Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 41.djvu/26

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We have come for inspiration, not for tears. The brave arms that bore these bodies to the grave and the gentle hands that have tended these green mounds through half a century of love have reared a monument we cannot grace. Their sobs and sighs and deep regrets through all these changing years have filled, as far as mankind may, the measure of our gratitude. We stand to-day and contemplate with grateful hearts a service made immortal, the lasting spirit of a living sacrifice. The ideals of our fathers, rather than their death; their glorified morrow and not their woeful yesterday, their gift to our day more than to their own—of these, it seems to me, our thoughts should be this solemn afternoon.

We are wont to make of history a chronicle of obvious effect and not of vital cause. We write of battles fought and not of battles forced. We tell the story of our great sires' deeds and leave untold the reasons for their acts. We measure in the common scales success by what we see achieved and not by what right though unachieved. We think a cause lost with a field and see no victor but a Grant at every Appomattox.

From such a narrow view as this, these bones cry out. The men interred about us here had died in vain if death had been defeat. They live because defeat meant victory! For it fell to the lot of Southern manhood, in a day when the eyes of the world were fixed upon our land, to give to America the one ideal it had known since the first revolution. The old traditions had been lost in the North and the voice of a prophet was drowned in the babel of conflicting council. The grasping alien