"It is a monument of a past age; but like all other monuments, it is interesting as well as venerable. It carried thousands of population and millions of wealth into the West; and more than any other material structure in the land, served to harmonize and strengthen, if not to save, the Union.”VEECH.

THE OLD NATIONAL ROAD—A CHAPTER OF AMERICAN EXPANSION.

CHAPTER I.

66 THE MIDDLE AGE."

"The middle ages had their wars and agonies, but also their intense delights. Their gold was dashed with blood, but ours is sprinkled with dust. Their life was intermingled with white and purple; ours is one seamless stuff of brown."- RUSKIN.

A

PERSON can not live in the American central west and be acquainted with the generation which greets. the new century with feeble hand and dimmed eyewithout realizing that there has been a time which,. compared with to-day, seems as the Middle Ages did. to the England to which Ruskin wrote when "life was intermingled with white and purple."

This western boy, born to a feeble republicmother, with exceeding suffering in those days which "tried men's souls," grew up as all boys grow up.. For a long and doubtful period the young west grew slowly and changed appearance gradually. Then, suddenly, it started from:

its slumbering, and, in two decades, could hardly have been recognized as the infant which, in 1787, looked forward to a precarious and doubtful future. The boy has grown into the man in the century, but the changes of the last half century are not, perhaps, so marked as those of the first, when a wilderness was suddenly transformed into a number of imperial commonwealths.

When this west was in its teens and began suddenly outstripping itself, to the marvel of the world, one of the momentous factors in its progress was the building of a great National Road, from the Potomac river to the Mississippi river, by the United States Government a highway seven hundred miles in length, at a cost of seven millions of treasure. This ribbon of road, winding its way through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, toward the Mississippi, was one of the most important steps in that movement of national expansion which followed the conquest of the west. It is probably impossible for us to realize fully what it meant to this west when that vanguard of surveyors came down the western slopes of the Alleghanies, hewing a thoroughfare which should, in one generation, bind distant and half-acquainted states together in bonds of common interest, sympathy and ambition. Until that day travelers spoke of "going into" and "coming out of" the west as though it were a Mammoth Cave. Such were the herculean difficulties

of travel that it was commonly said, despite the dangers of life in the unconquered land, if pioneers could live to get into the west, nothing could, thereafter, daunt them. The growth and prosperity of the west was impossible, until the dawning of such convictions as those which made the National Road a reality.

But if it meant something to the wilderness of the west, how much more it meant to the east-opening for its possession the richest garden on the planet, the four million square miles in the Mississippi basin. For this same prize two great powers. of the old world had yearned and fought. France and England. had studded the west with forts, and their arms had been reflected in every stream from Presque Isle to the Holston, but neither of them could conquer the Alleghanies. A century had proven that the west could not be held by water ways. The question, then, was, could it be held by land approaches? The ringing of woodmen's axes, the clinking of surveyors' chains, the rattle of tavern signs and the rumble of stage coach wheels, thundered. the answer Yes!

So patriotic and so thoroughly American is the central west to-day, that it is also difficult to realize by what a slender thread it hung to the fragile republic east of the mountains, during the two decades succeeding the Revolutionary war. The whole world: looked upon the east and west as realms distinct as Italy and France, and for the same geographical reason. It looked for a partition of the alleged "United States" among the powers as confidently as we to-day look for the partition of China, and for identically similar reasons. England and France and Spain had their well defined "spheres of influence," and the populated and flourishing center of the then west, Kentucky, became, and was for a generation, a hotbed of their wily emissaries. Through all those years, when Burr and others "played fast and loose with conspiracy," the loyalty of the west was far less sure than one can easily believe. The building of the National Road was, undoubt