Americans, is a grim necessity to which sober men may be driven in the last extremity to ward off violent hands from all which makes life valuable, and no flowers of rhetoric can make us see in it anything else than the dire necessity of a peaceful citizen when his life, his family, his fireside, and his country are in danger from the rage of a misguided foe.
The war taught us also the value of moral forces in national life. We were in danger of falling into all the vices of a long and lazy peace. Our interests were centering in mercantile and industrial pursuits until it seemed that, as a nation, we might hold no cause worth the injury which must result from an interruption of industry. It seemed that our country might come to mean to us only a territory teeming with wealth for which we desired to scramble without interruption. Patriotism was a virtue which languished for want of exercise. It could no longer live on the story of great deeds done by a former generation, for the love of country, like every other love, grows by what it demands, not by what it brings; those who love their country are those who have paid for it, not those who have enjoyed its blessings after it was bought. But the great crisis of our recent history offered to our people an ideal good. It held up before the mind of the nation a good to be won which was worth more than gold or raiment. It called them to win for their children another inheritance than lands or stocks and that was the inheritance of a nation which should be to them a true nursing mother by its traditions of labor, patience, suffering, and self-denial. The people responded to the call. They proved to all the world and to themselves, which is far more important, that they could understand such a call, that they could appreciate a higher and ideal good, and
