THE TRUE BASIS OF HEROISM Here, where we meet to honor the memory of those who drew the great prize of death in battle, a word in reference to the survivors: I think that one lesson everyone who was capable of learning anything learned from his experience in that war was the old, old lesson that we need to apply in peace quite as much—the lesson that the man who does not care to do any act until the time for heroic action comes, does not do the heroic act when the time does come. You all of you remember, comrades, some man -it is barely possible some of you remember being the man—who, when you enlisted, had a theory that there was nothing but splendor and fighting and bloodshed in the war, and then had the experience of learning that the first thing you had to do was to perform commonplace duties, and perform them well. The work of any man in the campaign depended upon the resolution and effective intelligence with which he started about doing each duty as it arose; not waiting until he could choose the duty that he thought sufficiently spectacular to do, but doing the duty that came to hand. That is exactly the lesson that all of us need to learn in times of peace. It is not merely a great thing, but an indispensable thing that the nation's citizens should be ready and willing to die for it in time of need; and the presence of no other quality could atone for the lack of such readiness to lay down life if the nation calls. But in addition to dying for the nation you must be willing and anxious to live for the nation, or the nation will be badly off. If you want to do your duty only when the time comes for you to die, the nation will be deprived of valuable services during your lives. I never see a gathering of this kind; I never see a gathering under the auspices of any of the societies which are organized to commemorate the valor and patriotism of the founders of this nation; I never see a gathering composed of the men who fought in the great Civil War or in any of the lesser contests in which this country has been engaged, without feeling the anxiety to make such a gathering feel, each in his or her heart, the all-importance of doing the ordinary, humdrum, commonplace duties of each day as those duties arise. A large part of the success on the day of battle is always due to the aggregate of the individual performance of duty dur ing the long months that have preceded the day of battle. The way in which a nation arises to a great crisis is largely conditioned upon the way in which its citizens have habituated themselves to act in the ordinary affairs of the national life. You cannot expect that much will be done in the supreme hour of peril by soldiers who have not fitted themselves to meet the need when the need comes, and you cannot expect the highest type of citizenship in the periods when it is needed if that citizenship has not been trained by the faithful performance of ordinary duty. What we need most in this Republic is not special genius, not unusual brilliancy, but the honest and upright adherence on the part of the mass of the citizens and of their representatives to the fundamental laws of private and public morality -which are now what they have been during recorded history. We shall succeed or fail in making this Republic what it should be made -I will go a little further than that-what it shall and must be made, accordingly as we do or do not seriously and resolutely set ourselves to do the tasks of citizenship-and good citizenship consists in doing the many small duties, private and public, which in the aggregate make it up.-Speech at Arlington, May 21, 1902. GRANT 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 high 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 any 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 |