General Slocum did his first great public service when the crisis called not primarily for the softer and milder, but for the sterner and harder virtues; and we can not afford in this day of material luxury, in this day when civilization tends to make life easy, to ignore those hard and stern virtues. In the workaday world as it is, not only in war, but in private life and in public life alike, a man has to have toughness of fibre or he can not put into effect even the best of intentions. We can not afford to let the generation that is coming grow up with the feeling that any quality will serve as a substitute for the old, essential qualities of manliness in a man and womanliness in a woman. Much, very much, has been done in this country by education. No one can overstate the debt that this country is under to the educators; but in taking advantage of all the improved methods let us not forget that there are certain qualities which are not new, which are eternal because they are eternally true, the failure to develop which will cause a loss that can not be offset by any merely intellectual or mental gain. A sound body is a first-class thing, a sound mind is an even better thing, but the thing that counts for most in the individual as in the Nation is character—the sum of those qualities which make a man a good man and a woman a good woman. You men of the Civil War, you men to whom this country owes more than to any others, no matter how great the service of those others may be (because to you this country owes its life), you won the place you did, you won for this country its salvation, because you had in you those qualities which in the aggregate we know by the name of character, the qualities which made you put material gain, material well-being, not merely below, but immeasurably below devotion to an ideal, when the crisis called for showing your manhood. You went to the war leaving those behind who would make more money, but carrying with you in your hearts the honor and the future of a mighty Nation. You had, in the first place, the right spirit, and then you had the quality of making that spirit evident in the time of need. If you had not had patriotism, devotion to the country and to the flag, you could have done nothing. But you could not have done much more if your patriotism, your devotion to the flag, had not been backed up by the power to show that your metal rang true in battle. You showed in times that tried men’s souls what this country has a right to expect from its sons. You had the supreme good fortune to test your manhood in one of the two great crises of the Nation’s history, the great crisis in which the Nation was born in the days of 1776, and the no less great crisis in which the Nation was saved by the men of 1861. You have left us not merely a reunited country, but you have left us the glorious heritage of the memory of the exploits, of the qualities by which the country was left reunited.