“ The American ideal of citizenship and its ideal, its aims, possibilities, and destiny, had its origin and enshrinement in that Anglo-Saxon spirit of freedom which has been the peculiar characteristic of a race whose civil and judicial development in the remotest and darkest days of its history distanced all rival clans and, from Alfred to William III, from tribe to Empire, has cherished and sustained a system of civil and religious liberty, which, intolerant of every form of oppression has made the English language the vernacular of liberty. ”

“ Chariman, men are great and small, they roam the vast wilderness of the stars, and soar the very empyrean of thought and action, and they fear and crouch and kneel; and in their quaking fears and driveling doubts seem like puny things crawling on the ground; they are saints and sinners; sometimes emissaries of light and love, and yet again harbingers of ill, and sometimes the very Nemesis of hate ”

“ Exult copiously, if you will, over the triumphal march of a great material civilization, the marvelous expansion of your territory, your wonderful development of hidden resources, your power and dignity at home or abroad, but invite not, nor condone that spirit of listless satiety, nor sink into that national egotism which lets the dagger steal to the heat of the nation while your reveling conceals the presence of the foe. ”

“ I am going to speak to you tonight of what your race has contributed and is contributing to this great stream on whose bosom is borne the freighted destiny of the human race, and whose currents wash every shore. ”

“ It is but a part of that great race spirit which the Conqueror could not conquer; the lingering spirit of freedom which the iron heel of despotic usurpation could not stamp out, the memory of a lost freedom ranking in the hearts of men determined to restore in their island home those ancient rights which no man dared to question in the days of the Saxon. ”

“ The liberty of the individual unit of society secured in the exercise of the largest liberty consistent with the public welfare, and that liberty protected by the just and righteous administration of public laws, was the ideal of the Anglo-Saxon state.
In their religion, philosophy, poetry, oratory, and literature they have always confessed that oppression was venal and wrong. If selfishness, greed, or pride have allured them for a while from that royal path of national rectitude and honor, they have in the final test returned conquering to their true and higher selves. ”

“ No race has been so domineering, none stronger and with a more exclusive spirit of caste, none which a more contemptuous dislike of inferiority, none more violent in prejudice once formed, or dislikes once engendered; yet doth the spirit and impulse of freedom "in the chambers of their soul", raising them finally above those hated obliquities, conquering their repugnance, enfeebling and vanishing their hates. ”

“ The Puritan and the Cavalier joined their cause; political liberty invoked the aid of Faith, and Faith hallowed and strengthened the crusade of human liberty. The struggle increased against absolute power, spiritual and political, now concentrated in kingly hands. Giants they were who took up the quarrel of liberty in those dark days of civil strife. Men they were who inherited the blood of the saintly Langton and of his lordly Barons. Five centuries of heroic strife against oppression sanctified the name of liberty. ”

“ They brought themselves the safeguard of Anglo-Saxon liberty purified and burned by those years of oppression. They transplanted Saxon England freed from the dross of Norman rule and feudal aristocracy. Liberty and law are henceforth to work out the destinies of men, and who contemplating the manner of men and whence they derived their faith, their hopes and fears, can quibble about the aims and purposes of the founders of this Republic? ”

“ Liberty is now about to win on Saxon soil, but not there alone, for those of her yeomanry, who were hardiest for the fight and cherished the broadest foundation of a new Empire, which then and forever should be untrammeled by the conservation of princes and unabashed by the sneers of monarch. ”

“ If American citizenship contains a hope and promise, a wealth, a blessing, and a content, aye! and immorality and just renown, it lives to-day in hearts, and not in stone; it lives in feelings and not in lands ”

“ The work we have to do is not outside, but deep down in the teeming flow of struggling human souls, think of them as your other self, and your own souls will interpret the meaning of their complaints, the quality of their striving, and the measure of their justice. ”

“ In the earliest periods of these peoples' history we ding the germal elements of those great charters of liberty which are to become the chief corner-stone of free government and mighty guarantees of personal liberty. ”

“ It is yours to fulfill its duties; to meet well its responsibilities; it is what your fathers builded out of heat and soul, out of love, compassion, and generous fellowship; and not out of love, compassion, and generous fellowship, and not out of blood and brawn; it is humanity's own ”

“ The condition of the early Saxon as it was raised by the wisdom and benevolence of good King Alfred, and as it remained until the end of the reign of the unfortunate Harold, was that of a freeman, a freeman not merely in the sense of being his own master, but "he was a living unit in the State." ”

“ But in order to know and feel what there is of universal interest which we have to do, what there is for humanity's glory and wheal we have to preserve; what is the task set to us, as our work in forwarding the current of human life and liberty, we must look to the past, and learn what fundamental, essential truths have grown from its toil and achievement. Many such the American idea of citizenship contains ”