These intolerant extremists
not only opposed the admission of the young western States into the
Union, but at a later date actually announced that the annexation by the
United States of vast territories beyond the Mississippi offered just
cause for the secession of the northeastern States. Even those who did
not take such an advanced ground felt an unreasonable dread lest the
West might grow to overtop the East in power. In their desire to prevent
this (which has long since happened without a particle of damage
resulting to the East), they proposed to establish in the Constitution
that the representatives from the West should never exceed in number
those from the East,--a proviso which would not have been merely futile,
for it would quite properly have been regarded by the West as
unforgivable.
A curious feature of the way many honest men looked at the West was
their inability to see how essentially transient were some of the
characteristics to which they objected. Thus they were alarmed at the
turbulence and the lawless shortcomings of various kinds which grew out
of the conditions of frontier settlement and sparse population. They
looked with anxious foreboding to the time when the turbulent and
lawless people would be very numerous, and would form a dense and
powerful population; failing to see that in exact proportion as the
population became dense, the conditions which caused the qualities to
which they objected would disappear.
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