Page:Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star.djvu/55

Rh A few days later there came an editorial prompted by a letter from a woman friend in California. Visiting this friend was another woman whose son had died of influenza in the navy. That mother had said she had given her boy proudly to her country, "but if only he could have died with a gun in his hand—a little glory for him and a thought for me that my sacrifice had not been useless." The California friend had written: "There must be other mothers who feel they have laid their sacrifices on cold altars. You have written much that will comfort the mothers whose sons have paid with their bodies in battle. Is n't there something you can say to comfort these other mothers?"

The letter touched Colonel Roosevelt deeply. "I felt a real pang when I received this letter," he wrote, "because the thought suggested had been in my mind and yet I had failed to express it." The editorial, "Sacrifices on Cold Altars," which he wrote in response, gave consolation from the heart. It made it clear that all who had given their lives in the country's service, whether in action or from disease, stood on "an exact level of service and sacrifice and honor and glory." It concluded:

The mother or wife whose son or husband has died, whether in battle or by fever or in the accident inevitable in hurriedly preparing a modern army for war, must never feel that the sacrifice has'been laid on "a cold altar." There is no gradation of honor among these gallant men and no essential gradation of service. They all died that we might live; our debt is to all of them, and we can pay it even personally only by striving so to live as to bring a little nearer the day when justice and