If, indeed, "it needs be that wars must come," it seems we should all be thankful to High Providence that it fell to our lot to participate in this war for the Union rather than any other of which we have knowledge, and, further, from our knowledge of the past history of mankind, we should be thankful that it fell to our lot to live in our generation, race, and country, with all its blood and tears. In fact, we of our generation who are still alive have witnessed more and greater progress for betterment physically, mentally, and morally, than all that had gone before. But to revert to our text, "The Army of the Cumberland," and the war itself. My theme is to inspire just but long-belated honors to the Confederate soldiers in arms. The nucleus from which sprang the new race and nation of thirty millions of unmilitary and unwarlike Americans called suddenly to form the mighty hosts of over three million Confederate and Union warriors, was the Puritans and Cavaliers of Northern Europe, who for conscience's sake exiled themselves from religious, social and political persecution over two hundred years ago to the American wilderness where they hoped, untrammeled by the imperious custom of ages, to raise a new people self-reliant and of universal common interests where all should be schooled in the same ethics politically, socially and morally. For over a hundred years they kept faith in their purpose in a self-reliant way never known before, being almost wholly self-supporting, having no public factories, each trade making and repairing its own tools and implements, each rural family raising its own flax, wool and cotton and almost universally spinning and weaving its own fabric for clothing. This brought the rearing of children to the mother's fireside, where the moral training of the mother is more pure, effective and lasting than all other methods, including schools and colleges. They kept this faith until they had increased to a population of three millions of the most earnest, sturdy and conscientious people on the globe, when the principal mother country beginning insidiously to re-establish over them the very evils from which they had fled into exile, they again in 1776 engaged to free themselves, this time in a war for independence and government of their own. In this they succeeded, and by the time of the adoption of the Constitution in 1787 they had established a government more unique in all its leading characteristics than any known to history, its leading feature being that "all just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed."