The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1904-05-31

sons as applicable in our everyday
lives now as in the rare times of great
stress. The men who made this field
forever memorable did so because
they combined the power of fealty to
a lofty ideal with the power of show
ing that fealty in hard, practical,
common sense fashion. They stood
for the life of effort, not the life of
that love of justice, that love of their
fellowmen, without which power and
resourceful efficiency but make man
a danger to his fellows. Yet, in ad-
dition thereto, they likewise possessed
the power and the efficiency; for
otherwise their high purpose would
have been barren of result. They
knew each how to act for himself, and
yet each how to act with his fellows.
They learned, as all the generation of
the civil war learned, that rare in
deed is the chance to do anything
worth doing by one sudden and V1O-
lent effort. The men who believed
that the civil war would be ended in
ninety days, the men who cried loud
est on to Richmond if they had the
right stuff in them speedily learned
their error; and the war was actually
won by those who settled themselves
steadfastly down to fight Tor three
years, or for as much longer as the
war might last, and who gradually
grew to understand that the triumph
would come, not by a single brilliant
victory, but by a hundred painful and
tedious campaigns.
Exactly as in time of war courage
is the cardinal virtue of the soldier,
so in time of peace honesty, using the
word in its deepest and broadcast
significance, is the essential basic vir-
tue without which all else avails
nothing.
National greatness is of slow
growth. 1t cannot be forced and yet
be stable and enduring; for it is based
fundamentally upon national charac-
ter, and national character is stamped
deep in people by the lives of many
generations. The men who went into
the army had to submit to discipline,
had to submit to restraint through the
government of the leaders they had
chosen, as the price of winning. So
we, the people, can preserve our lib
erty and our greatness in time of
peace only by ourselves exercising the
virtues of honesty, or self-restra1nt,
and of fair dealing between man and
man.
Here, on Memorial day, on this
great battlefield, We commemorate
not only the chiefs who actually won
this battle; not only Meade, and his
leutenants, Hancock and Reynolds
and Howard and Sickles, and the
many others whose names flame in
our annals; but also the chiefs who
had made the Army of the Potomac
what it was. and those who afterwards
led it in the campaigns which were
crowned at AppomattOx; and further
more those who made and used its
sister armies. Mcclellan, with his ex-
traOrdinary genius for organization;
Rosecrans; Buell.; Thomas, the UNI
yielding, the steadfast; and that great
trio, Sherman, Sheridan, and last and
greatest of all, Grant himself, the
silent soldier whose hammer-like
blows finally beat down even the
prOweSs of the men who fought
against him. Above all we meet here
to pay homage to the officers and en-
listed men who served and fought
and died, without having, as their
chiefs had, the chance to write their
names on the tablets of fame; to the
men who marched and fought in the
ranks who were buried in long
trenches on the field of battle who
died in cots marked only by numbers
in the hospitals; who. if they lived
when the war was over, went back
each to his task on the farm or in the
town. to do his duty in peace as he
had don it in war; to take up the
threads of his working life where he
had dropped them when the trumpets
of the nation paeled to arms"