There is another point in General Sheridan’s career which it is good for all of us to remember. Whereas Grant, Sherman, and Thomas were of the old native American stock, the parents of Sheridan, like the parents of Farragut, were born on the other side of the water. Any one of the five was just as much a type of the real American, of what is best in America, as the other four. We should keep steadily before our minds the fact that Americanism is a question of principle, of purpose, of idealism, of character; that it is not a matter of birthplace, or creed, or line of descent. Here in this country the representatives of many old-world races are being fused together into a new type, a type the main features of which are already determined, and were determined at the time of the Revolutionary war; for the crucible in which all the new types are melted into one was shaped from 1776 to 1789, and our nationality was definitely fixed in all its essentials by the men of Washington’s day. The strains will not continue to exist separately in this country as in the old world. They will be combined in one; and of this new type those men will best represent what is loftiest in the nation’s past, what is finest in her hope for the future, who stand each solely on his worth as a man; who scorn to do evil to others, and who refuse to submit to wrongdoing themselves; who have in them no taint of weakness; who never fear to fight when fighting is demanded by a sound and high morality, but who hope by their lives to bring ever nearer the day when justice and peace shall prevail within our own borders and in our relations with all foreign powers.
Much of the usefulness of any career must lie in the impress that it makes upon, and the lessons that it teaches to, the generations that come after. We of this generation have our own problems to solve, and the condition of our solving them is that we shall all work together as American citizens without regard to differences of section or creed or birthplace, copying, not the divisions which so lamentably sundered our fathers one from another, but the spirit of burning devotion to duty which drove them forward, each to do the right as it was given him to see the right, in the great years when Grant, Farragut, Sherman, Thomas, and Sheridan, when Lee and Jackson, and the Johnstons, the valiant men of the North and the valiant men of the South, fought to a finish the great civil war. They did not themselves realize, in the bitterness of the struggle, that the blood and the grim suffering marked the death throes of what was worn out, and the birth pangs of a new and more glorious national life. Mighty is the heritage which we have received from the men of the mighty days. We, in our turn, must gird up our loins to meet the new issues with the same stern courage and resolute adherence to an ideal, which marked our fathers who belonged to the generation of the man in whose honor we commemorate this monument to-day.
