Mexico and South America were new lands, wild lands, rich lands. They are not far inferior, if at all, to the United States in soil, climate, and natural resources. They presented the same kind of opportunity, necessity, and reward to their settlers and conquerors. Yet they have seen nothing like the same industrial advance. Why? There may be many reasons. But I am sure that the most important reasons lie in the soul of the people, and that one of them is the lack, in the republics of the South, of that strong and confident will-power which has made the Americans a nation of hard and quick workers. This fondness for the active life, this impulse to "do things," this sense of value in the thing done, does not seem to be an affair of recent growth in America. It is an ancestral quality. The men of the Revolution were almost all of them busy and laborious persons, whether they were rich or poor. Read the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and you will find that he was as proud of the fact that he was a good printer and that he invented a new kind of stove as of anything else in his career. One of his life mottoes under the head of industry is: "Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions." Washington, retiring from his second term in the presidency, did not seek a well-earned ease, but turned at once to the active improvement of his estate. He was not only the richest man, he was one of the best practical farmers in America. His diary shows how willingly and steadily he rode his daily rounds, cultivated his crops, sought to improve the methods of agriculture and the condition and efficiency of his work-people. And this primarily not because he wished to add to his wealth,--for he was a childless man and a person of modest habits,--but because he felt "_il faut cultiver son jardin_."