The Indian Wars, 1784-1787 187 



vanced ground felt an unreasonable dread lest the 

 West might grow to overtop the East in power. In 

 their desire to prevent this (which has long since 

 happened without a particle of damage resulting to 

 the East), they proposed to establish in the Consti 

 tution that the representatives from the West should 

 never exceed in number those from the East, a 

 proviso which would not have been merely futile, 

 for it would quite properly have been regarded by 

 the West as unforgivable. 



A curious feature of the way many honest men 

 looked at the West was their inability to see how 

 essentially transient were some of the characteristics 

 to which they objected. Thus they were alarmed 

 at the turbulence and the lawless shortcomings of 

 various kinds which grew out of the conditions of 

 frontier settlement and sparse population. They 

 looked with anxious foreboding to the time when 

 the turbulent and lawless people would be very nu 

 merous, and would form a dense and powerful popu 

 lation ; failing to see that in exact proportion as the 

 population became dense, the conditions which 

 caused the qualities to which they objected would 

 disappear. Even the men who had too much good 

 sense to share these fears, even men as broadly pa 

 triotic as Jay, could not realize the extreme rapidity 

 of Western growth. Kentucky and Tennessee grew 

 much faster than any of the old frontier colonies 

 had ever grown ; and from sheer lack of experience, 

 Eastern statesmen could not realize that this rapid 

 ity of growth made the navigation of the Mississippi 



