Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 14.djvu/33

 Annual Reunion of Pegram Battalion Association. 27

In i860 the population in her territory, without West Virginia, was in round numbers, 1,100,000; in 1885, 2,120,000. She has con- structed since 1870 more than six hundred miles of railroad. Every city and town, except two, which had a municipal government before the war has more than doubled its population since. Her capitol city, with a population of hardly forty thousand in 1865, with all its business houses in ashes and all its people overwhelmed with an intolerable burden of debt, afterjiaving passed through a period of five years of military occupation from 1865 to the first day of Janu- ary, 1870, within a period of a little more than sixteen years from the last named date, has more than doubled its population, more than trebled its material wealth, and is to-day, with its splendid monuments, beautiful parks, and public drives, the most attractive city in the South.

Now be it known to all the world that this progress and improve- ment is almost entirely the work of her ragged soldiers who surren- dered their bright muskets at Appomattox. But, my friends, the wealth and strength of a nation is not to be found in her material prosperity alone. Courage (I use the word in its broadest and grandest sensej and moral and intellectual culture are elements of strength, without which no people can hope to live long or reach the heights of commanding greatness. If Virginia's future is to be worthy of her past her sons and daughters must make it so. And if it is to be so they must study the characters and emulate the exam- ples of her men and women who have gone into history. Her history, written and unwritten, is a vast storehouse of splendid achiev- ments. In the council chamber, in the judgment hall, and on the bloody field of war, her sons have always been first. She gave the world the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Federal Constitution. It was her soldier who led the armies of the infant colonies to victory against the greatest captains and the best trained soldiers of the eighteenth century. In peace she has always pursued the even tenor of her way with noiseless step. Slow to anger, her councils have never been influenced by the wild demands of fanaticism. When her angry sisters of the South, in an hour of deep resentment, severed the ties which bound them to the Union, anxious to preserve the magnificent fabric, she used all her powers of persuasion to avert the dread catastrophe of war, but when nothing was left but a conflict of blood she put on the vestments of her sov- ereignty and with the stately steps of a great queen turned her back upon those who refused to regard her warning voice and became a