The world is learning, largely through American experience that freedom in the form of government is no guarantee against abuse, tyranny, cruelty, and greed. The old sufferings, the old passions are in full blast among us. What, then, are the advantages of self-government? The chief advantage is that self-government enables a man in his youth, in his own town, within the radius of his first public interests, to fight the important battle of his life while his powers are at their strongest, and the powers of oppression are at their weakest. If a man acquires the power of speech here, if he says what he means now, if he makes his point and dominates his surroundings at once, his voice will, as a matter of fact, be heard instantly in a very wide radius. And so he walks up into a new sphere and begins to accomplish greater things. He does this through the very force of his insistence on the importance of small things. The reason for his graduation is not far to seek. A man cannot reach the hearts of his townsfolks, without using the whole apparatus of the world of thought. He cannot tell or act the truth in his own town without enlisting every power for truth, and setting in vibration the cords that knit that town into the world’s history. He is forced to find and strike the same note which he would use on some great occasion when speaking for all mankind. A man who has won a town-fight is a veteran, and our country to-day is full of these young men. To-morrow their force will show in national politics, and in that moment the fate of the Malay, the food of the Russian prisoner, the civilization of South Africa, and the future of Japan will be seen to have been in issue. These world problems are now being settled in the contest over the town-pump in a western village. I think it likely that the next thirty years will reveal the recuperative power of American institutions. One of you young men may easily become a reform President, and be carried into office and held in office by the force of that private opinion which is now being sown broadcast throughout the country by just such men as yourselves. You will concede the utility of such a President. Yet it would not be the man but the masses behind him that did his work. Democracy thus lets character loose upon society and shows us that in the realm of natural law there is nothing either small or great: and this is the chief value of democracy. In America the young man meets the struggle between good and evil in the easiest form in which it was ever laid before men. The cruelties of interest and of custom have with us no artificial assistance from caste, creed, race prejudice. Our frame of government is drawn in close accordance with the laws of nature. By our documents we are dedicated to mankind; and hence it is that we can so easily feel the pulse of the world and lay our hand on the living organism of humanity. THE DOCTRINE OF NON-RESISTANCE.[D]