Thus, the American Republic is an absorbent of the optimism of the world. We attract to ourselves the children of faith and hope among the common people of other nations. And these are the types we are after. They are the most vital, the least exhausted. I should not want "the flower" of other nations to immigrate to our shores. Nature is through with them, and they must be renewed from below. Do not object to human raw material for our citizenship. One or two generations will produce the finished product.
What says Emerson:
"The lord is the peasant that was,
The peasant the lord that shall be.
The lord is hay, the peasant grass,
One dry and one the living tree."
The purpose of our institutions is to manufacture manhood.
Make it impossible for the criminal and diseased, the vicious and the decadent, to come to us; bar out those who seek our country merely because they cannot subsist in their own, and you will find that the remainder of our immigrants are valuable additions to our populations. Don't despise these common people who come to us from other lands.
Don't despise the common people anywhere on earth. The Master did not go to the "first citizens" for His followers. He selected the humblest. He chose fishermen. A promoter of a financial enterprise does not do this. But the Saviour was not a promoter; He was teacher, reformer, Redeemer.
Then, too, consider our imperial location on the globe. If all the minds of all the statesmen who ever lived were combined into one vast intellect of world-wisdom, and if this great composite brain should take an eternity to plan, it could not devise a land better located for power and world-dominance than the American Republic.
On the east is Europe, with an ocean between. This ocean is a highway for commerce and a fluid fortress for defense, an open gateway of trade and a bulwark of peace.
On the west is the Orient, with its multitude of millions. Between Asia and ourselves is again an ocean. And again this ocean is an invitation to effort and a condition of safety.
The Republic is thus enthroned between the two great oceans of the world. Its seat of power commands both Europe and Cathay.