not that a literal immortality should give to us the blazon of their names. Whoever thought of asking the names of the three hundred who died with Leonidas at the Phocion wall, and what does it add to the glory of the hero of Khartoum that we know his name was Gordon? Those whom we knew we associate with their names; those whom we did not we associate with their deeds. In their sublime self-abnegation and esprit du corps, while living, it was enough for them to say I was of the Army of the Tennessee, of the Cumberland, of the Potomac. I was with Grant at Vicksburg; I followed Sherman through Georgia; I fought under Thomas at Nashville; I rode with Logan at Atlanta; I marched with Sheridan in the valley of the Shenandoah.”

With tender and reverent hands the Nation has given them all a place of sepulture, and in their cemeteries the most pathetic interest invests those graves marked "Unknown." To the stranger their occupants have an identity, an individuality, which inscriptions on other headstones cannot confer.

Wordsworth says: "Silence is the privilege of the grave." Ambiguous as this phrase is, it cannot apply where the "Soldier Dead" is the subject or the object. Trumpet-tongued they speak to the race worthy of them; and, glad of ideals to which they can look up, the race worthy of them surrounds their pale faces with immortelles and embalms their memories in the fragrant offerings of poetry and song.

History itself owes its origin to men who, dying for others or for their country, gave birth to a gratitude whose mission was to perpetuate their heroism and deplore their fate.

Primeval man, a compound of earth and sunshine, with hardly enough soul to entitle him to immortality, or to make it desirable, had for his first ennobling lesson the sacrifice implied in the aphorism, "for what can a man do greater than this, that he shall lay down his life for his friend." Afterward, patriots died for their country.

And again, demi-gods died for a principle. These lessons recurring so often through the centuries, have furnished the motive power, the inspiration and the aim by which men have risen and without which the civilization of to-day would have been the partial civilization of the intellect, cold, cruel and unfruitful like that of Carthage.

We need not go back, Mr. President, of the past twenty-five

years for our lesson. We will commence with those who are here to-night, with your brothers, with our neighbors, with the men who in the heyday of life went forth to play their part in that tragedy which sprinkled half our country with blood and the other half with tears. These men have passed on. Some went down "when the long line came gleaming on;" some died by starvation; some in the hospital; others, tortured by hunger and thirst, died amid the burning leaves and underbrush, with no hand to succor and no tongue to console.

These men were martyrs. Their blood redeemed this country, and by their sacrifice for their faith they are as much entitled to the martyr's crown as any who gave up their lives at the stake. No tradition, no declaration of dogma formulated by human hands can make me believe that men who unselfishly die for men do not thereby gain remission of their faults and frailties in the great hereafter. Their future is secure. Their blood is the solvent of the concrete in which our national edifice has been laid on indestructible foundations.

Could they speak they would not talk to us of patriotism. If their eternal silence is not effective to that end, though they should rise from the dead, they could not move us. If from their pallid lips one sound could come, it would remind us of our duty to the survivors and those dear to them. They would point with averted faces to the present pension laws. They would ask us to cease insulting their comrades with pensions running as low as one dollar a month; to cease insulting their children with two dollars a month; to cease insulting an old dependent mother, stricken by poverty in later years, by asking her to prove that she was dependent upon her dead son at the time of his death twenty years before. They would ask us to abrogate the absurd conditions precedent to securing a pension. They would ask us to make a dependent soldier dependent upon no man, but give him a right in law, as he has in justice, to demand support from the government for which he periled his life, and, finally, they would ask us to rub from our escutcheon the ineffable shame of having seven thousand Union soldiers gazetted in the poorhouses of the country. In their behalf I would add, let no loyal man rest until this is done. loyal men of this country. it, and the opposition, I am

It is the wish of the majority of the The poor men of the country desire sorry to say, comes from men whose

wealth has doubled [Interruption by General Sherman-"Yes, trebled."] Yes, Mr. President, trebled, by the sacrifice of the soldier. Although men desire it, the clamor against it is inspired by those who would have their country rich in bullion rather than in men.

As there is no bankruptcy court that will acquit a man of a debt of honor, so is there no tribunal in Heaven above or in the earth below that will hold guiltless a country that will not take care of its defenders when helpless.

No old soldier should be compelled to hold out his hand to his fellow-man for charity, nor accept the refuge of the public alms. It should be sufficient for him to say, "I was a soldier of the Republic. I am needy. I do not ask aid, I demand support." Mr. President, I will go further than the Grand Army of the Republic, some of whose recommendations I have recited in substance. I would not require the soldier to prove that his inability was "not the result of vice or his own gross carelessness." I would not exclude men whose vices were engendered in the exhaustion of the march and the exposure of the trenches. To sum up, I would not let any old soldier, dependent, incapable from any cause, suffer in poverty or neglect. I would not let any who have a natural right to the dead soldier's aid, feel that our country gave grudgingly while it could borrow a dollar.

We boast of the rapidity with which we have paid our national debt. It would be a prouder boast if we could say that every living soldier had been made comfortable and every dependent of the dead soldier had been tenderly cared for. To do this is nothing more than common honesty. To do less is infamous and, if persisted in, time will show to be not only a crime but a blunder. The Sepoy in India serves a specified time and is secure in his pension for the balance of his life. The Union soldier served while his services were needed, and unless he can prove that his disability was incurred in the service, can receive no aid from this great, this paternal, this munificent government. And yet we are troubled about our surplus and both parties are devising ways and means to reduce it. This, Mr. President, is the way, in part, to reduce the surplus. Take care of these wards of the Nation. We are not paying to-day in pensions $100,000,000 a year. had not been for our soldiers we should to-day be supporting a standing army of 200,000 men, which would have cost at least

$200,000,000 per year, with one-half the capacity to pay we now have.

Gratitude, honesty, prudence, decency, admonish that these wrongs be righted. To withhold from these men their rights, or, they being dead, to haggle, barter with, or deny those near to them, is a sight over which angels must weep, and the spirits of your dead comrades, as they hear the recital hide their pale faces in shame for the country which they helped to redeem.

This is the burden of the dead soldier's arraignment. They ask nothing for themselves, and yet we build monuments ană dedicate cemeteries. They could have slept peacefully on the fields. of their valor, and yet we reverently give them sepulture in consecrated ground. They do ask for justice to the living, and be hold we treat the living and the dead alike; when they ask for bread we give them a stone.

We decorate graves with flowers which delight the eye and enrich each city of the dead, and the old soldier in the poor-house totters down to see his old comrades honored and then totters back again, humming, "Bring the Good Old Bugle, Boys, We'll Sing Another Song," or "When Johnnie Comes Marching Home," and wonders if Memorial Day will last until he can be snugly housed in his narrow cell and have garlands hung upon his grave.

In that city of which it is written "that her glory will still survive, when a single naked fisherman shall cast his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts," it was customary when troops started out upon a war to celebrate the event by a festival. At the end of the last tragedy a herald appeared followed by a number of youth in armor. "Behold!" the herald cries, "these young men, whose fathers were slain in battle. The people adopted them and educated them until their twentieth year. This day they return them to their homes and assign them the first places at all public spectacles."

This was a little Greek state. She had no surplus. She was so careful of her gold that the precious metal used in the construction of her most famous statue was so put on that it could be easily removed should public exigencies demand.

Her glory does still survive. Conquered, overrun, despoiled by barbaric hordes for centuries, she rules the world to-day. She governs the world because she recognized sentimental obligations

as being just as potent as the letter of the bond. Her soldiers living, or they being dead, their representatives, were never oppressed by poverty or obscurity. It was that quality of gratitude, warming the heart and stimulating the brain, which made her so prolific in art, in arms, in philosophy, and which, although two thousand years have passed away, still surrounds the name of Athens with an aureola of undying glory.

Thrift in individuals or nations is always to be commended, but never at the expense of honesty. Public prosperity is to be hoped for, but never at the expense of those qualities, without which a nation is not worth saving.

It is told of Don Roderick, in riding out of his capitol one morning among the hills of sunny Spain, after he had betrayed his faith and lost his honor, that he came to a mystic tower to which he forced an entrance despite the protests of the guardians of its portals. Opening a casket which he found therein, he took forth and unrolled a scroll. On it were figures of a strange race. They were dark hued and of lithe and agile form like the sons of the desert. They were mounted on Arab steeds. On their heads were turbans, and by their sides hung cimeters. They were clothed in all the panoply of war. Soon the figures began to move, and then, amid the clashing of swords, the rattling of spears, the din of targets, the rolling of drums and the shouts of combatants, a furious battle raged. The king's flag went down before the assault of Paynim hordes, and he saw his own horse flying riderless from the field. This was the precursor of the doom of Don Roderick and the Moorish occupation which held Spain for eight hundred years.

When, in the years to come, a deadly peril threatens our land and danger envelopes it as with a cloud, let no such dire portent assail the eye of the seer who may strive to forecast the future. Let rather our country so acquit herself that his sight may be greeted with the shades of the armies of the Republic, their decimated ranks refilled, as in the course of nature they must be, from the comrades left behind, their colors with the tatters all glorified, the shattered staves restored. Then, as by brigades, divisions and by corps they deploy upon the fields whereon they are now encamped, which are so near and yet unseen save through the subtle sense given to prophetic souls, "the air shall be filled with music" and become vital with their presence. Then men shall