You will but have spread a bed of thorns.
Failure will write disgrace upon the brow of this generation, and shame
will outlast the age. It is not with us as with the South. She can
surrender without dishonor. She is the weaker power, and her success
will be against the nature of things. Her dishonor lay in her attempt,
not in its relinquishment. But we shall fail, not because of mechanics
and mathematics, but because our manhood and womanhood weighed in the
balance are found wanting. There are few who will not share in the sin.
There are none who will not share in the shame. Wives, would you hold
back your husbands? Mothers, would you keep your sons? From what? for
what? From the doing of the grandest duty that ever ennobled man, to the
grief of the greatest infamy that ever crushed him down. You would hold
him back from prizes before which Olympian laurels fade, for a fate
before which a Helot slave might cower. His country in the agony of her
death-struggle calls to him for succor. All the blood in all the ages,
poured out for liberty, poured out for him, cries unto him from the
ground. All that life has of noble, of heroic, beckons him forward.
Death itself wears for him a golden crown. Ever since the world swung
free from God's hand, men have died,--obeying the blind fiat of Nature;
but only once in a generation comes the sacrificial year, the year
of jubilee, when men march lovingly to meet their fate and die for a
nation's life.
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