t of the half century
are felt in every fiber of our social and political being. Never before
have men tried so vast and formidable an experiment as that of
administering the affairs of a continent under the forms of a democratic
republic. The conditions which have told for our marvelous material
well-being, which have developed to a very high degree our energy,
self-reliance, and individual initiative, also have brought the care and
anxiety inseparable from the accumulation of great wealth in industrial
centers.

Upon the success of our experiment much depends--not only as regards our
own welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind. If we fail, the
cause of free self-government throughout the world will rock to its
foundations, and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to ourselves, to
the world as it is to-day, and to the generations yet unborn.

There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but there is
every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding from
ourselves the gravity of the problems before us, nor fearing to approach
these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them
aright.

Yet after all, tho the problems are new, tho the tasks set before us
differ from the tasks set before our fathers, who founded and preserved
this Republic, the spirit in which these tasks must be undertaken and
these problems faced, if our duty is to be well done, remains
essentially unchanged. We know that self-government is difficult. We
know that no people needs such high traits of character as that people
which seeks to govern its affairs aright through the freely expressed
will of the free men who compose it.

But we have faith that we shall not prove false to memories of the men
of the mighty past. They did their work; they left us the splendid
heritage we now enjoy. We in our turn have an assured confidence that we
shall be able to leave this heritage unwasted and enlarged to our
children's children.

To do so, we must show, not merely in great crises, but in the everyday
affairs of life, the qualities of practical intelligence, of courage, of
hardihood, and endurance, and, above all, the power of devotion to a
lofty ideal, which made great the men who founded this Republic in the
days of Washington; which made great the men who preserved this Republic
in the days of Abraham Lincoln.

ON AMERICAN MOTHERHOOD[38]

(1905)

In our modern industrial civilization there are many