ADDRESS AT THE GRANT ANNIVERSARY AT GALENA, FELLOW CITIZENS: In the long run every great nation instinctively recognizes the men who peculiarly and preeminently represent its own type of greatness. Here in our country we have had many public men of the first rank—soldiers, orators, constructive statesmen and popular leaders. We have even had great philosophers who were also leaders of popular thought. Each one of these men has had his own group of devoted followers, and some of them have at times swayed the nation with a power such as the foremost of all hardly wielded. Yet as the generations slip away, as the dust of conflict settles, and as through the clearing air we look back with keener wisdom into the nation's past, mightiest among the mighty dead loom the three great figures of Washington, Lincoln and Grant. There are great men also in the second rank; for in my gallery of merely national heroes, Franklin and Hamilton, Jefferson and Jackson would surely have their place. But these three greatest men have taken their place among the great men of all nations, the great men of all time. They stood supreme in the two great crises of our history, on the two great occasions when we stood in the van of all humanity and struck the most effective blows that have ever been struck for the cause of human freedom under the law; for that spirit of orderly liberty which must stand at the base of every wise movement to secure to each man his rights, and to guard each from being wronged by his fellows. Washington fought in the earlier struggle, and it was his good fortune to win the highest renown alike as soldier and statesman. In the second and even greater struggle, the deeds of Lincoln the statesman were made good by those of Grant the soldier, and later Grant himself took up the work that dropped from Lincoln's tired hands when the assassin's bullet went home and the sad, patient, kindly eyes were closed forever. It was no mere accident that made our three mightiest men, two of them soldiers and one the great war President. It is only through work and strife that either nation or individual moves on to greatness. The great man is always the man of mighty effort, and usually the man whom grinding need has trained to mighty effort. Rest and peace are good things, are great blessings, but only if they come honorably; and it is those who fearlessly turn away from them, when they have not been earned, who in the long run deserve the best of their country. In the sweat of our brows do we eat bread, and though the sweat is bitter at times, yet in the long run it is far more bitter to eat the bread that is unearned, unwon, undeserved. America must nerve herself for labor and peril. The men who have made our national greatness are those who faced danger and overcame it, who met difficulties and surmounted them, not those whose paths were cast in such pleasant places that toil and dread were ever far from them. Neither was it an accident that our three leaders were men who while they did not shrink from war were nevertheless heartily men of peace. The man who will not fight to avert or undo wrong is but a poor creature; but after all he is less dangerous than the man who fights on the side of wrong. Again and again in a nation's history the time may, and indeed sometimes must come, when the nation's highest duty is war. But peace must be the normal condition, or the nation will come to a bloody doom. Twice in great crises, in 1776 and 1861, and twice in lesser crises, in 1812 and 1898, the nation was called to arms in the name of all that makes the words honor, freedom and justice other than empty sounds. On each occasion the net result of the war was greatly for the benefit of mankind. But on each occasion this net result was of benefit only because after the war came peace, came justice and order and liberty. If the Revolution had been followed by bloody anarchy, if the Declaration of Independence had not been supplemented by the adoption of the Constitution, if the independence won by the sword of Washington had not been supplemented by the stable and orderly government which Washington was instrumental in founding, then we should have but added to the chaos of the world and our victories would have told against and not for the betterment of mankind. So it was with the Civil War. If the four iron years had not been followed by peace, they would not have been justified. If the Great Silent Soldier, the Hammer of the North, had struck the shackles off the slave only, as so many conquerors in civil strife before him had done, to rivet them around the wrists of freemen, then the war would have been fought in vain, and worse than in vain. If the Union which so many men shed their blood to restore, were not now a Union in fact, then the precious blood would have been wasted. But it was not wasted; for the work of peace has made good the work of war, and North and South, East and West, we are one people in fact as well as in name; one in purpose, in fellow feeling and in high resolve, as we stand to greet the new century, and, high of heart, to face the mighty tasks which the coming years will surely bring. Grant and his fellow soldiers who fought through the war, and his fellow statesmen who completed the work partly done by the soldiers, not only left. us the heritage of a reunited country and of a land from which slavery had been banished, but left us what was quite as important, the great memory of their great deeds, to serve forever as an example and an inspiration, to spur us on so that we may not fall below the level reached by our fathers. The rough, strong poet of democracy has sung of Grant as "the man of mighty days, and equal to the days." The days are less mighty now; and that is all the more reason why we should show ourselves equal to them. We meet here to pay glad homage to the memory of our illustrious dead; but let us keep ever clear before our minds the fact that mere lip loyalty is no loyalty at all, and that the only homage that counts is the homage of deeds, not of words. It is but an idle waste of time to celebrate the memory of the dead unless we, the living, in our lives strive to show ourselves not unworthy of them. If the careers of Washington and Grant are not vital and full of meaning to us, if they are merely part of the storied past, and stir us to no eager emulation in the ceaseless, endless war for right against wrong, then the root of right thinking is not in us; and where we do not think right we cannot act right. It is not my purpose in this address to sketch in even the briefest manner the life and deeds of General Grant. It is not even my purpose to touch on the points where Grant's influence has told so tremendously in the making of our history. It is part of the man's greatness that now we can use his career purely for illustration. We can take for granted the fact that each American who knows the history of the country must know the history of this. man, at least in its broad outline; and that we no more need to explain Vicksburg and Appomattox than we need to explain Yorktown. I shall ask attention not to Grant's life, but to the lessons taught by that life as we of to-day should learn them. Foremost of all, the lesson of tenacity, of stubborn fixity of purpose. In the Union armies there were generals as brilliant as Grant, but none with his iron determination. This quality he showed as President no less than as General. He was no more to be influenced by a hostile majority in Congress into abandoning his attitude in favor of a sound and stable currency, than he was to be influenced by check or repulse into releasing his grip on beleaguered Richmond. It is this element of unshakable strength to which we are apt specially to allude when we praise a man in the simplest and most effective way, by praising him as a man. It is the one quality which we can least afford to lose. It is the only quality, the lack of which is as unpardonable in the nation as in the man. It is the antithesis of levity, fickleness, volatility, of undue exaltation, of undue depression, of hysteria and neuroticism in all their myriad forms. The lesson of unyielding, unflinching, unfaltering perseverance in the course upon which the nation has entered, is one very necessary for a generation whose preachers sometimes dwell over-much on the policies of the moment. There are not a few public men, not a few men who try to mould opinion within. Congress and without, on the stump and in the daily press, who seem to aim at instability, who pander to and thereby |