In the interest of one who believed not at all
in the brotherhood of man they who had wept at the mention of the word
brotherhood died fighting brothers.
In the heart of all men lies sleeping the love of order. How to
achieve order out of our strange jumble of forms, out of democracies
and monarchies, dreams and endeavours is the riddle of the Universe
and the thing that in the artist is called the passion for form and
for which he also will laugh in the face of death is in all men. By
grasping that fact Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon and our own Grant have
made heroes of the dullest clods that walk and not a man of all the
thousands who marched with Sherman to the sea but lived the rest of
his life with a something sweeter, braver and finer sleeping in his
soul than will ever be produced by the reformer scolding of
brotherhood from a soap-box. The long march, the burning of the throat
and the stinging of the dust in the nostrils, the touch of shoulder
against shoulder, the quick bond of a common, unquestioned,
instinctive passion that bursts in the orgasm of battle, the
forgetting of words and the doing of the thing, be it winning battles
or destroying ugliness, the passionate massing of men for
accomplishment--these are the signs, if they ever awake in our land,
by which you may know you have come to the days of the making of men.
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