2^4 BANQUET. 



the men who are on the other side and in the cantonments of this country. The return to 

 normal conditions involves great economic and statesmenship questions that in some re- 

 spects are even greater than the test that came to us in the rapid preparedness for this war. 

 Then overyone was keyed up with a desire to help and to forward this great patriotic service, 

 but the time of strain has passed and we are tempted to weaken a bit now in our further 

 patriotic service. You can feel it in the air. You can feel it in yourselves, and yet in my 

 judgment we are facing the mightiest of the problems in a return to a peace basis. But in 

 facing that return and that readjustment, there is one great factor we are going to have, 

 and that is in the awakened souls of the 2,000,000 boys in khaki who crossed the seas, or 

 remained on this side, ready to cross, for I make no difference between the man who crossed, 

 from the buck private up to John Pershing, and the man who did not cross, from the buck 

 private to Leonard Wood. For, mark you well, "they also serve who only stand and wait." 



These 2,000,000 men are a tremendous added asset to the stability of this country, to 

 the solution of its great problems when they come back to civil life. It has been my privi- 

 lege to mingle with these lads in the cantonments and drink in their spirit of splendid self- 

 sacrifice to the highest ideals of government. I have found a changed spirit in the souls 

 of men who by education and environment were conscious of duty, and a changed soul in 

 the minds of men who were inspired and ennobled in spite of the humbleness of their origin 

 and lack of opportunity in their earlier life. When they come back they are going to look 

 us through and through ; they are going to put an X-ray into our souls. As they themselves 

 have been looking into the souls of men and nations over there that have been purified by 

 four years of conflict, they are going to see when they come back whether we on this side, 

 who have remained at home — we have not had the four years of soul purification — are now, 

 and in the future, to ring true to the higher standard of patriotism and love and duty to 

 coimtry they have learned overseas. And when they come back they will see to it that the 

 same principles, the same ideals, the same rising of soul that has inspired the men in the 

 trenches of all nations over there, are going to inspire them when they return and be the great 

 leaven in the solution of the problems we face. 



I wish I might take time to dwell seriously on that subject, but I cannot. I do want 

 to say that in my judgment the principles of Anglo-Saxon law and order and obedience and 

 stability of government have been tremendously increased over all this country by the les- 

 sons of order, competence and executive work America's young men have learned in, by and 

 for the Army. The getting the point of goinig "over the top" and the enduring of hardships 

 without complaint, with a smile on their faces, and with a spirit that, after all is said, it did 

 not matter much whether the tombstone at a man's head made his age read ten years more 

 or less so long as he had done that which is called by the plain old Saxon word "duty" — 

 thank God, I learned it at my mother's knee — "to do my duty in that state of life into which 

 it hath pleased God to call me." 



That is the spirit of the Army. Duty is what has been before every man in Belgium, 

 Italy, France, Britain, the colonies, and in our beloved country. Duty ! Duty ! ! Duty ! ! ! 



