"I thought again of Jackson, as he knelt in prayer, when the great guns were signaling the issue of battle, as with hands uplifted to heaven he was supplicating his Father to guide and guard his poor country in her sore hour of travail, and I thought if there were a Pericles somewhere, who from the foot of our American Acropolis would sound his fame, the 'bloody chasm' would be bridged by a single span. "A little more than three years ago, by the violation of a plain order, the tears of a nation, magnanimous and patriotic, rained down upon and extinguished almost the last camp fire of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Within that short period events, like chasing shadows, both clouded and glorified the perspective of history. Within a like period of time this great country, by a vigorous discipline, has completely obliterated lines and boundaries that once circumscribed the ambition of men. A trifling order methinks of Jackson, but it cancelled our charter of freedom, it rendered a nude pact our declaration of independence. It was only the nod of the head of an unlettered peasant at Hougomont, but it sent somersaulting into the sunken road of Ohain the steel clad cuirassiers of Napoleon the great; dipped the imperial purple starred with bees, into the silt of the English channel, and paragraphed the capitulation of Paris with the civil death of the great emperor. Such are some of the pivots upon which great crises rotate. Forty eight years after the Scotch-Greys pierced the uplifted visors of the old guard, there glided down the echoing corridors of time this sententious order; "Shoot down without halting the man who dares to cross the lines to-night." The catastrophe that rode as a courier upon the flank of this order, hacked the sword, unnerved the arm that was carving out of a heart of fire a civilization whose altars and whose shrines were relumed by the torch of liberty; but the God of battles, amid the carnage, called a halt. It was a night of exasperation, of despair. Ten million people watched, as watchers never watched before, the last flickering of a life that laid down its all, at the altar of love and duty. Those ten million people kept their vigil like vestal virgins, and saw, alas, the frenzied spirit of hate and wrath snuff out the candle and heard the groans of the victim of his own blunder, as he cried out in his delirium, "Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees."