glorious nation time has yet produced." And on their side the gray can
reply, in the words of Colonel Grady, the eloquent orator of the South, in
his speech at Atlanta: "We can now see that in this conflict loss was gain,
and defeat real and substantial victory; that everything we hoped for and
fought for, in the new government we sought to establish, is given to us in
greater measure in the old government our fathers founded."

We do not meet on these Memorial Days to weep for the dead, as we did while
wounds were yet fresh. Time has healed the scars of war, and we can calmly
contemplate the great lesson of patriotic devotion, and rejoice that the
nation to which we belong produced men noble enough to die for that which
they valued so much. Neither do I care to say anything of human slavery,
the institution that died and was buried with the Confederacy. I had enough
to say about it while it was living. Let the dead past bury its dead.

But we are here to foster patriotism, in view of the most tremendous
sacrifice ever willingly made by a people on the altar of nationality. That
the sacrifices of the Civil War deserve this rank will appear from the
fact that they were made--in the main--by volunteers. We were not fighting
directly to defend our altars and our fires; we were not driven to arms
to repel an invading foe; we were not hurried to the field by king or
noble; but in the first flush of manhood we offered ourselves to preserve
unimpaired the unity, the purity, the glory of our nation. So far as I have
turned over the leaves of the volume of time, I have found nothing in all
the past like this. Therefore, standing before the highest manifestation of
earthly patriotism, viewing it crowned in all the glory of self-sacrifice,
by a faithfulness which was literally in the case of hundreds of thousands
"unto death," we ask: "What is there that justifies a nation in exacting or
accepting (when freely offered) such tribute of the life-blood of its
people?"