The French priest, kneeling over the dying Indian child in the forest hut
and stealthily touching its brow with water, had vision of another
immortality than that, as we know; the empire which the French explorers
and adventurers hoped to build with its capital on the Rock of Quebec, or
on the Rock St. Louis of the Illinois, or at the mouth of the Mississippi
did not grow in the fashion of their dream, as we of course realize. But
we see, on the other hand, what promise of ages has been given to the
faith and adventure which found incarnation in a frontier democracy whose
energy and spirit made possible the great, lusty republic of to-day, that
now begins to talk of a thousand centuries.
Out in that far west, in a recent autumn, the men of the standing army
were set to fighting forest-fires. This has seemed to me a happy omen of
what the new conservatism of the world may ask of its soldiery--the
conserving not of borders but of the resources of human life and of human
life itself. And so have I added another class to the inhabitants of the
valley, to the precursors, the producers, the poets, and the teachers of
to-morrow-the conservers of the day after to-morrow.
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