thrills all hearts. This happened to England or at least to a large
part of the people of England, in the seventeenth century. It happened
to Germany in the days of the War of Liberation, and to Italy when
she was striving to expel the Austrians and the petty princes who
ruled by Austria’s help. You here felt it during the War of Secession.
Sometimes, and usually at one of these crises, a great man stands out
who helps to raise the feeling of his people and inspire them with his
own lofty thoughts and aims. Such a man was Mazzini, seventy years
ago in Italy. Such were Washington and Lincoln, the former more by his
example than by his words, the latter by both, yet most by the quiet
patience, dignity, and hopefulness which he showed in the darkest
hours. Nations respond to the appeal which such a man makes to their
best instincts. He typifies for the moment whatever is highest in them.
Unhappily, with nations as with individuals, there is apt to be a
relapse from these loftier moods into the old common ways when selfish
interest and trivial pleasures resume their sway. There comes a sort
of reaction from the stress of virtue and strenuous high-soaring
effort. Everything looks gray and dull. The divine light has died out
of the sky. This, too, is an oft-repeated lesson of European history.
Yet the reaction and decline are not inevitable. When an individual
man has been raised above himself by some spiritual impulse, he is
sometimes able to hold the ground he has won. His will may have been
strengthened. He has learnt to control the meaner desires. The impulse
that stirred him is not wholly spent, because the nobler thoughts and
acts which it prompted have become a habit with him. So, too, with
a nation. What habits are to the individual man, that, to a nation,
are its Traditions. They are the memories of the Past turned into
the standards of the Present. High traditions go to form a code of
honour, which speaks with authority to the sense of honour. Whoever
transgresses that code is felt to be unworthy of the nation, unfit to
hold that place in its respect and confidence which the great ones
of the days of old have held. Pride in the glorious foretime of the
race and in its heroes sustains in the individual man who is called
to public duty, the personal pride which makes him feel that all his
affections and all his emotions stand rooted in the sense of honour,
which is, for the man and for the nation, the foundation of all virtue.
We have seen in our own time, in the people of Japan, a striking
example of what the passionate attachment to a national ideal can do
in war to intensify the sense of duty and self-sacrifice. A similar
example is held up to us by those who have recorded the earlier annals
of Rome. The deepest moral they teach is the splendid power which the
love of Rome and the idea of what her children owed to her exercised
over her great citizens, enabling them to set shining examples of
devotion to the city which the world has admired ever since. Each
example evoked later examples in later generations, till at last in
a changed community, its upper class demoralized by wealth and power
even more than it was torn by discord, its lower classes corrupted
by the upper and looking on their suffrage as a means of gain, the
ancient traditions died out. Whoever, studying the conditions of modern
European democracies, sees the infinite fatalities which popular
government in large countries full of rich men and of opportunities for
acquiring riches, offers for the perversion of government to private
selfish ends, will often feel that those European States which have
maintained the highest standard of civic purity have done it in respect
of their Traditions. Were these to be weakened, the fabric might
crumble into dust.
Every new generation as it comes up can make the traditions which it
finds better or worse. If its imagination is touched and its emotions
stirred by all that is finest in the history of its country, it learns
to live up to the ideals set before it, and thus it strengthens the
best standards of conduct it has inherited and prolongs the reverence
felt for them.
The responsibility for forming ideals and fixing standards does not
belong to statesmen alone. It belongs, and now perhaps more largely
than ever before, to the intellectual leaders of the nation, and
especially to those who address the people in the universities and
through the press. Teachers, writers, journalists, are forming the
mind of modern nations to an extent previously unknown. Here they
have opportunities such as have existed never before, nor in any
other country, for trying to inspire the nation with a love of truth
and honour, with a sense of the high obligations of citizenship, and
especially of those who hold public office.
Of the power which the daily press exerts upon the thought and the
tastes of the people through the matter it scatters among them, and
of the grave import of the choice it has always and everywhere to make
between the serious treatment of public issues and that cheap cynicism
which so many readers find amusing, there is no need to speak here. You
know better than I do how far those who direct the press realize and
try to discharge the responsibilities which attach to their power.
The observer who seeks to discern and estimate the forces working for
good or evil that mark the spirit and tendencies of an age, finds it
easiest to do this by noting the changes which have occurred within
his own memory. To-day everyone seems to dwell upon the growth not
only of luxury, but of the passion for amusement, and most of those
who can look back thirty or forty years find in this growth grounds
for discouragement. I deny neither the fact nor the significance of
the auguries that it suggests. But let us also note a hopeful sign
manifest during the last twenty years both here and in England. It
is the diffusion among the educated and richer classes of a warmer
feeling of sympathy and a stronger feeling of responsibility for the
less fortunate sections of the community. There is more of a sense
of brotherhood, more of a desire to help, more of a discontent with
those arrangements of society which press hardly on the common man
than there was forty years ago. This altruistic spirit which is now
everywhere visible in the field of private philanthropic work, seems
likely to spread into the field of civic action also, and may there
become a new motive power. It has already become a more efficient force
in legislation than it ever was before. We may well hope that it will
draw more and more of those who love and seek to help their fellow-men
into that legislative and administrative work whose opportunities for
grappling with economic and social problems become every day greater.
Here in America I am told in nearly every city I visit that the young
men are more and more caring for and bestirring themselves to discharge
their civic duties. That is the best news one can hear. Surely no
country makes so clear a call upon her citizens to work for her as
yours does. Think of the wide-spreading results which good solid work
produces on so vast a community, where everything achieved for good
in one place is quickly known and may be quickly imitated in another.
Think of the advantages for the development of the highest civilization
which the boundless resources of your territory provide. Think of that
principle of the Sovereignty of the People which you have carried
further than it was ever carried before and which requires and inspires
and, indeed, compels you to endeavour to make the whole people fit to
bear a weight and discharge a task such as no other multitude of men
ever yet undertook. Think of the sense of fraternity, also without
precedent in any other great nation, which binds all Americans together
and makes it easier here than elsewhere for each citizen to meet every
other citizen as an equal upon a common ground. One who, coming from
the Old World, remembers the greater difficulties the Old World has
to face, rejoices to think how much, with all these advantages, the
youth of America, such youth as I see here to-night in this venerable
university, may accomplish for the future of your country. Nature
has done her best to provide a foundation whereon the fabric of an
enlightened and steadily advancing civilization may be reared. It is
for you to build upon that foundation. Free from many of the dangers
that surround the States of Europe, you have unequalled opportunities
for showing what a high spirit of citizenship--zealous, intelligent,
disinterested--may do for the happiness and dignity of a mighty nation,
enabling it to become what its founders hoped it might be--a model for
other peoples more lately emerged into the sunlight of freedom.
Transcriber’s Note
Page 48: “Americans” was printed as “Ameritans”, and changed here,
presuming it was a typographical error.