Our wives and children dear,
With hearts too full for utterance,
But with a silent tear.
“We’re coming, we’re coming, the Union to restore;
We’re coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more!”
Had it not been for such songs and the spirit they aroused the Civil War never could have been won. We now understand that during the great war the French army was at the point of mutiny, and was saved not by stern discipline but by a renewal of its spiritual power. I think it will be as hard as for a man to try and lift himself by his boot straps to try to put farming into its proper place through science and material prosperity alone. We need poets to give us songs and playwrights to put our story in such pictures that the world must listen to it and understand. The one great thing which impels us to work on and fight is the hope that the property which we may leave behind us will be safe and put to reasonable use. Some of us may leave cash and lands; others can give the world only a family of children, but at heart our struggle is to see that this heritage may be made safe.
For most of us make a great mistake in locating a storage place for the heritage which we hope to leave to the future. We work and we toil; we struggle to improve conditions; we strive to capitalize our worry and our work into money and into land in order that our children may carry on our work. Have you ever stopped to think who holds the future of all this? Many of you no doubt will say that the future of this great nation lies in the banks and vaults of the cities where money is piled up mountains high. We have all acted upon that principle too long, digging wealth from the soil and then sending it into the town for investment, until we have come to think that our future lies there. We are wrong; it is a mistake. The future of this land, and all it means to us, lies in the hands of little children, who are playing on the city streets or in the open fields of the country, and it is not so much in their hands as in the pictures which are being printed on their little minds and souls. And this future will be safer with poetry and imagination than with the multiplication table alone.
I know about this from my own start in life. I was expected to be satisfied with work until I was 21, and then have a suit of clothes and a yoke of oxen. One trouble with the farmers of New England was that they thought this a sufficient outfit for their boys. I think I might have fallen in with that plan and contented my life with it had it not been for a crude picture which hung in the shop where we pegged shoes. It was a poor color scheme, a perfect daub of art, in which some amateur artist had tried to express a thought which was too large for his soul. A bare oak tree, with most of its branches gone, was framed against the Winter sky. It was evening; a few stars had appeared, and the sky was full of color. The artist had tried to arrange the stars and the sky colors so that they represented a crude American flag, with the oak tree serving as the staff. His great unexpressed thought was that at the close of the Civil War God had painted His promise of freedom on the sky in the coloring of that flag. As a child, that crude picture became a part of my life. I have never been able to forget the glory of it, as I have forgotten the meanness, the poverty, the narrow blindness of our daily lives, so that all through the long and stormy years, wherever I have walked, I have seen that flag upon the sky, and I have waited hopefully for the coming of the sunrise of that day when, through the work of real education, when with the help of such men and such women as are here today, every hopeless man, every lonely woman, every melancholy child upon a sad and desolate hill farm, may feel the thrill of opportunity, and the joy and the glory of living upon the sunny side of the barn.