Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 40.djvu/239

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The Character of the Confederate Soldier.
235

they prevented has gone far to preserve the equilibrium in our dual form of government.

When the Panama Canal is completed it will be no less a monument to the skill and genius of the American engineers than to the patient and untiring efforts of Senator Morgan, of Alabama. It would be a pleasant task to name many others in both houses, who through long and faithful service, have inscribed their names on the roll of fame, high among the civic heroes of this age. Your own State furnishes one whose memory is tenderly revered by every Confederate soldier, whose name will be for many years a household word in very many homes in Virginia. Major Daniel's fame as an orator will not rest primarily on the Confederate addresses he delivered, although more than one of these has long since taken rank as American classics.

His many able and eloquent speeches on constitutional questions, particularly those on the force bill and the anti-option bill, will ever rank him among the most profound lawyers and able statesmen of his day.

Senator Lodge, of Massachusetts, in closing his eulogy on Senator Daniel, said: "The Civil War brought many tragedies to North and South alike. None greater, certainly, than the division of Virginia. To a State with such a history, with such memories and traditions, there was a peculiar cruelty in such a fate. Virginia alone, among the States, has so suffered. Other wounds have healed. The land that was rent in twain is one again. The old friendships and affections are once more warm and strong as they were at the beginning. But the wound which the war dealt to Virginia can never be healed. There, and there alone, the past cannot be restored. One bows to the inevitable, but as a lover of my country and my country's past, I have felt a deep pride in the history of Virginia, in which I, as an American, had a right to share, and I have always sorrowed that an inexorable destiny had severed that land where so many brave and shining memories were garnered up. That thought was often in my mind as I looked at Senator Daniel in this chamber. Not only did he fitly and highly represent the great past with all its memories and traditions, but he also rep-