Attempt now to estimate our resources.  Your mathematics are not equal to it.  The available productivity of the Mississippi Valley exceeds the supply of all the fertile regions of fable or history.  The country watered by the Columbia or the Oregon surpasses in wealth-producing power the valleys of the Nile or the Euphrates in ancient times.

Our deposits of coal and iron already under development are equalled nowhere on earth except perhaps by the unopened mines of China; and greater fields of ore and fuel than those which we are now working are known positively to exist within our dominions.  The mere indexing of America’s material possibilities well-nigh stuns credulity.

But all these are definite and physical things, things you can measure or weigh.  More valuable than all of these combined are our American institutions and our exalted National ideals.

You can meditate all day on the reasons for pride in your Americanism, and each reason you think of will suggest others.  The examples I have given are only hints.  Be proud of your Americanism, therefore—­earnestly, aggressively, fervently proud of your Americanism.  I like to see patriotism have a religious ardor.  It will put you in harmony with the people you are living among, which, I repeat, is the first condition of success.

Also it puts a vigor, manliness, mental productivity into you.  Make it a practise, when going to your business or your work each morning, to reflect how blessed a thing it is to be an American, and why it is a blessed thing.  Then observe how your backbone stiffens as you think, how your step becomes light and firm, how the very soul of you floods with a kind of sunlight of confidence.

There was a time when each one of that masterful race that lived upon the Tiber’s banks in the days of the Eternal City’s greatest glory believed that “to be a Roman was greater than to be a king.”  And the ideals of civic duty were more nearly realized in that golden hour of human history than they had ever been before—­or than they have ever been since until now.

Very well, young man.  If to be a Roman then was greater than to be a king, what is it to be an American now?

Think of it!  To be an American at the beginning of the twentieth century!

Ponder over these eleven words for ten minutes every day.  After a while you will begin to appreciate your country, its institutions, and the possibilities which both produce.

Realizing, then, that you are an American, and that, after all, this is a richer possession than royal birth, make up your mind that you will be worthy of it, and then go ahead and be worthy of it.

Be a part of our institutions.  And understand clearly what our institutions are.  They are not a set of written laws. American institutions are citizens in action. American institutions are the American people in the tangible and physical process of governing themselves.