The eighteenth century was the era of the development of political rights.  It was the culmination of the ideas of the Renaissance.  It was the putting into practice in government of the answer to the long pondered and much discussed question, “What is right?” Custom was giving way at last to reason.  Class and caste and place, all the distinctions based on appearance and accident were giving way before reality.  Men turned from distinctions which were temporal to those which were eternal.  The sovereignty of kings and the nobility of peers was swallowed up in the sovereignty and nobility of all men.  The inequal in quantity became equal in quality.

The successful solution of this problem was the crowning glory of a century and a half of America.  It established for all time how men ought to act toward each other in the governmental relation.  The rule of the people had begun.

Bunker Hill had a deeper significance.  It was an example of the great law of human progress and civilization.  There has been much talk in recent years of the survival of the fittest and of efficiency.  We are beginning to hear of the development of the super-man and the claim that he has of right dominion over the rest of his inferiors on earth.  This philosophy denies the doctrine of equality and holds that government is not based on consent but on compulsion.  It holds that the weak must serve the strong, which is the law of slavery, it applies the law of the animal world to mankind and puts science above morals.  This sounds the call to the jungle.  It is not an advance to the morning but a retreat to night.  It is not the light of human reason but the darkness of the wisdom of the serpent.

The law of progress and civilization is not the law of the jungle.  It is not an earthly law, it is a divine law.  It does not mean the survival of the fittest, it means the sacrifice of the fittest.  Any mother will give her life for her child.  Men put the women and children in the lifeboats before they themselves will leave the sinking ship.  John Hampden and Nathan Hale did not survive, nor did Lincoln, but Benedict Arnold did.  The example above all others takes us back to Jerusalem some nineteen hundred years ago.  The men of Bunker Hill were true disciples of civilization, because they were willing to sacrifice themselves to resist the evils and redeem the liberties of the British Empire.  The proud shaft which rises over their battlefield and the bronze form of Joseph Warren in your square are not monuments to expediency or success, they are monuments to righteousness.

This is the age-old story.  Men are reading it again to-day—­written in blood.  The Prussian military despotism has abandoned the law of civilization for the law of barbarism.  We could approve and join in the scramble to the jungle, or we could resist and sacrifice ourselves to save an erring nation.  Not being beasts, but men, we choose the sacrifice.