Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/558



He looked around among his neighbors and saw boys no brighter and girls no worthier than his own, enjoying the advantages of education, the best society and all that wealth could bring. His sons and daughters were as dear to him as those who were highly favored by fortune were to their parents. There were no class divisions in America to exclude his children from aspiring to higher positions; no exclusive social circles which they might not enter; the field was open to all. Misfortune or poverty alone kept the ambitious from participation in the luxuries of life. There were great unsettled regions in the far West where industry, perseverance and privations for this generation would give all of these advantages to the children of the poor. It was hard to sever all social and kindred ties and seek among unsettled regions a place to make new homes; endure the stern privations, slavish toil and long, slow waiting for the coming in late years of life of the advantages that the children might some distant day enjoy. The whole West of fifty years ago was dotted over with log cabins, where, amid hardships, sickness, want and unending toil, the best years of the lives of brave self-sacrificing men and women were given to the building up of a new civilization from little more than nature had provided.

The younger generation of the closing years of the Nineteenth Century can know little of the slow progress of evolution which has transformed the bleak prairies of fifty years ago into beautiful farms of unsurpassed fertility, adorned with shady groves, fruitful orchards, large barns, modern homes and generous equipments of the best labor-saving implements. They cannot realize that our network of railroads, telegraphs and telephones has so recently displaced the stage coach, the emigrant wagon drawn by oxen, the weekly horseback mail carrier. That our cities and thriving villages with their modern homes, imposing business blocks and public buildings, with factories, banks, elegant churches and stately school-houses