My countrymen, a thousand times I have thought of that historic scene beneath the apple-tree at Appomattox, of Lee’s 8000 ragged, half-starved immortals, going home to begin anew amid the ashes of their homes, and the graves of their dead, the weary struggle for existence, and Grant’s 68,000 splendid soldiers, well fed and equipped, going home to riot amid the plenty of a grateful and prosperous people, and I have thought how hard it was that out of our poverty we should be taxed to pay their pension, and to divide with this rich people the crust we scraped up from the ashes of our homes. And I have thought when their maimed and helpless soldiers were sheltered in superb homes, and lapped in luxury, while our poor cripples limped along the highway or hid their shame in huts, or broke bitter bread in the county poor-house, how hard it was that, of all the millions we send them annually, we can save not one dollar to go to our old heroes, who deserve so much and get so little. And yet we made no complaint. We were willing that every Union soldier made helpless by the war should have his pension and his home, and thank God, without setting our crippled soldiers on the curbstone of distant Babylons to beg, as blind Belisarius did, from the passing stranger. We have provided them a home in which they can rest in honorable peace until God has called them hence to a home not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. We have not complained that our earnings have gone to pension Union soldiers—the maimed soldiers of the Union armies. But the scheme to rob the people that every man who enlisted for sixty days, or his widow, shall be supported at public expense is an outrage that must not be submitted to. It is not patriotism—it is politics. It is not honesty—it is plunder. The South has played a patient and a waiting game for twenty years, fearing to protest against what she knew to be wrong in the fear that she would be misunderstood. I fear that she has gained little by this course save the contempt of her enemies. The time has come when she should stand upright among the States of this Republic and declare her mind and stand by her convictions. She must not stand silent while this crowning outrage is perpetrated. It means that the Republican party will loot the treasury to recruit its ranks—that $70,000,000 a year shall be taken from the South to enrich the North, thus building up one section against another—that the protective tariff shall be deepened, thus building one class against another, and that the party of trusts and monopoly shall be kept in power, the autonomy of the Republic lost, the government centralized, the oligarchs established, and justice to the people postponed. But this party will not prevail, even though its pension bill should pass, and its pretorial God be established in every Northern State. It was Louis XVI. who peddled the taxing privileges to his friends, and when the people protested surrounded