were to save lives, to save treasure, but at all costs to save his country and he did save his country. His army cheerfully accepted the sacrifice, wrote its farewell, buckled its belts, and stood ready.

The struggle was not for victory; it was for existence. It was not for glory; it was for life and death. Grant had not only to defeat armies, but to annihilate their forces; to leave no choice but destruction or submission. He saw that the brief ravage of the hurricane is infinitely less ruinous than the interminable malignity of the pestilence, and in the colossal struggle, victory, swift, decisive, overwhelming, was the truest mercy. In silence and with determination, and with clearness of insight, he was like your Washington and our Wellington. He was like them also in this, that the word "cannot" did not exist in his soldier's dictionary, and what he achieved was achieved without bluster. In the hottest fury of all his battles, his speech was never known to be more than "yea, yea," and "nay, nay." He met General Lee at Appomattox. He received his surrender with faultless delicacy. He immediately issued an order that the Confederates should be supplied with rations. Immediately his enemies surrendered, he gave them terms as simple and as generous as a brother could have given themterms which healed differences; terms of which they freely acknowledged the magnanimity. Not even entering the capital, avoiding all ostentation, unelated by triumph, and unruffled by adversity, he hurried back to stop recruits and to curtail the vast expenses of the country. After the surrender at Appomattox Court-House, the war was over. He had put his hand to the plow and had looked not back. He had made blow after blow, each following where the last had struck; he had wielded like a hammer the gigantic forces at his disposal, and had smitten opposition into the dust. It was a mighty work, and he had done it well. Surely history has shown that for the future destinies of a mighty nation it was a necessary and blessed work! The Church utters her most indignant anathema at an unrighteous war, but she has never refused to honor the faithful soldiers who fight in the cause of their country and God. The gentlest and most Christian of modern poets has used the tremendous thought:—

God's most dreaded instrument
In working out a pure intent

Is man arrayed for mutual slaughter,
Yea, Carnage is his daughter!

We shudder even as we quote the words, but yet the cause for which General Grant fought-the honor of a great people and the freedom of a whole race of mankind-was a great and noble cause. And the South has accepted that desperate and bloody arbitrament. Two of the Southern Generals, we rejoice to hear, will bear General Grant's funeral pall. The rancor and ill-feeling of the past are buried in oblivion; true friends have been made out of brave foemen. Americans are no longer Northerners and Southerners, Federals and Confederates, but they are Americans. "Do not teach your children to hate," said General Lee, to an American lady; "teach them that they are Americans. I thought that we were better off as one nation than as two, and I think so now." "The war is over," said Grant, "and the best sign of rejoicing after victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations in the field." "Let us have peace," were the memorable words with which he ended his brief inaugural address as President. On the rest of the great soldier's life, we will only touch in a very few words. As Wellington became Prime Minister of England, and lived to be hooted in the streets of London, so Grant, more than half against his will, became President, and for a time lost much of his popularity. He foresaw it all, but it is not for a man to choose; it is for a man to accept his destiny. What verdict history may pronounce on him as a politician I know not; but here, and now, the voice of censure, deserved or undeserved, is silent. When the great Duke of Marlborough died and one began to speak of his avarice, "He was so great a man," said Bolingbroke, "I had forgotten that he had that fault."

It was a fine and delicate rebuke, and we do not intend to rake up a man's faults and errors. Those errors, whatever they may have been, we leave to the mercy of the Merciful, and the atoning blood of his Savior. Beside the open grave, we speak only in gratitude of his great achievements. Let us record his virtues in brass, for men's examples; but let his faults,

whatever they may have been, be writ in water. Some may think that it would have been well for Grant if he had died in 1865, when steeples clanged and cities were illuminated and congregations rose in his honor. Many and dark clouds overshadowed the last of his days-the blow of financial ruin; the dread that men should suppose that he had a tarnished reputation; the terribly agony of an incurable disease. But God's ways are not our ways. To bear that sudden ruin, and that speechless agony, required a courage nobler and greater than that of the battle-field, and human courage grows magnificently to the height of human need. "I am a man," said Frederick the Great, "and therefore born to suffer." On the long agonizing death-bed, Grant showed himself every inch a hero, bearing his agonies and trials without a murmur, with rugged stoicism, in unflinching fortitude; yes, and we believe in a Christian's patience and a Christian's prayers. Which of us can tell whether those hours of torture and misery may not have been blessings in disguise; whether God may not have been refining the gold from the brass, and the strong man had been truly purified by the strong agony?

We are gathered here in England to do honor to his memory and to show our sympathy with the sorrow of a great sister nation. Could we be gathered in a more fitting place? We do not lack here memorials to recall the history of your country. There is the grave of André; there is the monument raised by grateful Massachusetts to the gallant Howe; there is the temporary resting-place of George Peabody; there is the bust of Longfellow; over the Dean's grave there is the faint semblance of Boston Harbor. We add another memory to-day. Whatever there may have been between the two nations to forget and forgive, it is forgotten and forgiven. "I will not speak of them as two peoples," said General Grant at Newcastle in 1877, "because in fact, we are one people, with a common destiny, and that destiny will be brilliant in proportion to the friendship and coöperation of the brethren dwelling on each side of the Atlantic." Oh! if the two peoples, which are one people, be true to their duty, and true to their God, who can doubt that in their hands are the destinies of the world? Can anything short of utter dementation ever thwart a destiny so

manifest? Your founders were our sons; it was from our past that your present grew. The monument of Sir Walter Raleigh is not that nameless grave in St. Margaret's; it is the State of Virginia. Yours and ours alike are the memories of Captain John Smith and of the Pilgrim Fathers, of General Oglethorpe's strong benevolence of soul, of the apostolic holiness of Berkeley, and the burning zeal of Wesley and Whitefield. Yours and ours alike are the plays of Shakespeare and the poems of Milton; ours and yours alike are all that you have accomplished in literature or in history-the songs of Longfellow and Bryant, the genius of Hawthorne and of Irving, the fame of Washington, Lee and Grant.

But great memories imply great responsibilities. It was not for nothing that God made England what she is; not for nothing that the free individualism of a busy multitude, the humble traders of a fugitive people, snatched the New World from feudalism and bigotry, from Philip II and Louis XIV, from Menendez and Montcalm, from the Jesuit and the Inquisition, from Torquemada, and from Richelieu, to make it the land of the Reformation and the Republic of Christianity and of Peace. "Let us auspicate all our proceedings in America," said Edmund Burke, "with the old Church cry, Sursum corda!" But it is for America to live up to the spirit of such words, not merely to quote them with profound enthusiasm. We have heard ofNew times, new climes, new lands, new men, but still The same old tears, old crimes, and oldest ill.

It is for America to falsify the cynical foreboding. Let her take her place side by side with England in the very van of freedom and progress, united by a common language, by common blood, by common measures, by common interests, by a common history, by common hopes; united by the common glory of great men, of which this great temple of silence and reconciliation is the richest shrine. Be it the steadfast purposes of the two peoples who are one people to show all the world not only the magnificent spectacle of human happiness, but the still more magnificent spectacle of two peoples which are one people, loving righteousness and hating iniquity, inflexibly faithful to the principles of eternal justice which are the unchanging laws of God.

JOHN FISKE

COLUMBUS THE NAVIGATOR

Oration by John Fiske, author, historian, lecturer (born Edmund Fiske Green, in Middletown, Conn., 1842; died 1901), delivered in the Boston Theater, Oct. 21, 1892, on the occasion of the celebration by the city government of Boston of the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus.

FRIENDS AND FELLOW CITIZENS:-We have met here this morning to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of one of the greatest events in the history of the world. The first crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by Christopher Columbus was an achievement of which Americans are not likely to underrate the importance, and which no one with a due sense of the relations of cause and effect in human affairs can for a moment fail to recognize as supremely important. When we duly consider what America already means to the world while the development of European civilization upon this fresh soil is still in its earliest stages, when we take sober thought of what the future must have in store if this early promise is even partially fulfilled, we shall be inclined to pronounce the voyage that led the way to this New World as the most epoch-making event of all that have occurred since the birth of Christ.

But I do not propose to take up your time with glittering generalities. The best way to do homage to Columbus, or to show our appreciation of the real grandeur of his achievement, is to try to understand it in its relations to what went before it; and that is a kind of understanding which people surely do not commonly show in speaking or writing on the subject. In order to appreciate the significance of any historical event we must look at it in perspective, and the greater the event the more is the need of such perspective.