The man must be glad to do a man's
work, to dare and endure and to labor; to keep himself, and to keep
those dependent upon him. The woman must be the housewife, the helpmeet
of the homemaker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy children.
In one of Daudet's powerful and melancholy books he speaks of "the fear
of maternity, the haunting terror of the young wife of the present day."
When such words can be truthfully written of a nation, that nation is
rotten to the heart's core. When men fear work or fear righteous war,
when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom; and well
it is that they should vanish from the earth, where they are fit
subjects for the scorn of all men and women who are themselves strong
and brave and high-minded.

As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. It is a base
untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history. Thrice
happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to
dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even tho checkered by
failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy
much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows
not victory nor defeat. If in 1861 the men who loved the Union had
believed that peace was the end of all things, and war and strife the
worst of all 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