Nations can win success, can be rich and powerful, can cover the earth with their armies, the seas with their fleets, and yet be selfish, small and mean. Physical progress means opportunity for doing good. It means responsibility. Wealth is the end of the despicable, victory the purpose of brutality.
But there is something nobler than all these—something that rises above wealth and power—something above lands and palaces—something above raiment and gold—it is the love of right, the cultivation of the moral nature, the desire to do justice, the inextinguishable love of human liberty.
Nothing can be nobler than a nation governed by conscience, nothing more infamous than power without pity, wealth without honor and without the sense of justice.
Only by the soldiers of the right can the laurel be won or worn.
On this day we honor the heroes who fought to make our Nation just and free—who broke the shackles of the slave, who freed the masters of the South and their allies of the North. We honor chivalric men who made America the hope and beacon of the human race—the foremost Nation of the world.
These heroes established the first republic, and demonstrated that a government in which the legally expressed will of the people is sovereign and supreme is the safest, strongest, securest, noblest and the best.
They demonstrated the human right of the people, and of all the people, to make and execute the laws—that authority does not come from the clouds, or from ancestry, or from the crowned and titled, or from constitutions and compacts, laws and customs—not from the admissions of the great, or the concessions of the powerful and victorious—not from graves, or consecrated dust—not from treaties made between successful robbers—not from the decisions of corrupt and menial courts—not from the dead, but from the living—not from the past but from the present, from the people of to-day—from the brain, from the heart and from the conscience of those who live and love and labor.
The history of this world for the most part is the history of conflict and war, of invasion, of conquest, of victorious wrong, of the many enslaved by the few.
Millions have fought for kings, for the destruction and enslavement of their fellow-men. Millions have battled for empire, and great armies have been inspired by the hope of pillage; but for the first time in the history of this world millions of men battled for the right, fought to free not themselves, but others, not for prejudice, but for principle, not for conquest, but for conscience.
The men whom we honor were the liberators of a Nation, of a whole country, North and South—of two races. They freed the body and the brain, gave liberty to master and to slave. They opened all the highways of thought, and gave to fifty millions of people the inestimable legacy of free speech.