
. a certain little hamlet nesting among New England hills 
of a nation’s broadest activities has de- 
veloped faults and fissures undreamed of, 
sagging, as it were, in its very foundations 
under the weight of disclosures wrung from 
the unwilling lips of our disgraced ‘‘Cap- 
tains of Industry.” 
It was too much to hope that the Army 
of Professional Detractors should let the 
opportunity pass for an onslaught upon the 
national spirit, and so out of the ‘‘Age of 
Exposure” evolved the day of ‘‘The Man 
with the Muck-rake,’’ who is but the 
pessimist enthroned. 
And then some one—some one with a 
clear, far-reaching voice—cried ‘“‘Halt!”’ and 
the undertakers and embalmers, the grave- 
diggers and hired pall-bearers, the whole 
sad-visaged procession, which was ready 
to join in “‘the last sad rites” over our late 
lamented National Ideal, paused to listen. 
It appeared there had been a mistake. 
The bulletins were incorrect and _ pre- 
mature. There was no corpse to bury! 
The National Ideal had suffered only a 
relapse; with proper care it might, probably 
would, recover its ancient strength and 
vigor. 
A recent and a gifted writer, fresh from 
the immensity of the West, inspired by the 
earnestness, the vigor and the optimism of 
its people, has seen the accomplishment of 
our national mission as possible only in 
that vast land of promise beyond the 
Mississippl. The poor old East—‘‘the 
effete East’? of unnumbered pens and 
tongues—is left in its desolation like Enoch 
Arden, ‘‘a shipwrecked sailor waiting for a 
sail.” 
It is remote from the purpose of the 
present writer to belittle or ignore any 
phase of this glorious growth and promise 
of the West. It is incontestable that in that 
vast territory, which is even yet unfolding 
the mystery of infinite resources, a nation 
still in its infancy should look for the fulfill- 
ment of much of its greatness. And what 
may thus be said for the West, in a minor 
measure may be claimed by the South, and 
echoed from across the border where the 
axe of the pioneer and the locomotive’s 
whistle disturb the primeval quiet of the 
wilderness. 
It is the writer’s belief, however, that this 
foreordained supremacy of,the West will 
but reenact, on a larger scale, the history of 
the East. Commercialism, the foundation 
of huge fortunes, the ever-beckoning allure- 
ments of vast operations, must form a current 
easier to follow than to stem. The cry 
ultimately will be, there as here, for release 
_ from the tyranny of false ideals. 
It is true enough that the East has given 
freely of its brain and blood and bone to: 
the upbuilding of this republic of ours; that 
many of the names which are figuring in 
every notable enterprise of the West hark 
back to an origin among the first Americans; 
that much of that which still grips our 
