. We now have our garden and the tools with which
to work it. If the pioneer allowed the children to pick flowers and in
some cases to run away with the plants and the soil, he did not fail to
develop the estate.

Our inheritance from the pioneer is not only material but
psychological. The pioneer attitude of mind has made a real
contribution to our business standards. The very magnitude of our
enterprises, the fact that we have had to develop our methods as we
went, our success in approaching problems that way, have given us a
confidence in ourselves and a readiness to undertake big things without
counting the cost. This readiness is a large, perhaps a dominant,
factor in our contribution to world progress. It is not an accident
that the greatest problems of mountain railway building have been met
and solved by American engineers, or that they have carried a great
railroad under two rivers to the heart of our greatest city. These in a
private way, and the Panama Canal in a public way, are typical of
American engineering enterprise.

As with engineering, so with general business. Our pioneer managers did
not lack imagination; they were not afraid to undertake; they were not
constrained by worry lest they make mistakes. They made many mistakes.
Some were corrected, others ignored, but many more were concealed by an
abundant success. The pioneer could afford to do the next thing and let
the distant thing take care of itself, and in large measure he escaped
the penalties which normally follow a failure to look ahead.

Substantial forces have tended to keep the pioneer spirit alive. If
some resources have been depleted, other resources have been found to
take their place. Scientific discovery, invention, and the development
of technique have placed new forces at our command. Products have been
multiplied, but the demand for products has multiplied faster. We have
been able to continue offering men great and immediate rewards for the
development of new enterprises. As labor was needed, our neighbors have
continued to supply it. The result is that our business has continued
to go ahead without being too much concerned about the direction in
which it was going.

Business has eagerly appropriated the results of science without itself
becoming scientific. The difficult way of science makes slow progress
against the dazzling rewards of unbridled daring. So many strong but
untrained men have been enriched by seizing upon the i