But this is the smallest part of the sacrifices which the Nation has made to defend its life and perpetuate in the world the principle of self-government. What shall we say of the thousands and tens of thousands of brave men who have laid down their lives in our defence, and who sleep in their beds of glory from the heights of Gettysburg to the plains of Texas. Heroic, self-sacrificing men! They died for the Declaration of Independence, for the Constitution, for their country, for mankind. They have consecrated to everlasting freedom the soil in which they repose. They stand in no need of our poor eulogies. Their memory and their deeds will be revered while the world shall stand. As he--the last, the greatest, noblest martyr of them all--said at Gettysburg:--“The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated this ground far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note or long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that the Nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that the Government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Nor, in counting up the cost of this dread struggle, must we overlook that great army of stricken and wounded men who, although they have survived the conflict of arms, have returned to us maimed and crippled for life. If we shall neglect our duty to them and disregard the mute appeal of their honorable scars; if we shall ever cease to treat them with that respect and tender consideration to which their services and their sufferings alike entitle them; or, if we shall forbear to extend to them that generous succour which they need, we shall be alike insensible to the claims of gratitude and the demands of honor. If we turn our eyes to the region in which this great convulsion originated, we behold stretched out before us the prostrate, desolated South; its resources exhausted, its commerce blighted, its agriculture deserted, its industrial interests paralyzed, its internal improvements destroyed, its people bankrupt, its homes darkened, and the genius of her once fair and beautiful domain sitting in silence and tears, and awaiting the generous hand which shall soon raise her from her humiliation and her grief, and set her again in the place of a companion and an equal. If the crime was great, who shall say that the retribution is not sufficient! God forbid that in the presence of calamities so wide-spread and so profound we should indulge in any spirit of pride or exultation.