We who know do not charge that horror to the great nation to which we are as loyal and true as any beneath the flag to-day, but to individuals who abused authority and misrepresented the spirit of the North toward the South. I, for one, thank God that our people themselves settled the problem of reconstruction by the application of a righteous courage to a desperate situation, but there was one influence in that settlement which was never generally appreciated. Across the closed chasm, above the graves of all the soldier dead, the great men of the North and the great men of the South looked at each other in silence and understood when the oppressors were driven from the South. As soon as the insidious tongues of a few intermeddling, ignorant, vicious men and women, seeking to be the ministering angels of the former slaves, were hushed by the stern policy of the representative Southern people, the happy and natural relations of the two races were restored; and to-day, after nearly sixty years of freedom, the black man of the South knows that the Southern white man is his truest friend, because he alone understands him and sympathizes with his natural and legitimate needs. As one who in a very humble way helped to make that sad history, as the representative of a family who owned slaves, I desire to here record my opinion that in the trying period following the war it was the Christian fortitude of our people that saved the day for us. Out of the ashes of material wealth, out of anguish and humiliation, we came with honor; and the unbroken spirit of the old South, serene amid its earthly poverty, is the unquestioned and priceless heritage of our sons. Whenever and wherever I meet a soldier of the sixties, no matter whether he wore the blue or the gray, I think of his life as the figure and symbol of a sad, eventful day. His youth represents the morning, and it was filled with golden dreams. Achievement and success smiled before him, and his heart leaped with love, just as young hearts leap to-day. But, before he could realize his dreams, a great storm--that awful war--came and swept away his fairest prospects. The noontide of his life found him busy with the wreckage of the morning, and then it was that there rose in his soul a far greater courage than that which had sustained him on the bloodiest battle field--the courage to meet and conquer adversity, the divine grace to cast away his bitterness and to love his former foes. My comrades, out of the ruined morning and the rebuilding toil of the noontide we have come at last to the evening and the twilight. Time has placed upon our heads his crown of silver and of snow. For us the long day of life is near spent, and the world can never chide us if, in the spirit of fraternity and forgiveness, we find ourselves dreaming backward toward the blood-billowed years of Shiloh and Chickamauga and all our other fields of mutual and glorious memories.