“GO WEST, YOUNG MAN”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23703, 10 January 1939, Page 10

“GO WEST, YOUNG MAN”

The West is not a locality; it is a state of thought, asserts Miss Mary L. Allen, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, When Horace Greeley gave his famous advice, “Go West, young man. go West,” he was not merely advising someone, who thought they lived in a place, to go to some other latitude and longitude. He was counselling and encouraging the broadening, lengthening and strengthening of thought and purpose. The word west is associated with pioneering because what we name world civilisation began in the east and spread and enlarged always toward the west until the globe became encircled. To pioneer is to prepare, but this pioneering was not alone the preparing of the soil, or putting in order a new country. It was not the planting of almost endless fields, the subduing of mountains, the harnessing of streams, the conquering of space. It was the loosening and widening of thought, which has led through and on to the footing where mental frontiers are now visioned. “Always our forefathers had further frontiers to run to —but these are gone—our frontiers are mental.”