Scarcely a nation in Europe, or a State in the union, that did
not furnish emigrants for the great west. The greater mass from Europe
were of the humble classes, who came from hunger, poverty and
oppression. They found themselves here with the joy of shipwrecked
mariners cast on the untenanted woods, and instantly became cheered with
the hope of being able to build up a family and a fortune from
new elements.
The Puritan and the planter, the German, the Briton, the Frenchman, the
Irishman and the Swede, each with his peculiar prejudices and local
attachments, and all the complicated and interwoven tissue of
sentiments, feelings and thoughts, that country, kindred and home,
indelibly combined with the web of youthful existence, settled down
beside each other. The merchant, mechanic and farmer found themselves
placed by necessity in the same society. Men must cleave to their kind
and must be dependent upon each other. Pride and jealousy give way to
the natural yearnings of the human heart for society. They began to rub
off mutual prejudices. One took a step and then the other. They met half
way and embraced; and the society thus newly organized and constituted
was more liberal, enlarged, unprejudiced, and of course more
affectionate and pleasant than a society of people of like birth and
character, who would bring all their early prejudices as a common stock,
to be transmitted as an inheritance to posterity.
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