University of Virginia Library

X
Pioneer Ideals and the State University[1]

The ideals of a people, their aspirations and convictions,
their hopes and ambitions, their dreams and determinations,
are assets in their civilization as real and important as per
capita wealth or industrial skill.

This nation was formed under pioneer ideals. During three
centuries after Captain John Smith struck the first blow at
the American forest on the eastern edge of the continent, the
pioneers were abandoning settled society for the wilderness,
seeking, for generation after generation, new frontiers. Their
experiences left abiding influences upon the ideas and purposes
of the nation. Indeed the older settled regions themselves
were shaped profoundly by the very fact that the whole nation
was pioneering and that in the development of the West the
East had its own part.

The first ideal of the pioneer was that of conquest. It was
his task to fight with nature for the chance to exist. Not as
in older countries did this contest take place in a mythical
past, told in folk lore and epic. It has been continuous to
our own day. Facing each generation of pioneers was the
unmastered continent. Vast forests blocked the way; mountainous
ramparts interposed; desolate, grass-clad prairies,
barren oceans of rolling plains, arid deserts, and a fierce race
of savages, all had to be met and defeated. The rifle and the
ax are the symbols of the backwoods pioneer. They meant

a training in aggressive courage, in domination, in directness
of action, in destructiveness.

To the pioneer the forest was no friendly resource for posterity,
no object of careful economy. He must wage a hand-to-hand
war upon it, cutting and burning a little space to let
in the light upon a dozen acres of hard-won soil, and year
after year expanding the clearing into new woodlands against
the stubborn resistance of primeval trunks and matted roots.
He made war against the rank fertility of the soil. While
new worlds of virgin land lay ever just beyond, it was idle
to expect the pioneer to stay his hand and turn to scientific
farming. Indeed, as Secretary Wilson has said, the pioneer
would, in that case, have raised wheat that no one wanted to
eat, corn to store on the farm, and cotton not worth the picking.

Thus, fired with the ideal of subduing the wilderness, the
destroying pioneer fought his way across the continent, masterful
and wasteful, preparing the way by seeking the immediate
thing, rejoicing in rude strength and wilful achievement.

But even this backwoodsman was more than a mere destroyer.
He had visions. He was finder as well as fighter—the trail-maker
for civilization, the inventor of new ways. Although
Rudyard Kipling's "Foreloper"[2] deals with the English pioneer
in lands beneath the Southern Cross, yet the poem portrays
American traits as well:

This quest after the unknown, this yearning "beyond the
sky line, where the strange roads go down," is of the very
essence of the backwoods pioneer, even though he was unconscious
of its spiritual significance.

The pioneer was taught in the school of experience that the
crops of one area would not do for a new frontier; that the
scythe of the clearing must be replaced by the reaper of the
prairies. He was forced to make old tools serve new uses;
to shape former habits, institutions and ideas to changed conditions;
and to find new means when the old proved inapplicable.
He was building a new society as well as breaking
new soil; he had the ideal of nonconformity and of change.
He rebelled against the conventional.

Besides the ideals of conquest and of discovery, the pioneer
had the ideal of personal development, free from social and
governmental constraint. He came from a civilization based
on individual competition, and he brought the conception with
him to the wilderness where a wealth of resources, and innumerable
opportunities gave it a new scope. The prizes were
for the keenest and the strongest; for them were the best
bottom lands, the finest timber tracts, the best salt-springs,
the richest ore beds; and not only these natural gifts, but
also the opportunities afforded in the midst of a forming
society. Here were mill sites, town sites, transportation lines,

banking centers, openings in the law, in politics—all the
varied chances for advancement afforded in a rapidly developing
society where everything was open to him who knew how
to seize the opportunity.

The squatter enforced his claim to lands even against the
government's title by the use of extra-legal combinations and
force. He appealed to lynch law with little hesitation. He
was impatient of any governmental restriction upon his individual
right to deal with the wilderness.

In our own day we sometimes hear of congressmen sent to
jail for violating land laws; but the different spirit in the
pioneer days may be illustrated by a speech of Delegate Sibley
of Minnesota in Congress in 1852. In view of the fact
that he became the State's first governor, a regent of its university,
president of its historical society, and a doctor of laws
of Princeton, we may assume that he was a pillar of society.
He said:

Sibley's protest in congress against these "outrages" by
which the northern lumbermen were "harassed" in their
work of what would now be called stealing government timber,
aroused no protest from his colleagues. No president
called this congressman an undesirable citizen or gave him
over to the courts.

Thus many of the pioneers, following the ideal of the right
of the individual to rise, subordinated the rights of the nation
and posterity to the desire that the country should be "developed"
and that the individual should advance with as little
interference as possible. Squatter doctrines and individualism
have left deep traces upon American conceptions.

But quite as deeply fixed in the pioneer's mind as the ideal
of individualism was the ideal of democracy. He had a passionate
hatred for aristocracy, monopoly and special privilege;
he believed in simplicity, economy and in the rule of
the people. It is true that he honored the successful man,
and that he strove in all ways to advance himself. But the
West was so free and so vast, the barriers to individual achievement
were so remote, that the pioneer was hardly conscious
that any danger to equality could come from his competition
for natural resources. He thought of democracy as in some

way the result of our political institutions, and he failed to
see that it was primarily the result of the free lands and
immense opportunities which surrounded him. Occasional
statesmen voiced the idea that American democracy was based
on the abundance of unoccupied land, even in the first debates
on the public domain.

This early recognition of the influence of abundance of land
in shaping the economic conditions of American democracy
is peculiarly significant to-day in view of the practical exhaustion
of the supply of cheap arable public lands open to the
poor man, and the coincident development of labor unions to
keep up wages.

Certain it is that the strength of democratic movements
has chiefly lain in the regions of the pioneer. "Our governments
tend too much to democracy," wrote Izard, of South
Carolina, to Jefferson, in 1785. "A handicraftsman thinks
an apprenticeship necessary to make him acquainted with his
business. But our backcountrymen are of the opinion that a
politician may be born just as well as a poet."

The Revolutionary ideas, of course, gave a great impetus
to democracy, and in substantially every colony there was a
double revolution, one for independence and the other for
the overthrow of aristocratic control. But in the long run
the effective force behind American democracy was the presence
of the practically free land into which men might escape
from oppression or inequalities which burdened them in the
older settlements. This possibility compelled the coastwise
States to liberalize the franchise; and it prevented the formation
of a dominant class, whether based on property or on
custom. Among the pioneers one man was as good as his
neighbor. He had the same chance; conditions were simple
and free. Economic equality fostered political equality. An
optimistic and buoyant belief in the worth of the plain people,

a devout faith in man prevailed in the West. Democracy became
almost the religion of the pioneer. He held with passionate
devotion the idea that he was building under freedom
a new society, based on self government, and for the
welfare of the average man.

And yet even as he proclaimed the gospel of democracy
the pioneer showed a vague apprehension lest the time be
short—lest equality should not endure—lest he might fall
behind in the ascending movement of Western society. This
led him on in feverish haste to acquire advantages as though
he only half believed his dream. "Before him lies a boundless
continent," wrote De Tocqueville, in the days when pioneer
democracy was triumphant under Jackson, "and he urges forward
as if time pressed and he was afraid of finding no room
for his exertions."

Even while Jackson lived, labor leaders and speculative
thinkers were demanding legislation to place a limit on the
amount of land which one person might acquire and to provide
free farms. De Tocqueville saw the signs of change.
"Between the workman and the master," he said, "there are
frequent relations but no real association. . . . I am of the
opinion, upon the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy
which is growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest
which ever existed in the world; . . . if ever a permanent
inequality, of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate into
the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which
they will enter." But the sanative influences of the free spaces
of the West were destined to ameliorate labor's condition, to
afford new hopes and new faith to pioneer democracy, and to
postpone the problem.

As the settlers advanced into provinces whose area dwarfed
that of the older sections, pioneer democracy itself began to
undergo changes, both in its composition and in its processes

of expansion. At the close of the Civil War, when settlement
was spreading with greatest vigor across the Mississippi, the
railways began their work as colonists. Their land grants
from the government, amounting altogether by 1871 to an area
five times that of the State of Pennsylvania, demanded purchasers,
and so the railroads pioneered the way for the pioneer.

The homestead law increased the tide of settlers. The
improved farm machinery made it possible for him to go
boldly out on to the prairie and to deal effectively with virgin
soil in farms whose cultivated area made the old clearings of
the backwoodsman seem mere garden plots. Two things
resulted from these conditions, which profoundly modified
pioneer ideals. In the first place the new form of colonization
demanded an increasing use of capital; and the rapidity
of the formation of towns, the speed with which society developed,
made men the more eager to secure bank credit to deal
with the new West. This made the pioneer more dependent
on the eastern economic forces. In the second place the farmer
became dependent as never before on transportation companies.
In this speculative movement the railroads, finding
that they had pressed too far in advance and had issued stock
to freely for their earnings to justify the face of the investment,
came into collision with the pioneer on the question of
rates and of discriminations. The Greenback movement and
the Granger movements were appeals to government to prevent
what the pioneer thought to be invasions of pioneer democracy.

As the western settler began to face the problem of magnitude
in the areas he was occupying; as he began to adjust
his life to the modern forces of capital and to complex
productive processes; as he began to see that, go where he
would, the question of credit and currency, of transportation
and distribution in general conditioned his success, he sought

relief by legislation. He began to lose his primitive attitude
of individualism, government began to look less like a necessary
evil and more like an instrument for the perpetuation of
his democratic ideals. In brief, the defenses of the pioneer
democrat began to shift from free land to legislation, from
the ideal of individualism to the ideal of social control
through regulation by law. He had no sympathy with a radical
reconstruction of society by the revolution of socialism;
even his alliances with the movement of organized labor,
which paralleled that of organized capital in the East, were
only half-hearted. But he was becoming alarmed over the
future of the free democratic ideal. The wisdom of his legislation
it is not necessary to discuss here. The essential point
is that his conception of the right of government to control
social process had undergone a change. He was coming to
regard legislation as an instrument of social construction.
The individualism of the Kentucky pioneer of 1796 was giving
way to the Populism of the Kansas pioneer of 1896.

The later days of pioneer democracy are too familiar to
require much exposition. But they are profoundly significant.
As the pioneer doctrine of free competition for the
resources of the nation revealed its tendencies; as individual,
corporation and trust, like the pioneer, turned increasingly to
legal devices to promote their contrasting ideals, the natural
resources were falling into private possession. Tides of alien
immigrants were surging into the country to replace the old
American stock in the labor market, to lower the standard of
living and to increase the pressure of population upon the
land. These recent foreigners have lodged almost exclusively
in the dozen great centers of industrial life, and there they
have accented the antagonisms between capital and labor by
the fact that the labor supply has become increasingly foreign
born, and recruited from nationalities who arouse no sympathy

on the part of capital and little on the part of the general
public. Class distinctions are accented by national prejudices,
and democracy is thereby invaded. But even in the
dull brains of great masses of these unfortunates from southern
and eastern Europe the idea of America as the land of
freedom and of opportunity to rise, the land of pioneer democratic
ideals, has found lodgment, and if it is given time and
is not turned into revolutionary lines it will fructify.

As the American pioneer passed on in advance of this new
tide of European immigration, he found lands increasingly
limited. In place of the old lavish opportunity for the scttler
to set his stakes where he would, there were frantic rushes
of thousands of eager pioneers across the line of newly opened
Indian reservations. Even in 1889, when Oklahoma was
opened to settlement, twenty thousand settlers crowded at the
boundaries, like straining athletes, waiting the bugle note that
should start the race across the line. To-day great crowds
gather at the land lotteries of the government as the remaining
fragments of the public domain are flung to hungry settlers.

Hundreds of thousands of pioneers from the Middle West
have crossed the national boundary into Canadian wheat fields
eager to find farms for their children, although under an
alien flag. And finally the government has taken to itself
great areas of arid land for reclamation by costly irrigation
projects whereby to furnish twenty-acre tracts in the desert
to settlers under careful regulation of water rights. The government
supplies the capital for huge irrigation dams and
reservoirs and builds them itself. It owns and operates quarries,
coal mines and timber to facilitate this work. It seeks
the remotest regions of the earth for crops suitable for these
areas. It analyzes the soils and tells the farmer what and
when and how to plant. It has even considered the rental

to manufacturers of the surplus water, electrical and steam
power generated in its irrigation works and the utilization of
this power to extract nitrates from the air to replenish worn-out
soils. The pioneer of the arid regions must be both a
capitalist and the protégé of the government.

Consider the contrast between the conditions of the pioneers
at the beginning and at the end of this period of development.
Three hundred years ago adventurous Englishmen on the coast
of Virginia began the attack on the wilderness. Three years
ago the President of the United States summoned the governors
of forty-six states to deliberate upon the danger of the exhaustion
of the natural resources of the nation.[3]

The pressure of population upon the food supply is already
felt and we are at the beginning only of this transformation.
It is profoundly significant that at the very time when American
democracy is becoming conscious that its pioneer basis
of free land and sparse population is giving way, it is also
brought face to face with the startling outcome of its old
ideals of individualism and exploitation under competition
uncontrolled by government. Pioneer society itself was not
sufficiently sophisticated to work out to its logical result the
conception of the self-made man. But the captains of industry
by applying squatter doctrines to the evolution of American
industrial society, have made the process so clear that
he who runs may read. Contests imply alliances as well as
rivalries. The increasing magnitude of the areas to be dealt
with and the occurrences of times of industrial stress furnished
occasion for such unions. The panic of 1873 was
followed by an unprecedented combination of individual businesses
and partnerships into corporations. The panic of 1893
marked the beginning of an extraordinary development of corporate
combinations into pools and trusts, agreements and

absorptions, until, by the time of the panic of 1907, it seemed
not impossible that the outcome of free competition under
individualism was to be monopoly of the most important natural
resources and processes by a limited group of men whose
vast fortunes were so invested in allied and dependent industries
that they constituted the dominating force in the industrial
life of the nation. The development of large scale factory
production, the benefit of combination in the competitive
struggle, and the tremendous advantage of concentration in
securing possession of the unoccupied opportunities, were so
great that vast accumulations of capital became the normal
agency of the industrial world. In almost exact ratio to the
diminution of the supply of unpossessed resources, combinations
of capital have increased in magnitude and in efficiency
of conquest. The solitary backwoodsman wielding his ax at
the edge of a measureless forest is replaced by companies
capitalized at millions, operating railroads, sawmills, and all
the enginery of modern machinery to harvest the remaining
trees.[4]

A new national development is before us without the former
safety valve of abundant resources open to him who would
take. Classes are becoming alarmingly distinct: There is the
demand on the one side voiced by Mr. Harriman so well and
by others since, that nothing must be done to interfere with
the early pioneer ideals of the exploitation and the development
of the country's wealth; that restrictive and reforming
legislation must on no account threaten prosperity even for
a moment. In fact, we sometimes hear in these days, from
men of influence, serious doubts of democracy, and intimations
that the country would be better off if it freely resigned
itself to guidance by the geniuses who are mastering the economic
forces of the nation, and who, it is alleged, would work

out the prosperity of the United States more effectively, if
unvexed by politicians and people.

On the other hand, an inharmonious group of reformers are
sounding the warning that American democratic ideals and
society are menaced and already invaded by the very conditions
that make this apparent prosperity; that the economic
resources are no longer limitless and free; that the aggregate
national wealth is increasing at the cost of present social
justice and moral health, and the future well-being of the
American people. The Granger and the Populist were
prophets of this reform movement. Mr. Bryan's Democracy,
Mr. Debs' Socialism, and Mr. Roosevelt's Republicanism all
had in common the emphasis upon the need of governmental
regulation of industrial tendencies in the interest of the common
man; the checking of the power of those business Titans who
emerged successful out of the competitive individualism of
pioneer America. As land values rise, as meat and bread
grow dearer, as the process of industrial consolidation goes
on, and as Eastern industrial conditions spread across the
West, the problems of traditional American democracy will
become increasingly grave.

The time has come when University men may well consider
pioneer ideals, for American society has reached the end of the
first great period in its formation. It must survey itself, reflect
upon its origins, consider what freightage of purposes it carried
in its long march across the continent, what ambitions it
had for the man, what rôle it would play in the world. How
shall we conserve what was best in pioneer ideals? How
adjust the old conceptions to the changed conditions of modern
life?

Other nations have been rich and prosperous and powerful.
But the United States has believed that it had an original, contribution
to make to the history of society by the production

of a self-determining, self-restrained, intelligent democracy.
It is in the Middle West that society has formed on lines least
like those of Europe. It is here, if anywhere, that American
democracy will make its stand against the tendency to adjust to
a European type.

This consideration gives importance to my final topic, the
relation of the University to pioneer ideals and to the changing
conditions of American democracy. President Pritchett
of the Carnegie Foundation has recently declared that in no
other form of popular activity does a nation or State so clearly
reveal its ideals or the quality of its civilization as in its system
of education; and he finds, especially in the State University,
"a conception of education from the standpoint of
the whole people." "If our American democracy were to-day
called to give proof of its constructive ability," he says, "the
State University and the public school system which it crowns
would be the strongest evidence of its fitness which it could
offer."

It may at least be conceded that an essential characteristic
of the State University is its democracy in the largest sense.
The provision in the Constitution of Indiana of 1816, so familiar
to you all, for a "general system of education ascending in
regular gradations from township schools to a State University,
wherein tuition shall be gratis and equally open to all,"
expresses the Middle Western conception born in the days of
pioneer society and doubtless deeply influenced by Jeffersonian
democracy.

The most obvious fact about these universities, perhaps, lies
in their integral relation with the public schools, whereby the
pupil has pressed upon him the question whether he shall go
to college, and whereby the road is made open and direct to
the highest training. By this means the State offers to every
class the means of education, and even engages in propaganda

to induce students to continue. It sinks deep shafts through
the social strata to find the gold of real ability in the underlying
rock of the masses. It fosters that due degree of individualism
which is implied in the right of every human being
to have opportunity to rise in whatever directions his peculiar
abilities entitle him to go, subordinate to the welfare of the
state. It keeps the avenues of promotion to the highest offices,
the highest honors, open to the humblest and most obscure
lad who has the natural gifts, at the same time that it aids
in the improvement of the masses.

Nothing in our educational history is more striking than
the steady pressure of democracy upon its universities to adapt
them to the requirements of all the people. From the State
Universities of the Middle West, shaped under pioneer ideals,
have come the fuller recognition of scientific studies, and especially
those of applied science devoted to the conquest of
nature; the breaking down of the traditional required curriculum;
the union of vocational and college work in the same
institution; the development of agricultural and engineering
colleges and business courses; the training of lawyers, administrators,
public men, and journalists—all under the ideal of
service to democracy rather than of individual advancement
alone. Other universities do the same thing; but the head
springs and the main current of this great stream of tendency
come from the land of the pioneers, the democratic states of
the Middle West. And the people themselves, through their
boards of trustees and the legislature, are in the last resort the
court of appeal as to the directions and conditions of growth,
as well as have the fountain of income from which these
universities derive their existence.

The State University has thus both a peculiar power in the
directness of its influence upon the whole people and a peculiar
limitation in its dependence upon the people. The

ideals of the people constitute the atmosphere in which it
moves, though it can itself affect this atmosphere. Herein
is the source of its strength and the direction of its difficulties.
For to fulfil its mission of uplifting the state to continuously
higher levels the University must, in the words of Mr. Bryce,
"serve the time without yielding to it;" it must recognize new
needs without becoming subordinate to the immediately practical,
to the short-sightedly expedient. It must not sacrifice
the higher efficiency for the more obvious but lower efficiency.
It must have the wisdom to make expenditures for results
which pay manifold in the enrichment of civilization, But
which are not immediate and palpable.

In the transitional condition of American democracy which
I have tried to indicate, the mission of the university is most
important. The times call for educated leaders. General
experience and rule-of-thumb information are inadequate for
the solution of the problems of a democracy which no longer
owns the safety fund of an unlimited quantity of untouched
resources. Scientific farming must increase the yield of
the field, scientific forestry must economize the woodlands,
scientific experiment and construction by chemist, physicist,
biologist and engineer must be applied to all of nature's
forces in our complex modern society. The test tube and the
microscope are needed rather than ax and rifle in this new
ideal of conquest. The very discoveries of science in such
fields as public health and manufacturing processes have made
it necessary to depend upon the expert, and if the ranks of
experts are to be recruited broadly from the democratic masses
as well as from those of larger means, the State Universities
must furnish at least as liberal opportunities for research and
training as the universities based on private endowments furnish.
It needs no argument to show that it is not to the

advantage of democracy to give over the training of the expert
exclusively to privately endowed institutions.

But quite as much in the field of legislation and of public
life in general as in the industrial world is the expert
needed. The industrial conditions which shape society are
too complex, problems of labor, finance, social reform too difficult
to be dealt with intelligently and wisely without the
leadership of highly educated men familiar with the legislation
and literature on social questions in other States and
nations.

By training in science, in law, politics, economics and history
the universities may supply from the ranks of democracy
administrators, legislators, judges and experts for commissions
who shall disinterestedly and intelligently mediate
between contending interests. When the words "capitalistic
classes" and "the proletariate" can be used and understood
in America it is surely time to develop such men, with the
ideal of service to the State, who may help to break the force
of these collisions, to find common grounds between the contestants
and to possess the respect and confidence of all parties
which are genuinely loyal to the best American ideals.

The signs of such a development are already plain in the expert
commissions of some States; in the increasing proportion
of university men in legislatures; in the university men's influence
in federal departments and commissions. It is hardly too
much to say that the best hope of intelligent and principled
progress in economic and social legislation and administration
lies in the increasing influence of American universities. By
sending out these open-minded experts, by furnishing well-fitted
legislators, public leaders and teachers, by graduating
successive armies of enlightened citizens accustomed to deal
dispassionately with the problems of modern life, able to

think for themselves, governed not by ignorance, by prejudice
or by impulse, but by knowledge and reason and high-mindedness,
the State Universities will safeguard democracy. Without
such leaders and followers democratic reactions may create
revolutions, but they will not be able to produce industrial
and social progress. America's problem is not violently to
introduce democratic ideals, but to preserve and entrench
them by courageous adaptation to new conditions. Educated
leadership sets bulwarks against both the passionate impulses
of the mob and the sinister designs of those who would subordinate
public welfare to private greed. Lord Bacon's
splendid utterance still rings true: "The learning of the few
is despotism; the learning of the many is liberty. And intelligent
and principled liberty is fame, wisdom and power."

There is a danger to the universities in this very opportunity.
At first pioneer democracy had scant respect for the
expert. He believed that "a fool can put on his coat better
than a wise man can do it for him." There is much truth
in the belief; and the educated leader, even he who has been
trained under present university conditions, in direct contact
with the world about him, will still have to contend with this
inherited suspicion of the expert. But if he be well trained
and worthy of his training, if he be endowed with creative
imagination and personality, he will make good his leadership.

A more serious danger will come when the universities are
fully recognized as powerful factors in shaping the life of the
State—not mere cloisters, remote from its life, but an influential
element in its life. Then it may easily happen that the
smoke of the battle-field of political and social controversy
will obscure their pure air, that efforts will be made to stamp
out the exceptional doctrine and the exceptional man. Those
who investigate and teach within the university walls must
respond to the injunction of the church, "Sursum corda"—

lift up the heart to high thinking and impartial search for the
unsullied truth in the interests of all the people; this is the
holy grail of the universities.

That they may perform their work they must be left free, as
the pioneer was free, to explore new regions and to report
what they find; for like the pioneers they have the ideal of
investigation, they seek new horizons. They are not tied to
past knowledge; they recognize the fact that the universe still
abounds in mystery, that science and society have not crystallized,
but are still growing and need their pioneer trail-makers.
New and beneficent discoveries in nature, new and
beneficial discoveries in the processes and directions of the
growth of society, substitutes for the vanishing material basis
of pioneer democracy may be expected if the university pioneers
are left free to seek the trail.

In conclusion, the university has a duty in adjusting pioneer
ideals to the new requirements of American democracy, even
more important than those which I have named. The early
pioneer was an individualist and a seeker after the undiscovered;
but he did not understand the richness and complexity
of life as a whole; he did not fully realize his opportunities
of individualism and discovery. He stood in his somber forest
as the traveler sometimes stands in a village on the Alps
when the mist has shrouded everything, and only the squalid
hut, the stony field, the muddy pathway are in view. But
suddenly a wind sweeps the fog away. Vast fields of radiant
snow and sparkling ice lie before him; profound abysses open
at his feet; and as he lifts his eyes the unimaginable peak of
the Matterhorn cleaves the thin air, far, far above. A new
and unsuspected world is revealed all about him. Thus it is
the function of the university to reveal to the individual the
mystery and the glory of life as a whole—to open all the
realms of rational human enjoyment and achievement; to

preserve the consciousness of the past; to spread before the
eye the beauty of the universe; and to throw wide its portals
of duty and of power to the human soul. It must honor the
poet and painter, the writer and the teacher, the scientist and
the inventor, the musician and the prophet of righteousness—
the men of genius in all fields who make life nobler. It must
call forth anew, and for finer uses, the pioneer's love of creative
individualism and provide for it a spiritual atmosphere
friendly to the development of personality in all uplifting
ways. It must check the tendency to act in mediocre social
masses with undue emphasis upon the ideals of prosperity
and politics. In short, it must summon ability of all kinds
to joyous and earnest effort for the welfare and the spiritual
enrichment of society. It must awaken new tastes and ambitions
among the people.

The light of these university watch towers should flash from
State to State until American democracy itself is illuminated
with higher and broader ideals of what constitutes service to
the State and to mankind; of what are prizes; of what is worthy
of praise and reward. So long as success in amassing
great wealth for the aggrandizement of the individual is the
exclusive or the dominant standard of success, so long as material
prosperity, regardless of the conditions of its cost, or the
civilization which results, is the shibboleth, American democracy,
that faith in the common man which the pioneer cherishes,
is in danger. For the strongest will make their way
unerringly to whatever goal society sets up as the mark of
conceded preëminence. What more effective agency is there
for the cultivation of the seed wheat of ideals than the university?
Where can we find a more promising body of sowers
of the grain?

The pioneer's clearing must be broadened into a domain
where all that is worthy of human endeavor may find fcrtile

soil on which to grow; and America must exact of the constructive
business geniuses who owe their rise to the freedom
of pioneer democracy supreme allegiance and devotion to
the commonweal. In fostering such an outcome and in tempering
the asperities of the conflicts that must precede its fulfilment,
the nation has no more promising agency than the
State Universities, no more hopeful product than their graduates.