Arctic night,
with a soil blessed by the fruits of the earth and nourished by the
waters under it; I see a great country tenanted by untold millions of
happy, healthy human beings; men of every race that God has made out of
one blood to inherit the earth, a great human family, governed by
righteousness and justice, not by greed and fear--in which peace and
happiness shall reign supreme.

Men more and more are beginning to realize that the common origin and
destiny of the human race give to each species the right to occupy the
earth in peace, prosperity, and plenty, and that the duty of each race
is to promote the happiness of all. The movements for social and
industrial justice and the right of the people to rule are world-wide.

The American people are fast losing their provincial character. They are
to-day a great world power with interests and possessions upon every
part of the globe. Their horizon is the world; they are thinking in
terms of the universe, and speaking in the tongues of all men.

With the widening of men's visions they must realize that the basis of
true democracy and human brotherhood is the common origin and destiny of
the human race; that we are all born alike, live alike, and die alike,
that the laws of man's existence make absolutely no distinction.

I wandered recently into Westminster Abbey. I beheld all around me the
images and effigies of the illustrious and the great,--kings, rulers,
statesmen, poets, patriots, explorers, and scientists; I trampled upon
the graves of some; I stood before the tombs of kings, some dead twelve
centuries; there the wisest and merriest of monarchs and the most pious
and dissolute of kings slept side by side. As illustrating the vanity of
triumphs of personal glory, on one side of the Chapel of Henry VII,
rests Mary, Queen of Scots, and almost directly opposite, all that
remains of Elizabeth, her executioner. I stood before the tomb of the
great Napoleon; I wandered through his palaces at Versailles and
Fontainebleau with all of their magnificence and splendor, and I
recalled the period of his power and glory among men, and yet, he too
died. Then I passed a Potter's field and I looked upon the graves of the
unknown, graves of the pauper and the pleb, and I realized that they
were at last equal, those who slept in Valhalla and those who slept in
the common burying-ground, and that they would each and all hear the
first or the second trump of the resurrection "a