My friends, we all know that we are going to live together.  There is no more baseless theory on God’s earth than that we are going to take eight millions of men and send them out of this country, because they want to learn something, because they want to live like men and be men and citizens, and because God has put them here for our work and our education.  I tell you, my friends, the immediate problem seems to me only one form of a larger problem.  What is the problem of the planet to-day?  Is it not the problem as to which of two theories shall maintain itself concerning the masses which are at the base of society?  Isn’t that the problem in every nation?  Isn’t it the problem here concerning white and black, red and yellow alike?  There is no possible doubt about it.  The labor problem, do you call it?  Here is one theory which holds that the masses shall be kept down.  Here is the other system which maintains that they shall be elevated.  We have got to live with them in the world, for I imagine there is nobody talking about sending them to the moon.  Don’t you know, and I know that the world is growing smaller every year?  Talk about neighborhood—­look over this continent.  Germany is here; Ireland is here; France is here; China is here; Africa is here.  We are neighbors to everybody.  We are touching elbows across the ocean all the time.  If you send anybody to Africa, why, he is only next door; and by and by we shall have air ships that will float up over there in a few hours!  How are you going to manage this thing?  We have got to live together in this world, and nearer and nearer to one another with every generation; and this country may just as well be the field in which to try the experiment out as any other country on the face of the globe.  I think we are going to try it out to the end.  There are symptoms of it all around.

But the conflict is here; it is in the air.  It is not a conflict by sword.  You know they tell the legend among the old mediaeval stories that in one of the great battles on one of the plains of Europe, after the quiet darkness of the night had settled over the scene, the field strewn all over with the forms of the mangled and the dead, there were seen in the shuddering midnight air to rise spirit forms maintaining the deadly conflict there, and carrying on the battle of the day.  It seems to me, in some sense, true of us.  The sword has done what the sword could do; it can do no more.  But the conflict is here in the air, pronouncing itself with every event that drifts across our horizon.  Harvard sets its seal on the brow of Clement Morgan, and the Memphis Avalanche has no other word for him than to call him “that dusky steer with the crumpled forelock.”