silent
tear for the woodlands gone; the fleet-footed game no longer at his
door; his father's dust, scattered by winds over consecrated and
hallowed battle-plains.

I stood beside the enchanted Nile and wondered at the mystery of the
Sphinx; I felt the lure, the wanderlust of the mysterious arid plains
and laid my body down on the desert sand to sleep, a weapon by my side;
I arose to greet the rising sun and, with "_Allah_" on my tongue, bowed
my head in solemn worship towards Mecca's distant domes.

I wandered through Africa's torrid forest and scorching plains and sat
naked before a bamboo hut; I felt the savage's freedom and his ease; I
learned the songs of birds, the shriek of beasts, the omens of the
moons, and kenned the dread and sacred lore which tradition single
tongue had brought from the ages past and gone.

I walked beside the Ganges' sacred shores, worshiped at the shrine of
mighty gods and felt the spirit of the mighty _All_ vibrate through my
being. I chanted the songs whose authors are forgot, and studied strange
philosophies of sages passed; I starved and hungered on his arid plains;
I felt the whips and scorn of cast; the curse of fated birth and the
iron rule of oppression's heartless greed.

I was slave, and by fortune scorned; I felt the whip cut into my
quivering flesh and my blood rush hot to the gaping wound; I knew the
agony of unrequited toil, and with aching limbs dragged my hopeless body
to my hut, to think, but not to sleep.

I learned to dream and hate, and at Nemesis' bloody altar immolated in
thought and hope the whole detested tribe of human oppressors and cried
_Content_.

And thus I know the bondage which men endure, the realty and the
delusion in what they think and feel; and the subtlety and strength of
those evil forces which color his disposition and becloud his prospect.

And I stand amidst his turbulent fortunes and above the storm and rage
of his contentions and despairs to proclaim the divinity of his soul,
and to herald a new awakening under which his quickened energies will
yet surge forward in mighty waves of better things.

If the Republic is true to the great principles of liberty and justice
which it proclaims; if you have learned the lesson of your own history,
and appropriated the experience coined out of your own struggles, then
will Anglo-Saxon genius and achievement glow like a mighty flame to
light the path of struggling men, and Anglo-Saxon glory light ang