Prosperity is assured.
It is a source of joy to every one of us, as we make our annual pilgrimage to meet together, when we saw how prosperous our country has grown. At last I think we all feel that the prosperity of the land is assured. When the savings of all previous generations were consumed in the common disaster, it seemed for a while as if the South has to face the bitterness of poverty for generations to come. Statesmanship, literature, art, culture, flowers of leisure and opportnnity were to remain forever withered on the soil once so congenial; nothing was to be left but the hard struggle with adversity till the bitter end. I think we are fully convinced now that the South is fully on its feet again. In material prosperity we have now not only reached, but have surpassed the achievements of our fathers; yet, when I look about me for the men who are to enter into the garden which you, my brave comrades, have made blossom under such hard conditions, I cannot but be sensible to the incomparable loss which the South sustained. The tongues which would have commanded the applause of senates were never heard after the cry of battle was over; the genius that might have directed the counsel of nations breathed its last upon some forgotten skirmish line. The very flower and pride of our people perished in our battle front and the blood of our race lost much of its most magnificent strain when they went to their graves. [181] I hold no view of Southern degeneracy, but I deplore the irreparable loss to my country and the coming generations when those splendid men, the bravest and best the world has ever held, went down in death. Some one has said that every generation must have its war. If so, in God's name let it not be a real war. The burning houses, the wasted fields, the ravaged cities—I could see them all go until the wilderness was back again, and contain my grief; but I can never bear to think of the strength and beauty, the manly courage, the stubborn nerve, the pure chivalry, the peerless devotion, the unstinted faith and loyalty which went into the battle's deadly front and never returned. It is the loss of men like these that made the South poor indeed—a loss that can never be restored, not in forty years! No, not in forty centuries!
