THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



VOL. VI. 



CHICAGO, MARCH, 1894. 



No. 3 



THE PROGRESS OF WESTERN AMERICA. 



HON. W. J. McCONNELL, 

 Governor of Idaho, President of the Trans-Mississippi Congress. 



The Trans-Mississippi Congress has no 

 The Trans- 

 Mississippi counterpart in past or contemporaneous 



Congress, history. Popular conventions are of 

 common occurrence, and particular .topics have fre- 

 quently called into being representative bodies of 

 this kind which have flourished for a time and passed 

 away. These have generally been directed to the 

 promotion of reforms in the realm of politics, morals 

 or society, or the championship of great public im- 

 provements, like railroads or harbors. But in none 

 of these conventions do we find a parallel to the 

 Trans-Mississippi Congress. This latter is a perma- 

 nent body, and is devoted to no single idea. 

 Although it verges close upon the boundary of parti- 

 san politics, since it is only through the machinery of 



political parties that legislation can generally be ob- 

 tained, it is the fixed purpose of this organization to 

 formulate industrial policies for the West. The com- 

 mon criticism of the Trans-Mississippi Congress is 

 that it was begotten and nurtured by the narrow 

 spirit of sectionalism. This would be true of a simi- 

 lar body assembled in the North, the East or the 

 South. It is not true of this annual assemblage of 

 representative men of the West. To understand the 

 meaning of this distinction is to grasp the mighty 

 significance of Western America as a factor in the 

 future life of this republic. 



A Sectional- There is a sectionalism that is the broad- 

 ^National 1 - 8 est nationalism. To hold a convention 

 ism. in Boston to promote the peculiar inter- 

 ests of New England would be petty provincialism, 

 because New England is, in a sense, private 

 property. It has little or no undeveloped resources. 

 It offers no field for the exercise of national 

 energies. Its great history is made and recorded. 

 But the western half of this continent is for the most 

 part a national estate. It is impossible to create any- 

 thing in the new West that does not add something 

 to the wealth and glory of the nation. There is no 

 such thing as western provincialism. Its sky is too 

 wide, its mountains are too high, its prairies are too 

 measureless. The western man is naturally a man 

 of broad national views. The child of New England, 

 of the South, or of the Central West, he has been 

 broadened by travel and mingling with men from all 

 parts of the Union and all over the world. There 

 has been much talk of sectionalism in connection 

 with the silver question. It is the idlest nonsense, 

 since the material for sectionalism does not exist in 

 the western mind. This is not saying that men do 

 not love their States as well beyond the Missouri 

 river as east of it, but they see those States as a part 

 of a great nation. When a Territory is admitted to 

 statehood it is not the thought that sovereignty has 

 been acquired that thrills the people. They do not 



