the traditions of the American Revolution, this people will stand
like a stone wall with our splendid Ally of old and of to-day--France--and
from Great Britain from whence came our institutions, to end forever
the Hohenzollern system of blood and iron so that a better future
may come to Europe and America, one in which peace may be builded upon
a guaranty of justice and law--a world order in which fundamental
moral postulates and human rights may never again be set at defiance at
the behest of mere material force, however scientifically organized.

To France has fallen the honor of checking, to Britain the burden
of containing by sea and land, to America now comes the duty of
finally overthrowing that common enemy of democratic institutions
and ordered liberty, the foe whose morality knows no truth, whose
philosophy admits no check upon the "will to power."

In France the traveler passing along the roads to the northeast
leading to Lorraine may see at every cross-road a great index
finger pointing to the single word VERDUN. To many thousands,
nay, hundreds of thousands of men passing over these roads in the
five fateful months of critical battle, these six letters spelled
mutilation and death, yet the word was an inspiration to heroism
in every home of France, and from every corner of the land men
followed that great index finger pointing, as it did indeed, to
the modern Calvary.

To-day at every cross-road must we here in America set up a great
index hand with the words "TO FRANCE." To France, land of suffering
humanity, in whose devastated fields again must be saved the same
principles for which Americans fought at Bunker Hill, at Saratoga,
at Yorktown, at Gettysburg and in the Wilderness; to France, where