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tablet to the beloved memory of Frank Harleston, and honor the friendship that consecrates it to-day.
As in life his character was an example most worthy of our imitation, so in death may this memorial in his honor teach us from its pure and chaste inscription of a duty, yet unfulfilled, which we owe to the dead of our Alma Mater, who with Harleston, laid down their lives, rather than neglect their duty to us and to the State.
The University of North Carolina has erected a Memorial Hall, and dedicated it to the memory of her sons who have died in the honorable fulfilment of their responsibilities, whatever their callings in life!
Fellow-graduates, ex-cadets, and cadets of the South Carolina Military Academy, citizens of Old Charleston, yes, Carolinians all, shall we not write on these walls, in Parian marble, the names of Tew, and Gendron Palmer, and Jenkins, and Charley Haskell, and Jim Nance, and McCreary, and Randall Craft, and Mason Smith, and Datterer, and the other honored names of the gallant men who died in the service of their country.
If he had been spared to his friends and his State, no one of us could take a heartier interest in the discharge of this sacred duty than the brave soldier whose name we have inscribed on this beautiful tablet.
My friends, there is a deeper lesson for us and our children in these memorials to our dead than the natural gratification of surviving friendship and love.
They bear us witness that the sons of Carolina do not blush for the history of their State!
A land without dead heroes is a land without aspirations and hopes!
A State without monuments is a State without examples!
History may record the failures, or the mistakes, or the unwisdom of a people, and the perusal of such chapters may disappoint while they instruct us; but while that history inscribes the record of virtue and valor, and illustrates the power of conscientious self-sacrifice, so long as it tells the story of patience, and courage, and fortitude, and faith!—that history can never be the badge of a people's dishonor.
He dishonors himself who does not respect it, and he alone is unblessed by its lessons and its examples, who treats its memory with disregard.
The day will never come in South Carolina, my friends, when her
Richmond, VA. 1884.
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