Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 38.djvu/317

Rh celebrated English historian, in treating this subject, remarks: "Slavery was but the occasion of the rupture, in no sense the object of the war. Slavery would have been abolished in time had the South succeeded."

The enlightened sentiment of mankind, the spirit of the age, was against chattel slavery. England and France had freed their bondmen. Russia emancipated her serfs about 1880. In 1873 the Island of Porto Rico taxed itself $12,000,000 and freed 30,000 slaves. Does any one suppose that the enlightened and Christian people of the Southern States would have set themselves against the moral sentiment of mankind, and refused to heed the voice of civilization and progress?

Under the leadership of Lee and Gordon, Vance and Currie and thousands of others, these Southern States would have carried out a destiny full of moral grandeur and glory. The problems that now challenge the patience, courage, and endurance of a mighty people would not have, in all probability, arisen. At all events the one black, dark cloud that overshadows our domestic and political horizon would have been turned back through wiser and more humane legislation, or at least prevented from spending its force through false teaching, inspired by a band of the most selfish and ignorant fanatics that were ever permitted to prey upon a noble and defenceless people.

On memorial occasions such as this the speaker, anxious always to leave some abiding thought in the minds and on the hearts of his hearers, turns to those who made our history a half of a century ago and by precept and example impressed themselves on their countrymen. What Cromwell was to the English Commonwealth; what Washington was to the Revolution, Lee was to our Southern cause. Let me give you a pen-portrait of our Chieftain from an English viewpoint. In a translation of Homer, dedicated to General R. E. Lee, the most stainless of living commanders, and except in fortune, the greatest, Philip Stanley Worsley, of Oxford, wrote:

"The grand old bard that never dies, Receive him in our English tongue; I send thee, but with weeping eyes, The story that he sung.