I see before me here men who won high honor serving as comrades in arms of General Slocum, and I know that there exists in the Union no men who will appreciate more the fact that now, forty years after the war, the crowning triumph of what they did is to be found in the fact that we have a genuinely reunited country, a country in which the man who wore the blue stretches out the hand of loyal friendship to his erstwhile foe, his now devoted friend and fellow-countryman, the man who wore the gray. A short while ago I passed through the great State of Texas. Wherever I stopped in that great State I was greeted by representatives of the Grand Army marching side by side with or intermingled with men clad in the gray uniform that showed that they had fought in the armies of the Confederacy. They had tested one another’s worth on the stricken fields, they knew each that the other had been ready when the hour of supreme appeal came to show his truth by his endeavors. Now these men, now you and those like you, now the men in blue and the men in gray, know that they leave to their children and their children’s children as a heritage of honor forever the memory of the great deeds done alike by those who fought under Grant and by those who fought under Lee; for we, because of the very fact that the Union triumphed now have the right to feel a like pride in the valor and devotion of those who valiantly fought against the stars in their courses, no less than of those who finally saw their efforts and their sufferings crowned by triumph. Think of it, my fellow-countrymen! Think of what a thrice-blessed fortune is ours, that the greatest war that the nineteenth century saw after the close of the Napoleonic struggles has left, not as most wars inevitably do and must leave, memories of bitterness and anger and shame to offset the memories of glory, memories which make the men of one side hang their heads because the men of the other side walk exultingly; that it has left not such dreadful memories, but instead to victor and vanquished alike, after the temporary soreness is over, the same right to feel the proudest satisfaction in the fact that the Union was saved, and the utmost pride in the honor, the gallantry, the devotion to the right as each side had given it the light to see the right, shown alike by those who warred under one banner and by those who warred under the other.