The passes of these eastern mountains were the arteries of the nation’s life.  The real breath of our growth and manhood came into our nostrils when first, like Governor Spotswood and that gallant company of Virginian gentlemen that rode with him in the far year 1716, the Knights of the Order of the Golden Horseshoe, our pioneers stood upon the ridges of the eastern hills and looked down upon those reaches of the continent where lay the untrodden paths of the westward migration.  There, upon the courses of the distant rivers that gleamed before them in the sun, down the farther slopes of the hills beyond, out upon the broad fields that lay upon the fertile banks of the “Father of Waters,” up the long tilt of the continent to the vast hills that looked out upon the Pacific—­there were the regions in which, joining with people from every race and clime under the sun, they were to make the great compounded nation whose liberty and mighty works of peace were to cause all the world to stand at gaze.  Thither were to come Frenchmen, Scandinavians, Celts, Dutch, Slavs,—­men of the Latin races and of the races of the Orient, as well as men, a great host, of the first stock of the settlements:  English, Scots, Scots-Irish,—­like New England men, but touched with the salt of humor, hard, and yet neighborly too.  For this great process of growth by grafting, of modification no less than of expansion, the colonies,—­the original thirteen States,—­were only preliminary studies and first experiments.  But the experiments that most resembled the great methods by which we peopled the continent from side to side and knit a single polity across all its length and breadth, were surely the experiments made from the very first in the Middle States of our Atlantic seaboard.

Here from the first were mixture of population, variety of element, combination of type, as if of the nation itself in small.  Here was never a simple body, a people of but a single blood and extraction, a polity and a practice brought straight from one motherland.  The life of these States was from the beginning like the life of the country:  they have always shown the national pattern.  In New England and the South it was very different.  There some of the great elements of the national life were long in preparation:  but separately and with an individual distinction; without mixture,—­for long almost without movement.  That the elements thus separately prepared were of the greatest importance, and run everywhere like chief threads of the pattern through all our subsequent life, who can doubt?  They give color and tone to every part of the figure.  The very fact that they are so distinct and separately evident throughout, the very emphasis of individuality they carry with them, but proves their distinct origin.  The other elements of our life, various though they be, and of the very fibre, giving toughness and consistency to the fabric, are merged in its texture, united, confused, almost indistinguishable, so thoroughly are they mixed, intertwined, interwoven, like the essential strands of the stuff itself:  but these of the Puritan and the Southerner, though they run everywhere with the rest and seem upon a superficial view themselves the body of the cloth, in fact modify rather than make it.