we must conceive and carry out, not only does it minister to my own modesty, I hope, of opinion, but it also fills me with a very great enthusiasm.  It is a splendid thing to be part of a great wide-awake Nation.  It is a splendid thing to know that your own strength is infinitely multiplied by the strength of other men who love the country as you do.  It is a splendid thing to feel that the wholesome blood of a great country can be united in common purposes, and that by frankly looking one another in the face and taking counsel with one another, prejudices will drop away, handsome understandings will arise, a universal spirit of service will be engendered, and that with this increased sense of community of purpose will come a vastly enhanced individual power of achievement; for we will be lifted by the whole mass of which we constitute a part.

Have you never heard a great chorus of trained voices lift the voice of the prima donna as if it soared with easy grace above the whole melodious sound?  It does not seem to come from the single throat that produces it.  It seems as if it were the perfect accent and crown of the great chorus.  So it ought to be with the statesman.  So it ought to be with every man who tries to guide the counsels of a great nation.  He should feel that his voice is lifted upon the chorus and that it is only the crown of the common theme.

[G] This was at Princeton, in 1902 and 1903.

TO NATURALIZED CITIZENS

[Address delivered at Convention Hall, Philadelphia, May 10, 1915.  The audience included four thousand newly naturalized citizens.  This speech attracted great attention because in it no reference was made to the sinking of the “Lusitania,” three days before.]

MR. MAYOR, FELLOW-CITIZENS: 

It warms my heart that you should give me such a reception; but it is not of myself that I wish to think to-night, but of those who have just become citizens of the United States.

This is the only country in the world which experiences this constant and repeated rebirth.  Other countries depend upon the multiplication of their own native people.  This country is constantly drinking strength out of new sources by the voluntary association with it of great bodies of strong men and forward-looking women out of other lands.  And so by the gift of the free will of independent people it is being constantly renewed from generation to generation by the same process by which it was originally created.  It is as if humanity had determined to see to it that this great Nation, founded for the benefit of humanity, should not lack for the allegiance of the people of the world.