National Duties 229 



have built up this State. Throughout our history the 

 success of the home-maker has been but another 

 name for the upbuilding of the nation. The men 

 who with axe in the forests and pick in the mountains 

 and plow on the prairies pushed to completion the 

 dominion of our people over the American wilderness 

 have given the definite shape to our nation. They 

 have shown the qualities of daring, endurance, and 

 far-sightedness, of eager desire for victory and stub 

 born refusal to accept defeat, which go to make up 

 the essential manliness of the American character. 

 Above all, they have recognized in practical form the 

 fundamental law of success in American life the 

 law of worthy work, the law of high, resolute en 

 deavor. We have but little room among our people 

 for the timid, the irresolute, and the idle; and it is 

 no less true that there is scant room in the world at 

 large for the nation with mighty thews that dares not 

 to be great. 



Surely in speaking to the sons of the men who ac 

 tually did the rough and hard and infinitely glorious 

 work of making the great Northwest what it now is, 

 I need hardly insist upon the righteousness of this 

 doctrine. In your own vigorous lives you show by 

 every act how scant is your patience with those who 

 do not see in the life of effort the life supremely 

 worth living. Sometimes we hear those who do not 

 work spoken of with envy. Surely the wilfully idle 



