period, not of preparation, but of more enjoyment, he shows that he is
simply a cumberer on the earth's surface, and he surely unfits himself
to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do so should again
arise. A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life,
and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow
it for serious work in the world.

In the last analysis a healthy State can exist only when the men and
women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the
children are so trained that they shall endeavor, not to shirk
difficulties, but to overcome them; not to seek ease, but to know how to
wrest triumph from toil and risk. The man must be glad to do a man's
work, to dare and endure and to labor; to keep himself, and to keep
those dependent upon him. The woman must be the housewife, the helpmeet
of the homemaker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy children.
In one of Daudet's powerful and melancholy books he speaks of "the fear
of maternity, the haunting terror of the young wife of the present day."
When such words can be truthfully written of a nation, that nation is
rotten to the heart's core. When men fear work or fear righteous war,
when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom; and well
it is that they should vanish from the earth, where they are fit
subjects for the scorn of all men and women who are themselves strong
and brave and high-minded.

As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. It is a base
untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history. Thrice
happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to
dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even tho checkered by
failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy
much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows