After the Land Ordinance of 1785, which authorized the surveying and division of all unsettled land in America west of the Appalachian mountains into six mile square townships, the settlers of those townships often, if not always, numbered the thirty-six subdivisions boustrophedonically, starting at the Northeast corner. The main importance of this fact is its underscoring of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century divide between the Enlightenment-based ideas of those in power (as evidenced by their intense ordering of the chaotic American wilderness into the symbol that is possibly the best geometric expression of rationality, the square) and the folk traditions (exemplified by boustrophedonic ordering, a practice used by peasants the world over for centuries as a sort of standard operating procedure) by which the actual citizens of the nation operated in the course of their daily lives. Said divide (i.e. between the educated ideals of the elite and the more practical ideals by which the average person operates on a day-to-day basis) exists to this day and can be seen in action in such modern debates as that over political correctness, that over the proper way to raise a child, and the one over the efficacy and appropriateness of war, to name a few.