When a boy on those silent plains I had my Horace and my Euripides in the field. The unattainable eternal cities lent their charm and glory to the valley whose childhood horizon I had not crossed. But now no country boy thinks of the ancient or the mediaeval. It is the nearer city and civilization that impress the imagination. The valedictorian of a class, graduating as I entered college, told me a few months ago that he was building a trolley-line in Rome, and that, after all, Falernian wine, of which we who had never tasted wine out in that vineless region thought as some drink of the gods, was very bitter. I have hinted at what the wheel has done, in what it carries, to make all look alike and think alike and act alike, but there is one supreme service that must have mention. In that country when travel was slow we had a representative government. But while we still have the same form, the wheel has made possible, and so necessary, a more democratic government. When a representative was weeks in reaching the capital he acted on his own responsibility in larger measure than now, when his constituency can reach him every morning. The valley is reached every day, just as the people in a pure democracy were reached by the ancient stentor. The people are reserving to themselves more and more of the function of their one- time representatives, in such measures as the referendum and initiative intimate, and are trying to secure more accurate representation in such systems as the direct primary and proportional representation suggest; but these all are possible only through the aid of the wheel and of what it has brought. If the improvement of democracy is to come through more democracy, as some think, then the railroad is an essential agent of political progress as well as of economic exploitation and social homogeneity. I am not discussing this thesis but simply showing how dependent upon this physical agent is the machinery of democracy. Moreover, mobility is almost an essential quality of the spirit of democracy, the free way to the farthest horizons, the open road to the highest position and service. When the atom becomes practically fixed by its environment, reposeful and stable, stratification sets in. We may or we may not have then something better. It may seem to you a far cry from those rough, lawless coureurs de bois to the mobile but orderly people of that valley to-day. But after an experience of a few summers ago the distance does not seem so great. Here is a journal of three days: