Not long ago, in Lincoln, where I now live, I expressed myself on this subject to the same effect; and I afterwards found I, in so doing, had occasioned pain, as well as surprise. I had seemed to speak depreciatingly of the dead, and of a period the memory of which was sacred. Nothing could have been further from my thought. The criticism I then made, and now make again, applies to all of our Massachusetts, I may say our New England, towns. Their records tell me the same story. Turn, for instance, to your own town books covering those heroic periods, whether Revolutionary or of the Civil war. Should you do so, you will find in them a wearisome repetition. In the first flush of excitement, volunteers, in each case, enrolled themselves in crowds, they were eager to get to the front; then came the cold reaction, and the consequent haggling. Call follows call for men--and yet more men; for war is insatiable,--and these calls are grudgingly responded to by votes providing for the payment of bounties, and by complicated plans for the procurement of substitutes. Never once in all those annals do you read of a stern exaction. On the contrary, the question always is as to how cheapest to avoid it. The heroic chord is rarely struck. That there were individual cases, many and touching, of self-sacrifice and lofty patriotic impulse, I am the last to deny. Was I not witness to them? Such you do well to commemorate and recall; nor can they be held in too green a memory. It is not to those I refer, but to the system under which war was carried on; it was weak, unscientific, to the last degree wasteful of blood and of treasure,--moreover, it was cruel to those in the field. Through it much unnecessary agony was caused; and the necessary agony, at best quite enough, was unduly prolonged. Properly studied, your town record, like the records of all your sister towns, teaches on this head a lesson of utmost value. No nation has any right to enter upon a war, domestic or foreign, unless it is ready promptly to meet the cost thereof in flesh and blood, as well as in money. It should not be a question of voluntary enlistment, or of mercenary service; but, if a community elects to fight, it should put its fighting force at the absolute disposal of its government. Conscription and the draft should be the order of the day,--the unmarried first, the married next; and, for the able-bodied, no exemption. Never, in the whole history of Massachusetts, was the ordeal of a war thus systematically met. On the contrary, as studied in your Weymouth annals, or those of your sister towns, after the first fierce outburst of ardor cooled, it is one long wearisome record of services sold and bought.