Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 65.djvu/38

34 own needs, is sufficient unto himself and has the large charity which sound nerves ensure. The way of Colorado is the warrior's way—'the Bushido,' as they said in old Japan, the way of the rough rider, the way of the quick arm and the tender heart, the way of him who cares only for what men are and not at all for what men say.

Weak men who have been kept good in the east through the upbraiding of maiden aunts often fail in Colorado. Good men grow better there, for they must fight for and justify their virtue. After all that is the only kind of righteousness that counts, vast, burly, aggressive righteousness to which sin is folly; selfishness and vice are things to be avoided as contemptible, as well as shunned as wicked. The scholar in Colorado shares the largeness of his field. The dim-eyed monk, the stoop-shouldered grammarian, these are not his ideals. The scholar is the leader of enterprise, the builder of states.

The air of Colorado is charged with oxygen. It is good atmosphere in which to bring up a boy. In Colorado he becomes an out-of-door man. He expands his chest, he can do things, he becomes fearless because he is adequate. Here in the west we send our graduate students to the east, because we know that it will be well for them to know what homes their fathers came from. They need New England acquaintanceship, English culture and German methods of thought. Far more does the eastern graduate need what the west can give. The life in the foothills makes a man, if need be, of the Harvard doctor of philosophy. The world beyond the Missouri spreads his horizon and the swift oxygen in the Colorado sunshine swells the size of his heart. Some day men will go to Colorado and California for inspiration of force as poets go to Greece for the inspiration of beauty.

The new America is born where things are broad and free, and her finest inspiration where things are grand and strengthening. When the days of the emigrant are over and our people reach their equilibrium, the home of the highest education must be in the west. Whoever has known Colorado, whoever knows the great west will, all his life long, always hear it calling, and wherever he goes he will carry with him a fuller heart and a freer hand for his life in the plains or the foothills, for his life in the regions where the very heavens are cosmopolitan.

I might say a word on the field of local scientific study which Colorado offers. The problems of the local geology have been discussed by my colleague President Van Hise. A region as vast as the Mississippi valley has been crumpled and folded in the stress of the earth to make Colorado. Noble scenery is the raw material of geology. A mighty cliff is an uncovered record of primeval history. In all this history, from the earliest to the latest, Colorado has something to say. The graves of our earliest ancestors, it may be, lie in the hills of