of the West, but all the settlers of any pretension to respectability were anxious to give their children a decent education.  Even the poorer people, who were still engaged in the hardest and roughest struggle for a livelihood, showed appreciation of the need of schooling for their children; and wherever the clearings of the settlers were within reasonable distance of one another a log schoolhouse was sure to spring up.  The school-teacher boarded around among the different families, and was quite as apt to be paid in produce as in cash.  Sometimes he was a teacher by profession; more often he took up teaching simply as an interlude to some of his other occupations.  Schoolbooks were more common than any others in the scanty libraries of the pioneers.

    The County-System in the West.

The settlers who became firmly established in the land gave definite shape to its political career.  The county was throughout the West the unit of division, though in the North it became somewhat mixed with the township system.  It is a pity that the township could not have been the unit, as it would have rendered the social and political development in many respects easier, by giving to each little community responsibility for, and power in, matters concerning its own welfare; but the backwoodsmen lived so scattered out, and the thinly-settled regions covered so large an extent of territory, that the county was at first in some ways more suited to their needs.  Moreover, it was the unit of organization in Virginia, to which State more than to any other the pioneers owed their social and governmental system.  The people were ordinarily brought but little in contact with the Government.  They were exceedingly jealous of their individual liberty, and wished to be interfered with as little as possible.  Nevertheless, they were fond of litigation.  One observer remarks that horses and lawsuits were their great subjects of conversation. [Footnote:  Michaux, p. 240.]

    The Lawyers and Clergymen Forced to Much Travel.

The vast extent of the territory and the scantiness of the population forced the men of law, like the religious leaders, to travel about rather than stay permanently fixed in any one place.  In a few towns there were lawyers and clergymen who had permanent homes; but as a rule both rode circuits.  The judges and the lawyers travelled together on the circuits, to hold court.  At the Shire-town all might sleep in one room, or at least under one roof; and it was far from an unusual thing to see both the grand and petty juries sitting under trees in the open. [Footnote:  Atwater, p. 177.]

    Power to Combine among the Frontiersmen.