The Mississippi Valley has furnished a new social order to America. Its universities have set new types of institutions for social service and for the elevation of the plain people. Its historians should recount its old ambitions, and inventory its ideals, as well as its resources, for the information of the present age, to the end that building on its past, the mighty Valley may have a significance in the life of the nation even more profound than any which I have recounted. FOOTNOTES: [177:1] Proceedings of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association for 1909-10. Reprinted with the permission of the Association. [177:2] _Harper's Magazine_, February, 1900, p. 413. [178:1] Roosevelt, "The Northwest in the Nation," in "Proceedings of the Wisconsin Historical Society," Fortieth Annual Meeting, p. 92. [182:1] "Franklin's Works," iv, p. 141. [186:1] [See the author's paper in _American Historical Review_, x, p. 245.] [187:1] Cutler's "Cutler," ii, p. 372. [188:1] "Jefferson's Works," iv, p. 431. [189:1] [See on the Cotton Kingdom, U. B. Phillips, "History of Slavery"; W. G. Brown, "Lower South"; W. E. Dodd, "Expansion and Conflict"; F. J. Turner, "New West."] [198:1] "Congressional Globe," 35th Congress, First Session, Appendix, p. 70. [199:1] "Seward's Works" (Boston, 1884), iv, p. 319. VII THE PROBLEM OF THE WEST[205:1] The problem of the West is nothing less than the problem of American development. A glance at the map of the United States reveals the truth. To write of a "Western sectionalism," bounded on the east by the Alleghanies, is, in itself, to proclaim the writer a provincial. What is the West? What has it been in American life? To have the answers to these questions, is to understand the most significant features of the United States of to-day.