Very well.  Such a man will be searching for his mate and finding her, planning a home and building it before he is twenty-five; and the man who does not, is either too weak or too selfish to do it.  In either case you need not fear him.  “He will never set the world afire.”

I am assuming that you are man enough to be a man—­not a mere machine of selfishness on the one hand, or an anemic imitation of masculinity on the other hand.  I am assuming that you think—­and, what is more important, feel—­that Nature knows what she is about; that “God is not mocked”; and that therefore you propose to live in harmony with universal law.

Therefore, I am assuming that you have established, or will establish, the new home in place of the old home.  I am assuming that you will do this before there is a gray hair in your head or a wrinkle under your eye.  These new homes which young Americans are building will be the sources of all the power and righteousness of this Republic to-morrow, just as the lack of them will be the source of such weakness as our future develops.

Within these new homes which young Americans are to build, the altar must be raised again on which the sacred fire of American ideals must be kept burning, just as it was kept burning in the old homes which these young Americans have left.  And precisely to the extent that these new homes are not erected will American ideals pale, and finally perish.

It is a question, you see, which travels quite to the horizon of our vision and beyond it, and which searches the very heart of our national purity and power.  No wonder that Bismarck considered the perpetuation of the German home, with its elemental and joyous productivity, as the source of all imperial puissance on the one hand, and the purpose and end of all statesmanship on the other hand.

It would be far better for America if our public men were more interested in these simple, vital, elemental matters than in “great problems of statesmanship,” many of which, on analysis, are found to be imaginary and supposititious.  Yes, and it would be better for the country if our literary men would describe the healthful life of the Nation’s plain people, than tell unsavory stories of artificial careers and abnormal affections, and all that sort of thing.

They would sell more books, too.  I never yet heard that anybody got tired of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.”  I think it quite likely that the Book of Ruth will outlast all the short stories that will be written during the present decade.  Yes, decidedly, our public men, and our writers, too, ought to “get down to earth.”  There is where the people live.  The people walk upon the brown soil and the green grass.  They dwell beneath the apple-blossoms.  How fine a thing it is that our American President is preaching the doctrine of the American home so forcefully that he impresses the Nation and the world with these basic truths of living and of life.