What was the result? The ranks of your regiments were never full; the morale of the men at the front suffered. The saddest sights I ever saw were those skeleton battalions in the last campaign against Richmond, that of 1864,--those few survivors grouped about the tattered colors, thrust into action yesterday, decimated again to-day, doomed to-morrow: and no recruits! Those were the men who went forward voluntarily, and at the first call to arms. No better material was ever mustered; no braver troops ever returned an enemy’s fire: but, under the system which always prevailed, the community from which they came either left them to take that fire to the end, or sent forward to associate with them the bounty-bought sweepings of your municipal gutters, the dregs of your civic cesspools. I speak of that whereof I know. It was not right, nor was it war: but it made war costly, long, murderous. Life was simply flung away. Do you ask what course should have been pursued? What ought to have been done? I will tell you. With 30,000 men in the field, the State should have had 20,000 always at home in the training-camps; and when, after such terrible struggles as those at Gettysburg or in the Wilderness, word came that a regiment had lost 150 men, dead or disabled, on the notifying click of the wire the message should have flashed back that 175 men were on the way to make full the depleted ranks. The next day 175 fresh men, bearing as yet uncalled numbers in the draft, should have been ordered forthwith to report at the depots. That is business; that would be war. In place of it, you let your old regiments dwindle to skeletons, while you ever organized new; and, as the indecisive warfare dragged itself along, your towns competed with each other for bounty-bought flesh and blood. It was quoted at so much a pound. This is the side of the record to be studied in your town-books; but it is a side of the record men do not like to study. Even reference to it is misconstrued. It is not popular! Yet here is the lesson to be borne in mind, that valuable to learn. That our young men rushed eagerly to arms in the early days of each conflict, no one denies; that they fought bravely and fell frequently, the names on your monuments and the flags in your cemeteries give proof. But, under your methods of carrying on warfare, two of them died where one only need to have died; two indecisive battles had to be fought, where one vigorously followed up would have sufficed. It was so in the Revolution; it was so in the Civil War. That in either case it would have been so had the struggle been over your own hearth-stones, I neither suggest nor believe. Then, however, the outcome would have directly influenced home existence, and Weymouth development; not so a remote war, the echoes only of which disturbed the monotony of your daily village life.