Show THE WESTERN AMERICAN Charles Dudley Warner Explains in Harpers magazine The American man the Drawer imagines im-agines only develops himself and spreads himself and grows for all he is worth in i the Great West He is more free and limber l there and unfolds those generous peculiarities am largenesses of humanity which never blossomed before The environment has much to do with it The great spaces over which he roams contribute to the enlargement of his I mental horizon There have been races before who roamed the illimitable desert but they traveled on foot or on camelback and were limited in their range There was nothing continental about them a there is about our railway desert travelers who swing along through thousands of miles of sand and I sagebrush with a growing contempt for I time and space But expansive and great as these people have become under the new conditions the Drawer has a fancy that the development develop-ment of ho race has only just begun and that the future will show us in perfection a kind of man new to the world Out somewhere on the Santa Fe route where the desert of one day was like the desert of the day before and the Pullman car rolls and swings over the wide waste beneath the blue sky day after day under its black flag of smoke in the early gray of morning when the men were waiting their turns at the ablution ablu-tion bowls a slip of a boy perhaps aged 7 stood balancing himself on his little legs clad in the knickerbockers biding his time with all the nonchalance of an old campaigner How did you sleep cap asked a wellmeaning elderly gentleman gen-tleman Well thank you was the dignified response as always do on a sleepingcar Always does Great horrors hor-rors Hardly out of his swaddling clothes and yet he always sleeps well in a sleeper Wa he born on the wheels Was he cradled in a Pullman He has always been in motion probably he was started at thirty miles an hour no doubt this marvelous boy of our new era He was not born in a house at rest but the locomotive snatched him along with a shriek and a roar before his eyes were fairly open and he was rocked in a section sec-tion and his first sensation of life was that of moving rapidly over vast arid spaces through cattle ranges and along canyons The effort of qiick and easy locomotion on character may have been noted before but it seems that here is the production of a now sort of man the direct di-rect product of our railway era I is not simply that this boy is mature but he must be a different and a nobler sort of boy than one born say of home or on a canal boat for whether he was born on tne rail or not he belongs t the railway system of civilization Be fore he gets into trousers he is old in experience ex-perience and he has discounted many of the novelties that usually break gradually I on the pilgrim in this world He belongs to the new expansive race that must live in motion whose proper home is the I Pullman which will probably be improved im-proved in time to a dustless sweetsmel I ling wellaired bedroom and whose domestic do-mestic life will be on the wing so to I speak The InterState Commerce bill will pass him along without friction from end to end of the Union and perhaps a uniform divorce law will enable him to change his marital relations at any place where he happens to dine This promis ing lad is only a faint intimation of what we are all coming to when we fully acquire ac-quire the freedom of the continent and come into that expansiveness of feeling and of language which characterizes the Great West I is a burst of joyous exuberance ex-uberance that comes from the sense of an illimitable horison I shows itself in the tender words of a local newspaper at Bowie Arizona on the death of abe loved citizen Death loves a shining mark and she bit u dandy when she turned locire 3i Jim And also in the closing words of a New Mexico obituary which the Kansas Magazine quotes Her tired spirit was released from the painracking body and soared aloft to eternal glory at1 30 Denver time We die as it were in motion as we sleep and there is nowhere any boundary to our expansion Perhaps we shall never again know any rest as we now understand under-stand the term rest being only change of motionand we shall not bo able to sleep except on the cars and whether we die by Denver time or the 90th merid ian we shall only change our time Blessed be this slip of a boy who is a man before he is an infant and teaches us what rapid transit can do for our race The only thing that can possibly hinder us in our progress will be second child hood we have abolished first CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER in Harpers Jfaainc for June |