for sale—(there is no poetry, as we have seen, about a western homestead)—and he stands ready to vacate upon six months' notice and a consideration.
This miscellaneous state of society begets a peculiar hospitality. New England has been famed for its hospitality; but the kind I mean is a very different thing. Hospitality in an old country, under the bonds of society, is too formal, too cold, and sometimes a little oppressive. It is not always hospitality; it is, sometimes, the performance of a social duty, according to the rules and regulations prescribed for its observance—painful to all parties concerned. It is artificial—as hearty, perhaps, as it can be under "bonds." The table, in the West, is always spread, and the roof always offers shelter. There is an ease, an abandonment in its exercise, that is positively beautiful, and can be understood only when felt.
A fixed state of society begets feuds, and cherishes old grudges. A quarrel that originated between grandfathers is often carried down and kept brewing. Families are divided from other families for years, and sometimes for generations, about matters of no consequence. It is perhaps a point of etiquette, a stinging remark, an accidental or premeditated slight, a question of dollars and cents, a political or religious difference of opinion, that opened the breach which will not be healed. Thus, bombshells are often thrown from one to another, by fathers and children and grandchildren, and families kept in an uproar about nothing. This society not only cherishes old grudges, but it is nervous and sensitive to the least touch of the present. A morbid pride of wealth, family, position, is ever on the lookout for an attack upon its consequence—perhaps to make an onslaught upon others.
Here the West has the advantage. There is no one to keep alive old grudges. Not one man in a hundred can tell what his neighbor's father or grandfather was—where he flourished or decayed—what were his personal piques or social battles. And as for present causes of personal war, they are few—it requires something more than a sublimated idea or notion—an antiquated figment of the brain or present artificiality—to warm up the combatants. The practical realities of the West are too great and pressing to give time or disposition to dally with abstractions. Gross outrages are quickly met and redressed—they are not carried down on the docket of time for posterity to try, nor nursed in the bosom from the revengeful pleasure they afford.
Reader, these are a few of the advantages and disadvantages of the two states of eastern and western society—not western society after it becomes rooted and established, as it has in many of the states—but during its first ten, perhaps twenty years, in its green state, while the gristle is hardening into bone.
These few suggestions are written in no morbid or carping spirit. They are written with a consciousness of the manly virtues, and solid worth, of New England, as she is, and always has been. They simply mark points of difference worked upon men by a change of soil and society—points that should be known, whether approved or condemned. What son of New England does not look back upon her with pride? What associations throng around him when her name is mentioned! Her hills, her hearts, her homes, send a thrill through the soul, and make him, for a time at least, a better man. What armies of scholars have walked forth into the battle of life from her cloisters? How many have been girded and helmeted in her halls? Where is the spot where her footsteps are not imprinted, her cheering voice heard? Shall we ever forget her? What sermons her old homesteads are continually preaching to her children, scattered as they are throughout every degree of latitude and longitude, in all positions and avocations! The cold brooks, where the trout darted—the grove where the nuts dropped—the blue sublimity of her mountain-tops, where sunlight first broke in the morn, and last died at night—the great shadows that slept in her valleys—the reverberation of her thunder—her solemn "fasts and feasts"—her day of Thanksgiving, that united again the broken fragments of the family circle—the merry voice of Christmas, that rung so cheerily through her halls—her graves, that hold all that remains of those who were giants in religion, liberty, and law, and who, "although dead, yet speak"—her arts—her monuments—her altars, where generations have knelt and passed away—are all living eloquence to her children, and can never be forgotten, if not always remembered. She is the Mecca to which many a weary pilgrim turns for strength and counsel in the storm and bustle of life, and her brain, and her capital, and her example are felt throughout half the globe.
Let us not, however, in our veneration for New England, forget the iron-souled and true-hearted men, who have gone forth from that ancient hive to make a way in the wilderness for incoming generations, whose march is ever upon the ear. They had their mission, too, and nobly have they performed it. What but Saxon blood, and Saxon spirit, could have accomplished so much? If it was, and still is, done roughly, it was all done for time, and will stand—it is something that will bear looking back upon, and of which no son of posterity will be ashamed.