TWENTIETH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VII 619 



And that spirit of the women and men was matched in 1917-18 by 

 this greater nation, the women working everywhere, the Red Cross, the 

 Y. M. C. A., and other organizations, and working in their homes knitting 

 and making bandages, and tlie young manhood of the country to the tune 

 of four millions, with thirteen millions more ready to go, donned the khaki 

 in defense of their country. It was the emergence of this nation to the 

 life of the world, the same great spirit of heroism that will yet save and 

 preserve this nation, you may depend upon it. (Applause.) 



Well, we went through that struggle. There was the brave spirit that 

 carried the burden of it upon his heart, who understood it so well. He 

 was a typical example of Americanism. Think of the two great men — 

 we are near to Washington's birthday, you know, and we have just passed 

 Lincoln's birthday — Washington, the representative of Virginian aristoc- 

 racy, and Lincoln, the barefoot boy from the slab cabin in Kentucky, and 

 yet both typical spirits in the life of this nation. But what do we learn 

 from that truth? — that it doesn't matter whether he comes from the ranks 

 of aristocracy or the ranks of industry, if he is a man, true to his fellow 

 men, then he has an equal right to march under the folds of our wondrous 

 flag. (Applause.) And so that struggle passed, and with the struggle in 

 the civil war, came to an end the great, simple, yet complex, period that 

 preceded the scientific era in this country. And then began what? And 

 then man began to harness the forces of nature, didn't he? And what 

 wondrous harnessing it has been! It has gone on down the ages, down 

 the years, the electric light, telephone, aviation, wireless, the submarine, 

 the dreadnaught, the electric railway, the transcontinental railways — oh, 

 yes, it has been a perfectly wondrous age! I will tell you a story of the 

 Canadian prairies. When I was first up there we were driving along in 

 an automobile up in the Hudson Bay country, and there were no houses, 

 no trees, no people, just the vast rolling, billowy, waving grass of the 

 prairies as far as the eye could reach, even as it was in the days our fath- 

 ers saw it. We were going along over this prairie and off in the distance 

 we saw a great herd of wild horses — possibly a thousand of them. Horses 

 are like many other animals in that they are very curious, and on seeing 

 us they came thundering down upon us; we could hear the thunder of 

 their hoofs, we could hear them neighing as they came, and within a 

 hundred yards of us they stopped, with their heads in the air, watching 

 that strange creature (we would make a noise with the engine by using 

 the cutout) as it dashed across their prairie. Oh, what a wondrous thing 

 is a herd of a thousand horses! But when we throw the energy of the 

 inventive genius of the world to the mastering of our scientific prob- 

 lems, we see such an institution as stands at Keokuk, where the power 

 of not 1,000 horses is harnessed, but the power of 250,000 horses, the 

 thunder of whose hoofs is transformed into the crash and roar of giant 

 turbine engines, their silken sides become the thousand glistening shafts, 

 their neigh changed to singing the song of concentrated industry. 



Now let me tell you one thing about this age: You and I and all the 

 rest of humanity in all civilized lands, like children with a new toy, were 

 intoxicated from seeing the wheels go around. But this nation of ours, 

 in spite of that, was not so materialistic that it lost its great ideal of 



