ng civilization, themselves vanish before the civilization for
which they have prepared the way. The children of their successors and
supplanters, and then their children and children's children, change
and develop with extraordinary rapidity. The conditions accentuate
vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities and
all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant,
self-centred, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and
blind to its own shortcomings. To the hard materialism of the frontier
days succeeds the hard materialism of an industrialism even more
intense and absorbing than that of the older nations; although these
themselves have likewise already entered on the age of a complex and
predominantly industrial civilization.

As the country grows, its people, who have won success in so many
lines, turn back to try to recover the possessions of the mind and the
spirit, which perforce their fathers threw aside in order better to
wage the first rough battles for the continent their children inherit.
The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new
life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the
life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of
value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift
that comes from devotion to loftier ideals. The new life thus sought
can in part be developed afresh from what is round about in the New
World; but it can be developed in full only by freely drawing upon the
treasure-houses of the Old World, upon the treasures stored in the
ancient abodes of wisdom and learning, such as this where I speak
to-day. It is a mistake for any nation merely to copy another; but it
is an even greater mistake, it is a proof of weakness in any nation,
not to be anxious to learn from another, and willing and able to adapt
that learning to the new national conditions and make it fruitful and
productive therein. It is for us of the New World to sit at the feet
of the Gamaliel of the Old; then, if we have the right stuff in us,
we can show that, Paul in his turn can become a teacher as well as a
scholar.

To-day I shall speak to you on the subject of individual citizenship,
the one subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to me and
my countrymen, because you and we are citizens of great democratic
republics. A democratic republic such as each of ours--an effort to
realize in i