ADDRESS TO GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC

AT THE METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

MAY 30, 1899

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN AND YOU MEN OF THE GRAND ARMY OF THE
REPUBLIC: Men whom I should have called comrades if I didn't feel
that your war was too big for ours to be set beside it; we of this
generation, looking at your records who have fought the wars of the
past, can say one thing: that we have the spirit, anyway, and if we had
been called upon to perform such a task as yours we should have tried
our best to do it. We have learned aright, I hope the lesson taught in
the great years of the republic; the days of Lincoln and Grant and
Sherman and Farragut, and while our war didn't last long enough to
bring the strain upon our strength and endurance, and while our task
was over so quickly that we had no time to develop men who should
stand, in point of deeds done, beside the great Captains of the civil
war, we did add lustre to the arms of the republic almost as great as
was added in that war. I won't say that there is any one who can quite
come beside Farragut, but Dewey presses him mighty hard: and, ladies
and gentlemen — comrades, if you'll allow it — when I say that
Dewey presses Farragut hard, I only say what every sailor who served
under Farragut would agree to.

The men who went to the war last year went with the wholesome
feeling that they would be ashamed to come back unless they fought as
you had fought. It is no small thing to teach a nation such a lesson.
Besides the victory you left the memory. You have made it indeed
difficult for the country ever to fall short of its duty, and have put it
under the greatest possible burden of obligation, the obligation to be
true to the best purposes of our national life. When you had won the
victory you came back once more to your useful pursuits and served
your country in peace as you had in war. This, too, is a necessary of a
nation's greatness: that her citizens should be thrifty and industrious;
further, that they should have a high standard of personal honor and of
civic honor. The man who would feel an honest pride in his country
must be as sensitive to an attack upon the national honor as to an
attack upon his own. In our republic our well-being must correspond
to the way in which the average citizen performs his everyday duties.
One of the musical numbers on your program is the "Blue and
Gray." What an augury that a gathering such as yours to-night, of men
who fought under Grant and Sherman, should select as one of your
tunes a commemoration of the foes who fought bravely for what they
considered the right, and that last year when we fought an alien nation
the sons of the men who wore blue and the sons of the men who wore
gray, fought shoulder to shoulder under those very men who wore the
blue and those very men who wore the gray, showing the whole world
that North and South and East and West, in every class of society,
when it came to the call to arms, are Americans — nothing more and
nothing less.

As a result of this row we have assumed a great burden. Shame to
us had we hesitated; but let us undertake it with an appreciation that it
is a serious matter. Having driven out the mediaeval tyranny of Spain
from those islands we are under bonds of honor to supplant it with
something better; to govern them with firmness and righteousness for
their own interest. Let us so carry out this task that the generations to
come shall point with pride to the history made in the last of the
nineteenth and the first of the twentieth centuries.