138. Let us Drink to the Living and the Dead

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The soldiers of the Union saved the South as well as the North. They made us a Nation. Their victory made us free and rendered tyranny in every other land as insecure as snow upon volcano lips. And now let us drink to the volunteers, to those who sleep in unknown, sunken graves, whose names are only in the hearts of those they loved and left—of those who only hear in happy dreams the footsteps of return. Let us drink to those who died where lipless famine mocked at want—to all the maimed whose scars give modesty a tongue, to all who dared and gave to chance the care and keeping of their lives—to all the living and all the dead—to Sherman, to Sheridan and to Grant, the foremost soldiers of the world; and last, to Lincoln, whose loving life, like a bow of peace, spans and arches all the clouds of war.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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