ontinent,
dominating the shores of two oceans, and sending West as well as East
the influences of individual freedom. These things were consciously in
their minds as they framed the great Government which was born out of
the American Revolution; and every time we gather to perpetuate their
memories it is incumbent upon us that we should be worthy of recalling
them and that we should endeavor by every means in our power to emulate
their example.

The American Revolution was the birth of a nation; it was the creation
of a great free republic based upon traditions of personal liberty which
theretofore had been confined to a single little island, but which it
was purposed should spread to all mankind. And the singular fascination
of American history is that it has been a process of constant
re-creation, of making over again in each generation the thing which was
conceived at first. You know how peculiarly necessary that has been in
our case, because America has not grown by the mere multiplication of
the original stock. It is easy to preserve tradition with continuity of
blood; it is easy in a single family to remember the origins of the race
and the purposes of its organization; but it is not so easy when that
race is constantly being renewed and augmented from other sources, from
stocks that did not carry or originate the same principles.

So from generation to generation strangers have had to be indoctrinated
with the principles of the American family, and the wonder and the
beauty of it all has been that the infection has been so generously
easy. For the principles of liberty are united with the principles of
hope. Every individual, as well as every nation, wishes to realize the
best thing that is in him, the best thing that can be conceived out of
the materials of which his spirit is constructed. It has happened in a
way that fascinates the imagination that we have not only been augmented
by additions from outside, but that we have been greatly stimulated by
those additions. Living in the easy prosperity of a free people, knowing
that the sun had always been free to shine upon us and prosper our
undertakings, we did not realize how hard the task of liberty is and how
rare the privilege of liberty is; but men were drawn out of every
climate and out of every race because of an irresistible attraction of
their spirits to the American ideal. They thought of America as lifting,
like that great statue in the harbor of New Y