reflects most honor upon the nation.  We do not admire the man of timid peace.  We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.  It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.  In this life we get nothing save by effort.  Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past.  A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose.  If the freedom thus purchased is used aright and the man still does actual work tho of a different kind, whether as a writer or a general, whether in the field of politics or in the field of exploration and adventure, he shows he deserves his good fortune.  But if he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labor as a period, not of preparation, but of more enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a cumberer on the earth’s surface, and he surely unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do so should again arise.  A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.

In the last analysis a healthy State can exist only when the men and women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the children are so trained that they shall endeavor, not to shirk difficulties, but to overcome them; not to seek ease, but to know how to wrest triumph from toil and risk.  The man must be glad to do a man’s work, to dare and endure and to labor; to keep himself, and to keep those dependent upon him.  The woman must be the housewife, the helpmeet of the homemaker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy children.  In one of Daudet’s powerful and melancholy books he speaks of “the fear of maternity, the haunting terror of the young wife of the present day.”  When such words can be truthfully written of a nation, that nation is rotten to the heart’s core.  When men fear work or fear righteous war, when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom; and well it is that they should vanish from the earth, where they are fit subjects for the scorn of all men and women who are themselves strong and brave and high-minded.

As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation.  It is a base untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history.  Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history.  Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even tho checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.  If in 1861 the men who loved the Union had believed that peace was the end of all things, and war and strife the worst of all