Their relations with one another, with their brethren of the seaboard,
and with the Federal Government, likewise had to be adjusted without
much chance of profiting by antecedent experience. Many phases of these
relations between the people who stayed at home, and those who wandered
off to make homes, between the frontiersmen as they formed young States,
and the Central Government representing the old States, were entirely
new, and were ill-understood by both parties. Truths which all citizens
have now grown to accept as axiomatic were then seen clearly only by the
very greatest men, and by most others were seen dimly, if at all. What
is now regarded as inevitable and proper was then held as something
abnormal, unnatural, and greatly to be dreaded. The men engaged in
building new commonwealths did not, as yet, understand that they owed
the Union as much as did the dwellers in the old States. They were apt
to let liberty become mere anarchy and license, to talk extravagantly
about their rights while ignoring their duties, and to rail at the
weakness of the Central Government while at the same time opposing with
foolish violence every effort to make it stronger.
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