Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/274

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to our warm youth, eager for sensuous contacts, somewhat cold and insubstantial; but as we advance in age and discover the fickle and transitory character and the emptiness of many of our relationships with those who seem to be living, and, on the other hand, the fidelity and permanence and richness of our relationships with those who seemed to be dead, then the ideal world begins to grow upon us, and its presences appear to our clearer perception to be the objects in our consciousness of the most indisputable reality. Then indeed we know that Socrates and Cicero are with us; St. Paul and Augustine and Aquinas; Petrarch and Machiavelli and Montaigne; Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, and Bunyan; Descartes and Locke; Voltaire and Rousseau and Burke and Goethe; Franklin and Adams and Lincoln, Emerson, Whitman, and Mark Twain."

"Our association with this company makes our standards of a 'good society' a little exacting. Till you give us better assurance of the splendor of your own projected commonwealth, we shall retain our free citizenship in this ideal community. You will set up in vain a tyranny of shop keepers over this august republic. We shall not be subject to it. We shall obey and follow the commands of the great society, whose