Off with the heads of Charles the First, Louis the Sixteenth and Robespierre!

I stood by the side of

GENERAL BEAUREGARD

on the 12th of April, 1861, at the city of Charleston, South Carolina, and heard him give the order to "fire" on the flag at Fort Sumter.

Slavery and "State Rights" threw down the gauntlet to Freedom and "National Rights!" A million of men were destroyed in the great American Rebellion, and after four years of the bloodiest civil war in history, the Stars and Stripes arose in all its glory at Appomattox, and fluttered again over the fort in Charleston Harbor, so nobly defended by the illustrious Major Anderson.

Alternate success and defeat came to the Union army and the Confederate forces. Bull Run, Donelson, Shiloh, Antietam, Stone River, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Spottsylvania, Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, and Gettysburg, are battle milestones of the Republic that shall never be forgotten so long as valor and manhood find a lodgment in the human heart.

Gettysburg is the mausoleum of the American Marathon and the Thermopyla of Liberty. The grandest heroes of the world died here.

"They fell, devoted, but undying;

The very gales their names seem sighing;
The waters murmur of their name;
The woods are peopled with their fame;

The silent pillars, lone and gray,
Claim kindred with their silent clay;
Their spirits wrap the dusky mountain,
Their memory sparkles o'er the fountain;
The meanest rill, the mightiest river

Rolls mingling with their fame forever!"

What soldier at Gettysburg will ever forget the terrible battles of the 1st, 2d and 3d of July, 1863, when

GENERAL MEAD AND GENERAL LEE,

with two hundred thousand Americans met in deadly conflict for the salvation or destruction of the Great Republic?

The vales and rills and rocks and hills for twenty miles around trembled with the onslaught of the contending hosts, and from Culp's Hill to Cemetery Heights and Round Top the smoke and blaze of the rifle and the cannon lit up the bloody scene with the concussion of an earthquake and volcano, and the climax charge of Pickett's Division punctured the bravest and most unavailing assault ever made by heroic soldiers; and although these warriors in "gray" were doomed to defeat by the defenders of the Union, they deserve a crown of unfading glory for imperishable American valor. Standing by the side of

PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN

on the heights of Gettysburg, on the 19th of November, 1863, I heard him deliver before a multitude

of people the following eloquent and philosophic address in dedicating the great National Cemetery:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have

come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that the nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

"But, 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 poor power to add or detract.

"The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have so far 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 gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; and 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 not perish from the earth."

I saw

GENERAL GRANT

at Appomattox on the 9th of April, 1865, I hear again these phrases of the silent soldier to General Lee:

"I am equally anxious for peace with yourself and the whole North entertains the same feeling. The terms upon which peace can be had are well understood. By the South laying down their arms they will hasten that most desirable event, save thousands of human lives, and hundreds of millions of property not yet destroyed."

"The officers to give their individual paroles not to take up arms against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged, and each company or regimental commander sign a like parole for the men of their commands.

"The surrender of all munitions of war will not embrace the side arms of the officers, nor their private horses or baggage. Each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by the United States authorities so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside."

Still marching onward in my mission of my love for freedom and keeping close and quick step to the music of the Great Republic, I rose again in soul, heart and pride, as I stood on the deck of the Olympia, fronting Manila and the Spanish navy, and heard the great

ADMIRAL GEORGE DEWEY

say: "When you are ready, fire, Gridley!"

In an hour the royal navy of Spain was at the bottom of the sea, and over the citadel of Manila waved the Stars and Stripes, a hope and a blessing to the Philippine Islands.

I stood on the turrets of Morro Castle, Havana, as the devilish Weyler sailed away from the beautiful "Queen of the Antilles," and wondered that the cruel, infernal, tyrannical wretch was not ignominiously slaughtered by some of the victims of his starvation reign. A rattlesnake-cobra-tarantula human deformity!

It is not the plutocracy of wealth, or the aristocracy of learning, but the democracy of the heart that makes the world better and greater.

Selfishness, cupidity and greed lead to tyranny, and tyranny finally destroys itself.

Down with the villains who would enslave the people!

Dose them, quick, with leaden pills-
Only cure for tyrant ills!

And on the heights of San Juan I beheld the American troops, white and black, shoot the cruel Spaniard into defeat, and last, but not least, I stood on the prow of the Oregon and beheld the most destructive naval engagement of the century. "Santiago was a captains' fight," and, as Admiral Schley said: "There is glory enough for all." Schley, Sampson, Cook, Clarke, Evans, Taylor