In the name of the Good God who made us all—are we never to hear the last of these bitter revilings of the South?
Are we never to reach the Era of Good Feeling for which so many strong men have toiled, so many pure women have prayed?
Will the blind Apostles of Hate never “Let us have Peace”?
Shall the marplot and the bigot and the partisan and the Pharisee forever be able to thwart the nobler efforts of nobler men?
Shall Ransy Sniffle always succeed in embroiling those who want to be friends?
When I think of Abraham Lincoln—magnanimous, broad, far-seeing, praising the Confederates who had stormed the heights at Gettysburg, calling upon the band to play “Dixie” on the night following Lee’s surrender—and then contemplate this narrow, spiteful, out-of-date Professor of History at Harvard, I realize more than ever how much the South lost when a madman assassinated the statesman who had her blood in his veins, sympathy for her in his heart, and a knowledge of her in his mind.
In vain will Congress return the battle-flags of the Lost Cause, in vain will the McKinleys and the Roosevelts labor for the Era of Good Feeling, if the violent partisans of the North, playing into the hands of the almost obsolete fire-eaters of the South, give to sectional hatreds a new lease of life.