such momentum under the disadvantages of the struggle through which he passed.  Born from the general level of American society, blood of a noble ancestry flowed in his veins, and he was a type of the race from which he sprang.  Such was the grandeur and urbaneness of his manner, the dignity and majesty of his carriage, that his only peer in social life could be found in courts and among those educated amid the refinements of courts and thrones.  In that regard there was something beautiful and appropriate that he should become, in the later years of his life, the educator of the young.  Sir, it is a cause for mourning before high Heaven to-night that he was not spared thirty years to educate a generation for the time that is to come; for, as in the days when the red banner streamed over the land, the South sent her sons to fight under his flag and beneath the wave of his sword, these sons have been sent again to sit at his feet when he was the disciple of the Muses and the teacher of philosophy.  Oh, that he might have brought his more than regal character, his majestic fame, all his intellectual and moral endowments, to the task of fitting those that should come in the crisis of the future to take the mantle that had fallen from his shoulders and bear it to the generations that are unborn!

“General Lee I accept as the representative of his people, and of the temper with which this whole Southland entered into that gigantic, that prolonged, and that disastrous struggle which has closed, but closed as to us in grief.  Sir, they wrong us who say that the South was ever impatient to rupture the bonds of the American Union.  The war of 1776, which, sir, has no more yet a written history than has the war of 1861 to 1865, tells us that it was this Southland that wrought the Revolution of 1776.  We were the heirs of all the glory of that immortal struggle.  It was purchased with our blood, with the blood of our fathers which yet flows in these veins, and which we desire to transmit, pure and consecrated, to the sons that are born to our loins.  The traditions of the past sixty years were a portion of our heritage, and it never was easy for any great heart and reflective mind even to seem to part with that heritage to enter upon the perilous effort of establishing a new nationality.

“Mr. President, it was my privilege once to be thrilled in a short speech, uttered by one of the noblest names clustering upon the roll of South Carolina; for, sir, South Carolina was Virginia’s sister, and South Carolina stood by Virginia in the old struggle, as Virginia stood by South Carolina in the new, and the little State, small as Greece, barren in resources but great only in the grandeur of the men, in their gigantic proportions, whom she, like Virginia, was permitted to produce—­I heard, sir, one of South Carolina’s noblest sons speak once thus:  ’I walked through the Tower of London, that grand repository where are gathered the memorials of England’s martial prowess; and when the guide,