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 Canyon, 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 multi-millionaire 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:
"Even the best of modern civilization appears to me to exhibit
a condition of mankind which neither embodies any worthy ideal
nor even possesses the merit of stability. I do not hesitate
to express the opinion that, if there is no hope of a large
improvement of the condition of the greater part of the human
family; if it is true that the increase of knowledge, the
winning of a greater dominion over Nature, which is its
consequence, and the wealth which follows upon that dominion,
are to make no difference in the extent and the intensity of
Want, with its concomitant physical and moral degradation,
among the masses of the people, I should hail the advent of
some kindly comet, which would sweep the whole affair away, as
a desirable consummation."
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.
"Daughters of Time, the hypocritic days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bear diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that hold them all.
I, in my pleached garden watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples and the day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet, saw the scorn!"
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.