we can, because we know how we would like
to be free, and how we would like to be served if there were friends
standing by in such case ready to serve us. A war of aggression is not a
war in which it is a proud thing to die, but a war of service is a thing
in which it is a proud thing to die.

Notice how truly these men were of our blood. I mean of our American
blood, which is not drawn from any one country, which is not drawn from
any one stock, which is not drawn from any one language of the modern
world; but free men everywhere have sent their sons and their brothers
and their daughters to this country in order to make that great
compounded Nation which consists of all the sturdy elements and of all
the best elements of the whole globe. I listened again to this list of
the dead with a profound interest because of the mixture of the names,
for the names bear the marks of the several national stocks from which
these men came. But they are not Irishmen or Germans or Frenchmen or
Hebrews or Italians any more. They were not when they went to Vera Cruz;
they were Americans, every one of them, and with no difference in their
Americanism because of the stock from which they came. They were in a
peculiar sense of our blood, and they proved it by showing that they
were of our spirit--that no matter what their derivation, no matter
where their people came from, they thought and wished and did the things
that were American; and the flag under which they served was a flag in
which all the blood of mankind is united to make a free Nation.

War, gentlemen, is only a sort of dramatic representation, a sort of
dramatic symbol, of a thousand forms of duty. I never went into battle;
I never was under fire; but I fancy that there are some things just as
hard to do as to go under fire. I fancy that it is just as hard to do
your duty when men are sneering at you as when they are shooting at you.
When they shoot at you, they can only take your natural life; when they
sneer at you, they can wound your living heart, and men who are brave
enough, steadfast enough, steady in their principles enough, to go about
their duty with regard to their fellow-men, no matter whether there are
hisses or cheers, men who can do what Rudyard Kipling in one of his
poems wrote, "Meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two
impostors just the same," are men for a nation to be proud of. Morally
speaking, disaster and triumph are impostors. The cheers of t