I answer first that I am not writing of twenty years ago, or yesterday, or the day before yesterday, but _to-day_, the Year of our Lord 1909-1910 in the most highly civilized country the world has ever known; in a country where self-government has reached a perfection of prosperity and power not dreamed by poet or prophet. The menace to self-government from such national influences at work need not be described. The triumph of such factors in national life means the wresting of self-government from the people into the hands of the few, a repetition of the struggle between the Robber Barons of the Middle Ages and the Commoners. It seems almost incredible that such lawlessness and outrage and chicanery can exist in America--many of the outrages would disgrace Russia or Turkey--yet every episode related here has ten prototypes in Life, in Fact; not of twenty years ago, or yesterday, or the day before yesterday, _but to-day_. For instance, the number of sheep destroyed is given as fifteen thousand. The number destroyed in two counties which I had in mind when I wrote that chapter, by actual tally of the Stock Association for the past six years, is sixty thousand. Last year alone, five thousand in one State suffered every form of hideous mutilation--backs broken, entrails torn out; fifteen hundred in an adjoining State had their throats cut; three men were burned to death; one herder in a still more Northern State was riddled to death with bullets. Or to take the case of the timber thefts, I refer to two hundred thousand acres in California. I might have referred to a million and a half in Washington and Oregon. Or referring to the mineral lands, I mention two thousand acres of coal. I might have told another story of fifty thousand acres, or yet another of three hundred thousand acres of gold and silver lands. When I narrate the shooting of a man at the head of a coal shaft, the stealing of Government timber by the half million dollars a year through "the hatchet" trick, or the theft of two thousand acres by "dummies," I am stating facts known to every Westerner out on the spot. In which States have these episodes occurred? Take an imaginary point anywhere in Central Utah. Describe a circle round that point to include the timber and grazing sections of all the Rocky Mountain States from Northern Arizona to Montana and Washington. The episodes related here could be true of any State inside that circle except (in part) one. Such forces are at work in all the Mountain States except (in part) one. That one exception is Utah. Utah has had and is having tribulations of her own in the working out of self-government; but, for reasons that need not be given here, she has kept comparatively free of recent range wars and timber steals.