Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/19

Rh its hospitality for new ideas, the beginnings of the fine art of good living, and eagerness to promote schools, churches, and the organizations for the higher life.

Some of the particular features recorded by Cuming, that are now obsolete, are the use of lotteries for raising money for public purposes, and the prevalence of highway robbery in the unsettled parts of the country. The restlessness of the population is also worthy of note—the long journeys for trivial purposes, the abandoned settlements in Kentucky and Illinois.

Especially valuable for purposes of comparison, is Cuming's accurate account of the towns through which he passed—their size and appearance, number and kind of manufactures, business methods and interests. Characteristic of the period also, is the enterprise of the inhabitants—townsites laid out at every available position, speculation in lands, and large confidence in the future of the region. In that confidence Cuming appears fully to have shared. Already, he tells us, food-stuffs were being exported to Europe, the growth of the cotton industry promised large returns, the richness of the soil and the resources and fertility of the land fostered high hopes.

In regard to social conditions, our author writes at a time when the formerly uniform and homogeneous character of the Western population was beginning to break up, especially in the slave states and territories, and when the professional classes and large land-owners were taking a leading position in affairs. He notes particularly the importance and assumption of leadership on the part of the lawyers. The virulent excitement of political life is one of the features of his observations that his first editor attempted to excuse and modify. It was doubtless true that the incidents attendant upon the arrest and trial of Burr had especially aroused the section through which Cuming passed. It