Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 23.djvu/371

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rmnent of the city of Richmond, who honor themselves in honoring this occasion, and by the free sentiment of this great and noble people.

There is nothing like it in history. No Greek general, no Roman roiiMil. \\.i> ever welcomed with a triumph after a defeat. Nowhere, at no time, has a defeated side ever been so honored or the unsuc- cessful apotheosized.

A SUCCESS IN A SENSE.

Success is worshiped, failure is forgotten. That is the universal experience and the unvarying law of nature. Therefore, it would seem that the fall of the Confederacy was in some sense a success and a triumph, for it cannot by that universal law have been set aside, for this sole exception, the glorification of the Lost Confede- racy, its heroines, and its heroes.

I shall endeavor to make clear in what respects there was success and triumph. I believe our first and most sacred duty is to our holy dead, to ourselves, and to our posterity.

It is our highest obligation to satisfy the world of the righteous- ness of our cause and the sound judgment with which we defended it. And we injure ourselves, we impair the moral of our side, by incessant protestations of loyalty to the victor and continual asser- tions of respect for his motives of forgiveness, for his conduct, and of belief in the nobility of his faith.

There never can be two rights, nor two wrongs one side must be right, and, therefore, the other is, of course, wrong. This is so of every question of morals and of conduct, and it must be pre-emi- nently so of a question which divided millions of people, and which cost a million of lives.

The world is surely coming to the conclusion that the cause ol the Confederacy was right. Every lover of liberty, constitutional lib- erty, controlled by law, all over the world begins to understand that the past was not a war waged by the South in defense of slavery, but was a war to protect liberty, won and bequeathed by free ancestors.

PRINCIPLE OF THE REVOLUTION.

They now know that the fundamental basic principle of the Revo- lution of 1775 upon which the governments of the States united, were all founded, Massachusetts and Virginia, Rhode Island and North Carolina, was that "all government of right rests upon the