The Pilgrims were poor, and they built their huts on a shore which gave such niggardly returns for labor that the utmost thrift was required to secure the necessaries of life.  Out of this struggle with nature and savage life was no doubt evolved the hardihood, the endurance, that builds states and wins the favors of fortune.  But poverty is not commonly a nurse of virtue, long continued, it is a degeneration.  It is almost as difficult for the very poor man to be virtuous as for the very rich man; and very good and very rich at the same time, says Socrates, a man cannot be.  It is a great people that can withstand great prosperity.  The condition of comfort without extremes is that which makes a happy life.  I know a village of old-fashioned houses and broad elm-shaded streets in New England, indeed more than one, where no one is inordinately rich, and no one is very poor, where paupers are so scarce that it is difficult to find beneficiaries for the small traditionary contribution for the church poor; where the homes are centres of intelligence, of interest in books, in the news of the world, in the church, in the school, in politics; whence go young men and women to the colleges, teachers to the illiterate parts of the land, missionaries to the city slums.  Multiply such villages all over the country, and we have one of the chief requisites for an ideal republic.

This has been the longing of humanity.  Poets have sung of it; prophets have had visions of it; statesmen have striven for it; patriots have died for it.  There must be somewhere, some time, a fruitage of so much suffering, so much sacrifice, a land of equal laws and equal opportunities, a government of all the people for the benefit of all the people; where the conditions of living will be so adjusted that every one can make the most out of his life, neither waste it in hopeless slavery nor in selfish tyranny, where poverty and crime will not be hereditary generation after generation, where great fortunes will not be for vulgar ostentation, but for the service of humanity and the glory of the State, where the privileges of freemen will be so valued that no one will be mean enough to sell his vote nor corrupt enough to attempt to buy a vote, where the truth will at last be recognized, that the society is not prosperous when half its members are lucky, and half are miserable, and that that nation can only be truly great that takes its orders from the Great Teacher of Humanity.

And, lo! at last here is a great continent, virgin, fertile, a land of sun and shower and bloom, discovered, organized into a great nation, with a government flexible in a distributed home rule, stiff as steel in a central power, already rich, already powerful.  It is a land of promise.  The materials are all here.  Will you repeat the old experiment of a material success and a moral and spiritual failure?  Or will you make it what humanity has passionately longed for?  Only good individual lives can do that.