There is a striking parallel between this sustained effort of the south and the struggle of Ireland, when the latter, for the fifty years ending with the advent of the present century, was arrayed against the British, in their encroachments upon her independent government. During this half-century, Ireland maintained that she was an independent integral part of the British Empire, just as Virginia contended that she was a sovereign in the federation of States. Ireland, like a southern State, challenged every seeming interference, by the general government, in her local affairs; and the claims put forth, in each instance, were inexorably contested by an adverse government, claiming supremacy and supported by superiority of power. Both were on the eve of revolutionary secession without knowing it. The results in Ireland and the south were similar: there was but one intellectual activity, namely, politics. The memory of all Irishmen of that time not forgotten--and many of their names are familiar words--is nothing but resistance to English aggression. Even Curran, Ireland's great forensic advocate, made his world-wide fame in defending Irishmen against the prosecutions of the British ministry. It was much the same at the south in the period antecedent to the civil war. She had neither literature nor science; but she had statesmen and advocates, who will be remembered as long as her soldiers and generals. The national germ had long been growing below the surface, in darkness, and at last it burst into view, and shot up into a body of amazing proportions. There was not the birth of a new nation at Montgomery in 1861; only the majority of this vigorous young member of the family of nations was there proclaimed. But, for all of the eloquence of its orators and the virtue and bravery of its people, it was, as compared with its adversary, in raw and untutored nonage, and the great disaster that befell four years afterwards was then preordained. It was her unshunnable fate that she should be denationalized on the battle-field. The late war was a conflict between implacable enemies. Each belligerent, standing up for national life, was resistlessly coerced to fight to the last. Neither can be blamed. The past may be taxed with lack of wisdom. It may be that as Scotland and, more lately, Ireland have been peacefully denationalized, a preventive, anticipating the dreadful event of war, might years before have been devised by statesmanly forecast. The actual combatants--the southerner fighting for the confederacy, and the northern soldier bearing up the flag of the union--were equals in manhood and virtue. The survivors, federal and confederate, at last see this, and therefore they go in company to decorate alike the graves of the dead of both armies.