ut it in scientific phrase, and
say: Home is the laboratory of character. The home is the place where
you get what the common people so pithily call your "bringing up." It
is there where your conception of all human relationships is formed.
It is there where it is largely determined whether you will make your
life worth the living.

Your future sits at the old fireside. The fate of the Nation abides
beneath the roof-tree. And so it is that neither college, nor
market-place, nor forum, nor editor's sanctum, nor traffic of the high
seas, nor anything that you may do, nor any environment that may
hereafter surround you, is so important to you as the old home and
your early years. Yes, and not to you only, but to the Nation also.

Nothing means so much to the Republic as the influence of the
American home upon the young manhood of the Nation.

We are about to enter upon the serious problem of the regulation of
railway rates, which is a beginning in some sort of the national
control of transportation. It is a problem whose weight and
possibilities challenge and all but confound every thoughtful and
serious mind. Every step in its solution must be taken with both
wisdom and justice.

Our relations with the Orient daily increase, and the fixedness of our
position in the Far East hourly becomes more definite. The public man
wears a scarf about his eyes who does not see that our historic
statesmanship during this century will deal with our growing mastery
of the Pacific, and the weaving backward and forward across that ocean
of our ever-multiplying relations with the East.

This paper might be entirely taken up with a statement of tangled
situations and deep problems which will require the combined
intelligence of the whole American people to solve.

Yet, for the purpose of this life, what are they all, compared with
the character of individual Americans, and therefore with the
influence of the American home upon American men in the making; for
men in the making is what the youth of our land are. Gladstone stated
a truth, wide and vital as English institutions, when he said that the
relation of the Church to the youth of Great Britain is a matter of
more concern than all the problems of the Empire put together.

All this is commonplace, you say. I say so too. Yet it is the
commonplaces, and those things alone, by which we live and move and
have our being. For example, sunlight is commonplace, and so is air.
Who was it t