“But as one of the great captains will General Lee first pass review and inspection before the criticism of history.  We will not compare him with Washington.  The mind will halt instinctively at the comparison of two such men, so equally and gloriously great.  But with modest, yet calm and unflinching confidence we place him by the side of the Marlboroughs and Wellingtons who take high niches in the pantheon of immortality.  Let us dwell for a moment, my friends, on this thought.  Marlborough never met defeat, it is true.  Victory marked every step of his triumphant march; but when, where, and whom did Marlborough fight?  The ambitious and vain but able Louis XIV.  But he had already exhausted the resources of his kingdom before Marlborough stepped upon the stage.  The great marshals Turenne and Conde were no more, and Luxembourg the beloved had vanished from the scene.  Marlborough, preeminently great as he certainly was, nevertheless led the combined forces of England and of Holland, in the freshness of their strength and the fulness of their financial ability, against prostrate France, with a treasury depleted, a people worn out, discouraged, and dejected.  But let us turn to another comparison.  The great Von Moltke, who now rides upon the whirlwind and commands the storm of Prussian invasion, has recently declared that General Lee, in all respects, was fully the equal of Wellington, and you may the better appreciate this admission when you remember that Wellington was the benefactor of Prussia, and probably Von Moltke’s special idol.  But let us examine the arguments ourselves.  France was already prostrate when Wellington met Napoleon.  That great emperor had seemed to make war upon the very elements themselves, to have contended with Nature, and to have almost defeated Providence itself.  The enemies of the North, more savage than Goth or Vandal, mounting the swift gales of a Russian winter, had carried death, desolation, and ruin, to the very gates of Paris.  Wellington fought at Waterloo a bleeding and broken nation—­a nation electrified, it is true, to almost superhuman energy by the genius of Napoleon, but a nation prostrate and bleeding nevertheless.  Compare this, my friends, the condition of France and the condition of the United States, in the freshness of her strength, in the luxuriance of her resources, in the lustihood of her gigantic youth.  Tell me whether to place the chaplet of military superiority with him, or with Marlborough, or Wellington?  Even the greatest of captains, in his Italian campaigns, flashing fame in lightning splendor over the world, even Bonaparte met and crushed in battle but three or four (I think) Austrian armies; while our Lee, with one army badly equipped, in time incredibly short, met and hurled back in broken and shattered fragments five of the greatest prepared and most magnificently appointed invasions.  Yea, more!  He discrowned, in rapid succession, one after another of the United States’ most, accomplished and admirable commanders.