People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 July 1896 — MEMORIAL ADDRESS. [ARTICLE]

MEMORIAL ADDRESS.

RxTfcAcfrs •’ROM A Jbhort i? SPSECH.-GF A.-PUCKETT. •& * - . '** --• ' ' .Delivered o* M«**art*l Dey to to* Old Sojdlen at Kgrdy. drtauuaa —Battlaa SUU to Be Fo««kt—Evil* That Grew Out of the Wan You old soldiers doubtless wonder •what a young man about war, anyway—and I wish to admit in the beginning that he doesn’t know much —and that little has been gained by reading. I have no reminiscences to relate of the war but what have been related before. The past is interesting only as it contributes to the present. Now is ever the time for all patriotic and pure thoughts. If the past records mistakes, the present and the future must correct them. We cannot go back. Forward is the command of duty and progress. If I had been old enough, I might have been a rebel, as my father was —but living now, I am an American citizen proud to live in a united country. Though an orphan of the rebellion, I feel no resentment against the Union soldier. The effect of my widowed mother’s tears has been to create in my mind a horror of all war. War makes widows and orphans on both sides —and these are all human beings. Religious and political views are of no moment in the presence of ’ human suffering. There the heart speaks. The heat of the hardest battle ever fought on American soil never so hardened the heart of a good soldier on either side but.that he would give up the last drop of water in his canteen to the dying soldier of the other side. Sword, shot and shell cannot sever the tie of brotherhood by which human hearts are bound to each other in times of suffering. i God never created men to butcher

each other. Christ came to earth to preach “peace on earth, good will to men.” The true honor of a nation is to be found only In deeds of justice and in the happiness of its people, all of which are inconsistent with war. Senator Plumb said of Grant that his greatest honor was that he, a soldier, opposed war. Sherman pronounced war a failure —and even the great warrior brigand Napoleon said, while in exile at St. Helena, that the more he studied the problem the more he became convinced of the inability of war to create any permanent good. Owing to the weakness of man, war sometimes seems a necessity—but that is no justification for its crimes and desolation. War is a terrible thing, -however you may consider it. * ♦ • Slavery was wrong—but more money was spent in the war than would have been required to purchase and liberate every slave in America—and the lives lost were of more value than all the gold and silver that was ever mined Judas betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver until America was mortgaged to Baron Rothschilds for gold. But let us grant that the war could not be avoided, that it was settled right and that all bitter feelings are now dead. There are still evils growing out of that war that affect us all to-day. There were men who did not respond to their country’s call —men who hired substitutes —and one of them is now president of the United States. I wish to read a prophecy of Abraham Lincoln. This letter was written to Uncle Danny Hanks, who was an early day partner of Lincoln in rail splitting in Rock creek township, Sangamon river bottoms, Macon county, Illinois, at the close of the war in 1864: Uncle Danny Hanks lived until September, 1890, and gave out this letter for publication. This letter was only one of a number Uncle Danny received from him during the war. This letter read: “I see in the near future a crisis approaching ttfat unnerves me, and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed. I feel at this momen* more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war.” 'You know how much of Lincoln’s prophecy has already come true. This is perhaps not a proper place for me to enter upon the discussion of a subject that is now agitating this country from center to circumference —the money question. Lincoln foresaw the struggle the country was approaching, and warned us. The circular which I shall now read is said to have been sent out to American bankers during the war by an agent of the Bank of England, and is known as the Hazard circular: “Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power, and chattel slavery destroyed. This, I and my friends are in favor of, for slavery is but the owning of labor, and carries with it the care of the laborer; while the European plan, led on by Bngland, is capital’s control of labor, by controlling wagon This can be deme By controlling the money. The great debt that capitaliebe WHI see to it ia made out of the war, aunt be need an a mmure to control the til i —mry. To aaeempliah gate te baada aaant be used as a baa Nag bants. Wt at bow waiting be gat the Baaaotaey es the Triwi—pj tn aaatce M mMMBdNM to chagMSß. it wia wt g» to Mtaw the >■ I üßiilßr,* os it fib «WBM, efrcirtdK ae WMgv aagr l«tgih et

for we cannot control them. But we can control the bonds, and through them the bank issue.” Whether this circular is genuine or hot Ido m>t;ktiow. But l'do’kndw, and you know, that an immense debt was made out of the war and that Wall street now controls the volume of money. You also know that this great debt was made after the war was over by issuing bonds and burning up the greenbacks—the money that fought the war. , Hon. Robert Toombs said: “When Pendleton got up his agitation in Ohio in 1867 and 1868 by declaring that the bonds ought'to be paid in greenbacks, because they were bought in greenbacks, the bondholders got frightened and said we must get rid of these greenbacks. They went to work and had their value destroyed —they demonetized them and got them out of the way by an adjudicatiori of the supreme court. Then the increasing production of the mines in this country came in to swell their fears, and so they determined that as their bonds said they were payable in coin, gold and silver, or its equivalent at the present standard value, they must get rid of silver.” John G. Carlisle, once the able champion of the people and an honest Democrat, in a speech in congress in 1878, denounced the conspiracy which, he said, seemed to have been formed here and in Europe, to destroy by legislation and otherwise from three-sevenths to one-half the metallic money of the world as the most gigantic crime of this or any other age. Said he: “The consummation of such a scheme would ultimately entail more misery upon the human race than all the wars, pestilences and famines that ever occurred in the history of the world.” Now, Carlisle is a gold-bug—but he has not yet succeeded in answering his own speeches. i . . ; • But here I go drifting off onto the money question. It is mighty hard to make a speech even to a Sunday school class nowadays without bringing up the story of the golden calf. I take it as a good sign that the people are waking up, thinking and j>reparing to throw off the yoke of an English financial system in America. The agitation of the money question is to-day as bitterly sectional as the slavery question in 1860. It is Wall street against the rich Mississippi valley, the glorious wide West and the Sunny South —gold gamblers against a nation of seventy million useful people. The East threatens to secede. Well, turn about is. fair play—the South will save the Union this time — but not with sword and gun. We will shell the plutocrats from the American fortress of Liberty—the ballot box. There is work for tfie young men of to-day—yea, and fighting, but not with firearms, let us hope—as great as any work our forefathers have done. There are problems as grave confronting us as confronted our forefathers. This is a government of the people, and the people are responsible. Every one of you here present is responsible for his part of the government, and it is cowardice and treason that refuses to-day to uphold every principle of the Declaration of Independence. Such people as we here assembled constitute the United States of America, and our actions help decide the destiny of a great nation. It is the personal duty of each one of us to see that his part in this grand people’s government is' the part of an honest, intelligent, progressive manhood. Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln were great—because they represented great principles. The principles are greater than the men, because they live forever, and are eternally right. Truth and justice are greater than statesmen, kings or countries. And government for the people now on earth is the noblest study of mankind. Let me close with a quotation from Abraham Lincoln’s speech at the dedication of Gettysburg: “In a larger sense we cannot dedicate —we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gpve the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall npt perish from the earth.” 0 North! O South! O East! 0 West! i Away with jealousy, suspicion, hate! I Joint heritors are ye of one estate, ■ Forevermore to hold— Ample and broad, so fill'd with bread ; and meat, The recompense of honest toil, That ye might weh*me all the world to eat. * • « L®t Che dead past, and all its curse and acorn, Be bertod, with no renurrectloo mom! Stand forth, O land, in Ktoty aad ■sight, Levine the true, and vnlerow far the Dnwn to €te* aarstwalng depths be tovTd ■4® IBto by GM aMtonrid, AM stoats, Aton veer fanfll a Utantog toffito werM— W tote* ’