dear; many a superintendent is dismissed for overdriving a delicate
machine, who wouldn't be dismissed for overdriving an overtaxed man. You
can discard your man and replace him; there are others ready to come into
his place; but you can't without great cost discard your machine and put a
new one in its place. You are less apt, therefore, to look upon your men
as the essential vital foundation part of your whole business. It is time
that property, as compared with humanity, should take second place, not
first place. We must see to it that there is no over-crowding, that there
is no bad sanitation, that there is no unnecessary spread of avoidable
diseases, that the purity of food is safeguarded, that there is every
precaution against accident, that women are not driven to impossible
tasks, nor children permitted to spend their energy before it is fit to be
spent. The hope and elasticity of the race must be preserved; men must be
preserved according to their individual needs, and not according to the
programs of industry merely. What is the use of having industry, if we
perish in producing it? If we die in trying to feed ourselves, why should
we eat? If we die trying to get a foothold in the crowd, why not let the
crowd trample us sooner and be done with it? I tell you that there is
beginning to beat in this nation a great pulse of irresistible sympathy
which is going to transform the processes of government amongst us. The
strength of America is proportioned only to the health, the energy, the
hope, the elasticity, the buoyancy of the American people.

Is not that the greatest thought that you can have of freedom,--the
thought of it as a gift that shall release men and women from all that
pulls them back from being their best and from doing their best, that
shall liberate their energy to its fullest limit, free their aspirations
till no bounds confine them, and fill their spirits with the jubilance of
realizable hope?

XII

THE LIBERATION OF A PEOPLE'S VITAL ENERGIES

No matter how often we think of it, the discovery of America must each
time make a fresh appeal to our imaginations. For centuries, indeed from
the beginning, the face of Europe had been turned toward the east. All the
routes of trade, every impulse and energy, ran from west to east. The
Atlantic lay at the world's back-door. Then, suddenly, the conquest of
Constantinople by the Turk closed the route to the Orient. Europe had
either to face abou