table, as men and women speak here this evening, he said: "I have never heard a better talk about your flag than I have just heard from your President." [Applause.] We can none of us talk about the flag. Women can beat us on that subject. [Laughter.] There, it is. It is a beautiful thing. It floats in the breezes of heaven, pretty to look upon. It is not a gaudy flag. Aye, but it floats in the heart of every man and woman. The beauty of our flag is, that it is planted in the bosom of the people. The flag would be a worthless piece of tinsel rag were it not that what the flag speaks for is already spoken in our hearts. [Applause.] We love the flag, because the flag speaks for us with a universal utterance that the world may hear. Now, Mr. Chairman, what is the last part of the toast? The President:-The heroism of their fathers will be emulated by them. Governor Oglesby:-Well, I don't know. I can't tell about that for the boys. I don't know whether they will or not. I can tell the boys to-night- and it may be the last time I will ever speak to them - I will tell the boys, aye, fathers and mothers here to-night, I, with you, will tell our sweet descendants, our lovely children, our boys, that if they will not have heroism equal to ours they will lose that flag. No nation can preserve its flag unless it preserves its courage. It will be nibbled at and it will be distributed piecemeal, as poor Poland was, as every other kingdom in Europe almost has been, certainly in the dark ages, and substantially in our own time. Our republic will be picked to pieces and fall as a worthless thing before the disgusted eyes of unborn people unless our descendants will have heroism. They have got to have it or lose their country. They must have unselfish heroism, the heroism of Abraham Lincoln. God bless his beloved memory! God bless his holy fame! God bless the light and influence of his whole character shed all over this broad land; and blessed most because he rose from the common walks of life. Oh! we talk of our millionaires. We talk of our philosophers. We talk of our states men. We talk of our literati. We talk and discourse very much of our learning and progress in the world. We point with excusable pride to the bright lights before us in every direction. How closely they are all allied to, and belong to the lower, common strata of mankind! Cut loose from that base of supply, break away from your lines of communication to this great source of supply, and all will be lost, all will be gone. O, glorious Republic! O, splendid Nation! May the time come and come again, when heroes, such as the last war produced, may be found plentiful in the ranks of the boys of the future! for the last time on the shores of the Atlantic, a little more than a year ago, that modest, silent soldier, who with your help (turning to General Sherman) led these brave men to victory - I saw that silent, plain man, born upon the yellow clay hills of Ohio, a farmer, one who in Europe would be called a peasant's boy — I saw him for the last time, after he had substantially accomplished the career and circle of life. Pardon me if I say, in the presence of his worthy son, pardon me, my friends, if I be so self-conceited as to say it was partially by my persuasion that he was induced to go once more before the public, at Ocean Grove, where there was a vast assemblage of Christian people, Christian women and men, who had come together from the North and South, the old Sanitary commission and the old Christian commission, and the chaplains of both armies. They had come together there for a social reunion. They telegraphed him, the day before, to meet them. He declined. They telegraphed him again, and he read it to me. I said: "General, by all means go. These people want to see you." He studied a moment and said: "Yes, I will go." He went and I went with him. Oh! he was very much depressed. There was great cause for depression, but he went with that same impurtability and unfathomable face, neither fate nor genius could have read, to the social reunion. He came limping upon the platform, broken in limb and broken in fortune; but, thank God, not broken in spirit. The same buoyant, brave, patriotic heart was still throbbing in that breast. [Applause.] He rose to reply, overwhelmed by the benevolent, charitable and patriotic demonstration before him. Before he had proceeded to the accomplishment of six sentences, a silvery tear stole down his warbronzed cheek, and he retired cane and crutch in hand, to his obscure seat. It was the last time he was before the public. Boys-aye, boys of the future, young men of America, youth of our own beloved land, look upon that character and that glorious impersonation of human, manly liberty, and it will stir your heroism to the point of protecting your flag. [Cheers.] The quartet sang "Tramp, Tramp, Tramp," and the company joined in the chorus with an energy and vigor that made the banquet chamber and the corridors of the hotel resound with the old familiar strains. The President:-We come now to the sixth regular toast, which will be changed from the form in which it appears on the list of toasts. The committee having been disappointed in securing the presence of General Harlan, one of our own comrades, now a Justice of the Supreme Court, who was expected here to-night, but is not here, in lieu of the sixth toast as printed, the following has been substituted: SIXTH TOAST.-"Our Reunited Country." "The Union of hearts, the Union of hands, The Union of states none can sever, The Union of lakes, the Union of lands, Response by Colonel DONAN: MR. PRESIDENT, SOLDIERS AND GENTLEMEN: As a Southerner and former foeman; as one who, in the late Confederacy fought four years trying to get out of the Union. at the South end, and who, in Dakota, has fought five years trying to get into it at the Northern end, I salute in you the representatives of the grandest Army the God of hosts and of battles ever looked down upon the grandest in its numbers, and its intelligence the grandest in the cause it fought for, the grandest in the government and country it saved, and infinitely the grandest of all in the methods of its triumph and its treatment of the vanquished. Classic Greece slaughtered or enslaved her beaten enemies, imperial Rome dragged captive princes in chains at her triumphal chariot wheels, and even enlightened and Christian Britain has been known to blow her insurgent subjects from the muzzles of her guns. You, with a magnanimity unparalleled in human annals, throw wide your doors and your arms to your foes of yesterday, and welcome them as fellow-citizens, friends and brethren, to your governmental councils and your banquet halls. History never recorded, eye of man or angel never beheld a contrast so sublime! Other armies have struck down the mailed hands, and subjugated the bodies of their adversaries. You alone of all the hosts whose resistless tread ever shook the earth, have con quered the hearts and won the love of those whom you overthrew on a hundred ensanguined battle plains. Scarcely more than twenty years ago, amid the roar of cannon and the rattle of musketry, our embattled millions in blue and gray grappled in deadly strife. To-day the gray and the blue mingle in all our poetry and our tenderest memories; monuments of blended blue and gray proclaim the glory of our common dead; Johnston and Buckner, with bared heads and sorrowing hearts, as pall-bearers, follow to the tomb the sacred ashes of Ulyses Grant; and a united country, a united people, from ocean to ocean, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf, mourn the loss and treasure the fame of the patriothero who said, "Let us have peace"! With your gleaming sword, you carved high on the walls of immortality's holy of holies the names of two of the new world's mighty trinity, Washington, Lincoln, Grant!--Pater, Liberator, Salvator! The Father, the Liberator, and the Savior of the country! You were an army of saviors. You saved the South from slavery, her greatest curse; from secession, her greatest folly; and from herself, her own greatest enemy; so that, from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, there is not an honest-thinking man to-day who does not say with me: Thank God for the victories of Grant and Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas, McPherson and Logan-the victories that saved the Union and insured the perpetuity of the grandest and freest Government fabric that ever the sun from heaven shone upon. How resplendent the heritage of freedom and glory your heroism and devotion preserved! Never since the omnipotent hand of Jehovah set the universe in motion-never since the roseate hues of creation's dawn flushed the tree tops of Eden and humanity's strange story began-was such a land as this magnificent half-hemisphere given to any other people, or such a people given to any other land. In domain so vast that it takes three oceans and earth's mightiest gulf to lave its toes and finger tips; in population, blending the best blood and combining the best qualities of all other nationalities and races. So rich and varied in its resources, capacities and possibilities that language and imagination reel under the burden of a hopeless effort to depict it. So grand that angels and archangels may well lean far over the jasper walls above to look upon it, to study and admire. So glorious that its inspired and heroic founders and preservers may claim to have done what Babel's builders strove in vain to doreared an earth-based fabric whose head pierces the heavens and gleams with the light that flows from the great white throne. Free as it is boundless and happy, free as God's sweet air and salvation, it holds out its welcoming arms to every race, tribe, kindred and tongue. It stands a majestic light-house of hope and refuge to the oppressed of every land and nation, time's latest and noblest experiment in government of the people, by the people, for the people. Where every man is a sovereign and every woman is a queen, and can only blame themselves if they are not well ruled. Its success has shattered the fetters of despotism and exalted manhood and womanhood throughout the world. Land of the stars and stripes, land of the sun-bathed eagle, land of the proud. and free, without rival or peer in all the annals of time. Forty-six imperial commonwealths linked by the golden bands of a free constitution in one sublime, indissoluble Union, all aglow with the same patriotic pride and love of liberty, all inspired with the same high hopes and ambitions, and all with generous emulation working out together the lofty and glorious destiny decreed by heaven to America and Americans. One in forty-six, and fortysix in one! Such is the land, such the government, such the Nation of our love and pride. Such is the peerless continental New World Republic, around which cluster the hopes and prayers of freedom's sons in every land. And you, soldiers of the Union, are its saviors and preservers. With all its gigantic growth and development; with its amazing imagination outstripping, rush forward in population, wealth, power and prosperity, will it not ere long take in our continent, if not our hemisphere? May not the close of our century see all North America, from Behring Strait to the Isthmus of Panama, under one glorious free government and tri-colored flag? May not the mystical figures “A. D., 1900,” find us all, men who wore the blue and men who wore the gray, Unionists and Confederates, Canadians, United Statians, Mexicans, Guatemalaians, Hondurians, and Nicaraguans, brethren and friends and fellow citizens, marching beneath the starry banner of the free and the brave, to a grand common destiny of illimitable wealth and power and renown? Then shall Columbia's proud pet eagle, perched upon the loftiest |