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Advance from Appomattox.
From the Richmond News-leader, January 21, 1907.
John Skelton Williams tells of the
South's great forward March—Talks to
Virginians living in
Atlanta.
Startling figures of Development and how the cotton Growers could Tie up the
Commerce of the world.
On Saturday the
Virginia Society of
Atlanta, Ga., gave a banquet in honor of
General Lee's birthday.
John Skelton Williams was the orator of the occasion.
While his address in a great measure was statistical, many of his facts and figures are new and some of them are startling, and they will be found of intense interest by thinking people of the South and North.
The address follows:
General Lee was one of the few men who have lived whose greatness and glory culminated with defeat and who won from disaster the ever-deepening love, the ever-rising reverence of mankind.
I say he was. He is. His character and his qualities, which are the essentials and the realities of a man, live.
As those who knew and followed him in his lifetime die, the hosts of those who know and love him multiply continually.
With his body resting quietly in its humble grave in a little
Virginia town these thirty-six years, his fame spreads more widely.
An immediate personal recollection of him recedes along the ever-lengthening vista of time and becomes dim and misty, the world beyond the boundaries of the dead republic for which he fought learns him more intimately, feels more strongly the power of his sublimity.
As the serene white light of history shines upon him more clearly and more brightly it shows him rising ever higher and more majestic and reveals to humanity that one of its highest ideals is realized, one of its noblest conceptions is personified, its foremost hero and gentleman presented to it in this beaten leader of a vanished army, this baffled hope of a
