How much of this spirit lives in you?
I tell you, when I hear a girl or a boy say: “This place is good enough for me. I can get a good job round the corner! I know all the folks in town; and I don't see any reason for bothering about how they live in other places or what they do away from here”; when I hear that sort of talk from young people, my heart sinks a bit.
For such boys and girls there is no golden call of adventure, no lure of wonder by day and night, no desire to measure their strength against the world, no hope of something finer and more beautiful than what they have as yet known or seen.
I like the boy or girl who sighs after a quest more difficult than the trodden trail, who wants more of life than the assurance of a good job. I know very well that the home-keeping lad has a stout task to perform and a good life to live. But I know, too, that if the youth of a nation loses its love of adventure, if that wild and moving spirit passes from it, then the nation is close to losing its soul. It has about reached the limit of its power and growth.
So much in our daily existence works against this noble spirit, disapproves it, fears it. People are always ready to prove that there is neither sense nor profit in it. Why should you sail with Drake[61] and Frobisher,[62] or march with Fremont[63] or track the forest with Boone,[64] when it is so much easier and safer and pays better to stay at home? Why shouldn't you be content to do exactly like the people about you, and live the life that is already marked out for you to live?
That is what most of us will do. But that is no reason why the glorious spirit of adventure should be denied and reviled. It is the great spirit of creation in our race. If it stirs in you, listen to it, be glad of it.
A mere restless impulse to move about, the necessity to change your environment or else be bored, the dissatisfaction with your condition that leads to nothing but ill temper or melancholy, these are not part of the spirit of which I am speaking. You may develop the spirit of adventure without stirring from home, for it is not ruled by the body and its movements. Great and high adventure may be yours in the home where you now live, if you realize that home as a part of the great world, as a link of the vast chain of life. Two boys can sit side by side on the same hearth-stone, and in one the spirit of adventure is living and calling, in the other it is dead. To the first, life will be an opportunity and a beckoning. He will be ready to give himself for the better future; he will be ready to strike hands with the fine thought and generous endeavor of the whole world, bringing to his own community the fruit of great things, caring little for the ease and comfort of his body, but much for the possibilities of a finer, truer realization of man's eternal struggle toward a purer liberty and a nobler life. The spirit of adventure is a generous spirit, kindling to great appeals. Of the two boys, sitting there together, the second may perhaps go round the world, but to him there will be no song and no wonder. He will not find adventure, because he has it not. The old phrase, “adventures to the adventurous,” is a true saying. The selfish and the small of soul know no adventures.
As I think of America to-day, I say the spirit that found and built her must maintain her. There are great things to be done for America in the coming years, in your years. Her boundaries are fixed, but within those boundaries marvelous development is possible. Her government has found its form, but there is work for the true adventurer in seeing that the spirit of that government, in all its endless ramifications and expressions, fulfils the intention of human liberty and well-being that lie within that form. Her relations with the world outside of herself are forming anew, and here too there is labor of the noblest. The lad who cares only for his own small job and his own small comforts, who dreads the rough contacts of life and the dangers of pioneering will not help America much.
In the older days the Pilgrim Fathers cast aside every comfort of life to follow the call of liberty, coming to a wilderness so remote, that for us a voyage to some star would scarcely seem more distant or strange. None of us will be called upon to do so tremendous a thing as that act of theirs, so far as the conditions of existence go, since the telegraph and the aëroplane and turbine knit us close. But there are adventures quite as magnificent to be achieved.
The spirit of adventure loves the unknown. And in the unknown we shall find all the wonders that are waiting for us. Our whole life is lived on the very border of unknown things, but only the adventurous spirit reaches out to these and makes them known, and widens the horizons for humanity. The very essence of the spirit of adventure is in doing something no one has done before. Every high-road was once a trail, every trail had its trail-breaker, setting his foot where no man's foot had gone before through what new forests and over what far plains.