aught us higher ideas of the value of the Nation, and a loftier idea of
the meaning of its life. We have awaked to the fact that we are trustees
of this continent for the world. We have been fighting for two years and
more, not to save this nation for the value of its wheat, or cotton, or
manufactures, or exports, but for the value of the ideas, the hopes, the
aspirations, the tendencies this nation embodies. We have risen to see
that it were a good bargain to barter all the material wealth it holds
for the priceless spiritual ideas it represents. France babbles about
'going to war for an idea.' We don't babble. We buckle on our armor and
fight, we practical, money-making Yankees, who are said to value
everything by dollars, and, after two years of tremendous fighting, are
half amazed ourselves to find we have been fighting solely for a
half-dozen ideas the world can lose only at the cost of despair. Since
the days when men left house and home and friends, with red crosses on
their hearts, to redeem from the hands of the infidel the sepulchre
which the dead Christ once made holy, the world has never seen a war
carried on for a more purely ideal end than our own. We fight for the
integrity of _the Nation_. We fight for what that word means of hope
and confidence and freedom and advancement to the groaning and
bewildered world. We say, let all else perish,--wealth, commerce,
agriculture, cunning manufacture, humanizing art. We expend all to save
_the Nation_. That priceless possession we shall hold intact to the end,
for ourselves, our children, and the coming years!

Let us see what this thing is that we prize so highly. Let us see if we
are paying any too high a price for our object--if it is worth a million
lives and a countless treasure. What is _the Nation_?

There used to be a theory of 'the Social Compact.' It was a prominent
theory in the French Revolution, It was vastly older, however, than that
event. It was originally a theory of the Epicureans. Ovid has something
to say about it. Horace advocates it. It has not perished. It exists in
a fragmentary way in some books taught in colleges. It has more or less
of a hold still on many minds. This theory teaches that the natural
state of man is a state of warfare, an isolated savagery, where each
man's hand is against his neighbor, each lord and master for himself,
with no rights except what force gives him, and no possessions except
what he can hold by force. This na