ons, filling the sky with glory. What is that combination
of influences, partly physical, partly intellectual, but somewhat more
moral, which should make a particular country productive of men great
over all others on earth and to all ages of time? Ancient Greece, with
her indented coast, inviting to maritime adventures, from her earliest
period was the mother of heroes in war, of poets in song, of sculptors
and artists, and stands up after the lapse of centuries the educator
of mankind, living in the grandeur of her works and in the immortal
productions of minds which modern civilization with all its
cultivation and refinement and science never surpassed and scarcely
equalled. And why in the three hundred years of American history it
should be given to the Old Dominion to be the grand mother, not only
of States, but of the men by whom States and empires are formed, it
might be curious were it possible for us to inquire. Unquestionably,
Mr. President, there is in this problem the element of race; for he
is blind to all the truths of history, to all the revelations of the
past, who does not recognize a select race as we recognize a select
individual of a race, to make all history; but pretermitting all
speculation of that sort, when Virginia unfolds the scroll of her
immortal sons--not because illustrious men did not precede him
gathering in constellations and clusters, but because the name shines
out through those constellations and clusters in all its peerless
grandeur--we read the name of George Washington. And then, Mr.
President, after the interval of three-quarters of a century, when
your jealous eye has ranged down the record and traced the names that
history will never let die, you come to the name--the only name in all
the annals of history that can be named in the perilous connection--of
Robert E. Lee, the second Washington. Well may old Virginia be proud
of her twin sons! born almost a century apart, but shining like those
binary stars which open their glory and shed their splendor on the
darkness of the world.

"Sir, it is not an artifice of rhetoric which suggests this parallel
between two great names in American history; for the suggestion
springs spontaneously to every mind, and men scarcely speak of Lee
without thinking of a mysterious connection that binds the two
together. They were alike in the presage of their early history--the
history of their boyhood. Both earnest, grave, studious; both alike
in t