We do things in the mass, not as individuals. Mass action is the keynote of our civilization. Why should it not inspire our monuments? What opportunities there have been in our history for the inspiration of great sculpture animated by that mass spirit. What I should like to see, for instance, is a monument to Lincoln that would include his cabinet. The more one grows, the more his close associates grow with him. And there are the colonial settlements, the founders of the republic and the Western pioneers still waiting to be memorialized in mass action. The sculptor began his first designs in more or less the conventional way. He adopted the shaft or the upright column, which is often used as a symbol of civilization, and surrounded that shaft with figures, struggling, rising above material difficulties. In making this model he discovered that it failed completely to express the natural impulses of the human being under stress, either attacking or defending himself against an enemy. All war monuments, he decided, should be planned to depict emotions when threatened by loss of a way of life which was at once familiar and sacred to every family, tribe or nation. When that idea became clear the problem of a memorial to men who had sacrificed their lives for home and country became one of human anxiety and confusion out of which order, organization and direction gradually developed. This went hand in hand with the thought that the wars of America were defensive wars, that America was not a crusader in a militant sense. The war with England, for example, was a declaration of independence, in no way a struggle for dominion beyond America’s own boundaries. And the First World War was, in the sculptor’s own words, “probably the most remarkable example of utter disinterestedness in conquest.” Monuments that are built for war, he concluded, generally treat battle and fighting as part of the process of civilization, while in fact civilization develops its lines of peace on confidence and in ways that are antagonistic to war. Of how the plan slowly developed in his mind he said: My first sketch, following abandonment of the shaft idea, represented a confused group of men who were attempting to organize [Illustration: _Photo by Lincoln Borglum_ “THE TRAIL DRIVERS” This group is in Breckenridge Park, San Antonio, Texas.] [Illustration: THE BORGLUMS’ DAUGHTER Mary Ellis Borglum is now Mrs. David Vhay.]