In the bustle, rush and interest of personal and public activities, the people sometimes forget how immeasurable is the debt of gratitude the Republic owes to the soldiers. I have, now and then, heard good citizens bewailing the burden of our pension list, and thoughtlessly declaring that Congress was extravagantly generous in the pensions given those who were disabled in the service. It is probably true that in some instances the generosity of the Government has been imposed upon. But would any young man in this assemblage consent to lose an arm for thirteen dollars a month, or a leg for thirty-two dollars a month, or to go through life blind and helpless for seventy-two dollars a month? Measure the sacrifice with the pension, and no true-hearted, right-thinking man or woman will say that the Government has done more than justice to its disabled soldiers. Nor should it be forgotten, in considering the obligation of the people and the Government to the soldiers, that there was a time, not many years ago, when everything in this country—its Government, its lands, its money—was absolutely at the mercy of the army. When, at the close of the late civil war, the men who had followed Grant, and Sherman, and Thomas, and Meade, marched in review down Pennsylvania avenue, in Washington, on their bayonets rested all control, all law, all public authority. They had only to say to Congress, “These States we have conquered are ours; divide their territory and give us patents for it,” and it would have been done. They had only to say to the President, Congress, and people: “We have each earned pensions of one hundred dollars a month—enact such a law,” and it would have been enacted. Or if they had declared, “Give every soldier’s widow or orphan one thousand dollars a year,” where was the power to say nay? The Government? It was their strong and steady columns. The Congress? They could have sent a Corporal with his guard and brushed it away as you would a fly from your hand. The Constitution? It was a mere faded parchment, as dry and useless as a last year’s bird’s nest, if these men in faded blue uniforms, marching with their tattered flags—these men who had looked death in the face on dozens of battle-fields—had so decreed. But they used their great power with the chivalry of heroes and the unselfishness of patriots. They demanded nothing of the country they had saved. Quietly and modestly they returned to the peaceful homes and walks they had left, and took up again the broken threads of their old life. Thousands of these soldiers contracted, during their service, the seeds of diseases that were only developed years afterward. The surgeon of my own Regiment, an old and capable physician, once told me that every man in the army marching to Atlanta under Sherman, would sooner or later suffer from the effects of the exposures and hardships of that trying campaign.