Is it so hard, for us, whose minds have grown,
From tribal limits, petty cousinship,
Out to a million counted nation's soul;
From pasture ranges, or a city wall,
To continental rule and ownership
To intercontinental talk and trade,
To travel and exchange from sea to sea; —
Is it so much, to ask mankind today
To spread a trifle wider, to enlarge
One further step, and see our trodden world,
Our well-known freely travelled modern world,
As One — as long each nation stood as one?

This is Our World, as little islands are;
Just a round place of land and water wide
For us to live on — where we have to live
This is Mankind, Humanity, our Race,
And there is not more difference between
The highest haughtiest white man and the black, —
The lowest wildest savage in the wood, —
Than, in one nation, we may plainly see
Between wise courteous educated men
And their own savages in city slums.
No savage so degraded, so diseased,
So hopeless in accumulated shame,
As the ancestral paupers we have made,
With long black pedigrees of social crime.

If we can feel one nation, rich and poor,
Pious and vicious, ignorant and wise;
With high self-sacrifice of noblest life,
Long social service, fullest duty done,
By some; and also, piece and part of us,
Our criminal diseased degenerate ones;
Our feebleminded, idiot, insane,
Our weak poor half-developed backward class;
If all this makes a nation, and we stand
To guard and honor it, defend its rights,
Know it and love it as a living thing, —
Our Country! To serve which a man should live;
Our Country! To save which a man should die; —
If the plain ordinary common mind
Can hold a thought like this and live by it
What hinders us from seeing this, Our World?
Our races are no wider set apart
By difference in stage of social growth
Than child from man, and as we love the child,
Feed it and teach it, wait for it to grow,
So should grown races help the little ones
By transcendent aid of social power;
Assisted evolution, that which lifts
A people over centuries of change,
Giving to all, in rapid smooth advance,
The benefits attained by one alone.

Some nations are superior? Agreed.
So are some persons to the rest of us.
No nation has appeared where all the folk
Stand flat and even as a level beach,
Identical as grain on grain on sand.
But in our nations we can clearly see
That statesmanship and learning, power and skill,
Appear and grow in service to the rest,
And only so. Superiority
Means but the Great Man's Burden, the high law
Of duty to the less — noblesse oblige .

Our world, with a new spirit, a new hope flag,
Flag of the white orb, belted with the red
Of our one blood, our human brotherhood,
Centered supreme in a blue field of stars;
Our world, Our Country, Our Humanity,
No one land over all, but all for one
And one for all, in widest comradeship;
This gives at last room for the human soul,
Room to fulfill ambition's highest hope,
Love's deepest service, wisdom's widest power;
Something to live for, fully satisfied,
And facing death with utter unconcern,
So that, in living, we have served Our World.