We have had the wrong jury; we have had the wrong group,—­no, I will not say the wrong group, but too small a group,—­in control of the policies of the United States.  The average man has not been consulted, and his heart had begun to sink for fear he never would be consulted again.  Therefore, we have got to organize a government whose sympathies will be open to the whole body of the people of the United States, a government which will consult as large a proportion of the people of the United States as possible before it acts.  Because the great problem of government is to know what the average man is experiencing and is thinking about.  Most of us are average men; very few of us rise, except by fortunate accident, above the general level of the community about us; and therefore the man who thinks common thoughts, the man who has had common experiences, is almost always the man who interprets America aright.  Isn’t that the reason that we are proud of such stories as the story of Abraham Lincoln,—­a man who rose out of the ranks and interpreted America better than any man had interpreted it who had risen out of the privileged classes or the educated classes of America?

The hope of the United States in the present and in the future is the same that it has always been:  it is the hope and confidence that out of unknown homes will come men who will constitute themselves the masters of industry and of politics.  The average hopefulness, the average welfare, the average enterprise, the average initiative, of the United States are the only things that make it rich.  We are not rich because a few gentlemen direct our industry; we are rich because of our own intelligence and our own industry.  America does not consist of men who get their names into the newspapers; America does not consist politically of the men who set themselves up to be political leaders; she does not consist of the men who do most of her talking,—­they are important only so far as they speak for that great voiceless multitude of men who constitute the great body and the saving force of the nation.  Nobody who cannot speak the common thought, who does not move by the common impulse, is the man to speak for America, or for any of her future purposes.  Only he is fit to speak who knows the thoughts of the great body of citizens, the men who go about their business every day, the men who toil from morning till night, the men who go home tired in the evenings, the men who are carrying on the things we are so proud of.

You know how it thrills our blood sometimes to think how all the nations of the earth wait to see what America is going to do with her power, her physical power, her enormous resources, her enormous wealth.  The nations hold their breath to see what this young country will do with her young unspoiled strength; we cannot help but be proud that we are strong.  But what has made us strong?  The toil of millions of men, the toil of men who do not boast, who are inconspicuous, but who live their lives humbly from day to day; it is the great body of toilers that constitutes the might of America.  It is one of the glories of our land that nobody is able to predict from what family, from what region, from what race, even, the leaders of the country are going to come.  The great leaders of this country have not come very often from the established, “successful” families.