Our nation is
the greatest in the world and the greatest of all time, because it is
rendering a larger service than any other nation is rendering or has
rendered. It is giving the world ideals in education, in social life,
in government, and in religion. It is the teacher of nations; it is the
world's torch-bearer. Here the people are more free than elsewhere to
"try all things and hold fast that which is good"; "to know the truth"
and to find freedom in that knowledge. No material considerations
should blind us to our nation's mission, or turn us aside from the
accomplishment of the great work which has been reserved for us. Our
fields bring forth abundantly and the products of our farms furnish food
for many in the Old World. Our mills and looms supply an increasing
export, but these are not our greatest asset. Our most fertile soil
is to be found in the minds and the hearts of our people; our most
important manufacturing plants are not our factories, with their smoking
chimneys, but our schools, our colleges and our churches, which take in
a priceless raw material and turn out the most valuable finished product
that the world has known.

We enjoy by inheritance, or by choice, the blessings of American
citizenship; let us not be unmindful of the obligations which these
blessings impose. Let us not become so occupied in the struggle for
wealth or in the contest for honours as to repudiate the debt that we
owe to those who have gone before us and to those who bear with us the
responsibilities that rest upon the present generation. Society has
claims upon us; our country makes demands upon our time, our thought and
our purpose. We cannot shirk these duties without disgrace to ourselves
and injury to those who come after us. If one is tempted to complain of
the burdens borne by American citizens, let him compare them with the
much larger burdens imposed by despots upon their subjects.

I challenge the doctrine, now being taught, that we must enter into
a mad rivalry with the Old World in the building of battleships--the
doctrine that the only way to preserve peace is to get ready for wars
that ought never to come! It is a barbarous, brutal, un-Christian
doctrine--the doctrine of the darkness, not the doctrine of the dawn.

Nation after nation, when at the zenith of its power, has proclaimed
itself invincible because its army could shake the earth with its tread
and its ships could fill the seas, but these nations are de