were doing this for us, that we have been the direct beneficiaries of peoples who have given their all, the less disposition we have to think too much of our own importance.  But all this should not cause us to withhold the praise that is due our own Army and Navy, or to overlook the fact that our people have met every call that patriotism has made.  The soldiers and sailors who fight under the Stars and Stripes are the most magnificent body of men that ever took up arms for defence of a great cause.  Man for man they surpass any other troops on earth.

We must not forget these things.  We must not neglect to record them for the information of generations to come.  The names and records of boards and commissions, relief societies, of all who have engaged in financing the cause of government and charity, and other patriotic work, should be preserved in the Library of the Commonwealth, and with these, our military achievements.  These will show how American soldiers met and defeated the Prussian Guard.  They will show also that in all the war no single accomplishment, on a like scale, excelled the battle of St. Mihiel, carried out by American troops, with our own Massachusetts boys among them, and that the first regiment to be decorated as a regiment for conspicuous service and gallantry in our Army in France was the 104th, formerly of the old Massachusetts National Guard.  Such is our record and it cannot be forgotten.

In reaching the great decision to enter the war, in preparing the answer which speaks with so much authority, in the only language that despotism can understand, America has arisen to a new life.  We have taken a new place among the nations.  The Revolution made us a nation; the Spanish War made us a world power, the present war has given us recognition as a world power.  We shall not again be considered provincial.  Whether we desired it or not this position has come to us with its duties and its responsibilities.

This new position should not be misunderstood.  It does not mean any diminution of our national spirit.  It rather means that it should be intensified.  The most outstanding feature of the war has been the assertion of the national spirit.  Each nationality is contending for the right to have its own government, and in that is meeting with the sanction of the free peoples of the earth.  We are discussing a league of nations.  Such a league, if formed, is not for the purpose, must not be for the purpose, of diminishing the spirit or influence of our Nation, but to make that spirit and influence more real and more effective.  Believing in our Nation thoroughly and unreservedly, confident that the evidence of the past and present justifies that belief, it is our one desire to make America more American.  There is no greater service that we can render the oppressed of the earth than to maintain inviolate the freedom of our own citizens.