y; and in the
northern counties of the State, where there is a sparser population, and
the country is being settled, its sympathies are still with the debtor
class. Thus the Old Northwest is a region where the older frontier
conditions survive in parts, and where the inherited ways of looking at
things are largely to be traced to its frontier days. At the same time
it is a region in many ways assimilated to the East. It understands both
sections. It is not entirely content with the existing structure of
economic society in the sections where wealth has accumulated and
corporate organizations are powerful; but neither has it seemed to feel
that its interests lie in supporting the program of the prairies and the
South. In the Fifty-third Congress it voted for the income tax, but it
rejected free coinage. It is still affected by the ideal of the
self-made man, rather than by the ideal of industrial nationalism. It is
more American, but less cosmopolitan than the seaboard.

We are now in a position to see clearly some of the factors involved in
the Western problem. For nearly three centuries the dominant fact in
American life has been expansion. With the settlement of the Pacific
coast and the occupation of the free lands, this movement has come to a
check. That these energies of expansion will no longer operate would be
a rash prediction; and the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an
interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for
the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining
countries, are indications that the movement will continue. The
stronghold of these demands lies west of the Alleghanies.

In the remoter West, the restless, rushing wave of settlement has broken
with a shock against the arid plains. The free lands are gone, the
continent is crossed, and all this push and energy is turning into
channels of agitation. Failures in one area can no longer be made good
by taking up land on a new frontier; the conditions of a settled society
are being reached with suddenness and with confusion. The West has been
built up with borrowed capital, and the question of the stability of
gold, as a standard of deferred payments, is eagerly agitated by the
debtor West, profoundly dissatisfied with the industrial conditions that
confront it, and actuated by frontier directness and rigor in its
remedies. For the most part, the men who built up the West beyond the
Mississippi, and