I wish to express my acknowledgments for the greeting which I have received here in San Antonio and which I have received throughout the length and breadth of Texas. This is the third time I have visited this beautiful city—and it is such a beautiful city. I wonder if you yourselves, proud though you are of it, appreciate the charm it has to an outsider coming here. It is fifteen years ago that I first came here, simply passing through as any number of other travelers pass through, and saw it. Seven years ago when I came here I was here strictly on business. When we got back that year from Santiago I said to the officers of the regiment, “Now we have got to have a reunion of the regiment in San Antonio.” All kinds of things happened in between. I have led a middling busy life myself since; and now at last the chance has come to make good the promise and to have those of the regiment who are able to come together here in the city where the regiment was raised to greet one another and talk over the past. In a sense we can claim that that regiment was a typical American body. The men composing it were raised chiefly in the Southwest, but some from the North, some from the East, so that we had the Northerner and the Southerner, the Easterner and the Westerner in that regiment; we had men in it who worshiped their Creator some according to one creed, some according to another, for almost every religious body of any size in the United States was represented within our ranks. We had men who had been born abroad and men who were born here, whose ancestors came to what is now the United States at the time of the landing of the first colonists at the mouth of the James or at Plymouth. We had men of inherited wealth and men who all their lives long had earned each day’s bread by that day’s toil. We had men of every grade socially; men who worked with their heads; men who worked with their hands; men of all the types that our country produces; but each of them glad to get in on his worth as a man only, and content to be judged purely by what he could show himself to be. It has always seemed to me that one of the greatest lessons taught by the Civil War was the lesson of brotherhood. You, my friends, who wore the blue; you, my friends, who wore the gray, what each of you when he went forward to battle was concerned with about the man on his right hand and the man on his left was not what that man’s ancestry was, not as to how he worshiped his Maker, not as to what his profession was, or his means; what you wanted to know was whether he would stay put. If he did you were for him, and if he did not you were against him.