The Pilgrim, and the American of Today | Page 7

were life-giving over the continent.
Here in the West you are near the centre of a vast empire, you feel its
mighty pulse, the throb and heartbeat of its immense and growing
strength. Some of you have seen this great civilization actually grow on
the vacant prairies, in the unoccupied wilderness, on the sandy shores
of the inland seas. You have seen the trails of the Indian and the deer
replaced by highways of steel, and upon the spots where the first
immigrants corralled their wagons, and the voyagers dragged their
canoes upon the reedy shore, you have seen arise great cities, centres of
industry, of commerce, of art, attaining in a generation the proportions
and the world-wide fame of cities that were already famous before the
discovery of America.
Naturally the country is proud of this achievement. Naturally we
magnify our material prosperity. But in this age of science and
invention this development may be said to be inevitable, and besides it
is the necessary outlet of the energy of a free people. There must be
growth of cities, extension of railways, improvement of agriculture,
development of manufactures, amassing of wealth, concentration of
capital, beautifying of homes, splendid public buildings, private palaces,
luxury, display. Without reservoirs of wealth there would be no great
universities, schools of science, museums, galleries of art, libraries,
solid institutions of charity, and perhaps not the wide diffusion of
culture which is the avowed aim of modern civilization.

But this in its kind is an old story. It is an experiment that has been
repeated over and over. History is the record of the rise of splendid
civilizations, many of which have flowered into the most glorious
products of learning and of art, and have left monuments of the
proudest material achievements. Except in the rapidity with which
steam and electricity have enabled us to move to our object, and in the
discoveries of science which enable us to relieve suffering and prolong
human life, there is nothing new in our experiment. We are pursuing
substantially the old ends of material success and display. And the ends
are not different because we have more people in a nation, or bigger
cities with taller buildings, or more miles of railway, or grow more corn
and cotton, or make more plows and threshing-machines, or have a
greater variety of products than any nation ever had before. I fancy that
a pleased visitor from another planet the other day at Chicago, who was
shown an assembly much larger than ever before met under one roof,
might have been interested to know that it was also the wisest, the most
cultivated, the most weighty in character of any assembly ever gathered
under one roof. Our experiment on this continent was intended to be
something more than the creation of a nation on the old pattern, that
should become big and strong, and rich and luxurious, divided into
classes of the very wealthy and the very poor, of the enlightened and
the illiterate. It was intended to be a nation in which the welfare of the
people is the supreme object, and whatever its show among nations it
fails if it does not become this. This welfare is an individual matter, and
it means many things. It includes in the first place physical comfort for
every person willing and deserving to be physically comfortable,
decent lodging, good food, sufficient clothing. It means, in the second
place, that this shall be an agreeable country to live in, by reason of its
impartial laws, social amenities, and a fair chance to enjoy the gifts of
nature and Providence. And it means, again, the opportunity to develop
talents, aptitudes for cultivation and enjoyment, in short, freedom to
make the most possible out of our lives. This is what Jefferson meant
by the "pursuit of happiness"; it was what the Constitution meant by the
"general welfare," and what it tried to secure in States, safe-guarded
enough to secure independence in the play of local ambition and home
rule, and in a federal republic strong enough to protect the whole from
foreign interference. We are in no vain chase of an equality which

would eliminate all individual initiative, and check all progress, by
ignoring differences of capacity and strength, and rating muscles equal
to brains. But we are in pursuit of equal laws, and a fairer chance of
leading happy lives than humanity in general ever had yet. And this
fairer chance would not, for instance, permit any man to become a
millionaire by so manipulating railways that the subscribing towns and
private stockholders should lose their investments; nor would it assume
that any Gentile or Jew has the right to grow rich by the chance of
compelling poor women to make shirts for six cents apiece.