Do you see that tender vine binding up the shattered tree and hiding its wounds? That is Southern woman clinging closer and more tenderly to father and husband when the storms beat upon him, comforting as only such Christian women can comfort; smiling only as such heroines can smile; with "toil-beat nerves, and care-worn eye," helping only as such women can help. In the schoolroom and behind the counter, over the sewing machine and the cooking stove, in garden and field, everywhere showing the gems of Southern character washed up from its depths by the ocean of Southern woe. Let the last symbol on the monument be the clasped right hands of the Union. These Southern women of 1861 were the daughters of the great American Union. Their fathers under the leadership of Jefferson, Madison and Washington, had proposed the Union, devised the Union, loved the Union, and, under Clay and Calhoun and Benton, had preserved the Union. As an inducement for union between the original States, without which the Northern States would not come into it, Virginia, the great mother of the Union, gave up all her splendid territory north of the Ohio, embracing what is now Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and agreed that they should be made States without slavery. She afterwards gave Kentucky. North Carolina gave Tennessee, and Georgia gave Alabama and Mississippi. Southern influence and Southern statesmanship made the Union strong at home and respected abroad by the war of 1812, which was gallantly fought by the South and bitterly opposed by New England--opposed to the very verge of secession from the Union in the Hartford convention. The Southern States had shown their devotion to the Union by yielding to the compromises on the tariff, the bounty, and the territorial questions. The South demanded no tariff tribute, no bounties and no internal improvements as the price of her devotion to the Union. She loved the Union for the Union's sake. All that she demanded was that in the territory, while it was territory, belonging to the government, her sons, with their families, white and black, should have an equal share.