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There is a companion picture, a gleam of democracy's poesy. One writing of the habitants of one of those smoky valley cities said: "They are not below poetry but above it." Rather are they making it rough, virile, formless, rhymeless.
Of all dangers to a nation, as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account. Much quackery teems, of course, even on democracy's side, yet does not really affect the orbic quality of the matter.
"What seems so strange," I said, as I looked at him lying back on his pillows, "is your faith that we shall be able to bring order out of all this chaos your belief in Democracy." "Democracy's an adventure," he replied, "the great adventure of mankind. I think the trouble in many minds lies in the fact that they persist in regarding it as something to be made safe.
In those thoughts, in a sort, I make the first steps or studies toward the mighty theme, from the point of view necessitated by my foregoing poems, and by modern science. In them I also seek to set the key-stone to my democracy's enduring arch.
But I wander from my thesis which is that the classics are needed as the fallow to give lasting and increasing fertility to the natural mind out upon democracy's great levels, into which so much has been washed down and laid down from the Olympic mountains and eternal hills of the classical world. In the war days we naturally ignored the fallow. We cultivated with Hooverian haste.
Franck, one of the Social Democracy's most shining lights and the man who was in line to be Bebel's successor, volunteered for military service. He was one of the first to fall fighting in September, somewhere in the West. The authorities might have known that Liebknecht was a hard man to keep quiet if he ever decided to speak out.
After all of which, returning to our starting-point, we reiterate, and in the whole Land's name, a welcome to our eminent guests. Visits like theirs, and hospitalities, and hand-shaking, and face meeting face, and the distant brought near what divine solvents they are! Travel, reciprocity, "interviewing," intercommunion of lands what are they but Democracy's and the highest Law's best aids?
Carl Sandburg said, "I see America not in the setting sun of a black night of despair... I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God... I see great days ahead for men and women of will and vision." I've never felt more strongly that America's best days and democracy's best days lie ahead. We're a powerful force for good.
And he would, I think, be gladdened by this day; for today is the concrete expression of a stunning fact: our continuity these 200 years since our government began. We meet on democracy's front porch, a good place to talk as neighbors and as friends. For this is a day when our nation is made whole, when our differences, for a moment, are suspended. And my first act as President is a prayer.
They forgot it was only a sham attack, an imitation battle, an exhibition drill. For the moment a curtain had been lifted and they were permitted to see something of the glory, the passion, the horror of democracy's struggle against the armed autocracy of the world. When it was over they sighed and came back to the present almost with a shock; so greatly had they been engrossed in the scene.
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