But alas for dreams! Any one can have them, but their realization is not always possible. The men in the Moose before me had fought vainly for these high ideals. At the end of my first year as director general I had not made one-tenth the progress I had hoped for. Figuring on the rate of progress I was making, I saw that a lifetime would be too short to accomplish anything. It was then that I would have despaired, if my Welsh blood had not been so stubborn. I summoned new courage and went on with the work. At the end of the fourth year I began to see results from my preliminary efforts. The convention of 1910 showed that the membership was eighty thousand, distributed among three hundred and thirty-three lodges. It was resolved to start the actual work of founding an educational institution. A tax of two cents a week was laid on members and later increased to four cents. Land was bought, a building erected and in 1913 the school was dedicated by Thomas R. Marshall, Vice-President of the United States. There were eleven children established in the home. Soon the lodge membership increased enormously. Having passed the hundred thousand mark it swept on to the half million goal. The “Mooseheart idea,” as we called it, had caught the imagination of the men. To-day the city of Mooseheart in the Fox River Valley, thirty-seven miles west of Chicago, is the home of more than a thousand fatherless children and one hundred and fifteen mothers who are there with their children, and several old men whose working days are over. The dream of the Moose has come true. In many ways the “City of Happy Childhood” is the most beautiful and the most wonderful city in the world. CHAPTER XLV. THE DREAM COMES TRUE What kind of school is Mooseheart? That can not be answered by making comparisons, for it is the only school of its kind. When the Moose committee met to decide what sort of school it would build, somebody suggested a normal school, a school to teach the young how to become teachers. I objected. “The world is well supplied with teachers,” I said. “Everybody wants to teach the other fellow what to do, but nobody cares to do it. Hand work will make a country rich and mouth work make it poor. All the speeches I have ever made have never added a dollar to the taxable value of America. But the tin and iron I wrought with my hands have helped make America the richest country in the world. The Indians were philosophers and orators; they could outtalk the white man every time. But the Indians had no houses and no clothes. They wouldn't work with their hands. A race that works with its hands has run the Indian off the earth. If we quit working now and try to live on philosophy, some race that still knows how to work will run us out of this country. The first law of civilized life is labor. Labor is the giver of all good things. Let us teach these orphans how to apply their labor, and after that all things will be added unto them.”