west itself is, as it stands—to use the vernacular—the work of the earnest, eager, sound reasoning, sane American citizen. To none other, not even to his government, is the glory due. He has made it, and the fact that the government anticipated him in the matter of fostering a railroad may be a pure accident. His life-giving enterprise found the capabilities of the land, and its development, its fruitage, is his and his alone. Its great railroads tell the tale as they run their courses. They leave the waters of the Mississippi and the lands whose crumbling iron ore helps to make us the richest country in the world. What wonder is it that the palmist in the blue and silver car reads the hands, and the gypsy tells fortunes midway between the twin cities, to the wondering and helpless multitude who dwell near the most magical of nature's storehouses, where the forest is cut into millions of dollars only to leave behind a far greater number of millions under the tangled roots of its stumps! Leaving this abode of wealth behind it, the road runs through the wheat-lands of the Red River, the cattle plains, the copper and silver, the varied agriculture west of the mountains, on to the great timber of Puget Sound. And in running thus through these varied gifts of nature, the railroads have nourished industry, have stimulated the arts of production, have taught the unready and have aided the ready, in obedience to the great and universal law that one who would serve profitably to himself must serve profitably to others.
In twenty years, since Mr. Villard's company of distinguished guests crossed the continent to see and participate in the completion of the first of the great northern roads, well-built towns have succeeded the wooden shelters of the first day, while the face of nature itself has been changed. The once brown plains, whose many unfenced acres were seized perhaps in obedience to the law of seeming necessity—for necessity is oftenest seeming,—but contrary to the law of legislatures, are greening under the influence of irrigation, and the husbandman once more, as in all times past, is moving on the herdsman and is driving the cattle into smaller and richer fields, to the betterment of all. All this that we see, the growing splendor of the land, is the work of the individual man, either alone or in voluntary association with others. Together men have led the mountain streams to the arid sage-brush plains, and alone man has made green and fruitful squares from forbidding bits of territory. These green oases in the Great American Desert are the fine achievements of the Western men who are, let us remember, Eastern men and sons or grandsons of Eastern men, working with their own and with the capital of other Eastern men who have faith in them and in their land,—all these achievements are tributes to the individual and a great sustainer of the old-fashioned faith in individualism.
It ought not to be possible to look upon the wonderful gains of this wonderful region without the reflection that the individual has ventured millions and succeeded, where government has granted thousands and partly failed. This is not the place for the discussion of the fundamental difference between those who want the government to try to do more than they have done and those who think that the private citizen will continue to do better and more wisely than the political power can ever do, but there is room for such discussion, which, however, as in almost all human problems, will doubtless be settled in the end by hard experience; but this is now the truth, that, whatever may be done in the time to come, men unaided by government, or despite the efforts of government to aid, have created a rich empire out of lands once ridiculed as the "Banana Tract," and that men uncherished by the politicians who manage the government have built a pathway from the manufactories of the East, the corn and wheat prairies of the Middle West, the cotton-plantations of the South, across the plains to the Pacific coast, gold and timber bearing, and that, farther still, the pathway is going on across the Pacific, so that this marvellous Western empire of ours is looking onward with wise prescience into mysterious and still undeveloped Asia.
Can government, with its little war-fleets and its pampering laws, which, like all pampering, weakens character, expect to do as much for the welfare of the world of men as the men of the world have done for themselves
