The Pilgrim, and the American of Today | Page 8

The public
opinion which sustains these deeds is as un-American, and as guilty as
their doers. While abuses like these exist, tolerated by the majority that
not only make public opinion, but make the laws, this is not a
government for the people, any more than a government of bosses is a
government by the people.
The Pilgrims of Plymouth could see no way of shaping their lives in
accordance with the higher law except by separating themselves from
the world. We have their problem, how to make the most of our lives,
but the conditions have changed. Ours is an age of scientific aggression,
fierce competition, and the widest toleration. The horizon of humanity
is enlarged. To live the life now is to be no more isolated or separate,
but to throw ourselves into the great movement of thought, and feeling,
and achievement. Therefore we are altruists in charity, missionaries of
humanity, patriots at home. Therefore we have a justifiable pride in the
growth, the wealth, the power of the nation, the state, the city. But the
stream cannot rise above its source. The nation is what the majority of
its citizens are. It is to be judged by the condition of its humblest
members. We shall gain nothing over other experiments in government,
although we have money enough to buy peace from the rest of the
world, or arms enough to conquer it, although we rear upon our
material prosperity a structure of scientific achievement, of art, of
literature unparalleled, if the common people are not sharers in this
great prosperity, and are not fuller of hope and of the enjoyment of life
than common people ever were before.
And we are all common people when it comes to that. Whatever the
greatness of the nation, whatever the accumulation of wealth, the worth

of the world to us is exactly the worth of our individual lives. The
magnificent opportunity in this Republic is that we may make the most
possible out of our lives, and it will continue only as we adhere to the
original conception of the Republic. Politics without virtue, money-
making without conscience, may result in great splendor, but as such an
experiment is not new, its end can be predicted. An agreeable home for
a vast, and a free, and a happy people is quite another thing. It expects
thrift, it expects prosperity, but its foundations are in the moral and
spiritual life.
Therefore I say that we are still to make the continent we have
discovered and occupied, and that the scope and quality of our national
life are still to be determined. If they are determined not by the narrow
tenets of the Pilgrims, but by their high sense of duty, and of the value
of the human soul, it will be a nation that will call the world up to a
higher plane of action than it ever attained before, and it will bring in a
new era of humanity. If they are determined by the vulgar successes of
a mere material civilization, it is an experiment not worth making. It
would have been better to have left the Indians in possession, to see if
they could not have evolved out of their barbarism some new line of
action.
The Pilgrims were poor, and they built their huts on a shore which gave
such niggardly returns for labor that the utmost thrift was required to
secure the necessaries of life. Out of this struggle with nature and
savage life was no doubt evolved the hardihood, the endurance, that
builds states and wins the favors of fortune. But poverty is not
commonly a nurse of virtue, long continued, it is a degeneration. It is
almost as difficult for the very poor man to be virtuous as for the very
rich man; and very good and very rich at the same time, says Socrates,
a man cannot be. It is a great people that can withstand great prosperity.
The condition of comfort without extremes is that which makes a
happy life. I know a village of old-fashioned houses and broad
elm-shaded streets in New England, indeed more than one, where no
one is inordinately rich, and no one is very poor, where paupers are so
scarce that it is difficult to find beneficiaries for the small traditionary
contribution for the church poor; where the homes are centres of

intelligence, of interest in books, in the news of the world, in the church,
in the school, in politics; whence go young men and women to the
colleges, teachers to the illiterate parts of the land, missionaries to the
city slums. Multiply such villages all over the country, and we have one
of the chief requisites for an ideal republic.
This has been the longing of humanity.