University of Virginia Library

XI
The West and American Ideals[1]

True to American traditions that each succeeding generation
ought to find in the Republic a better home, once in every year
the colleges and universities summon the nation to lift its
eyes from the routine of work, in order to take stock of the
country's purposes and achievements, to examine its past and
consider its future.

This attitude of self-examination is hardly characteristic of
the people as a whole. Particularly it is not characteristic of
the historic American. He has been an opportunist rather
than a dealer in general ideas. Destiny set him in a current
which bore him swiftly along through such a wealth of opportunity
that reflection and well-considered planning seemed
wasted time. He knew not where he was going, but he was on
his way, cheerful, optimistic, busy and buoyant.

To-day we are reaching a changed condition, less apparent
perhaps, in the newer regions than in the old, but sufficiently
obvious to extend the commencement frame of mind from the
college to the country as a whole. The swift and inevitable
current of the upper reaches of the nation's history has borne
it to the broader expanse and slower stretches which mark the
nearness of the level sea. The vessel, no longer carried along
by the rushing waters, finds it necessary to determine its own

directions on this new ocean of its future, to give conscious
consideration to its motive power and to its steering gear.

It matters not so much that those who address these college
men and women upon life, give conflicting answers to the
questions of whence and whither: the pause for remembrance,
for reflection and for aspiration is wholesome in itself.

Although the American people are becoming more self-conscious,
more responsive to the appeal to act by deliberate
choices, we should be over-sanguine if we believed that even
in this new day these commencement surveys were taken to
heart by the general public, or that they were directly and
immediately influential upon national thought and action.

But even while we check our enthusiasm by this realization
of the common thought, we must take heart. The University's
peculiar privilege and distinction lie in the fact that it is not
the passive instrument of the State to voice its current ideas.
Its problem is not that of expressing tendencies. Its mission
is to create tendencies and to direct them. Its problem is that
of leadership and of ideals. It is called, of course, to justify
the support which the public gives it, by working in close and
sympathetic touch with those it serves. More than that, it
would lose important element of strength if it failed to recognize
the fact that improvement and creative movement often
come from the masses themselves, instinctively moving toward
a better order. The University's graduates must be fitted to
take their places naturally and effectually in the common life
of the time.

But the University is called especially to justify its existence
by giving to its sons and daughters something which
they could not well have gotten through the ordinary experiences
of the life outside its walls. It is called to serve the
time by independent research and by original thought. If it
were a mere recording instrument of conventional opinion and

average information, it is hard to see why the University
should exist at all. To clasp hands with the common life in
order that it may lift that life, to be a radiant center enkindling
the society in which it has its being, these are primary
duties of the University. Fortunate the State which gives free
play to this spirit of inquiry. Let it "grubstake" its intellectual
prospectors and send them forth where "the trails run
out and stop." A famous scientist holds that the universal
ether bears vital germs which impinging upon a dead world
would bring life to it. So, at least it is, in the world of
thought, where energized ideals put in the air and carried here
and there by the waves and currents of the intellectual atmosphere,
fertilize vast inert areas.

The University, therefore, has a double duty. On the one
hand it must aid in the improvement of the general economic
and social environment. It must help on in the work of scientific
discovery and of making such conditions of existence,
economic, political and social, as will produce more fertile
and responsive soil for a higher and better life. It must stimulate
a wider demand on the part of the public for right
leadership. It must extend its operations more widely among
the people and sink deeper shafts through social strata to find
new supplies of intellectual gold in popular levels yet
untouched. And on the other hand, it must find and fit men
and women for leadership. It must both awaken new demands
and it must satisfy those demands by trained leaders with
new motives, with new incentives to ambition, with higher and
broader conception of what constitute the prize in life, of
what constitutes success. The University has to deal with
both the soil and sifted seed in the agriculture of the human
spirit.

Its efficiency is not the efficiency which the business engineer
is fitted to appraise. If it is a training ship, it is a training

ship bound on a voyage of discovery, seeking new horizons.
The economy of the University's consumption can only be
rightly measured by the later times which shall possess those
new realms of the spirit which its voyage shall reveal. If the
ships of Columbus had engaged in a profitable coastwise traffic
between Palos and Cadiz they might have saved sail cloth, but
their keels would never have grated on the shores of a New
World.

The appeal of the undiscovered is strong in America. For
three centuries the fundamental process in its history was
the westward movement, the discovery and occupation of the
vast free spaces of the continent. We are the first generation
of Americans who can look back upon that era as a historic
movement now coming to its end. Other generations
have been so much a part of it that they could hardly comprehend
its significance. To them it seemed inevitable. The
free land and the natural resources seemed practically inexhaustible.
Nor were they aware of the fact that their most
fundamental traits, their institutions, even their ideals were
shaped by this interaction between the wilderness and themselves.

American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was
not carried in the Susan Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower
to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and
it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier.
Not the constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural
resources open to a fit people, made the democratic type of
society in America for three centuries while it occupied its
empire.

To-day we are looking with a shock upon a changed world.
The national problem is no longer how to cut and burn away
the vast screen of the dense and daunting forest; it is how
to save and wisely use the remaining timber. It is no longer

how to get the great spaces of fertile prairie land in humid
zones out of the hands of the government into the hands of
the pioneer; these lands have already passed into private
possession. No longer is it a question of how to avoid or
cross the Great Plains and the arid desert. It is a question
of how to conquer those rejected lands by new method of
farming and by cultivating new crops from seed collected
by the government and by scientists from the cold, dry steppes
of Siberia, the burning sands of Egypt, and the remote interior
of China, It is a problem of how to bring the precious
rills of water on to the alkali and sage brush. Population
is increasing faster than the food supply.

New farm lands no longer increase decade after decade
in areas equal to those of European states. While the ratio
of increase of improved land declines, the value of farm lands
rise and the price of food leaps upward, reversing the old
ratio between the two. The cry of scientific farming and
the conservation of natural resources replaces the cry of rapid
conquest of the wilderness. We have so far won our national
home, wrested from it its first rich treasures, and drawn to
it the unfortunate of other lands, that we are already obliged
to compare ourselves with settled states of the Old World.
In place of our attitude of contemptuous indifference to the
legislation of such countries as Germany and England, even
Western States like Wisconsin send commissions to study their
systems of taxation, workingmen's insurance, old age pensions
and a great variety of other remedies for social ills.

If we look about the periphery of the nation, everywhere we
see the indications that our world is changing. On the streets
of Northeastern cities like New York and Boston, the faces
which, we meet are to a surprising extent those of Southeastern
Europe. Puritan New England, which turned its capital
into factories and mills and drew to its shores an army of

cheap labor, governed these people for a time by a ruling
class like an upper stratum between which and the lower
strata there was no assimilation. There was no such evolution
into an assimilated commonwealth as is seen in Middle
Western agricultural States, where immigrant and old native
stock came in together and built up a homogeneous society on
the principle of give and take. But now the Northeastern
coast finds its destiny, politically and economically, passing
away from the descendants of the Puritans. It is the little
Jewish boy, the Greek or the Sicilian, who takes the traveler
through historic streets, now the home of these newer people
to the Old North Church or to Paul Revere's house, or to Tea
Wharf, and tells you in his strange patois the story of revolution
against oppression.

Along the Southern Atlantic and the Gulf coast, in spite of
the preservative influence of the negro, whose presence has
always called out resistance to change on the part of the
whites, the forces of social and industrial transformation are
at work. The old tidewater aristocracy has surrendered to
the up-country democrats. Along the line of the Alleghanies
like an advancing column, the forces of Northern capital,
textile and steel mills, year after year extend their invasion
into the lower South. New Orleans, once the mistress of the
commerce of the Mississippi Valley, is awakening to new
dreams of world commerce. On the southern border, similar
invasions of American capital have been entering Mexico. At
the same time, the opening of the Panama Canal has completed
the dream of the ages of the Straits of Anian between
Atlantic and Pacific. Four hundred years ago, Balboa raised
the flag of Spain at the edge of the Sea of the West and we
are now preparing to celebrate both that anniversary, and
the piercing of the continent. New relations have been created
between Spanish America and the United States and the world

is watching the mediation of Argentina, Brazil and Chile
between the contending forces of Mexico and the Union. Once
more alien national interests lie threatening at our borders,
but we no longer appeal to the Monroe Doctrine and send our
armies of frontiersmen to settle our concerns off-hand. We
take council with European nations and with the sisterhood of
South America, and propose a remedy of social reorganization
in place of imperious will and force. Whether the effort will
succeed or not, it is a significant indication that an old order
is passing away, when such a solution is undertaken by a
President of Scotch Presbyterian stock, born in the State of
Virginia.

If we turn to the Northern border, where we are about to
celebrate a century of peace with England, we see in progress,
like a belated procession of our own history the spread of
pioneers, the opening of new wildernesses, the building of new
cities, the growth of a new and mighty nation. That old
American advance of the wheat farmer from the Connecticut
to the Mohawk, and the Genesee, from the Great Valley of
Pennsylvania to the Ohio Valley and the prairies of the Middle
West, is now by its own momentum and under the stimulus
of Canadian homesteads and the high price of wheat, carried
across the national border to the once lone plains where
the Hudson Bay dog trains crossed the desolate snows of
the wild North Land. In the Pacific Northwest the era of
construction has not ended, but it is so rapidly in progress
that we can already see the closing of the age of the pioneer.
Already Alaska beckons on the north, and pointing to her
wealth of natural resources asks the nation on what new
terms the new age will deal with her. Across the Pacific
looms Asia, no longer a remote vision and a symbol of the
unchanging, but borne as by mirage close to our shores and
raising grave questions of the common destiny of the people

of the ocean. The dreams of Benton and of Seward of a
regenerated Orient, when the long march of westward civilization
should complete its circle, seem almost to be in process
of realization. The age of the Pacific Ocean begins, mysterious
and unfathomable in its meaning for our own future.

Turning to view the interior, we see the same picture of
change. When the Superintendent of the Census in 1890
declared the frontier line no longer traceable, the beginning
of the rush into Oklahoma had just occurred. Here where
the broken fragments of Indian nations from the East had
been gathered and where the wilder tribes of the Southwest
were being settled, came the rush of the land-hungry pioneer.
Almost at a blow the old Indian territory passed away, populous
cities came into being and it was not long before gushing
oil wells made a new era of sudden wealth. The farm lands
of the Middle West taken as free homesteads or bought for a
mere pittance, have risen so in value that the original owners
have in an increasing degree either sold them in order to
reinvest in the newer cheap lands of the West, or have moved
into the town and have left the tillage to tenant farmers. The
growth of absentee ownership of the soil is producing a serious
problem in the former centers of the Granger and the Populist.
Along the Old Northwest the Great Lakes are becoming
a new Mediterranean Sea joining the realms of wheat and
iron ore, at one end with the coal and furnaces of the forks
of the Ohio, where the most intense and wide-reaching center
of industrial energy exists. City life like that of the East,
manufactures and accumulated capital, seem to be reproducing
in the center of the Republic the tendencies already so
plain on the Atlantic Coast.

Across the Great Plains where buffalo and Indian held sway
successive industrial waves are passing. The old free range
gave place to the ranch, the ranch to the homestead and now

in places in the arid lands the homestead is replaced by the
ten or twenty acre irrigated fruit farm. The age of cheap
land, cheap corn and wheat, and cheap cattle has gone forever.
The federal government has undertaken vast paternal
enterprises of reclamation of the desert.

In the Rocky Mountains where at the time of Civil War,
the first important rushes to gold and silver mines carried the
frontier backward on a march toward the east, the most amazing
transformations have occurred. Here, where prospectors
made new trails, and lived the wild free life of mountain
men, here where the human spirit seemed likely to attain the
largest measure of individual freedom, and where fortune
beckoned to the common man, have come revolutions wrought
by the demand for organized industry and capital. In the
regions where the popular tribunal and the free competitive
life flourished, we have seen law and order break down in the
unmitigated collision of great aggregations of capital, with
each other and with organized socialistic labor. The Cripple
Creek strikes, the contests at Butte, the Goldfield mobs, the
recent Colorado fighting, all tell a similar story,—the solid
impact of contending forces in regions where civic power and
loyalty to the State have never fully developed. Like the
Grand Cañon, where in dazzling light the huge geologic history
is written so large that none may fail to read it, so in
the Rocky Mountains the dangers of modern American industrial
tendencies have been exposed.

As we crossed the Cascades on our way to Seattle, one of
the passengers was moved to explain his feeling on the excellence
of Puget Sound in contrast with the remaining visible
Universe. He did it well in spite of irreverent interruptions
from those fellow travelers who were unconverted children
of the East, and at last he broke forth in passionate challenge,
"Why should I not love Seattle! It took me from the slums

of the Atlantic Coast, a poor Swedish boy with hardly fifteen
dollars in my pocket. It gave me a home by the beautiful
sea; it spread before my eyes a vision of snow-capped peaks
and smiling fields; it brought abundance and a new life to me
and my children and I love it, I love it! If I were a multimillionaire
I would charter freight cars and carry away from
the crowded tenements and noisome alleys of the eastern cities
and the Old World the toiling masses, and let them loose in
our vast forests and ore-laden mountains to learn what life
really is!" And my heart was stirred by his words and by
the whirling spaces of woods and peaks through which we
passed.

But as I looked and listened to this passionate outcry, I
remembered the words of Talleyrand, the exiled Bishop of
Autun, in Washington's administration. Looking down from
an eminence not far from Philadelphia upon a wilderness
which is now in the heart of that huge industrial society
where population presses on the means of life, even the cold-blooded
and cynical Talleyrand, gazing on those unpeopled
hills and forests, kindled with the vision of coming clearings,
the smiling farms and grazing herds that were to be, the
populous towns that should be built, the newer and finer social
organization that should there arise. And then I remembered
the hall in Harvard's museum of social ethics through which
I pass to my lecture room when I speak on the history of the
Westward movement. That hall is covered with an exhibit
of the work in Pittsburgh steel mills, and of the congested
tenements. Its charts and diagrams tell of the long hours of
work, the death rate, the relation of typhoid to the slums, the
gathering of the poor of all Southeastern Europe to make a
civilization at that center of American industrial energy and
vast capital that is a social tragedy. As I enter my lecture
room through that hall, I speak of the young Washington

leading his Virginia frontiersmen to the magnificent forest at
the forks of the Ohio. Where Braddock and his men, "carving
a cross on the wilderness rim," were struck by the painted
savages in the primeval woods, huge furnaces belch forth
perpetual fires and Huns and Bulgars, Poles and Sicilians
struggle for a chance to earn their daily bread, and live a
brutal and degraded life. Irresistibly there rushed across my
mind the memorable words of Huxley:

But if there is disillusion and shock and apprehension as
we come to realize these changes, to strong men and women
there is challenge and inspiration in them too. In place of
old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon
fields of science, fruitful for the needs of the race; there are
frontiers of better social domains yet unexplored. Let us
hold to our attitude of faith and courage, and creative zeal.

Let us dream as our fathers dreamt and let us make our dreams
come true.

What were America's "morning wishes"? From the beginning
of that long westward march of the American people
America has never been the home of mere contented materialism.
It has continuously sought new ways and dreamed of a
perfected social type.

In the fifteenth century when men dealt with the New World
which Columbus found, the ideal of discovery was dominant.
Here was placed within the reach of men whose ideas had
been bounded by the Atlantic, new realms to be explored.
America became the land of European dreams, its Fortunate
Islands were made real, where, in the imagination of old
Europe, peace and happiness, as well as riches and eternal
youth, were to be found. To Sir Edwin Sandys and his
friends of the London Company, Virginia offered an opportunity
to erect the Republic for which they had longed in vain
In England. To the Puritans, New England was the new land
of freedom, wherein they might establish the institutions of
God, according to their own faith. As the vision died away
in Virginia toward the close of the seventeenth century, it
was taken up anew by the fiery Bacon with his revolution
to establish a real democracy in place of the rule of the

planter aristocracy, that formed along the coast. Hardly had
he been overthrown when in the eighteenth century, the democratic
ideal was rejuvenated by the strong frontiersmen, who
pressed beyond the New England Coast into the Berkshires
and up the valleys of the Green Mountains of Vermont, and
by the Scotch-Irish and German pioneers who followed the
Great Valley from Pennsylvania into the Upland South. In
both the Yankee frontiersmen and the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians
of the South, the Calvinistic conception of the importance
of the individual, bound by free covenant to his fellow
men and to God, was a compelling influence, and all their
wilderness experience combined to emphasize the ideals of
opening new ways, of giving freer play to the individual, and
of constructing democratic society.

When the backwoodsmen crossed the Alleghanies they put
between themselves and the Atlantic Coast a barrier which
seemed to separate them from a region already too much like
the Europe they had left, and as they followed the courses of
the rivers that flowed to the Mississippi, they called themselves"
Men of the Western Waters," and their new home in
the Mississippi Valley was the "Western World." Here, by
the thirties, Jacksonian democracy flourished, strong in the
faith of the intrinsic excellence of the common man, in his
right to make his own place in the world, and in his capacity
to share in government. But while Jacksonian democracy
demanded these rights, it was also loyal to leadership as the
very name implies. It was ready to follow to the uttermost
the man in whom it placed its trust, whether the hero were
frontier fighter or president, and it even rebuked and limited
its own legislative representatives and recalled its senators
when they ran counter to their chosen executive. Jacksonian
democracy was essentially rural. It was based on the good
fellowship and genuine social feeling of the frontier, in which

classes and inequalities of fortune played little part. But it
did not demand equality of condition, for there was abundance
of natural resources and the belief that the self-made man
had a right to his success in the free competition which
western life afforded, was as prominent in their thought as was
the love of democracy. On the other hand, they viewed governmental
restraints with suspicion as a limitation on their
right to work out their own individuality.

For the banking institutions and capitalists of the East they
had an instinctive antipathy. Already they feared that the
"money power "as Jackson called it, was planning to make
hewers of wood and drawers of water of the common people.

In this view they found allies among the labor leaders of
the East, who in the same period began their fight for better
conditions of the wage earner. These Locofocos were the
first Americans to demand fundamental social changes for
the benefit of the workers in the cities. Like the Western
pioneers, they protested against monopolies and special privilege.
But they also had a constructive policy, whereby society
was to be kept democratic by free gifts of the public land, so
that surplus labor might not bid against itself, but might find
an outlet in the West. Thus to both the labor theorist and
the practical pioneer, the existence of what seemed inexhaustible
cheap land and unpossessed resources was the condition
of democracy. In these years of the thirties and forties, Western
democracy took on its distinctive form. Travelers like
De Tocqueville and Harriet Martineau, came to study and to
report it enthusiastically to Europe.

Side by side with this westward marching army of individualistic
liberty-loving democratic backwoodsmen, went a more
northern stream of pioneers, who cherished similar ideas, but
added to them the desire to create new industrial centers, to
build up factories, to build railroads, and to develop the

country by founding cities and extending prosperity. They
were ready to call upon legislatures to aid in this, by subscriptions
to stock, grants of franchises, promotion of banking
and internal improvements. These were the Whig followers
of that other Western leader, Henry Clay, and their early
strength lay in the Ohio Valley, and particularly among the
well-to-do. In the South their strength was found among the
aristocracy of the Cotton Kingdom.

Both of these Western groups, Whigs and Democrats alike,
had one common ideal: the desire to leave their children a
better heritage than they themselves had received, and both
were fired with devotion to the ideal of creating in this New
World a home more worthy of mankind. Both were ready to
break with the past, to boldly strike out new lines of social
endeavor, and both believed in American expansion.

Before these tendencies had worked themselves out, three
new forces entered. In the sudden extension of our boundaries
to the Pacific Coast, which took place in the forties, the nation
won so vast a domain that its resources seemed illimitable
and its society seemed able to throw off all its maladies by the
very presence of these vast new spaces. At the same period
the great activity of railroad building to the Mississippi Valley
occurred, making these lands available and diverting attention
to the task of economic construction. The third influence
was the slavery question which, becoming acute, shaped the
American ideals and public discussion for nearly a generation.
Viewed from one angle, this struggle involved the great
question of national unity. From another it involved the question
of the relations of labor and capital, democracy and
aristocracy. It was not without significance that Abraham
Lincoln became the very type of American pioneer democracy,
the first adequate and elemental demonstration to the world

that that democracy could produce a man who belonged to
the ages.

After the war, new national energies were set loose, and new
construction and development engaged the attention of the
Westerners as they occupied prairies and Great Plains and
mountains. Democracy and capitalistic development did not
seem antagonistic.

With the passing of the frontier, Western social and political
ideals took new form. Capital began to consolidate in even
greater masses, and increasingly attempted to reduce to system
and control the processes of industrial development. Labor
with equal step organized its forces to destroy the old competitive
system. It is not strange that the Western pioneers
took alarm for their ideals of democracy as the outcome of
the free struggle for the national resources became apparent.
They espoused the cause of governmental activity.

It was a new gospel, for the Western radical became convinced
that he must sacrifice his ideal of individualism and
free competition in order to maintain his ideal of democracy.
Under this conviction the Populist revised the pioneer conception
of government. He saw in government no longer
something outside of him, but the people themselves shaping
their own affairs. He demanded therefore an extension of
the powers of governments in the interest of his historic ideal
of democratic society. He demanded not only free silver, but
the ownership of the agencies of communication and transportation,
the income tax, the postal savings bank, the provision
of means of credit for agriculture, the construction of
more effective devices to express the will of the people, primary
nominations, direct elections, initiative, referendum and recall.
In a word, capital, labor, and the Western pioneer, all deserted
the ideal of competitive individualism in order to organize

their interests in more effective combinations. The disappearance
of the frontier, the closing of the era which was marked
by the influence of the West as a form of society, brings with
it new problems of social adjustment, new demands for considering
our past ideals and our present needs.

Let us recall the conditions of the foreign relations along
our borders, the dangers that wait us if we fail to unite in
the solution of our domestic problems. Let us recall those
internal evidences of the destruction of our old social order.
If we take to heart this warning, we shall do well also to
recount our historic ideals, to take stock of those purposes,
and fundamental assumptions that have gone to make the
American spirit and the meaning of America in world history.

First of all, there was the ideal of discovery, the courageous
determination to break new paths, indifference to the
dogma that because an institution or a condition exists, it must
remain. All American experience has gone to the making of
the spirit of innovation; it is in the blood and will not be
repressed.

Then, there was the ideal of democracy, the ideal of a free
self-directing people, responsive to leadership in the forming
of programs and their execution, but insistent that the procedure
should be that of free choice, not of compulsion.

But there was also the ideal of individualism. This democratic
society was not a disciplined army, where all must keep
step and where the collective interests destroyed individual
will and work. Rather it was a mobile mass of freely circulating
atoms, each seeking its own place and finding play for
its own powers and for its own original initiative. We cannot
lay too much stress upon this point, for it was at the very heart
of the whole American movement. The world was to be made
a better world by the example of a democracy in which there

was freedom of the individual, in which there was the vitality
and mobility productive of originality and variety.

Bearing in mind the far-reaching influence of the disappearance
of unlimited resources open to all men for the taking,
and considering the recoil of the common man when he saw
the outcome of the competitive struggle for these resources as
the supply came to its end over most of the nation, we can
understand the reaction against individualism and in favor
of drastic assertion of the powers of government. Legislation
is taking the place of the free lands as the means of preserving
the ideal of democracy. But at the same time it is
endangering the other pioneer ideal of creative and competitive
individualism. Both were essential and constituted what
was best in America's contribution to history and to progress.
Both must be preserved if the nation would be true to its past,
and would fulfil its highest destiny. It would be a grave misfortune
if these people so rich in experience, in self-confidence
and aspiration, in creative genius, should turn to some Old
World discipline of socialism or plutocracy, or despotic rule,
whether by class or by dictator. Nor shall we be driven to
these alternatives. Our ancient hopes, our courageous faith,
our underlying good humor and love of fair play will triumph
in the end. There will be give and take in all directions.
There will be disinterested leadership, under loyalty to the
best American ideals. Nowhere is this leadership more likely
to arise than among the men trained in the Universities, aware
of the promise of the past and the possibilities of the future.
The times call for new ambitions and new motives.

In a most suggestive essay on the Problems of Modern
Democracy, Mr. Godkin has said:

All that was buoyant and creative in American life would
be lost if we gave up the respect for distinct personality, and
variety in genius, and came to the dead level of common
standards. To be "socialized into an average" and placed
" under the tutelage of the mass of us," as a recent writer
has put it, would be an irreparable loss. Nor is it necessary
in a democracy, as these words of Godkin well disclose. What
is needed is the multiplication of motives for ambition and
the opening of new lines of achievement for the strongest.
As we turn from the task of the first rough conquest of the
continent there lies before us a whole wealth of unexploited
resources in the realm of the spirit. Arts and letters, science
and better social creation, loyalty and political service to the
commonweal,—these and a thousand other directions of activity
are open to the men, who formerly under the incentive of
attaining distinction by amassing extraordinary wealth, saw
success only in material display. Newer and finer careers
will open to the ambitious when once public opinion shall
award the laurels to those who rise above their fellows in
these new fields of labor. It has not been the gold, but the
getting of the gold, that has caught the imaginations of our
captains of industry. Their real enjoyment lay not in the

luxuries which wealth brought, but in the work of construction
and in the place which society awarded them. A new era
will come if schools and universities can only widen the
intellectual horizon of the people, help to lay the foundations
of a better industrial life, show them new goals for endeavor,
inspire them with more varied and higher ideals.

The Western spirit must be invoked for new and nobler
achievements. Of that matured Western spirit, Tennyson's
Ulysses is a symbol.

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