f 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,
an