FREDERIC WILLIAM FARRAR

ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT

[Address by the Very Reverend Frederic William Farrar, Dean of Canterbury since 1895 (born in Bombay, British India, August 7, 1831;

−), delivered in Westminster Abbey, London, August 4, 1885, at the hour when funeral services in honor of General Grant were being held simultaneously in America and England.]

Eight years have not passed since the Dean of Westminster, whom Americans so much loved and honored, was walking round this Abbey with General Grant, and explaining to him its wealth of great memorials. Neither of them had attained the alloted span of human life, and for both we might have hoped that many years would elapse before they went down to the grave, full of years and honors. But this is already the fourth summer since the Dean fell asleep, and to-day we are assembled at the obsequies of the great soldier whose sun has gone down while it yet was day, and at whose funeral service in America tens of thousands are assembled at this moment to mourn with his widow, family, and friends.

Yes; life at the best is but as a vapor that passeth away. The glories of our birth and state are shadows, not substantial things. But when death comes, what nobler epitaph can any man have than this, that, having served his generation, by the will of God he fell asleep? Little can the living do for the dead. The pomps and ceremonies of earthly grandeur have lost their significance, but when our soul shall leave its dwelling, the story of one fair and virtuous action is above all the escutcheons on our tombs or silken banners over us. I would desire to speak simply and directly, and, if with generous appreciation, yet

with no idle flattery, of him whose death has made a nation mourn. His private life, the faults and failings of his character, whatever they may have been, belong in no sense to the world. They are for the judgment of God, whose merciful forgiveness is necessary for the best of what we do and are. We touch only on his public actions and services, the record of his strength, his magnanimity, his self-control, his generous deeds. His life falls into four marked divisions, of which each has its own lessons for us. He touched on them himself in part when he said: "Bury me at West Point, where I was trained as a youth; or in Illinois, which gave me my first commission; or in New York, which sympathized with me in my misfortunes."

His wish has been respected, and on the cliff overhanging the Hudson, his monument will stand, to recall to the memory of future generations those dark days of a nation's history which he did so much to close. First came the early years of growth and training, of poverty and obscurity, of struggle and self-denial. Poor and humbly

born, he had to make his own way in the world. God's unseen providence, which men nickname chance, directed his boyhood. A cadetship was given him at the Military Academy of West Point, and after a brief period of service in the Mexican War, in which he was three times mentioned in despatches, seeing no opening for a soldier in what seemed likely to be days of unbroken peace, he settled down to a humble life in a provincial town.

Citizens of St. Louis will remember the rough backwoodsman who sold cord-wood from door to door, and who afterward became a leather-seller in the obscure town of Galena. Those who knew him in those days have said that if any one had predicted that the silent, unprosperous, unambitious man, whose chief aim was to get a plank road from his shop to the railway depot, would become twice President of the United States, and one of the foremost men of his day, the prophecy would have seemed extravagantly ridiculous. But such careers are the glory of the American continent. They show that the people have a sovereign insight into intrinsic force. If Rome told with pride how her dictators came from the plough-tail, America, too, may record the answer of the

President who, on being asked what would be his coat of arms, answered, proudly mindful of his early struggles, "A pair of shirt-sleeves." The answer showed a noble sense of the dignity of labor, the noble superiority to the vanities of feudalism, a strong conviction that men are to be honored simply as men, and not for the prizes of birth and accident, which are without them. You have of late years had two martyr Presidents, both men sons of the people. One was the homely man, who at the age of seven was a farm lad, at seventeen a rail-splitter, at twenty a boatman on the Mississippi, and who in manhood proved to be one of the most honest and God-fearing of modern rulers. The other grew up from a shoeless child in a loghut on the prairies, round which the wolves prowled in the winter snow, to be a humble teacher in Hiram Institute. With these Presidents America need not blush to name also the leather-seller of Galena. Every true man derived

his patent of nobleness direct from God.

Did not God choose David from the sheepfold, from following the ewes great with young ones, to make him the ruler of his people Israel? Was not the Lord of Life and all the worlds for thirty years a carpenter at Nazareth? Do not such things illustrate the prophecy of Solomon: "Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men."

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When Abraham Lincoln sat, book in hand, day after day, under the tree, moving round it as the shadow crossed, absorbed in mastering his task; when James Garfield rang the bell at Hiram Institute on the very stroke of the hour, and swept the schoolroom as faithfully as he mastered his Greek lesson; when Ulysses Grant, sent with his team to meet some men who came to load his cart with logs, and, finding no men, loaded the cart with his own boy's strength, they showed in the conscientious performance of duty the qualities which were to raise them to become kings of men. When John Adams was told that his son, John Quincy Adams, had been elected President of the United States, he said: "He has always been laborious, child and man, from infancy."

But the youth was not destined to die in the deep valley of obscurity and toil, in which it is the lot-and perhaps

the happy lot of most of us to spend our little lives. The hour came; the man was needed. In 1861 there broke out that most terrible war of modern days. Grant received a commission as Colonel of Volunteers, and in four years the struggling toiler had been raised to the chief command of a vaster army than has ever been handled by any mortal man. Who could have imagined that four years would make that enormous difference? But it is often so. The great men needed for some tremendous crisis have stepped often, as it were, out of a door in the wall which no man had noticed; and, unannounced, unheralded, without prestige, have made their way silently and single-handed to the front. And there was no luck in it. It was a work of inflexible faithfulness, of indomitable resolution, of sleepless energy, and iron purpose and tenacity. In the campaigns at Fort Donelson; in the desperate battle at Shiloh; in the siege of Corinth; in battle after battle, in siege after siege; whatever Grant had to do, he did it with his might. Other generals might fail-he would not fail. He showed what a man could do whose will was strong. He undertook, as General Sherman said of him, what no one else would have ventured, and his very soldiers began to reflect something of his indomitable determination.

His sayings revealed the man. "I have nothing to do with opinions," he said at the outset, "and shall only deal with armed rebellion." "In riding over the field, he said at Shiloh, "I saw that either side was ready to give way, if the other showed a bold front. I took the opportunity, and ordered an advance along the whole line." "No terms," he wrote to General Buckner at Fort Donelson (and it is pleasant to know that General Buckner stood as a warm friend beside his dying bed); no terms other than unconditional surrender can be accepted. " "My headquarters," he wrote from Vicksburg, "will be on the field. With a military genius which embraced the vastest plans while attending to the smallest details, he defeated, one after another, every great general of the Confederates, except Stonewall Jackson. The Southerners felt that he held them as in the grasp of a vise; that this man could neither be arrested nor avoided. For all this he has been severely blamed.

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He ought not to be blamed. He has been called a butcher, which is grossly unjust. He loved peace; he hated bloodshed; his heart was generous and kind. His orders were to save lives, to save treasure, but at all costs to save his country-and he did save his country. His army cheerfully accepted the sacrifice, wrote its farewells, buckled its belts, and stood ready.

The struggle was not for victory; it was for existence. It was not for glory; it was for life and death. Grant had not only to defeat armies, but to annihilate their forces; to leave no choice but destruction or submission. He saw that the brief ravage of the hurricane is infinitely less ruinous than the interminable malignity of the pestilence, and in the colossal struggle, victory, swift, decisive, overwhelming, was the truest mercy.

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In silence and with determination, and with clearness of insight, he was like your Washington and our Wellington. He was like them also in this, that the word "cannot " did not exist in his soldier's dictionary, and what he achieved was achieved without bluster. In the hottest fury of all his battles, his speech was never known to be more than yea, yea," and "nay, nay." He met General Lee at Appomattox. He received his surrender with faultless delicacy. He immediately issued an order that the Confederates should be supplied with rations. Immediately his enemies surrendered, he gave them terms as simple and as generous as a brother could have given themterms which healed differences; terms of which they freely acknowledged the magnanimity. Not even entering the capital, avoiding all ostentation, unelated by triumph, as unruffled by adversity, he hurried back to stop recruits and to curtail the vast expenses of the country. After the surrender at Appomattox Court-House, the war was over. He had put his hand to the plow and had looked not back. He had made blow after blow, each following where the last had struck; he had wielded like a hammer the gigantic forces at his disposal, and had smitten opposition into the dust. It was a mighty work, and he had done it well. Surely history has shown that for the future destinies of a mighty nation it was a necessary and blessed work! The Church utters her most indignant anathema at an unrighteous war, but she has never refused to honor the