America, and this includes Canada and the Southern Republics, was a choice land when the Jaredites left the land of Shinar approximately four thousand years ago. So was it fourteen hundred years later when Lehi and his colony formed the nucleus of a nation, prospered on the bounty of the country, and after a thousand years perished because of transgression.

America was a great land when the stately Indian chiefs ruled their tribes, which thrived from the Behring Sea in the north to the Panama and the towering Andes in the south.

Today, yielding to the demands of the greatest economic era since the dawn of her creation America is demonstrating the vastness of her resources and the extent of her natural possibilities as never before. Well may we sing: I love thy rocks and rills,
Thy woods and templed hills;
My heart with rapture thrills
Like that above.

This country is not only the choicest of all lands, but now the preserver of true liberty, and the hope of civilized man!

However, as I have already implied, a country may be ever so great and fruitful, yet a nation subsisting upon it be impotent and decadent. As Lyman Abbott has truly said:

The greatness of a nation is measured, not by its fruitful acres, but by the men who cultivate those acres; not by great forests, but by the men who use those forests; not by its mines, but by the men who work them.

God has made America fruitful; man must make and keep the nation great.