Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 58, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 March 1920 — America’s Assets: People, Institutions, as Well as Physical Resources. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

America’s Assets: People, Institutions, as Well as Physical Resources.

By SECRETARY FRANKLIN K. LANE

in New York Times.

The basis for confidence in the future of America, lies in its past and its present; in its past, because we can see what has been done; in its present, because we know what we have that can be the basis of future development. Our assets ate our people, our institutions, our physical resources. That is to say, we have greater resources than the mere continent itself. The breed of men that, we have, their attitude toward life and each other is more important even than the number of our acres and the greatness of our

mineral resources and of our industries. We are in every way a young people, and we look at things with youthful daring and with youthful selfishness, too. No one has said that we are lacking in self-appreciation. We are emotional, sentimental, romantic, idealistic, and these things go for the making of standards which affect us in everything we do. Our sense of humor and our common sense save us from extremes and keep these up-in-the-air tendencies within the limitations of practicability. With this kind of a nature, a daring, aggressive, mastering nature, tempered by standards of fair play, plus a good conceit of ourselves and. analmost inordinate ambition to excel, individually and collectively, there is not much danger of our becoming stagnant or settling down complacently or cynically into a flat-footed life. We shall not do things in the twentieth century in the same way we did them in the nineteenth, but we shall have the same purpose which is to give to every man his chance. We will not permit ourselves as a people to be rounded up into a mass and rolled into a jelly cake, so to say but as individuals we shall feel a responsibility to meet the challenges which physical and social conditions give.——— — J