of Governor Herbert R. O'Conor 387

WELCOMING THE COUNCIL OF LITHUANIAN SOCIETIES
ON OCCASION OF PLANTING COMMEMORATIVE OAK TREE

State House Lawn, May 18, 1941
Annapolis

IT seems peculiary fitting that the ceremonies commemorating and renewing
the close ties established by the State of Maryland and the Republic of
Lithuania six years ago, with the planting of the Oak Tree on our State House
lawn, should coincide with the celebration throughout the Nation today of
"I Am An American Day. "

Since that Sunday in May, 1935, when representatives of the Council of
Lithuanian Societies assembled on our State House grounds to plant the Oak
Tree which the government of their homeland had sent to our State, many
things have happened to solidify the close bond thus established.

At that time, the tree-planting ceremony was an expression of grateful
appreciation from the Government of Lithuania for the passage by the Mary-
land Legislature of the joint resolution establishing Republic of Lithuania
Day annually in Maryland. Today, however, your pilgrimage to this Mary-
land shrine brings to mind similar pilgrimages from Europe to Maryland
three hundred years ago, when the newly established Colony of Maryland
offered for the first time a refuge for the oppressed of all lands.

The happy coincidence that your visitation comes on a day set aside to
mark in a special way the advantages of American citizenship, will appeal
with particular significance to a group like yours, a group whose fatherland,
after having enjoyed the privileges of freedom such as we know it here in
America, now finds these priceless liberties denied them.

Constituted as we human beings are, it often happens that we never really
appreciate the good things we have until we've either lost them, or face a
serious threat in that direction. Here in America our free way of life has
been so bound up with our very existence that it seems inconceivable that we
should ever be without those privileges. Individual liberty; the right of free
speech, of free press, of free assembly; the right to worship God according
to the individual conscience, all of these have-become so much a part of our
every-day life that possibly some of us haven't realized how blest we are.

I have no doubt that many of those who came to us from other lands and
have become American citizens, having known what life is under oppression,
sometimes value more sincerely the things that America has to offer than do we
who have been born and raised under that priceless heritage.

With the world in turmoil today, however; with practically all of con-
tinental Europe under the control of governments who deny every right to
the peoples of these lands; with Democracy threatened throughout the world
as it never has been threatened before, it is timely that all of us set aside this