“To trace that which we owe to the line of blood of which this man was one of the most illustrious examples, is a duty which belongs to every student of American history. Let us find, if we may, wherein lay that in which he so far exceeded most of his fellowmen. Let us make it a lesson not alone to say that this man was one of the greatest of American Irish or Irish Americans, but that he illustrated a trait of character which Americans and Irish American citizens all ought to follow, ought to teach their children to follow, ought to endeavor to perpetuate in the thoughts, the work, the labors of this land. “Now we are met principally to do honor to the memory and the merits of a brave and good man; that is our purpose; but in our acts and words today, my friends, we do honor not only to him and to his memory, but we do honor to ourselves and our countrymen. He belongs to us and we appreciate it. The laurels which we lay on the graves of such as he, who periled life, limb, fortune, happiness and health that we might enjoy the blessings which are ours today, are laurels piled upon our own characters, our own qualities. “From this beautiful tablet, so fittingly placed in honor of him, whose name in this hour fills all our hearts, the veil has just fallen in your sight. I do not envy that American who, at such a time as this, does not feel his heart swell with patriotic pride at the thought of what this graven monument means to us and ours. “A thousand recollections sparkle in the chambers of memory as we recall the chivalry, the worth, the dauntless courage and self-denying loyalty of him whose heart, stilled in its own earthly tenement for more than a hundred years, yet lives and throbs and pulses in the hearts of every lover of his land and of human liberty the wide world around; and, although appreciating to the fullest extent all that your Mayor has so well said and the Chairman so ably suggested of the beauty of this memorial, I may be pardoned for saying that no work of art, no accomplishment of high design, no costly metal, no skilful chiseling, no beautiful moulding, can make a memorial worthy of such a man as was Major General John Sullivan. “For when I think of what he was and what he did, when there rises to my sight the sacrifice and effort, the combat and the stern endurance, the privation and the grief, the sorrow and the pain, which marked his labor and his life throughout the years which spanned the rise of freedom, yea, the hope of men upon this continent, I feel sure that pen may not write, voice may not sound, nor can the chisel of art produce token worthy of his high deserving.