I want to suggest to the young men of this association that it is the duty of young men not only to combine for the things that are good, but to combine in a militant spirit.  There is a fine passage in one of Milton’s prose writings which I am sorry to say I cannot quote, but the meaning of which I can give you, and it is worth hearing.[E] He says that he has no patience with a cloistered virtue that does not go out and seek its adversary.  Ah, how tired I am of the men who are merely on the defensive, who hedge themselves in, who perhaps enlarge the hedge enough to include their little family circle and ward off all the evil influences of the world from that loved and hallowed group.  How tired I am of the men whose virtue is selfish because it is merely self-protective!  And how much I wish that men by the hundred thousand might volunteer to go out and seek an adversary and subdue him!

I have had the fortune to take part in affairs of a considerable variety of sorts, and I have tried to hate as few persons as possible, but there is an exquisite combination of contempt and hate that I have for a particular kind of person, and that is the moral coward.  I wish we could give all our cowards a perpetual vacation.  Let them go off and sit on the side lines and see us play the game; and put them off the field if they interfere with the game.  They do nothing but harm, and they do it by that most subtle and fatal thing of all, that of taking the momentum and the spirit and the forward dash out of things.  A man who is virtuous and a coward has no marketable virtue about him.  The virtue, I repeat, which is merely self-defensive is not serviceable even, I suspect, to himself.  For how a man can swallow and not taste bad when he is a coward and thinking only of himself I cannot imagine.

Be militant!  Be an organization that is going to do things!  If you can find older men who will give you countenance and acceptable leadership, follow them; but if you cannot, organize separately and dispense with them.  There are only two sorts of men worth associating with when something is to be done.  Those are young men and men who never grow old.  Now, if you find men who have grown old, about whom the crust has hardened, whose hinges are stiff, whose minds always have their eye over the shoulder thinking of things as they were done, do not have anything to do with them.  It would not be Christian to exclude them from your organization, but merely use them to pad the roll.  If you can find older men who will lead you acceptably and keep you in countenance, I am bound as an older man to advise you to follow them.  But suit yourselves.  Do not follow people that stand still.  Just remind them that this is not a statical proposition; it is a movement, and if they cannot get a move on them they are not serviceable.