Memorial Day Remarks at Arlington Cemetery

[The President said In part:]

It is the solemn contemplation of what the civil war and its consequences really meant in the history of our country that makes this day’s celebration most valuable. It Is religious regard for the pillars of popular government, for the principle of liberty regulated by law, for the preservation of popular representative institutions, which this day’s ceremonies should consecrate and strengthen.

On this day it is the high duty of all the people to revitalize their love of their country and renew their devotion to the limitations of its Constitution which have made it permanent and useful to the people, and to reject with stern and flintlike front all light suggestions of change in those principles which it has cost centuries of struggle and hetacombs [see APP Note] of lives to secure and maintain.

Such celebrations as this are important, of course, to renew the loving memories of the Individual heroes whom those of the mourners and celebrants can remember in the flesh, but as the civil war withdraws further and further into the past. Memorial Day becomes less individual and more impersonal. And, while we do not minimize in the slightest the individual heroism of those who are buried here, we find ourselves more and more on each recurring day, measuring by the extent of the enormous total sacrifice, the value to mankind of the principles which these men about us here died to uphold.

As we look back over the range of history, the growth of civilization, the establishment of lawful and peaceful authority, and finally the working out of individual liberty through the growth of popular government, we mark the milestones of progress by the tremendous cost that humanity has paid In this onward march, and by that cost, we note the greatness of the advance and the sacredness and inviolability of the principles achieved.

Look back upon the sacrifice of our ancestors, the lives lost, the suffering, the strenuous endeavor, the many defeats, and the final triumph of a weak, struggling confederacy after six years of continuous war.

Is it not the fact that all that effort and all that cost which we celebrate on the 4th of every July Increases in our minds the importance of the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution which followed it? Are not the limitations of that Constitution, its declarations, its divisions into separate branches of popular government, its checks and balances, all of them made sacred and inviolate by the Revolutionary War, and are they not sealed in the blood of its heroes? And then, when we come to the greatest cataclysm to which our Nation has ever been subjected—indeed, the greatest to which any Nation has ever been subjected—when we think how the whole Nation, led by Abraham Lincoln, went down into the valley of the shadow of death, and the agony of spirit through which every patriot passed, the hundreds of thousands of lives and the hundreds of millions of treasure, and the unlimited suffering of the people, can we forget the cause that thereby was maintained, the principles that thereby were vindicated, and the governmental structure whose foundations were thereby renewed and made more solid and more venerated? We fought to preserve the Union, to maintain the Constitution, modified only by striking out slavery and putting on equality as to freedom, as to civil and political rights, the man with the dark skin with the man of the white skin. We consecrated again representative government by the people. We consecrated again the inalienable rights of the individual citizen, and we have given them a sanction and a stability that annual observances like this are best fitted to preserve and to maintain.