he vision and message of Washington; and that
insight and that law, coming to petty, prejudiced, jealous, and
disordered states, put an end to chaos and brought peace, prosperity,
strength, largeness of life, and an ever broadening horizon. Let no man
think of himself any longer in the first place as an American, as an
Englishman, a Spaniard, a Frenchman, a German, a Russian, but all men in
the first place citizens of the world,--that is the message which has
been thundered in the ears of Washington's America in these eventful and
surprising years as it was never done before. It took a civil war to
teach Gadsden's Carolina and Washington's Virginia that the interests
of the nation are above those of the state, and that a state can only
then be true to itself and its duty when it remembers that there is a
lower and a higher, and knows well what that lower and that higher are.
Virginia and Massachusetts have no less genuine and worthy pride as
states, they do not put to smaller or less vital use their sacred
history and heritage, their great sons are no less their sons, because
they bowed their heads to the baptism of a nation which must measure its
powers and duties on a continental scale. They know that national life
into which they are incorporated as the nobler and more commanding life.
The nation is organized. Its logic was shaped finally in the fiery forge
of war.

The nation is the largest thing we have yet got organized. We must
organize the world. Unending jealousies, commercial clash, friction of
law, paralysis of industry, financial disorder, the misdirection and
miscarriage of good energy, mischievous ignorance and prejudice,
incalculable waste, chronic alarm, and devastating wars are before us
until we do it. That is the lesson of the hour. The relations and
interdependence of the nations of Christendom have become, by the
amazing advance of civilization in the century, closer, complexer, and
more imperious far than the relations of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,
and Georgia, when Washington from the heights of the Alleghanies looked
into the West and thought of the continent. Yet France and Germany,
England and Russia, America and Spain, in their great burrs of guns,
jealous of each other, distrustful, envious, afraid, go on in their
separate, incooeperant, abortive ways, keeping God's earth in chaos, when
a great wisdom and great virtue like Washington's a hundred years ago
would convert them into a family of