as in time of war courage is the cardinal virtue of the soldier, so in time of peace honesty, using the word in its deepest and broadest significance, is the essential basic virtue, without which all else avails nothing. National greatness is of slow growth. It can not be forced and yet be stable and enduring; for it is based fundamentally upon national character, and national character is stamped deep in a people by the lives of many generations. The men who went into the army had to submit to discipline, had to submit to restraint through the government of the leaders they had chosen, as the price of winning. So we, the people, can preserve our liberty and our greatness in time of peace only by ourselves exercising the virtues of honesty, of self-restraint, and of fair dealing between man and man. In all the ages of the past men have seen countries lose their liberty, because their people could not restrain and order themselves, and therefore forfeited the right to what they were unable to use with wisdom. It was because you men of the Civil War both knew how to use liberty temperately and how to defend it at need that we and our children and our children’s children shall hold you in honor forever. Here, on Memorial Day, on this great battlefield, we commemorate not only the chiefs who actually won this battle; not only Meade, and his lieutenants, Hancock and Reynolds and Howard and Sickles, and the many others whose names flame in our annals; but also the chiefs who had made the Army of the Potomac what it was, and those who afterward led it in the campaigns which were crowned at Appomattox; and furthermore those who made and used its sister armies: McClellan, with his extraordinary genius for organization; Rosecrans; Buell; Thomas, the unyielding, the steadfast; and that great trio, Sherman, Sheridan, and last and greatest of all, Grant himself, the silent soldier whose hammer-like blows finally beat down even the prowess of the men who fought against him. Above all we meet here to pay homage to the officers and enlisted men who served and fought and died, without having, as their chiefs had, the chance to write their names on the tablets of fame; to the men who marched and fought in the ranks, who were buried in long trenches on the field of battle, who died in cots marked only by numbers in the hospitals; who, if they lived, when the war was over, went back each to his task on the farm or in the town, to do his duty in peace as he had done it in war; to take up the threads of his working life where he had dropped them when the trumpets of the Nation pealed to arms. To-day, all over this land our people meet to pay reverent homage to the dead who died that the Nation might live; and we pay homage also to their comrades who are still with us.