The great and admirable strength of America consists in this, that America is truly the American people.

Maritain’s line frames “America” less as territory, ethnicity, or state apparatus than as a civic and moral reality constituted by its people. The “strength” he praises is therefore not primarily military or economic, but the capacity of a plural, immigrant society to cohere around shared political ideals and a common public life. Read in Maritain’s broader personalist and democratic thought, the sentence also implies a warning: if the people’s civic virtues, freedoms, and commitment to the common good erode, the nation’s real substance weakens. America’s durability, on this view, depends on the lived character and agency of citizens rather than on institutions alone.