Blaine lost Indiana in 1884; Bryan failed thrice to carry it. The campaign of 1910 in Indiana was remarkable for the stubbornness of “silent” voters, who listened respectfully to the orators but left the managers of both parties in the air as to their intentions. In the Indiana Democratic State Convention of 1910 a gentleman was furiously hissed for ten minutes amid a scene of wildest tumult; but the cause he advocated won, and the ticket nominated in that memorable convention succeeded in November. Within fifty years Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois have sent to Washington seven Presidents, elected for ten terms. Without discussing the value of their public services it may be said that it has been an important demonstration to our Mid-Western people of the closeness of their ties with the nation, that so many men of their own soil have been chosen to the seat of the Presidents; and it is creditable to Maine and California that they have cheerfully acquiesced. In Lincoln the provincial American most nobly asserted himself, and any discussion of the value of provincial life and character in our politics may well begin and end in him. We have seen verily that
“Fishers and choppers and ploughmen
Shall constitute a state.”
Whitman, addressing Grant on his return from his world’s tour, declared that it was not that the hero had walked “with kings with even pace the round world’s promenade”;—
“But that in foreign lands, in all thy walks with kings,
Those prairie sovereigns of the West, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois,
Ohio’s, Indiana’s millions, comrades, farmers, soldiers, all to the front,
Invisibly with thee walking with kings with even pace the round world’s promenade,
Were all so justified.”
What we miss and what we lack who live in the provinces seem to me of little weight in the scale against our compensations. We slouch,—we are deficient in the graces,—we are prone to boast,—and we lack in those fine reticences that mark the cultivated citizen of the metropolis. We like to talk, and we talk our problems out to a finish. Our commonwealths rose in the ashes of the hunter’s camp-fires, and we are all a great neighborhood, united in a common understanding of what democracy is, and animated by ideals of what we want it to be. That saving humor which is a philosophy of life flourishes amid the tall corn. We are old enough now—we of the West—to have built up in ourselves a species of wisdom, founded upon experience, which is a part of the continuing, unwritten law of democracy. We are less likely these days to “wobble right” than we are to stand fast or march forward like an army with banners.