Our Common Country/Chapter 15
When I stop to think of the long period that has passed since our G. A. R. Veterans went to the front in 1861 it brings to me a new realization of what they did, first in service to country in preserving nationality and second in laying down arms and returning to citizenship, giving to the country the leaven of patriotism.
From my earliest recollections I have a distinct remembrance of Civil War soldiers in their activities of citizenship and their marked influence in political progress. If the millions of sons who went forth in the defense of our national rights in the World War can turn to a new birth of patriotism as you did, that will compensate us for all our part in the great world struggle. The man who goes forth to offer all on the altars of country returns a better patriot. We need a new birth of patriotism in our country.
Our veterans didn't enter the war to free the slave, although that was a becoming ideal. They didn't go to war because they hated any group in the South or to establish any new conception of justice. But they entered the conflict because they found the Union was threatened; they went to save the Union and nationality.
There have been a variety of opinions as to why their grandsons went to war. Their sons went to war with Spain for humanity. Some have said that their grandsons went to war for democracy and some that they went forth to insure that there would be no wars in the future. If we went to war for democracy, shouldn't we have gone in when it first started? And if we went to war to insure that there would be no more wars, shouldn't we have gone in before so many millions had been sacrificed?
The simple truth is that their grandsons went to war when Congress made the declaration because our nationality and rights had been threatened. Then it was possible to call the sons of America to battle.
That doesn't mean that when the war is over we should surrender what we went in to maintain. If it is within my power, there will never be a surrender of that which you have handed down to the generation of to-day.