conception
of the modern Captain of Industry. His silk hat is on the back of his
head as if he had just come from his office as fast as his
forty-horse-power automobile could carry him. His portly form shows
evidences of intense excitement. He is holding his hand aloft to stay
the proceedings, while from his lips comes the stage whisper:
"Gentlemen, stop! You will hurt business!" What would those old New
England fathers think, could they know that such a conception may be
taken as representing a well-recognized tendency of the present day? And
remember, too, that those old heroes had something of a passion for
trade themselves.

But when we seek for the source of our most important national
ideal,--the ideal that we have called equality of opportunity,--we must
look to another part of the country. The typical Americanism that is
represented by Lincoln owes its origin, I believe, very largely to
geographical factors. It could have been developed only under certain
conditions and these conditions the Middle West alone provided. The
settling of the Middle West in the latter part of the eighteenth and the
early part of the nineteenth centuries was part and parcel of a rigid
logic of events. As Miss Semple so clearly points out in her work on the
geographic conditions of American history, the Atlantic seaboard sloped
toward the sea and its people held their faces eastward. They were never
cut off from easy communication with the Old World, and consequently
they were never quite freed from the Old World prejudices and standards.
But the movement across the mountains gave rise to a new condition. The
faces of the people were turned westward, and cut off from easy
communication with the Old World, they developed a new set of ideals and
standards under the stress of new conditions. Chief among these
conditions was the immensity and richness of the territory that they
were settling. The vastness of their outlook and the wealth of their
resources confirmed and extended the ideals of self-reliance that they
had brought with them from the seaboard. But on the seaboard, the Old
World notion of social classes, the prestige of family and station,
still held sway. The development of the Middle West would have been
impossible under so severe a handicap. With resources so great, every
stimulus must be given to individual achievement. Nothing must be
permitted to stand in its way. The man who could do things, the man who
could most effect