who are now leading the agitation,[220:1] came as
pioneers from the old Northwest, in the days when it was just passing
from the stage of a frontier section. For example, Senator Allen of
Nebraska, president of the recent national Populist Convention, and a
type of the political leaders of his section, was born in Ohio in the
middle of the century, went in his youth to Iowa, and not long after the
Civil War made his home in Nebraska. As a boy, he saw the buffalo driven
out by the settlers; he saw the Indian retreat as the pioneer advanced.
His training is that of the old West, in its frontier days. And now the
frontier opportunities are gone. Discontent is demanding an extension of
governmental activity in its behalf. In these demands, it finds itself
in touch with the depressed agricultural classes and the workingmen of
the South and East. The Western problem is no longer a sectional
problem: it is a social problem on a national scale. The greater West,
extending from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, cannot be regarded as a
unit; it requires analysis into regions and classes. But its area, its
population, and its material resources would give force to its assertion
that if there is a sectionalism in the country, the sectionalism is
Eastern. The old West, united to the new South, would produce, not a new
sectionalism, but a new Americanism. It would not mean sectional
disunion, as some have speculated, but it might mean a drastic assertion
of national government and imperial expansion under a popular hero.

This, then, is the real situation: a people composed of heterogeneous
materials, with diverse and conflicting ideals and social interests,
having passed from the task of filling up the vacant spaces of the
continent, is now thrown back upon itself, and is seeking an
equilibrium. The diverse elements are being fused into national unity.
The forces of reorganization are turbulent and the nation seems like a
witches' kettle.

But the West has its own centers of industrial life and culture not
unlike those of the East. It has State universities, rivaling in
conservative and scientific economic instruction those of any other part
of the Union, and its citizens more often visit the East, than do
Eastern men the West. As time goes on, its industrial development will
bring it more into harmony with the East.

Moreover, the Old Northwest holds the balance of power, and is the
battlefield on which these issues of American dev