stronger interests than in the older society; hence all married. Thanks to cheap living and to the need of helpers, the big family was welcomed. Living by agriculture, the West knew little of cities, manufactures, social rivalry, luxury, and a serving class, all foes of rapid multiplication. In 1802, Michaux found the families of the Ohio settlers "always very numerous," and of Kentucky he wrote: "There are few houses which contain less than four or five children." Traveling in the Ohio Valley in 1807, Cumings observed: "Throughout this whole country, whenever you see a cabin you see a swarm of children"; and Woods wrote in 1819: "The first thing that strikes a traveler on the Ohio is the immense number of children." But there is solider proof of frontier prolificacy. The census of 1830 showed the proportion of children under five years in the States west of the Alleghanies to be a third to a half greater than in the seaboard region. The proportion of children to women between fifteen and fifty was from fifty to a hundred per cent. greater. In 1840, children were forty per cent. more numerous among the Yankees of the Western Reserve than among their kinsmen in Connecticut. The next half-century took the edge off the fecundity of the people of the Ohio Valley; but their sons and daughters who had pushed on into Kansas, Nebraska, and Minnesota showed families a fifth larger. In 1900, the people of the agricultural frontier-Texas, Oklahoma, and the Dakotas-had a proportion of children larger by twenty-eight per cent. than that of the population between Pittsburgh and Omaha. If the frontier drew from the seaboard population a certain element, and let it multiply more freely than it would have multiplied at home, the frontier must have made that element more plentiful in the American people, taken as a whole; and this, indeed, appears to be what actually occurred. No one ventures to assert that the Americans are differentiated from the original immigrating stocks by superiority in any form of talent or in any kind of sensibility; but they impress all foreign observers with their high endowment of energy, tenacity of purpose, and willingness to take risks, and these are just the qualities that are fostered and made more abundant by the wilderness. I do not maintain that life in America has added any new trait to the descendants of transplanted Europeans, nor has it filled them all with the pioneer virtues. What I do mean is that, owing to the progressive peopling of the fertile wilderness, certain valuable strains that once were represented in, say, a sixth of the population, might come to be represented in a quarter of it; and the timid, inert sort might shrivel from a fifth of the population to a tenth. Such a shifting in the numerical strength of types would account both for the large contingent of the forceful in the normal American community, and for the prevalence of the ruthless, high-pressure, getthere-at-any-cost spirit which leaves in its wake achievement, prosperity, neurasthenia, Bright's disease, heart failure, and shattered moral standards. THE CRUCIBLE: by Robert Haven Schauffler URNING a while from the golden foes, hemist of morrows am 1. Here in my crucible seething lie. Fused with the bloom of a new-found earth. Here's blood that was warmed in Tolstoy's heart; Lit the lone beach of Patmos Isle. Here 's blood that danced in the ageless Greek At the Parthenon's brow as he filleted there Those sculptures blithe Whose adamant youth should dull the eternal scythe. Such drops for my crucible flow from the veins of time's deathless men; And what blood has accomplished, lo! blood may accomplish again. Nay, here in my crucible's glow Shall it accomplish yet more. Grandeur of prairie and cañon and highland, DECORATIONS BY CHARLES S. CHAPMAN Of hope for democracy's way, Of faith in fraternity's powers, Of trust that out of these calyx hours Shall blossom the perfect day. Jo! here to my hand are the bloods of the monarchs of time; Lo! here to my hand, new wonders of earth and mere, songful blood of the German land, Shall I mix you with breath of the peaks that stand Gazing forth to the line of my sunset strand? hen the gods were young and earth's matins were rung, Led the hero where yet there thrills nd to-morrow, where icy Sierran towers Chime my western Valhalla's hours, Shall a greater than Wagner, the lyre-hearted, Of dancing waters, A swooping of valkyrs, a sunset dirge ith the seed of the bards who were Britain's boast Shall I mingle the lure of my Georgian coast? h, Scottish heather And English broom And the fat, rank Irish bog, Halcyon weather For weeks together, The North's wet gloom, And the London fog All have offered the true bard room To build his saga, to court his dream, |
