If it was narrow, it was
grandly patriotic. It was more: it appealed to the elemental in their
breasts.

Love of one's own is a universal and deathless passion, common not
only to human beings but also shared by all animate creation. Be an
American, therefore, to the uttermost limit of consciousness and
feeling. Thank God each day that your lot has fallen beneath the Stars
and Stripes. It is a sacred flag. There is only one holier emblem
known to man.

You have American conditions about you every day, and so their value
and advantage become commonplace and unnoted. To any young man
afflicted with the disease of thinking life hard and burdens heavy in
this Republic, I know of no remedy equal to a trip abroad. You will
find things to admire in France; you will applaud things in Germany;
you will see much in other lands that suggests modifications of
American methods.

But after you have traveled all over the earth; after you have seen
Teutonic system made ten times more perfect in Japan and Slav patience
outdone in China--in short, after you circle the globe and sojourn
among its peoples, you will come home a living, breathing, thinking
Fourth of July.

Of course I do not mean that we are perfect--we are still crude; or
that we have not made mistakes--we have rioted in error; or that other
nations cannot teach us something--we can learn greatly from them, and
we will. But this is the point as it affects you, young man: Among all
the uncounted millions of human beings on this earth, none has the
opportunities to make the most of life that the young American has.

No government now existing or described by history gives you such
liberty of effort, or scatters before and around you such chances. No
soil now occupied by any separate nation is so bountiful or
resourceful. No other people have our American unwearied spirit of
youth. The composite brain of no other nation yeasts in thought and
ideas like the combined intellect of the American millions.

For, look you, our institutions invite every man to do his best. There
is positively no position which a man of sufficient mind, energy, and
character cannot obtain, no reward he cannot win. Everybody,
therefore, is literally "putting in his best licks" in America. In
other countries there is in comparison a general atmosphere of "what's
the use?"--a comparative slumberousness of activity and effort.

Then, again, the American people are made up of the world's boldest
s