No Government is strong enough to glorify treason against itself, nor to encourage it anywhere.
The individual I would take most heartily by the hand, the organization I discard.
There can be no true call for a union of the blue and the gray. Let all don the blue. In place of waiting for the chasm to be closed, flank it and locate upon our side. The chasm itself can do no harm. It will be a thing well to look upon at times, and take warning from as the divider of great depth and impassable width.
As in Heaven, so in Earth, to dwell together as brothers, all must be of one mind, patriots upholding the one Flag, standing fast by the Red, White and Blue.
When true history of our day comes to be written, all things will be made plain. With the faithful historian, it is not the question of the doing, but of the thing done. Just as when we look upon the completed work of the sculptor, or the finished touch of the painter, it is not of the marble, or the canvas and the material laid upon it that we think, but of the figure before us, as we note perfection in every line, and see life in the seeming light of the eye, and apparent movement of muscle.
History gives little heed to men, save to designate the moral character of the age.
And now, Comrades, for the part taken by the 84th Regiment Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteers in the setting of the page which will commemorate the work of our time, a grateful Commonwealth has placed upon this spot this weight of granite.
To the living it is, and to the people yet to come it will be, the visible proof of the deeds of heroism which located a part of the life of the men who bore the names that make up the Roll of a Command, whose record among the Archives of the Nation is without the semblance of a blur or particle of a stain. Clear, positive, clean cut all the way through. Do we advance sentiment only, when we say that such a body did not, could not have died in '65? Is there nothing of substance, nothing real, to come out of the thought, that as our Country lives, so we as a Regiment go on, living in the freedom of a land and the stability of a Government, neither of which would now be, without sentiment, the spring of human life?
The Memorial which is here placed speaks from all along the line, from Bath to Appomattox.