Have you ever read the Declaration of Independence?

If you have, you will know that it is not a Fourth of July oration.

The Declaration of Independence was a document preliminary to war.

It was a vital piece of practical business, not a piece of rhetoric.

And if you will pass beyond those preliminary passages, which we are accustomed

to quote about the rights of men and read into the heart of the document, you will see that it is

very express and detailed, that it consists of a series of definite specifications concerning

actual public business of the day.

Not the business of our day, for the matter with which it deals is past, but the business of that first revolution by which the nation was set up, the business of 1776.

Its general statements, its general declarations cannot mean anything to us unless we append to it a similar specific body of particulars as to what we consider the essential business of our own day.

Liberty does not consist, my fellow citizens, in mere general declarations of the rights of man.

It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action. Therefore, standing here where the declaration was

adopted, reading its business-like sentences, we ought to ask ourselves what there is in it

for us. There is nothing in it for us unless we can translate it into the terms of our own conditions

and our own lives.

We must reduce it to what the lawyers call a bill of particulars.

It contains a bill of particulars, but the Bill of Particulars of 1776.

If we would keep it alive, we must fill it with a Bill of Particulars of 1776. If we would keep it alive, we must fill it with a Bill of

Particulars of the year 1914. The way to be patriotic in America is not only to love America,

but to love the duty that lies nearest to our hand and know that in performing it we are serving our country.

There are some gentlemen in Washington, for example, at this very moment, who are showing

themselves very patriotic in a way which does not attract wide attention, but seems to

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