f Georgia leaped to his feet. His words came slowly,
throbbing with emotion.

"Any suggestion from General Lee deserves the immediate attention of
this Government. He speaks to-night as an engineer and mathematician. He
has told us the worst. It was his duty. I honor him for it.

"But I differ with him. He can see but one angle of this question. He
is a soldier in field. It is our duty to see both the soldier's and the
statesman's point of view. And our cause is not so desperate as the
science of engineering and mathematics would tell us.

"The war of the revolution was won by Washington in spite of
mathematics. The odds were all against him. We have our chance. This war
is now in its fourth year. The outlook seems dark in Richmond. It is
darker in Washington. What have they accomplished in these years of
blood and tears? Nothing. Not a slave has been freed. Not a question at
issue has found its solution. The millions of the North are in despair
and they are crying for peace--peace at any price. The Presidential
election is but a few weeks off. They have nominated Abraham Lincoln
again for President. They had to, although he is the most unpopular man
who ever sat in the White House. All the mistakes, all the agony, all
the horrors of this war, they have unjustly heaped on his drooping
shoulders.

"McClellan is his opponent _on a peace platform_.

"The Republican Party is split as ours was before the war. John C.
Fremont is running on the Radical ticket against Lincoln. Unless a
miracle happens General George B. McClellan will be elected the next
President. If he is, the war ends in a draw.

"It's a fair chance. We can take it.

"But our chance of success is not the real question before us. It is
a bigger one. The question before you is bigger than the South. It
is bigger than the Republic. It is bigger than the Continent. It may
involve the future of civilization.

"The employment of these negro troops, clothed in the uniform of the
Union, marks the lowest tide mud to which its citizenship has ever sunk.
The profoundest word in history is _race_. The ancestral soul of a
people rules its destiny. What is the ancestral soul of the negro? The
measurement of the skull of the Egyptian is exactly the shape and size
of six thousand years ago. Has the negro moved upward? This republic
was born of the soul of a race of pioneer white freemen who settled our
continent and built an altar within its Forest Cathedral to Libe