--should be picked out for such unusual commemoration?

The historic significance of an event is measured neither by its
material magnitude, nor by its immediate success. Thermopylae was a
defeat; but to the Greek imagination, Leonidas and his few Spartans
stood for the whole worth of Grecian life. Bunker Hill was a defeat;
but for our people, the fight over that breastwork has always seemed to
show as well as any victory that our forefathers were men of a temper
not to be finally overcome. And so here. The war for our Union, with
all the constitutional questions which it settled, and all the military
lessons which it gathered in, has throughout its dilatory length but
one meaning in the eye of history. And nowhere was that meaning better
symbolized and embodied than in the constitution of this first Northern
negro regiment.

Look at the monument and read the story;--see the mingling of elements
which the sculptor's genius has brought so vividly before the eye.
There on foot go the dark outcasts, so true to nature that one can
almost hear them breathing as they march. State after State by its
laws had denied them to be human persons. The Southern leaders in
congressional debates, insolent in their security, loved most to
designate them by the contemptuous collective epithet of "this peculiar
kind of property." There they march, warm-blooded champions of a
better day for man. There on horseback, among them, in his very habit
as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune, upon whose happy
youth every divinity had smiled. Onward they move together, a single
resolution kindled in their eyes, and animating their otherwise so
different frames. The bronze that makes their memory eternal betrays
the very soul and secret of those awful years.

Since the 'thirties the slavery question been the only question, and by
the end of 'fifties our land lay sick and shaking with it like a
traveller who has thrown himself down at night beside a pestilential
swamp, and in the morning finds the fever through the marrow of his
bones. "Only muzzle the Abolition fanatics," said the South, "and all
will be well again!" But the Abolitionists would not be muzzled,--they
were the voice of the world's conscience, they were a part of destiny.
Weak as they were, they drove the South to madness. "Every step she
takes in her blindness," said Wendell Phillips, "is one more step
towards ruin." And when South Carolina took the final step