It warms my heart that you should give me such a reception; but it is
not of myself that I wish to think to-night, but of those who have just
become citizens of the United States.
This is the only country in the world which experiences this constant
and repeated rebirth. Other countries depend upon the multiplication of
their own native people. This country is constantly drinking strength
out of new sources by the voluntary association with it of great bodies
of strong men and forward-looking women out of other lands. And so by
the gift of the free will of independent people it is being constantly
renewed from generation to generation by the same process by which it
was originally created. It is as if humanity had determined to see to it
that this great Nation, founded for the benefit of humanity, should not
lack for the allegiance of the people of the world.
You have just taken an oath of allegiance to the United States. Of
allegiance to whom? Of allegiance to no one, unless it be God--certainly
not of allegiance to those who temporarily represent this great
Government. You have taken an oath of allegiance to a great ideal, to a
great body of principles, to a great hope of the human race. You have
said, "We are going to America not only to earn a living, not only to
seek the things which it was more difficult to obtain where we were
born, but to help forward the great enterprises of the human spirit--to
let men know that everywhere in the world there are men who will cross
strange oceans and go where a speech is spoken which is alien to them if
they can but satisfy their quest for what their spirits crave; knowing
that whatever the speech there is but one longing and utterance of the
human heart, and that is for liberty and justice." And while you bring
all countries with you, you come with a purpose of leaving all other
countries behind you--bringing what is best of their spirit, but not
looking over your shoulders and seeking to perpetuate what you intended
to leave behind in them. I certainly would not be one even to suggest
that a man cease to love the home of his birth and the nation of his
origin--these things are very sacred and ought not to be put out of our
hearts--but it is one thing to love the place where you were born and it
is another thing to dedicate yourself to the place to which you go. You
cannot dedicate yourself to America unless you become in every respect
and with every purpose of your will thorough Americans. You cannot
become thorough Americans if you think of yourselves in groups. America
does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to
a particular national group in America has not yet become an American,
and the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no
worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes.
My urgent advice to you would be, not only always to think first of
America, but always, also, to think first of humanity. You do not love
humanity if you seek to divide humanity into jealous camps. Humanity can
be welded together only by love, by sympathy, by justice, not by
jealousy and hatred. I am sorry for the man who seeks to make personal
capital out of the passions of his fellow-men. He has lost the touch
and ideal of America, for America was created to unite mankind by those
passions which lift and not by the passions which separate and debase.
We came to America, either ourselves or in the persons of our ancestors,
to better the ideals of men, to make them see finer things than they had
seen before, to get rid of the things that divide and to make sure of
the things that unite. It was but an historical accident no doubt that
this great country was called the "United States"; yet I am very
thankful that it has that word "United" in its title, and the man who
seeks to divide man from man, group from group, interest from interest
in this great Union is striking at its very heart.
It is a very interesting circumstance to me, in thinking of those of you
who have just sworn allegiance to this great Government, that you were
drawn across the ocean by some beckoning finger of hope, by some belief,
by some vision of a new kind of justice, by some expectation of a better
kind of life. No doubt you have been disappointed in some of us. Some of
us are very disappointing. No doubt you have found that justice in the
United States goes only with a pure heart and a right purpose as it does
everywhere else in the world. No doubt what you found here did not seem
touched for you, after all, with the complete beauty of the ideal which
you had conceived beforehand. But remember this: If we had grown at all
poor in the ideal, you brought some of it with you. A man does not go
out to seek the thing that is not in him. A man does not hope for the
thing that he does not believe in, and if some of us have forgotten what
America believed in, you, at any rate, imported in your own hearts a
renewal of the belief. That is the reason that I, for one, make you
welcome. If I have in any degree forgotten what America was intended
for, I will thank God if you will remind me. I was born in America. You
dreamed dreams of what America was to be, and I hope you brought the
dreams with you. No man that does not see visions will ever realize any
high hope or undertake any high enterprise. Just because you brought
dreams with you, America is more likely to realize dreams such as you
brought. You are enriching us if you came expecting us to be better than
we are.
See, my friends, what that means. It means that Americans must have a
consciousness different from the consciousness of every other nation in
the world. I am not saying this with even the slightest thought of
criticism of other nations. You know how it is with a family. A family
gets centered on itself if it is not careful and is less interested in
the neighbors than it is in its own members. So a nation that is not
constantly renewed out of new sources is apt to have the narrowness and
prejudice of a family; whereas, America must have this consciousness,
that on all sides it touches elbows and touches hearts with all the
nations of mankind. The example of America must be a special example.
The example of America must be the example not merely of peace because
it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and
elevating influence of the world and strife is not. There is such a
thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a
nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force
that it is right.
You have come into this great Nation voluntarily seeking something that
we have to give, and all that we have to give is this: We cannot exempt
you from work. No man is exempt from work anywhere in the world. We
cannot exempt you from the strife and the heartbreaking burden of the
struggle of the day--that is common to mankind everywhere; we cannot
exempt you from the loads that you must carry. We can only make them
light by the spirit in which they are carried. That is the spirit of
hope, it is the spirit of liberty, it is the spirit of justice.
When I was asked, therefore, by the Mayor and the committee that
accompanied him to come up from Washington to meet this great company of
newly admitted citizens, I could not decline the invitation. I ought not
to be away from Washington, and yet I feel that it has renewed my spirit
as an American to be here. In Washington men tell you so many things
every day that are not so, and I like to come and stand in the presence
of a great body of my fellow-citizens, whether they have been
fellow-citizens a long time or a short time, and drink, as it were, out
of the common fountains with them and go back feeling what you have so
generously given me--the sense of your support and of the living
vitality in your hearts of the great ideals which have made America the
hope of the world.