Reprinted from the July 4, 1916, issue of the Minneapolis Morning Tribune.

It is perhaps the very noblest aspect of our republic, Countrymen, which ought today to command your wonder and your awe. What America represents at present is the world reborn in a nation.

Society spent six or seven thousand years of recorded history working out its destinies practically in one hemisphere. The progress which it made, particularly in the past few centuries, has been the miracle of the ages. Men little better than beasts banded themselves into organizations, and learned to subordinate the wants of the individual to the needs of the community. From wandering animals not unlike anthropoid apes they evolved into the sovereigns of continents, they leveled forests, built cities, constructed highways, drew up laws.

They went further and ascended to even loftier heights: they created enduring works of art, painted incomparable pictures, wrought rare statues, and wrote unsurpassable literature. They invented a science, printing, which enabled them to save for each succeeding generation the work of every great genius. They annihilated space, sent floating palaces skimming across the ocean, discovered means of transmitting the human voice over measureless distances, and flew fleets of winged vehicles into the air.

And yet with all these amazing accomplishments, they could not rid themselves of petty sectionalism, or nationalism, which kept them perpetually fighting and slaughtering one another. Neither religion nor philosophy could rid them of these pernicious habits and this pernicious outlook which threatened to undo all the miraculous work they and their forefathers had achieved.

Only a few hundred years ago Nature, as if despairing of her own subjects, opened up to them a new continent on which they might make a fresh start. Upon this continent a new nation was born, a nation conceived and dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal. This nation was to have every advantage of Old World experience and none of the disadvantages of Old World sectionalism. The progress which this experimental, this Utopian nation shortly recorded soared beyond the most sanguinary dreams of its founders. Peoples from all over the globe came flocking to it, and in time it became a visible embodiment of that iridescent dream, the federation of races, or the parliament of man.

Today, Countrymen, our nation represents the most impressive national, or international, experiment that the world has ever beheld. One hundred millions strong we stand, the richest and most powerful people which at present inhabits the globe. We are recruited from all races, all colors, all nationalities, all creeds. We are as universal as the species of man. We have within our midst the Red Indian, the yellow Mongolian, the black African, as well as the white Caucasian. We are descended from Teuton as well as Anglo-Saxon, Celt as well as Latin, Slav as well as Magyar.

It is a bold, an audacious experiment which we represent; this attempt to reassemble into a single nation all the races of man. We must remember that we have only made a beginning in our unparalleled undertaking, yet it is inspiring to observe that our progress has already been extraordinary. We loom up today as a beacon figure among nations, an eloquent and splendid gesture pointing the way towards the finest and loftiest internationalism that the world has yet seen.

For we represent the world reborn in a nation, the one international nation, the nation which — when its peculiar destinies are fulfilled and its distinctive ideals realized — ought to culminate, or fructify, in that supreme social and religious millennium, the brotherhood of man.