HOW TO OVERCOME THE OBSTACLES TO GOOD CITIZENSHIP
In the preceding three lectures[3] the chief hindrances to the discharge of civic duty have been considered. Let us now go on to inquire what can be done to remove these hindrances by grappling with those faults or weaknesses in the citizen to which they are due. When symptoms have been examined, one looks about for remedies.
[3] The two lectures reprinted in this volume are the first and last of a series of four given by Mr. Bryce at Yale University.
We have seen that of the three causes assigned, Indolence, Selfish Personal Interest, and Party Spirit, the first is the most common, the second the most noxious, the third the most excusable, yet also the most subtle, and perhaps the most likely to affect the class which takes the lead in politics and is incessantly employed upon its daily work. Whether the influence of these causes, or of any of them, is increasing with that more complete democratization of government which we see going on in Europe, is a question that cannot yet be answered. Fifty years may be needed before it can be answered, for new tendencies both for good and for evil are constantly emerging and affecting one another in unpredictable ways.
The remedies that may be applied to any defects in the working of governments are some of them Mechanical, some of them Ethical. By Mechanical remedies I understand those which consist in improving the structure or the customs and working devices of government, i. e., the laws and the institutions or political methods, by Ethical those which affect the character and spirit of the people. If you want to get more work and better work done in any industry, you may either improve the machinery, or the implements, by which the work is done, or else improve the strength and skill of the men who run the machinery and use the tools. In doing the former, you sometimes do the latter also, for when the workman has finer tools, he is led on to attempt more difficult work, and thus not only does his own skill become more perfect, but his interest in the work is likely to be increased.
Although in politics by far the most real and lasting progress may be expected from raising the intelligence and virtue of the citizens, still improvements in the machinery of government must not be undervalued. To take away from bad men the means and opportunities by which they may work evil, to furnish good men with means and opportunities which make it easier for them to prevent or overcome evil, is to render a great service. And as laws which breathe a high spirit help to educate the whole community, so does the presence of opportunities for reform stimulate and invigorate the best citizens in their efforts after better things.
I will enumerate briefly some of the remedies that may be classed as Mechanical because they consist in alterations of institutions or methods.
Two of these need only a few passing words, because they are so sweeping as to involve the whole fabric of government, and therefore too large to be discussed here.
One is propounded by those thinkers whom, to distinguish them from the persons who announce themselves as enemies of all society, we may call the Philosophical Anarchists, thinkers who are entitled to respectful consideration because their doctrine represents a protest that needs to be made against the conception of an all-engulfing State in which individual initiative and self-guided development might be merged and lost. They desire to get rid of the defects of government by getting rid of government itself; that is to say, by leaving men entirely alone without any coercive control, trusting to their natural good impulses to restrain them from harming one another. In such a state of things there would be no Citizenship, properly so called, but only the isolation of families, or perhaps of individuals—for it is not quite clear how far the family is expected to remain in the Anarchist paradise—an isolation more or less qualified by brotherly love. We are so far at present from a prospect of reaching the conditions needed for such an amelioration that it is enough to note this view and pass on.
A second and diametrically opposite cure for the evils of existing society comes from those who are commonly termed Socialists or Collectivists. It consists in so widely enlarging the functions of government as to commit to it not merely all the work it now performs of defending the country, maintaining order, enacting laws, and enforcing justice between man and man, but also the further work of producing and distributing all commodities, allotting to each man his proper labour and proper remuneration, or possibly, instead of giving any pecuniary remuneration, providing each man with what he needs for life. Under this régime two of the hindrances to good citizenship would be much reduced. There ought to be less indifference to politics when everybody’s interest in the management of public concerns had been immensely increased by the fact that he found himself dependent on the public officials for everything. Nobody could plead that he was occupied by his own private business, because his private business would have vanished. So also selfish personal interest in making gains out of government must needs disappear when private property itself had ceased to exist. Whether, however, self-interest might not still find means of influencing public administration in ways beneficial to individual cupidity, and whether personal selfishness might not be even more dangerous, under such conditions, in proportion to the extended range and power of government,—this is another question which cannot be discussed till some definite scheme for the allotment of work and of remuneration (if any) shall have been propounded. Party Spirit would evidently, in a Collectivistic State, pass into new forms. It might, however, become more potent than ever before. But that again would depend on the kind of scheme for the reshaping of economic society that had been adopted.
We may pass from these suggestions for the extinction, or reconstruction on new lines, of the existing social and political system to certain minor devices for improving the structure and methods of government which have been put forward as likely to help the citizen to discharge his duties more efficiently.
One of these is the system of Proportional Representation. It is argued that if electoral areas were created with more than two members each, and if each elector was either allowed to vote for a number of candidates less than the number to be chosen, or was allowed to concentrate all his votes upon one candidate, or more, according to the number to be chosen, two good results would follow. The will of the electors would be more adequately and exactly expressed, because the minority, or possibly more than one minority, as well as the majority, would have everywhere its representative. The zeal of the electors would be stimulated, because in each district a section of opinion not large enough to have a chance of winning an election, if there were but one member, and accordingly now apathetic, because without hope, would then be roused to organize itself and to take a warmer interest in public affairs. The Proportional system is, therefore, advocated as one of those improvements in machinery which would react upon the people by quickening the pulses of public life. Some experiments have already been made in this direction. Those tried in England did not win general approval and have been dropped. That which is still in operation in the State of Illinois has not, if my informants are right, given much satisfaction. But the plan is said to work well both in Belgium and in some of the cantons of Switzerland; so one may hope that further experiments will be attempted. It deserves your careful study, but it is too complicated and opens too many side issues to be further discussed now and here.[4]
[4] Since the above was written a Royal Commission has been appointed in Britain to examine divers questions relating to elections, and is investigating this, among other plans.
Attempts have been made in some places to overcome the indifference of citizens to their duty by fining those who, without sufficient excuse, fail to vote. This plan of Obligatory Voting, as it is called, finds favour in some Swiss cantons and in Belgium, but is too uncongenial to the habits of England or of the United States to be worth considering as a practical measure in either country. Moreover, the neglect to vote is no very serious evil in either country, at least as regards the more important elections. Swiss legislation on the subject is evidence not so much of indifference among the citizens of that country as of the high standard of public duty they are expected to reach.
When we come to the proposals made both here and in England for the reference of proposals to a direct popular vote, we come to a question of real practical importance. I wish that I had time to state to you and to examine the arguments both for and against this mode of legislation, which has been practised for many years in Switzerland with a virtually unanimous approval, and has been applied pretty freely in some of your States. It has taken two forms. One is the so-called Initiative, under which a section of the electors (being a number, or a proportion, prescribed by law) may propose a law upon which the people vote. This is being tried in Switzerland, but so far as I have been able to gather, has not yet proved its utility. The balance of skilled opinion seems to incline against it. The other is called the Referendum, and consists in the submission to popular vote of measures already passed by the legislative body. In this form the reference of laws to the people undoubtedly sharpens the interest of the ordinary citizen in the conduct of public affairs. The Swiss voters, at any rate, take pains to inform themselves on the merits of the measures submitted to them. These are widely and acutely canvassed at public meetings, and in the press. A large vote is usually cast, and all, whether or no they approve the result, agree that it is an intelligent, not a heedless, vote. The Swiss do not seem to think that the power and dignity of the legislature is weakened, as some might expect it to be, when their final voice is thus superseded by that of the people. All I need now ask you to note and remember is that the practice of bringing political issues directly before the people, whatever its drawbacks, does tend to diminish both that indolence and indifference which is pretty common among European voters. It requires every citizen to think for himself and deliver his vote upon all the more important measures, and it also reduces the power of that Party Spirit which everywhere distracts men’s minds from the real merits of the questions before the country. When a law is submitted to the Swiss people for their judgment, their decision nowise affects either the Executive or the Legislature. The law may be rejected by the people, but the officials who drafted the law continue to hold office. The party which brought it in and carried it through the Legislature is not deemed to have been censured or weakened by the fact of its ultimate rejection. That party spirit is less strong in Switzerland than in any other free country (except perhaps Norway) may be largely attributed to this disjunction of the deciding voice in legislation from those governmental organs which every political party seeks to control. The Swiss voter is to-day an exceptionally intelligent and patriotic citizen, fitter to exercise the function of direct legislation than perhaps any other citizen in Europe, and the practice of directly legislating has doubtless helped to train him for the function.
It must, however, be admitted that the circumstances of that little republic and its cantons are too peculiar to make it safe to draw inferences from Swiss experience to large countries like Britain and France, the political life of which is highly centralized. The States of your Union may appear to offer a better field, and the results of the various experiments which some of them (such as Oklahoma) are trying will be watched with interest by Europeans.
In considering the harm done to civic duty by selfish personal interests we were led to observe that the fewer points of contact between government and the pecuniary interests of private citizens, the better both for the purity of government and for the conscience of the private citizen. How far government ought to include within its functions schemes for increasing national wealth, otherwise than by such means (being means which a government alone can employ because to be effective they must be done on a great scale) as the improving of education, the diffusing of knowledge, the providing means of transportation, the conservation of natural resources, and so forth, may be matter for debate. But at any rate government ought to avoid measures tending to enrich any one person or group of persons at the expense of the citizens generally. Common justice requires that. Accordingly, all contracts should be made on the terms best for the public, and if possible by open bidding. Franchises, if not reserved by the public authority for itself, should be granted only for limited times and so as to secure the interests of the community, whether by way of a rent payable to the city or county treasury or otherwise. Public employees should not be made into a privileged class, to which there is given larger pay than other workers of the same class and capacity receive. All bills promoted by a private person, firm, or company looking to his or their pecuniary advantage ought to be closely scrutinized by some responsible public authority. In England we draw a sharp distinction between such bills and general public legislation, and we submit the former to a quasi-judicial examination by a Parliamentary committee in order to avoid possible jobs or scandals or losses to the public. As respects general legislation, i. e., that which is not in its terms local or personal, it may be difficult or impossible to prevent a law from incidentally benefiting one group or class of men and injuring another. But everything that can be done ought to be done to prevent any set of men from abusing legislation to serve their own interest. If there be truth in what one hears about the groups which in France, Belgium, and Germany have, through political pressure, obtained by law bounties benefiting their industries, or tariffs specially favourable to their own commercial enterprises, the danger that the general taxpayer, or the consumer, may be sacrificed to these private interests, is a real danger. To remove the occasion and the opportunities for the exercise of such pressure, which is likely to be often exerted in a covert way and to warp or pervert the legislator’s mind, is to diminish a temptation and to remove a stumbling block that lies in the path of civic duty. Whether a man be in theory a Protectionist or a Free Trader, whether or not he desires to nationalize public utilities, he must recognize the dangers incident to the passing of laws which influential groups of wealthy men may have a personal interest in promoting or resisting, because they offer a prospect of gain sufficiently large to make it worth while to “get at” legislatures and officials. Such dangers arise in all governments. That which makes them formidable in democracies is the fact that the interest of each individual citizen in protecting himself and the public against the selfish groups may be so small an interest that everybody neglects it, and the groups get their way.
As we have been considering improvements in the machinery of government, this would be a fitting place for a discussion of what you call Primary Election Laws, which are intended both to reduce the power of party organizations and to stimulate the personal zeal of the voter by making it easier for him to influence the selection of a candidate. We have, however, in Europe, nothing corresponding to the Primary Laws of American States, nothing which recognizes a political party as a concrete body, nothing which deals with the mode of selecting candidates; and many of you doubtless know better than I do what has been the effect of these American enactments and whether they have really roused the ordinary citizen to bestir himself and to assert his independence of such party organizations as may have heretofore interfered with it. Europeans do not take kindly to the notion of giving statutory recognition to a Party, and they doubt whether the astuteness of those whom you call “machine politicians” may not succeed in getting hold of the new statutory Primaries as they did of the old ones. Be the merits of the new legislation what they may, one must hope that its existence will not induce the friends of reform to relax their efforts to reduce in other ways the power of political “Machines.”
One obvious expedient to which good citizens may resort for keeping other citizens up to the mark is to be found in the enactment and enforcement of stringent laws against breaches of public trust. I took occasion, in referring to the practices of bribery and treating at elections, to note the wholesome effect of the statute passed in England in 1883 for repressing those offences. Although St. Paul has told us that he who is under grace does not need to be under the law, Christianity has not yet gone far enough to enable any of us to dispense with the moral force law can exert, both directly through the penalties it imposes and indirectly through the type of conduct which it exhorts the community to maintain. Laws may do much to raise and sustain the tone of all the persons engaged in public affairs as officials or as legislators, not only by appealing to their conscience, but by giving them a quick and easy reply to those who seek improper favours from them. A statute may express the best conscience of the whole people and set the standard they approve, even where the practice of most individuals falls short of the standard. If the prosecuting authorities and the courts do their duty unflinchingly, without regard to the social position of the offender, a statute may bring the practice of ordinary men up to the level of that collective conscience of the nation which it embodies.
In every walk of life a class of persons constantly subject to a particular set of temptations is apt to form habits, due to the pressure of those temptations, which are below what the conscience of the better men in the community approves. The aim of legislation, as expressing that best conscience of the whole community, ought to be to correct or extirpate those habits and make each particular class understand that it is not to be excused because it has special temptations and thinks its own sins venial. Even the men who yield to the temptations peculiar to their own class are willing to join in condemning those who yield to some other kind of temptation. Thus the “better conscience” may succeed in screwing up one class after another to a higher level. But the enactment of a law is not enough. It must be strictly enforced. Procedure must be prompt. Juries must be firm. Technicalities must not be suffered to obstruct the march of justice. Sentences must be carried out, else the statute will become, as statutes often have become, a record of aspiration rather than of accomplishment.
To contrive plans by which the interest of the citizen in public affairs shall be aroused and sustained, is far easier than to induce the citizen to use and to go on using, year in and year out, the contrivances and opportunities provided for his benefit. Yet it is from the heart and will of the citizen that all real and lasting improvements must proceed. In the words of the Gospel, it is the inside of the cup and platter that must be made clean. The central problem of civic duty is the ethical problem. Indifference, selfish interests, the excesses of party spirit, will all begin to disappear as civic life is lifted on to a higher plane, and as the number of those who, standing on that higher plane, will apply a strict test to their own conduct and to that of their leaders, realizing and striving to discharge their responsibilities, goes on steadily increasing until they come to form the majority of the people. What we have called “the better conscience” must be grafted on to the “wild stock” of the natural Average Man.
How is this to be done? The difficulty is the same as that which meets the social reformer or the preacher of religion.
One must try to reach the Will through the Soul. The most obvious way to begin is through the education of those who are to be citizens, moral education combined with and made the foundation for instruction in civic duty. This is a task which the Swiss alone among European nations seem to have seriously undertaken. Here in America it has become doubly important through the recent entrance into your community of a vast mass of immigrants, most of them ignorant of our language, still more of them ignorant, not only of your institutions, but of the general principles and habits of free government. Most of them doubtless belong to races of high natural intelligence, and many of them have the simple virtues of the peasant. You are providing for all of them good schools, and their children will soon become Americans in speech and habits, quite patriotic enough so far as flag-waving goes. But they will not so soon or so completely acquire your intellectual and moral standard, or imbibe your historical and religious traditions. There is no fear but what they will quickly learn to vote. To some Europeans you seem to have been overconfident in intrusting them with a power which most of them cannot yet have learned to use wisely. That however you have done, and as you hold that it cannot now be undone, your task must now be to teach them, if you can, to understand your institutions, to think about the vote they have to give, and to realize the responsibilities which the suffrage implies as these were realized by your New England forefathers when they planted free commonwealths in the wilderness nearly three centuries ago.
Valuable as instruction may be in fitting the citizen to comprehend and judge upon the issues which his vote determines, there must also be the will to apply his knowledge for the public good. What appeal shall be made to him?
We—I say “we” because this is our task in Europe no less than it is yours here—we may appeal to his enlightened self-interest, making self-interest so enlightened that it loses its selfish quality. We can remind him of all the useful work which governments may accomplish when they are conducted by the right men in the right spirit. Take, for instance, the work to be performed in those cities wherein so large and increasing a part of the population now dwell. How much remains to be done to make cities healthier, to secure better dwellings for the poor, to root out nests of crime, to remove the temptations to intemperance and gambling, to bring within the reach of the poorest all possible facilities both for intellectual progress and for enjoying the pleasures of art and music! How much may we do so to adorn the city with parks and public buildings as to make its external aspect instil the sense of beauty into its inhabitants and give them a fine pride in it! These are some of the tasks which cannot safely be intrusted to a municipality unless its government is above suspicion, unless men of probity and capacity are placed in power, unless the whole community extends its sympathy to the work and keeps a vigilant eye upon all the officials. Municipal governments cannot be encouraged to own public utilities so long as there is a risk that somebody may own municipal governments. Have we not here a strong motive for securing purity and efficiency in city administration? Is it not the personal interest of every one of us that the city we dwell in should be such as I have sought to describe? Nothing makes more for happiness than to see others around one happy. The rich residents need not grudge—nor indeed would your rich residents grudge, for there is less grumbling among the rich tax payers here than in Europe—taxation which they could see was being honestly spent for the benefit of the city. The interest each one of us has as a member of a city or a nation in seeing our fellow-citizens healthy, peaceful, and happy is a greater interest, if it be measured in terms of our own real enjoyment of life, than is that interest, of which we so constantly are reminded, which we have in making the State either wealthy by the development of trade, or formidable to foreign countries by its armaments.
We may also appeal to every citizen’s sense of dignity and self-respect. We may bid him recollect that he is the heir of rights and privileges which you and our ancestors fought for, and which place him, whatever his birth or fortune, among the rulers of his country. He is unworthy of himself, unmindful of what he owes to the Constitution that has given him these functions, if he does not try to discharge them worthily. These considerations are no doubt familiar to us Englishmen and Americans, though we may not always feel their force as deeply as we ought. To the new immigrants of whom I have already spoken they are unfamiliar; yet to the best among these also they have sometimes powerfully appealed. You had, in the last generation, no more high-minded and patriotic citizen than the German exile of 1849, the late Mr. Carl Schurz.
When every motive has been invoked, and every expedient applied that can stimulate the sense of civic duty, one never can feel sure that the desired result will follow. The moral reformer and the preacher of religion have the same experience. The ebbs and flows of ethical life are beyond the reach of scientific prediction. There are times of awakening, “times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord,” as your Puritan ancestors said, but we do not know when they will come nor can we explain why they come just when they do. Every man can recall moments in his own life when the sky seemed to open above him, and when his vision was so quickened that all things stood transfigured in a purer and brighter radiance, when duty, and even toil done for the sake of duty, seemed beautiful and full of joy.
You remember Wordsworth’s lines—
“Hence, in a season of fair weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that celestial sea
That brought us hither.”
If we survey the wide field of European history, we shall find that something like this happens with nations also. They, too, have moments of exaltation, moments of depression. Their ideals rise and fall. They are for a time filled with a spirit which seeks truth, which loves honour, which is ready for self-sacrifice; and after a time the light begins to fade from the hills and this spirit lingers only among the best souls.
Such a spirit is sometimes evoked by a great national crisis which thrills all hearts. This happened to England or at least to a large part of the people of England, in the seventeenth century. It happened to Germany in the days of the War of Liberation, and to Italy when she was striving to expel the Austrians and the petty princes who ruled by Austria’s help. You here felt it during the War of Secession. Sometimes, and usually at one of these crises, a great man stands out who helps to raise the feeling of his people and inspire them with his own lofty thoughts and aims. Such a man was Mazzini, seventy years ago in Italy. Such were Washington and Lincoln, the former more by his example than by his words, the latter by both, yet most by the quiet patience, dignity, and hopefulness which he showed in the darkest hours. Nations respond to the appeal which such a man makes to their best instincts. He typifies for the moment whatever is highest in them.
Unhappily, with nations as with individuals, there is apt to be a relapse from these loftier moods into the old common ways when selfish interest and trivial pleasures resume their sway. There comes a sort of reaction from the stress of virtue and strenuous high-soaring effort. Everything looks gray and dull. The divine light has died out of the sky. This, too, is an oft-repeated lesson of European history. Yet the reaction and decline are not inevitable. When an individual man has been raised above himself by some spiritual impulse, he is sometimes able to hold the ground he has won. His will may have been strengthened. He has learnt to control the meaner desires. The impulse that stirred him is not wholly spent, because the nobler thoughts and acts which it prompted have become a habit with him. So, too, with a nation. What habits are to the individual man, that, to a nation, are its Traditions. They are the memories of the Past turned into the standards of the Present. High traditions go to form a code of honour, which speaks with authority to the sense of honour. Whoever transgresses that code is felt to be unworthy of the nation, unfit to hold that place in its respect and confidence which the great ones of the days of old have held. Pride in the glorious foretime of the race and in its heroes sustains in the individual man who is called to public duty, the personal pride which makes him feel that all his affections and all his emotions stand rooted in the sense of honour, which is, for the man and for the nation, the foundation of all virtue.
We have seen in our own time, in the people of Japan, a striking example of what the passionate attachment to a national ideal can do in war to intensify the sense of duty and self-sacrifice. A similar example is held up to us by those who have recorded the earlier annals of Rome. The deepest moral they teach is the splendid power which the love of Rome and the idea of what her children owed to her exercised over her great citizens, enabling them to set shining examples of devotion to the city which the world has admired ever since. Each example evoked later examples in later generations, till at last in a changed community, its upper class demoralized by wealth and power even more than it was torn by discord, its lower classes corrupted by the upper and looking on their suffrage as a means of gain, the ancient traditions died out. Whoever, studying the conditions of modern European democracies, sees the infinite fatalities which popular government in large countries full of rich men and of opportunities for acquiring riches, offers for the perversion of government to private selfish ends, will often feel that those European States which have maintained the highest standard of civic purity have done it in respect of their Traditions. Were these to be weakened, the fabric might crumble into dust.
Every new generation as it comes up can make the traditions which it finds better or worse. If its imagination is touched and its emotions stirred by all that is finest in the history of its country, it learns to live up to the ideals set before it, and thus it strengthens the best standards of conduct it has inherited and prolongs the reverence felt for them.
The responsibility for forming ideals and fixing standards does not belong to statesmen alone. It belongs, and now perhaps more largely than ever before, to the intellectual leaders of the nation, and especially to those who address the people in the universities and through the press. Teachers, writers, journalists, are forming the mind of modern nations to an extent previously unknown. Here they have opportunities such as have existed never before, nor in any other country, for trying to inspire the nation with a love of truth and honour, with a sense of the high obligations of citizenship, and especially of those who hold public office.
Of the power which the daily press exerts upon the thought and the tastes of the people through the matter it scatters among them, and of the grave import of the choice it has always and everywhere to make between the serious treatment of public issues and that cheap cynicism which so many readers find amusing, there is no need to speak here. You know better than I do how far those who direct the press realize and try to discharge the responsibilities which attach to their power.
The observer who seeks to discern and estimate the forces working for good or evil that mark the spirit and tendencies of an age, finds it easiest to do this by noting the changes which have occurred within his own memory. To-day everyone seems to dwell upon the growth not only of luxury, but of the passion for amusement, and most of those who can look back thirty or forty years find in this growth grounds for discouragement. I deny neither the fact nor the significance of the auguries that it suggests. But let us also note a hopeful sign manifest during the last twenty years both here and in England. It is the diffusion among the educated and richer classes of a warmer feeling of sympathy and a stronger feeling of responsibility for the less fortunate sections of the community. There is more of a sense of brotherhood, more of a desire to help, more of a discontent with those arrangements of society which press hardly on the common man than there was forty years ago. This altruistic spirit which is now everywhere visible in the field of private philanthropic work, seems likely to spread into the field of civic action also, and may there become a new motive power. It has already become a more efficient force in legislation than it ever was before. We may well hope that it will draw more and more of those who love and seek to help their fellow-men into that legislative and administrative work whose opportunities for grappling with economic and social problems become every day greater.
Here in America I am told in nearly every city I visit that the young men are more and more caring for and bestirring themselves to discharge their civic duties. That is the best news one can hear. Surely no country makes so clear a call upon her citizens to work for her as yours does. Think of the wide-spreading results which good solid work produces on so vast a community, where everything achieved for good in one place is quickly known and may be quickly imitated in another. Think of the advantages for the development of the highest civilization which the boundless resources of your territory provide. Think of that principle of the Sovereignty of the People which you have carried further than it was ever carried before and which requires and inspires and, indeed, compels you to endeavour to make the whole people fit to bear a weight and discharge a task such as no other multitude of men ever yet undertook. Think of the sense of fraternity, also without precedent in any other great nation, which binds all Americans together and makes it easier here than elsewhere for each citizen to meet every other citizen as an equal upon a common ground. One who, coming from the Old World, remembers the greater difficulties the Old World has to face, rejoices to think how much, with all these advantages, the youth of America, such youth as I see here to-night in this venerable university, may accomplish for the future of your country. Nature has done her best to provide a foundation whereon the fabric of an enlightened and steadily advancing civilization may be reared. It is for you to build upon that foundation. Free from many of the dangers that surround the States of Europe, you have unequalled opportunities for showing what a high spirit of citizenship—zealous, intelligent, disinterested—may do for the happiness and dignity of a mighty nation, enabling it to become what its founders hoped it might be—a model for other peoples more lately emerged into the sunlight of freedom.