" We are the champions of a particular sort of freedom,
the sort of freedom which is the only foundation and guarantee of
peace.
Peace lies in the hearts of great industrial and agricultural
populations, and we have arranged a government on this side of the water
by which their preferences and their predilections and their interests
are the mainsprings of government itself. And so when we prepare for
national defense we prepare for national political integrity; we prepare
to take care of the great ideals which gave birth to this Government; we
are going back in spirit and in energy to those great first generations
in America, when men banded themselves together, though they were but a
handful upon a single coast of the Atlantic, to set up in the world the
standards which have ever since floated everywhere that Americans
asserted the power of their Government. As I came along the line of the
railway to-day, I was touched to observe that everywhere, upon every
railway station, upon every house, where a flag could be procured, some
temporary standard had been raised from which there floated the stars
and stripes.
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