ness, as far as he can, to those unhappy States which have suffered so much from war, and the unrelenting hostility of wicked men, but, as the Roman poet has said, Victrix causa Dies placuit, sed victa Catoni, and, if I dedicated this little book to any man, I would dedicate to him who led the Confederate armies against the powerful invader and retired from the unequal contest, defeated but not dishonored, to the noble Virginian soldier whose talents and virtues place him by the side of the best and wisest man who sat on the throne of the imperial Cæsars.
There would be Joseph E. Johnston, and over against him W. T. Sherman; and then J. E. B. Stuart, and opposing him Philip Sheridan; and John B. Gordon, and confronting him John A. Logan; and so on, down through the rosters of both armies—always, of course, excepting Stonewall Jackson, as one with whom it were sheer profanity to suggest comparison or contrast. And what, besides such a history as these opposing walls afford, could any man, now or hereafter, desire? The lesson is obvious. To which wall of this chamber of fame would we direct the eyes of our children for that instruction in virtue, that enrichment of the mind, that inspiration to the higher life, that comes from the contemplation of noble lives.
Indeed, to which of these walls, think you, will all intelligent and virtuous people of this land point their children, with the trustful hope that from such contemplation there may come the ardent emulation of those types of courage and virtue and noble manhood which are exemplified in the lives of the leaders of the Confederate armies?
It may be, indeed, that in this age of shams and mockeries, when the acquisition and possession of wealth is accounted the highest evidence of human merit; when the standards and maxims of our former civilization are perverted and distorted to dignify the vulgarity of a gross materialism, that among the votaries of the present time the exhibition of the lives we have here commended would be as the casting of pearls before swine.
I need not say to you that true success in life is not to be tested or measured by its material results, but that it is to be
