Page:Frank David Ely -Why defend the nation? Sound Americanism... (1924).pdf/22

18 development of needed powers, this country has always arisen to meet every emergency with which it has been confronted. Many of these efforts have proved costly, and have strained the Nation well nigh to the breaking point, but, like the race from which we sprung, we have somehow “muddled through.” But even though successful in the past, those very successes, in the light of deeper knowledge and changed conditions, warn us against any implicit faith in dependence upon emergency action. A city does not wait until the flames rage and the mob loots to organize fire and police protection, nor await the ravages of disease and pestilence to insure good water supply and establish proper health measures.

Our ability to meet and solve the great questions which have been vital to our development as a great free nation has rested mainly on the sound basic training of the entire body politic. The “little red schoolhouse” was the forum which primarily fitted for their life's work many of the greatest leaders known to our history. The nineteenth century was one devoted in the main to the settlement and upbuilding of our undeveloped territory and lands. Living thus close to the soil as a great agricultural people, simplicity was the rule in life, and the absorbing questions thought out and discussed were in the main those fundamental to the development of the Nation.

Now the free lands of our great West are no more. The industrial strides of the Nation have placed our industrial products ahead of the agricultural in value, and the environment of great masses of our people has changed from the freedom of the farm to the congestion of the cities. Life has grown harder and more complex. The fundamental has become clouded and overshadowed by the immediate questions of how to live and how to gain a competence, our avenues for which are concededly unequaled elsewhere.

Under these changed conditions the foundation for assured safe action, which is well-informed, sound judgement in all men, has become weakened. The motives for the establishment of the Nation, and which have set it free and far above all others on this globe, are in danger of becoming hopelessly obscured. As against party government and majority rule we