away. With security of personal rights has come security
of property rights. The freedom of the human mind is recognized in the
right of free speech and free press. The public schools have made
education possible for all, and ignorance a disgrace. A most significant
development of respect for man has come to be respect for his
occupation. It is not alone for the learned professions that great
treasures are now poured out. Technical, trade, and vocational schools
for teaching skill in occupations are fostered and nourished, with the
same care as colleges and universities for the teaching of sciences and
the classics. Democracy not only ennobled man; it has ennobled industry.
In political affairs the vote of the humblest has long counted for as
much as the vote of the most exalted. We are working towards the day
when, in our industrial life, equal honor shall fall to equal endeavor,
whether it be exhibited in the office or in the shop.

These are some of the results of that great world movement, which, first
exhibiting itself in the Continental Congress of America, carried her
arms to victory, through the sacrifice of a seven years' revolutionary
war, and wrote into the Treaty of Paris the recognition of the right of
the people to rule: since which days existence on this planet has had a
new meaning; a result which, changing the old order of things, putting
the race under the control and guidance of new forces, rescued man from
every thraldom, but laid on him every duty.

We know that only ignorance and superstition seek to explain events by
fate and destiny, yet there is a fascination in such speculations born,
perhaps, of human frailty. How happens it that James Otis laid out in
1762 the then almost treasonable proposition that "Kings were made for
the good of the people, and not the people for them," in a pamphlet
which was circulated among the Colonists? What school had taught Patrick
Henry that national outlook which he expressed in the opening debates of
the first Continental Congress when he said, "I am not a Virginian, but
an American," and which hurried him on to the later cry of "Liberty or
death?" How was it that the filling of a vacancy sent Thomas Jefferson
to the second Continental Congress, there to pen the immortal
Declaration we this day celebrate? No other living man could have
excelled him in preparation for, or in the execution of, that great
task. What circumstance put the young George Washington und