Eve wholly good, honorable, and courageous? How fortunate to be sprung
exclusively from the loins of centuries of angels--and to know all about
them! Consider the hoard of virtue to which you have fallen heir!

But you know very well that this is not so; that every one of us has
every kind of person for an ancestor; that all sorts of virtue and vice,
of heroism and disgrace, are mingled in our blood; that inevitably amidst
the huge herd of our grandsires black sheep as well as white are to be
found.

As it is with men, so it is with nations. Do you imagine that any nation
has a spotless history? Do you think that you can peer into our past,
turn over the back pages of our record, and never come upon a single
blot? Indeed you cannot. And it is better--a great deal better--that you
should be aware of these blots. Such knowledge may enlighten you, may
make you a better American. What we need is to be critics of ourselves,
and this is exactly what we have been taught not to be.

We are quite good enough to look straight at ourselves. Owing to one
thing and another we are cleaner, honester, humaner, and whiter than any
people on the continent of Europe. If any nation on the continent of
Europe has ever behaved with the generosity and magnanimity that we have
shown to Cuba, I have yet to learn of it. They jeered at us about Cuba,
did the Europeans of the continent. Their papers stuck their tongues in
their cheeks. Of course our fine sentiments were all sham, they said. Of
course we intended to swallow Cuba, and never had intended anything else.
And when General Leonard Wood came away from Cuba, having made Havana
healthy, having brought order out of chaos on the island, and we left
Cuba independent, Europe jeered on. That dear old Europe!