ous and
organized states in which the big cities are do not constitute the
political United States. But, I confess, I hardly expected so soon
to see this fact proclaimed at the ballot-box. To me that's the
surprise of the election. And your popular majority as well as your
clear majority in the Electoral College is a great personal triumph
for you. And you have remade the ancient and demoralized Democratic
party. Four years ago it consisted of a protest and of the wreck
wrought by Mr. Bryan's long captaincy. This rebirth, with a popular
majority, is an historical achievement--of your own.

You have relaid the foundation and reset the pillars of a party
that may enjoy a long supremacy for domestic reasons. Now, if you
will permit me to say so, from my somewhat distant view (four years
make a long period of absence) the big party task is to build up a
clearer and more positive foreign policy. We are in the world and
we've got to choose what active part we shall play in it--I fear
rather quickly. I have the conviction, as you know, that this whole
round globe now hangs as a ripe apple for our plucking, if we use
the right ladder while the chance lasts. I do not mean that we want
or could get the apple for ourselves, but that we can see to it
that it is put to proper uses. What we have to do, in my judgment,
is to go back to our political fathers for our clue. If my longtime
memory be good, they were sure that their establishment of a great
free Republic would soon be imitated by European peoples--that
democracies would take the place of autocracies in all so-called
civilized countries; for that was the form that the fight took in
their day against organized Privilege. But for one reason or
another--in our life-time partly because we chose so completely to
isolate ourselves--the democratic idea took root in Europe with
disappointing slowness. It is, for instance, now perhaps for the
first time, in a thoroughgoing way, within sight in this Kingdom.
The dream of the American Fathers, therefore, is not yet come true.
They fought against organized Privilege exerted from over the sea.
In principle it is the same fight that we have made, in our
domestic field, during recent decades. Now the same fight has come
on a far larger scale than men ever dreamed of be