They pictured ploughs and axes on the shields of their commonwealths. But
if one were to seek a symbol for the democracy of that valley, one could
find none more appropriate than the image of a frontier schoolhouse. It is
the most poetical thing of all that western landscape, when it is seen for
what it is, though it is not always architecturally imposing. A signal-
box, says an English essayist, such as one sees along the railroads, is
only called a signal-box, but it is the house of life and death, a place
"where men in an agony of vigilance light blood-red and sea-green fires to
keep other men from death." A post-box is only called a post-box; it is a
sanctuary of human words, a place to which "friends and lovers commit
their messages, conscious that when they have done so they are sacred, and
not to be touched not only by others but even by themselves." [Footnote:
G. K. Chesterton, on Mr. Rudyard Kipling, in his "Heretics," p. 41.] And
so a schoolhouse is only called a schoolhouse, but it is a place where the
invisible spirits of the past meet in the present the nascent spirits of
the future--the meetinghouse of the nation of yesterday and to-morrow.
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