Let me give you an illustration of that demigrating influence. Two years ago I invited several leaders of great transportation and educational interests in New York to meet one of their number who, beginning life as a telegraph operator out beyond the Mississippi, was at the head of one of the two greatest railroads in the east. Of the guests, one, the president of another important railroad, was once a farm boy, then a freight brakeman in that same western State; another, the president of one of the longest railroads, was the son of a stone-mason out in that valley; another, the head of the Interborough system of New York, also a prairie- born boy; another, president of the greatest southern railroad, was born at the mouth of the Mississippi; and still another, one of the wealthiest men in the world, was at one time a messenger boy and telegraph operator just over the mountains on the site of Fort Duquesne. Only one man of the company of nearly twenty men, assembled without thought of origin, had been born in New York. All had come from the country or from across the water, and most of them from the great Mississippi Valley. I speak of this while discussing the railroad, because it is their paths through the valley of the French that have made this phenomenon possible. I have spoken of what the wheel has done in making the permanence of one republic of such an area a possibility. Nothing save a loose, heterogeneous confederation could have been practicable without its unifying service. It is only fair to those who made such gloomy prophecies in the early days to say that they had no intimation of what steam was destined to do. When Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, early in the nineteenth century, on a journey back from the west in a stage- coach, said that some day steam would drive wagons faster than they were going in the coach, his fellow passengers thought him a dreamer--a visionary. But it was only a man of such dreams or visions who in those days could have seen the possibility which has to-day been realized through the railroad. I have spoken of the part which the steam wheel has had in the rapid development and the exploitation of that great valley which, except for its pioneering in wild places, might have been seven hundred years, as Andrew Johnson predicted, in filling up, or at least two or three centuries. I have intimated its influence in promoting migration cityward--a movement as wide as European civilization--but intensified there, where the inhabitants have not been tied through generations of inheritance or historic associations to particular fields, where primogeniture has no observance, and where the traditions are of the wilderness and the visions are ever of a promised land beyond. The city is on every boy's horizon. Its glow is in every prairie sky at twilight.