Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from American Loyalty: An Address Delivered in the Old South Church, Boston, Massachusetts, at the Morning Service, March 18, 1917
Nor have we Americans the instinct of loyalty to our country born of history. Whether we know it or nor, the voices of history sing in the soul of a nation, and charm it into unity, both when the song is a dirge and a paeon. In the fibre of our ?esh, in blood and brain there are stored the subtlest memories, the most potent susceptibilities. Men are largely the resultant of racial experiences in the historic environment in which their ancestors have lived. They are born with instinctive loves for nature as she appears in a particular country. Even the universal features of na ture, sunrise and sunset, the morning and evening stars, take on new beauty and splen dor because they shine through the dear heavens that bend above the beloved land. For these peoples nature is bathed and transfigured in the most moving human associations; it is never beheld except through the eyes of racial achievement, suffering, love and tears. Nature becomes a country whose homes are founded and whose cradles are rocked upon a land of hollowed graves. Loyalty here rises as by the force of gravity, it is pushed upward by the unseen might of immemorial generations, it calls aloud in the strength of great instincts; it can be undone only by the wreck of all social order that comes from the sway of the tyrant. This vast assurance of unity and loyalty we possess only in a minority of our people, and it would be folly to underestimate our poverty here.
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