eptember. "You see, at this time of year, the farm labourers cause a
drain on the currency by keeping their wages in their pockets." This
surprising fact did not seem surprising to the banker. He was himself bred
on the soil--the son of a farm-hand who had become a rich farmer. But to
the financiers of Europe, what an incredible thing is this--that the wages
of the farm-labourers should sway the money market up and down.

The pride of Iowa is Des Moines, a city of farm-bred people. It is so
young that some of its old men remember when wolf-hunting was good where
its one skyscraper stands to-day. It has no ancient history and no
souvenirs. A little while ago a lot of industrious people came here poor,
and now they are prosperous and still busy--that is the story of Des
Moines in a sentence.

In the main hall of the five-domed Capitol at Des Moines is a life-sized
painting of a prairie wagon, hauled by oxen. In such a rude conveyance as
this most of the early settlers rolled into Iowa, at a gait of two miles
an hour. But there are no prairie wagons now, nor oxen. Ten thousand miles
of railway criss-cross the State, and make more profit in three months
than all the railways of ancient India made last year.

Instead of being tax-ridden serfs, these Iowans pay the total
self-governing cost of their Commonwealth by handing over the price of the
summer's hay. Instead of being the prey of money-lenders, they have made
Des Moines the Hartford of the West, in which forty-two insurance
companies carry a risk of half a billion. And so, in each one of its
details, the story of these Corn Kings is staggering to a mere
city-dweller, especially to anyone who has cold storage ideas about
farmers.

Big Men, too, as well as big corn, are grown in Iowa. Here is a sample
group--half educators and half statesmen--John B. Grinnell, Henry Smith
Williams, Albert Shaw, Newell Dwight Hillis, Carl Snyder, Emerson Hough,
Hamlin Garland, Senators Allison and Dolliver, Leslie M. Shaw, John A.
Kasson, Horace Boies, Governor Albert B. Cummins and our Official
Farmer--James Wilson. There are now fifteen hundred newspaper men in Iowa.
(One of them ships seven carloads of magazines a month.) There are three
hundred and fifty architects, two thousand engineers, five thousand
doctors, three thousand bankers and brokers, and thirty thousand
teachers.

These amazing changes have taken place within the memory of men and women
who are now alive.

"I can