Pause a moment and picture those serried ranks as they marched undismayed with grim precision and intrepid step to certain death, and, very many, to unknown graves, and tell me whether heroism did not have its holocaust, and patriotism and courage their grand coronation on these plains about Fredericksburg; and tell me whether a nation's gratitude and meed of honor to these unknelled, uncoffined and unknown heroes, who thus gave up their lives for their country, in obedience to orders, should be measured by the accident of victory or defeat, or by the unclouded grandeur of the sacrifice they cheerfully made. Tell me whether the majestic memorial, which that splendid old veteran, General Butterfield, proposes to erect on the plains of Fredericksburg, to perpetuate the fame of the Fifth corps, will not commemorate a higher type of heroism than any similar memorial to that corps on the heights about Gettysburg! Tell me whether there was not more courage and more manhood required to assail Marye's Heights than to hold Cemetery Hill! The charge of Pickett's Division at Gettysburg was far grander, even with its dreadful recoil, than was the defence of the stone wall at Fredericksburg; and the heroes of the former deserve more of their country than do the latter. Napoleon, after the battle of Austerlitz, addressing his army, said: "Soldiers, it will be enough for one of you to say, 'I was at the battle of Austerlitz,' for your countrymen to say, 'There is a brave man.'" Impartial history will record that the Union soldiers who fought at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania Courthouse were not only brave men, but that their valor on those immortal fields decorated the Stars and Stripes with imperishable glory. And no American army of the future, composed of those who wore the blue and the gray, or their descendants, will ever permit that glory to be tarnished! It was the brilliant prowess of the Confederate army on the battlefields of Spotsylvania that shed such dazzling lustre on the Union arms at Gettysburg. If we should blot out the battlefields of Spotsylvania, we should rob Gettysburg of all its glory; we should filch from General Grant half his fame as a great commander, and should obscure to the future student of the art of war Grant's invincible pertinacity and his sagacious and successful policy of concentration and attrition, which alone explains and vindicates his famous march of eighty miles from Culpeper Courthouse to Petersburg, with a loss of tens of thousands of his brave troops, when he might have transferred his army by transports to the shadow of the Confederate capital without the loss of a man.