The people in the eastern part of West Virginia are, so far as I am capable of judging, precisely like Virginians.  The old houses, when built, were in Virginia, the names of the people are Virginian names, and customs and points of view are Virginian.  Until I went there I was not aware how very much this means.

I do not know who wrote the school history I studied as a boy, but I do know now that it was written by a lopsided historian, and that his “lop,” like that of many another of his kind, led him to enlarge upon American naval and military victories, to minimize American defeats, to give an impression that the all-important early colonies were those of New England, and that the all-important one of them was Massachusetts.  From this bias I judge that the historian was a Boston man.  It takes a Bostonian to think in that way.  They do it still.

From my school history I gathered the idea that although Sir Walter Raleigh and Captain John Smith were so foolish as to dally more or less in the remote fastnesses of Virginia, and although there was a little ineffectual settlement at Jamestown, all the important colonizing of this country occurred in New England.  I read about Peregrine White, but not about Virginia Dare; I read much of Miles Standish, but nothing of Christopher Newport; I read a great deal of the Mayflower, but not a word of the Susan Constant.

Yet Virginia Dare, if she lived, must have been nearing young ladyhood when Peregrine White was born; Captain Christopher Newport passed the Virginia capes when Miles Standish was hardly more than a youth, in Lancashire; and the Susan Constant landed the Jamestown settlers more than a dozen years before the Mayflower landed her shipload of eminent furniture owners at Plymouth.  Even Plymouth itself had been visited years before by John Smith, and it was he, not the Pilgrims, who named the place.

I find that some boys, to-day, know these things.  But though that fact is encouraging, I am not writing for boys, but for their comparatively ignorant parents.

Not only did the first English colony establish itself in Virginia, and the first known tobacco come from there—­a point the importance of which cannot be overstated—­but the history of the Old Dominion is in every way more romantic and heroic than that of any other State.  The first popular government existed there long before the Revolution, and at the time of the break with the mother country Virginia was the most wealthy and populous of the Colonies.  Some historians say that slavery was first introduced there when some Dutchmen sold to the colonists a shipload of negroes, but I believe this point is disputed.  The Declaration of Independence was, of course, written by a Virginian, and made good by the sword of one.  The first President of the United States was a Virginian, and so is the present Chief Executive.  The whole of New England has produced but four presidents; Ohio has produced six;