estion is not whether we have yet achieved success,
but whether a successful democracy is worth striving for? If, however, I
should be obliged to answer the question by "Yes" or "No" I would say,
"Yes, it is a success!"

The best route for the development of any man lies along the hard and
thorny road of self-development. In the end, self-development, by dint
of hard work and mistakes, produces the best man, provided he has the
courage to "see it through." Nations are merely big collections of
individuals. In the end this self-development produces the best nation.
The road is filled with difficulties, but so are most roads to goals
that are worth reaching.

Our national government may have been inefficient in its details, but
taken as a whole it has created a country which for generations has been
a haven for the oppressed of the world. How many hundred thousand
Germans have immigrated to America? How many Americans have ever
emigrated to Germany? We have lynchings in the South, but no other
country was ever left a more hideous problem of slavery, and in 1861
when the supreme test came the government rose to it; no one but a
visionary can expect an immediate Utopian readjustment. Our
municipalities abound in graft, but what country before ours ever faced
the problem of absorbing annually the enormous flood of unlettered
immigrants that is unceasingly poured upon us by the Old World. The
wonder is not that we have graft, but that we have not more graft. We
have great wealth and extreme poverty, but they are due to unusual
economic causes, namely: great national resources on the one hand, and
ceaseless immigration on the other. Our cities are overcrowded and our
standards of work are superficial, but would this be cured by a
despotism?

And always we have the hope that goes with liberty, the undying strength
that accompanies the knowledge that you are master of your own soul. A
good despot at the head of a military autocracy may for the time being
make the most efficient government in the world; certainly a bad despot
at the head of a military autocracy makes the worst government. But I
will never believe that the total surrender of the individual to the
guiding hand of a despotic autocracy makes in the end for the progress
of the whole. History shows it to be untrue; the never-ceasing efforts
of democracy, as endless as the waves of the sea, show that despotic
autocracy cannot last; and the hell let loose upon earth b