His fortitude in peace-not less than his courage in battle entitles him to the respect of all true men; and with Crawford and Clark and Troup and Forsyth, with Gordon and Hill and Toombs and Stephens, he deserves to rank among the great Georgians even as Arcturus ranks with Sirius and Procyron, on the belt of the celestial heavens.

Every beat of his rugged old heart was for his people; nor did they cease to love him in return. Never can I forget a picture in which Longstreet and Davis were the central figures. It was in the spring of 1886, at the unveiling of the Ben Hill monument, in the city of Atlanta. On that ever to be remembered day a vast concourse of people was assembled in Georgia's capital.

General Longstreet was not expected. For some reason the old soldier had declined an invitation. But suddenly, bedecked in a handsome uniform of Confederate gray his sword dangling at his side and his stars blazing around his neck-he appeared upon the platform, all aglow with the splendid look of the old days, to be received in the outstretched arms of Jefferson Davis.

It was a moment tense with excitement. Shouts rose to the lips and tears to the eyes of the coldest spectator of that magnificent scene. It unrolled the panorama of the years. It lifted the sentence of outlawry, for a time at least. The bitter memories of Reconstruction faded; and once more the name of Longstreet, firing the sluggish blood of the old veterans, became the battle-music of the victorious field. If I have read the signs of the times aright, it was then the tide began to turn.

But the sweet accents of forgiveness remained unspoken. He died without further proof of his people's affection. Nor could anything have been sadder than the spectacle which the old hero presented when, bowed with age and wasted by disease, he lay propped upon his pillow, in his hillside home, and looked for the last time upon the drapery of the mountains.

Underneath the Blue Ridge pines, he was still waiting -waiting for a message which he longed to hear; but he waited like the old Spaniard, who sat beneath the roses

of his seaside villa and watched in vain for the returning sails of the lost Armada.

Sad would it be if the story of Longstreet's life ended here. But I cannot bring myself to believe that, when the old soldier knelt in the olive-glooms, his prayer was unheeded by the gentle Master who was once Himself an outcast among his kindred-"despised and rejected of men." In the kindling dawn of the New Year, as it reddened upon the Blue Ridge, a pale courier summoned him again to the bivouac of Lee. This time it was an order to start at sunrise. But it found him ready; and so he left us, under the morning stars.

It requires no effort of the fancy-no Miltonic sweep of the imagination-to picture the old war horse vindicated at the hands of his glorious chieftain. Once more, along the expectant lines, is heard the shout: "Longstreet is coming." In the phantom host around the great captain, I can see Jackson and Stuart and Hampton and Gordon, and all who rode with him in the fiery days; and at last the old charge is riven into shreds by the peerless Lee.

But the sentence of outlawry, pronounced upon the old war horse, still remains unlifted; and I ask you, is it right? Lawyers, who weigh the sands of evidence. Ministers, who preach the Golden Rule. Teachers, who follow the lode-star of Truth. Georgians, of every pursuit and calling, to whom blood has ever been thicker than water. I ask you, is it right?

When we read of the suffering exiles in the country of the Czar, we shudder and grow sick at heart. But heed what I say. It matters not in what favored zone of the earth a man may live, if he encounters the cold gaze of his fellow men-even though it be in Georgia-he does not need to be banished to the Arctic snows to experience the frozen hell of Siberian Russia.

Well do I know the Southern people-these descendants of men who followed kings and wore the crests of the court. Sprung from an imperial ancestry, they inherit all the noble failings of empurpled sires beyond the seas. They were sorely tried by the enormities of Reconstruction.

But they are too magnanimous in spirit, too royal in blood, too full of the knightly soul of Sir Philip Sidney, to harbor an ungenerous prejudice or to resent, except in momentary pique, an honest difference of opinion.

The days of Reconstruction are now half a century behind us. Renegades there were in our camp, turn-coats and traitors, compared with whom even Calaban was an angel of light. But among those who, in the darkness, told us to be patient, can we not discover that some hearts were true? We were not all fiery Hotspurs. In some of us the warm blood of the South was curbed by the fibres of the Highland sycamores and cooled by the rude chaffings of the old North Sea which beats upon the dykes of Holland.

Even among children, who bend at the same parent knee, there are differences of temperament; and among men of equal virtue, some are destined to tread the Via Appia and some the Via Dolorosa. Only the God of the storm can tell us this; why, in the same range of mountains, there are certain peaks around which the forked lightnings gather, while the sunbeams play upon the rest; but, in the heart of the old Alps, through which I have traveled, it is the oft-observed phenomenon of summer that, when the storm is over, the air becomes like flawless crystal. Then the old peak on which the clouds have brooded-which has known the lightning's flash and the thunder's peal-begins at last to glow in the waning day, "to catch the refulgent beams of sunset and wear the regalia of the evening stars." So may it be with this rugged old rock of the Confederate range.

Perhaps I am wrong. But somehow I feel that out of all this opprobrium there will yet come an enlarged fruition of honor and that like unto the experience of Stephen, the very stones which have sent him bleeding to his martyrdom will yet unite to lift the marble friezes of his monument. Bolingbroke was banished from England to be recalled as Henry the Fourth. Aristides was exiled from Athens; but

when the Persians were at the gates he was summoned back to share the glory of Salamis.

Time heals the bitterest wounds. Twenty-eight years ago, Georgia took Joseph E. Brown once more to her heart and, with Benjamin H. Hill for his colleague, she made him an American senator. But not yet has she recalled her Longstreet to ride side by side with her Gordon upon the grounds of her capitol. In a sense, it is now too late to undo the past, for it lies not in the voice of honor to provoke the silent dust nor in the tongue of flattery to soothe the dull, cold ear of death.

Georgia cannot stand at the barred entrance to the -tomb and say to its tenant: "Longstreet, come forth." She must wait for the hour of sunrise upon the eternal mountains, before she can look again into the face of the old commander. But, though she be not ready to acquit him, she can at least lift the sentence of ostracism and she can write above his dust at Gainesville: "Forgiven."

Aye, and I believe that she will. For, the more I scan the ways of Providence, the more I believe with Alfred Tennyson that "good will be the final goal of ill." In the storm that beat upon the Trojan ships, it was wondered why Aeneas should be tossed upon the waves while other sons of Troy felt the softer breath of the Mediterranean? Why did he not die with Hector on the Dardan plains? The future revealed an answer in the walls of Rome.

Longstreet's voyage of life has ended. But the bark which bears his immortal record still rocks upon the troubled deep. What shall be its fate? May it not find some happy port; and, though hymned by no Virgil among the minstrels of earth and helped by no Venus among the powers of heaven, may not the waves which have tossed and beaten Longstreet's bark, yet bear it to some imperial shelter, hard by the eternal hills, in some sun-bathed, starcrowned, sweet Italia?

Brethren, I am weary. I have overtaxed my strength.

But I cannot resign the arches of this hall to silence until I have spoken one word more. Saul is not among the prophets. But, ere many suns have risen and set upon Georgia, another silent figure on horseback will be seen upon her capitol grounds. Gordon's statue faces the North; and it tells how Gordon faced it, whether in wrestling for victory or in pleading for peace. Longstreet's statue must face the South-not only in confident appeal but with expectant look, awaiting a judgment which time at last will render.

Justice must come. Until it does, the legend upon Georgia's coat-of-arms is meaningless mockery. Until it does, her proud flag of statehood will droop in shame from its uplifted staff. Until it does, her scales of justice will flash into her face the mystic symbols upon the walls of Babylon; and, though prosperity may belt her like the bands of Saturn, it will only wrap her in the guilty splendors of Belshazzar's feast.

But come it will. Then start the procession to the quarry-bring forth the granite-summon the sculptor and prepare the chisel-for the old commonwealth, from Chickamauga's dust to Tybee's light, is waking from her sleep. She intends to revoke an unjust sentence which has rested all too long on Lee's old war horse; and in her zeal to set him right before the world, it will be her joy to proclaim the final verdict in colors so bright and in letters so large that, standing upon the battlements of Yonah Mountain, she will snatch the pencil of the dawn and write it where the stars are lit forever.

[Extract from an address delivered at Elberton Ga., Memorial Day, April 26, 1919, under the auspices of the U. D. C.]

We meet today in the midst of great events. This hour is epochal. It is one of the supreme moments in the history of the world. Its issues reach far into the future and upon them hang the destinies of billions yet unborn. One