It is a hard thing to picture to ourselves our Homeland. Is America just a lot of cities and towns and farms, or a collection of so many thousands of square miles of prairies and mountains, the sort of thing one would see from an airplane if one could get up high enough and had good enough eyes? Or is it a collection of states with queer boundary lines that look plainer on a map than they do when we cross them in the train? There are people who try to find America in some motto or symbol. One of our great cities has for its motto the words “I will,” and the people who live in that city like to think that the enterprise by which they build great industries and give work to great numbers of people is the expression of their Americanism. And some people see in the Statue of Liberty in the New York harbor, a statue holding aloft a blazing torch to give light to all people, the symbol that best expresses the spirit of America. Both the motto and the statue help us to see our country as something more than a part of a book called “Geography” or “History.” Both of them express what America had always been to its citizens and what it became to the world in 1917. We did not desire to enter the war, but when it became necessary to do so no true American hesitated. There were great difficulties: an army to raise and equip and train so that it could meet an army that had been preparing for forty years to fight the world; an army to be transported over three thousand miles of water, a terrific task even in normal times, but made a hundred-fold harder because of the monsters that lurked under the sea waiting a chance to send a transport to the bottom. And once across, there were docks and railroads to be built and a great industrial organization to be set going. But the will of America was triumphant and the job was done. And the statue, like the “I will,” is a symbol of the spirit in America that has helped the spirit of liberty throughout the world, so that we now know the day is coming when all peoples, everywhere, shall be free. We can make a beginning, therefore, in our effort to form a picture of what America means, by thinking of this Statue of Liberty and of these words of high purpose, “I will.”