The soldiers went home to their waiting wives, to their glad children, and to the girls they loved—they went back to the fields, the shops, and mines. They had not been demoralized. They had been ennobled. They were as honest in peace as they had been brave in war. Mocking at poverty, laughing at reverses, they made a friend of toil. They said: "We saved the Nation's life, and what is life without honor?" They-worked and wrought with all of labor's royal sons that every pledge the Nation gave might be redeemed. And their great leader, having put a shining band of friendship—a girdle of clasped and happy hands—around the globe, comes home and finds that every promise made in war has now the ring and gleam of gold.
There is another question still:—Will all the wounds of war be healed? I answer, Yes. The Southern people must submit, not to the dictation of the North, but to the Nation's will and to the verdict of mankind. They were wrong, and the time will come when they will say that they are victors who have been vanquished by the right. Freedom conquered them, and freedom will cultivate their fields, educate their children, weave for them the robes of wealth, execute their laws, and fill their land with happy homes.
The soldiers of the Union saved the South as well as North. They made us a Nation. Their victory made us free and rendered tyranny in every other land as insecure as snow upon volcanoes' lips.
And now let us drink to the volunteers—to those who sleep in unknown, sunken graves, whose names are only in the hearts of those they loved and left—of those who only hear in happy dreams the footsteps of return. Let us drink to those who died where lipless famine mocked at want—to all the maimed whose scars give modesty a tongue—to all who dared and gave to chance the care and keeping of their lives:—to all the living and to all the dead—to Sherman, to Sheridan, and to Grant, the laureled soldiers of the world, and last, to Lincoln, whose loving life, like a bow of peace, spans and arches all the clouds of war.
A TRIBUTE TO THE Rev. ALEXANDER CLARK.
UPON the grave of the Reverend Alexander Clark I wish to place one flower.
Utterly destitute of cold dogmatic pride that often passes for the love of God; without the arrogance of the "elect"—simple, free, and kind—this earnest man made me his friend by being mine. I forgot that he was a Christian, and he seemed to forget that I was not, while each remembered that the other was a man.
Frank, candid, and sincere, he practiced what he preached, and looked with the holy eyes of charity upon the failings and mistakes of men. He believed in the power of kindness, and spanned with divine sympathy the hideous gulf that separates the fallen from the pure.
Giving freely to others the rights that he claimed for himself, it never occurred to him that his God hated a brave and honest unbeliever. He remembered that even an infidel has rights that love respects; that hatred has no saving power, and that in order to be a Christian it is not necessary to become less than a man. He knew that no one can be maligned into kindness; that epithets cannot convince; that curses are not arguments, and that the finger of scorn never points towards heaven. With the generosity of an honest man, he accorded to all the fullest liberty of thought, knowing, as he did, that in the realm of mind a chain is but a curse.