The soldiers of the Union saved the South as well as the North. They
made us a Nation. Their victory made us free and rendered tyranny in
every other land as insecure as snow upon volcano lips. And now let us
drink to the volunteers, to those who sleep in unknown, sunken graves,
whose names are only in the hearts of those they loved and left--of
those who only hear in happy dreams the footsteps of return. Let us
drink to those who died where lipless famine mocked at want--to all the
maimed whose scars give modesty a tongue, to all who dared and gave to
chance the care and keeping of their lives--to all the living and all
the dead--to Sherman, to Sheridan and to Grant, the foremost soldiers of
the world; and last, to Lincoln, whose loving life, like a bow of peace,
spans and arches all the clouds of war.