is born a social being. A condition of his existence
and of his growth of mature age is the family. Nor does the family
suffice to itself. A larger social organism is needed, into which
families gather, so as to obtain from one another security to life and
property and aid in the development of the faculties and powers with
which nature has endowed the children of men.

The whole human race is too extensive and too diversified in interests
to serve those ends: hence its subdivisions into countries or peoples.
Countries have their providential limits--the waters of a sea, a
mountain range, the lines of similarity of requirements or of methods of
living. The limits widen in space according to the measure of the
destinies which the great Ruler allots to peoples, and the importance of
their parts in the mighty work of the cycles of years, the
ever-advancing tide of humanity's evolution.

The Lord is the God of nations because he is the God of men. No nation
is born into life or vanishes back into nothingness without his bidding.
I believe in the providence of God over countries as I believe in his
wisdom and his love, and my patriotism to my country rises within my
soul invested with the halo of my religion to my God.

More than a century ago a trans-Atlantic poet and philosopher, reading
well the signs, wrote:

"Westward the course of empire takes its way.
The first four acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time's noblest offspring is the last."

Berkeley's prophetic eye had descried America. What shall I say, in a
brief discourse of my country's value and beauty, of her claims to my
love and loyalty? I will pass by in silence her fields and forests, her
rivers and seas, the boundless riches hidden beneath her soil and amid
the rocks of her mountains, her pure and health-giving air, her
transcendent wealth of nature's fairest and most precious gifts. I will
not speak of the noble qualities and robust deeds of her sons, skilled
in commerce and industry, valorous in war, prosperous in peace. In all
these things America is opulent and great: but beyond them and above
them in her singular grandeur, to which her material splendor is only
the fitting circumstance.

America born into the family of nations in these latter times is the
highest billow in humanity's evolution, the crowning effort of ages in
the aggrandizement of man. Unless we take her in this altitude, we do
not comprehe