202 Manhood and Statehood 



the order of Nature. Moreover, it now seems to us 

 equally a matter of course that when a sufficient num 

 ber of the citizens of our common country have thus 

 entered into and taken possession of some great tract 

 of empty wilderness, they should be permitted to 

 enter the Union as a State on an absolute equality 

 with the older States, having the same right both to 

 manage their own local affairs as they deem best, and 

 to exercise their full share of control over all the af 

 fairs of whatever kind or sort in which the nation is 

 interested as a whole. The youngest and the oldest 

 States stand on an exact level in one indissoluble and 

 perpetual Union. 



To us nowadays these processes seem so natural 

 that it is only by a mental wrench that we con 

 ceive of any other as possible. Yet they are really 

 wholly modern and of purely American develop 

 ment. When, a century before Colorado became a 

 State, the original thirteen States began the great 

 experiment of a free and independent Republic on 

 this continent, the processes which we now accept in 

 such matter-of-course fashion were looked upon as 

 abnormal and revolutionary. It is our own success 

 here in America that has brought about the complete 

 alteration in feeling. The chief factor in producing 

 the Revolution, and later in producing the War of 

 1812, was the inability of the mother country to un 

 derstand that the freemen who went forth to conquer 



