PHYSICAL environment is but a cradle for the growth of ideas. Thought, in its all embracing sweep, can command all avenues of human expression, can o'erleap the boundaries of time and space, and fill the soul with a power to penetrate the veil of an immortal destiny. Through a creative faculty inherent in the best of finite minds, the Creator controls the affairs of a universe.
_5.png)
With one eye on the stars, for a balance, and but a plank under his feet, Columbus crossed a trackless ocean, to give a new world to the old, and for five hundred years this pathway has been traveled by a human tide which no power of vested interests could stop, no ecclesiastical dogma control, or fiery persecution lead from its course toward liberty of thought and higher civilization.
When the best blood of England measured swords with royal prerogative, it was on the bleak shore of Massachusetts that refugees found a home—and a line drawn from the seashore across the centre of the state to the crest of Mount Holyoke, and thence to the mouth of the Connecticut river, would bring into view most of the region that nursed the mental force which has proved so large a factor in the welfare of sixty millions of people.
But it is a basin scooped by the waters long ago in the, granite foundations of Western Massachusetts that holds our centre of interest at the present moment. Just at the junction of the hill country of northern New England with the more level lands in Connecticut the Holyoke range shuts across the southern front
