Also it puts a vigor, manliness, mental productivity into you. Make it
a practise, when going to your business or your work each morning, to
reflect how blessed a thing it is to be an American, and why it is a
blessed thing. Then observe how your backbone stiffens as you think,
how your step becomes light and firm, how the very soul of you floods
with a kind of sunlight of confidence.
There was a time when each one of that masterful race that lived upon
the Tiber's banks in the days of the Eternal City's greatest glory
believed that "to be a Roman was greater than to be a king." And the
ideals of civic duty were more nearly realized in that golden hour of
human history than they had ever been before--or than they have ever
been since until now.
Very well, young man. If to be a Roman then was greater than to be a
king, what is it to be an American now?
Think of it! To be an American at the beginning of the twentieth
century!
Ponder over these eleven words for ten minutes every day. After a
while you will begin to appreciate your country, its institutions,
and the possibilities which both produce.
Realizing, then, that you are an American, and that, after all, this
is a richer possession than royal birth, make up your mind that you
will be worthy of it, and then go ahead and be worthy of it.
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