And this is in America, in the zenith of the Age of Transportation! I fancy my man of pack-horse and cordelle living upon rice! I fancy Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett or Kit Carson using such diet as backing for his deeds! Meat and corn are the diet that built America. Good leaders of America, insist not over-much on this rice fare, as you do at present in these bubble days. Let weediness and immaturity, imported overmuch, be overrun and oppressed by organized rapacity, and then, one day, good leaders, you shall see the American man even yet fall to his well-learned task of leading himself.
This is in America, and in the Age of Transportation! I read of these startling changes and can scarcely believe that they have happened within a lifetime, a part of which was passed in a West where wealth and poverty, arrogance and self-denial, were alike unknown; where, if one hungered, he was free to enter the door of any little cabin he found here or there in the mountains, and to eat freely of whatever food he found, though the owner of the abode himself might be absent and might forever remain unknown; where the thought of price did not enter into the mind of either the uninvited visitor or his unknown host; where herds, wild or tame, covered a country vast, inviting and hospitable; where each man was his own leader; and where the thought of any difficulty in the simple problem of making a living never entered into the heart of man!
Those were days perhaps of not so great and apparent a national prosperity, but there comes a catch in the throat at comparing those days with these. The horror of it, the shameless waste, the destruction, the change, the ruin of it all--these can leave us little comfort as we gaze on the glittering picture of to-day. As a nation we are building for ourselves higher and higher a false castle of prosperity, blowing for ourselves wider and wider a bubble fragile at heart as any that ever met collapse in another day. "Give me back my legions!" cried the Roman general. God grant there may never bitterly rise to the lips of an American leader the unavailing cry, "Give me back my Americans!" God grant there come not too late the cry, "Give us back our America!"