emember, pomp and splendor, wealth, ease, and power's
pride and heraldry's boast once echoed

"Through haughty Rome's imperial street."

If American citizenship contains a hope and promise, a wealth, a
blessing, and a content, aye! and immortality and just renown, it lives
to-day in hearts, and not in stones; it lives in feelings and not in
lands; it resides in aspirations and not in coffers, it lives in ideals
and not in vaunt and splendor.

It is yours to fulfill its duties; to meet well its responsibilities; it
is what your fathers builded out of heart and soul, out of love,
compassion, and generous fellowship, and not out of blood and brawn; it
is humanity's own; yours be it to study and repeat, if need be, the
sacrifices of those who planted its first seeds with the sword,
nourished them with their blood and suffering, and with wisdom, blessed
by Heaven, consecrated by heroic sacrifices and sanctified by prayer,
left it to you and to all of us, more wisely fashioned, more glittering
in its prospect and more alluring to our fancy than anything political
wisdom ever offered to human hope.

But in order to know and feel what there is of universal interest which
we have to do, what there is for humanity's glory and weal we have to
preserve; what is the task set to us, as our work in forwarding the
current of human life and liberty, we must look to the past, and learn
what fundamental, essential truths have grown from its toil and
achievement. Many such the American idea of citizenship contains; but of
one let us speak.

The American idea of citizenship and its ideal, its aims, possibilities,
and destiny, had its origin and enshrinement in that Anglo-Saxon spirit
of freedom which has been the peculiar characteristic of a race whose
civil and judicial development in the remotest and darkest days of its
history distanced all rival clans and, from Alfred to William III, from
tribe to Empire, has cherished and sustained a system of civil and
religious liberty, which, intolerant of every form of oppression, has
made the English language the vernacular of liberty.

In the earliest periods of these peoples' history we find the germinal
elements of those great charters of liberty which are to become the
chief corner-stone of free government and mighty guarantees of personal
liberty.

A philosophical review of the evolution of these early ideas of personal
liberty to their full growth into a free constitutional gover