The Forest and Man 45 



never overcame their distrust of them. These men 

 owed surprisingly little to the European tradition 

 still powerful in the East. The roots of their 

 being were sunk deep in the western forests. 

 The influence of the boundless woods, with their 

 long, dreary stretches of swamp land, and their 

 majestic corridors of towering trees, had penetrated 

 their minds on their long travels through the wil- 

 derness as circuit riders or military leaders. Though 

 some of them, in the course of long public careers, 

 became really men of wide education and broad 

 minds, who could very well appreciate the points 

 of view of people of different type, yet they never 

 lost their affinity with the men whom they repre- 

 sented. The winds that rustled through the syca- 

 mores of the river bottom can be heard in the 

 speeches of Henry Clay, and the odor of the pines 

 hovers around Cass while he moves through the 

 over-civilized circles of the East. 



The race of backwoods statesmen has disap- 

 peared. Their successors obtain their training no 

 longer in the Indian fight and the log cabins that 

 served as court-houses. Their training-schools are 

 the library and the university lecture-hall, and the 

 counting-house, with which even the modern law- 

 office has but too much in common. No doubt 

 they will never be guilty of the lapses in good 

 taste nor of the occasional na'ive blunders their 

 rude predecessors committed. But is it altogether 

 for the best that the influence of the forest has 

 been so far removed from our modern leaders that 



