“Oh!” he exclaimed. “You caught the feeling of my children, who cannot see beyond feeling. My purpose is only to destroy the present to make way for the old life.” “But the present is always a stage,” I said, “on the highroad that leads to the future. And my people reincarnated, and yours reincarnated--or so many of them as are ready to go on--shall go on together and in this land. They will form, with those who join them from beyond the seas, a new race. And thanks to the labors of a few among the white men who have studied and appreciated the traditions and civilization of the red man and sought to save them from utter obliteration, the old forest lore will become a part of the inheritance of that new race which is to grow out of the union of yours and mine and the others. And for a part of every year, when the life of the new race is adjusted, the boys and girls and men and women will go out to the wilds and enjoy the freedom of the tent and the society round the campfire, and we shall be brothers--real blood-brothers--at last, and all the old wounds shall be healed. Can you not recognize me as your brother?” He nodded his head. “And will you not spread among your people the glad tidings of the new race, in all of whose possessions they will share?” We stood long looking in each other’s eyes, and I told him more than I could record here if I held the use of your pencil for many hours. In the end he understood me. It is my belief that he will spread the story among his people, and that one danger will be lessened thereby, to some degree, for the children of the new race. LETTER XVII THE IDEAL OF SUCCESS _June 23, 1917._ PUT fear out of your hearts. The future will give you no greater lessons than you can master. It is not well to know the future in complete detail. Had the world known during the last ten years all it would be obliged to suffer in this war, would it have made the progress it has made in art, science and commerce? No. Every thought would have been haunted. You may say that the weaker races (and the stronger ones) would have made better preparation. But a part of this lesson has been not to delay inevitable preparation, and to know in future that a nation which idealizes war and is mostly army, has not cultivated that ideal and that army solely for its own amusement. If you want to understand national life and individual life, you must look for their dominating ideals. An ideal is a tendency. What is the dominating ideal of America? Summed in a word, it is success, is it not? Now America is in a great war, and you may be sure that she will leave nothing undone that can make for success in that war, as she has left nothing undone that could make for success in business.