military power fades away beside the picture of the victorious general,
returning his commission to the representatives of a people who would
have made him king, and retiring after two terms from the Presidency
which he could have held for life, and the picture of a war-worn people
turning from debt, disorder, almost anarchy, not to division, not to
despotism, but to national unity under the ordered liberty of the
Federal Constitution.

It was manifested again in the adoption and defence by the young nation
of that principle which is known as the Monroe Doctrine that European
despotism should make no further progress in the Western Hemisphere. It
is in the great argument of Webster replying to Hayne and the stout
declaration of Jackson that he would treat nullification as treason. It
was the compelling force of the Civil War, expounded by Lincoln in his
unyielding purpose to save the Union but "with malice toward none, with
charity for all," which General Grant, his greatest soldier, put into
practice at Appomattox when he sent General Lee back with his sword, and
his soldiers home to the plantations, with their war horses for the
spring plowing. And at the conclusion of the Spanish War it is to the
ever-enduring credit of our country that it exacted not penalties, but
justice, and actually compensated a defeated foe for public property
that had come to our hands in the Philippines as the result of the
fortunes of battle. But what of the present crisis? Is the heart of the
Nation still sound, does it still respond to the appeal to the high
ideals of the past? If those two and one half years, before the American
declaration of war, shall appear, when unprejudiced history is written,
to have been characterized by patience, forbearance, and self-restraint,
they will add to the credit of former days. If they were characterized
by selfishness, by politics, by a balancing of expediency against
justice they will be counted as a time of ignominy for which a