nst the mighty current 'as things of life,'
bearing speculators, merchants, dandies, fine ladies, everything real,
and everything affected, in the form of humanity, with pianos, and
stocks of novels, and cards, and dice, and flirting, and love-making,
and drinking, and champagne, and on the deck, perhaps, three hundred
fellows, who have seen alligators, and neither fear whiskey, nor
gun-powder. A steamboat, coming from New Orleans, brings to the remotest
villages of our streams, and the very doors of the cabins, a little
Paris, a section of Broadway, or a slice of Philadelphia, to ferment in
the minds of our young people, the innate propensity for fashions and
finery.... Cincinnati will soon be the centre of the 'celestial
empire,' as the Chinese say; and instead of encountering the storms,
the seasickness, and dangers of a passage from the Gulf of Mexico to
the Atlantic, whenever the Erie Canal shall be completed, the opulent
southern planters will take their families, their dogs and parrots,
through a world of forests, from New Orleans to New York, giving us a
call by the way. When they are more acquainted with us, their voyage
will often terminate here." *

* Vol. I., p. 25 (May, 1827).

The new West was frankly materialistic. Yet its interests were by
no means restricted to steamboats, turnpikes, crops, exports, and
moneymaking. It concerned itself much with religion. One of the most
familiar figures on trail and highway was the circuit-rider, with his
Bible and saddlebags; and no community was so remote, or so hardened, as
not to be raised occasionally to a frenzy of religious zeal by the crude
but terrifying eloquence of the revivalist. For education, likewise,
there was a growing regard. Nowhere did the devotion of the Western
people to the twin ideas of democracy and enlightenment find nobler
expression than in the clause of the Indiana constitution of 1816 making
it the duty of the Legislature to provide for "a general system of
education, ascending in a regular gradation from township schools to a
state university, wherein tuition shall be gratis, and equally open to
all." This principle found general application throughout the Northwest.
By 1830 common schools existed wherever population was sufficient
to warrant the expense; academies and other secondary schools were
springing up in Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, and many lesser
places; state universities existed in Ohio and Indiana; and Baptists,