time these
United States were only a strip along the eastern seaboard, bounded on
the east by the Atlantic Ocean and on the west by an unexplored
wilderness; thirteen sparsely settled states, the settlements widely
separated from each other, with a population of less than four million
persons. Now the wilderness is overcome. By the Louisiana Purchase we
acquired the Great Southwest. For a pittance we bought the wastes of
Alaska and then found them to be the gold fields of the world. The
Philippines, with an area of one hundred and fifteen thousand square
miles, and the Hawaiian Islands mark the extension of our western
boundaries. Cuba is under our immediate protection. Porto Rico is part
of us, and likewise the Danish West Indies. In Central America we have
built the Panama Canal. By the Monroe Doctrine we are the protectors
from foreign interference of all of Central and South America. Our
population has grown to more than one hundred million souls. Our
material wealth is the greatest of any single nation in the world.

Does this constitute success? Look on the other side of the picture. Our
form of national government has been notoriously inefficient--taking
Germany as the standard. Our state governments at their best are
mediocre, while at their worst they stand pitifully paralyzed before mob
law. Our unpunished lynchings of coloured people, innocent as well as
guilty, make us contemptible in the eyes of the civilized world. No
other government on earth remains silent and helpless while its citizens
assemble as for a holiday and burn a criminal at the stake. Our
municipalities are largely rotten with graft, and the graft is
accompanied by its inevitable handmaids, extravagance and inefficiency.
Enormous wealth, in the hands of a few, dwells side by side with extreme
poverty. Our cities are overcrowded, and the country of Whittier, where

"Shut in from all the world without
We sat the clean-winged hearth about,"

is handed over to the huts and shanties of immigrants. Capital fights
labour and labour fights capital. Politics are such that most men avoid
them. The standard of work is not how well you can do your job, but how
much you can make out of it. Is this democracy a success?

In answer to this, however, does not an inner consciousness in each of
us, perhaps the spirit of Lafayette and perhaps our own, perhaps the
whispering of an unseen, great, and infinite power, tell us that the
really relevant qu