The spiritual background of Great Britain is in the mountains of the North, among the Cumberland Lakes and on the wild border. Or it is in the obscure grandeur of the Sussex Downs, or on Dartmoor, or on the Welsh hills. Small though the mountains may be, they are continually in the minds of English people. The way of escape is clear. And many of the bright spirits of England and Scotland have derived their strength direct from the hills. Byron and Scott and Ruskin and Wordsworth drew their strength from the hills. Carlyle super-imposed Ecclefechan upon Chelsea. Even he who once said “London’s streets are paved with gold” was driven by the spirit from Battersea to Buckingham. I find a belief in the wilderness strong in Vachel Lindsay. He holds that the wild West has been and still must be the spiritual lodestone of American men. Untamed America has remade the race. Andrew Jackson was the voice of the West of his day, Abraham Lincoln of his. And though New England has held the hegemony of letters he divines that the wilderness--the mountains--will be the source of the inspiration of the coming time. Early America derived most of her inspiration from across the Atlantic. Her heart was outside her body. But mature America, conscious of herself as a whole, will know more surely that she has a heart and a soul and a way to God in herself. * * * * * I LOOK to a time when national wildernesses will have an acknowledged significance in our public life, when men and women of all classes of life will naturally retire to them for recreation--as naturally as people used to go to church on Sundays and for a similar reason. All praise to the foresight and energy of Franklin Lane, the late American Minister of the Interior, that enterprising Canadian who did so much to bring the people’s heritage before their eyes! The “See America First” is a poor slogan. It is like “Do Everything Once” and “Buy him a Fountain Pen.” The question should be raised to a higher level. People need not visit Glacier as they visit Switzerland, in a spirit of curiosity. Even in this sophisticated age they can come as pilgrims of Nature as easily as they can come as tourists. “Triangular trips,” “Four-day tours,” are not in the right spirit. Time is immaterial. But there is virtue in shoe-leather, virtue in the saddle of the horse. Not much virtue in guides, in hotels. You come to these places to be alone with Nature or you do not arrive. * * * * *