We read to-day of forgotten Phenicia and of ancient Britain. They were unlike, because they were far apart. The ancient captains who directed the ships that brought them approximately together were great men in their day, fateful men. The captains of transportation that made all America one land are still within our reach, great men, fateful men; and they hold a romantic interest under their grim tale of material things. You and I live where they said we must live. It was they who marked out the very spot where the fire was to rise upon your hearth-stone. You have married a certain Phenician because they said that this must be your fate. Your children were born because some captain said they should be. You are here not of your own volition. The day of volitions, let us remember, is gone. The West was sown by a race of giants, and reaped by a race far different and in a day dissimilar. Though the day of rifle and ax, of linsey-woolsey and hand-ground meal, went before the time of trolley-cars and self-binders, of purple and fine linen, it must be observed that in the one day or the other the same causes were at work, and back of all these causes were the original law and the original mandate. The force of this primeval impulse was behind all those early actors, and Roundhead Cavalier, praying man and fighting man, who had this continent for a stage. It was behind the men that followed inland from the sea the first prophets of adventure. It is behind us to-day. The Iliad of the West is only the story of a mighty pilgrimage. When the Spaniard held the mouth of the Great River, the Frenchman the upper sources, the American only the thin line of coast whose West was the Alleghanies, how then did the west-bound adventurers travel, these folk who established half a dozen homes for every generation? The answer would seem easy. They traveled as did the Cimri, the Goths—in the easiest way they could. It was a day of raft and boat, of saddle-horse and pack-horse, of ax and rifle, and little other luggage. Mankind followed the pathways of the waters.