The record-union., 1899-04-11

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 u.s. the children of the men who
carried the great civil war to a tri-
umphant conclusion, praise the God of
our fathers that the ignoble counsels of
peace We're 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 re-
stored, and the mighty American re-
public placed once more as helmeted
queen among nations.
I'VE of this generation do not have
to face task such as that our fathers
faced, but we have our tasks, and woe
to US if we fail to perform them. We
cannot if we could, play RE part OF
China, and be content to rot by inches
ing no interest in what goes On beyond
them; sunk in a scrambling CONNER
cialism, needless of the higher life. the
life of aspiration, of toll and risk; busy
ing ourselves only with the wants of
our bodies for the day until suddenly we
find beyond a shadow of question, what
China has already found. that in this
world the nation that has trained itself
~,1s1- dot tod
ease is bound in the end to go down be-
fore other nations which have not lost
the manly and adventurous qualities.
IF we are to be a really great peo-
pie, we must strive in good faith to
play a great part in the world. We
cannot avoid meeting great issues. All
that we can determine for ourselves is,
whether we shall meet them well or Ill.
Last year we could not help being
brought face to face with the problem
of war with Spain. All we could decide
was whether we should shrink like
ccwards from the contest, or enter into
il as beseemed brave and high
spirited people; and, once in, whether
failure or success should crown our
banners. So it is now We cannot
avoid the responsibilities that confront
us in Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico and the
Philippines All we can decide is
whether we shall meet them in a way
that will rebound to the national credit,
or whether we shall make of our deal
ings with these new problems a dark
and shameful page in our history. To
refuse to deal with them at all merely
amounts to dealing with them badly
We have a given problem to solve. If
we undertake the solution, there is, of
course, always danger that we may not
sclve it Alright; but to refuse to under
take the solution simply renders it GER
tain that we cannot possibly solve it
Alright
1.-The timid man, the lazy man, the
man who distrusts his country, the
over civilized man who has lost the
great fighting, masterful virtues, the
ignorant man and the man of dull mind,
whose soul is incapable of feeling the
mighty life that thrills, stern men with
empires in their brains'-all these of
course shrink from seeing the nation
undertake its new duties; shrink from
seeing us build a navy and army ade
oHate to our needs: shrink from seeing
US do our share of the worlds work, by
bringing order out of chaos in the great,
fair t1opic islands from which the valor
the Spanish flag. These are the men
who fear the strenuous life, who fear
the only national life which is really
worth leading. They believe in that
clcistered life which saps the. hardy
virtues in a nation, as it saps them in
the individual or else they are welded
i
which recognizes in conmercialism the
be-all and end-all of national life. in
stead of realizing that, though an indis-
pensable element. it is after all but one
of the many elements that go to make
up true national greatness.
mo country can long endure if its
foundations are not laid deep in the
material prosperity which comes from
thrift, from business energy and enter
prise, from hard unsparing effort in the
fields of industrial activity; but neither
was any nation ever yet truly great if
it relied upon material prosperity alone.
"All honor must be paid to the archi-
tects of our material prosperity: to the
great captains of industry who have
built our factories and our railroads: to
the strong men who toll for wealth with
brain or hand, for great is the debt Of
the nation to these and their kind. But
our debt is yet greater to the men
whose highest type is to be found in
statesman like Lincoln, soldier like
Grant. They showed by their lives that
they recognized the law of work, the
law of strife; they toiled to win COM
petence for themselves and those de-
pendent upon them, but they recog-
nized that there were yet other and
even loftier duties-duties to the nation
and duties to the race
1--WE cannot sit huddled within our
borders and avow ourselves merely an
assemblage of well-to-do hucksters, who
care nothing for what happens beyond.
Such policy would defeat even its own
end: for as the nations grow to have
ever wider and wider interests, and are
brought into closer and closer contact
IL we are to hold our own in the strug-
gle for naval and commercial su-
premacy, we must build up our power
without our own borders. We must
build the Isthmian Canal and we must
grasp the points of vantage which will
enable us to have our say in deciding
the destiny of the oceans of the East
and the West
so much for the commercial side
From the standpoint of international
honor, the argument is even stronger.
The guns that thunderedl off Manila and
Santiago left us echoes of glory, but
they also left us legacy of duty If
we drove out a mediaeval tyranny only
to make room for savage anarchy, we
had better not have begun the task at
all. 1t is worse than idle to say that we
have no duty to perform, and can leave