So it is happening and so should it be. Offsprings of the same continent, your institutions point out the path for the development of ours, your mental and moral advance fires the vigor of our spirit, your tireless activity excites us to action; in a word, your progress uplifts our noblest ambitions. We are both marching on to the victories of civilization, although your lot, in the course of history, shall have been that of forerunners. One of your scholars has said that the American nation has rendered five eminent services to the world's civilization. True are his words. For the American nation has, in the first place, sustained by word and by deed, the principle that the medium of bringing differences between nations to an end, is arbitration; it has accepted and practised religious toleration as has no other nation; it has known how to raise the dignity of man, by giving to the political vote the development which a true democracy calls for; it has thrown open its doors to all such as seek progress and liberty in your country, and it has taken them in to form part of one and the same great soul; and lastly, it has known, as no other nation has, how to scatter abroad material benefits, the very basis of the moral and mental perfection of the individual. To these factors and to others derived from the conditions of its privileged soil, is due the great importance of the American people as a powerful force in the progress of humanity. I shall not attempt to analyze in their essence these five glorious victories of civilization. My mind is dazed by the victory of democracy through the true action of the suffrage. This is the germ, the primary origin of your greatness as a people, which makes you the beacon for the eager gaze of all those who, down-trodden by power or by poverty, seek under the shelter of your wise laws, the guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to quote the sacred formula of your Declaration of Independence; this it is which explains why neither the difference of race and language, nor the morbid influence produced in the mind by secular despotism, nor the infinite diversity of religion, is an obstacle to the hundreds of thousands of helpless beings whom year by year the Old World is casting on your shores, to be transformed into citizens and become identified with the new fatherland, as if the national spirit had breathed into the souls of these new arrivals love for your glorious traditions and your lofty ideals of liberty, justice, and progress. The American fatherland is not hemmed in by battlements; it is the redeemer of all miseries, it is the refuge of all those who, in their flight from tyranny, like your illustrious Carl Schurz, exclaim: _ubi libertas, ibi patria!_