g 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 th