ABSTRACT
This speech, the second of Oliver Wendell Holmes two famous Memorial Day Addresses, has come to be known as The Soldier's Faith. In it, Holmes went even further than 1884 in his emphasis on individual heroism and on life as essentially a battlefield. Holmes drew a clear distinction between what regarded as an unrealistic idealism, the kind of idealism Holmes had espoused when still a student at Harvard and supported abolition, and the more rigorous and, realistic requirements of commerce and conflict in the modern world. This speech really encapsulated Holmes understanding of the life-struggle, through his own Civil War experiences. Yet his harsh assertions that achievement and success came only through destruction and sometimes death, his injunction to his listeners to keep the soldier's faith against the doubts of civil life, did not meet with universal approval at the time, and the speech was regarded by some as little more than a jingoistic paean to war.
