largely by federal land grants, and whose
settlements were protected by the United States army and governed by the
national authority until they were carved into rectangular States and
admitted into the Union. Its native settlers were drawn from many
States, many of them former soldiers of the Civil War, who mingled in
new lands with foreign immigrants accustomed to the vigorous authority
of European national governments.

But these old ideals of the American pioneer, phrased in the new
language of national power, did not meet with the assent of the East.
Even in the Middle West a change of deepest import had been in progress
during these years of prairie settlement. The agricultural preponderance
of the country has passed to the prairies, and manufacturing has
developed in the areas once devoted to pioneer farming. In the decade
prior to the Civil War, the area of greatest wheat production passed
from Ohio and the States to the east, into Illinois, Indiana, and
Wisconsin; after 1880, the center of wheat growing moved across the
Mississippi; and in 1890 the new settlements produced half the crop of
the United States. The corn area shows a similar migration. In 1840 the
Southern States produced half the crop, and the Middle West one-fifth;
by 1860 the situation was reversed and in 1890 nearly one-half the corn
of the Union came from beyond the Mississippi. Thus the settlers of the
Old Northwest and their crops have moved together across the
Mississippi, and in the regions whence they migrated varied agriculture
and manufacture have sprung up.

As these movements in population and products have passed across the
Middle West, and as the economic life of the eastern border has been
intensified, a huge industrial organism has been created in the
province,--an organism of tremendous power, activity, and unity.
Fundamentally the Middle West is an agricultural area unequaled for its
combination of space, variety, productiveness, and freedom from
interruption by deserts or mountains. The huge water system of the Great
Lakes has become the highway of a mighty commerce. The Sault Ste. Marie
Canal, although open but two-thirds of the year, is the channel of a
traffic of greater tonnage than that which passes through the Suez
Canal, and nearly all this commerce moves almost the whole length of the
Great Lakes system; the chief ports being Duluth, Chicago, Detroit,
Cleveland, and Buffalo. The transportation facilities of the Great L