is noble strife for the service of our race we need never fear that
claimants for the prize will be too large a multitude.

As an able scholar of your own has said, Jefferson was here using the
old vernacular of English aspirations after a free, manly, and
well-ordered political life--a vernacular rich in stately tradition and
noble phrase, to be found in a score of a thousand of champions in many
camps--in Buchanan, Milton, Hooker, Locke, Jeremy Taylor, Roger
Williams, and many another humbler but not less strenuous pioneer and
confessor of freedom. Ah, do not fail to count up, and count up often,
what a different world it would have been but for that island in the
distant northern sea! These were the tributary fountains, that, as time
went on, swelled into the broad confluence of modern time. What was new
in 1776 was the transformation of thought into actual polity.

What is progress? It is best to be slow in the complex arts of politics
in their widest sense, and not to hurry to define. If you want a
platitude, there is nothing for supplying it like a definition. Or shall
we say that most definitions hang between platitude and paradox? There
are said, tho I have never counted, to be 10,000 definitions of
religion. There must be about as many of poetry. There can hardly be
fewer of liberty, or even of happiness.

I am not bold enough to try a definition. I will not try to gauge how
far the advance of moral forces has kept pace with that extension of
material forces in the world of which this continent, conspicuous before
all others, bears such astounding evidence. This, of course, is the
question of questions, because as an illustrious English writer--to
whom, by the way, I owe my friendship with your founder many long years
ago--as Matthew Arnold said in America here, it is moral ideas that at
bottom decide the standing or falling of states and nations. Without
opening this vast discussion at large, many a sign of progress is beyond
mistake. The practise of associated action--one of the master keys of
progress--is a new force in a hundred fields, and with immeasurable
diversity of forms. There is less acquiescence in triumphant wrong.
Toleration in religion has been called the best fruit of the last four
centuries, and in spite of a few bigoted survivals, even in our United
Kingdom, and some savage outbreaks of hatred, half religious, half
racial, on the Continent of Europe, this glorious gain of time may now
be ta