A Realization of Our Patriotic Duty at Home 
By Keene H. Addington, Illinois 
Ah Address Before the Patriotic Meeting of the North Shore Horticultural Society, Lake Forest, 111., 
Tendered the Members of the National Association of Gardeners During Their Convention at Chicago 
Ot 
I UNDERSTAND that the regular occupation 
most of you is to cultivate more of the beautiful 
which delights the eye than of the useful which 
sustains the body. But let not my words be misunder- 
stood. In times like these it is fitting that the beautiful 
shall subsist in order that the spirit of man may continue 
to possess something of its accustomed joy. In general, 
the face of the world is exceeding solemn and the heart 
is very sad, but with that divine ordering of things the 
bounties of nature continue and its beauties and its 
glories still subsist among men. 
You are wooers of the soil, and from your ardent woo- 
ing supreme beauty comes. You, likewise, I know, pos- 
sess that knowledge with which, as magicians of the 
soil, you cause the earth to give forth a bountv which it 
did not know Ijefore. The possession of that knowl- 
edge and the employment of it in times like these are 
of first importance. Those in positions such as you, 
and you are leaders of men, are to increase production 
and thus enable the nation not alone to feed itself InU 
also to feed its allies. 
It is, therefore, upon occasions like these when men 
and women meet together, that we representing in a 
small way the length and breadth of the country should 
consider of conditions and should consider of causes. 
The more that I have occasion to think or to speak of 
the conditions of today, the conditions of the past and 
the prospects of the future, the more fortunate I con- 
sider myself to have lived in this generation. Does it 
occur to you that all of the civilization of all the ages 
and of the centuries and of the generations that have 
gone before is being passed through the crucible of the 
present generation ? We all know that the world strug- 
gled from an early barbarism and has reached the point 
of a certain civilization. Every generation has done 
something to make up the sum total of the civilization 
which exists today. Every generation has contributed 
something of good and something of bad. In some gen- 
erations the good has exceeded the bad and in others 
the bad has exceeded the good, but today we have be- 
fore us the composite result involved in a mighty strug- 
gle, and the issue of this world-wide conflict is to de- 
termine what is to survive. If it shall be that our own 
cause and the common cause of our allies shall survive, 
all thinking men are agreed that the best of civilization 
will survive, with the worst that this and preceding gen- 
erations have created largely stripped awa\'. 
We stand, then, as the responsible agents and the 
trustees of the civilization of the world, with the obli- 
gation to strip the past of its worst and transmit to the 
future for its work of preservation, its work of purifica- 
tion, its work of exaltation the best that remains. But, 
if the issue of this struggle shall ever be against us, can 
you contemplate what the future generations must deal 
with and how the world must start again to Ijuild a new 
civilization under conditions so adverse as hardlv to be 
described ? 
And I say to you, ladies and gentlemen, that of the 
civilization that exists today, the best of it lies in liberty 
and the chief support of liberty is democracy. Liberty 
has been defined time and again and defined in many 
ways but in the last analysis as you and I know liberty 
it is the right to control our own destinies, to enjoy our 
own opportunities, to pursue our own coiu'ses of happi- 
429 
ness witiiout involving others in injury. Broadening 
out that idea, it means to rear our families and have 
them enjoy like opportunities with ourselves, to keep 
them safe from harm and to permit them to walk in the 
paths of rectitude and of happiness. It means further 
that whatever curtailment is necessary for the common 
good is not entrusted to the capricious will of any man 
or set of men, but is entrusted by our own choice to our 
o\yn neighbors who possess the same love of liberty 
that we do and who hold dear the same aspirations 
which we hold dear. 
I doubt if a single man in all this country of ours has 
realized what liberty meant until it has become con- 
fronted with its great and imminent danger, unless we 
persevere according to our might and according to our 
present determined purpose. 
I'd like to tell you the story of Poland in a few brief 
words, to illustrate what lack of liberty means and to 
illustrate further one of the great and beneficent efifects 
which must come from this war if we win, — and we must 
in our earnest efforts never think or consider any other 
result. 
l'"ive hundred years ago the Polish nation was one of 
the great nations of Europe. Her kings were among 
the greatest of the continent of Europe ; her people were 
of the first order of intelligence. When I say to you 
today that the Polish language is conceded by the great 
linguists of the world to stand first, — to be a language 
so rich in its power of expression, whether that ex- 
pression be of the workings of the mind or the workings 
of the heart or the workings of the soul, whether that 
expression be in diplomacy, in science, in music or in 
literature, or whether it involves the conunonplaces of 
life itself, — that of it Prof. Phelps, of Yale University, 
has said that the great diplomatic language of the 
world — French — is as to it but a dialect, you get some 
idea of the expansion and development of the Polish in- 
tellect. And when I tell you that 250 years ago when 
the Turkish hordes were seeking to over-run Europe 
and \'ienna alone standing under a state of siege, stood 
in their pathway, it was a Polish army led by a Polish 
king that defeated the Turks and saved civilization and 
saved Europe. But what is the condition of the Polish 
race to-da)^? Their people scattered throughout the 
earth to a very large extent. Those who have remained 
upon their native soil are ruled a part by Germany, a 
part by Austria and a part by Russia. In the capital of 
Galicia, Cracow, the kings of Poland lie buried in ma- 
jestic state but under the dominion of Austria. Warsaw 
where those kings reigned, until recently was under 
the domination of Russia, now a city in the hands of the 
German invaders, and the third part of her territory 
has for nearly a hundred years been under the control 
and govenunent of Germany. 
\\'hen you stop to think of the progress of this coun- 
try under its free government and of its opportunities 
to expand and develop both in its national and its indi- 
vidual life, and when you realize the stage of civilization 
to which Poland had arisen until her country was dis- 
membered, you have an object lesson to which the world 
has paid little heed of what can come from the forces 
which are led by capricious and autocratic rulers. .-\nd 
it is no idle dream to say that the day of the bondage 
of the Poles is fast nearing the end. The end is to come 
