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 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 things that divide, and to make sure of the things that unite.  It was but a historical accident no doubt that this great country was called the “United States,” and yet I am very thankful that it has the word “united” in its title; and the man who seeks to divide man from man, group from group, interest from interest, in the United States is striking at its very heart.

It is a very interesting circumstance to me, in thinking of those of you who have just sworn allegiance to this great Government, that you were drawn across the ocean by some beckoning finger of hope, by some belief, by some vision of a new kind of justice, by some expectation of a better kind of life.

No doubt you have been disappointed in some of us; some of us are very disappointing.  No doubt you have found that justice in the United States goes only with a pure heart and a right purpose as it does everywhere else in the world.  No doubt what you found here didn’t seem touched for you, after all, with the complete beauty of the ideal which you had conceived beforehand.

But remember this, if we had grown at all poor in the ideal, you brought some of it with you.  A man does not go out to seek the thing that is not in him.  A man does not hope for the thing that he does not believe in, and if some of us have forgotten what America believed in, you, at any rate, imported in your own hearts a renewal of the belief.  That is the reason that I, for one, make you welcome.

If I have in any degree forgotten what America was intended for, I will thank God if you will remind me.

I was born in America.  You dreamed dreams of what America was to be, and I hope you brought the dreams with you.  No man that does not see visions will ever realize any high hope or undertake any high enterprise.

Just because you brought dreams with you, America is more likely to realize the dreams such as you brought.  You are enriching us if you came expecting us to be better than we are.

See, my friends, what that means.  It means that Americans must have a consciousness different from the consciousness of every other nation in the world.  I am not saying this with even the slightest thought of criticism of other nations.  You know how it is with a family.  A family gets centred on itself if it is not careful and is less interested in the neighbors than it is in its own members.