Our inheritance from the pioneer is not only material but psychological. The pioneer attitude of mind has made a real contribution to our business standards. The very magnitude of our enterprises, the fact that we have had to develop our methods as we went, our success in approaching problems that way, have given us a confidence in ourselves and a readiness to undertake big things without counting the cost. This readiness is a large, perhaps a dominant, factor in our contribution to world progress. It is not an accident that the greatest problems of mountain railway building have been met and solved by American engineers, or that they have carried a great railroad under two rivers to the heart of our greatest city. These in a private way, and the Panama Canal in a public way, are typical of American engineering enterprise. As with engineering, so with general business. Our pioneer managers did not lack imagination; they were not afraid to undertake; they were not constrained by worry lest they make mistakes. They made many mistakes. Some were corrected, others ignored, but many more were concealed by an abundant success. The pioneer could afford to do the next thing and let the distant thing take care of itself, and in large measure he escaped the penalties which normally follow a failure to look ahead. Substantial forces have tended to keep the pioneer spirit alive. If some resources have been depleted, other resources have been found to take their place. Scientific discovery, invention, and the development of technique have placed new forces at our command. Products have been multiplied, but the demand for products has multiplied faster. We have been able to continue offering men great and immediate rewards for the development of new enterprises. As labor was needed, our neighbors have continued to supply it. The result is that our business has continued to go ahead without being too much concerned about the direction in which it was going. Business has eagerly appropriated the results of science without itself becoming scientific. The difficult way of science makes slow progress against the dazzling rewards of unbridled daring. So many strong but untrained men have been enriched by seizing upon the immediate and obvious circumstance--there has been so little necessity for sparing materials or men and so little penalty for waste--that we have developed a national impatience with the slow and tedious process of finding out.