ghting against one of the most grinding, one of the most galling, one
of the most irritating attempts to establish tyrannical government that
ever disgraced the history of the World."--G. W. BENTINCK, quoted by
CHAS. FRANCIS ADAMS, _l. c._, p. 111.]

I have tried in this paper to reproduce the past and its perspective, to
show how the men of my time and of my environment looked at the problems
that confronted us. It has been a painful and, I fear, a futile task. So
far as I have reproduced the perspective for myself it has been a
revival of sorrows such as this generation cannot understand; it has
recalled the hours when it gave one a passion for death, a shame of
life, to read our bulletins. And how could I hope to reproduce that
perspective for others, for men who belong to another generation and
another region, when so many men who lived the same life and fought on
the same side have themselves lost the point of view not only of the
beginning of the war, but also of the end of the war, not only of the
inexpressible exaltation, but of the unutterable degradation? They have
forgotten what a strange world the survivors of the conflict had to
face. If the State had been ours still, the foundations of the earth
would not have been out of course; but the State was a military
district, and the Confederacy had ceased to exist. The generous policy
which would have restored the State and made a new union possible, which
would have disentwined much of the passionate clinging to the past, was
crossed by the death of the only man who could have carried it through,
if even he could have carried it through; and years of trouble had to
pass before the current of national life ran freely through the Southern
States. It was before this circuit was complete that the principal of
one of the chief schools of Virginia set up a tablet to the memory of
the "old boys" who had perished in the war,--it was a list the length
of which few Northern colleges could equal,--and I was asked to furnish
a motto. Those who know classic literature at all know that for
patriotism and friendship mottoes are not far to seek, but during the
war I felt as I had never felt before the meaning of many a classic
sentence. The motto came from Ovid, whom many call a frivolous poet; but
the frivolous Roman was after all a Roman, and he was young when he
wrote the line,--too young not to feel the generous swell of true
feeling. It was written of the dead brothers of B