"Triumphant America," says George Horace Lorimer, "certainly does not mean each and every one of our seventy-eight millions. For instance, it does not include the admitted idiots and lunatics, the registered paupers and parasites, the caged criminals, the six million illiterates. In a sense, it includes the twenty-five to thirty million children, for they exert a tremendous influence upon the grown people. But in no sense does it include the whittlers on dry-goods boxes, the bar-room loafers, the fellows that listen all day long for the whistle to blow, those who are the first to be mentioned whenever there is talk of cutting down the force. It does not include those of our statesmen who spend their time in promoting corrupt jobs, or in hunting places for lazy heelers. It does not include the doctors who reach their high-water mark for professional knowledge on the day they graduate, or the lawyers who lie and cheat and procure injustice for the sake of fees. "Most of these--even the idiots and criminals--do a little something towards progress. This world is so happily ordered that it is impossible for one man to do much harm or to avoid doing some good; and one of the greatest forces for good is the power of a bad example. Still it is not our bad examples that make us get on and earn us these smothers of flowery compliment. "Some of us are tall and others short, some straight and others crooked, some strong, others feeble; some of us run, others walk, others snail it. But all, all have their feet upon the same level of the common earth. And America's worst enemy is he--or she--who by word or look encourages another to think otherwise. Head as high as you please; but feet always upon the common ground, never upon anybody's shoulders or neck, even though he be weak or willing." So in this strenuous and complex age, this age of "fierce democracy," what have we to do, and with what manner of men shall we work? Young men of the Twentieth Century, will your times find place for you? There is plenty to do in every direction. That is plain enough. All the pages in this little book, or in a very large one, would be filled by a mere enumeration. In agriculture a whole great empire is yet to be won in the arid west, and the west that is not arid and the east that was never so must be turned into one vast market-garden. The Twentieth Century will treat a farm as a friend, and it will yield rich returns for such friendship. In the Twentieth Century vast regions will be fitted to civilization, not by imperialism, which blasts, but by permeation, which reclaims.