e alkali and sage brush. Population is increasing faster
than the food supply.

New farm lands no longer increase decade after decade in areas equal to
those of European states. While the ratio of increase of improved land
declines, the value of farm lands rise and the price of food leaps
upward, reversing the old ratio between the two. The cry of scientific
farming and the conservation of natural resources replaces the cry of
rapid conquest of the wilderness. We have so far won our national home,
wrested from it its first rich treasures, and drawn to it the
unfortunate of other lands, that we are already obliged to compare
ourselves with settled states of the Old World. In place of our attitude
of contemptuous indifference to the legislation of such countries as
Germany and England, even Western States like Wisconsin send commissions
to study their systems of taxation, workingmen's insurance, old age
pensions and a great variety of other remedies for social ills.

If we look about the periphery of the nation, everywhere we see the
indications that our world is changing. On the streets of Northeastern
cities like New York and Boston, the faces which we meet are to a
surprising extent those of Southeastern Europe. Puritan New England,
which turned its capital into factories and mills and drew to its shores
an army of cheap labor, governed these people for a time by a ruling
class like an upper stratum between which and the lower strata there was
no assimilation. There was no such evolution into an assimilated
commonwealth as is seen in Middle Western agricultural States, where
immigrant and old native stock came in together and built up a
homogeneous society on the principle of give and take. But now the
Northeastern coast finds its destiny, politically and economically,
passing away from the descendants of the Puritans. It is the little
Jewish boy, the Greek or the Sicilian, who takes the traveler through
historic streets, now the home of these newer people to the Old North
Church or to Paul Revere's house, or to Tea Wharf, and tells you in his
strange patois the story of revolution against oppression.

Along the Southern Atlantic and the Gulf coast, in spite of the
preservative influence of the negro, whose presence has always called
out resistance to change on the part of the whites, the forces of social
and industrial transformation are at work. The old tidewater aristocracy
has surrendered to the up-country democr