And so the castle where Lafayette was born and the fields and woods he knew so well in his boyhood among the Auvergne Mountains are now to be the home of generations of French children whose fathers gave their lives that the world might be set free from tyrants and war cease to be. What could be more fitting! It is one of the beautiful things of history that Americans could do this for France. It is in such ways that the spirit of brotherly love may some day encircle the earth. For all wise men know that it is not riches, nor material possessions nor great territories that make either men or nations noble. The United States might cover half the globe, her wealth be beyond what man has ever dreamed of, her population run into the hundreds of millions, and yet our country be only hated and feared by other peoples. That was the future the rulers of Germany had been planning for their nation; so they might possess material things they were willing, nay, they were glad that the rest of the world should hate them. They had no wisdom at all; they had forgotten all the lessons of history. Christ might never have taught, churches never been more than bricks and stone, patriots and poets never have striven to show men their ideals, so far as these rulers, and through them their people, were concerned. Lafayette knew the truth, but the spirit of Lafayette was what Germany and Austria most hated; they are trying to-day to imprison that spirit just as they did imprison the man himself when they had the chance. Nations, like men, live to serve, not to conquer for the lust of power. Only when nations have learned that are they worthy of admiration. Had America drawn her cloak about her, said “I am safe between my two oceans,” made money out of the sufferings of other peoples, held fast to safety and ease, then America would have betrayed every ideal of her founders, every hope of the men who have loved and worshipped their “land of the free.” Only when America said there were greater things than ease and safety, that the liberty of all peoples was indissolubly bound up with her own freedom, did she show herself as the great republic in spirit as well as in name; only when she was willing to serve others did she rise to the true heights of her national soul. One of our poets, James Russell Lowell, has written the beautiful line, “‘Tis man’s perdition to be safe, when for the truth he ought to die!” The truth of that was known to the farmers of 1775 who took their guns and at Lexington and Concord fired “the shot heard round the world.” And the same truth was known to the men of 1861 who went out to keep the republic their fathers had given them. For we have all received a great legacy from those who have gone before, and now we know what it is, and have again gone forth to fight for truth.