I use these figures, not because I find them particularly interesting or philosophically significant, but because the mere size of them illustrates, and perhaps explains, a point that is noteworthy in the development of will-power in the American people: and that is its characteristic spirit of _magnificence_. I take this word for want of a better, and employ it, according to its derivation, to signify the desire to do things on a large scale. This is a spirit which is growing everywhere in the modern civilized world. Everywhere, if I mistake not, quantity is taking precedence of quality in the popular thought. Everywhere men are carried away by the attraction of huge enterprises, immense combinations, enormous results. One reason is that Nature herself seems to have put a premium upon the mere mass of things. In the industrial world it appears as if Napoleon were right in his observation that "God is on the side of the big battalions." Another reason is the strange, almost hypnotic, effect that number has upon the human mind. But while the spirit of "the large scale" is gaining all over the world, among the Americans it seems to be innate and most characteristic. Perhaps the very size of their country may have had something to do with this. The habit of dealing with land in terms of the square mile and the quarter-section, instead of in the terms of the _are_ and the _hectare_; the subconscious effect of owning the longest river and the largest lakes in the world may have developed a half-humorous, half-serious sense of necessity for doing things magnificently in order to keep in proportion with the natural surroundings. A well-known American wit, who had a slight impediment in his speech, moved his residence from Baltimore to New York. "Do you make as many jokes here," asked a friend, "as you used to make in Baltimore?" "M-m-more!" he answered; "b-b-bigger town!" To produce more corn and cotton than all the rest of the world together, to have a wheat crop which is more than double that of any other country; to mine a million tons of coal a year in excess of any rival; to double Germany's output of steel and iron and to treble Great Britain's output,--these are things which give the American spirit the sense of living up to its opportunities.