didn't seem touched for
you, after all, with the complete beauty of the ideal which you had
conceived beforehand.

But remember this, if we had grown at all poor in the ideal, you brought
some of it with you. A man does not go out to seek the thing that is not
in him. A man does not hope for the thing that he does not believe in,
and if some of us have forgotten what America believed in, you, at any
rate, imported in your own hearts a renewal of the belief. That is the
reason that I, for one, make you welcome.

If I have in any degree forgotten what America was intended for, I will
thank God if you will remind me.

I was born in America. You dreamed dreams of what America was to be, and
I hope you brought the dreams with you. No man that does not see visions
will ever realize any high hope or undertake any high enterprise.

Just because you brought dreams with you, America is more likely to
realize the dreams such as you brought. You are enriching us if you came
expecting us to be better than we are.

See, my friends, what that means. It means that Americans must have a
consciousness different from the consciousness of every other nation in
the world. I am not saying this with even the slightest thought of
criticism of other nations. You know how it is with a family. A family
gets centred on itself if it is not careful and is less interested in
the neighbors than it is in its own members.

So a nation that is not constantly renewed out of new sources is apt to
have the narrowness and prejudice of a family. Whereas, America must
have this consciousness, that on all sides it touches elbows and touches
hearts with all the nations of mankind.

The example of America must be a special example. The example of America
must be the example not merely of peace because it will not fight, but
of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the
world and strife is not.

There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a
thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince
others by force that it is right.

So, if you come into this great nation as you have come, voluntarily
seeking something that we have to give, all that we have to give is
this: We cannot exempt you from work. No man is exempt from work
anywhere in the world. I sometimes think he is fortunate if he has to
work only with his hands and not with his head. It is very easy to do
what other people give you