For, my friends, the real fruition of life is to do the things we have said we wish to do. There are times when work seems empty and only action seems great. Such a time has come, and in the providence of God America will once more have an opportunity to show the world she was born to serve mankind.

ADDRESS AT THE CONFEDERATE REUNION,

WASHINGTON, JUNE 6, 1917

I esteem it a very great pleasure and a real privilege to extend to the men who are attending this reunion the very cordial greetings of the United States.

I suppose that as you mix with one another you chiefly find these to be days of memory, when your thoughts go back and recall those days of struggle in which your hearts were strained, in which the whole nation seemed in grapple, and I dare say that you are thrilled as you remember the heroic things that were then done.

You are glad to remember that heroic things were done on both sides and that men in those days fought in something like the old spirit of chivalric gallantry.

There are many memories of the Civil War that thrill along the blood and make one proud to have been sprung of a race that could produce such bravery and constancy; and yet the world does not live on memories.

The world is constantly making its toilsome way forward into new and different days and I believe that one of the things that contribute satisfaction to a reunion like this and a welcome like this is that this is also a day of oblivion.

There are some things that we have thankfully buried, and among them are the great passions of division which once threatened to rend this nation in twain.

The passion of admiration we still entertain for the heroic figures of those old days, but the passion of separation, the passion of difference of principle is gone-gone out of our minds, gone out of our hearts, and one of the things that will thrill this country as it reads of this reunion is that it will read also of a rededication on the part of all of us to the great nation which we serve in common.

These are days of oblivion as well as of memory, for we are forgetting the things that once held us asunder. Not only that, but they are days of rejoicing because we now at last see why this great nation was kept united, for we are beginning to see the great world purpose which it was meant to serve.

Many men I know, particularly of your own generation, have wondered at some of the dealings of Providence, but the wise heart never questions the dealings of Providence, because the great long plan as it unfolds has a majesty about it and a definiteness of purpose, an elevation of ideal which we were incapable of conceiving as we tried to work things out with our own short sight and weak strength.

And now that we see ourselves part of a nation united, powerful, great in spirit and in purpose, we know the great ends which God in His mysterious Providence wrought through our instrumentality, because at the heart of the men of the North and of the South there was the same love of self-government and of liberty and now we are to be an instrument in the hands of God to see that liberty is made secure for mankind.

At the day of our greatest division there was one common passion among us, and that was the passion for human freedom. We did not know that God was working out in His own way the method by which we should best serve human freedom-by making this Union a great united, indivisible, indestructible instrument in His hands for the accomplishment of these great things.

As I came along the streets a few minutes ago my heart was full of the thought that this is registration day. Will you not support me in feeling that there is some significance in this coincidence, that this day, when I come to welcome you to the National Capital, is the day when men young as you were in those old days, when you gathered together to fight, are now registering their names as evidence of this great idea, that in a democracy the duty to serve and the privilege to serve falls upon all alike?

There is something very fine, my fellow citizens, in the spirit of the volunteer, but deeper than the volunteer spirit is the spirit of obligation.

There is not a man of us who must not hold himself ready to be summoned to the duty of supporting the great government under which we live. No really thoughtful and patriotic man is jealous of that obligation. No man who really understands the privilege and dignity of being an American citizen quarrels for a moment with the idea that the Congress of the United States has the right to call upon whom it will to serve the nation.

These solemn lines of young men going to-day all over the union to the places of registration ought to be a signal to the world, to those who dare flout the dignity and honor and rights of the United States, that all her manhood will flock to that standard under which we all delight to serve, and that he who challenges the rights and principles of the United States challenges the united strength and devotion of a nation.

There are not many things that one desires about war, my fellow citizens, but you have come through war; you know how you have been chastened by it, and there comes a time when it is good for a nation to know that it must sacrifice, if need be, everything that it has to vindicate the principles which it professes.

We have prospered with a sort of heedless and irresponsible prosperity. Now we are going to lay all our wealth, if necessary, and spend all our blood, if need be, to show that we were not accumulating that wealth selfishly, but were accumulating it for the service of mankind.

Men all over the world have thought of the United States as a trading and money-getting people, where as we who have lived at home know the ideals with which the hearts of this people have thrilled; we know the sober convictions which have lain at the basis of our life all the time, and we know the power and devotion which can be spent in heroic ways for the service of those ideals that we have treasured.

We have been allowed to become strong in the providence of God that our strength might be used to prove not our selfishness, but our greatness, and if there is