Global Governance in the Twenty First Century. Appendix E by Michael L. Chadwick

Author:Michael L. Chadwick [Chadwick, Michael L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Global Affairs Publishing Company
Published: 2007-05-31T21:00:00+00:00

153. Gratitude for Our Heritage

By

J. Reuben Clark, Jr.

November 25, 1947

Address before the Salt Lake Rotary Club.

You honor me by asking me to speak upon this occasion. President Adam S. Bennion gave me the text, "Gratitude for Our Heritage."

Lacking six years, I have lived one-fourth of the time since the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock.

Lacking three years, I have lived half the life of our nation under the Constitution.

So young are we as a people and as a nation!

Yet in that scant four and two lives respectively, we have grown to be, not relatively, but actually the most powerful people and nation the world has ever seen.

Rome from its founding three-quarters of a millennium before Christ, till the fall to its lowest state in 600 A.D., had lived for over 1300 years; she built great temples, amphitheaters, palaces, roads, the mighty and tragic Colosseum; she gave us great orators, great literature, great art, developed great philosophies; she conquered the world and gave peace and order to her conquests; she developed a legal system that still governs half the world; she finally harbored and fostered Christianity. No other nation before or since has equalled her length of life, nor surpassed her achievements in some of the fields she occupied.

But in a little more than one-eighth of Rome's life span we have bred a nation of 140,000,000 free men.

We have built great temples into which we have garnered the art treasures of a thousand years, brought there by fair purchase and not by such lawless seizure as robbed the Athenian Acropolis.

We have constructed great museums to which we have brought the wonders of the world,—from all climes and from all shores.

We have erected gigantic mills from which roll steel monsters of strength and power that move mountains and carve out rivers.

We have moved over copper wires no bigger than a lady's finger, the energy of the falling waters of Niagara, of the waters of the great Columbia from Coulee Dam, of the mighty current of the Father of Waters at Keokuk, and of the Colorado at Hoover Dam, and scores upon scores of other great rivers and streams. We have carried that energy to far-away cities, villages, hamlets, where it has done the work of two thousand times ten thousand horses.

We have stored the waters of many rivers in huge reservoirs, and from them have slaked the thirst of the deserts that have yielded us the fruits of Paradise.

We have drilled the depths of the earth and drawn therefrom a golden liquid that drives our engines on land, on sea, in the air, that yields us all the colors of the rainbow, that washes away the earth that clings to our garments, that makes our clothing and a thousand plastic articles for our daily use.

We have net-worked the nation with tens of thousands of miles of iron bands over which we carry the goods and sustenance of the people.

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