Memorial Day Address at Arlington Cemetery

As we gather in this assembly, with all the thoughts that its surroundings suggest, the question presents itself, “What is the purpose of these commemorative services?” It is said that we are here to pay tribute to our patriotic dead—to those who yielded up their lives that our country might be saved. But does our coming here and do our ceremonies and hymns and eloquent tributes make the dead happier? If from somewhere their souls contemplate this scene, are they gratified merely because we praise them? Is it not rather that they can see that the influence of their deeds lives after them in the uplifting and revitalizing of the highest ideals of the living? These ceremonies are not for the benefit of the dead. They are to keep green the memory of their deeds and thereby to stir in the living members of society—in the citizens of today—the spirit of high appreciation and enthusiastic emulation of those supreme sacrifices for their fellow-countrymen that the sight of these graves of the dead makes alive to us.

Love of country, love of family, love of God—it is difficult to classify these affections of the human heart and soul, for they so melt into each other that the one who has most of one has most of all.

As we stand, however, in the presence of the dead on this beautiful May morning and seek to realize and enjoy the essence of patriotism which, like incense, steals into the atmosphere of this sacred spot, we find ourselves slipping into a conception of war as necessary to human development, the making of human character, and the exhibition of the highest human ideals. We lost sight of the cruelty, the courage, the arousing of the most brutal human passion, the indifference to human suffering, the meanest human ambitions, the ghoulish corruption, and all the other wickedness that follows in the trail of war, and we think only of the calm spirit of supreme self-sacrifice that ennobled the brave soldier who lost his life in the shock of battle and who rests peacefully with his comrades in these beautiful shades.

Of course, it is necessary that we should have sin and temptation if we would have exhibitions of virtue which resist them; but is that a reason for favoring either temptation or sin? Of course, in order that we should know the existence and power of the highest traits of the human soul, we must have human tragedies, but certainly no one would promote a tragedy for the purpose of furnishing to the world proof of the existence of such traits. Strive as we may to prevent or destroy them, we shall have sin and wickedness and temptation and tragedy enough as a school of experience, development, and demonstration of human character. The same answer must be made to those who permit themselves to advocate war as a necessary experience in the development of man.

There was a time when an insult by one man to another in the same social class could only be wiped out by the blood of the other in a mortal duel, and in those days it took more moral courage to avoid a duel than to fight one. We have made great progress, almost within our own memory, in such ideals. If that be true of men why may it not be true in the near future of nations? Why will it not show more patriotism and more love of country to refuse to go to war for an insult and to submit it to the arbitrament of a peaceful tribunal, than to subject a whole people to the misery and cruelty and suffering and burden of heavy cost of a national war, however glossed over by the excitement and ambitions and the glory of a successful conquest?

The lesson in national restraint, the looking at things as they are, the rejecting of the dictates of false pride, and the following of the teachings of the Master of men are not at all inconsistent with, and do not detract from, the continuance of the highest love of country and of one’s countrymen.

Far be it from me to minimize in any way by these suggestions the debt we owe to the men buried here who carried on the successful struggle that resulted in the abolition of the cancer of slavery and which seemed ineradicable save by such an awful slaughter of the brightest and bravest and best of the Nation’s youth and manhood.

I shall not stop to discuss whether it might have been possible to accomplish the same great reform by milder methods. Whether that be true or not, the supreme sacrifice of these men, who lie about us, in the course of advancing humanity can never be lessened or obscured by such a suggestion. But the thought at which I would but hint this morning is that even in the hallowed presence of these dead, whose ideals of patriotism and love of their countrymen it needed a war to make everlastingly evident, we should abate no effort and should strain every nerve and avail ourselves of every honorable possible device to avoid war in the future.

I am not blind to the aid in creating sturdy manhood that the military discipline we see in the standing armies of Europe and in the Regular Army of this country furnishes, nor do I deny the incidental benefits that may grow out of the exigencies and sequelae of war. But when the books are balanced the awful horrors of either internecine or international strife far outweigh the benefits that may be traced to it.

Let us leave this beautiful city of the national dead, therefore, with the deepest gratitude to the men whose valorous deeds we celebrate and whose memories we cherish with the tenderest appreciation of the value of the examples they set, but with a determination in every way possible, consistent with honesty and manly and national self-restraint, to avoid the necessity for the display of that supreme self-sacrifice that we commemorate to-day in them.