osperity, but its foundations are in the
moral and spiritual life.

Therefore I say that we are still to make the continent we have
discovered and occupied, and that the scope and quality of our national
life are still to be determined. If they are determined not by the narrow
tenets of the Pilgrims, but by their high sense of duty, and of the value
of the human soul, it will be a nation that will call the world up to a
higher plane of action than it ever attained before, and it will bring in
a new era of humanity. If they are determined by the vulgar successes of
a mere material civilization, it is an experiment not worth making. It
would have been better to have left the Indians in possession, to see if
they could not have evolved out of their barbarism some new line of
action.

The Pilgrims were poor, and they built their huts on a shore which gave
such niggardly returns for labor that the utmost thrift was required to
secure the necessaries of life. Out of this struggle with nature and
savage life was no doubt evolved the hardihood, the endurance, that
builds states and wins the favors of fortune. But poverty is not commonly
a nurse of virtue, long continued, it is a degeneration. It is almost as
difficult for the very poor man to be virtuous as for the very rich man;
and very good and very rich at the same time, says Socrates, a man cannot
be. It is a great people that can withstand great prosperity. The
condition of comfort without extremes is that which makes a happy life. I
know a village of old-fashioned houses and broad elm-shaded streets in
New England, indeed more than one, where no one is inordinately rich, and
no one is very poor, where paupers are so scarce that it is difficult to
find beneficiaries for the small traditionary contribution for the church
poor; where the homes are centres of intelligence, of interest in books,
in the news of the world, in the church, in the school, in politics;
whence go young men and women to the colleges, teachers to the illiterate
parts of the land, missionaries to the city slums. Multiply such villages
all over the country, and we have one of the chief requisites for an
ideal republic.

This has been the longing of humanity. Poets have sung of it; prophets
have had visions of it; statesmen have striven for it; patriots have died
for it. There must be somewhere, some time, a fruitage of so much
suffering, so much sacrifice, a land of equal laws and equal
opportunities