The Pilgrim, and the American of Today | Page 9

Poets have sung of it; prophets
have had visions of it; statesmen have striven for it; patriots have died
for it. There must be somewhere, some time, a fruitage of so much
suffering, so much sacrifice, a land of equal laws and equal
opportunities, a government of all the people for the benefit of all the
people; where the conditions of living will be so adjusted that every
one can make the most out of his life, neither waste it in hopeless
slavery nor in selfish tyranny, where poverty and crime will not be
hereditary generation after generation, where great fortunes will not be
for vulgar ostentation, but for the service of humanity and the glory of
the State, where the privileges of freemen will be so valued that no one
will be mean enough to sell his vote nor corrupt enough to attempt to
buy a vote, where the truth will at last be recognized, that the society is
not prosperous when half its members are lucky, and half are miserable,
and that that nation can only be truly great that takes its orders from the
Great Teacher of Humanity.
And, lo! at last here is a great continent, virgin, fertile, a land of sun
and shower and bloom, discovered, organized into a great nation, with
a government flexible in a distributed home rule, stiff as steel in a
central power, already rich, already powerful. It is a land of promise.
The materials are all here. Will you repeat the old experiment of a
material success and a moral and spiritual failure? Or will you make it
what humanity has passionately longed for? Only good individual lives
can do that.

End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Pilgrim and American by
Charles Dudley Warner

The Pilgrim and the American of Today
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