it great glory to our country that its
institutions have nourished and the highest characteristic of our race
that it has produced successive generations of men who preserve the
continuity of sterling virtues. I count also as the star of hope for
this grand Republic that a distinguished soldier of a lost cause becomes
the beloved statesman of the cause that won, and finds around him the
old-time comrades and old-time foes, all his friends and each other's
friends united in the service of our common country.

No nobler words have been spoken of the late Gen. LEE than by soldiers
who fought against him, and I respond to them with honor and praise. The
production of men who may maintain the rights their fathers won, and
ever grow in liberal thought, noble character, and worthy achievement is
the highest mission of republican institutions. From Hastings, A.D.
1066, to Boston in 1776, the name of Lee was blended with the glories of
our fatherland. But from Boston to Appomattox it grew the more
illustrious with grander opportunities. Victorious through a track of
eight hundred years to the 9th of April, 1865, it has been still more
victorious since--rising to the height of harder trials and sterner
tasks and grander duties than those of leading embattled lines. The
glorious nation of which he was a type and the glorious band of which he
was the son come forth from ruin and desolation on one side, moved by
gracious institutions and magnanimous sentiments upon the other, taking
their place in the reunited columns of parted friendship, cementing anew
by adaptive virtues the broken ties, marching again with the mutual
magnanimities of companionship at the head of column.

If a race that has won liberty and made it a birthright lets it slip
away through hands of weakness or deeds of folly, and if the self-made
man of to-day loses the vantage ground of his life work with his
fleeting breath, the careers of nations would be brief, the story of
liberty would be a nurse's tale, and the careers of individuals would be
vanity of vanities. The prepotent blood that made an empire of an
insignificant island and stamped its language and its laws upon it made
also here the most splendid Republic of the earth out of a savage
wilderness and assimilated to itself all tributaries. That Republic
delegates its unfinished tasks to a posterity that will lift higher the
monuments of its greatness and strengthen the foundations of its
endurance; and