“They took arms not to destroy, but to save liberty; not to overthrow,
but to establish the supremacy of the law.”

An excerpt from TR’s 1904 Memorial Day speech in Gettysburg Pennslyvania:
“But the soldiers who won at Gettysburg, the
soldiers who fought to a finish the Civil War and
thereby made their countrymen forever their debtors,
have left us far more even than the memories of
the war itself. They fought for four years in order
that on this Continent those who came after them,
their children and their children s children, might
enjoy a lasting peace. They took arms not to destroy,
but to save liberty; not to overthrow, but to
establish the supremacy of the law. The crisis
which they faced was to determine whether or not
this people was fit for self-government and, therefore,
fit for liberty. Freedom is not a gift which
can be enjoyed save by those who show them
selves worthy of it. In this world no privilege can
be permanently appropriated by men who have not
the power and the will successfully to assume the
responsibility of using it aright. In his recent
admirable little volume on freedom and responsibility
in democratic government, President Hadley of
Yale has pointed out that the freedom which is
worth anything is the freedom which means self-
government and not anarchy. Freedom thus conceived
is a constructive force, which enables an
intelligent and good man to do better things than
he could do without it; which is in its essence the
substitution of self-restraint for external restraint
the substitution of a form of restraint which
promotes progress for the form which retards it.
This is the right view to take of freedom; but it
can only be taken if there is a full recognition of
the close connection between liberty and
responsibility in every domain of human thought and action.
It was essentially the view taken by Abraham
Lincoln, and by all those who, when the Civil War
broke out, realized that in a self-governing
democracy those who desire to be considered fit to enjoy
liberty must show that they know how to use it
with moderation and justice in peace, and how to
fight for it when it is jeoparded by malice domestic
or foreign levy.”
Happy Memorial Day