Southern or Western or Northern or Eastern
is to say that it is a provincial utterance and not a literature. The
work to which I have referred is American literature. It is work of
which American literature is proud and will ever be proud, whatever is
worthy in literature or in achievement of any kind in any part of the
country goes ultimately in the common fund of American literature or of
American achievement; and that is the joy I have had in being here
to-night, when I ought to have been at home. The joy I have had to-night
has been that this sentiment of Americanism has seemed to be all around
me, and to run through and through everything that has been said here
to-night--a sentiment which was taken out of my mouth, as it were, by
the President this evening, that our first devotion above all is to what
I call the American idea. It seems to me that we are sometimes
forgetting what idea it is that has made this country great; what it is
that has made of it a nation of free men and educated men--a nation in
which the commonest laborer has the school open to him, as well as the
workshop; in which the commonest laborer can sit down three times every
day to a bountiful table. We sometimes forget the idea on which our
country was founded; the idea which prompted Jefferson, as a young man,
to stand up in the legislature of Virginia and fight through three bills
directly affecting mere questions of law, but determining the future of
this country more largely than any other acts,--even the acts of
Washington himself. Those three bills, one providing for the separation
of Church and State, one for the abolition of primogeniture, and the
third for the abolition of entail. The idea that ran through that time
was the idea of equal individual manhood--of the supremacy of the man to
all else, to the State itself, to Government and Society; that the
individual man was the one thing to be taken care of; that it is the
sole business of the Government to give him rights of manhood, to
protect him in his personal freedom, and then to let him alone.

We have imported of late subtly sophistical advocates of socialism who
would set up in opposition to these American ideas the system of State
paternalism, and assert the doctrine that the State should not let a man
alone to make the best use he can of his abilities and opportunities,
but should guide him and support him and direct him and provide for him
and, in short, make a moral and inte