By trouble met and patiently mastered, by suffering endured and conquered, by trials tested and overcome, so only does a man's soul grow to manliness.
Now a nation is made up of single men. The law holds for the mass as for the individuals. It took a thousand years of toil, and war, and suffering, to make the Europe that we have. It took a thousand years of wrestle for the very life itself, to build Rome before. To be sure, we inherited all that this past of agony had bought the world. For us Rome had lived, fought, toiled, and fallen. For us Celt, Saxon, Norman had wrought and striven. We started with the accumulated capital of a hundred generations. It was perhaps natural to suppose we might escape the hard necessity of our fathers. We might surely profit by their dear-bought experience. The wrecks, strewn along the shores, would be effectual warnings to our gallant vessel on the dangerous seas where they had sailed. In peace, plenty, and prosperity, we might be carried to the highest reach of national greatness.
Nay! never, unless we give the lie to all the world's experience! There never was a great nation yet nursed on pap, and swathed in silk. Storms broke around its rude cradle instead. The tempests rocked the stalwart child. The dragons came to strangle the baby Hercules in his swaddling clothes. The magnificent commerce, the increasing manufactures, the teeming soil, the wealth fast accumulating, they would never have made us, after all, a great people. They would have eaten the manhood out of us at last. We were becoming selfish, self-indulgent, sybaritic rapidly. The nation's muscle was softening, its heart was hardening. If we were to become a great nation, we needed more than commerce, more than plenty, more than rapid riches, more than a comfortable, indulgent life. If we were to be one of the world's great peoples, a people to dig deep and build strong, a people whose name and fame the world was to accept as a part of itself, we must look to pay the price inflexibly demanded at every people's hand, and count it out in sweat drops, tear drops, blood drops, to the last unit.
We have been patiently counting out this costly currency for three slow years. I pity the moral outlook of the man who does not see that we have received largely of our purchase.
From a nation whom the world believed, and whom itself believed, to be sunk in hopeless mammon worship, we have risen to be a nation that pours out its wealth like water for a noble purpose. Never again will 'the almighty dollar' be called America's divinity. We were sinking fast to low aims and selfish purposes, and wise men groaned at national degeneracy. The summons came, and millions leaped to offer all they had, to fling fortune, limb, and life on the altar of an unselfish cause. The dead manhood of the nation sprang to life at the call. We proved the redness of the old faithful, manly blood, to be as bright as ever.
I know we hear men talk of the demoralization produced by war. There is a great deal they can say eloquently on that side. Drunkenness, licentiousness, lawlessness, they say are produced by it, already to an extent fearful to consider. And scoundrels are using the land's necessities for their own selfish purposes, and fattening on its blood. These things are all true, and a great deal more of the same sort beside. And it may be well at times, with good purpose, to consider them. But it is not well to consider them alone, and speak of them as the only moral results of the war. No! by the ten thousands who have died for the grand idea of National Unity, by the unselfish heroes who have thrown themselves, a living wall, before the parricidal hands of traitors, who have perished that the land they loved beyond life might not perish, by the example and the memory they have left in ten thousand homes, which their death has consecrated for the nation's reverence by their lives and deaths, we protest against the one-sided view that looks only on the moral evil of the struggle!
The truth is, there are war vices and war virtues. There are peace vices and there are peace virtues. Decorous quiet, orderly habits, sober conduct, attention to business, these are the good things demanded by society in peace. And they may consist with meanness, selfishness, cowardice, and utter unmanliness. The round-stomached, prosperous man, with his ships, shops, and factories, is very anxious for the cultivation of these virtues. He does not like to be disturbed o' nights. He wants his street to be quiet and orderly. He wants to be left undisturbed to prosecute his prosperous business. He measures virtue by the aid it offers for that end. Peace vices, the cankers that gnaw a nation's heart, greed, self-seeking luxury, epicurean self-indulgence, hardness to growing ignorance, want, and suffering, indifference to all high purposes, spiritual coma and deadness, these do not disturb him. They are rotting the nation to its marrow, but they do not stand in the way of his money-getting. He never thinks of them as evils at all. To be sure, sometimes, across his torpid brain and heart may echo some harsh expressions, from those stern old Hebrew prophets, about these things. But he has a very comfortable pew, in a very soporific church, and he is only half awake, and the echo dies away and leaves no sign. He is just the man to tell us all about the demoralization of war.
Now quietness and good order, sober, discreet, self-seeking, decorous epicureanism and the rest, are not precisely the virtues that will save a people. There are certain old foundation virtues of another kind, which are the only safe substratum for national or personal salvation. These are couragehard, muscular, manly couragefortitude, patience, obedience to discipline, self-denial, self-sacrifice, veracity of purpose, and such like. These rough old virtues must lie at the base of all right character. You may add, as ornaments to your edifice, as frieze, cornices, and capitals to the pillars, refinements, and courtesies, and gentleness, and so on. But the foundation must rest on the rude granite blocks we have mentioned, or your gingerbread erection will go down in the first storm.
And the simple fact is that peace has a tendency to eat out just these foundation virtues. They are war virtues; just the things called out by a life-and-death battle for some good cause. In these virtues we claim the land has grown. The national character has deepened and intensified in these. We have strengthened anew these rocky foundations of a nation's greatness. Men lapped in luxury have patiently bowed to toil and weariness. Men living in self-indulgence have shaken off their sloth, and roused the old slumbering fearlessness of their race. Men, living for selfish ends, have been penetrated by the light of a great purpose, and have risen to the loftiness of human duty. Men, who shrank from pain as the sorest evil, have voluntarily accepted pain, and borne it with a fortitude we once believed lost from among mankind; and, over all, the flaming light of a worthy cause that men might worthily live for and worthily die for, has led the thousands of the land out of their narrow lives, and low endeavors, to the clear mountain heights of sacrifice! We stand now, a courageous, patient, steadfast, unselfish people before all the world. We stand, a people that has taken its life in its hand for a purely unselfish cause. We have won our place in the foremost rank of nations, not on our wealth, our numbers, or our prosperity, but on the truer test of our manhood, truth, and steadfastness. We stand justified at the bar of our own conscience, for national pride and self-reliance, as we shall infallibly be justified at the bar of the world.
Is this lifting up of a great people nothing? Is this placing of twenty millions on the clear ground of unselfish duty, as life's motive, nothing? Is there one of us, to-day, who is not prouder of his nation and its character, in the midst of its desperate tug for life, than he ever was in the day of its envied prosperity? And when he considers how the nation has answered to its hard necessity, how it has borne itself in its sore trial, is he not clear of all doubt about its vitality and continuance? And is that, also, nothing?