An idealism persistently struggling to implant itself in the young soil always has been manifest in the West, and the record of it is very marked in the Mississippi Valley States. Emerson had a fine appreciation of this. He left Concord frequently to brave the winter storms in what was then pretty rough country, to deliver his message and to observe the people. His philosophy seems to have been equal to his hardships. “My chief adventure,” he wrote in his journal of one such pilgrimage, “was the necessity of riding in a buggy forty-eight miles to Grand Rapids; then after lecture twenty more in return, and the next morning back to Kalamazoo in time for the train hither at twelve.” Nor did small audiences disturb him. “Here is America in the making, America in the raw. But it does not want much to go to lectures, and ’tis a pity to drive it.” There is, really, something about corn--tall corn, that whispers on summer nights in what George Ade calls the black dirt country. There is something finely spiritual about corn that grows like a forest in Kansas and Nebraska. And Democracy is like unto it--the plowing, and the sowing, and the tending to keep the weeds out. We can’t scratch a single acre and say all the soil’s bad;--it may be wonderfully rich in the next township! It is the way of nature to be perverse and to fashion the good and great out of the least promising clay. Country men and small-town men have preponderated in our national counsels and all things considered they haven’t done so badly. Greatness has a way of unfolding itself; it remains true that the fault is in ourselves, and not in our stars, that we are underlings. Out of one small town in Missouri came the two men who, just now, hold respectively the rank of general and admiral of our army and navy. And there is a trustworthy strength in elemental natures--in what Whitman called “powerful uneducated persons.” Ancestry and environment are not negligible factors, yet if Lincoln had been born in New York and Roosevelt in a Kentucky log cabin, both would have reached the White House. In the common phrase, you can’t keep a good man down. The distinguishing achievement of Drinkwater’s _Lincoln_ is not merely his superb realization of a great character, but the sense so happily communicated, of a wisdom deep-planted in the general heart of man. It isn’t all just luck, the workings of our democracy. If there’s any manifestation on earth of a divine ordering of things, it is here in America. Considering that most of the hundred million trudge along away back in the line where the music of the band reaches them only faintly, the army keeps step pretty well. IV