The Washington Historical Quarterly, Volume V, 1914Various
History
The Washington Historical Quarterly, Volume V, 1914
Various
Northwest, Pacific -- History -- Periodicals
The University therefore, has a double duty. On the one hand it must
aid in the improvement of the general economic and social environment.
It must help on in the work of scientific discovery and of making
such conditions of existence, economic, political and social, as will
produce more fertile and responsive soil for a higher and better life.
It must stimulate a wider demand on the part of the public for right
leadership. It must extend its operations more widely among the people
and sink deeper shafts through social strata to find new supplies of
intellectual gold in popular levels yet untouched. And on the other
hand, it must find and fit men and women for leadership. It must
both awaken new demands and it must satisfy those demands by trained
leaders with new motives, with new incentives to ambition, with higher
and broader conception of what constitute the prizes in life, of what
constitutes success. The University has to deal with both the soil and
sifted seed in the agriculture of the human spirit.
Its efficiency is not the efficiency which the business engineer is
fitted to appraise. If it is a training ship, it is a training ship
bound on a voyage of discovery, seeking new horizons. The economy
of the University's consumption can only be rightly measured by the
later times which shall possess those new realms of the spirit which
its voyage shall reveal. If the ships of Columbus had engaged in a
profitable coastwise traffic between Palos and Cadiz they might have
saved sail cloth, but their keels would never have grated on the shores
of a New World.
The appeal of the undiscovered is strong in America. For three
centuries the fundamental process in its history was the westward
movement, the discovery and occupation of the vast free spaces of the
continent. We are the first generation of Americans who can look back
upon that era as a historic movement now coming to its end. Other
generations have been so much a part of it that they could hardly
comprehend its significance. To them it seemed inevitable. The free
land and the natural resources seemed practically inexhaustible. Nor
were they aware of the fact that their most fundamental traits, their
institutions, even their ideals were shaped by this interaction between
the wilderness and themselves.
American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried
in the Susan Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth.
It came stark and strong and full of life out of the American forest,
and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier. Not the
constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open
to a fit people, made the democratic type of society in America for
three centuries while it occupied its great empire.
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