“The West,” an Eastern critic complains, “appears always to be demanding something!” The idea of the West as an Oliver Twist with a plate insistently extended pleases me and I am unable to meet it with any plausible refutation. The West has always wanted and it will continue to want and to ask for a great many things; we may only pray that it will more and more hammer upon the federal counter, not for appropriations but for things of value for the whole. “We will try anything once!” This for long was more or less the Western attitude in politics, but we seem to have escaped from it; and the war, with its enormous demands upon our resources, its revelation of national weaknesses, caused a prompt cleaning of the slate of old, unfinished business to await the outcome. It is an element of strength in a democracy that its political and social necessities are continuing; there is no point of rest. Obstacles, differences, criticism are all a necessary part of the eternal struggle toward perfection. What was impossible yesterday is achieved to-day and may be abandoned to-morrow. Democracy, as we have thus far practised it, is a series of experiments, a quest. II The enormous industrial development of the Middle West was a thing undreamed of by the pioneers, whose chief concern was with the soil; there was no way of anticipating the economic changes that have been forced upon attention by the growth of cities and States. Minnesota had been a State thirteen years when in 1871 Proctor Knott, in a speech in Congress, ridiculed the then unknown name of Duluth: “The word fell upon my ear with a peculiar and indescribable charm, like the gentle murmur of a low fountain stealing forth in the midst of roses, or the soft, sweet accent of an angel’s whisper in the bright, joyous dream of sleeping innocence.” And yet Duluth has become indeed a zenith city of the saltless seas, and the manufactured products of Minnesota have an annual value approximating $500,000,000.