No doubt what you found here didn't seem touched for
you, after all, with the complete beauty of the ideal which you had
conceived beforehand.
But remember this, if we had grown at all poor in the ideal, you brought
some of it with you. A man does not go out to seek the thing that is not
in him. A man does not hope for the thing that he does not believe in,
and if some of us have forgotten what America believed in, you, at any
rate, imported in your own hearts a renewal of the belief. That is the
reason that I, for one, make you welcome.
If I have in any degree forgotten what America was intended for, I will
thank God if you will remind me.
I was born in America. You dreamed dreams of what America was to be, and
I hope you brought the dreams with you. No man that does not see visions
will ever realize any high hope or undertake any high enterprise.
Just because you brought dreams with you, America is more likely to
realize the dreams such as you brought. You are enriching us if you came
expecting us to be better than we are.
See, my friends, what that means. It means that Americans must have a
consciousness different from the consciousness of every other nation in
the world.
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