egree master the essential tools
of their trade. And the followers of the sister-studies must likewise
familiarize themselves and their students with the work and the methods
of the historians, and cooperate in the difficult task.

It is necessary that the American historian shall aim at this equipment,
not so much that he may possess the key to history or satisfy himself in
regard to its ultimate laws. At present a different duty is before him.
He must see in American society with its vast spaces, its sections equal
to European nations, its geographic influences, its brief period of
development, its variety of nationalities and races, its extraordinary
industrial growth under the conditions of freedom, its institutions,
culture, ideals, social psychology, and even its religions forming and
changing almost under his eyes, one of the richest fields ever offered
for the preliminary recognition and study of the forces that operate and
interplay in the making of society.

FOOTNOTES:

[311:1] Annual address as the president of the American Historical
Association, delivered at Indianapolis, December 28, 1910. Reprinted by
permission from _The American Historical Review_, January, 1911.

[313:1] Van Hise, "Conservation of Natural Resources," pp. 23, 24.

[316:1] _Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1908, vii, p. 745.

[317:1] [Although the words of these early land debates are quoted above
in Chapter VI, they are repeated because of the light they cast upon the
present problem.]

[321:1] [I have outlined this subject in various essays, including the
article on "Sectionalism" in McLaughlin and Hart, "Cyclopedia of
Government."]

[322:1] [It is not impossible that they may ultimately replace the State
as the significant administrative and legislative units. There are
strong evidences of this tendency, such as the organization of the
Federal Reserve districts, and proposals for railroad administration by
regions.]

[329:1] [See R. G. Wellington, "Public Lands, 1820-1840"; G. M.
Stephenson, "Public Lands, 1841-1862"; J. Ise, "Forest Policy."]

[333:1] Professor J. B. Clark, in Commons, ed., "Documentary History of
American Industrial Society," I. 43-44.

XIII

MIDDLE WESTERN PIONEER DEMOCRACY[335:1]

In time of war, when all that this nation has stood for, all the things
in which it passionately believes, are at stake, we have met to dedicate
this beautiful home for history.

There is a fitness in the occasion