Practically the whole western country has tied itself to a wheel, and so whatever its happiness and welfare may be, come of or with the wheel. This territory is capable of self-support; it has still its independent spirit, bred of the pioneer who lived before the day of wheels; it is responsive to appeals that stop its restless movement--as the wheel of Ixion when Orpheus played; but none the less is it an eager, restless, unquiet life, driven as a wheel, driven by the same hand that urged it into the valley. No one asks--or few ask--if the wheel brings good or ill. The only concern is that it shall run as quickly and safely as is humanly and mechanically possible and shall not discriminate between one shipper and another, one community and another, one consumer and another. That is the railroad problem. The wheel has removed watersheds at pleasure, created cities and fortunes by its presence or its taking thought. But under the new policy of the government it is not likely that there will ever again be such ruthless disturbance of nature, or such wild, profuse creation. Democracy, beginning in that valley, is seeking now a perfect impersonal transportation machine. But such a machine will drain quite as effectively the country districts. The census returns for 1910 show, for example, that in one prosperous agricultural State, Missouri, just west of the Mississippi, while the State as a whole showed an increase of 187,000 in ten years, there was a net decrease of 84,000 in the rural districts. A partial explanation of the latter statistic is the moving on of farmers to still newer lands; another, the decline in the size of families; but it is attributable chiefly to the first statistic, the drift to the city--and to this the wheels contribute more than any other influence, carrying, as they do, the glamour or the opportunity of the city life daily before the eyes of the country boy. To be sure, these same wheels are lessening, to some extent, the congestion of the great centres of population, and lightening their shadows by extending them--spreading them--but none the less are the shadows spreading faster from the coming of the country to the city than of the suburbanizing of the city. This movement is not peculiar to the Mississippi Valley, but it is more rapid there, perhaps, than in any other great area.