It is the home which interprets the whole universe for you.  And it is the home which not only furnishes a reason for your existence, but in itself constitutes the motive for all manly effort.  Quite naturally, therefore, the home is concerned with character more than it is with grosser things.

The instruction which the American mother gives her son is a training in honor rather than in success.  Her passion for righteousness creeps into the commonplaces of her daily speech.  “Be a good boy” is what she says to the little fellow each day as he starts to school.  “Be a good boy” is what she says to the youth when he leaves for college.  “Be a good boy” is still her sacred charge when, standing at the gate, she gives him her blessing as he goes out into the world.

And, finally, “Be a good boy” is what her lips murmur when in after years, rich perchance in achievement, honor, power, or wealth, the man of the world returns to the old home to again get her benediction, and have his weary soul refreshed by the beauty of her almost holy presence.

For you never cease to be a boy to her; and her supreme wish and most passionate prayer for you is not that you shall be a strong man, or a rich man, or an able man—­she wants you to be all these, of course, and everything else that is fine—­but chiefly she cares that you should be a good man.

And so it is that home is the temple of ideals, the sanctuary of the true, the beautiful, and the good.  Or put it in scientific phrase, and say:  Home is the laboratory of character.  The home is the place where you get what the common people so pithily call your “bringing up.”  It is there where your conception of all human relationships is formed.  It is there where it is largely determined whether you will make your life worth the living.

Your future sits at the old fireside.  The fate of the Nation abides beneath the roof-tree.  And so it is that neither college, nor market-place, nor forum, nor editor’s sanctum, nor traffic of the high seas, nor anything that you may do, nor any environment that may hereafter surround you, is so important to you as the old home and your early years.  Yes, and not to you only, but to the Nation also.

Nothing means so much to the Republic as the influence of the American home upon the young manhood of the Nation.

We are about to enter upon the serious problem of the regulation of railway rates, which is a beginning in some sort of the national control of transportation.  It is a problem whose weight and possibilities challenge and all but confound every thoughtful and serious mind.  Every step in its solution must be taken with both wisdom and justice.

Our relations with the Orient daily increase, and the fixedness of our position in the Far East hourly becomes more definite.  The public man wears a scarf about his eyes who does not see that our historic statesmanship during this century will deal with our growing mastery of the Pacific, and the weaving backward and forward across that ocean of our ever-multiplying relations with the East.