and private stockholders should lose their investments; nor would it assume that any Gentile or Jew has the right to grow rich by the chance of compelling poor women to make shirts for six cents apiece.  The public opinion which sustains these deeds is as un-American, and as guilty as their doers.  While abuses like these exist, tolerated by the majority that not only make public opinion, but make the laws, this is not a government for the people, any more than a government of bosses is a government by the people.

The Pilgrims of Plymouth could see no way of shaping their lives in accordance with the higher law except by separating themselves from the world.  We have their problem, how to make the most of our lives, but the conditions have changed.  Ours is an age of scientific aggression, fierce competition, and the widest toleration.  The horizon of humanity is enlarged.  To live the life now is to be no more isolated or separate, but to throw ourselves into the great movement of thought, and feeling, and achievement.  Therefore we are altruists in charity, missionaries of humanity, patriots at home.  Therefore we have a justifiable pride in the growth, the wealth, the power of the nation, the state, the city.  But the stream cannot rise above its source.  The nation is what the majority of its citizens are.  It is to be judged by the condition of its humblest members.  We shall gain nothing over other experiments in government, although we have money enough to buy peace from the rest of the world, or arms enough to conquer it, although we rear upon our material prosperity a structure of scientific achievement, of art, of literature unparalleled, if the common people are not sharers in this great prosperity, and are not fuller of hope and of the enjoyment of life than common people ever were before.

And we are all common people when it comes to that.  Whatever the greatness of the nation, whatever the accumulation of wealth, the worth of the world to us is exactly the worth of our individual lives.  The magnificent opportunity in this Republic is that we may make the most possible out of our lives, and it will continue only as we adhere to the original conception of the Republic.  Politics without virtue, money-making without conscience, may result in great splendor, but as such an experiment is not new, its end can be predicted.  An agreeable home for a vast, and a free, and a happy people is quite another thing.  It expects thrift, it expects prosperity, but its foundations are in the moral and spiritual life.

Therefore I say that we are still to make the continent we have discovered and occupied, and that the scope and quality of our national life are still to be determined.  If they are determined not by the narrow tenets of the Pilgrims, but by their high sense of duty, and of the value of the human soul, it will be a nation that will call the world up to a higher plane of action than it ever attained before, and it will bring in a new era of humanity.  If they are determined by the vulgar successes of a mere material civilization, it is an experiment not worth making.  It would have been better to have left the Indians in possession, to see if they could not have evolved out of their barbarism some new line of action.