Upon the rich and the poor alike rests the burden of the fulfillment of the dream of the Fathers, and they are poor patriots who seek to lift that burden from our shoulders instead of teaching us how to bear it nobly. Fresh from the press, there lies on my table, as I write, a review of an important work on immigration, in which the reviewer refers to the "sincere idealists who still cling to the superstition that it is opposition to some predestined divine purpose to suggest the rejection of the 'poor and oppressed.'" It is just such teaching as that, which discards as so much sentimental junk the ideas that made our great men great, that is pushing us inch by inch into the quagmire of materialism. If it is true that our rich care for nothing but their ease, and our poor have no thought beyond their daily needs, it is due to the fact that the canker of selfishness is gnawing at the heart of the nation. The love of self, absorption in the immediate moment, are vices of the flesh which fastened on us during the centuries of our agonized struggle for brute survival. The remedy that God appointed for these evils, the vision of our insignificant selves as a part of a great whole, whose lifetime is commensurate with eternity, the materialists would shatter and throw on the dump of human illusions. Who talks of superstition in a world built on superstition? Civilization is the triumph of one superstition after another. At the very foundation of our world is the huge superstition of the Fatherhood of God. In a time when the peoples of the earth bowed down to gods of stone, gods of wood, gods of brass and of gold, what more incomprehensible superstition could have been invented than that of an invisible, omnipresent Creator who made and ruled and disciplined the entire universe? One nation ventured to adopt this superstition, and that nation is regarded as the liberator of humanity from the slavery of bestial ignorance. Out of that initial superstition followed, in logical sequence, the superstition of the Brotherhood of Man, spread abroad by a son of the venturesome race; succeeded by a refinement of the same notion, the idea that the Father has no favorite children, but allots to each an equal portion of the goods of His house. That is democracy, the latest superstition of them all, the cornerstone of our Republic, and the model after which all the nations are striving to pattern themselves. * * * * *