Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 25.djvu/366

 3H2 Southern Historical Society Papers.

What means this building with the significant name of "Lee Camp?" What means the hundreds of similar organizations all over the Southland ? They speak in no unmeaning language. They tell us that though our cause is lost in the sense that the indepen- dence of the Southern Confederacy was not achieved; that though we were wasted and worn and all was lost, we saved our honor and our manhood, and we cannot forget our herdes. Sacred history tells us that one of the disciples proposed that three tabernacles should be raised on the mount of transfiguration, and in all ages of the world heroic deeds of men and nations have been commemorated by their fellow-citizens. Show me a land where there are no churches whose spires point heavenward, commemorative of the great work finished on Calvary, as told in that Book, suspended as it were in the zenith of the moral heaven, bidding all men to look, believe, and live; show me a land where there are no tombs of marble, no statues of bronze, no monuments of granite, erected to commemorate heroic, self-sacrificing deeds, and I will show you a people lost to every lofty emotion, without an ennobling sentiment, fit subjects to be the dupes of demagogues and the slaves of the ambitious. No, no; we cannot forget the boys who wore the gray and offered their lives for what they believed to be right.

" On fame's eternal camping ground

Their silent tents are spread; While glory guards with solemn round The. bivouac of the dead."

MEN OF THE NOBLEST TYPE.

Raise monuments to their memory, and with each returning season strew their graves with flowers of field and garden, and by these things let your children and children's children be taught that the heroes of the Lost Cause were not rebels and traitors, but men of the noblest type, who were ready to do, to dare, and to die in obedience to the call of duty. Go on with the work, and the brave, the true of every land, will approve such conduct. No one who wore the blue, and who was a soldier, will say aught against it. Only those who were peace-like in war and warlike in peace will condemn. " He jests at scars who never felt a wound." We covet not their praise, nor will we be deterred by their censure.

A few more words and I am done. To the rising generation I would deliver a message. Soon " taps " for " lights out " will sound