Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 07.djvu/388

380 traders in strife, who, having labored painfully to induce the conflict, surpassed even those toils in their successful efforts to shirk its perils while it lasted and prolong its hates after it is dead—those patriots by proxy, who put the profits of their country's agony in their own pockets, and encountered its perils by a substitute. For myself I find reconciliation easy with him who says, "I answered the summons of Massachusetts or Ohio," for I answered the summons of Virginia, and hers alone.

Each year this platform of reconciliation will more and more assert itself, as each year the Government will more and more conform to its original conceptions.

Even now, with constantly increasing courage and frequency, we hear the voice of protest against the fatal tendencies of the war-engendered theories of American republicanism; and here, in the presence of these heroic dead, I salute every such warning note as a tribute of praise to their memory, none the less valuable for being undesigned.

Wherever, in all this land, a patriot tongue or pen gives expression to the theory of our government propounded in the Declaration of Independence, and formulated in our constitution; wherever an indignant protest is issued against the debauching tendency to erect the substance, and anticipate the forms of imperialism in the place of the democracy our fathers fought to found; wherever a judicial tribunal, passing upon the rights of citizens and States, republishes the old but ever-obligatory and ever-valuable confession of our political faith, that "the Federal Government is one of limited powers," and "that the powers not delegated to it, nor prohibited to the States by the constitution, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people"—then, my dead comrades, a wreath is laid, albeit by an enemy, on your humble graves, and a vindication, the weightier for being unconscious, is offered to your memories.

Those, indeed, write and speak for the common faith: you died for it: and in these days of shallow convictions, when opinion masquerades as belief, and speculation as fact, what State in Christendom is so rich in its heritage of heroism that it can afford to part with the fame, much less dishonor the memory, of citizens who were willing, for loyalty to a principle, to surrender ease and comfort, security and life!

Such was the first controlling motive of the rank and file of the South in the late war. Nobler far, and higher—of wider scope and more pervasive influences—was the second grand motive of their