deny that he himself existed; and, along with this all-controlling love of freedom, he possessed a moral sensibility, keenly intense and vivid, a conscientiousness which would never permit him to swerve, by the breadth of a hair, from what he pictured to himself as the path of duty. Thus were combined in him the characteristics which have, in all ages, given to religion her martyrs, and to patriotism her self-sacrificing heroes.

Let me do this great man the justice which, amid the excitements of the struggle between the sections, now past, many have been disposed to deny him. In his fiery zeal, and his earnest warfare against the wrong, as he viewed it, there entered no enduring personal animosity towards the men whose lot it was to be born to the system which he denounced. It has been the kindness of his sympathy, which, in these later years, he has displayed to the impoverished and suffering people of the Southern States, that has unveiled to me the generous and tender heart which beat beneath the bosom of the zealot, and has forced me to yield him the tribute of my respect, I might say, even of my admiration. Nor, in the manifestation of this, has there been anything which a proud and sensitive people, smarting under a sense of recent discomfiture and present suffering, might not frankly accept, or which would give them just cause to doubt his sincerity. The spirit of magnanimity, therefore, which breathes in his utterances and manifests itself in all his acts affecting the South, was as evidently honest as it was grateful to the feelings of those to whom it was displayed.

It was certainly a gracious act towards the South, though it jarred upon the sensibility of the people at the other extreme of the Union, to propose to erase from the banners of the National Army the mementos of the bloody internal struggle, which might be regarded as assailing the pride, or wounding the sensibilities, of the Southern people. That proposal will never be forgotten by that people, so long as the name of Charles Sumner lives in the memory of men. But, while it touched her heart and elicited her profound gratitude, her people would

not have asked of the North such an act of self-renunciation. Conscious that they themselves were animated by devotion to constitutional liberty, and that the brightest pages of history are replete with evidence of the depth and sincerity of that devotion, they can but cherish the recollections of the battles fought, and the victories won, in defence of a hopeless cause; and, respecting, as all true and brave men must, the martial spirit with which the men of the North vindicated the integrity of the Union, and their devotion to the principles of human freedom, they do not ask, they do not wish the North to strike the mementos of heroism and victory from either records, monuments, or battle-flags. They would rather that both sections should gather up the glories won by each section, not envious, but proud of each other, and regard them as a common heritage of American valor.

SLAVERY IS DEAD

L. Q. C. LAMAR

[From an address at the unveiling of a statue to John C. Calhoun at Charleston, South Carolina, on April 26, 1888. Lamar was then an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.]

SLAVERY is dead, buried in a grave that never gives up its dead. Let it rest! Yet, if I remain silent, it will be taken as an admission that there is one part of Mr. Calhoun's life of which it is prudent for his friends to say nothing to the present generation. No one would disapprove, and even disdain, such silence more than he. With reference to the constitutional status of slavery in the States, Mr. Calhoun never entertained or expressed a sentiment that was not entertained and expressed by Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, and all the eminent statesmen of his time. The only difference between Mr. Calhoun, on the one hand, and Webster, Clay, and such statesmen, on the other, was, that the measures hostile to slavery which they sometimes countenanced, and at other times advo

cated, he saw and predicted, were in conflict with the guarantees of the Constitution, and that their direct tendency and inevitable effect, and, in many cases, avowed motive, was the destruction of slavery in the States. And while Mr. Webster and Mr. Clay disclaimed any such motive, and denied any such probable effects, he declared to Mr. Webster, in debate, that the sentiment would grow and increase, until he, Mr. Webster, would himself be compelled to succumb, or be swept down beneath it.

Vain the forms of law, vain the barriers of the Constitution, vain the considerations of State policy, vain the eloquence and the compromises of statesmen! His predictions were verified to the letter. They were all swept away before the irresistible force of the civilization of the nineteenth century, whose moral sentiment demanded the extinction of slavery.

Every benefit which slavery conferred upon those subject to it; all the ameliorating and humanizing tendencies it introduced into the life of the African; all the elevating agencies which lifted him higher in the scale of rational moral being, were the elements of the future and inevitable destruction of the system. The mistake that was made, by the Southern defenders of slavery, was in regarding it as a permanent form of society, instead of a process of emergence and transition from barbarism to freedom. If, at this very day, the North, or the American Union, were to propose to re-establish the institution, it would be impracticable. The South could not and would not accept it, as a boon. Slavery, as it existed then, could not exist under the present commercial systems of Europe and America. The existing industrial relations of capital and labor, had there been no secession, no war, would of themselves have brought about the death of slavery.

THE CONFLICT ENDED

CHARLES DEVENS

[From an address at Charlestown, Massachusetts, June 17, 1875, at the Centennial Celebration of the battle of Bunker Hill. Representatives from Southern states were among those who took part in the celebration.]

WELCOME to the citizens of every State, alike from those which represent the thirteen Colonies, and from the younger States of the Union! In the earnest hope that the liberty, guarded and sustained by the sanctions of law, which the valor of the fathers won for us, and which to-day we hold in solemn trust, may be transmitted to endless generations, we have gathered, in this countless throng, representing in its assemblage every portion of our common country. A welcome, cordial, generous, and heart-felt, to each and all!

Above all, let us strive to maintain and renew the fraternal feeling which should exist between all the States of the Union. The difficulty which the fathers could not eliminate from the problem before them, they dealt with, with all the wisdom and foresight they possessed. Two classes of States had their place, differing radically in this, that in the one, the system of slavery existed. Believing that the whole system would fade before the great principles of civil and religious liberty, and in pious memory of those who vindicated them; they join with us in the wish to make of this regenerated Union a power grander and more august than its founders dared to hope.

Standing, always, in generous remembrance of every section of the Union, neither now nor hereafter will we distinguish between States, or sections, in our anxiety for the glory and happiness of all. To-day, upon the verge of the centuries, as together we look back upon that which is gone, in deep and heart-felt gratitude for the prosperity so largely enjoyed by us, so together will we look forward serenely and with confidence

to that which is advancing. Together will we utter our solemn aspiration, in the spirit of the motto of the city which now encloses within its limits the battlefield and the town for which the battle was fought: "As God was to our fathers, so may He be to us."

DECORATION DAY ADDRESS

JAMES A. GARFIELD

[From an oration delivered at Arlington, Virginia, May 30, 1868. Arlington, just across the Potomac River from Washington, was formerly the country estate of the Custis family. At the outbreak of the Civil War, it was in the possession of Mrs. R. E. Lee, a granddaughter of Mrs. Washington. It was acquired by the government and converted into a national burying-ground.]

I AM oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion. If silence is ever golden, it must be here beside the graves of fifteen thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem, the music of which can never be sung. With words we make promises, plight faith, praise virtue. Promises may not be kept; plighted faith may be broken; and vaunted virtue be only the cunning mask of vice. We do not know one promise these men made, one pledge they gave, one word they spoke; but we do know they summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens. For love of country they accepted death, and thus resolved all doubts, and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue. For the noblest man that lives, there still remains a conflict. He must still withstand the assaults of time and fortune, must still be assailed with temptations, before which lofty natures have fallen; but with these the conflict ended, the victory was won, when death stamped on them the great seal of heroic character, and closed a record which years can never blot.