People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 July 1895 — LITERARY REVIEW. [ARTICLE]

LITERARY REVIEW.

Are Weltrn People Fanatical? The charge has been so often made in the press that the people of the Western States are fanatics on the financial and other questions, that a writer has seriously considered the grounds of it in the June Arena. The writer, J. K. Miller, is a Western man. and he is evidently of good old Yankee blood, for he makes his points like a keen, shrewd Yankee lawyer. And one that goes right home is this: We are told over and over again, he says, by the most influential statisticians and other authorities, that the enormous move ment of western immigration has resulted in depleting the native element in the Eastern States, and that their ranks have been tilled by foreign emigrants. French Canadians, Irish and Germans. If this is true, he asks, it is not- a little startling to lav it down as a political principle that the native born American people, born under the much lauded institutions of America, are less capable of exercising intelligent judgment upon questions of public policy than are their adopted brethren in the Eastern States, so recently from quite different political and social institutions. This is a home thrust at such oracles as Mrs. E. L. Godkin of the New York Evening Post, who also hails from across the sea.