WHEN the savagery of the lash, the barbarism of the chain, and the
insanity of secession confronted the civilization of our century, the
question "Will the great Republic defend itself?" trembled on the lips
of every lover of mankind.
The North, filled with intelligence and wealth--children of
liberty--marshaled her hosts and asked only for a leader. From civil
life a man, silent, thoughtful, poised and calm, stepped forth, and
with the lips of victory voiced the Nation's first and last demand:
"Unconditional and immediate surrender." From that moment the end was
known. That utterance was the first real declaration of real war, and,
in accordance with the dramatic unities of mighty events, the great
soldier who made it, received the final sword of the rebellion.
The soldiers of the Republic were not seekers after vulgar glory. They
were not animated by the hope of plunder or the love of conquest. They
fought to preserve the homestead of liberty and that their children
might have peace. They were the defenders of humanity, the destroyers
of prejudice, the breakers of chains, and in the name of the future they
slew the monster of their time. They finished what the soldiers of the
Revolution commenced. They re-lighted the torch that fell from their
august hands and filled the world again with light. They blotted
from the statute-books laws that had been passed by hypocrites at
the instigation of robbers, and tore with indignant hands from the
Constitution that infamous clause that made men the catchers of their
fellow-men. They made it possible for judges to be just, for statesmen
to be humane, and for politicians to be honest. They broke the shackles
from the limbs of slaves, from the souls of masters, and from the
Northern brain. They kept our country on the map of the world, and our
flag in heaven. They rolled the stone from the sepulchre of progress,
and found therein two angels clad in shining garments--Nationality and
Liberty.
The soldiers were the saviors of the Nation; they were the liberators of
men. In writing the Proclamation of Emancipation, Lincoln, greatest
of our mighty dead, whose memory is as gentle as the summer air when
reapers sing amid the gathered sheaves, copied with the pen what Grant
and his brave comrades wrote with swords.
Grander than the Greek, nobler than the Roman, the soldiers of the
Republic, with patriotism as shoreless as the air, battled for the
rights of others, for the nobility of labor, fought that mothers might
own their babes, that arrogant idleness should not scar the back of
patient toil, and that our country should not be a many-headed monster
made of warring states, but a Nation, sovereign, great, and free.
Blood was water, money was leaves, and life was only common air until
one flag floated over a Republic without a master and without a slave.
And then was asked the question: "Will a free people tax themselves to
pay a nation's debt?"
The soldiers went home to their waiting wives, to their glad children,
and to the girls they loved--they went back to the fields, the shops,
and mines. They had not been demoralized. They had been ennobled.
They were as honest in peace as they had been brave in war. Mocking at
poverty, laughing at reverses, they made a friend of toil. They
said: "We saved the Nation's life, and what is life without honor?"
They-worked and wrought with all of labor's royal sons that every pledge
the Nation gave might be redeemed. And their great leader, having put a
shining band of friendship--a girdle of clasped and happy hands--around
the globe, comes home and finds that every promise made in war has now
the ring and gleam of gold.
There is another question still:--Will all the wounds of war be healed?
I answer, Yes. The Southern people must submit, not to the dictation of
the North, but to the Nation's will and to the verdict of mankind. They
were wrong, and the time will come when they will say that they are
victors who have been vanquished by the right. Freedom conquered them,
and freedom will cultivate their fields, educate their children, weave
for them the robes of wealth, execute their laws, and fill their land
with happy homes.
The soldiers of the Union saved the South as well as North. They made us
a Nation. Their victory made us free and rendered tyranny in every other
land as insecure as snow upon volcanoes' 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 to all the dead--to Sherman, to Sheridan, and to Grant,
the laureled soldiers of the world, and last, to Lincoln, whose loving
life, like a bow of peace, spans and arches all the clouds of war.
A TRIBUTE TO THE Rev. ALEXANDER CLARK.
UPON the grave of the Reverend Alexander Clark I wish to place one
flower.
Utterly destitute of cold dogmatic pride that often passes for the
love of God; without the arrogance of the "elect"--simple, free, and
kind--this earnest man made me his friend by being mine. I forgot that
he was a Christian, and he seemed to forget that I was not, while each
remembered that the other was a man.
Frank, candid, and sincere, he practiced what he preached, and looked
with the holy eyes of charity upon the failings and mistakes of men. He
believed in the power of kindness, and spanned with divine sympathy the
hideous gulf that separates the fallen from the pure.
Giving freely to others the rights that he claimed for himself, it never
occurred to him that his God hated a brave and honest unbeliever. He
remembered that even an infidel has rights that love respects; that
hatred has no saving power, and that in order to be a Christian it is
not necessary to become less than a man. He knew that no one can be
maligned into kindness; that epithets cannot convince; that curses are
not arguments, and that the finger of scorn never points towards heaven.
With the generosity of an honest man, he accorded to all the fullest
liberty of thought, knowing, as he did, that in the realm of mind a
chain is but a curse.
For this man I entertained the profoundest respect. In spite of the
taunts and jeers of his brethren, he publicly proclaimed that he would
treat infidels with fairness and respect; that he would endeavor to
convince them by argument and win them with love. He insisted that the
God he worshipped loved the well-being even of an atheist. In this grand
position he stood almost alone. Tender, just, and loving where others
were harsh, vindictive, and cruel, he challenged the respect and
admiration of every honest man.
A few more such clergymen might drive calumny from the lips of faith and
render the pulpit worthy of respect.
The heartiness and kindness with which this generous man treated me can
never be excelled. He admitted that I had not lost, and could not lose
a single right by the expression of my honest thought. Neither did he
believe that a servant could win the respect of a generous master by
persecuting and maligning those whom the master would willingly forgive.
While this good man was living, his brethren blamed him for having
treated me with fairness. But, I trust, now that he has left the shore
touched by the mysterious sea that never yet has borne, on any wave, the
image of a homeward sail, this crime will be forgiven him by those who
still remain to preach the love of God.
His sympathies were not confined within the prison of a creed, but ran
out and over the walls like vines, hiding the cruel rocks and rusted
bars with leaf and flower. He could not echo with his heart the fiendish
sentence of eternal fire. In spite of book and creed, he read "between
the lines" the words of tenderness and love, with promises for all the
world. Above, beyond the dogmas of his church--humane even to the verge
of heresy--causing some to doubt his love of God because he failed to
hate his unbelieving fellow-men, he labored for the welfare of mankind,
and to his work gave up his life with all his heart.
Robert G. Ingersoll.
Washington, D. C,