The pioneer idea--that was the heart of my scheme; the same old idea that had already lifted me from the slough of a salary and the suburbs and put me on my feet. Under its inspiration I had worked out my salvation in the city and now, although I had come here for peace and quiet, I felt as though I were being challenged by a cuff on the cheek. No live man could sit down and look on calmly at such conditions as faced me here. When these people within sight of a hungry market said that farming didn’t pay it proved that the fundamental trouble was not lack of opportunity but lack of appreciation of the opportunity. Just sit down and figure out what the forebears of these same people accomplished on these very acres. Out of this soil they wrenched the capital that went far towards establishing the richest nation on the face of the earth. But it may be argued that the Pilgrims had the advantage of virgin land. So they did, but virgin land in New England meant also virgin rocks--a million or more to the acre as testified to by the stone walls of to-day; it meant virgin trees with a wild tangle of roots and no dynamite to blow them out with; it meant virgin cold and the crudest kind of stoves to fight it off with; it meant crude virgin farm implements and virgin Indians to make the use of them interesting by zipping arrows from ambush at the sturdy plowman. And yet in spite of these handicaps and a hundred others, those same pioneers fought it out with such fine spirit that there are to-day men who sigh because they were not living then instead of now. They won a comfortable living and so did their sons and grandsons after them, even though they were forced to sacrifice half their time and money and life in battle to establish this nation which now we enjoy already established. And they did this because of the pioneer spirit back of them--a spirit which a nation allows to die at its peril. With all I saw before me I didn’t believe that spirit was yet dead. As Ruth said, there wasn’t a youngster in this very village, who though he wasn’t worth his salt here, wouldn’t buck up if placed on a Western homestead a hundred miles or more from civilization. The spirit of his ancestors would then rouse him. They were proving it by taking up farms in Canada. In a less marked degree it was this same spirit which without their knowledge prompted them to do better in the cities at the beginning than at home. The thing then, to my mind, which was needed was to make these same young men realize that it was really just as much of a brave adventure to make a few acres pay in the East as in the West. That was what I had got hold of when standing helpless without the capital to go West. I assumed that I had already traveled a thousand miles to get where I already was and from that point didn’t go ten miles from home.