tion. Your memories of home and country are still a bright tradition, but you have chosen America as your final home. It is your country; its air and sunshine have mingled with your blood. All that the future holds for you and your children is centered in this Republic. You have anxiously awaited this day when the fullness of your citizenship would be accomplished. You now accept the full measures of responsibility, the burdens which the government imposes along with the blessings it bestows.

You will be no longer subjects, but citizens, vested with sovereign functions and privileges. We welcome you to that high estate. Our power and might are drawn from every quarter of the earth. The unseen crimson threads of kinship stretch across the seas. Here the best blood of the world is mingled; here the races are fused into a great mixed racial family, forming a composite citizenship, the greatest the world has known. The government confers upon you a privilege that is above price. You receive the institutions of liberty as a free heritage, institutions which were founded by the fathers through privation and sacrifice, through blood and tears. It is our duty to preserve them in their native vigor, and to transmit them unimpaired to succeeding generations. It remains for you to demonstrate that this confidence has not been misplaced. If your allegiance be undivided, if your loyalty be pure and constant, then you will be a distinct contribution to our industrial life, an energizing influence in every field of activity, a bulwark of safety in times of stress and danger.

In ancient Rome the sacred fire burned constantly in the temple of Vesta. It was thought that the safety of the city depended upon the wavering, lambent flame. If it were extinguished, the vestal virgins were severely punished, and it was rekindled from the rays of the sun. Patriotism is our sacred fire, and the existence of the state depends upon its ardent glow. We are the vestals. charged with the duty to tend and watch with eternal vigilance. Let it never smoulder, but keep it ever aglow, that this nation, the refuge of the persecuted and haven of the oppressed, the nation of equal opportunity, of impartial justice, of equality before the law, may not perish from the earth.

As you call the God of Nations to witness the sincerity of your intentions and the purity of your motives, may there arise in your mental vision the spirit of America, in grace and majesty, her form suffused with holy light, bearing the flaming sword of justice and the radiant shield of mercy a sign and promise that before the sword is sheathed again tryanny will be brought low and the weak raised up; and that peace with justice may prevail among all the races of men.

Abridged.

GOOD CITIZENSHIP

AN ADDRESS TO THE BOYS OF THE HILL SCHOOL, JUNE 9, 1913

BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT

MR. CHAIRMAN, and you members of the school, and parents: It is about sixteen years ago that I came to the

Hill School to speak and I have always remembered my visit. I take a peculiar interest in speaking to you, as introduced by the President of the Civic Club, because I feel that every school such as this fails in its duty unless it turns out men who in after life will play a useful part in the world. The first thing I want to say to you here,

to the boys of the school, is that the only efficient way in which, in after life, you can show your gratitude to the school is by the kind of reputation you win in the great world. You cannot, save in wholly exceptional cases, individually do much of direct return to the school itself for what the school has done for you. Your return must be in the way of

adding to the school's good name, adding to the sum of reputation which will come, and can come only, from the part played by the graduates of the school in the life of the Nation after they have graduated.

The first point that I want to make with you is the dual character of the obligation that rests on you when you leave here; that is, that first you have got to be efficient, and next, and equally, you have got to be decent and straight. The one thing that I wish to see avoided in this connection is a segregation of our people into two camps: the

camp of those who know how and can do things but who do them crookedly, and the camp of those who have excellent purposes and no power to achieve them. I am not in the least interested in virtue that is only virtue in the abstract. I want to hold up to you nothing in the way of an ideal that you cannot live up to if you have got in you the right stuff for citizenship. That is why I want to dwell upon the need of your combining the

qualities of idealism and efficiency.

First, efficiency. Remember that you cannot do good to anybody else until you can pull your own weight, and no amount of lofty ambition will atone in the least if you have not the practical efficiency that will make you count among your fellows. I don't care in what line of work you make the effort, you cannot be a benefit from the standpoint of those with high aspirations until, in addition to the high aspirations, you develop the trait that will enable you to put them into effect.

If I were speaking only to the Civic Club, for instance, I should say to you that you would be perfectly worthless in politics if you did not have a lofty purpose, but that you would also be utterly worthless if you did not possess the necessary physical and moral robustness to do more than meet other men like yourselves in politics and say, "How nice it would be to have that lofty purpose realized in our National life!" If you go into politics with an idea that, merely because you have, and because you have announced that you have, fine qualities, you are going to have any special consideration shown you, you will be left,

What is true of politics is just as true of business. I do not want you to think even for a moment that I intend to put efficiency as the sole idea before you. I do not. I shall speak of that later. But you must have it. You cannot do any good to anybody as a business man unless you make your business succeed. You cannot take care of those who work for you unless you are such a good business man that there will be something that you have to divide with them. If you do not earn anything you cannot divide it, because it is not there to divide.

If you take up newspaper work, unless you can make a newspaper which people will read, then it does not make any difference what you write in it; some one has got to read it, or else the writing does not do any good. I could extend it to the pathetic portion of the brotherhood of authors (I am one of them—one of the authors — myself, not one of the pathetic portion) who keep writing to me and explaining that they have written poems or essays or novels of such unexampled excellency of purpose, but that nobody will read them. Then the poor, good people usually ask me to get them read, or tell them how they can get them read. There is not any answer that I can make, except to make them interesting, which, although excellent advice, is a little too large to meet the needs of the case.

What is true of the man with the newspaper, and true of the business man, is true of the public servant, is true in every relation of life. You must be efficient, you must be able to hold your own in the world of politics, the world of business, able to keep your own head above water, to