the nation on what new terms the new age will deal with her. Across
the Pacific looms Asia, no longer a remote vision and a symbol of the
unchanging, but borne as by mirage close to our shores and raising grave
questions of the common destiny of the people of the ocean. The dreams
of Benton and of Seward of a regenerated Orient, when the long march of
westward civilization should complete its circle, seem almost to be in
process of realization. The age of the Pacific Ocean begins, mysterious
and unfathomable in its meaning for our own future.

Turning to view the interior, we see the same picture of change. When
the Superintendent of the Census in 1890 declared the frontier line no
longer traceable, the beginning of the rush into Oklahoma had just
occurred. Here where the broken fragments of Indian nations from the
East had been gathered and where the wilder tribes of the Southwest were
being settled, came the rush of the land-hungry pioneer. Almost at a
blow the old Indian territory passed away, populous cities came into
being and it was not long before gushing oil wells made a new era of
sudden wealth. The farm lands of the Middle West taken as free
homesteads or bought for a mere pittance, have risen so in value that
the original owners have in an increasing degree either sold them in
order to reinvest in the newer cheap lands of the West, or have moved
into the town and have left the tillage to tenant farmers. The growth of
absentee ownership of the soil is producing a serious problem in the
former centers of the Granger and the Populist. Along the Old Northwest
the Great Lakes are becoming a new Mediterranean Sea joining the realms
of wheat and iron ore, at one end with the coal and furnaces of the
forks of the Ohio, where the most intense and wide-reaching center of
industrial energy exists. City life like that of the East, manufactures
and accumulated capital, seem to be reproducing in the center of the
Republic the tendencies already so plain on the Atlantic Coast.

Across the Great Plains where buffalo and Indian held sway successive
industrial waves are passing. The old free range gave place to the
ranch, the ranch to the homestead and now in places in the arid lands
the homestead is replaced by the ten or twenty acre irrigated fruit
farm. The age of cheap land, cheap corn and wheat, and cheap cattle has
gone forever. The federal government has undertaken vast paternal
enterprises of reclamation of the desert.