estern
America and assimilate with their neighbors is much greater than is the
case with the Germans, so that Wisconsin seems to offer opportunity for
non-English influence in a greater degree than her sister on the west.
While Minnesota's economic development has heretofore been closely
dependent on the wheat-producing prairies, the opening of the iron
fields of the Mesabi and Vermilion ranges, together with the development
of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Duluth and West Superior, and the
prospective achievement of a deep-water communication with the Atlantic,
seem to offer to that State a new and imperial industrial destiny.
Between this stupendous economic future to the northwest and the
colossal growth of Chicago on the southeast Wisconsin seems likely to
become a middle agricultural area, developing particularly into a dairy
State. She is powerfully affected by the conservative tendencies of her
German element in times of political agitation and of proposals of
social change.

Some of the social modifications in this State are more or less typical
of important processes at work among the neighboring States of the Old
Northwest. In the north, the men who built up the lumber interests of
the State, who founded a mill town surrounded by the stumps of the pine
forests which they exploited for the prairie markets, have acquired
wealth and political power. The spacious and well-appointed home of the
town-builder may now be seen in many a northern community, in a group of
less pretentious homes of operatives and tradesmen, the social
distinctions between them emphasized by the difference in nationality. A
few years before, this captain of industry was perhaps actively engaged
in the task of seeking the best "forties" or directing the operations of
his log-drivers. His wife and daughters make extensive visits to Europe,
his sons go to some university, and he himself is likely to acquire
political position, or to devote his energies to saving the town from
industrial decline, as the timber is cut away, by transforming it into a
manufacturing center for more finished products. Still others continue
their activity among the forests of the South. This social history of
the timber areas of Wisconsin has left clear indications in the
development of the peculiar political leadership in the northern portion
of the State.

In the southern and middle counties of the State, the original
settlement of the native American pioneer farmer