You
cannot dedicate yourself to America unless you become in every respect
and with every purpose of your will thorough Americans. You cannot
become thorough Americans if you think of yourselves in groups. America
does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to
a particular national group in America has not yet become an American,
and the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no
worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes.
My urgent advice to you would be, not only always to think first of
America, but always, also, to think first of humanity. You do not love
humanity if you seek to divide humanity into jealous camps. Humanity can
be welded together only by love, by sympathy, by justice, not by
jealousy and hatred. I am sorry for the man who seeks to make personal
capital out of the passions of his fellow-men. He has lost the touch
and ideal of America, for America was created to unite mankind by those
passions which lift and not by the passions which separate and debase.
We came to America, either ourselves or in the persons of our ancestors,
to better the ideals of men, to make them see finer things than they had
seen before, to get rid of the things that divide and to make sure of
the things that unite.
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