little globe now all mapped and navigated, will never be seen again. Our three centuries have watched the living tide roll on, pushing the savage who had wasted his inheritance before it, and sweeping off to one side or the other rival races which strove with it for mastery. Here has been effected the conquest of a continent, its submission to the uses of man; and there is no greater achievement possible than this with all its manifold meanings. Here the years have seen a new nation founded, built up, and then welded together in the greatest war of the last century, at a vast sacrifice dictated only by faith in country, and by the grand refusal to dissolve into jarring atoms. To me there is here an epic of human life and a drama of human action larger in its proportions than almost any which have gone before. To those who can discern only crude civilization, unkempt, unfinished cities, little towns on the border, unbeautiful in hasty and perishable houses, rawness and roughness, and a lack of the refinements of more ancient seats of the race, I say, you are still under the dominion of the religion of clothes. You hear only the noise of the streets, and you are deaf to the mighty harmonies which sound across the ages.

There is a majestic sweep to the events which have befallen in this Western Hemisphere since the founding of Jamestown1 and Plymouth 2 which it is hard to rival in any movement of mankind. And it is all compact of those personal incidents which stir the heart and touch the imagination more than the march of the race, because we are each one of us nearer to the man than to the multitude. These are the events which in the 2 1620.

1 1607.

mass make up human history, and wherever human history has been made we find them, whether on the sandy plains of Troy or in an American forest.

AMERICAN MOTHERHOOD 2

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

(1905)

THEODORE ROOSEVELT (1858- ), statesman, was born in New York city. He graduated from Harvard College. He was three times elected to the New York legislature. He served as a mem

ber of the United States Civil Service Commission, under Presidents Harrison and Cleveland. He was appointed assistant Secretary of the Navy by President McKinley, but resigned to recruit the first United States volunteer cavalry, commonly known as the "Rough Riders." He was commissioned lieutenant colonel, and promoted to rank of colonel after the battle of San Juan. At the close of the Spanish War he was elected governor of New York state. Later he became vice president of the United States, and by reason of

the assassination of President McKinley became president. After the completion of the term, he was elected president.

Into the women's keeping is committed the destiny of the generation to come after us. In bringing up

1 Troy was the scene of the Ten Years War for the recovery of Helen of Sparta. See translation of " Iliad."

2 From a speech delivered before the National Congress of Mothers. By permission of Funk & Wagnalls Company.

your children, you mothers must remember that while it is essential to be loving and tender, it is no less essential to be wise and firm. Foolishness and affection must not be treated as interchangeable terms; and besides training your sons and daughters in the softer and milder virtues, you must seek to give them those stern and hardy qualities which in after life they will surely need. Some children will go wrong in spite of the best training; and some will go right, even when their surroundings are most unfortunate; nevertheless, an immense amount depends upon the family training. If you mothers through weakness bring up your sons to be selfish and to think only of themselves, you will be responsible for much sadness among the women who are to be their wives in the future. If you let your daughters grow up idle, perhaps under the mistaken impression that as you yourselves have had to work hard they shall know only enjoyment, you are preparing them to be useless to others and burdens to themselves. Teach boys and girls alike that they are not to look forward to lives spent in avoiding difficulties, but to lives spent in overcoming difficulties. Teach them that work, for themselves and also for others, is not a curse but a blessing; seek to make them happy, to make them enjoy life, but seek also to make them face life with the steadfast resolution to wrest success from labor and adversity, and to do their whole duty before God and to man. Surely she who can thus train her sons and her daughters is thrice fortunate among women.1

1 Cf. Luke i. 41.

THE PROBLEMS OF THE REPUBLIC 1

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

(1905)

MODERN life is both complex and intense, and the tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary industrial development of the half century are felt in every fiber of our social and political being. Never before have men tried so vast and formidable an experiment as that of administering the affairs of a continent under the forms of a democratic republic. The conditions which have told for our marvelous material wellbeing, which have developed to a very high degree our energy, self-reliance, and individual initiative, also have brought the care and anxiety inseparable from the accumulation of great wealth in industrial centers.

Upon the success of our experiment much depends, not only as regards our own welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind. If we fail, the cause of free selfgovernment throughout the world will rock to its foundations, and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the generations yet unborn.

There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but there is every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us, nor fearing to approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright.

Yet after all, though the problems are new, though

1 From President Roosevelt's inaugural address, March 4, 1905.

the tasks set before us differ from the tasks set before our fathers, who founded and preserved this republic, the spirit in which these tasks must be undertaken and these problems faced, if our duty is to be well done, remains essentially unchanged. We know that selfgovernment is difficult. We know that no people needs such high traits of character as that people which seeks to govern its affairs aright through the freely expressed will of the free men who compose it.

But we have faith that we shall not prove false to memories of the men of the mighty past. They did their work; they left us the splendid heritage we now enjoy. We in our turn have an assured confidence that we shall be able to leave this heritage unwasted and enlarged to our children's children.

To do so, we must show, not merely in great crises, but in the everyday affairs of life, the qualities of practical intelligence, of courage, of hardihood, and endurance, and, above all, the power of devotion to a lofty ideal, which made great the men who founded this republic in the days of Washington; which made great the men who preserved this republic in the day of Abraham Lincoln.