The living owners, when they go to their
graves, leave their little patches of earth as rich as they found them.
There is no hurrying. The habitants go at the pace of their oxen. They are
thrifty, apparently contented, conservers of what they have; they spend
prudently for to-day; they save for to-morrow--not for the to-morrow of
the nation, but for the to-morrow of the family. They are avowedly
individualistic, nepotic conservationists and only in effect national.
This is one picture. I put beside it another. Out on the farther edge of
the Mississippi Valley one finds the other extreme. Within the past
twenty-two years certain tracts of vacant land have been purchased by the
government from the Indians (and let me here say that the government has
been trying to deal fairly with these people; mistakes have been made, but
I should say that the nation had in its recent treatment of them, despite
reports I have heard in Paris, pauperized rather than robbed them). These
tracts have been opened to settlement--all the rest of the great public
domain that was immediately desirable having been occupied, as we have
seen.
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