The pregnant skyline of America was set in place one brick at a time. Now that represents a lot of calluses. America the beautiful is not an accomplished fact guaranteed to remain intact. God shed His grace on thee, to be sure. This was wasteland when God had it to Himself. He handed man a hoe and said you want another Eden, all right earn it. And all that is necessary for the weeds to take over again is for you and me to lay down that hoe. Now Americans, the problem is less acute today than it has been. We’re on the right track right now, but if we sit down on that track I’m afraid we’re going to get run over. We tell our young people how our country was carved out of the wilderness. No it wasn’t. Our nation was not carved out of the wilderness.

Our nation was hammered and hoed and chopped and dug and sawed and clawed out of the wilderness by bare-handed man who asked nothing for nothing!

America did not start out with an agricultural production that’s the awe and envy of the world. it was seeded first by sodbusting farmers who fought Indians and ranchers and cold and heat and drought and bugs and flood and one another. The fruited plain sprang forth from barren acres only after they had been watered with a lot of sweat. I guess what I’m saying is that the more history I study, ours and others, the more certain I am that there is one fertilizer essential to the survival of civilization, and that fertilizer is sweat.

And I don’t mean perspiration, I mean the kind of steamy, streamy, salty sweat that’s run from a man by hard physical work.

Somehow the sweat gets into the soil of a farm, or a factory, or a city, or a state, or a nation, and everything there a bouts grows tall and strong and tough enough to stand against any storm. But the day the sweat dries up, the soil dries up, and whole civilizations are buried in dust.