deals
and its service. "Let him who would be chiefest among you be the
servant of all," was intended for nations as well as for citizens.
Our nation is the greatest in the world and the greatest of all
time, because it is rendering a larger service than any other nation
is rendering or has rendered. It is giving the world ideals in
education, in social life, in government and in religion. It is the
teacher of nations, it is the world's torch-bearer. Here the people
are more free than elsewhere to "prove all things and hold fast that
which is good"; "to know the truth" and to find freedom in that
knowledge. No material considerations should blind us to our nation's
mission, or turn us aside from the accomplishment of the great work
which has been reserved for us. Our fields bring forth abundantly and
the products of our farms furnish food for many in the Old World. Our
mills and looms supply an increasing export, but these are not our
greatest asset. Our most fertile soil is to be found in the minds and
the hearts of our people, and our most important manufacturing plants
are not our factories, with their smoking chimneys, but our schools,
our colleges and our churches, which take in a priceless raw material
and turn out the most valuable finished product that the world has
known.

We enjoy by inheritance, or by choice, the blessings of American
citizenship; let us not be unmindful of the obligations which these
blessings impose. Let us not become so occupied in the struggle for
wealth or in the contest for honors as to repudiate the debt that we
owe to those who have gone before us and to those who bear with us
the responsibilities that rest upon the present generation. Society
has claims upon us; our country makes demands upon our time, our
thought and our purpose. We can not shirk these duties without
disgrace to ourselves and injury to those who come after us. If one
is tempted to complain of the burdens borne by American citizens, let
him compare them with the much larger burdens imposed by despots upon
their subjects.

I challenge the doctrine, now being taught, that we must enter into
a mad rivalry with the Old World in the building of battleships--the
doctrine that the only way to preserve peace is to get ready for wars
that ought never to come! It is a barbarous, brutal, unchristian
doctrine--the doctrine of the darkness, not the doctrine of the dawn.

Nation after nation, when at the zenith of its power, ha