Let's be quiet and let's be
sensible to-day until we get this infant on his legs. He's just a
recruit, a raw recruit, and he has to be trained and we are going to
do that now.
"Gentlemen, I want to say just here, if you can only think about this
Legion--the chairman spoke of it last night to me--as the jewel of the
ages. I believe that is the best interpretation I know. I cannot say
anything greater than this: I believe God raised up America for this
great hour; I can say that the strong young man of the time is to be
the American Legion in this country and in the world.
"What the great seers of the past ages have dreamed and what they have
planned and longed for, the opportunity that they sought, have
suddenly been placed and in our hands. Are we going to be great men
and big men? Will we arise to the dignity and be worthy of the
occasion?
"I believe that we will. Oh, men, if I might make it plain to you
that it seems to me I stand on the very rim of creation and I am
speaking there to an angel who has never yet been able to see light. I
said: 'Angel, what are you doing here?' and he said: 'I was placed
here when God created this world'; and he said: 'God sent me to look
down upon this world and report to him at one special time, and that
one time only,' and I said: 'What was to be the nature of that
report?' He said: 'God made man in His own image and God Himself is a
being of knowledge, love, truth, democracy, and peace,' and He said to
that angel, 'Don't you ever leave that world until you see dawn, until
you see that man has come up to the place where he will begin to
measure up to what I expected of him,' and that angel said to me, 'I
have sat here through all the ages and I have seen times when I
thought that the sunlight of God's great knowledge and love and truth
was going to come over the hills and then some being like the Kaiser
or Alexander or Napoleon or some one that was of a Bolsheviki type
would rise up and retard it and the sun could never rise,' but he
said: 'Thank God on April 6, 1917, I reported back to God when America
entered this war that I had seen the dawn.
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