but to
co-operate in--the organisation of society in the wilderness: to see a
town grow up--indeed, so far as his clumsy ability in the handling of an
ax will permit, to help to build it; to join the handful of men,
bearded, roughly clad, and unlettered most of them, proceeding
deliberately to the fashioning of the framework of government, the
election of town officers, the appointment of a sheriff, and the
necessary provisions, rough but not inadequate, for dealing with the
grosser forms of crime. Quickly thereafter, in the case which I have
especially in mind, came the formation of the county government and,
simultaneously therewith, the opportunity (automatically and by mere
right of the number of the population) to elect a representative to the
Territorial Legislature. In the first year, however, this last privilege
had to be pretermitted. The Territorial laws required that any member
must have been resident in the district from which he came for not less
than six months prior to his election and must be able to read and
write; and, as cruel chance would have it, among the first prospectors
to find their way into the new diggings in the preceding winter, who
alone could comply with the required term of residence, not one could
write his name. Had but one been able to do it ever so crudely--could
one but have made a reasonable pretence of an ability to stumble through
the opening paragraphs of the Constitution of the United States,--that
man would inevitably and unanimously have been elected a full-blown
Legislator. As it was, the new district was perforce compelled to go
without representation in the Territorial Capital.

"But," it will be objected, and by no one more quickly than by the
American of the Eastern States, "All Americans do not go through these
experiences. How many New Yorkers have helped to organise a new mining
town?" Not many, certainly; and that is one of the reasons why New York
is, perhaps, the least representative section of all the United States.
But though the American of to-day may not have had to do these things,
his father and his grandfather had to. The necessity has long ago left
New York, but Illinois was not far removed from the circumstances of
frontier life when Abraham Lincoln was a youth; and the men who laid the
foundations of Minneapolis, and Kansas City, and Omaha, and Duluth, are
still alive. The frontiersman is latent in every American.

For the benefit of many Englishmen who