204 State Papers and Addresses

States as the one great power of the world whose citizens still may go their
individual ways unhampered by restrictive regulations and legislation.

Let us not be so short-sighted, I beg of you, as to delude ourselves with
the soothing thought that this grand flag of ours could not be torn down from
its proud post. Short weeks ago there were thousands in France and England,
among them outstanding military leaders whose duty it was to be informed
about such matters, who felt that their particular countries were impregnable
to any assault. They would have scorned the suggestion that enemy forces
could overrun their lands. You know, however, what has taken place and how
seriously the very existence of those great nations is threatened today, and
certainly those countries were better prepared to resist attack than are we
here in America.

The changes taking place throughout the world today, cataclysmic as they
may seem to us and to the people of the nations even more immediately con-
cerned, are but another phase of world evolution that has proceeded without
interruption through all the pages of history. It was this ever-changing
aspect of world developments that the poet, Tennyson, wrote of in the Idylls
of the King, when he said:

"The Old order changeth, yielding

place to new
And God fulfills himself in many

ways

Lest one good custom should corrupt
the world. "

What the present outcome will be, of course, no one knows. This much is
certain, however, —the outcome is in the hands of God, and whatever ensues,
we know there is a definite purpose behind it all, and a definite ultimate good
to come out of all this present chaos.

There was a day, as you well recall, when the world knew no such govern-
mental system of democracy—a day when oppression was the rule everywhere,
and when the great masses of the people had no rights and no privileges ex-
cept as suited the whims of their rulers. In such a world the foundation of the
early colony of Maryland, with its offer of a new, free mode of life; and later,
the Constitution of our Great Nation, with its guarantees of individual rights
to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" were heartening promises of a
better life to freemen of an infant settlement. Democracy was the torch that
showed the world the way from the labyrinth of slavery and servility, to the
highest pinnacle of culture and development it has ever known. This was so
because these principles of early Maryland, and those guarantees rooted in
our Country's Constitution, bore testimony to the belief that man was a rational
creature, entitled in his own right to the privilege of working out his life in
the manner that most appealed to him.

Released from the bondage of centuries, mankind thereupon forged ahead
with giant strides, developing not only the vast new country, that is ours, to
a point that made it the leader of all the world, but also leaving the impress
of its influence for individual liberty and progress on all the other nations of
the civilized world. •

Today, the pendulum is swinging the other way, and democracy is on the
defensive, fighting for its very existence. This tragic war now raging in
Europe, is more than simply another war between Europe's nations. It is far