The mere writing down the bare fact of the journey stirs in one’s blood again the joy of that free life. The boundlessness of the world and your boundless enjoyment of it, the multiplicity of abundant life and your blood-kinship with it all, some goal on the distant horizon and your “spirit leaping within you to be gone before you then!” There is scarcely a recollection of all the tramp through Illinois and Minnesota and Iowa and eastern Nebraska which is without the charm of a free, wandering life through a rich, beautiful country. What I saw of the wealth of a fertile region in central Illinois I found again enhanced in beauty and productiveness in southern Minnesota, and, varying in outward configuration but scarcely less attractive or fruitful, across the face of Iowa, losing only its variety as it modulates in Nebraska to the plains which slope upward gently for five hundred miles to the Rockies. My mind throngs with the pictures of splendid cultivation, of leagues on leagues of farms which were had for the taking or were purchased from the Government at a dollar and a quarter an acre, and where I saw countless comfortable homes and fields white to the harvest, with no demand so strong as the one for laborers. It was not wealth in the sense of opulence, but it was the plenty which is beyond the fear of want that marked the character of that broad domain. The poor were there, and the suffering and the deeply discontented, and there were hard conditions of life and very sordid ones, but never the hopelessness which gives to town-bred destitution its quality of despair. In the gradual development of actual resources about you appeared to be the remedies of most of the obvious ills. “This is a rich region,” said a handsome young farmer who had offered me a lift one blistering hot day in Iowa--“this is a rich region, and it is more than rich, it is reliable. We never know a total failure of crops here; we can always make a living. This country, for hundreds of miles around, is a garden, and we live in the heart of it.” And he was one of the discontented. I only regret that I have not space here for his interesting account of the tyranny of capital under which, from his point of view, the farmers live and work, and the imperative need of monetary reform as a means of bringing about their emancipation. It was the thing which I had heard many times from many farmers at the West, only never presented with quite equal cogency before. The opposite views had been represented to me, and there was often a singular alternation of presentation within the course of a day or two, and I had come to recognize a comical uniformity between condition and views.