"I thought, too, of the thousand highways that rayed out from citadels of oppression, barricaded with human bones. I thought of the seas of human slaughter, whose redundant tides flowed on and on as libations upon the altars of ambition.
"I saw as it were the faded crowns and the crumbling thrones of dead despots, who once girdled the earth with a cincture of fire, and marked its boundaries with the sword, writing again their achievements where mankind might read and wonder.
"I saw again the accusing throngs of pensioned widows from the Moselle, the Rhine, the Danube, the Nile, and wherever else the scarlet standards of fanaticism flaunted their challenge, hastening to record their anguish, where the tyrants had memorialized their deeds.
"I saw everywhere the badges of speculative knavery, of incorrigible wrong; Cossacks all, who knew no law but force, and no patriotism but greed.
"I thought of the Spaniard, riding to the stirrup-leather in the blood of babes in the Netherlands; of the Hun and his proclamation 'beauty and booty,' and I thought of the angel of God's mercy proclaiming an armistice; giving a refreshing peace to the saturated earth after these monsters were dead, and I bowed with a profounder reverence at this hallowed grave in the valley of Virginia.
"I thought then of Alcibiades at Abydos; of Alexander at Issus; of Scipio at Zama; of Hannibal at Cannae; of Pompey at Pharsalia; of Cæsar at the Rubicon; of Napoleon at Marengo; and I thought, as Vattel thought, that warriors such as these failed to prosecute the rights of their countrymen by force.
"I thought of the keen blade of the assassin that cut in twain the heart of Alcibiades; of the dagger of Brutus; of the murder of Clitus; of the hemlock; of the suicide's sword at Thrapsus; of the assassination at Miletus; of the fifth paragraph in the will of Napoleon; and then I thought of the bleeding earth these warriors had scarified and scourged, until they were drunken with excess of human slaughter; and then I looked back over the tide of centuries for a single example of disinterested patriotism, and I bowed my head once more to hear a protest from principalities in their orphanage, and commonwealths in their sorrow.
"I thought again of Jackson, as he knelt in prayer, when the great guns were signaling the issue of battle, as with hands uplifted to heaven he was supplicating his Father to guide and guard his poor country in her sore hour of travail, and I thought if there were a Pericles somewhere, who from the foot of our American Acropolis would sound his fame, the 'bloody chasm' would be bridged by a single span.
"A little more than three years ago, by the violation of a plain order, the tears of a nation, magnanimous and patriotic, rained down upon and extinguished almost the last camp fire of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Within that short period events, like chasing shadows, both clouded and glorified the perspective of history. Within a like period of time this great country, by a vigorous discipline, has completely obliterated lines and boundaries that once circumscribed the ambition of men. A trifling order methinks of Jackson, but it cancelled our charter of freedom, it rendered a nude pact our declaration of independence. It was only the nod of the head of an unlettered peasant at Hougomont, but it sent somersaulting into the sunken road of Ohain the steel clad cuirassiers of Napoleon the great; dipped the imperial purple starred with bees, into the silt of the English channel, and paragraphed the capitulation of Paris with the civil death of the great emperor. Such are some of the pivots upon which great crises rotate.