1 88 The Winning of the West 



a matter of immediate and not of future interest to 

 the West. 



In short, these good people were learning with 

 reluctance and difficulty to accept as necessary cer 

 tain facts which we regard as part of the order of 

 our political nature. We look at territorial expan 

 sion, and the admission of new States, as part of a 

 process as natural as it is desirable. To our fore 

 fathers the process was novel, and, in some of its 

 features, repugnant. Many of them could not di 

 vest themselves of the feeling that the old States 

 ought to receive more consideration than the new; 

 whereas nowadays it would never occur to any one 

 that Pennsylvania and Georgia ought to stand either 

 above or below California and Montana. It is an 

 inestimable boon to all four States to be in the 

 Union, but this is because the citizens of all of them 

 are on a common footing. If the new common 

 wealths in the Rocky Mountains and on the Pacific 

 slope were not cordially accepted by the original 

 Thirteen States as having exactly the same rights 

 and privileges of every kind, it would be better for 

 them to stand alone. As a matter of fact, we have 

 become so accustomed to the idea of the equality of 

 the different States, that it never enters our heads 

 to conceive of the possibility of its being otherwise. 

 The feeling in its favor is so genuine and universal 

 that we are not even conscious that it exists. No 

 body dreams of treating the fact that the new com 

 monwealths are offshoots of the old as furnishing 

 grounds for any discrimination in reference to them, 



