THE AMERICANS WHOM WE MOST DELIGHT TO HONOR
August 1, 1918
At long intervals in the history of a nation there come great days when the picked sons of the Nation determine for generations to come that nation’s place in history. During the last few weeks our fighting men in France have rendered all the rest of us forever their debtors. They have won high honor for themselves and for their country. Our children’s children will owe them deep gratitude for what they have done. All Americans hold their heads higher because of their deeds.
Their achievement has been won at the cost of perseverance in training and of resolution in facing unbelievable hardship and fatigue. It has also cost and will cost the death, the crippling, and the wounding of many scores of thousands of our best and bravest. We who stay behind in ease and comfort, who show our patriotism by economizing on sugar or wheat or beef instead of by living in our clothes until they rot off us in the trenches, or who pay money for taxes and bonds and Thrift Stamps instead of paying with our blood, owe an incalculable debt to the men at the front and to the mothers, wives, and little children of those who are killed at the front. We must pay this debt.
The debt is due to our wonderful fighting men at the front individually, to our army collectively, and to this Nation as a whole. We must provide for the crippled men and for the widows and children of the dead. Nothing that we can do will lighten the bitter sorrow of those who have lost the men they loved; stern pride in the courage and gallant devotion of those who are dead is the only staff that will help to carry that burden for the living. But the material needs of the survivors must be met with ample generosity and yet in the only permanently effective fashion, by training those who need help to help themselves and achieve an ever-increasing self-respect and self-reliance.
We must now help the army as a whole by straining every nerve without a day’s delay immensely to increase our strength, our numbers, and our resources at the front. We should provide now, and as a matter of fact we ought to have provided six months ago, for an army of six or seven million men, so that when next spring opens we may have at least four million fighting men at the front. We are more populous than Germany, or France and Great Britain combined, and we should provide so that two years after we entered the war our army shall be as large as Germany’s or as the combined forces of our allies in France. We should speed to the limit the work of the ships, guns, and airplanes. At present our army is in France mainly because of the aid of British ships, and it is able to fight mainly because of the field cannon and even airplanes it has received from the French. The draft limit should be immensely increased and the exceptions immensely decreased.
To stand by the army is to stand by the Nation, and therefore to stand by the Allies to whom our national faith is plighted. This war will be won by the fighting men at the front. All other work is merely auxiliary and is entirely subordinate to theirs. Let us provide for the army instantly, and let us provide for the Nation’s future permanently by at once introducing the policy of universal obligatory military training for all our young men.
The fighting men at the front are the men most worthy of honor. Let every American lad hereafter be trained so that in time of need he can fill this most honorable of all positions.