Pericles and
Demosthenes speak to America as well as to Athens; and we may well
domesticate their admonitions here to-day and emphasize them to our
people and ourselves as the words of fellow-citizens, of Washington and
Jefferson, of Sumner and Emerson. If the life and burning eloquence of
Demosthenes teach anything, if the rounded period of history whose
darkness he lights up teaches anything, they teach the vitality and the
imperious moment of the appeal, in times of danger and temptation, to
the fathers and to the great past, to the history and the teachings
which in times of soberness have ever had the nation's highest honor. No
nation which is virtuous and vital will ever be slave to the past; at
the command of virtue and of vision it will snap precedent like a reed.
But every people of seriousness, stability, and character is a reverent
people; and when a people's reverence for its noble ancestors, its
sacred oracles and its venerable charters ceases to be sturdy and
becomes sentimental, much more when it ceases to exist at all, then the
hour of that people's decay and doom hast struck.
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