Congressmen caught in such
violations of the land laws, a change came over the American conscience
and the civic ideals were modified. That our great industrial
enterprises developed in the midst of these changing ideals is important
to recall when we write the history of their activity.

We should find also that we cannot understand the land question without
seeing its relations to the struggle of sections and classes bidding
against each other and finding in the public domain a most important
topic of political bargaining. We should find, too, that the settlement
of unlike geographic areas in the course of the nation's progress
resulted in changes in the effect of the land laws; that a system
intended for the humid prairies was ill-adjusted to the grazing lands
and coal fields and to the forests in the days of large-scale
exploitation by corporations commanding great capital. Thus changing
geographic factors as well as the changing character of the forces which
occupied the public domain must be considered, if we would understand
the bearing of legislation and policy in this field.[329:1] It is
fortunate that suggestive studies of democracy and the land policy have
already begun to appear.

The whole subject of American agriculture viewed in relation to the
economic, political, and social life of the nation has important
contributions to make. If, for example, we study the maps showing the
transition of the wheat belt from the East to the West, as the virgin
soils were conquered and made new bases for destructive competition with
the older wheat States, we shall see how deeply they affected not only
land values, railroad building, the movement of population, and the
supply of cheap food, but also how the regions once devoted to single
cropping of wheat were forced to turn to varied and intensive
agriculture and to diversified industry, and we shall see also how these
transformations affected party politics and even the ideals of the
Americans of the regions thus changed. We shall find in the
over-production of wheat in the provinces thus rapidly colonized, and in
the over-production of silver in the mountain provinces which were
contemporaneously exploited, important explanations of the peculiar
form which American politics took in the period when Mr. Bryan mastered
the Democratic party, just as we shall find in the opening of the new
gold fields in the years immediately following, and in the passing of
the era of a