Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 26.djvu/217

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ise-as well as the child. Those were brave words of the statesman who said: " Society has a soul as well as a body. The traditions of a nation rea a part of its existence its valor and discipline, its relig- ious faith, its venerable laws, its science and erudition, its poetry, its art, its wise laws and its scholarship, are as much the blood of its life as its agriculture, its commerce and its engineering skill." Bursting granaries, wide orchards and fields, rushing locomotives, the whir of spindles, the smoke of furnaces and the white sails of commerce, alone, cannot make a people great. Without manhood and virtue, love of God and native land, no people can become really great or long remain free. These virtues wither and die in the land where the child forgets father, and is unmindful of the heri- tage of his noble example and sacrifices. We serve 'humanity and country when we remind the children of the Confederate soldier of his life and achievements.

ALABAMA SHOULD WRITE HISTORY.

Our duty is not ended with the building of this monument. Where may an Alabamian find a roll of the men who made history, and yet left no name on its pages ? Where can he find the names of the great throng who died, with no rank to attract the eyes of the coun- try, and went down to death, uncheered save by the firm beating of their own dauntless hearts ? Can he find his name among the archives of the State for which they gave their lives ? They are not there. In historic publications of her heroic sons ? She has written none. Will he find them on the graves of the dead 7 Some have no headstones, and many are marked "unknown." There is but one sacred spot on earth, where these names are kept. Look in the hearts of our noble women, and there you will find them all. But the gentle lips which said the prayers he could not say, and the white hands which shunned no toil for him, and the pure souls that rose above him with a courage grander than his own, are fast passing away. Almost alone, for thirty-three years, she has guarded the memory of the dead. Her lips have uttered no complaint. Yet one reads in her eyes the wistful thought that the comrades of the dead have not kept full faith with him, when the State for which he died, ruled by his comrades and their children, has not even traced the names of the dead in the chronicles of her history, and leaves the bodies of her dead sons, who perished in prison, far off by the lakes, indebted to the chance kindness of the stranger for the hand- ful of earth and the enclosure that saves them from the beasts of the