Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 34.djvu/344

 336 Southern Historical Society Papers.

From the Richmond News- Leader, January 21, 1907.

ADVANCE FROM APPOMATTOX.

John Skelton Williams Tells of the South's Great

Forward March Talks to Virginians

Living in Atlanta.

Startling Figures of Development and How the

Cotton Growers Could Tie Up the

Commerce of the World.

On Saturday the Virginia Society of Atlanta, Ga., gave a banquet in honor of General Lee's birthday. John Skelton Williams was the orator of the occasion. While his address in a great measure was statistical, many of his facts and figures are new and some of them are startling, and they will be found of intense interest by thinking people of the South and North. The address follows:

OUR ADVANCE FROM APPOMATTOX.

General Lee was one of the few men who have lived whose great- ness and glory culminated with defeat and who won from disaster the ever-deepening love, the ever-rising reverence of mankind. I say he was. He is. His character and his qualities, which are the essentials and the realities of a man, live. As those who knew' and followed him in his lifetime die, the hosts of those who know and love him multiply continually. With his body resting quiet! v in its humble grave in a little Virginia town these thirty-six years, his fame spreads more widely. An immediate personal recollection of him recedes along the ever-lengthening vista of time and becomes dim and misty, the world beyond the boundaries of the dead republic for which he fought learns him more intimately, feels more strongly the power of his sublimity. As the serene white light of history shines upon him more clearly and more brightly it shows him rising ever higher and more majestic and reveals to humanity that one of its highest ideals is realized, one of its noblest concep- tions is personified, its foremost hero and gentleman presented to it in this beaten leader of a vanished army, this baffled hope of a