facturing concerns. But before one measures entirely the progress of a community by its material expansion, one should place proper appraisal upon the value of a "home" town.
The story is told of the mayor of a small residential town who became so concerned over the seeming static condition of his community that at last he addressed the following letter to the social science head of a nearby college:
Can you give us some advice as to what to do about our town? We have about 2,000 inhabitants of whom 75% own their own homes and keep them up well. Our citizens are law-abiding, prosperous and cultured. We have five churches and better than average grade and high schools. Our business houses are not large but each merchant earns a fair living. We have several miles of paved streets; two parks and children’s playgrounds; an adequate water supply and an efficient, well-equipped fire department. But we have no factories; no big business and no new industries. Can you give us some advice as to what we should do?
In a few days the mayor received his reply: "Your Honor, if your city has all that you say it has, what you need to do is to build a fence around it and keep it just as it is!"
It would, of course, be presumptuous for any city to foster complacency by building a fence around it in order to preserve it in its present state, but it still remains that if in its second hundred years El Paso continues to remain a "home" town with citizens who worship God, respect the law and believe in the future, it will have justified its second hundred years.
The greatest fear which the atomic era has put upon man today is the fear that he may not have a future to enjoy and therefore must greedily devour the present. No generation has been without some kind of fear. One can readily imagine the fitful slumber of the trailblazer, who, after a wearisome march through timber and marshland, lay down to sleep, only to awaken in the loneliness of night at the crackle of a twig, which might mean the presence of a lurking savage, a hungry beast or a blazing prairie fire. Fear was the frequent and unwanted guest of those pioneer parents who watched their families literally wiped out by contagious diseases with no drugs to administer and no doctors to prescribe. Fear trudged the failing furrows with the discouraged pioneer farmer when starvation threatened. Fear tortured the minds of those who watched godlessness, lawlessness and ignorance flood the frontier.
But those fears were conquered, one by one, by the determined efforts of those trailblazers and founding fathers who were not afraid to stand for what they believed to be right and to make the personal sacrifice in order to achieve it. The swamps were drained, the timbers felled, the grasslands plowed, savages either befriended or put to rout, wild beasts driven off, pestilence subdued, foods enriched, churches built, governments established and schools built and maintained. Thus was civilization advanced as fears were conquered.
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