If you would understand the driving power of America, you must understand “the divers discontented and impatient young men” who in each generation have found in the American wilderness an outlet for their energies.  In the rough contacts with untamed Nature they learned to be resourceful.  Emerson declared that the country went on most satisfactorily, not when it was in the hands of the respectable Whigs, but when in the hands of “these rough riders—­legislators in shirt-sleeves—­Hoosier, Sucker, Wolverine, Badger—­or whatever hard-head Arkansas, Oregon, or Utah sends, half-orator, half-assassin, to represent its wrath and cupidity at Washington.”

The men who made America had an “excess of virility.”  “Men of this surcharge of arterial blood cannot live on nuts, herb-tea, and elegies; cannot read novels and play whist; cannot satisfy all their wants at the Thursday Lecture and the Boston Athenaeum.  They pine for adventure and must go to Pike’s Peak; had rather die by the hatchet of the Pawnee than sit all day and every day at the counting-room desk.  They are made for war, for the sea, for mining, hunting, and clearing, and the joy of eventful living.”

In Emerson’s day there was ample scope for all these varied energies on the frontier.  “There are Oregons, Californias, and Exploring Expeditions enough appertaining to America to find them in files to gnaw and crocodiles to eat.”

But it must have occurred to some one to ask, “What will happen when the Oregons and Californias are filled up?” Well, the answer is, “See what is happening now.”  Instead of settling down to herb-tea and elegies, Young America, having finished one big job, is looking for another.  The noises which disturb you are not the cries of an angry proletariat, but are the shouts of eager young fellows who are finding new opportunities.  They have the same desire to do big things, the same joy in eventful living, that you had thirty years ago.  Only the tasks that challenge them have taken a different form.

When you hear the words “Conservation,” “Social Service,” “Social Justice,” and the like, you are apt to dismiss them as mere fads.  You think of the catchwords of ineffective reformers whom you have known from your youth.  But the fact is that they represent to-day the enthusiasms of a new generation.  They are big things, with big men behind them.  They represent the Oregons and Californias toward which sturdy pioneers are moving, undeterred by obstacles.

The live questions to-day concern not the material so much as the moral development of the nation.  For it is seen that the future welfare of the people depends on the creation of a finer type of civic life.  Is this still to be a land of opportunity?  Ninety millions of people are already here.  What shall be done with the next ninety millions?  That wealth is to increase goes without saying.  But how is it to be distributed?  Are we tending to a Plutocracy, or can a real Democracy hold its own?  Powerful machinery has been invented.  How can this machinery be controlled and used for truly human ends?  We have learned the economies that result from organization.  Who is to get the benefit of these economies?