the province. Nor were these ideals limited to
the native American settlers: Germans and Scandinavians who poured into
the Middle West sought the country with like hopes and like faith. These
facts must be remembered in estimating the effects of the economic
transformation of the province upon its democracy. The peculiar
democracy of the frontier has passed away with the conditions that
produced it; but the democratic aspirations remain. They are held with
passionate determination.

The task of the Middle West is that of adapting democracy to the vast
economic organization of the present. This region which has so often
needed the reminder that bigness is not greatness, may yet show that its
training has produced the power to reconcile popular government and
culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world. The
democracies of the past have been small communities, under simple and
primitive economic conditions. At bottom the problem is how to reconcile
real greatness with bigness.

It is important that the Middle West should accomplish this; the future
of the Republic is with her. Politically she is dominant, as is
illustrated by the fact that six out of seven of the Presidents elected
since 1860 have come from her borders. Twenty-six million people live in
the Middle West as against twenty-one million in New England and the
Middle States together, and the Middle West has indefinite capacity for
growth. The educational forces are more democratic than in the East,
and the Middle West has twice as many students (if we count together the
common school, secondary, and collegiate attendance), as have New
England and the Middle States combined. Nor is this educational system,
as a whole, inferior to that of the Eastern States. State universities
crown the public school system in every one of these States of the
Middle West, and rank with the universities of the seaboard, while
private munificence has furnished others on an unexampled scale. The
public and private art collections of Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Paul, and
other cities rival those of the seaboard. "World's fairs," with their
important popular educational influences, have been held at Chicago,
Omaha, and Buffalo; and the next of these national gatherings is to be
at St. Louis. There is throughout the Middle West a vigor and a mental
activity among the common people that bode well for its future. If the
task of reducing the Province of the Lake and Prairie