n, "that we give the name of
heroism."

Now that the universal instinct of humanity to identify the hero and the
soldier is sound and wholesome, to a large extent, we must all agree. I
would be among the last, I trust, to deny to the soldier the possession
of those heroic qualities which are so manifestly his. I must confess
that I have both admiration and love for the men who march away to
trench and battlefield, there to fling away their lives as little things
for the sake of some great cause which they hold to be supremely dear.
"Every heroic act," says Emerson again, in his essay on Heroism,
"measures itself by its contempt of some external good"; and what man, I
ask you, has more contempt for certain external goods, and therefore
more heroism, than the loyal soldier? Material comfort, physical
security, the familiar sights and sounds of home, the love of friends
and kindred, the laughter of little children, the dreams of quiet old
age, the precious boon of life--these are some of the more elementary
things which a man shows to us that he holds in contempt, as compared
with the happiness and safety of his native land, when he voluntarily
enlists for active service. There are some soldiers, of course, who are
mere adventurers. There are some others to whom war is nothing more nor
less than a trade. There are still others who see in war only an
opportunity for the release of the brutish passions which are
inconsistent with the ordered ways of peace. But even these men bear a
certain aspect of heroism. "I naturally love a soldier," says Sir Thomas
Browne, in his _Religio Medica_, "and honor those tattered and
contemptible regiments that will die at the command of a sergeant." And
when we come to the ordinary man who goes to the front in time of war,
such as the farmer described by John Masefield in his elegy, August,
1914, who looks with fond eyes upon his furrowed fields, his barns, his
hay-ricks, his "friendly horses"--

"The rooks, the tilted stacks, the beasts in pen * * *
The fields of home, the byres, the market towns"

and then, with weary heart, leaves all these things behind to perish in
"the misery of the soaking trench," we find the sublimity of sacrifice.
The true soldier is indeed a hero. In this age, of all ages of human
history, are we unable to give denial to this fact. Millions of men, on
a dozen different battle-fronts, have recently taught us the heroisms
which make war almost as glorious