But after you have traveled all over the earth; after you have seen Teutonic system made ten times more perfect in Japan and Slav patience outdone in China—­in short, after you circle the globe and sojourn among its peoples, you will come home a living, breathing, thinking Fourth of July.

Of course I do not mean that we are perfect—­we are still crude; or that we have not made mistakes—­we have rioted in error; or that other nations cannot teach us something—­we can learn greatly from them, and we will.  But this is the point as it affects you, young man:  Among all the uncounted millions of human beings on this earth, none has the opportunities to make the most of life that the young American has.

No government now existing or described by history gives you such liberty of effort, or scatters before and around you such chances.  No soil now occupied by any separate nation is so bountiful or resourceful.  No other people have our American unwearied spirit of youth.  The composite brain of no other nation yeasts in thought and ideas like the combined intellect of the American millions.

For, look you, our institutions invite every man to do his best.  There is positively no position which a man of sufficient mind, energy, and character cannot obtain, no reward he cannot win.  Everybody, therefore, is literally “putting in his best licks” in America.  In other countries there is in comparison a general atmosphere of “what’s the use?”—­a comparative slumberousness of activity and effort.

Then, again, the American people are made up of the world’s boldest spirits and the descendants of such.  The Puritans, who gave force, direction, and elevation to our national thought and purpose, were the stoutest hearts, the most productive minds of their time.  Their characteristics have not disappeared from their children.

The same is true, generally, but of course in an infinitely lesser degree, of most of our immigrants.  Usually it is the nervy and imaginative men who go to a new country.  Our own pioneers were endowed with daring and vision.  They had the courage and initiative to leave the scarcely warmed beds of their new-made homes and push farther on into the wilderness.

The blue-eyed, light-haired Swede who, among all in his little Scandinavian village, decides to come to America, the Irishman who does the like, are, for the most part, the hopeful, venturesome, self-reliant members of their communities across the sea.  The German who turns his face from the Fatherland, seeking a new home half across the world, brings us some of the most vigorous blood in the Kaiser’s Empire.  Such men believe in better things—­have the will to try to get those better things.

Thus, the American Republic is an absorbent of the optimism of the world.  We attract to ourselves the children of faith and hope among the common people of other nations.  And these are the types we are after.  They are the most vital, the least exhausted.  I should not want “the flower” of other nations to immigrate to our shores.  Nature is through with them, and they must be renewed from below.  Do not object to human raw material for our citizenship.  One or two generations will produce the finished product.