The home duties are the vital duties.

We need their ruggedness of body, their keen and vigorous minds, and above all their dominant quality of forceful character.

Our homage to-day to the memory of Sherman comes from the depths of our being.

Their lives teach us to strive after in our own lives, not the thing which is merely pleasant, but the thing which it is our duty to do.

Leadership is of avail only so far as there is wise and resolute public sentiment behind it.

The life of duty, not the life of mere ease or mere pleasure—that is the kind of life which makes the great man as it makes the great nation.

My faith that it will show no falling off is based upon my faith in the character of our average citizenship.

No man is warranted in feeling pride in the deeds of the army and navy of the past if he does not back up the army and the navy of the present.

We meet to-day upon one of the great battle-fields of the Civil War.

Our country, now so great and so wonderful, would have been split into little jangling rival nationalities.

Lincoln forthwith published that immortal paper, the preliminary declaration of emancipation.

No matter how patriotic he was, if he ran away he was no good.

In addition to decency he had to have the qualities that would make the decency effective.

Just one word in closing. As I said, we need to display the same qualities now that you needed in 1861.

The fundamental qualities which make for good citizenship do not change any more than the fundamental qualities which make good soldiers.

A man was not worth any thing then if he was not patriotic and decent.

No other battle of the Civil War lasting but one day shows as great a percentage of loss as that which occurred here upon the day on which Antietam was fought.

There has never been another war in which the issues at stake were so large.