This summer one more group of Brown men will leave college. After coming here to this church they will march out, behind the sheriff and behind the band. They will wind up over the hill, through Benefit Street and along George. And when they take off their gowns they might find some imaginary chute by Carrie Tower to carry them down College Hill and spray them out over Providence and over the world. Then those graduates will have to prove that their education here at Brown, in war, was worth the time. At college, service training has come to be more important than liberal education. And the value of that training for war service, in or out of uniform, is the standard by which we must measure our education here. Whether we are in the Naval unit or not, our education must be one for leadership. A leader is defined as "one fitted by force of ideas, character, or strength of will to arouse and direct men in conduct and achievement." So part of our ability to be officers will depend on the force of our ideas, and ideals. To direct men to fight we must try to show that we have an ideal that is worth the effort America is putting into this war, and that effort is tremendous.

We certainly don't want to make this effort in an eternal battle to maintain the status quo. We can find plenty to fight against, but we must also have an ideal to fight for.

Some people say we are fighting for peace. But it seems to be a contradiction to raise your sword in the cause of nonviolence. Peace is not very hard to get under any circumstances. Surrender will always bring peace. Hitler says that the true pacifist should pray for a German victory, and in a sense he is right. If peace is the ideal we are fighting for, we need not have fought at all.

Another slogan might be "make the world safe." After the last war France made her great objective security. Tons of concrete were poured into the hills of North France, and all over Europe alliances were formed until the cordon sanitaire was complete. Frenchmen were looking to safety, and that very spirit made them insecure. Neither the Maginot line nor the little entente were able to stop German aggression, and France fell, and great was the fall of it. No, neither security nor peace are sufficient to insure themselves. There must be some ideal beyond them, as liberty.

We are fighting this war for the freedom of our nation, to prevent German generals from ruling in Washington. But freedom of America is not enough. We cannot long remain free when Europe and Asia are subject. It was our unwillingness to let Japan conquer China which forced Pearl Harbor. It was Hitler's conquest of Europe and menace to England that finally drove us to war in the West. In neither case was America itself threatened. But our national independence cannot exist in a vacuum and that independence was just as surely threatened over London as it would be over New York.

Just as we cannot let Hitler dominate the world we cannot find real peace or security in trying to dominate the world ourselves. Newton's first law can be applied in politics where force, as least ultimately, finds force opposing it. If we tried to launch our own conquest, we should see our present friends combining as enemies. It has been a principle of our government to ensure liberty under law, and it is our job now to fashion a law under which nations can be free.

A free nation must have a free people. The freedom of Germany from the slavery of Versailles did not mean to them the freedom of the German people but the freedom and glory of the state. The state to them is purer and better than any single man and is more important than the sum of men comprising it. The present German is a vehicle for the glorification of the state and his welfare is unimportant beside the giant tide of German national life. The present is only a small part of the past and the future, and what does the liberty of free men matter beside this glorious panorama? We on the other hand believe that the state exists for the welfare of the people in it. A free nation means nothing if the people are not also free. Even Machiavelli admitted that fundamentally a nation with a suppressed people could not be as strong as a nation of free people.

But political freedom is very hard to defend or maintain if economic freedom does not go with it. In the great depression, war machines would trade a dinner for a vote, and hungry people are hard to impress with political independence. We cannot again afford to have a country where there is food to burn and one third of the people are ill fed. Neither can we have a country so hampered with restriction and control that we exercise our freedom only one day in four years. A straitjacket may well improve a man's posture but it does not necessarily leave him any happier. Enterprise on a crutch is not my idea of a good slogan. Economic control that sets up barriers around the ideas and ambitions and spirit of a man cannot free a nation. It is also true that private man with the will for control or profit should not be able to strangle free men. Man can be free only under law, but that law must be one that frees men rather than binds them.

We must have freedom of thought and belief. Germany has proved that even the ideas of a people can be controlled. The subtle pressure of falsehood and suggestion can do a great deal to wreck a man's mind. We have safeguards against that here, and we must defend and value them. But to be free to think, you must do some thinking. A man is not free if he remains in a prison even with no lock on the door. Liberty cannot be negative or it will destroy itself. It is a contradiction for a government to impose liberty. It is far healthier when liberty is imposed on government. Nor can liberty degenerate into license. In France between the wars, in many ways, liberty was mistaken for license. And liberty became only the negative object of avoiding the responsibility of freedom.

America has a great force driving toward the borders of Germany. We are grinding forward on the shores of Normandy, and we are racing with the enemy to reach the Italian Alps. We have thousands of planes which are putting on a great show over the continent. Not soon again will America's force of arms be doubted. But some day those arms will grow rusty and we must have a force of ideals, not consumed, but strengthened. For we should not have a small objective for such a big war, and there is a big objective: to build a free world of free men.