A secondary blast at the Pentagon rocked my building as I prepared to leave for the Capitol. I walked down East Capitol while people streamed out of the House Office Buildings and passed me on the street. The Capitol Hill police were cordoning off the area, sirens wailing in the background; no one was permitted further entry and Members of Congress were barred from their own offices. Another hijacked plane was in the air and one presumed destination was another target in the Capitol.

The Members of Congress, gathering at police headquarters to be briefed and set up makeshift offices, recalled Pearl Harbor. I thought of the Battle of Britain and Hitler's indiscriminate bombings of London. Churchill's words still so powerfully resonant. "He hopes by killing large numbers of civilians and women and children that he will terrorize and cow the people of this mighty imperial city . . . . Little does he know the spirit of the British nation or the tough fiber of the Londoners . . . who have been bred to value freedom far above their lives."

So true of America. Little do these petty tyrants and murderers know the spirit of the American people or the tough fiber of the New Yorkers, our defense workers, or the civilians who may have spared further casualties by taking down the hijackers and their own plane above Pennsylvania.

Firefighters and police officers by the hundreds rushing into the collapsing wreckage of the World Trade Center to rescue the victims, many, God bless them, so many, losing their lives in the process. One firefighter, injured and lying in the hospital, telling the Governor of New York: "What d'ya expect? We're New Yorkers." God, they make me proud.

American doctors, nurses, search and rescue teams from all over the country, by car, bus and train, using any means to come to the wounded and offer their help. Citizens all over the country lining up to donate blood, so much blood, in lines up to four hours long. Children outside the federal building in Oklahoma, site of another terrorist attack, putting their Teddy Bears in a box to be sent to the children in New York - now orphaned. "We just want them to know they will be all right," an Oklahoma boy says as he drops his bear in the box.

The face of this tyrant is new, and yet not so new. Like Hitler, he abhors a free society and democratic institutions. He is willing to kill innocent men, women and children to further his perverse aims; there are no means too inhuman, no tactic too appalling to further his ends. He thinks we are weak, because we do not tell our citizens what to think, how to act, whom to worship. Because we tolerate dissent. He does not realize this is our strength. And he has awoken the sleeping giant.

"What he has done," as Churchill had said, "is to kindle a fire in [American] hearts here and all over the world which will glow long after all traces of the conflagrations he has caused in [New York, Washington and Pennsylvania] have been removed."

What these petty tyrants do not understand, have never understood, is that for all our rough-and-tumble public discourse, we are one people, acting under one President, and capable of greater single-mindedness of purpose in times of adversity than any repressive regime. These acts of terror will not divide us. All Americans -- young, old, Democrats, Republicans, men, women, Christians, Moslems and Jews - are united against the common foe.

We will not be turned against each other. We will not tolerate acts of violence against Moslem Americans, many of whom lost their lives, serve as police and firefighters in the rescue effort, and all of whom are equally repelled at these atrocities. We will not relinquish our freedoms of speech, assembly and religion, nor sacrifice our precious right of privacy or way of life. "The price of freedom is high, and Americans have always paid it," President Kennedy said. We pay it still.

This is the Battle of America. The enemy may be new, but the fight has always been the same. Our government, our democracy is predicated on basic human freedoms, on the right of the governed to control their own national destiny. The civil war tested whether any nation so conceived could long endure. We have endured. We will go on, with growing confidence that we can fight terrorism wherever we find it, and strengthened by the conviction that the generation of Americans now being tested will not falter or flag.