You may hear it in its popular and somewhat vulgar form--not without a characteristic touch of humour--in the Yankee's answer to the intimation of an Englishman that if the United States did not behave themselves well, Great Britain would come over and whip them. "What!" said the Yankee, "ag'in?" You may hear it in deeper, saner, wiser tones, in Lincoln's noble asseveration on the battle-field of Gettysburg, that "government of the people, by the people, for the people _shall not_ perish from the earth." But however or whenever you hear it, the thing which it utters is the same,--the inward conviction of a people that they have the right and the ability, and consequently the duty, to regulate their own life, to direct their own property, and to pursue their own happiness according to the light which they possess. It is obvious that one may give different names to this spirit, according to the circumstances in which it is manifested and observed. It may be called the spirit of independence when it is shown in opposition to forces of external control. Professor Barrett Wendell, speaking from this chair four years ago, said that the first ideal to take form in the American consciousness was "the ideal of Liberty." But his well-balanced mind compelled him immediately to limit and define this ideal as a desire for "the political freedom of America from all control, from all coercion, from all interference by any power foreign to our own American selves." And what is this but self-reliance? Professor Münsterberg, in his admirable book, _The Americans_, calls it "the spirit of self-direction." He traces its influence in the development of American institutions and the structure of American life. He says: "Whoever wishes to understand the secret of that baffling turmoil, the inner mechanism and motive behind all the politically effective forces, must set out from only one point. He must appreciate the yearning of the American heart after self-direction. Everything else is to be understood from this." But this yearning after self-_direction_, it seems to me, is not peculiar to Americans. All men have more or less of it by nature. All men yearn to be their own masters, to shape their own life, to direct their own course. The difference among men lies in the clearness and the vigour with which they conceive their own right and power and duty so to do. Back of the temper of independence, back of the passion for liberty, back of the yearning after self-direction, stands the spirit of self-reliance, from which alone they derive force and permanence. It was this spirit that made America, and it is this spirit that preserves the republic. Emerson has expressed it in a sentence: "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds."