Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 215, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 September 1918 — ‘UNFIT TO LIVE IF YOU REFUSE DUTY TO NATION [ARTICLE]

‘UNFIT TO LIVE IF YOU REFUSE DUTY TO NATION

New York, Sept. 18.—Col. Roosevelt’s editorial in the .Metropolitan JVfngHzine for October, which was published today, is entitled “The Great Adventure,” and although no name is mentioned, it is apparent that the basis of the editorial was the supreme sacrifice of Lieut. Quentin Roosevelt. “Only those are fit to live,” Col. Roosevelt writes, “who do not fear to die; and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life. Both life and death are parts of the same great adventure. Never, yet was worthy adventure worthily carried through by the man who put his personal safety first. “Never yet was a country worth living in unless its sons and daughters were of that stern stuff which bade them die for it at need; and never yet was a country worth dying for unless its sons and daughters thought of life not as something concerned only with the selfish evanescence of the individual but a. sa link in the great chain of creation an<j causation, so that each person is seen in his true relations as an essential part of the whole, whose life must be made to serve the larger and continuing life of the whole. “Therefore it is that the man who is not willing to die in a war for a great cause is not worthy to live. Therefore it is man and woman who in peace time fear or ignore the primary and vital duties and the high happiness of family life, who dare not beget and bear and rear the life that is to last when they are in their graves, have broken the chain of creation, and have shown that they are unfit for companionship with the souls ready for the great adventure. “The wife of a fighting soldier at the front recently wrote as follows to the mother of a gallant boy, who at the front had fought in high air like an eagle, and, like an eagle, fighting had died: “ ‘I write these few lines—not of condolence, for who would dare to pity you?—but of deepest sympathy to you and yours as you stand in the shadow which is the earthly side of those clouds of glory in which your son’s life has just passed. “ ‘Many will envy you that when the call to sacrifice came you were ot found among the paupers to whom no gift of life worth offering had been intrusted. They are the ones to be pitied, not we whose dearest are jeoapardizing their lives unto the death in the high places of the field. 1 hope my two sons will live as worthily and die as greatly as yours.’ “There spoke one dauntless soul to another. America is safe while her daughters are of this kind, for their lovers and their sens cannot; fail as long as beside the heartstones stand such wives and mothers. And we have many, many such women, and their men are like unto them.”