ts. It was the culmination of the ideas of the Renaissance. It was
the putting into practice in government of the answer to the long
pondered and much discussed question, "What is right?" Custom was giving
way at last to reason. Class and caste and place, all the distinctions
based on appearance and accident were giving way before reality. Men
turned from distinctions which were temporal to those which were
eternal. The sovereignty of kings and the nobility of peers was
swallowed up in the sovereignty and nobility of all men. The inequal in
quantity became equal in quality.

The successful solution of this problem was the crowning glory of a
century and a half of America. It established for all time how men ought
to act toward each other in the governmental relation. The rule of the
people had begun.

Bunker Hill had a deeper significance. It was an example of the great
law of human progress and civilization. There has been much talk in
recent years of the survival of the fittest and of efficiency. We are
beginning to hear of the development of the super-man and the claim that
he has of right dominion over the rest of his inferiors on earth. This
philosophy denies the doctrine of equality and holds that government is
not based on consent but on compulsion. It holds that the weak must
serve the strong, which is the law of slavery, it applies the law of the
animal world to mankind and puts science above morals. This sounds the
call to the jungle. It is not an advance to the morning but a retreat to
night. It is not the light of human reason but the darkness of the
wisdom of the serpent.

The law of progress and civilization is not the law of the jungle. It is
not an earthly law, it is a divine law. It does not mean the survival of
the fittest, it means the sacrifice of the fittest. Any mother will give
her life for her child. Men put the women and children in the lifeboats
before they themselves will leave the sinking ship. John Hampden and
Nathan Hale did not survive, nor did Lincoln, but Benedict Arnold did.
The example above all others takes us back to Jerusalem some nineteen
hundred years ago. The men of Bunker Hill were true disciples of
civilization, because they were willing to sacrifice themselves to
resist the evils and redeem the liberties of the British Empire. The
proud shaft which rises over their battlefield and the bronze form of
Joseph Warren in your square are not monuments to expediency or success,
th