THE NATIONAL PARKS SYSTEM 243 



on earth, writers, publishers, advertising men the 

 well-to-do of all sorts and degrees. 



These constitute the great body of National Park 

 visitors. We also meet the workers in lesser num- 

 bers clerks, salesmen, farmers, small employers and 

 the thrifty employed all who can afford to tour by 

 automobile, and want to see their country. 



Imagine an average of church congregations 

 and the audiences of theaters, concerts, popular 

 lectures, grand opera and the better motion-picture 

 houses, of college football crowds and the patrons 

 of the Chautauquas and Ocean Groves of the coun- 

 try, and you will come pretty close to the average of 

 National Park visitors who come really to see the 

 parks, not merely to glance at them from passing 

 automobiles as is a fashion to-day among countless 

 casual tourists. It is an intelligent and a fairly edu- 

 cated crowd; but not rich nor fashionable. It rep- 

 resents America very well. 



Of enormous importance is the System's by- 

 product of democratization in a period which needs 

 it. Nowhere else do people from all the states mingle 

 in quite the same spirit as they do in their national 

 parks. One sits at dinner, say, between a Missouri 

 farmer and a Utah miner, and at supper between a 

 New York artist and an Oregon shopkeeper. One 

 stages it with people from Florida, Minnesota and 

 Idaho, climbs mountains with a chance crowd from 

 Vermont, Louisiana and Texas, and sits around the 

 evening camp-fire with a California grape grower, 



