Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/52

 farm, factory, and counting-room, even from among those before the mast, went boys to academy and college, while female seminaries springing up here and there took care of the educational interests of selected groups of girls. Such schools were not free, but their benefits were easy to attain, the principal requisite being pluck and a willingness to work both at earning money and at the studies. Girls and boys alike could usually earn their way by teaching in the common schools. Thus the educational system propagated itself, with the result that men and women of intelligence, culture, and refinement became widely dispersed through Yankeedom, and learning was recognized as an aid to the good life as well as a guarantee of the successful life. This was a fundamental condition of that literary flowering which marked the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It insured the poets, historians, orators, and novelists an audience which waxed ever larger as province after province in the West was added to New England's spiritual empire.

Let us not, however, picture to ourselves a Yankee society wholly suffused with intellectual and spiritual light. The Yankees had no such illusions about themselves. Listen to Timothy Dwight's description of a class of New Englanders who could not live "in regular society. They are too idle, too talkative, too passionate, too prodigal, and too shiftless to acquire either property or character. They are impatient of the restraints of law, religion and morality, grumble about the taxes by which rulers, ministers and schoolmasters are supported—at the same time they are usually possessed, in their own view, of uncommon wisdom; understand medical science, politics, and religion better than those who have studied them through life...." He represents the type as the pioneering or forester class, who had "already straggled onward from New England" to far distant settlements, and whose going he was not