“The Grand Army is not growing old.  You all feel younger at this moment than you did at the close of the day’s march.  Your work is not finished.  You were not fossilized in 1865.  The war was not a nurse, nor was it a very thorough schoolmaster.  It did serve, however, to show to friends and country what kind of men America contained.  Not I nor you perhaps can take this pleasing interpretation to ourselves, but looking at the five hundred thousand men who outlived the war, we see that they were the same men before the war and have remained the same since the war.  Their ability, friendship, patriotism, and religion were better known after they had shown their faith by deeds, but their identity and character were in great measure the same.

“Many of our Presidents have been taken from the ranks of the army.  But it would be a mockery of political wisdom to declare that a free, intelligent people elect a chief executive simply to reward him for having been in the war of 1861.  Captain Garfield, Lieutenant Hayes, Major McKinley, and General Grant were not put at the head of the nation as one would vote a pension.  They were elected because the people believed them to be the very best statesmen they could select for the office.  For a time every foreign consul except four was a soldier.  Two-thirds of Congress had been in the army.  Twenty-nine governors in the same year had been in military service.  Nine presidents of universities had been volunteers in 1863.  Three thousand postmasters appointed in one year were from the army.  Cabinet officers, custom-house officers, judges, district attorneys, and clerks in public offices were almost exclusively selected from army men.  Could you look in the face of the nations and declare that with all our enterprise, learning, progress, and common sense, we had such an inadequate idea of the responsibilities of government that we elected men to office who were incapable, simply because they had carried a gun or tripped over a sword!  No, no.  The shrewd Yankee and the calculating Hoosier are not caught with such chaff.  They selected these officers as servants of the nation because the war had served to show what sort of men they were.

“In short, they appointed them to high positions because they were true men.  They are just as true men now.  They are as patriotic, as industrious, as unselfish, as brave to-day as they were in the dark days of the rebellion.  Their efforts are as honest now as they were then, to perpetuate free institutions and maintain the honor of the flag.

“They have endowed colleges, built cathedrals, opened the wilderness to railroads, filled the American desert with roses, constructed telephone, telegraph, and steamship lines.  They have stood in classroom and in the pulpit by the thousand; they have honored our courts with their legal acumen; they have covered the plains with cities, and compelled the homage of Europe to secure our scholars, our wheat and our iron.