“There was the Red Son of the Great Prairie, who hated the Palefaces with a hot hatred; stealthily he swooped down upon them, tore up and laid waste the little settlements. Great was the terror he spread; bloody the saga concerning him. “But more to be dreaded than this tribulation was the strange spell of sadness which the unbroken solitude cast upon the minds of some. Many took their own lives; asylum after asylum was filled with disordered beings who had once been human.... Then, too, there were years of pestilence--toil and travail, famine and disease.” The frontier is exhausted, but it should be carefully noted that the quest for a physical, external paradise lives on in the American machine-age, in the dream of an industrial Utopia. To take but one illustration recorded in our fiction, Sherwood Anderson’s _Poor White_--paralleling the frontier stories--traces the transition from the optimism born of untapped resources to the despair of a standardised industrialism. It is the tale of a stolid boy, Hugh McVey, who manages to invent machines from which every one hopes great things; it is supposed to be typical, to present a cross-section of American life. “In every mind the future was bright with promise. Throughout the whole Mid-American country ... a hopeful spirit prevailed.... The youth and optimistic spirit of the country led it to take hold of the hand of the giant, industrialism, and lead him laughing into the land.... The thing that was happening in Bidwell happened in towns all over the Middle West. Out through the coal and iron regions of Pennsylvania, into Ohio and Indiana, and on westward into the States bordering on the Mississippi River, industry crept. Gas and oil were discovered in Ohio and Indiana. Over night towns grew into cities. A madness took hold of the minds of the people.... Wealth seemed to be spurting out of the very earth.... Farmers owning oil-producing land went to bed in the evening poor and owing money at the bank, and awoke in the morning rich.” But Hugh McVey, “the poor white, son of the defeated dreamer by the river,” finds mere money and the satisfaction of physical needs insufficient. “He was unfilled by the life he led.” Conscious of “some indefinable, inner struggle,” “he fought to accept himself, to understand himself, to relate himself with the life about him.” For the sanctity of the individual personality America had substituted the worship of mass production, of material gain. “It was a time of hideous architecture, a time when thought and learning paused. Without music, without poetry, without beauty in their lives or impulses, a whole people, full of the native energy and strength of lives lived in a new land, rushed pell-mell into a new age.”