Distance dims the panorama; haze obscures the ragged gaps in the pageant
until the long lines of victorious armies move smoothly across the
horizon, with never an abyss to check their triumph.

Yet there is one people who cannot view the past through a mirage. The
marks of the birth-pangs remain on the land; its struggle for breath was
too terrible, its scars too deep to hide or cover.

For us, the pages of the past turn all undimmed; battles, brutally
etched, stand clear as our own hills against the sky--for in this land
we have no haze to soften truth.

Treading the austere corridor of our Pantheon, we, too, come at last to
victory--but what a victory! Not the familiar, gracious goddess,
wide-winged, crowned, bearing wreaths, but a naked, desperate creature,
gaunt, dauntless, turning her iron face to the west.

The trampling centuries can raise for us no golden dust to cloak the
flanks of the starved ranks that press across our horizon.

Our ragged armies muster in a pitiless glare of light, every man
distinct, every battle in detail.

Pangs that they suffered we suffer.

The faint-hearted who failed are judged by us as though they failed
before the nation yesterday; the brave are re-enshrined as we read; the
traitor, to us, is no grotesque Guy Fawkes, but a living Judas
of to-day.