To be willing to defend one's country with his life, you say, is the highest test of patriotism and usefulness. Here you have a race but thirty-five years out of slavery, but a few hundred years removed from savagery. You place the negro soldiers of this race, on the one hand, by the side of the wealth and culture of New England and New York, on the other side of him you place the chivalry and intelligence of the South. In front of him you place the soldiery of one of the oldest and most renowned countries of Europe. In this position, with the highest type of Caucasian civilization on his right, on his left, and in front, you say to him, "Now, son of Africa, prove your right to be called a man, prove your claim to the title of American citizen!" For answer, with a bravery and an impetuosity that shall ever live in song and story, with his country's national song, "My country, 'tis of thee, flowing from his lips, he scales the heights of San Juan and the battle is won for his country-but is it won for himself? HENRY WATTERSON THE BIRTH OF GREATNESS [From a speech delivered at Louisville, Ky., Decoration Day, 1899.] THE duty which draws us together and the dayalthough appointed by law-come to us laden by a deeper meaning than they have ever borne before, and the place which witnesses our coming invests the occasion with increased solemnity and significance. Within the precincts of this dread but beautiful city-consecrated in all our hearts and all our homes-for here lie our loved ones-two plots of ground, with but a hillock between, have been set aside to mark the resting-place of the dead of two armies that in life were called hostile the army of the Union, the army of the Confederacy. We come to decorate the graves of those who died fighting for the Union. Presently others shall come to decorate the graves of those who died fighting for the Confederacy. Yet, if these flower-covered mounds could open and the brave men who inhabit them could rise, not as disembodied spirits, but in the sentient flesh and blood which they wore when they went hence, they would rejoice as we do that the hopes of both have been at last fulfilled, and that the Confederacy, swallowed up by the Union, lives again in American manhood and brotherhood, such as were contemplated by the makers of the Republic. To those of us who were the comrades and contemporaries of the dead that are buried here, who survived the ordeal of battle and who live to bless the day, there is nothing either strange or unnatural in this, because we have seen it coming for a long time; we have seen it coming in the kinship of ties even as close as those of a common country; in the robust intercourse of the forum and the market-place; in the sacred interchanges of the domestic affections; but, above all, in the prattle of children who cannot distinguish between the grandfather who wore the blue and the grandfather who wore the gray. It is required of no man-whichever flag he served under that he make any renunciation shameful to himself, and therefore, dishonoring to these grandchildren, and each may safely leave to history the casting of the balance between antagonistic schools of thought and opposing camps in action, where the essentials of fidelity and courage were so amply met. Nor is it the part of wisdom to regret a tale that is told. The issues that evoked the strife of sections are dead issues. The conflict, which was thought to be irreconcilable, and was certainly inevitable, ended more than thirty years ago. To some the result was logical -to others it was disappointing to all it was final. As no man disputes it, let no man deplore it. Let us rather believe that it was needful to make us a nation. Let us rather look upon it as into a mirror, seeing not the desolation of the past, but the radiance of the future; and in the heroes of the new North and the new South who contested in generous rivalry up the fire-swept steep of El Caney, and side by side reemblazoned the national character in the waters about Corregidor Island and under the walls of Cavite, let us behold hostages for the old North and the old South blent together in a Union that knows neither point of the compass and has flung its geography into the sea. Great as were the issues we have put behind us forever, yet greater issues still rise dimly upon the view. Who shall fathom them? Who shall forecast them? I seek not to lift the veil on what may lie beyond. It is enough for me to know that I have a country and that my country leads the world. I have lived to look upon its dismembered fragments whole again; to see it, like the fabled bird of wondrous plumage upon the Arabian desert, slowly shape itself above the flames and ashes of a conflagration that threatened to devour it; I have watched it gradually unfold its magnificent proportions through alternating tracks of light and shade. I have stood in awestruck wonder and fear lest the glorious fabric should fade into darkness and prove but the insubstantial pageant of a vision; when, lo! out of the misty depths of the far-away Pacific came the booming of Dewey's guns, quickly followed by the answering voice of the guns of Sampson and Shafter and Schley, and I said: "It is not a dream. It is God's promise redeemed. With the night of sectional confusion that is gone civil strife has passed from the scene, and in the light of the perfect day that is come the nation finds, as the first fruit of its new freedom, another birth of greatness and power and renown." Fully realizing the responsibility of this, and the duties that belong to it, I, for one, accept it, and all that it brings with it and implies, thankful that I, too, am an American. Wheresoever its star may lead, I shall follow, nothing loath or doubting, though it guide the nation's footsteps to the furthermost ends of the earth. Believing that in the creation and the preservation of the American Union the hand of the Almighty has appeared from first to last; that His will begat it, and that His word has prevailed; that in the War of the Revolution and in the Civil War the incidents and accidents of battle left no doubt where Providence inclined; if the star that now shines over us, at |