ting lessons
to be learned from Lee's campaigns; of the same race as both
belligerents, I could with the utmost pleasure dwell upon the many
brilliant feats of arms on both sides; but I cannot do so here.

The end came at last, when the well-supplied North, rich enough to pay
recruits, no matter where they came from, a bounty of over five
hundred dollars a head, triumphed over an exhausted South, hemmed in
on all sides, and even cut off from all communication with the outside
world. The desperate, though drawn battle of Gettysburg was the
death-knell of Southern independence; and General Sherman's splendid
but almost unopposed march to the sea showed the world that all
further resistance on the part of the Confederate States could only be
a profitless waste of blood. In the thirty-five days of fighting near
Richmond which ended the war in 1865, General Grant's army numbered
190,000, that of Lee only 51,000 men. Every man lost by the former was
easily replaced, but an exhausted South could find no more soldiers.
"The right of self-government," which Washington won and for which Lee
fought, was no longer to be a watchword to stir men's blood in the
United States. The South was humbled and beaten by its own flesh and
blood in the North, and it is difficult to know which to admire most,
the good sense with which the result was accepted in the so-called
Confederate States, or the wise magnanimity displayed by the victors.
The wounds are now healed on both sides; Northerners and Southerners
are now once more a united people, with a future before them to which
no other nation can aspire. If the English-speaking people of the
earth cannot all acknowledge the same sovereign, they can, and I am
sure they will, at least combine to work in the interests of truth and
of peace for the good of mankind. The wise men on both sides of the
Atlantic will take care to chase away all passing clouds that may at
any time throw even a shadow of dispute or discord between the two
great families into which our race is divided.

Like all men, Lee had his faults; like all the greatest of generals,
he sometimes made mistakes. His nature shrank with such horror from
the dread of wounding the feelings of others, that upon occasions he
left men in positions of responsibility to which their abilities were
not equal. This softness of heart, amiable as that quality may be,
amounts to a crime in the man intrusted with the direction of public
affairs at c