But the clouds lower, the winds shriek, the waves
boil, and immediately each craft shows its quality. The deep is strown
with broken masts, parted keels, floating wrecks; but here and there
a ship rides the raging sea, and flings defiance to the wind. She
overlives the sea because she is sea-worthy. Not our eighty years
of peace alone, but our two years of war are the touchstone of our
character. We have rolled our Democracy as a sweet morsel under our
tongue; we have gloried in the prosperity which it brought to the
individual; but if the comforts of men minister to the degradation of
man, if Democracy levels down and does not level up, if our era of peace
and plenty leaves us so feeble and frivolous, so childish, so impatient,
so deaf to all that calls to us from the past and entreats us in the
future, that we faint and fail under the stress of our one short effort,
then indeed is our Democracy our shame and curse. Let us show now what
manner of people we are. Let us be clear-sighted and far-sighted to see
how great is the issue that hangs upon the occasion. It is not a mere
military reputation that is at stake, not the decay of a generation's
commerce, not the determination of this or that party to power. It is
the question of the world that we have been set to answer. In the great
conflict of ages, the long strife between right and wrong, between
progress and sluggardy, through the Providence of God we are placed in
the van-guard.
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