The French priest, kneeling over the dying Indian child in the forest hut and stealthily touching its brow with water, had vision of another immortality than that, as we know; the empire which the French explorers and adventurers hoped to build with its capital on the Rock of Quebec, or on the Rock St. Louis of the Illinois, or at the mouth of the Mississippi did not grow in the fashion of their dream, as we of course realize. But we see, on the other hand, what promise of ages has been given to the faith and adventure which found incarnation in a frontier democracy whose energy and spirit made possible the great, lusty republic of to-day, that now begins to talk of a thousand centuries. Out in that far west, in a recent autumn, the men of the standing army were set to fighting forest-fires. This has seemed to me a happy omen of what the new conservatism of the world may ask of its soldiery--the conserving not of borders but of the resources of human life and of human life itself. And so have I added another class to the inhabitants of the valley, to the precursors, the producers, the poets, and the teachers of to-morrow-the conservers of the day after to-morrow. Our great philosopher William James gave expression in one of his last utterances to a hope that every man, rich or poor, may come to serve the State (as now every man in France does his military service) in some direct duty that asks the same obedience, the same sacrifice, the same forgetting of self that is asked of the soldier--that every man by the payment of the blood tax may be able to get and keep the spirit of neighborliness, to know how to sympathize more deeply with his fellow men, and to learn the joy of disinterested doing for the nation. [Footnote: "Memories and Studies: The Moral Equivalent of War," pp. 267-296.] But in this demand and appeal of the new theory of our common responsibility, of a dynamic conservationism, is the germ of a larger patriotism than any that history has as yet defined--a patriotism that asks the lifetime service of an individualism with an all-time horizon. CHAPTER XIX THE HEART OF AMERICA