splendid public buildings, private palaces, luxury, display.
Without reservoirs of wealth there would be no great universities,
schools of science, museums, galleries of art, libraries, solid
institutions of charity, and perhaps not the wide diffusion of culture
which is the avowed aim of modern civilization.

But this in its kind is an old story. It is an experiment that has been
repeated over and over. History is the record of the rise of splendid
civilizations, many of which have flowered into the most glorious
products of learning and of art, and have left monuments of the proudest
material achievements. Except in the rapidity with which steam and
electricity have enabled us to move to our object, and in the discoveries
of science which enable us to relieve suffering and prolong human life,
there is nothing new in our experiment. We are pursuing substantially the
old ends of material success and display. And the ends are not different
because we have more people in a nation, or bigger cities with taller
buildings, or more miles of railway, or grow more corn and cotton, or
make more plows and threshing-machines, or have a greater variety of
products than any nation ever had before. I fancy that a pleased visitor
from another planet the other day at Chicago, who was shown an assembly
much larger than ever before met under one roof, might have been
interested to know that it was also the wisest, the most cultivated, the
most weighty in character of any assembly ever gathered under one roof.
Our experiment on this continent was intended to be something more than
the creation of a nation on the old pattern, that should become big and
strong, and rich and luxurious, divided into classes of the very wealthy
and the very poor, of the enlightened and the illiterate. It was intended
to be a nation in which the welfare of the people is the supreme object,
and whatever its show among nations it fails if it does not become this.
This welfare is an individual matter, and it means many things. It
includes in the first place physical comfort for every person willing and
deserving to be physically comfortable, decent lodging, good food,
sufficient clothing. It means, in the second place, that this shall be an
agreeable country to live in, by reason of its impartial laws, social
amenities, and a fair chance to enjoy the gifts of nature and Providence.
And it means, again, the opportunity to develop talents, aptitudes for
cultivation