Excerpt from Gettysburg Peace Memorial: Hearing Before the Committee on the Library, House of Representatives Sixty-Third Congress Second Session on H. R. 11112, a Bill to Erect a Memorial on the Gettysburg Battle Field to Commemorate the Fiftieth Anniversary of That Battle, February 18, 1914

That was, taken altogether, the most wonderful meeting that the world has ever seen. We are here, as the representatives of those veterans, to ask the Government to build a monument to commemo rate that gathering. Those old gray - haired men knew, and they felt in their hearts, as they recalled the past and looked forward into the bright future that awaits their descendants, what that meeting meant. If you can be made to visualize all this as they did, I am sure you will report in favor of authorizing that monument, and that, when Congress comes to consider it, the Congress will say, as posterity will say, that that monument stands for far and away more than any memorial Congress has ever appropriated for, save and excepting only the monuments to George Washington and Abra ham Lincoln; and of these two monuments this will be the comple ment. The Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial leave the story of the formation of a perfect Union only two-thirds told. If we are to complete that story in stone the monument we ask for must be built. It is as essential as the other two. The three taken together will tell the tale to our posterity.

George Washington presided over the convention that framed our Constitution. He dreamed of and wrought for an everlasting Union of 13 coequal States, then composed of of people. He died full Of hope, but left his people wrangling over the question as to whether in the last resort the power of a State or the power of the Federal Government was supreme. Abraham Lincoln 'found 31 States and of people at war over that same question. He dreamed of and labored for his plan for bringing those States back into a peaceful and happy Union of coequal States; but President Lincoln unfortunately died when his plans were only half completed, and this delayed them for many years.

The meeting of the veterans Of the two armies that had fought out the issue that was pending when George Washington died and when Abraham Lincoln died - that gathering at Gettysburg in July, 1913 was a token, and it was the final and conclusive proof that what the monument to Washington and the monument to Lincoln both, more than all else, stood for - a perpetual Union of happy and con tented coequal States - had at last been realized. Those veterans at Gettysburg last summer went there because ours was now such a Union and it had now grown into a Union of 48 coequal States, com posed Of of people, not one of whom would have it other wise. All the clouds that had lowered over the house of those assem bled veterans and over the homes of their ancestors had been in the deep bosom of the ocean buried, and, our people united now forever.

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