?
Much else is there that it were well they should ponder, and I am coming to it presently; but first, one suggestion.

Most of us, if we dig back only fifty or sixty or seventy years, can disinter various relatives over whose doings we should prefer to glide lightly and in silence.
Do you mean to say that you have none?
Nobody stained with any shade of dishonor?
No grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-etc.
grandfather or grandmother who ever made a scandal, broke a heart, or betrayed a trust?
Every man Jack and woman Jill of the lot right back to Adam and Eve wholly good, honorable, and courageous?
How fortunate to be sprung exclusively from the loins of centuries of angels--and to know all about them! Consider the hoard of virtue to which you have fallen heir! But you know very well that this is not so; that every one of us has every kind of person for an ancestor; that all sorts of virtue and vice, of heroism and disgrace, are mingled in our blood; that inevitably amidst the huge herd of our grandsires black sheep as well as white are to be found.
As it is with men, so it is with nations.

Do you imagine that any nation has a spotless history?
Do you think that you can peer into our past, turn over the back pages of our record, and never come upon a single blot?
Indeed you cannot.

And it is better--a great deal better--that you should be aware of these blots.

Such knowledge may enlighten you, may make you a better American.