bring up their children in the midst of an immorality which is so prevailing as to make the social atmosphere of the community, and therefore the tough and his companions are moved off quickly by a vigilance committee, or else they slink back into slums, thereby increasing the slumminess. The process of human betterment has not been entirely completed. Time is required to bring about all that civilization demands, without counting the luxuries which it may bestow in return. Not long ago an indignant railroad president, moved to wrath by the obstreperous viciousness of a town that is a division headquarters, sent word to it that unless it mended its morals he would take his shops away from it—which in reality meant that he would move away most of the population.
It is impossible, apparently, that there shall be a frontier, or anything like it, without the youth who have wildness in the blood. It is the fashion to call the life of the ranches and of the mining towns free and unconventional. The idea that is hoped to be conveyed by this overtaxed word unconventionality is, as the mundane says, fetching, for it means relief from restraining artificialities; but experience teaches us that there is no decent community without its conventions, only these conventions differ in different places. There are, indeed, artificial restraints which are irksome, and apparently arbitrary and meaningless, but it is a great deal better, for the community and for the individual, that they be observed. Unrestrained freedom is bad all round, and socially bad, whether it is that of the beer-cellar in Bohemia or of a dance-hall in the Ear West. The young man who seeks in the Northwest liberty from all the sedate checks of civilized public opinion, including those which deserve the disdain of the intellectual, has before him varied opportunities. How he is to come out is the problem of his own nature. He may become a cattle-thief or a steady "puncher"; he may take to liquor and gambling or he may become a "leading citizen"; he may become a politician or a maker of politicians; he may graduate as a typical cowboy nuisance, wear queer clothes, shoot off pistols and strange oaths to frighten tenderfeet, or he may become a real ranchman—a "builder-up of empire," to use one of our newest phrases,—with a strong hankering after churches, schools, broadcloth, and other conventions from which in his youth he fled. The tendency of good Americans and of good American communities is in this direction; it is toward respectability, which means the ability to inspire respect in others by respecting one's self. It is the Americans, the sons of Americans, who impress themselves upon the far-out lands, as the same people have put their stamp upon the institutions of the Middle West. The foreigners who come to anything in the one as in the other part of the country reach their climacteric of citizenship by becoming Americanized.
Politics is perhaps queer, to say the least, in the newer parts of the country; but while, by reason of the hammer of the reformers, who love their country with a much stronger and more unselfish passion than do the self-dubbed optimists, the public is making up its mind to improve politics, still we cannot say that political vagaries, in municipal affairs, for example, are peculiar to the Far West. We continue to possess our "halls" and our "organizations" in the fringe along the Atlantic, even if it is true that in some respects, where there has been exposure and where penalties have been suffered, politics is a less flagrant vice than it used to be. Perhaps it may be said that the East is gradually waking up to the fact that party politics may afford virtuous occupation and be beneficial to the state, while a perceptible part of the men of the Northwest, or the Far West, are still regarding government, with its resources and its powers, as a quarry—and this virtuously, it may be. A quarry it is in sooth, to all parts of the country. There are three ways of looking at politics in our dear victimized land. In the East the tendency of the class is to take an office for "the money in it," although there are some men, who have arrived or who have inherited, who like to do the work of real statesmanship, or of something nearly akin to it. There are also those most dangerous enemies of the public weal, mere opportunists. It is true that all, or nearly all, democratic progress is made through compromises, but there are compromises for
