These Middle Western pioneers were in the fullest sense the sons of democracy. The Southern planter with the traditions of the English country gentleman behind him and, in slavery time, representing a survival of the feudal order, had no counterpart in the West, where the settler was limited in his holdings to the number of acres that he and his sons could cultivate by their own labor. I explored, last year, much of the Valley of Democracy, both in seed-time and in harvest. We had been drawn at last into the world war, and its demands and conjectures as to its outcome were upon the lips of men everywhere. It was impossible to avoid reflecting upon the part these plains have played in the history of America and the increasing part they are destined to play in the world history of the future. Every wheat shoot, every stalk of corn was a new testimony to the glory of America. Not an acre of land but had been won by intrepid pioneers who severed all ties but those that bound them to an ideal, whose only tangible expression was the log court-house where they recorded the deeds for their land or the military post that afforded them protection. At Decatur, Illinois, one of these first court-houses still stands, and we are told that within its walls Lincoln often pleaded causes. American democracy could have no finer monument than this; the imagination quickens at the thought of similar huts reared by the axes of the pioneers to establish safeguards of law and order on new soil almost before they had fashioned their habitations. It seemed to me that if the Kaiser had known the spirit in which these august fields were tamed and peopled, or the aspirations, the aims and hopes that are represented in every farmhouse and ranch-house between the Alleghanies and the Rockies, he would not so contemptuously have courted our participation against him in his war for world domination.