overnment
finds its surest footing here--that real autonomy of the spirit which
makes human uses the goal of effort, denies all inhuman ideals, seeks out
what men want, and proceeds to create it. With such a history how could a
nation fail to see in its constitution anything but a tool of life, like
the axe, the spade or the plough?

The West has in a measure carried its freedom over into politics and
social life generally. Formalism sets in as you move east and south into
the older and more settled communities. There the pioneering impulse has
passed out of life into stupid history books, and the inevitable
classicalism, the fear of adventure, the superstition before social
invention, have reasserted themselves. If I may turn for a moment from
description to prophecy, it is to say that this equilibrium will not hold
for very long. There are signs that the West after achieving the reforms
which it needs to-day--reforms which will free its economic life from the
credit monopolies of the East, and give it a greater fluidity in the
marketing of its products--will follow the way of all agricultural
communities to a rural and placid conservatism. The spirit of the pioneer
does not survive forever: it is kept alive to-day, I believe, by certain
unnatural irritants which may be summed up as absentee ownership. The
West is suffering from foreignly owned railroads, power-resources, and an
alien credit control. But once it recaptures these essentials of its
economic life, once the "progressive" movement is victorious, I venture
to predict that the agricultural West will become the heart of American
complacency. The East, on the other hand, with its industrial problem
must go to far more revolutionary measures for a solution. And the East
is fertilized continually by European traditions: that stream of
immigration brings with it a thousand unforeseeable possibilities. The
great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the
wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples. To-day perhaps,
it is still predominantly a question for the East. But it means that
America is turning from the contrast between her courage and nature's
obstacles to a comparison of her civilization with Europe's. Immigration
more than anything else is drawing us into world problems. Many people
profess to see horrible dangers in the foreign invasion. Certainly no man
is sure of its conclusion. It may swamp us, it may, if we seize the
opp