Are we to suffer that they may live? Is this liberty of ours, this Land of the Free, without price? And will those hold it dear whom it has cost nothing?
Yet, so great is my faith in this great nation, so sure am I that the principles on which it is built are enduring, that I believe all these things will be set right in time. The one thing that matters now is to do our part, to show to the world that America still believes that there is such a thing as honor, and such a word as right.
For—and this I believe as I do in my country—we are to end this war. And that is the greatest privilege a nation of the world may have. We have sat by, through such horrors as have turned the world to blood. But now we can come in our strength, and mighty strength it will be. So rich we are! So strong! So young!
And the enemy is old—jaded and crafty and old: as old as cruelty is old. We are young and tireless and unafraid.
I have seen a sixteen-year-old Belgian sentinel keeping watch over a part of the German army, and all its science was powerless against his keen young eyes.
But we must pay the price. And the cost falls heaviest on the women.
No woman has the right to hold her son back if he desires to go to war. It is the fruition of the years in which she sought to make him a man. It is the vindication of his manhood. It is the crystallization of those very ideals which she taught him with his prayers.
I decline to believe that there are mothers who will not let their boys strike back when they are attacked.
But it is hard. Always the relation between mother and son is very close. As the boy grows up, the mother faces this, that he needs more than she can give him. He is still her world, but she is no longer his. Life calls, work and play and love, and sometimes battle. And the mother cannot hold him.
Everywhere are mothers, women who have patched small garments and tied up little wounds, who have built up a house of life out of millions of loving services, whose world has been the four walls of home.