Do you mean to say that you have none? Nobody stained with any shade of dishonor? No grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-etc. grandfather or grandmother who ever made a scandal, broke a heart, or betrayed a trust? Every man Jack and woman Jill of the lot right back to Adam and Eve wholly good, honorable, and courageous? How fortunate to be sprung exclusively from the loins of centuries of angels--and to know all about them! Consider the hoard of virtue to which you have fallen heir! But you know very well that this is not so; that every one of us has every kind of person for an ancestor; that all sorts of virtue and vice, of heroism and disgrace, are mingled in our blood; that inevitably amidst the huge herd of our grandsires black sheep as well as white are to be found. As it is with men, so it is with nations. Do you imagine that any nation has a spotless history? Do you think that you can peer into our past, turn over the back pages of our record, and never come upon a single blot? Indeed you cannot. And it is better--a great deal better--that you should be aware of these blots. Such knowledge may enlighten you, may make you a better American. What we need is to be critics of ourselves, and this is exactly what we have been taught not to be. We are quite good enough to look straight at ourselves. Owing to one thing and another we are cleaner, honester, humaner, and whiter than any people on the continent of Europe. If any nation on the continent of Europe has ever behaved with the generosity and magnanimity that we have shown to Cuba, I have yet to learn of it. They jeered at us about Cuba, did the Europeans of the continent. Their papers stuck their tongues in their cheeks. Of course our fine sentiments were all sham, they said. Of course we intended to swallow Cuba, and never had intended anything else. And when General Leonard Wood came away from Cuba, having made Havana healthy, having brought order out of chaos on the island, and we left Cuba independent, Europe jeered on. That dear old Europe! Again, in 1909, it was not any European nation that returned to China their share of the indemnity exacted in consequence of the Boxer troubles; we alone returned our share to China--sixteen millions. It was we who prevented levying a punitive indemnity on China. Read the whole story; there is much more. We played the gentleman, Europe played the bully. But Europe calls us “dollar chasers.” That dear old Europe! Again, if any conquering General on the continent of Europe ever behaved as Grant did to Lee at Appomattox, his name has escaped me.