BETTER HALF OF THE UNITED STATES 



So it generally happens that the casual Western trav- 

 eller, looking at the country from car-windows in the in- 

 tervals between his daily paper, brings back more con- 

 tempt than admiration for the economic possibilities of 

 the country. One must live in the Far West to begin 

 to comprehend it. Not only so, but he must come with 

 eager eyes from an older civilization, and he must study 

 the beginnings of industrial and social institutions 

 throughout the region as a whole, to have any adequate 

 appreciation of the real potentialities of that half of the 

 United States which has been reserved for the theatre of 

 twentieth-century developments. To all other observers 

 the new West is a sealed book. 



The West is divided from the East by a boundary-lino 

 which is not imaginary. It is a plain mark on the face 

 of the earth, and no man made it. It is the place where 

 the region of assured rainfall ends and the arid region 

 begins. There have formerly been some costly doubts 

 about the precise location of this line, but these have 

 been dispelled by experience, and the lesson learned in 

 hardship and impressed by disaster is learned for all 

 time. The momentous boundary - line is that of the 

 ninety-seventh meridian, which cleaves in twain the 

 Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. East 

 of this line there is a rainfall which is accepted as re- 

 liable, though there are alternate disasters of drought 

 and flood, varying in their effects from short crops to 

 total failures. 



Even in humid regions nothing is so uncertain as the 

 time and amount of the rainfall. In the whole range of 

 modern industry nothing is so crude, uncalculating, and 

 unscientific as the childlike dependence on the mood of 



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