Edwin Markham

Ah, great it is to believe the dream as we stand in youth by the starry stream; but a greater thing is to fight life through and say at the end, the dream is true!

In my boyhood, cattle-raising ran almost neck and neck with grain-raising. In my secluded little valley in the Suisun Hills, the rodeo was the most exhilarating spectacle in the round year.

Is it not a grotesque civilization which sends missionaries across the sea to save the souls of the heathen, and yet permits conditions at home that debauch the children at our very doors?

Greed and Gain, grim guardians of the great god Mammon, continually cry in the ears of the poor, 'Give us your little ones!' And forever do the poor push out their little ones at the imperious ukase, feeding the children to a blind Hunger that is never filled.

Spain held the doctrine (and was right in holding it) that every human enterprise should stand on two pillars - the temporal and the spiritual. To depend upon one of these pillars alone is to call down final failure upon any undertaking.

Use and beauty - these should be the ends of all human effort. But the competitive struggle swings us away from this high ground and plunges us into a quagmire fight for cheap goods and cheap labor.

Few cities have been more definitely impressed upon the imagination of the world than San Francisco, this gray-hilled city on the peninsula by the hospitable bay, where Saint Francis protects the ships as he protected the birds of Assisi.

Every man on the planet should do some physical work: he should help in the bread-labor of mankind. He should also do some of the intellectual work: he should help in the thought-labor of mankind. In a word, every thinker should work, and every worker should think.