I have often thought that we overlook the fact that the real sources of strength in the community come from the bottom. Do you find society renewing itself from the top? Don’t you find society renewing itself from the ranks of unknown men? Do you look to the leading families to go on leading you? Do you look to the ranks of the men already established in authority to contribute sons to lead the next generation? They may, sometimes they do, but you can’t count on them; and what you are constantly depending on is the rise out of the ranks of unknown men, the discovery of men whom you had passed by, the sudden disclosure of capacity you had not dreamed of, the emergence of somebody from some place of which you had thought the least, of some man unanointed from on high, to do the thing that the generation calls for. Who would have looked to see Lincoln save a nation? Who that knew Lincoln when he was a lad and a youth and a young man—but all the while there was springing up in him as if he were connected with the very soil itself, the sap of a nation, the vision of a great people, a sympathy so ingrained and intimate with the common run of men that he was like the People impersonated, sublimated, touched with genius. And it is to such sources that we must always look. No man can calculate the courses of genius, no man can foretell the leadership of nations. And so we must see to it that the bottom is left open, we must see to it that the soil of the common feeling of the common consciousness is always fertile and unclogged, for there can be no fruit unless the roots touch the rich sources of life. And it seems to me that the schoolhouses dotted here, there, and everywhere, over the great expanse of this nation, will some day prove to be the roots of that great tree of liberty which shall spread for the sustenance and protection of all mankind. Transcriber’s Notes New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.