me, had five different
coats on him to keep him warm; and I looked out over that sea of snow, and
then I said, "Well, this is a pretty rough country, isn't it?" He was a
Dane, I think, and he looked me hard in the eye and he said, "Young fellow,
I want you to understand that this is God's own country."

Every one of those boys who returned from France came back feeling that
this is God's own country. He knows little of America as a whole, perhaps;
he can not recite any provisions in the Constitution of the United States;
it may be that he has learned his English while in the Army; but some part
of this country is "God's own country" to him. And it is a good thing that
we should not lose the local attachments that we have--those narrownesses,
those prejudices that give point to character. There is a kind of breadth
that is shallowness; there is a kind of sympathy that has no punch. We must
remember that if that world across the water is to be made what it can be
under democratic forms, it is to be led by Democracy; and, therefore, the
supreme responsibility falls upon us to make this all that a Democracy can
be. And if there is a bit of local pride attaching to one part of our soil,
that gives emphasis to our intense attachment to this country, let it be. I
would not remove it. I come from a part of this country that is supposed to
be more prejudiced in favor of itself than any other section. I remember
years ago hearing that the Commissioner of Fisheries wished to propagate
and spread in these Atlantic waters the western crab--which is about four
times the size of the Atlantic crab--and so they sent two carloads of those
crabs to the Atlantic coast. They were dumped into the Atlantic at Woods
Hole, and on each crab was a little aluminum tablet saying "When found
notify Fish Commission, Washington." A year passed and no crab was found;
two years passed and no crab was found. And the third year two of those
crabs were found by a Buenos Aires fisherman, who reported that they
evidently were going south, bound around the Cape, returning to California.

A week or two ago I was addressing a Methodist conference in Baltimore, and
I told this story to a dear old gray-headed man, seated opposite me, who
was eighty-six years of age, who said he had been preaching there for sixty
years; and I said to him, "Do you come from Maryland?" He said, "Yes, sir."
He said, "I come from the Eastern Shore. Have you ever been there?" I said,
"