Canada has a great future; Canada more than any country can prove to America that the British Empire is based on laws which strive to be fair to all men and women, and do harm to none. Canada, with her French and English living in peace and legislating together can show that the Entente need never go. And Canada, too, can help me to explain to England that those who bark the loudest in America are those who least understand the best and most real in America, and very often are not Americans at all. All nations can have great futures, but all greatness can only be founded on what is truly great. Your fifty thousand Canadians have shown the way; let us never forget that the greatest Way-shower of all came teaching us to do unto others as we would they should do unto us. The nations that do that will conquer all opposition, surmount all obstacles and secure the only true greatness.
VII[G]
“Law, humanity, and Christianity make a perfect state.”
EDUCATION is a dangerous thing unless it is started on the right lines. To start educating yourself for yourself is certainly one of the most misleading or mistaken forms of self-improvement. Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer—into a selflessness which links us with all humanity. Political education should do the same. The more I see of life the more I see that the only way is the narrow way and broad view.
When I landed here in New York about six weeks ago I expected to make two speeches and then go to Virginia and renew my youth. I have made altogether forty speeches—I spent only eleven days in Virginia and my youth has obviously not been renewed. However, in spite of talking, I have learned a lot—I have found out what a glorious thing it is to belong to two countries and try to be prejudiced against none. I’ve learned, too, how well all countries and all states think of Virginia, and well they might. It was in Virginia that the first laws of the best law-makers in the world were put into practice on this North American Continent—the common laws of England. It’s a wonderful tribute to these laws when one thinks of how well they have worked away from the little island on which they were started. Changed and improved, if you will, but always the same. Here we see all kinds of people from all kinds of countries, living uncommonly well and peacefully under these common laws. They seem almost like the Divine law in that they embrace all sorts and conditions of men.
The great merit of these common laws is this: They enable everyone to work out his own salvation in his own way. Now, we know that neither the law nor the state can make a man. But a good law, and a good state can go a long way toward helping a man to make himself. We must have law, humanity, and Christianity to make a perfect state. I think we—and to-night I speak as a Virginian, not a British M. P. (so bear with me, as my time is growing short and I won’t speak as a Virginian again for some time)—we can feel that we have built this country on these three—a good deal of law, some humanity, and some Christianity.
Think of what America has taken on to her shores in the last hundred years! Now, it was not only humanity or Christianity which made us welcome the immigrants, any more than it was the search of these two qualities which brought them. They have come from necessity and we welcomed them from necessity. They brought much to the country and some have taken much away. It’s amazing to see how many returned to their native countries after a period of about twenty-five years. In the meantime they have helped develop the country, and if your common law and common humanity and common Christianity has been brought into action, we will have helped to develop them, and when they leave these shores they will carry away more than mere money. When we look at Europe to-day we almost wish we had sent more.
Many of these immigrants make fine citizens. Just think what Mr. Straus has done for the infant welfare of this city. Many never leave the country again. But many of them—until they learn better—just make a mass of illiterate voters who are used by our less fine citizens for political purposes, and their purposes are not for the betterment of our country or any other country, but too often for a richer and a fuller life in the worst sense of the word.