Moreover, every friend of liberty, every believer in self-government, every idealist who wished to see his ideals take practical shape, wherever he might be in the world, knew that the success of all in which he most believed was bound up with the success of the Union armies in this great struggle. I confidently predict that when the final judgment of history is recorded it will be said that in no other war of which we have written record was it more vitally essential for the welfare of mankind that victory should rest where it finally rested. There have been other wars for individual freedom. There have been other wars for national greatness. But there has never been another war in which the issues at stake were so large, looked at from either standpoint. We take just pride in the great deeds of the men of 1776, but we must keep in mind that the Revolutionary War would have been shorn of wellnigh all its results had the side of union and liberty been defeated in the Civil War. In such case we should merely have added another to the lamentably long list of cases in which peoples have shown that after winning their liberty they are wholly unable to make good use of it. It now rests with us in civil life to make good by our deeds the deeds which you who wore the blue did in the great years from ’61 to ’65. The patriotism, the courage, the unflinching resolution and steadfast endurance of the soldiers whose triumph was crowned at Appomattox must be supplemented on our part by civic courage, civic honesty, cool sanity, and steadfast adherence to the immutable laws of righteousness. You left us a reunited country; reunited in fact as well as in name. You left us the right of brotherhood with your gallant foes who wore the gray; the right to feel pride in their courage and their high fealty to an ideal, even though they warred against the stars in their courses. You left us also the most splendid example of what brotherhood really means; for in your careers you showed in practical fashion that the only safety in our American life lies in spurning the accidental distinctions which sunder one man from another, and in paying homage to each man only because of what he essentially is; in stripping off the husks of occupation, of position, of accident, until the soul stands forth revealed, and we know the man only because of his worth as a man.