survive in the most corrupt form of society; but
the State, as an organized polity, capable of embodying, preserving, and
promoting the higher life of the nation, perishes.

I am the more led to dwell earnestly on these wider aspects, since that
great epoch-making commemoration which marked the sixtieth year of the
reign of our Queen, and which brought home to the consciousness of the
nation, as nothing else has ever done, its vast world-wide
responsibilities. That great national festival, with its proud imperial
note, in which we celebrated the rise and progress of that "larger
Venice with no narrow canals, but the sea itself for streets," will
forever form a landmark in English history. None who witnessed it will
ever forget that spectacle, of men of all races and color, of all creeds
and traditions, assembled together as brothers and fellow-subjects, to
do honor to a woman's gracious sway of sixty years. And is there not a
deep significance in the fact that these men of warring creeds and
opposed traditions came together to do homage to no commanding
personality, no Semiramis or Boadicea of old, no Catherine of Russia or
Elizabeth of England; but to a sovereign whose chief characteristic has
been that of being a true woman, with a true woman's instinctive
sagacity and wisdom of the heart: a woman with no glamour of youth and
beauty, but bowed with the weight of years and widowhood and cares of
State; a Queen who, on the morning of her crowning triumph, sent forth
no royal proclamation couched in set and pompous periods, but laid her
trembling hands on the bowed head of her people, and gave them a simple
mother's blessing: "Tell my beloved people that I pray from the bottom
of my heart that God may bless them"?

May I not take it as the very embodiment of all that I have been urging
on the women of this day, the immense possibilities of good that lie
latent in our womanhood, the vast issues of good to the nation, and
through it to the world, if that womanhood is only true to itself?

For let us clearly realize that this great moral question is no question
confined to the narrow limits of the home, but a question of the rise
and fall of nations. This is a truism of history. All history teaches us
that the welfare and very life of a nation is determined by moral
causes; and that it is the pure races that respect their women and guard
them jealously from defilement that are the tough, prolific, ascendant
races, the no