Every step in its solution must be taken with both
wisdom and justice.
Our relations with the Orient daily increase, and the fixedness of our
position in the Far East hourly becomes more definite. The public man
wears a scarf about his eyes who does not see that our historic
statesmanship during this century will deal with our growing mastery
of the Pacific, and the weaving backward and forward across that ocean
of our ever-multiplying relations with the East.
This paper might be entirely taken up with a statement of tangled
situations and deep problems which will require the combined
intelligence of the whole American people to solve.
Yet, for the purpose of this life, what are they all, compared with
the character of individual Americans, and therefore with the
influence of the American home upon American men in the making; for
men in the making is what the youth of our land are. Gladstone stated
a truth, wide and vital as English institutions, when he said that the
relation of the Church to the youth of Great Britain is a matter of
more concern than all the problems of the Empire put together.
All this is commonplace, you say. I say so too. Yet it is the
commonplaces, and those things alone, by which we live and move and
have our being.
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