I see a world at peace, adorned with every form of art, with music’s myriad voices thrilled, while lips are rich with words of love and truth; a world in which no exile sighs, no prisoner mourns; a world on which the gibbet’s shadow does not fall; a world where labor reaps its full reward, where work and worth go hand in hand, where the poor girl, trying to win bread with a needle—the needle that has been called “the asp for the breast of the poor”—is not driven to the desperate choice of crime or death or suicide or shame.
I see a world without the beggar’s outstretched palm, the miser’s heartless, stony stare, the piteous wail of want, the livid lips of lies, the cruel eyes of scorn.
I see a race without disease of flesh or brain—shapely and fair, married harmony of form and function, and as I look, life lengthens, joy deepens, love canopies the earth; and over all in the great dome shines the eternal star of human hope.
CREED OF AMERICANISM
I have faith that this government of ours was divinely ordained to disclose whether men are by nature fitted or can by education be made fit for self-government; to teach Jew and Greek, bondman and free, alike, the essential equality of all men before the law and to be tender and true to humanity everywhere and under all circumstances; to reveal that service is the highest reward of life....
I believe that the world, now advancing and now retreating, is nevertheless moving forward to a far-off divine event wherein the tongues of Babel will again be blended in the language of a common brotherhood; and I believe that I can reach the highest ideal of my tradition and my lineage as an American—as a man, as a citizen and as a public official—when I judge my fellowmen without malice and with charity, when I worry more about my own motives and conduct and less about the motives and conduct of others. The time I am liable to be wholly wrong is when I know that I am absolutely right....
I believe there is no finer form of government than the one under which we live and that I ought to be willing to live or to die, as God decrees, that it may not perish from off the earth through treachery within or through assault without; and I believe that though my first right is to be a partisan, that my first duty, when the only principles on which free government can rest are being strained, is to be a patriot and to follow in a wilderness of words that clear call which bids me guard and defend the ark of our national covenant.—From “Vice-President Marshall’s Inaugural Address.”
WHAT IS OUR COUNTRY
By Governor Newton Booth
(Extract from speech delivered at Sacramento, Calif., August 14, 1862.)