ane have added as much to the
products and power of the race as the pioneering of thousands of square
miles of fertile hills and plains. The man who can find a cheap and easy
way to capture and hold nitrogen from the air will add more to the wealth
of the race than all the discoverers of all the gold mines.

America needs to find efficient and profitable methods for manufacturing
her own raw materials. Up to the present time, our exports have been coal,
petroleum, steel rails, wheat, corn, oats, lumber, and other products
which carry out of the country the riches of our soil. We have been
exporting raw materials to foreign lands, where they have been refined and
fabricated by brain and hand and returned to us at some five hundred to a
thousand times the price we received for them. With the increase of
population, we need to capitalize more and more the intelligence and skill
of our people, and less and less the virgin resources of our lands. Ore
beds, coal measures, copper, lead, gold and silver mines, forests, oil
wells, and the fertility of our soils can all become exhausted. But the
skill of our hands and the power of our intellects grow and increase and
yield larger and larger returns the more they are called upon to produce.

The man of bone and muscle--the restless, active, pioneering, constructing
man--would do well to consider these things before determining upon his
vocation, and especially before entering upon any kind of non-productive
work. The world has need of his particular talents and he should find his
greatest happiness and greatest success in the exercise of them in
response to that need.

We have seen so many men of this active type so badly placed that
individual examples seem almost too commonplace for citation. Yet, a few
may be instructive and encouraging.

William Carleton's remarkable story, entitled "Rediscovering America,"
is, in fact, the story of a man who was a middle-aged failure in a
clerical position, and who afterward made a remarkable success of his life
by taking up contracting and building. James Cook, a misfit as a grocer,
afterward became famous as a naval officer and explorer. Henry M. Stanley,
office boy to a cotton broker and merchant, afterward won immortal fame as
a newspaper correspondent and explorer. What would have become of Theodore
Roosevelt had he followed the usual line of occupation of a man in his
position and entered a law office instead of becoming a rancher? We