common ground, never upon anybody's shoulders or neck, even though he be
weak or willing."

So in this strenuous and complex age, this age of "fierce democracy," what
have we to do, and with what manner of men shall we work? Young men of the
Twentieth Century, will your times find place for you? There is plenty to
do in every direction. That is plain enough. All the pages in this little
book, or in a very large one, would be filled by a mere enumeration. In
agriculture a whole great empire is yet to be won in the arid west, and the
west that is not arid and the east that was never so must be turned into
one vast market-garden. The Twentieth Century will treat a farm as a
friend, and it will yield rich returns for such friendship. In the
Twentieth Century vast regions will be fitted to civilization, not by
imperialism, which blasts, but by permeation, which reclaims.

The table-lands of Mexico, the plains of Manchuria, the Pampas of
Argentine, the moors of Northern Japan, all these regions in our own
temperate zone offer a welcome to the Anglo-Saxon farmer. The great tropics
are less hopeful, but they have never had a fair trial. The northern
nations have tried to exploit them in haste, and then to get away, never to
stay with them and work patiently to find out their best. Some day the
possibilities of the Torrid Zone may come to us as a great discovery.

There is need of men in forestry; for we must win back the trees we have
slain with such ruthless hand. The lumberman of the future will pick ripe
trees and save the rest as carefully as the herdsman selects his stock. In
engineering, in mining, in invention, there are endless possibilities.
Every man who masters what is already known in any one branch of applied
science, makes his own fortune. He who can add a little, save a little, do
something better or something cheaper, makes the fortune of a hundred