ADDRESS AT THE CONFEDERATE REUNION,

WASHINGTON, JUNE 6, 1917

I esteem it a very great pleasure and a real privilege to extend to the men who are attending this reunion the very cordial greetings of the United States.

I suppose that as you mix with one another you chiefly find these to be days of memory, when your thoughts go back and recall those days of struggle in which your hearts were strained, in which the whole nation seemed in grapple and I dare say that you are thrilled as you remember the heroic things that were then done.

You are glad to remember that heroic things were done on both sides and that men in those days fought in something like the old spirit of chivalric gallantry.

There are many memories of the Civil War that thrill along the blood and make one proud to have been sprung of a race that could produce such bravery and constancy; and yet the world does not live on memories.

The world is constantly making its toilsome way forward into new and different days and I believe that one of the things that contribute satisfaction to a reunion like this and a welcome like this is that this is also a day of oblivion.

There are some things that we have thankfully buried, and among them are the great passions of division which once threatened to rend this nation in twain.

The passion of admiration we still entertain for the

heroic figures of those old days, but the passion of separation, the passion of difference of principle is gone gone out of our minds, gone out of our hearts, and one of the things that will thrill this country as it reads of this reunion is that it will read also of a rededication on the part of all of us to the great nation which we serve in common.

These are days of oblivion as well as of memory, for we are forgetting the things that once held us asunder. Not only that, but they are days of rejoicing because we now at last see why this great nation was kept united, for we are beginning to see the great world purpose which it was meant to serve.

Many men I know, particularly of your own generation have wondered at some of the dealings of Providence, but the wise heart never questions the dealings of Providence, because the great long plan as it unfolds has a majesty about it and a definiteness of purpose, an elevation of ideal which we were incapable of conceiving as we tried to work things out with our own short sight and weak strength.

And now that we see ourselves part of a nation united, powerful, great in spirit and in purpose, we know the great ends which God in His mysterious Providence wrought through our instrumentality, because at the heart of the men of the North and of the South there was the same love of self-government and of liberty and now we are to be an instrument in the hands of God to see that liberty is made secure for mankind.

At the day of our greatest division there was one common passion among us, and that was the passion