[322:1] [It is not impossible that they may ultimately replace the State as the significant administrative and legislative units. There are strong evidences of this tendency, such as the organization of the Federal Reserve districts, and proposals for railroad administration by regions.] [329:1] [See R. G. Wellington, "Public Lands, 1820-1840"; G. M. Stephenson, "Public Lands, 1841-1862"; J. Ise, "Forest Policy."] [333:1] Professor J. B. Clark, in Commons, ed., "Documentary History of American Industrial Society," I. 43-44. XIII MIDDLE WESTERN PIONEER DEMOCRACY[335:1] In time of war, when all that this nation has stood for, all the things in which it passionately believes, are at stake, we have met to dedicate this beautiful home for history. There is a fitness in the occasion. It is for historic ideals that we are fighting. If this nation is one for which we should pour out our savings, postpone our differences, go hungry, and even give up life itself, it is not because it is a rich, extensive, well-fed and populous nation; it is because from its early days America has pressed onward toward a goal of its own; that it has followed an ideal, the ideal of a democracy developing under conditions unlike those of any other age or country. We are fighting not for an Old World ideal, not for an abstraction, not for a philosophical revolution. Broad and generous as are our sympathies, widely scattered in origin as are our people, keenly as we feel the call of kinship, the thrill of sympathy with the stricken nations across the Atlantic, we are fighting for the historic ideals of the United States, for the continued existence of the type of society in which we believe, because we have proved it good, for the things which drew European exiles to our shores, and which inspired the hopes of the pioneers. We are at war that the history of the United States, rich with the record of high human purposes, and of faith in the destiny of the common man under freedom, filled with the promises of a better world, may not become the lost and tragic story of a futile dream.