ber that the Soviet Government, fully aware of this, would be glad of your help, of your co-operation, would be glad even to give you control over some part of her resources, if only to prevent that ominous ultimate dominion within Russia of a single foreign power.
Remember all these things, if indeed you need, as I think you do not need, such selfish motives to prompt you to the support of men who, if they fail, will fail from having hoped too much. Every true man is in some sort, until his youth dies and his eyes harden, the potential builder of a New Jerusalem. At some time or other, every one of us has dreamed of laying his brick in such a work. And even if this thing that is being builded here with tears and blood is not the golden city that we ourselves have dreamed, it is still a thing to the sympathetic understanding of which each one of us is bound by whatever he owes to his own youth. And if each one of us, then, all the more each nation, by what it owes to those first daring days of its existence, when all the world looked askance upon its presumptuous birth. America was young once, and there were men in America who would have brought in foreign aid to re-establish their dominion over a revolted nation. Are those the men to whom America now looks back with gratitude and pride?
Well, writing at speed to break my pen, and with the knowledge that in a few hours the man leaves Moscow who is to carry this letter with him to America, I have failed to say much that I would have said. I write now with my messenger waiting for my manuscript and somehow or other, incoherent, incomplete as it is, must bring it to an end. I will end as I began, with a quotation from your own Emerson:
“What is the scholar, what is the man for, but for hospitality to every new thought of his time? Have you leisure, power, property, friends? you shall be the asylum and patron of every new thought, every unproven opinion, every untried project, which proceeds out of good will and honest seeking. All the newspapers, all the tongues of to-day will of course at first defame what is noble; but you who hold not of today, not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand for it; and the highest compliment man ever receives from heaven is the sending to him its disguised and discredited angels.”
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