Developed country

“ Turn your faces to the morning, for the sun is lightening the hilltops; there is coming to our country a great growth, an extraordinary development, and you are to be full participants in it all. While other nations of the world have reached a climax in their home development, and are struggling to parcel out remote regions of the earth that their commerce may be extended, we have here prodigious resources that are yet to be touched by the finger of development, and we have the power, if we will, to put our flag again on the sea and to share in the world's commerce. ”

“ What we see before us, be it good or evil in appearance, is the natural consequence of a development such as this country was bound to have, with a field of labor, resources and opportunities so great, with a population so ingenious, restless and energetic, with rewards of enterprise so certain, rapid and abundant. ”

“ A little less than three centuries of colonial and national life have brought the people inhabiting the United States, by a process of evolution, natural and, with the existing forces inevitable, to a point of distinct and radical change in their economic relations to the rest of mankind.
During the period now past, the energy of our people, directed by the formative power created in our early population by heredity, by environment, by the struggle for existence, by individual independence, and by free institutions, has been devoted to the internal development of our own country. ”

“ In opening the vast, illimitable resources of the great West, sturdy pioneers were as essential as the brain and muscle that propel the industries of the nation. Every new country must, of necessity, gather the vicious elements eliminated by the stern application of law, from the older communities. ”

“ But perhaps Great Britain and Europe will furnish the earlier links of a chain whose later links were firmly welded in America.
The history of our country since the first settlements less than three hundred years ago is by far the best epitome of the world's progress in its later phases that the life of any nation presents. On reaching the new world the settlers began a hand-to-hand, tooth-and-nail conflict with hard conditions of climate, soil, and savage. The simple basis of physical existence had to be fought for on the hardest terms. ”

“ We require (or, at least, our people believe, rightly or wrongly, that we require) wider territorial scope for our growth than we possess in our own country and in our colonies. We require, too, an assurance of greater security as to the conditions of our national existence and our economic development. ”

“ It has not yet reached the stability that comes to some nations in history, and which is marked by a fixed pattern of population growth, land use, day-to-day habits, and philosophic beliefs. It is, rather, a country in which every generation can look back to a strangely different era that existed before it came of age. ”

“ A country of such vast extent, with such varieties of soil and climate, with so much public spirit and private enterprise, with a population increasing so much beyond former example, with capacities of improvement not only unapplied or unexhausted, but even, in a great measure, as yet unexplored,—so free in its institutions, so mild in its laws, so secure in the title it confers on every man to his own acquisitions,—needs nothing but time and peace to carry it forward to almost any point of advancement. ”

“ If the resources of the Government will permit the work to progress as it has during the present year, through communication may be opened within two years, when this portion of the country, which contains so many undeveloped elements of wealth, and a population as large in proportion to its extent as any other part of the Republic, will commence a development, which, with peace, will exceed the brightest anticipations of the friends of the enterprise. ”

“ At the end of the nineteenth century the work of the colonizing powers was fairly at an end. Nearly all the available territory of the earth had been entered upon and occupied. But the work, while in this sense completed, was in a fuller sense only begun. It was left for the twentieth century for those great tracts of the earth to be brought properly under the dominion of civilization, their abundant resources developed, peace and prosperity brought to their fertile soils, and their long turbulent population taught the arts of peaceful progress and civilized industry. ”

“ It is recognized by all the countries of America that only by increasing their population through immigration can their territories be developed and made to yield the riches which a beneficent creator meant they should. ”

“ No one, beholding this enormous country, stretching from ocean to ocean, watered with ten thousand glorious rivers, combining every variety of climate and soil, therefore, every variety of produce and population; possessing within itself every resource that other nations are forced either to buy abroad, or to create substitutes for at home ”

“ A sufficient number of the salient features of American civilization have been brought under review to show that the new continent has not borne new social fruits. Under extremely favorable physical conditions—a country of vast resources, a wide range of climates, and a soil of great fertility—we planted old social forces, and old social evils are in process of rapid development. ”

“ And the development decisions of these countries, because of their great economic and political power, will have a profound effect upon the ability of all peoples to sustain human progress for generations to come. ”

“ And through the 10th expedient, an extended population would enjoy the advantages of instruction and example, and our ascendency and commerce be increased by a rapid process, which would predispose the natives to throw open the avenues of their country to our enterprize and research. ”

“ To develop the immense resources and wealth with which nature has so wonderfully endowed these countries; to render their territory accessible to labor and civilization by opening up means of communication, granting all facilities and giving security for the life, health, and welfare of their inhabitants; to obtain the population which their immense territories require: to educate and instruct the people, making them understand their liberty, their duties, and their rights; to develop their faculties and energies, their labor forces, their industrial and commercial capacity and power ”

“ We have, as I have intimated, passed through the pioneer stage of national development; we have tilled our fields, opened our mines, built our railroads, established our large cities—in short, have laid the foundations of a new and masterful civilization; it now remains for us to show whether we are capable of treating with originality the old problems which confront complex societies, and of solving them for the welfare of the public and the consequent elevation of individual character. ”

“ America has passed the era in which the interior development of the nation utilized all the energies of its ambitious population. Already it has stepped into the field of foreign commerce in which it must now continue. Time was when the nation’s interests lay entirely at home, but that time is no longer. ”

“ We will not need to send the call to other countries for men, and we can distribute our industries in parts of the country where labor is less abundant and where homes will take the place of tenements. ”

“ In time they mingle with the new community in which they find themselves, and seek means of living. Some find employment in the cities, others go to the frontiers, to cultivate lands reclaimed from the forest; and a greater or less number of the residue, becoming in time naturalized citizens, enter into the merchant service under the flag of their adopted country. ”

“ Effort has been made to present such important phases of national growth as the difficulties and dangers of exploration, and how they were overcome by earnestness and perseverance; the risks and hardships of settlement, and how they were met and conquered; the independence and patriotism of the colonists, and how they triumphed; the effect of environment upon character; the development of the people in politics and government and in social life; and the progress of invention and its effect upon national development. ”

“ Our great country lying in one continuous area, undivided by physical barriers and capable of furnishing every variety of raw material; in the possession of a progressive race with like degree of enterprise and honesty in all sections and employing the same trade usages and laws, possesses a capacity which a like area divided into many small states, although in the possession of an equal population of different races, could not have. ”

“ The resources of that country are still, to a very large extent, not only undeveloped, but even unexplored. They still offer, and for a long period of time will offer, ample and fruitful employment for the national energies. ”

“ Every civilized nation has adopted it as the best means of interior development, and as almost the only forerunner of commerce and communication with the outer world. It has thus become an indispensable necessity of every day life, whether by land or by sea, to the producer, the consumer, the merchant, the manufacturer, the artisan, the pleasure-seeker, the statesman, and the state itself, to public liberty, and to the peace of the world. ”

“ In my own country the progress of development has reached a point of transition. In the fifty years, from 1850 to 1900, we received on our shores nearly twenty million immigrants from the Old World. We borrowed from the Old World thousands of millions of dollars; and with the strong arm of the immigrants and with the capital from the Old World, we have threaded the country with railroads, we have constructed great public works, we have created the phenomenal prosperity that you all know ”

“ All the nations which we are accustomed to call civilized, increase gradually in production and in population: and there is no reason to doubt, that not only these nations will for some time continue so to increase, but that most of the other nations of the world, including some not yet founded, will successively enter upon the same career. ”

“ On the other hand, the vast international division of labor and specialization of production, geographically based and entailed by advancing economic development, besides the differences of traditions and ideals reaching far back into an historic past and rooted in the land, will serve to maintain many subtle inner differences between even the most progressive nations. ”

“ Now, in the first place, a country where the population is not crowded, where the resources of the soil are more than sufficient for the inhabitants,—a country of recent origin, not burdened with the worn-out institutions and clumsy lumber of past ages,—ought not to be satisfied to do only as well as countries which have to struggle against all these evils. ”

“ In the progress of human culture institutions are developed; new rights with their correlative duties arise from the new relations into which men are placed. For the maintenance of these rights and the enforcement of these duties, governments change in all their substantial characteristics, and the great laws of evolution in the processes of differentiation and integration are followed, as tribes integrate into nations and the functions of government are differentiated; communal industries change to individual and corporate industries ”

“ Development Although the beginnings of civilization of each country vary in time, the fundamental factors which gave impetus to each country to awaken and embark on the road to progress to reach their present level of development, are those qualities which are enshrined in the nature of man, namely desire and fortitude. ”

“ Another condition which leads to abnormally rapid increase is found when a civilised nation conquers and administers a backward country, introducing better methods of agriculture, and especially irrigation and the reclamation of waste lands. The alien Government also gives greater security, without raising the standard of living among the natives, since the dominant race usually monopolises the lucrative careers. ”

“ The rapid settlement of the country, the improvement in civilization, which has come through the multiplication of large villages and of cities, the general facilities for obtaining education, such as exist in no other country, have{248} made ours the land above all others in which generations may rise rapidly from the social position of their ancestors. ”

“ Two thousand miles westward from the rock where their fathers landed, may now be found the sons of the Pilgrims, cultivating smiling fields, rearing towns and villages, and cherishing, we trust, the patrimonial blessings of wise institutions, of liberty, and religion. The world has seen nothing like this. Regions large enough to be empires, and which, half a century ago, were known only as remote and unexplored wildernesses, are now teeming with population, and prosperous in all the great concerns of life; in good governments, the means of subsistence, and social happiness. ”

“ PROFESSOR MUENSTERBERG once defined the three stages of a nation's development as provincial, cosmopolitan, and national, and placed America—if we remember rightly—in a phase of transition between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. ”

“ Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. ”

“ Let us consider the cases of two countries somewhat differently situated, such as an old country like England and a newer country such as was the United States in the nineteenth century. Now the relative advantages of various industries in two such countries are very unlike. The newer country excels in its broad area, its abundant rich lands, its bountiful natural resources of forests and mines. These are the superior opportunities which give the economic motives for settlement and for continued immigration from the other lands. ”

“ If the same was the case in other countries, it would afford another instance of the fundamental community of development which seems to govern at least our part of the civilised world, regardless of national differences or boundaries. ”