"Well, I don't want to say nothing agin a man as fit as a colonel in the war," said the farmer, "but I know I ain't hiring no brigadier-generals if they come this way." They are growing old now, and fewer, the men who held commissions in the war that ended over forty years ago; but during those forty years there has been no community, no trade or profession or calling, in which they have not been to be found, indistinguishable from their civilian colleagues, except by the tiny button in the lapels of their coats. Until Mr. Roosevelt, (and he won his spurs in another war) there has been no man elected President of the United States, except Mr. Cleveland, the one Democrat, who had not a distinguished record as an officer in the Union armies--Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, and McKinley were all soldiers. You may still see that little button in many pulpits. Farmers wear it, and cabinet ministers, millionaires, and mechanics. The Anglo-Saxon is a fighting breed. The population of the British Isles sprang from the loins of successive waves of fighting men. It was not the weaklings of the Danes or Normans, Jutes, Saxons, or Angles who came to conquer Britain, but the bold, the hardy, the venturesome of each tribe or people. It was not the mere mixture of bloods that made the English character what it was, the race a race of empire builders; it was because of each blood there came to Britain only of the most adventurous. And through the centuries it has been the constant stress and training of the perpetual turmoil in which the people have lived that have kept the stock from degeneration. There has never been a time in English history, save when the people have been struggling in wars among themselves, when there has been an English family that has not at any given moment had sons or fathers, uncles or cousins out somewhere doing the work of the Empire. And some are drowned in deep water, And some in sight of shore, And word goes back to the weary wife And ever she sends more. For since that wife had gate or gear And hearth and garth and bield She willed her sons to the white Harvest, And that is a bitter yield. . . . . . . . The good wife's sons come home again With little into their hands, But the lore o' men that ha' dealt wi' men In the new and naked lands, But the faith o' men that ha' brothered men By more than the easy breath, And the eyes o' men that ha' read wi' men In the open book of death.[188:1]