To many, the _conscious_ end of the existence of the Yankee nation may have been a small affair indeed. That end is only what they make it. Its _unconscious_ end is, however, another matter. That end God has made. To one man, the nation exists that he may make wooden clocks and sell them. To another, the chief end of the nation's existence is that he may get a good crop of wheat to market during rising quotations. To another, that he may do a good stroke of business in the boot and shoe line. To another, that he may make a good thing in stocks. To some in the past, this nation existed solely that men might breed negroes in Virginia, and work them in Alabama! This great nation was worth the blacks it owned, and the cotton it raised! Actually that was all. The _conscious_ end to thousands amounted to about this. Men looked at the nation from their own small place. They dwarfed its purposes. They made them small and mean and low. They did this three years ago more commonly, we think, than they do now. The war has taught us many things. It has certainly taught us higher ideas of the value of the Nation, and a loftier idea of the meaning of its life. We have awaked to the fact that we are trustees of this continent for the world. We have been fighting for two years and more, not to save this nation for the value of its wheat, or cotton, or manufactures, or exports, but for the value of the ideas, the hopes, the aspirations, the tendencies this nation embodies. We have risen to see that it were a good bargain to barter all the material wealth it holds for the priceless spiritual ideas it represents. France babbles about 'going to war for an idea.' We don't babble. We buckle on our armor and fight, we practical, money-making Yankees, who are said to value everything by dollars, and, after two years of tremendous fighting, are half amazed ourselves to find we have been fighting solely for a half-dozen ideas the world can lose only at the cost of despair. Since the days when men left house and home and friends, with red crosses on their hearts, to redeem from the hands of the infidel the sepulchre which the dead Christ once made holy, the world has never seen a war carried on for a more purely ideal end than our own. We fight for the integrity of _the Nation_. We fight for what that word means of hope and confidence and freedom and advancement to the groaning and bewildered world. We say, let all else perish,--wealth, commerce, agriculture, cunning manufacture, humanizing art. We expend all to save _the Nation_. That priceless possession we shall hold intact to the end, for ourselves, our children, and the coming years!