ON THE OCCASION OF THE UNVEILING OF THE SOLDIERS’ AND SAILORS’ MONUMENT AT ARLINGTON, UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF THE COLONIAL DAMES OF AMERICA, MAY 21, 1902
Mrs. President, and members of the Society, and you, my comrades, and, finally, officers and men of the Regular Army, whom we took as our models in the war four years ago:
It is a pleasure to be here this afternoon to accept in the name of the nation the monument put up by your society to the memory of those who fell in the war with Spain; a short war; a war that called for the exertion of only the merest fraction of the giant strength of this nation; but a war, the effects of which will be felt through the centuries to come, because of the changes it wrought. It is eminently appropriate that the monument should be unveiled to-day, the day succeeding that on which the free republic of Cuba took its place among the nations of the world as a sequel to what was done by those men who fell and by their comrades in ’98.
And here, where we meet to honor the memory of those who drew the great prize of death in battle, a word in reference to the survivors: I think that one lesson every one who was capable of learning anything learned from his experience in that war was the old, old lesson that we need to apply in peace quite as much—the lesson that the man who does not care to do any act until the time for heroic action comes, does not do the heroic act when the time does come. You all of you remember, comrades, some man—it is barely possible some of you remember being the man—who, when you enlisted, had a theory that there was nothing but splendor and fighting and bloodshed in the war, and then had the experience of learning that the first thing you had to do was to perform commonplace duties, and perform them well. The work of any man in the campaign depended upon the resolution and effective intelligence with which he started about doing each duty as it arose; not waiting until he could choose the duty that he thought sufficiently spectacular to do, but doing the duty that came to hand. That is exactly the lesson that all of us need to learn in times of peace. It is not merely a great thing, but an indispensable thing that the nation’s citizens should be ready and willing to die for it in time of need; and the presence of no other quality could atone for the lack of such readiness to lay down life if the nation calls. But in addition to dying for the nation you must be willing and anxious to live for the nation, or the nation will be badly off. If you want to do your duty only when the time comes for you to die, the nation will be deprived of valuable services during your lives.
I never see a gathering of this kind; I never see a gathering under the auspices of any of the societies which are organized to commemorate the valor and patriotism of the founders of this nation; I never see a gathering composed of the men who fought in the great Civil War or in any of the lesser contests in which this country has been engaged, without feeling the anxiety to make such a gathering feel, each in his or her heart, the all-importance of doing the ordinary, humdrum, commonplace duties of each day as those duties arise. A large part of the success on the day of battle is always due to the aggregate of the individual performance of duty during the long months that have preceded the day of battle. The way in which a nation arises to a great crisis is largely conditioned upon the way in which its citizens have habituated themselves to act in the ordinary affairs of the national life. You can not expect that much will be done in the supreme hour of peril by soldiers who have not fitted themselves to meet the need when the need comes, and you can not expect the highest type of citizenship in the periods when it is needed if that citizenship has not been trained by the faithful performance of ordinary duty. What we need most in this Republic is not special genius, not unusual brilliancy, but the honest and upright adherence on the part of the mass of the citizens and of their representatives to the fundamental laws of private and public morality—which are now what they have been during recorded history. We shall succeed or fail in making this Republic what it should be made—I will go a little further than that—what it shall and must be made, accordingly as we do or do not seriously and resolutely set ourselves to do the tasks of citizenship—and good citizenship consists in doing the many small duties, private and public, which in the aggregate make it up.
AT ARLINGTON, MEMORIAL DAY, MAY 30, 1902
Mr. Commander; Comrades; and you, the men and women of the United States who owe your being here to what was done by the men of the great Civil War:
I greet you, and thank you for the honor done me in asking me to be present this day. It is a good custom for our country to have certain solemn holidays in commemoration of our greatest men and of the greatest crises in our history. There should be but few such holidays. To increase their number is to cheapen them. Washington and Lincoln—the man who did most to found the Union, and the man who did most to preserve it—stand head and shoulders above all our other public men, and have by common consent won the right to this preëminence. Among the holidays which commemorate the turning points in American history, Thanksgiving has a significance peculiarly its own. On July 4 we celebrate the birth of the nation; on this day, the 30th of May, we call to mind the deaths of those who died that the nation might live, who wagered all that life holds dear for the great prize of death in battle, who poured out their blood like water in order that the mighty national structure raised by the far-seeing genius of Washington, Franklin, Marshall, Hamilton, and the other great leaders of the Revolution, great framers of the Constitution, should not crumble into meaningless ruins.
You whom I address to-day and your comrades who wore the blue beside you in the perilous years during which strong, sad, patient Lincoln bore the crushing load of national leadership, performed the one feat the failure to perform which would have meant destruction to everything which makes the name America a symbol of hope among the nations of mankind. You did the greatest and most necessary task which has ever fallen to the lot of any men on this Western Hemisphere. Nearly three centuries have passed since the waters of our coasts were first furrowed by the keels of those whose children’s children were to inherit this fair land. Over a century and a half of colonial growth followed the settlement; and now for over a century and a quarter we have been a nation.
During our four generations of national life we have had to do many tasks, and some of them of far-reaching importance; but the only really vital task was the one you did, the task of saving the Union. There were other crises in which to have gone wrong would have meant disaster; but this was the one crisis in which to have gone wrong would have meant not merely disaster but annihilation. For failure at any other point atonement could have been made; but had you failed in the iron days the loss would have been irreparable, the defeat irretrievable. Upon your success depended all the future of the people on this continent, and much of the future of mankind as a whole.