Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Address Delivered at Wadesboro, N. C: Before the Daughters of the Confederacy and the Confederate Veterans, on the 7th of August, 1903
Essential as it is to safety, both in expression and conduct, even truth itself can not always seem opportune or pleasing in the telling; and yet innocence and virtue scorn to have themselves clothed in any other dialect - candor is always the indispensable ally of justice and surely both truth and justice are due to the dead; and my speech to-day must deal alike with the living and the dead.
How feeble and inadequate are even the loftiest resources of intellect and eloquence to the just discussion of topics that belong to such an occasion as this!
What form of noble utterance can compass the excellence of woman's unselfish love, or equal the praise of such as die for home and freedom!
A great Athenian orator, more than three thousand years ago, speaking by command of the State in praise of his country men who had fallen on Thracian plains fighting for Grecian liberty, confessed the feebleness of that art of which he was himself the world's consummate master, by prefacing the noblest panegyric that ever fell from mortal lips, with a protest against the custom that permitted the virtues of the dead to be periled in the speech of one man, there to find praise or blame according as the speaker might deliver him self well or ill.
Instructed by such an example. Admonished by such con siderations, it can not seem strange that I hesitated for some time to undertake the service desired at my hands; and I frankly confess, that had not the summons you sent, seemed to me to have in it as much of the authority of a command as of the grace, of an invitation, the duty it outlined would have been shifted to shoulders more capable and worthy.
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