Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/420

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN

I.—“A hundred miles broader than Pennsylvania. What are your revenues?”

He.—“About a million dollars, but it takes a good deal of that to pay the interest on the debt. What are the revenues of Pennsylvania?”

I.—“About twenty-five million dollars a year.”

He.—“What is your debt’?”

I.—“We have none.”

He.—“Great Gawd! twenty-five million dollars of revenue and no debt!”

At Americus, the nearest point to Andersonville upon the railroad, and about twelve miles distant, a crowd gathered in the town hall and a young lawyer named Robert E. Lee made an address of welcome, to which I replied. He had committed his speech to memory, and was much embarrassed, but it was couched in the best of tone and great kindliness.

At Andersonville were six hundred Pennsylvania soldiers, who had been imprisoned there during the war and who had been sent there by the state forty years afterward to take a last look at the place. It was a solemn occasion and the memories were all painful. In presenting the impressive memorial to the United States, I said:

Six hundred survivors of the war which ended forty years ago, the commander-in-chief of the National Guard of Pennsylvania and his military staff, the major general commanding that Guard and his three brigadier generals have come a distance of one thousand miles to dedicate a memorial. What is its significance? “What mean ye by these stones?” It is true of nations, as it is of men, that they may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things. But the pathway is ever attended by indescribable sufferings. During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army won but two great battles, and yet that war ended in success. Its spirit was typified, not by the victories at Saratoga and Yorktown, but by the sufferings at Valley Forge. The Dutch struggle for independence had but few victories, but it lasted eighty years and the power of Spain, then the mightiest of nations, was broken. Christianity, the most important influence in the development of man in the history of the world, is