In the Rocky Mountains where at the time of Civil War, the first
important rushes to gold and silver mines carried the frontier backward
on a march toward the east, the most amazing transformations have
occurred. Here, where prospectors made new trails, and lived the wild
free life of mountain men, here where the human spirit seemed likely to
attain the largest measure of individual freedom, and where fortune
beckoned to the common man, have come revolutions wrought by the demand
for organized industry and capital. In the regions where the popular
tribunal and the free competitive life flourished, we have seen law and
order break down in the unmitigated collision of great aggregations of
capital, with each other and with organized socialistic labor. The
Cripple Creek strikes, the contests at Butte, the Goldfield mobs, the
recent Colorado fighting, all tell a similar story,--the solid impact of
contending forces in regions where civic power and loyalty to the State
have never fully developed. Like the Grand Canyon, where in dazzling
light the huge geologic history is written so large that none may fail
to read it, so in the Rocky Mountains the dangers of modern American
industrial tendencies have been exposed.

As we crossed the Cascades on our way to Seattle, one of the passengers
was moved to explain his feeling on the excellence of Puget Sound in
contrast with the remaining visible Universe. He did it well in spite of
irreverent interruptions from those fellow travelers who were
unconverted children of the East, and at last he broke forth in
passionate challenge, "Why should I not love Seattle! It took me from
the slums of the Atlantic Coast, a poor Swedish boy with hardly fifteen
dollars in my pocket. It gave me a home by the beautiful sea; it spread
before my eyes a vision of snow-capped peaks and smiling fields; it
brought abundance and a new life to me and my children and I love it, I
love it! If I were a multi-millionaire I would charter freight cars and
carry away from the crowded tenements and noisome alleys of the eastern
cities and the Old World the toiling masses, and let them loose in our
vast forests and ore-laden mountains to learn what life really is!" And
my heart was stirred by his words and by the whirling spaces of woods
and peaks through which we passed.

But as I looked and listened to this passionate outcry, I remembered the
words of Talleyrand, the exiled Bishop of Autun, in Washington's
adm