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 preeminence. 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 fertile 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[269:1] Commencement Address at the University of Indiana, 1910.

[270:1] [Printed from an earlier version; since published in his "Songs
from Books," p. 93, under the title, "The Voortrekker." Even fuller of
insight into the idealistic side of the frontier, is his "Explorer," in
"Collected Verse," p. 19.]

[279:1] Written in 1910.

[280:1] Omissions from the original are incorporated in later chapters.

XI

THE WEST AND AMERICAN IDEALS[290:1]

True to American traditions that each succeeding generation ought to
find in the Republic a better home, once in every year the colleges and
universities summon the nation to lift its eyes from the routine of
work, in o