OF THE UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY



    My fellow-countrymen, it is a stupendous task we have under-
taken-this task of establishing a government of the people over a
whole continent and in various dependencies throughout the world,
but we dare not give it up. We must go forward with our work of
teaching the world equality and fraternity; and the only method of
doing this is by educating and spiritualizing the people. This is the
task of our schools and colleges. Let us consider one of its phases.
    My friends, human freedom-moral, political, social and indus-
trial freedom-realized through the home, the school, the shop, the
university, the city, and the state, the church and the various asso-
ciations of men and of nations, with all their interplay of influence,
is a tremendous concept. But nothing less will give the men of the
future complete liberty. The time was when men were satisfied with
the freedom in one or two of the-se relations, but our life has now
become so many-sided and complicated that liberty cannot be secured
through any one channel or in any two or three institutions.
    It has not been over an easy road that men have arrived at this
stage of imperfect liberty. It was only through ages of war and
struggle that we attained the measure of liberty we now possess.
There are no short-cuts to freedom. Complete liberty will be won
only through the application of knowledge and understanding, truth
and love, imagination and .sympathy, courage and devotion, to every
side of human life and every form of human relationship, interna-
tional as well as intra-national. The constructive energy of human
society works outward from the individual in ever-widening circles-
the township, the county, the state, the nation, the world-and then
back again through all these to the individual. Mankind is ready to
say, "Give me complete liberty or death."
    The democracy has in the past limited its activity too much to
organizations immediately surrounding the individual, to the neglect
of the broad questions touching the outer circle of human relations.
We concern ourselves intensely with the rights of the individual in
the shop or the city, and let amateur statesmen direct our business
with other nations. The time is at hand when we must cease this
policy of drift and undertake a broad and comprehensive treatment
of the problems of international life. Democracy, educated by the
sad lessons of this war, informed and enlightened by this larger
view of its duty. must drop his policy of "laissez faire" and abandon
the path of negation in international affairs. That policy may have
been wise when America was twenty days distant from all the world;
it would be madness in these days of steam warships and submarines,
of aeroplanes and Zeppelins. So long 'as our task was the breaking
of the bonds that bound mankind to the past the individualistic na-
tional policy was a useful and an opportune one; it is a use1ess Ana



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