pening mines, irrigating
deserts, spanning the continent with railroads; but she is doing these
things in a new way, by educating her people, by placing at the
service of every man's need every resource of human skill. She is
transmuting her industrial wealth into the education of her workmen,
so that unskilled people shall have no place in American life, so that
all men shall bring mind and soul to the control of matter. Her
children are not drudges and slaves. The Constitution has declared it,
and the spirit of our institutions has confirmed it. The best the land
can teach them they shall know. They shall learn that there is no
upper class in their country, and no lower, and they shall understand
how it is that God and His world are for everybody.

America might do all this, and still be selfish, still be a worshipper
of Mammon. But America is the home of charity as well as of commerce.
In the midst of roaring traffic, side by side with noisy factory and
sky-reaching warehouse, one sees the school, the library, the
hospital, the park-works of public benevolence which represent wealth
wrought into ideas that shall endure forever. Behold what America has
already done to alleviate suffering and restore the afflicted to
society--given sight to the fingers of the blind, language to the dumb
lip, and mind to the idiot clay, and tell me if indeed she worships
Mammon only. Who shall measure the sympathy, skill and intelligence
with which she ministers to all who come to her, and lessens the
ever-swelling tide of poverty, misery and degradation which every year
rolls against her gates from all the nations?

When I reflect on all these facts, I cannot but think that, Tolstoi
and other theorists to the contrary, it is a splendid thing to be an
American. In America the optimist finds abundant reason for confidence
in the present and hope for the future, and this hope, this
confidence, may well extend over all the great nations of the earth.

If we compare our own time with the past, we find in modern statistics
a solid foundation for a confident and buoyant world-optimism. Beneath
the doubt, the unrest, the materialism, which surround us still glows
and burns at the world's best life a steadfast faith. To hear the
pessimist, one would think civilization had bivouacked in the Middle
Ages, and had not had marching orders since. He does not realize that
the progress of evolution is not an uninterrupted march.

"Now touching