380 Extracts from Addresses
not ready for it. We had at first no part in it. It was not our work.
We were very much in the perturbed spirit of a Norwegian of whom I
heard in Chicago, who went into a training camp, and on furlough a
few weeks later he was asked how he liked it. He said : “I do not like it;
no good. I went to the camp and they took away my clothes and gave
me a uniform. They took away my name and gave me a number, No.
347. They took away my liberty on the Sabbath Day and made me go to
a chapel. I had to listen to a chaplain talk, and after he had talked for
three-quarters of an hour he said: ‘No. 347. Art Thou Weary, Art
Thou Languid?’ and I got ten days in the guardhouse for saying, ‘I
certainly am.’ ”
But that which we have gotten out of the war’s experience has been
a certain list of by-products, which I think we shall not lose. War is
not our business. It has never been the business of the American people.
I hope it never will be. We have come out of insularity to take our
place by the side of the nations in whom we believe. And in none of
them do we now believe so fundamentally and so firmly as in Great
Britain, whose marvelous achievements in this war and whose nobility
of purpose in the history of the nations we have never appreciated as
we appreciate them to-day. It has been our task in this war to take
our place in a most active kind of way by the side of these older civiliza-
tions, and we have acquired some by-products by the process. We have
gotten a consciousness of the meaning of the Flag that this generation
never knew before. We know what it means to salute the Flag to-day.
We know what it means to see the Flag go by in processions, or to
watch it as it is unfurled from flagstaffs. We know what it means to
sing the national anthem, or to hear its strains sung or played by bands
of music. Some of us can almost sing the first stanza of that hymn.
In the second place, we have gotten the physical training, the mar-
velous resiliency, of this out-of-door life, touching real earth, breathing
real air, feeling ourselves a part of a great moving, marching, singing,
jubilant company of men. That is a new thing in the life of the Republic.
We have never felt that before» I hope we shall never lose it. I do
not mean that I am in favor of universal military training. I am not.
But I am in favor of universal physical training for men and women
alike; and that we shall never lose, I hope, as one of the great by-
products of this war.
In the third place, we have gotten marvelous new advantages in the
scientific field. My friend, Professor Wilson, is far more capable of
giving you the broader aspects of that theme than I am, but it seems to
me that even the layman, the man who stands upon the side lines of the
great scientific game, is able to perceive how out of this war we are to