sed if they exhibit undue
vitality and outgrow their long clothes.

Some of our businesses are lasting monuments to our commercial and
professional ability, and stand out proudly against a background of
restricted opportunities, while the unnumbered many fade into the
shadow of the horizon and are lost to sight.

The questions that come to us are: Why is it so, and how may it be
remedied? Are the causes for these economic conditions of commercial
origin or social? Are they extrinsic or intrinsic? Are they the
results of the unbusinesslike methods of our merchants, or the lack of
appreciation of our buyers?

We glory that we are a full-fledged race. It is a splendid thing to
glory over. But do we realize what we have missed in our sudden
growth? Imagine a man, who has had no babyhood, no childhood, no
youthhood; a man born into manhood, without the pleasures and
experiences of boyhood; who has never fallen into a pond, battled with
wasps, played truant, or done any of those innocent mischiefs that
develop the boy both in body and in mind, and fit him for the
strenuous duties of life. Imagine such a man and you have our race.

A nation in a day, is our record. We were born into cities,
governments, laws, comforts, pleasures and schools. Aladdin's lamp has
never accomplished anything so wonderful, and we rubbed our eyes and
were amazed because everything had been prepared for us. This very
munificence has hampered us. We have not had that development as
individuals and as a people that would best fit us to grapple with
each succeeding obstacle. Therefore we must patiently though painfully
start from the beginning and travel over the same road, that each race
has traveled, because individuals and races develop alike, and the
same conditions that attach to the growth of one race, attach to that
of all others.

A nation in a day is a splendid record. But a nation that came out of
the wilderness, constructed its own cities, builded its own roads,
made its own laws, established its own schools, devised its own
comforts and pleasures, and in the contest with nature and poverty,
wrestled until it won a new name, that nation with its scars, its
experiences, and its development has far more to be desired, and has
far more resources upon which to draw in its after contests than the
former.

We entered the lists with these natural handicaps, and other
conditions imposed upon us. We have made mistakes, and the wonder is
that