What is the duty of foreign-born American citizens? First to learn the English language and to prefer it to all other tongues on the face of the earth. That tongue comes in the splendor of a June day; it breaks over life like a June sunrise, with an atmosphere, tone, beauty, and power which for Americans must ever be unapproachable. Let no American citizen hug his foreign tongue, go into the closet with it and shut out the light of the great English language which carries all our ideals as Americans! The very vessel of the Lord it is, in which American freedom is carried,--the language of Shakespeare and Milton, the incomparable free man; the language of Bacon and Burke and Washington and Hamilton and Webster and Lincoln. This tongue consecrates the immigrant who would be a citizen; he never can be a citizen of the United States without that, never. This is the tongue that carries in a unique translation the literature of Israel; the Bible is the maker of free peoples. Next, we foreign-born American citizens must read the story of the Revolution into our blood. What is the significance of the Revolution for the foreign-born American citizen? These men were Englishmen or the sons of Englishmen; they loved the British Isles better than any portion of the earth’s surface, except their own Colonies; they loved them with an inexpressible love. Yet when it came to question of principle they stood out and said, “We must be free; the Colonies, or the United States, first!” You recall Daniel Webster’s splendid eloquence here:-- “On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they raised their flag against a power to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjection, Rome in the height of her glory is not to be compared,--a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drumbeat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England.” Against that power to which they were as nothing, against that lovely land of their origin they stood out when it was a question of their own independence and their own manhood.