tutions; but we do stand for this,
that we are banded together in America to see to it that no man shall
serve any master who is not of his own choosing. And we have been very
liberal and generous about this idea. We have seen great peoples, for
the most part not of the same blood with ourselves, to the south of us
build up polities in which this same idea pulsed and was regnant, this
idea of free institutions and individual liberty, and when we have seen
hands reached across the water from older political polities to
interfere with the development of free institutions on the Western
Hemisphere we have said: "No; we are the champions of the freedom of
popular sovereignty wherever it displays or exercises itself throughout
both Americas." We are the champions of a particular sort of freedom,
the sort of freedom which is the only foundation and guarantee of
peace.

Peace lies in the hearts of great industrial and agricultural
populations, and we have arranged a government on this side of the water
by which their preferences and their predilections and their interests
are the mainsprings of government itself. And so when we prepare for
national defense we prepare for national political integrity; we prepare
to take care of the great ideals which gave birth to this Government; we
are going back in spirit and in energy to those great first generations
in America, when men banded themselves together, though they were but a
handful upon a single coast of the Atlantic, to set up in the world the
standards which have ever since floated everywhere that Americans
asserted the power of their Government. As I came along the line of the
railway to-day, I was touched to observe that everywhere, upon every
railway station, upon every house, where a flag could be procured, some
temporary standard had been raised from which there floated the stars
and stripes. They seemed to have divined the errand upon which I had
come, to remind you that we must subordinate every individual interest
and every local interest to assert once more, if it should be necessary
to assert them, the great principles for which that flag stands.

Do not deceive yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, as to where the colors
of that flag came from. Those lines of red are lines of blood, nobly and
unselfishly shed by men who loved the liberty of their fellow-men more
than they loved their own lives and fortunes. God forbid that we should
have to use the blood of America t