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.
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