cash register we have invented; in spite of my Puritan rebel and her numerous company—in spite of all that, our land is still full of dreamers of dreams, who yet are awake and practical enough to make their dreams come true.
“It is just like you Americans,” said General Riciotto Garibaldi, to my “boys,” as they stood together at the foot of his father’s monument in Rome; while he listened to the story of their journeyings in the immigrants’ land, living in their huts in Hungary, Poland and Italy, learning their language and their ways, that they may know how to minister to their needs over here, and bind us to them and them to us. “It is just like you Americans. We Italians think about those things and make poetry; you go to work at a great dream to make it true.”
My faith in the dreams of the great dreamers has never wavered. I knew that the prophet’s vision was not a Fata Morgana, and that the words of the Son of Man came straight from the fountain of truth. Believing in them and believing in American manhood and womanhood, in their altruism and in their faith, and believing in the essential humanity of our crowding alien host—I believe that cosmos is being created and that chaos will disappear.
Finally, what we teach the immigrant by precept or by example, he will become. He will bequeath our virtues or our vices, not only to the next generation which will spring with virgin strength from his loins; but through thousands of invisible channels, he will send these blessings or curses to the ends of the earth.
The issues of the Kingdom of God in this generation are with America.