Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year · E. C. Hartwell
4. In this connection make up a list of five poems
Chapter 11 of 94 · 2 min read
about birds; five about flowers; five about trees. For good reading on trees, see Dorrance's Story of the Forest.
MEMORIAL DAY, 1917
BY WOODROW WILSON
Spoken at Arlington to the veterans of the Federal and Confederate armies. There were present men in khaki soon to carry the spirit of America to the battlefields of France.
Any Memorial Day of this sort is, of course, a day touched with sorrowful memory, and yet I for one do not see how we can have any thought of pity for the men whose memory we honor to-day. I do not pity them. I envy them, rather, because theirs is a great work for liberty 5 accomplished and we are in the midst of a work unfinished, testing our strength where their strength already has been tested. There is a touch of sorrow, but there is a touch of reassurance also in a day like this, because we know how the men of America have responded to the call of the 10 cause of liberty, and it fills our minds with a perfect assurance that that response will come again in equal measure, with equal majesty, and with a result which will hold the attention of all mankind.
When you reflect upon it, these men who died to preserve 15 the Union died to preserve the instrument which we are now using to serve the world—a free nation espousing the cause of human liberty. In one sense that great struggle into which we have now entered is an American struggle, because it is in defense of American honor and 20 American rights, but it is something even greater than that; it is a world struggle. It is a struggle of men who love liberty everywhere and in this cause America will show herself greater than ever because she will rise to a greater thing.
We have said in the beginning that we planned this great government that men who wish freedom might have a place of refuge and a place where their hope could be 5 realized, and now, having established such a government, having preserved such a government, having vindicated the power of such a government, we are saying to all mankind, "We did not set this government up in order that we might have a selfish and separate liberty, for we are 10 now ready to come to your assistance and fight out upon the fields of the world the cause of human liberty." In this thing America attains her full dignity and the full fruition of her great purpose.
