pirits and the descendants of such. The Puritans, who gave force,
direction, and elevation to our national thought and purpose, were the
stoutest hearts, the most productive minds of their time. Their
characteristics have not disappeared from their children.

The same is true, generally, but of course in an infinitely lesser
degree, of most of our immigrants. Usually it is the nervy and
imaginative men who go to a new country. Our own pioneers were endowed
with daring and vision. They had the courage and initiative to leave
the scarcely warmed beds of their new-made homes and push farther on
into the wilderness.

The blue-eyed, light-haired Swede who, among all in his little
Scandinavian village, decides to come to America, the Irishman who
does the like, are, for the most part, the hopeful, venturesome,
self-reliant members of their communities across the sea. The German
who turns his face from the Fatherland, seeking a new home half across
the world, brings us some of the most vigorous blood in the Kaiser's
Empire. Such men believe in better things--have the will to try to get
those better things.

Thus, the American Republic is an absorbent of the optimism of the
world. We attract to ourselves the children of faith and hope among
the common people of other nations. And these are the types we are
after. They are the most vital, the least exhausted. I should not want
"the flower" of other nations to immigrate to our shores. Nature is
through with them, and they must be renewed from below. Do not object
to human raw material for our citizenship. One or two generations will
produce the finished product.

What says Emerson:

"The lord is the peasant that was,
The peasant the lord that shall be.
The lord is hay, the peasant grass,
One dry and one the living tree."

The purpose of our institutions is to manufacture manhood.

Make it impossible for the criminal and diseased, the vicious and the
decadent, to come to us; bar out those who seek our country merely
because they cannot subsist in their own, and you will find that the
remainder of our immigrants are valuable additions to our populations.
Don't despise these common people who come to us from other lands.

Don't despise the common people anywhere on earth. The Master did not
go to the "first citizens" for His followers. He selected the
humblest. He chose fishermen. A promoter of a financial enterprise
does not do this. But the Saviour was n