things, and had acted up to their belief, we would have saved hundreds of lives, we would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars.  Moreover, besides saving all the blood and treasure we then lavished, we would have prevented the heartbreak of many women, the dissolution of many homes, and we would have spared the country those months of gloom and shame when it seemed as if our armies marched only to defeat.  We could have avoided all this suffering simply by shrinking from strife.  And if we had thus avoided it, we would have shown that we were weaklings, and that we were unfit to stand among the great nations of the earth.  Thank God for the iron in the blood of our fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln, and bore sword or rifle in the armies of Grant!  Let us, the children of the men who proved themselves equal to the mighty days, let us the children of the men who carried the great Civil War to a triumphant conclusion, praise the God of our fathers that the ignoble counsels of peace were rejected; that the suffering and loss, the blackness of sorrow and despair were unflinchingly faced, and the years of strife endured; for in the end the slave was freed, the Union restored, and the mighty American republic placed once more as a helmeted queen among nations....

The Army and Navy are the sword and shield which this nation must carry if she is to do her duty among the nations of the earth—­if she is not to stand merely as the China of the western hemisphere.  Our proper conduct toward the tropic islands we have wrested from Spain is merely the form which our duty has taken at the moment.  Of course, we are bound to handle the affairs of our own household well.  We must see that there is civic good sense in our home administration of city, State and nation.  We must strive for honesty in office, for honesty toward the creditors of the nation and of the individual, for the widest freedom of individual initiative where possible, and for the wisest control of individual initiative where it is hostile to the welfare of the many.  But because we set our own household in order we are not thereby excused from playing our part in the great affairs of the world.  A man’s first duty is to his own home, but he is not thereby excused from doing his duty to the State; for if he fails in this second duty, it is under the penalty of ceasing to be a freeman.  In the same way, while a nation’s first duty is within its own borders it is not thereby absolved from facing its duties in the world as a whole; and if it refuses to do so, it merely forfeits its right to struggle for a place among the peoples that shape the destiny of mankind.