Modern American Prose Selections | Page 8

make a new trail with care. He must curb courage with common-sense. He may lay his first bricks upon the twentieth story, but not until he has made sure of the solidity of the frame below. The real tradition of our people permits the mason to place brick upon brick wherever he finds it most convenient, safest and most economical; but he must not mistake thin air for structural steel.
Let me illustrate the thought that I would leave with you by the description of one of our western railroads. Your train sweeps across the desert like some bold knight in a joust, and when about to drive recklessly into a sheer cliff it turns a graceful curve and follows up the wild meanderings of a stream until it reaches a ridge along which it finds its flinty way for many miles. At length you come face to face with a great gulf, a canyon--yawning, resounding and purple in its depths. Before you lies a path, zigzagging down the canyon's side to the very bottom, and away beyond another slighter trail climbs up upon the opposite side. Which is our way? Shall we follow the old trail? The answer comes as the train shoots out across a bridge and into a tunnel on the opposite side, coming out again upon the highlands and looking into the Valley of Heart's Desire where the wistful Rasselas might have lived.
When you or I look upon that stretch of steel we wonder at the daring of its builders. Great men they were who boldly built that road--great in imagination, greater in their deeds--for they were men so great that they did not build upon a line that was without tradition. The route they followed was made by the buffalo and the elk ten thousand years ago. The bear and the deer followed it generation after generation, and after them came the trapper, and then the pioneer. It was already a trail when the railroad engineer came with transit and chain seeking a path for the great black stallion of steel.
Up beside the stream and along the ridge the track was laid. But there was no thought of following the old trail downward into the canyon. Then the spirit of the new age broke through tradition, the canyon was leaped and the mountain's heart pierced, that man might have a swifter and safer way to the Valley of Heart's Desire.

AMERICA'S HERITAGE[3]
FRANKLIN K. LANE
[Footnote 3: Address at the Americanization Banquet, Washington, D. C., May 14, 1919. Reprinted by permission from Proceedings of the Americanization Conference, Government Printing Office, 1919.]
You have been in conference for the past three days, and I have greatly regretted that I could not be with you. You have been gathered together as crusaders in a great cause. You are the missionaries in a new movement. You represent millions of people in the United States who to-night believe that there is no other question of such importance before the American people as the solidifying and strengthening of true American sentiment.
I understand that your conference has been a success; and it has been a success because, unlike some other conferences, it was made up of experts who knew what they were talking about. But you know no one can give the final answer upon the question of Americanization. You may study methods, but you find yourselves foiled because there is no one method--no standardized method that can always be used to deal correctly and truly with any human problem. Bergson, the French philosopher, was here a year or two ago, and he made a suggestion to me that seemed very profound when he said that the theory of evolution could carry on as to species until it came to deal with man, and then you had to deal with each individual man upon the theory that he was a species by himself. And I think there is more than superficial significance to that. It may go to the very heart and center of what we call spirituality. It may be because of that very fact the individual is a soul by himself; and it is for that reason that there must be avenues opened into men's hearts that can not be standardized.
Man is a great moated, walled castle, with doors by the dozens, doors by the score, leading into him--but most of us keep our doors closed. It is difficult for people to gain access to us; but there are some doors that are open to the generality of mankind; and as those who are seeking to know our fellow man and to reach him, it is our place to find what those doors are and how those doors can be opened.
One of those doors might be labeled "our love for our children." That is