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Show UNITY OF NATION PROVED Great Southerner Long Ago Pointed Out How Complete Has Been Its Restoration. From an address delivered by Henry Watterson at the National cemetery, Nashville. Tenn., Decoration day, 1877. We are assembled, my countrymen, to commemorate the patriotism and valor of the brave men who died to save the Union. The season brings its tribute to the scene; pays its homage to the dead; inspires the living. There are images of tranquillity all about us; in the calm sunshine upon the ridges; in the tender shadows that creep along the streares; in the waving wav-ing grass and grain that mark God's lovo and bounty; in the flowers that bloom over the many graves. There Is peace everywhere in this land today. to-day. Peace on the open seas, In all our sheltered bays and ample streams. Peace where'er our starry banner gleams. And peace in every breeze. The war is over. It is for us to bury its passions with its dead; to bury them beneath a monument raised by the American people to American manhood and the American system, in order that "the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom and that guvernmenO of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth." The Union is, indeed, restored when the hands that pulled down that flag come willingly and lovingly to put it up again. I come with a full heart and a Bteady hand to salute the flag that floats above me my flag and your flag the flag of the free heart's heps and home the star spangled banner of our fathers the flag that, uplifted triumphantly over a few brave men, has never been obscured, destined des-tined by the God of the universe to waft on its ample folds the eternal song of freedom to all mankind, emblem em-blem of the power on earth which is deBtined to exceed that on which It was said that the sun never went down. |