Autocracy cannot take precedence over heart; wealth cannot compensate the loss of the spirit of love; wrong cannot win permanent victory over right; official mandate cannot dim the glory of record achievements. The highest achievement is the highest ideal, realized. In a nation the highest ideal, realized, is not wealth, not the palace of wealth; it is the individual. Eliminate the individual and there would be no history. The history of the individual is the history of a nation. In Greece the highest realized ideal is Homer; in Italy, Dante; in England, Shakespeare; in American philanthropy it is the Founder of the American Red Cross, of the National First Aid, and author of the American Amendment.
As in the early sixties the Daughter of the Regiment lit the fires of hope on the field and in the hospital of the Southland, in later years through her “American Amendment” her service-system in alleviating human suffering has become the system of forty civilized nations, comprising four-fifths of the human race. Certain of fulfillment the prophecy of our illustrious statesman, the late George F. Hoar of this city, who said that countless millions and uncounted generations will profit through the Founder of our American systems of philanthropy.
The achievements of the Daughter of the Regiment are the heritage of the nation. But the fame of the daughter is indissolubly linked with that of the regiment; the fame of the regiment, with that of the daughter.
Regiment and daughter were comrades in adversity, comrades when bullets whizzed and death stalked. That comradeship was the most beautiful of the humanities in the Civil War. Said a gallant son of the Twenty-first Massachusetts: “We dearly loved her, and I do not think there was a man in the regiment who would not have been willing to die for her.” Said the Daughter of the Regiment: “If my life could have purchased the lives of the patriot martyrs who fell for their country and mine, how cheerfully and quickly would the exchange have been made.” That sentiment reciprocal—willing to serve at the risk of life—is a sentiment chivalric, unsurpassed by the belted and spurred knights of the sword in Feudal Days.
The guns cease firing,—the battleground, a ghastly scene. Human ghouls are lurking, preying upon the helpless. The “lone woman” is in their midst, going in and coming out of houses where lay the dead and dying, walking through the streets and alley ways, on her mission. A knight-errant in his saddle, with hat in hand graciously bowing, gallops up to her, admonishing that she is in great danger and offering her the City’s protection. Pointing to the thousands of boys wearing the blue, she answered: “No, Marshal, I think not; I am the best protected woman in the United States.”
In the autumn of her life when war scenes were a misty memory, on a public occasion, she again comments: “In all the world none is so dear to me as the Old Guard who toiled by my side years ago.” As she is not here to speak for herself, kindly permit me to echo her sentiments in the very words the late daughter expressed to you at a former annual reunion:
Ye have met to remember, may ye ever thus meet,
So long as two comrades can rise to their feet;
May their withered hands join, and clear to the last
May they live o’er again the great deeds of the past