own interests thus perverted national policy; and we approve the verdict. But it is not so easy to condemn the policy itself or to indict the generation that adopted it. Looking at the matter from the standpoint of the nation, it was precisely the inefficiency and the corruption in government which augmented the theoretical distrust of government and made it unthinkable to the people of the seventies, that the Government should build and operate railways directly. The land-grant policy entailed corruption and waste, of course; but what mattered a few million acres of land! No one had heard of a conservation problem at the close of the Civil War. Resources were limitless; without enterprise, without labor and capital, without transportation they had no value, they were free goods. The great public task of the nineteenth century was to settle the continent and make these resources available for mankind. This task it performed with nineteenth-century methods. From our standpoint they may have been wasteful methods, but they did get results. In its historical setting, the viewpoint from which the task of settlement was approached was not so far wrong.

When we examine the counts against the railroads as private enterprises, we find that the poor construction, which from our point of vantage looks like dangerous, wasteful, hand-to-mouth policy, is only in part explained by the fact of reckless and dishonest finance. I am advised by an eminent and discriminating observer that the distinguished Italian engineer to whom Argentina entrusted the building of its railroad to Patagonia, produced a structure which in engineering excellence is the equal of any in the United States to-day. But the funds are exhausted and the Patagonia railroad is halted one hundred and fifty miles short of its goal; there are no earnings to maintain the investment.

The reaction of high interest rates on the practical sense of American capitalists and engineers has made operation at the earliest possible moment and with the smallest possible investment of capital the very essence of American railway building in new territory. Actual earnings are expected to furnish capital, or a basis for credit, with which to make good early engineering defects. All this, of course, is but another way of saying that the criterion of engineering efficiency is not "perfection," but "good enough." This distinction has placed a large measure of genuine efficiency to the credit of American engineers, and it explains why Americans have done many things that others were unwilling to undertake. It is a great thing to build a fine railroad in Patagonia, but I am sure we all rejoice that the first Pacific railroad did not have its terminus in the Nevada sagebrush. The standard of technical perfection set by the Italian engineer did not fit the facts. It is not the failure to attain his standard but the failure to measure up to a well-considered standard of "good enough" that stands as an indictment against American railway enterprise.

Viewed in historical perspective the business environment of the pioneer appears to have been dominated by two outstanding facts: one, seemingly inexhaustible resources; the other, a set of political and economic doctrines which told him that these resources must be developed by individual initiative and not by the State. The faster the resources were developed the more rapidly the nation became economically independent and economically great, and since they could not be developed by the State it is not strange that private initiative was stimulated by offering men great and immediate rewards. These rewards have encouraged individuals and associations of individuals to aspire to a quick achievement of great economic power, and their aspirations have been realized. Such achievements have been a dominating feature of our business life, and we have regarded them as an index of national greatness.

Abundance of resources, if it did not make this the best way, at least made it an obvious way, for the nineteenth century to solve its business problems. From our vantage point we can see that serious mistakes were made. When we set the foresight of our fathers against our own informed and chastened hindsight their methods appear clumsy and amateurish. But in the main they did solve their problems: they gave us a settled continent; they gave us transportation and diversified industry. We now have our garden and the tools with which to work it. If the pioneer allowed the children to pick flowers and in some cases to run away with the plants and the soil, he did not fail to develop the estate.

Our inheritance from the pioneer is not only material but psychological. The pioneer attitude of mind has made a real contribution to our business standards. The very magnitude of our enterprises, the fact that we have had to develop our methods as we went, our success in approaching problems that way, have given us a confidence in ourselves and a readiness to undertake big things without counting the cost. This readiness is a large, perhaps a dominant, factor in our contribution to world progress. It is not an accident that the greatest problems of mountain railway building have been met and solved by American engineers, or that they have carried a great railroad under two rivers to the heart of our greatest city. These in a private way, and the Panama Canal in a public way, are typical of American engineering enterprise.

As with engineering, so with general business. Our pioneer managers did not lack imagination; they were not afraid to undertake; they were not constrained by worry lest they make mistakes. They made many mistakes. Some were corrected, others ignored, but many more were concealed by an abundant success. The pioneer could afford to do the next thing and let the distant thing take care of itself, and in large measure he escaped the penalties which normally follow a failure to look ahead.

Substantial forces have tended to keep the pioneer spirit alive. If some resources have been depleted, other resources have been found to take their place. Scientific discovery, invention, and the development of technique have placed new forces at our command. Products have been multiplied, but the demand for products has multiplied faster. We have been able to continue offering men great and immediate rewards for the development of new enterprises. As labor was needed, our neighbors have continued to supply it. The result is that our business has continued to go ahead without being too much concerned about the direction in which it was going.

Business has eagerly appropriated the results of science without itself becoming scientific. The difficult way of science makes slow progress against the dazzling rewards of unbridled daring. So many strong but untrained men have been enriched by seizing upon the immediate and obvious circumstance—there has been so little necessity for sparing materials or men and so little penalty for waste—that we have developed a national impatience with the slow and tedious process of finding out.

Along with our technical and business enterprise, with the courage and imagination of which we are justly proud, a too easy success has given us a tendency to drop into a comfortable and optimistic frame of mind. Imagination, intuition, power to picture the future interplay of forces, courage and capacity for quick action—all these qualities are as essential to-day as they ever were to business success. The pioneer environment reacting on our native temperament has given us these qualities in full measure, but it has also given us a habit of doing things in a hit-or-miss fashion. Our very imagination and courage applied to wrong circumstances and in perverted form have often borne the fruit of national defects.

There is a strong inclination to assume that the old approach to problems will bring the same results that it did in the past, and to forget that we are living in a new world. The problems confronting the pioneer were not the problems we face to-day. It requires great ability to draft a