The Daily state journal. [volume] (Alexandria, Va.) 1868-1874, 1872-05-11
SATURDAY EVEN'G, MAY IL, 1872.
AND the objection to General Grant on

this score four subjugation) would lie
against any other leading officer of the
Northern army, who contributed to our
defeat. Therefore, were Grant wholly I'M
Objectionable on every other point, the fact
that by supporting him we shall sacrifice
our own self-respect is fatal. We cannot
become whipped spaniels. The people of
the South are no mongrel ours, to kiss the
hand Of the master who has struck them
down, and who still holds the whip over
them.-Enquver. ..... .r.
As much as we admire the pluck of our
indomitable contemporary, we admire its
ill-humored logic and the way it yields the
redudio adj absuro,un, hundred times
more. Grant may be wholly unobjecton-
able on every other point, but the fact that
be contributed to the defeat of the Confed-
eracy--that he received the all.glorious
sword of General Lee at the surrender of
the Southern armies--is q reason why he
should receive no political support what
ever from the South. We confess that
our logic is graveled by this remarkably
brilliant sequent of the Enquirer. To us
its conclusion is an absolute non sequitW--
the sheerest piece of insequential stuff
ever put together in the shape of logic.
We could do better by chopping logic with
a meat-sxe. The very fact that General
Lee held the powerful Northern armies at
bay for so many months, with force APP
parently inadequate to accomplish such
result, is the reason why the Northern
people should cast all manner of reproach
upon him, and hold his memory in the least
possible regard! Not SO, as we measure
the value Of human greatness, or the
splepdor of human achievement. Not SO
did the conquered heroes of ancient times
regard the self-respect and selfassertion
of their own peoples. War, and the issues
on which it hung, brought out the grander
personal qualities of each individual man,
and favored the growth of self-respect in
the honor shown to genuine heroes,
whether they were found among the rough
Dorians or the more refined Achmans of
the Peloponnese. .. ... ... -
Heroic times bring out heroic virtues,
and the grandest of these virtues is shown
in the respect paid to heroic worth, whether
1t be Northern or Southern-whether dis
p aged in a lost cause, or one triumphantly
&C leived. We beg of our neighbor to
evince more general Pan-Hellenic feeling
AT the root of which shall lay, if not a
conviction of the identity of cause, at least
a conviction of the identity of race.
The idea that any recognition by the
South of the worth or virtues of General
Grant would tend to make us whipped
spaniels" in our own estimation,
or that of any other sensible man in Chris
tendon, is, to say the least Of it, supreme
" absurd and ridiculous. Had the Homerio
poems been written from such an unheroic
standpoint as this, how ineffably flat, and
unreleved of interest, would they have
fallen upon the heroic spirit of the ages
the very age indeed in which the
Enquirer lives and fourishes as
an institution Of the past. Give us that
heroic type of manhood which accepts
situations that are inevitable, and looks
up to superior leadership. not as an evil
dence of whipped-spanielism on our part,
but as measure Of our own heroic virtues
in the contrast made with those that over
topped them.