o the American people to "cherish their high
democratic hope, their faith in man. The older they grow the more they
must reverence the dreams of their youth."

The dreams of their youth! Here they shall be preserved, and the
achievements as well as the aspirations of the men who made the State,
the men who built on their foundations, the men with large vision and
power of action, the lesser men in the mass, the leaders who served the
State and nation with devotion to the cause. Here shall be preserved the
record of the men who failed to see the larger vision and worked
impatiently with narrow or selfish or class ends, as well as of those
who labored with patience and sympathy and mutual concession, with
readiness to make adjustments and to subordinate their immediate
interests to the larger good and the immediate safety of the nation.

In the archives of such an old institution as that of the Historical
Society of Massachusetts, whose treasures run to the beginnings of the
Puritan colonization, the students cannot fail to find the evidence that
a State Historical Society is a Book of Judgment wherein is made up the
record of a people and its leaders. So, as time unfolds, shall be the
collections of this Society, the depository of the material that shall
preserve the memory of this people. Each section of this widely extended
and varied nation has its own peculiar past, its special form of
society, its traits and its leaders. It were a pity if any section left
its annals solely to the collectors of a remote region, and it were a
pity if its collections were not transformed into printed documents and
monographic studies which can go to the libraries of all the parts of
the Union and thus enable the student to see the nation as a whole in
its past as well as in its present.

This Society finds its special field of activity in a great State of the
Middle West, so new, as history reckons time, that its annals are still
predominantly those of the pioneers, but so rapidly growing that already
the era of the pioneers is a part of the history of the past, capable of
being handled objectively, seen in a perspective that is not possible to
the observer of the present conditions.

Because of these facts I have taken as the special theme of this address
the Middle Western Pioneer Democracy, which I would sketch in some of
its outstanding aspects, and chiefly in the generation before the Civil
War, for it was from those pioneers t