382 Extracts from Addresses
offerings, things that we gave because we could spare them easily. For
the first time in our lives we have been giving Sacrificially, and we
shall never go back to the ungenerous basis of the pre-war attitude
that we held with reference to those great causes that demand from us
generous, large-hearted and sacrificial benevolence.
Then think of the widening of the horizon that has come to us ! How
enormously bigger the world looks to men to-day than it did before the
war. We know something new about our world. We have studied
geography afresh. I can remember an old geography that I used to
have and pretended to study. My highest ambition was to be able to
bound the different States. I could always bound Texas easily enough,
because it had certain perfectly well defined frontiers, and it was so big.
I learned that you could place all the population of the United States
in Texas and have a population less dense than that of Central Ger-
many; that you could put all the population of the United States into
this State, raise in addition the world’s supply of cotton, and have left
a grazing pasture greater than the State of New York. One studied
about the capitals of States, the rulers of nations, and the products,
the imports and exports—as if anybody cared for those before the war!
To-day we are studying our geographies from the morning papers. We
know our world anew to-day. We know the great places that have
seen the conflicts of the present years. We know something of the
Oriental world as well. We used to think of Palestine as the place
where Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, and other worthies of the past
lived. Now you are not thinking in terms of Moses, Abraham, Isaac
or Jacob. You are thinking of Palestine now as the scene of General
Allenby’s exploits; of the French troops that rode up from Acre, past
Tyre and Sidon, into Beirût; of the British columns that went into
Damascus, the oldest city in the world; of Jerusalem regained, of Beth-
lehem retaken, and of the ancient tombs of the patriarchs in Hebron,
for the first time opened to the sight of the world. That is one of the
marvelous things that incidentally the war has brought to us.
I think also of the expansion of the human spirit in the literature
that the war has produced. There have come already some particularly
inspiring writings, and in the next ten years we are going to have a
renaissance of the finest traditions of our literature in all the nations
that have been involved in this war.
Last of all, and best of all, we have emerged in this war from our
insularity as a nation. We have come out from between our two pro-
tecting oceans. We have taken our place in the great sisterhood of
nations, and especially beside our mother peoples and our brother peoples
of the English-speaking world—England across the sea, and the four