Democracy is the outward and visible sign that a nation recognizes
its own needs and aspirations. Democracy wells up from the very
pit of things. Its value is its foundation in actuality, its
concordance with the slow unending process of man's evolution from
the animal he was. Democracy, for one with any comic and cosmic
animal sense, is the only natural form of government, because
alone it recognizes States as organisms, with spontaneous growth,
and a free will of their own. Democracy is final; other forms of
government are but steps on the way to it. It is the big thing,
because it can and does embody and make use of Aristocracy. It
is the rule of the future, because all human progress gradually
tends to recognition of God in man, and not outside of him; to the
establishment of the humanistic creed, and the belief that we have
the future in our own hands.

In life at large, whom does one respect--the man who gropes and
stumbles upward to control of his instincts, and full development
of his powers, confronting each new darkness and obstacle as it
arises; or the man who shelters in a cloister, and lives by rote
and rules hung up for him by another in his cell? The first man
lives, the second does but exist. So it is with nations.

The American and the Englishman are fundamentally democratic because
they are fundamentally self-reliant. Each demands to know why he
should do a thing before he does it. This is, I think, the great
link between two peoples in many ways very different; and they who
ardently desire abiding friendship between our two countries will
do well never to lose sight of it. Any sapping of this quality
of self-reliance, or judging for oneself, in either country, any