ndencies; and there is
some word, some act that you or I can do or say that will get inside of
that strange, strange man and reveal him to himself and reveal him to us
and make him of use to the world.

We want to reach, through one of those doors, every man in the United
States who does not sympathize with us in a supreme allegiance to our
country. You would be amused to see some of the letters that come to me,
asking almost peremptorily what methods should be adopted by which men and
women can be Americanized, as if there were some one particular
prescription that could be given; as if you could roll up the sleeve of a
man and give him a hypodermic of some solution that would, by some strange
alchemy, transform him into a good American citizen; as if you could take
him water, and in it make a mixture--one part the ability to read and write
and speak the English language; then another part, the Declaration of
Independence; one part, the Constitution of the United States; one part, a
love for apple pie; one part, a desire and a willingness to wear American
shoes; and another part, a pride in using American plumbing; and take all
those together and grind them up, and have a solution which you could put
into a man's veins and by those superficialities, transform him into a man
who loves America. No such thing can be done. We know it can not be done,
because we know those who read and write and speak the language and they do
not have that feeling. We know that we regard one who takes his glass of
milk and his apple pie for lunch as presumably a good American. We know
that there is virtue in the American bath. We know that there are
principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and in the
Constitution of the United States which are necessary to get into one's
system before he can thoroughly understand the United States; and there are
some who have those principles as a standard for their lives, who yet have
never heard of the Declaration of Independence or of the Constitution of
the United States. You can not make Americans that way. You have got to
make them by calling upon the fine things that are within them, and by
dealing with them in sympathy; by appreciating what they have to offer us,
and by revealing to them what we have to offer them. And that brings to
mind the thought that this work must be a human work--must be something
done out of the human heart and speaking to the human heart, and must
largely tur