suppose that I am pandering to what is commonly understood by national
pride. I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your
bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and
territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs a
true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you
going to do with all these things? What is to be the end to which these
are to be the means? You are making a novel experiment in politics on
the greatest scale which the world has yet seen. Forty millions at
your first centenary, it is reasonably to be expected that, at the
second, these states will be occupied by two hundred millions of
English-speaking people, spread over an area as large as that of
Europe, and with climates and interests as diverse as those of Spain
and Scandinavia, England and Russia. You and your descendants have to
ascertain whether this great mass will hold together under the forms of
a republic, and the despotic reality of universal suffrage; whether
state rights will hold out against centralisation, without separation;
whether centralisation will get the better, without actual or disguised
monarchy; whether shifting corruption is better than a permanent
bureaucracy; and as population thickens in your great cities, and the
pressure of want is felt, the gaunt spectre of pauperism will stalk
among you, and communism and socialism will claim to be heard. Truly
America has a great future before her; great in toil, in care, and in
responsibility; great in true glory if she be guided in wisdom and
righteousness; great in shame if she fail. I cannot understand why
other nations should envy you, or be blind to the fact that it is for
the highest interest of mankind that you should succeed; but the one
condition of success, your sole safeguard, is the moral worth and
intellectual clearness of the individual citizen. Education cannot give
these, but it may cherish them and bring them to the front in whatever
station of society they are to be found; and the universities ought to