Within two months in the year 1899, fifty-seven thousand foreigners were brought to this country to be made over into Americans. Among these were Croatians, Slavs, Armenians, Bohemians, Servians, Montenegrins, Dalmatians, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, Moravians, Lithuanians, Magyars, Jews, Syrians, Turks, Slovaks, with others of the better-known nationalities, such as English, Germans, French, and Scandinavians. Of the total number of these immigrants, less than one-tenth had a capital as great as thirty dollars with which to begin life in the new land. Many of these immigrants from lower Europe linger in the cities of the West, and do not become a part of the agricultural communities; but the indirect tax on the agricultural communities none the less remains. They become only parasites upon the parasitic middlemen, and all these must be supported by the farms. It must be conceded that the new problems assigned to the West in the way of absorption and assimilation of alien population in these days of rapid transportation are nothing short of serious and perplexing. These new people, brought out in swarms by means of the rapid wheels of steam-locomotion, are like the early Americans who settled first a real America. They are very poor; their fare must be coarse, their garb mean, their opportunities for self-improvement but meager. Yet how different are they, the product of the third age of transportation, from those Argonauts, the Southern riflemen and the Northern axmen, who toiled with oar or slow-moving wheel across this land in the days so recently gone by! There are three great pictures of the West—one that was, one that is, and one that might have been. This last picture is a sad one to any thinking man not concerned in politics. The West of steam-transportation has not so much impressed itself, and in reason could not be expected so to impress itself, upon its population as did that West reached by slow-moving wheels when the natural difficulties to be overcome were so vastly greater for the individual. The old West begot character, grew mighty individuals, because such were its soil and sky and air, its mountains, its streams, its long and devious trails, its constant stimulus and challenge. That which was to be has been. The days of the adventurers are gone. There are no longer any Voices to summon heroes out on voyage of mystic conquest. It now costs not so much heroism, but so much money, to get out into the West, and it costs so much to live there. As a region the West offers few special opportunities. It is no longer a poor man’s country, nor is any part of America a country good for a poor man. It is all much alike. Our young men of the West are as apt to go East to seek their fortunes as to try them near at home. There is no land of the free. America is not American. Food must digest before it can be flesh and blood, and our population must digest before it can be called American.