Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/71

 course of harmonious development, greater, more beautiful, mightier than ever in its self-conscious power. And thus, whatever losses, whatever sacrifices, whatever sufferings we may have endured, they appear before us in a blaze of glory.

But how do the Southern people stand there? All they have sacrificed, all they have lost, all the blood they have spilled, all the desolation of their homes, all the distress that stares them in the face, all the wreck and ruin they see around them—all for nothing; all for a wicked folly; all for a disastrous infatuation; the very graves of their slain nothing but monuments of a shadowy delusion; all their former hopes vanished for ever; and the very magniloquence which some of their leaders are still indulging in, nothing but a mocking illustration of their utter discomfiture! Ah, sir, if ever human efforts broke down in irretrievable disaster, if ever human pride was humiliated to the dust, if ever human hopes were turned into despair, there you behold them.

You may say that they deserved it all. Yes, but surely, sir, you can not say that the Rebellion has gone entirely unpunished. Nor will the senator from Indiana, with all his declamation (and I am sorry not now to see him before me), make any sane man believe that had no political disabilities ever been imposed, the history of the Rebellion, as long as the memory of men retains the recollection of the great story, will ever encourage a future generation to rebel again, or that if even this great example of disaster should