Americans contribution in the world

From Chapter 20: "Five American Contributions to Civilization" by Charles William Eliot (1834-1926), the longest serving president of Harvard University.

"These five contributions to civilization-peace-keeping, religious toleration, the development of manhood suffrage, the welcoming of newcomers, and the diffusion of wellbeing-I hold to have been eminently characteristic of our country, and so important that, in spite of the qualifications and deductions which every candid citizen would admit with regard to every one of them, they will ever be held in the grateful remembrance of mankind. They are reasonable grounds for a steady, glowing patriotism. They have had much to do, both as causes and as effects, with the material prosperity of the United States; but they are all five essentially moral contributions, being triumphs of reason, enterprise, courage, faith, and justice, over passion, selfishness, inertness, timidity, and distrust. Beneath each one of these developments there lies a strong ethical sentiment, a strenuous moral and social purpose."

The full essay appears in Brander Matthews, The Oxford Book of American Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1914. p. 28.