fought on the other. The proud self-sacrifice, the resolute and daring courage, the high and steadfast devotion to the right as each man saw it, whether Northerner or Southerner, these qualities render all Americans forever the debtors of those who in the dark days from ’61 to ’65 proved their truth by their endeavor. Here around Richmond, here in your own State, there lies battlefield after battlefield, rendered forever memorable by the men who counted death as but a little thing when weighed in the balance against doing their duty as it was given them to see it. These men have left us of the younger generation not merely the memory of what they did in war, but of what they did in peace. Foreign observers predicted that when such a great war closed it would be impossible for the hundreds of thousands of combatants to return to the paths of peace. They predicted ceaseless disorder, wild turbulence, the alternation of anarchy and despotism. But the good sense and self-restraint of the average American citizen falsified these prophecies. The great armies disbanded and the private in the ranks, like the officer who had commanded him, went back to take up the threads of his life where he had dropped them when the call to arms came. It was a wonderful, a marvelous thing, in a country consecrated to peace with but an infinitesimal regular army, to develop so quickly the huge hosts which confronted one another between the James and the Potomac and along the Mississippi and its tributaries. But it was an even more wonderful, an even more marvelous thing, how these great hosts, once their work done, resolved themselves into the general fabric of the Nation.