Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/217

Rh the advancement of the good cause, and there are compromises looking toward securing a reelection at the cost of the good cause; the latter are made by the mere opportunists. In the Middle West, men who have made firm their place in the community and who want greater advancement in the esteem of their fellows, having played the game of business to a successful end, strive for the honors of public office, spurred by their lifelong desire to win. It is true that the spirit of winning is essentially an American spirit, and that its excesses blemish other activities than those of intercollegiate athletics; but in endeavoring to draw between the sections a distinction as to motives for the avocation of politics one cannot intend a sharp distinction, but can only hope to catch the prevailing instinct. In the Middle West there seems to be a trifle more of the personal element in the political rage; the man who is at its head is the party. In the East it is likely to be the man who is the most adroit captain of the machine who is at the head; in the Far West the leader is usually the man who can get the most out of the nation for the good of his neighbors, or of his own town, or of his State, or of his section. These, more or less, are sectional idiosyncrasies.

Out in the Far West men go into political life for the advantage of their own community. They live in that part of the country which, more than any other, is possessed of the colonial spirit; they are the children of the nation—and the favored children. When the adventurous, good and bad, had filled the land behind them with the glory of the great territory beyond the Mississippi, then the real builders went out, and with these came real exploitation and real business. For twenty years the great Northwest has been growing in such a way that its endeavors, covering this brief distance in the pathway of the nation, have added so many new States to the Union that in a few years more the dominant power in the Senate will be that of the States west of the centre of population. This is a prosaic fact, but full of significance to the States whose capital is seeking pecuniary progeny on these plains and under these mountains. The vision of these people is very far; their dreams have the right to soar higher than the dreams of other people; their own achievements, discoveries, "strikes," justify their belief that under the soil and in the soil is wealth the like of which no land has yet produced. They tell the nation that the welfare of the whole country depends upon their welfare, and that it is the duty of the nation to pour its money into railroads, into irrigation, into a thousand and one works which will aid their commerce. The commercial spirit is set on fire by the bigness of the plains and of their seeming opportunities. It appeal's to the makers of this empire as though it "would pay" the whole world to turn its saved-up millions into canals for the conveyance of fruitful streams from the mountains to the brown, waste places on which rain rarely falls. Trade and commerce and "output" become rhythmic, melodious, harmonious, sounding in great and inspiriting measures. Alfalfa's three annual crops grow to the sound of six-footed verses, and the stream from the irrigation ditch babbles a golden tune to the fruit-trees that stagger under their rich and luscious burdens, growing out of land which but for those nourishing streams would still be blown sand held together by the roots of sage-brush.

What could not the great government do if its people in the East would but tax themselves more heavily for this land of miracle and prodigy! The individual, however, has worked these wonders. The railroad that has justified its building with profits from the beginning of its existence is the railroad which has never received a dollar of given money or an acre of public land from the government. Other railroads have become income-breeders since they ceased to regard the beneficence of the great father at Washington as sufficient for their day and generation. "It is too big for private citizens and for private enterprise," is the cry of the thoughtless, and the consequent adoption of enterprise by the paternal government has invariably brought injury to the enterprise itself.

The politics of the Northwest is for the Northwest, because the people out there believe in their land, and the politicians are of the people as well as the servants of the people; but the North-