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we still call "personal freedom," and which lies with the small 

 freeholder. These cities conquered country provinces and made 

 them pay tribute. Their entire scheme was one of developing city 

 and town. They never improved the agriculture of any province, 

 but drew the best blood away from it and made the production of 

 food a work for menials. On this false basis the city rose to splen- 

 dor and power, until finally it was always pulled down. And who 

 pulled it down? Men who came out of the star-lit deserts; men 

 who wandered out of the frozen north, where for centuries they 

 had brooded over their wrong and hoarded in their hearts that 

 spirit of home and of freedom which should ever remain as a part 

 of the nature of the small freeholder of land. For in every age, 

 and with every race of men, it is this man with the small parcel 

 of land which he controls who has finally kept alive the world's 

 liberties. It is therefore the great problem of government to keep 

 this class of men prosperous and contented. The men who founded 

 those old cities like the men who founded this republic, and who 

 fought for it during our war, recognize this foundation truth of 

 history, yet each and all of them have somehow failed to make 

 the generation which followed them understand it as they did. 

 As an illustration of what I mean, suppose you sit down with my 

 boy, with your boy, or any group of young men, and try to tell 

 them the true story of your competence or of your political con- 

 victions. Eight chances to ten the boy will get the form of it, but 

 will not get the spirit. You cannot make him understand fully, 

 because you are talking the hard language of experience which is 

 a language he has never learned. It is as if you were talking to 

 him in a foreign tongue. You will not and cannot reach common 

 ground with him on material things, not until you strike that strange 

 and unknown quality which we call sentiment, or the spiritual side 

 of public life. All through these long years men have been handing 

 the slave which they have conquered, over to their boy, not realiz- 

 ing that they have set a master over the young men without giving 

 the true weapon needed to reduce him to a useful servant. For you 

 and I, and all the rest of us have talked to our children and to 

 others too much from the viewpoint of material success. The 

 bright, clean and hopeful minds which are to take the slave of 

 our generation have not understood just what the legacy means. 

 You see it all comes back every time we start to the same point, the 

 life, the essential thing of all freedom is the moral or spiritual side 

 of it. That is the one universal language of manhood which binds 

 one generation to another, the great conquering force which makes 

 the slave of the father easier for the son to handle. 



Granting all this, what can I do ; what can you do to help the 

 cause of the common man? There are certain well defined things 

 which we should stand for always, definitely, openly, everywhere. 

 Let me name a few of them. Legislation against child labor. 

 When tender children are driven to work before their time, you 

 and your children are injured in two ways. Whenever children 



