We cannot understand this mood, this creed, this morality unless we realize that the business men of the generation after the Civil War were, essentially, still pioneers and that all their habits of thought were the fruits of the exigencies of pioneering. The whole country was, in fact, engaged in a vast crusade that required an absolute homogeneity of feeling: almost every American family had some sort of stake in the West and acquiesced naturally, therefore, in that worship of success, that instinctive belief that there was something sacred in the pursuit of wealth without which the pioneers themselves could hardly have survived. Without the chance of an indeterminate financial reward, they would never have left their homes in the East or in Europe, without it they could never, under the immensely difficult conditions they encountered, have transformed, as they so often did, the spirit of adventure into the spirit of perseverance. What kept them up if it was not the hope, hardly of a competence, but of great wealth? Faith in the possibility of a lucky strike, the fact that immeasurable riches lay before some of them at least, that the mountains _were_ full of gold and the lands of oil, that great cities were certainly destined to rise up some day in this wilderness, that these fertile territories, these great rivers, these rich forests lay there brimming over with fortune for a race to come--that vision was ever in their minds. And since through private enterprise alone could that consummation ever come--for the group-spirit of the colonist had not been bred in the American nature--private enterprise became for the pioneer a sort of obligation to the society of the future; some instinct told him, to the steady welfare of his self-respect, that in serving himself well he was also serving America. To the pioneer, in short, private and public interests were identical and the worship of success was actually a social cult.