ime the character of the New
England Pilgrim, nor to sketch his achievement on this continent. But it
is pertinent to recall his spirit, his attitude toward life, and to
inquire what he would probably do in the circumstances in which we find
ourselves.

It is another December night, before the dawn of a new year. And this
night still symbolizes the future. You have subdued a continent, and it
stands in the daylight radiant with a material splendor of which the
Pilgrims never dreamed. Yet a continent as dark, as unknown, exists. It
is yourselves, your future, your national life. The other continent was
made, you had only to discover it, to uncover it. This you must make
yourselves.

We have finished the outline sketch of a magnificent nation. The
territory is ample; it includes every variety of climate, in the changing
seasons, every variety of physical conformation, every kind of production
suited to the wants, almost everything desired in the imagination, of
man. It comes nearer than any empire in history to being self-sufficient,
physically independent of the rest of the globe. That is to say, if it
were shut off from the rest of the world, it has in itself the material
for great comfort and civilization. And it has the elements of motion, of
agitation, of life, because the vast territory is filling up with a
rapidity unexampled in history. I am not saying that isolated it could
attain the highest civilization, or that if it did touch a high one it
could long hold it in a living growth, cut off from the rest of the
world. I do not believe it. For no state, however large, is sufficient
unto itself. No state is really alive in the highest sense whose
receptivity is not equal to its power to contribute to the world with
which its destiny is bound up. It is only at its best when it is a part
of the vital current of movement, of sympathy, of hope, of enthusiasm of
the world at large. There is no doctrine so belittling, so withering to
our national life, as that which conceives our destiny to be a life of
exclusion of the affairs and interests of the whole globe, hemmed in to
the selfish development of our material wealth and strength, surrounded
by a Chinese wall built of strata of prejudice on the outside and of
ignorance on the inside. Fortunately it is a conception impossible to be
realized.

There is something captivating to the imagination in being a citizen of a
great nation, one powerful enough to command respect