In the main hall of the five-domed Capitol at Des Moines is a life-sized painting of a prairie wagon, hauled by oxen. In such a rude conveyance as this most of the early settlers rolled into Iowa, at a gait of two miles an hour. But there are no prairie wagons now, nor oxen. Ten thousand miles of railway criss-cross the State, and make more profit in three months than all the railways of ancient India made last year. Instead of being tax-ridden serfs, these Iowans pay the total self-governing cost of their Commonwealth by handing over the price of the summer's hay. Instead of being the prey of money-lenders, they have made Des Moines the Hartford of the West, in which forty-two insurance companies carry a risk of half a billion. And so, in each one of its details, the story of these Corn Kings is staggering to a mere city-dweller, especially to anyone who has cold storage ideas about farmers. Big Men, too, as well as big corn, are grown in Iowa. Here is a sample group--half educators and half statesmen--John B. Grinnell, Henry Smith Williams, Albert Shaw, Newell Dwight Hillis, Carl Snyder, Emerson Hough, Hamlin Garland, Senators Allison and Dolliver, Leslie M. Shaw, John A. Kasson, Horace Boies, Governor Albert B. Cummins and our Official Farmer--James Wilson. There are now fifteen hundred newspaper men in Iowa. (One of them ships seven carloads of magazines a month.) There are three hundred and fifty architects, two thousand engineers, five thousand doctors, three thousand bankers and brokers, and thirty thousand teachers. These amazing changes have taken place within the memory of men and women who are now alive. "I can remember when the first mowing-machine was made in our county," said Governor Cummins, who is still far from being a man of years. "I walked eight miles through the forest and sold eggs for three cents a dozen and butter for four cents a pound," said John Cownie--a well-known figure at the Des Moines Capitol. One short half-century, and here is the whole paraphernalia of a high civilisation--a fruitage which has usually required the long cultivation of a thousand years. And Iowa is not a freak State. A traveller hears the same story--from ox-cart to automobile, in almost every region of the prairie West. The various States are only patches of one vast grassy plain where "painted harvesters, fleet after fleet, Like yachts, career through seas of waving wheat." "My first experience with the 'New Farmer,' as you call him, was in Texas," said a Kansas City business man. "I had taken an agency for harvesters in a section of Texas that was bigger than several dozen Vermonts, and I made my headquarters in a town called Amarillo. The first morning I went into the bank to get acquainted. While I was there in came a big, roughly dressed man. 'Come here, Bill,' said the banker. 'Maybe you want some farm machinery.' "'Maybe I do,' said the big fellow; so I gave him a catalogue and went on talking with the banker.