Here and there are comparatively small, neglected tracts of land still to be developed, but there are no longer great new empires, as in former days.  The great welling sources of human life have not ceased to flow, even though the final boundaries of its spread have been reached.  Population will continue to grow and its demands upon the resources of the earth to increase.  The man who discovers a way to make a hundred bushels of wheat grow on an acre of land where only twenty-five bushels grew before is as great a benefactor of the race as the discoverer of a continent.  The invention of the electric light, the telephone, the automobile, the trolley car, and the aeroplane have added as much to the products and power of the race as the pioneering of thousands of square miles of fertile hills and plains.  The man who can find a cheap and easy way to capture and hold nitrogen from the air will add more to the wealth of the race than all the discoverers of all the gold mines.

America needs to find efficient and profitable methods for manufacturing her own raw materials.  Up to the present time, our exports have been coal, petroleum, steel rails, wheat, corn, oats, lumber, and other products which carry out of the country the riches of our soil.  We have been exporting raw materials to foreign lands, where they have been refined and fabricated by brain and hand and returned to us at some five hundred to a thousand times the price we received for them.  With the increase of population, we need to capitalize more and more the intelligence and skill of our people, and less and less the virgin resources of our lands.  Ore beds, coal measures, copper, lead, gold and silver mines, forests, oil wells, and the fertility of our soils can all become exhausted.  But the skill of our hands and the power of our intellects grow and increase and yield larger and larger returns the more they are called upon to produce.

The man of bone and muscle—­the restless, active, pioneering, constructing man—­would do well to consider these things before determining upon his vocation, and especially before entering upon any kind of non-productive work.  The world has need of his particular talents and he should find his greatest happiness and greatest success in the exercise of them in response to that need.

We have seen so many men of this active type so badly placed that individual examples seem almost too commonplace for citation.  Yet, a few may be instructive and encouraging.

William Carleton’s remarkable story, entitled “Rediscovering America,” is, in fact, the story of a man who was a middle-aged failure in a clerical position, and who afterward made a remarkable success of his life by taking up contracting and building.  James Cook, a misfit as a grocer, afterward became famous as a naval officer and explorer.  Henry M. Stanley, office boy to a cotton broker and merchant, afterward won immortal fame as a newspaper correspondent and explorer.  What would have become of Theodore Roosevelt had he followed the usual line of occupation of a man in his position and entered a law office instead of becoming a rancher?  We might add other experiences of similar importance from the biographies of other great men.