If I may delicately suggest the point without making too great a concession, the West is really quite human. It has its own “slant”--its tastes and preferences that differ in ways from those of the East, the South, or the farther West; and radicals are distributed through the corn belt in about the same proportion as elsewhere. The bread-and-butter Western Folks are pretty sensible, taken in the long run, and not at all anxious to pull down the social pillars just to make a noise. They will impiously carve them a little--yes, and occasionally stick an incongruous patch on the wall of the sanctuary of democracy; but they are never wilfully destructive. And it cannot be denied that some of their architectural and decorative efforts have improved the original design. The West has saved other sections a good deal of trouble by boldly experimenting with devices it had “thought up” amid the free airs of the plains; but the West, no more than the East, will give storage to a contrivance that has been proved worthless. The vindictive spirit that was very marked in the Western attitude toward the railroads for many years was not a gratuitous and unfounded hatred of corporations, but had a real basis in discriminations that touched vitally the life of the farmer and the struggling towns to which he carried his products. The railroads were the only corporations the West knew before the great industrial development. A railroad represented “capital,” and “capital” was therefore a thing to chastise whenever opportunity offered. It has been said in bitterness of late that the hostile legislation demanded by the West “ruined the railroads.” This is not a subject for discussion here, but it can hardly be denied that the railroads invited the war that was made upon them by injustices and discriminations of which the obscure shipper had a right to complain. The antagonism to railroads inspired a great deal of radicalism aimed at capital generally, and “corporate greed,” “the encroachments of capital,” “the money devils of Wall Street,” and “special privilege” burned fiercely in our political terminology. Our experiment with government control as a war measure has, of course, given a new twist to the whole transportation problem.