COUNTRY LIFE IN THE WEST 43 



goods. The habits of his early life stay with him and dominate 

 all his business transactions. The effect of town life upon the 

 retired farmer is, however, by no means to be compared with 

 its demoralizing effect upon his minor children, especially his 

 boys, if he happens to have any. 



As a traveler moves westward, if he keeps his eyes, or rather 

 his ears, open, he becomes more and more impressed at the 

 roughness and even profanity of the language which he hears in 

 public places. This impression, however, is due partly to the 

 fact that the ordinary traveler only sees and hears what goes on 

 about the railway stations, hotel corridors, and similar places, 

 and the class of people who infest such places are by no means 

 representative. When he gets away from beaten lines of travel, 

 out into the rural districts, this impression is by no means so 

 vivid. Nevertheless, it remains, and it is undoubtedly true that 

 there is more rough language in the West than in the East. At 

 the same time, if he takes the trouble to attend country churches 

 and to form some idea of the popular interest in religious matters, 

 he is impressed with the piety of the people. It will usually 

 take him some time to reconcile these two apparently contra- 

 dictory impressions, but the explanation is that as one moves 

 westward through the agricultural districts he meets fewer and 

 fewer of that class which is so numerous in cities and also in the 

 rural districts of the East, who are neither pious nor wicked 

 simply indifferent. In other words, it seems that throughout the 

 West, especially beyond the Missouri River, every man is either 

 pious or profane, and the prevailing type of piety is of the 

 Methodistic sort, just as the prevailing type of impiety is of the 

 turbulent, swearing sort. 



Politically, the West is rapidly settling down to more fixed 

 habits of thought, though it had its period of unrest. In the 

 early seventies, and again in the early nineties, the Western 

 farmer became the spoiled child of American politics. He has 

 been flattered and cajoled by demagogues until he came to think 

 himself the most important factor in our social system. This 

 position he has now been deprived of by the wage-worker, who 

 is to-day laying the flattering unction to his soul that he is the 

 most important personage in the universe. To be sure, neither 

 the Grange nor the Farmers' Alliance in their wildest days ap- 



