ted as we are with a heritage of moral leprosy from our
past history and hard pressed as we are in the economic world by foreign
immigrants and by native prejudice; our one surest haven of refuge is in
ourselves; our one safest means of advance is our belief in and implicit
trust in our own ability and worth. No race that despises itself, that
laughs at and ridicules itself, that wishes to God it were anything else
but itself, can ever be a great people. There is no power under heaven
that can stop the onward march of ten millions of earnest, honest,
inspired, God-fearing, race-loving, and united people.

Secondly, we must have a _high moral ideal_.

With a strong race consciousness and reasonable prudence, a people with
a low, vacillating, and uncertain moral ideal may, for a time, be able
to stem the tide of outraged virtue, but this is merely transitory.
Ultimate destruction and ruin follow absolutely in the wake of moral
degeneracy; this, all history shows;--this, experience teaches. God
visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third
and fourth generations. "The judgments of the Lord are true and
righteous all together."

Not long ago I stood in the city of Rome amid its ruined fountains,
crumbling walls, falling aqueducts, ancient palaces, and amphitheatres,
to-day mere relics of ancient history. One is struck with wonder and
amazement at the magnificent civilization which that people was able to
evolve. It does not seem possible that the Roman people, who could so
perfect society in its organic and civic relations and leave to the
world the organic principles which must always lie at the base of all
subsequent social development,--it does not seem possible that such a
people should so decay as to leave hardly a vestige of its original
stock, and that such cities as the Romans erected should so fall as to
leave scarcely one stone upon another. Neither does it seem credible
that a people who could so work out in its philosophical aspect man's
relation to the eternal mystery, and come as near a perfect solution as
is perhaps possible for the human mind to reach, that a people who could
give to the world such literature, such art, such ideals of physical and
intellectual beauty, as did the Greeks, could so utterly perish from
the face of the earth; yet this is the case not only with Rome and
Greece, but with a score or more of nations which were once masters of
the world. The Greeks, Romans, P