TOPICAL READING.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9991, 10 March 1910, Page 4

TOPICAL READING.

NORTH AND SOUTH. It is"over forty years since the American Civil War, but the fires of that great struggle still burn fiercely in some'quarters. The State of Virginia recently selected the late General Lee, the famous Confederate leader, to stand as her representative beside George Washington in the Statuary Hall in the Capitol at Washington. A gathering at Chicago of veterans of the grand Army of the Republic passed a resolution condemning the acceptance of the statue. ' Tut Lee in the hall and they will put blood on the hands of Abraham Lincoln," said one speaker. "Was it not enough when the Daughters of the Confederacy a short time ago unveiled a monument to memorialise the vileßt murderer in the Western world? Wirz, the beeper of the living hell; Liberty's temple; the House of Lee, the memorial abode of Jeffer son Davis, These three—Davis, Lee, Wirz—Treason's triumvirate!" Fortunately the people who hold such views are insignificant in numbers and influence. The Southern Press rebukes this "waving of the bloody shirt," and deplores such "hysterical objections" to the placing of Lee's statue where it will "typify Virginia's return to the national allegiance." One paper remarks that "it is pitiful, discouraging, to know that after the lapse of nearly half a century the name of the most heroic, knighliest, kindest, gentlest of gentlemen, the world's greatest soldier, the flower of a lofty civilisation, should provoke men anywhere to outbursts [of prejudice and unforgiving hate " The Northern Press shows that so tar as journalists are concerned, at any rate, time has healed the wounds of the war. "The country will know the memory of General Lee aa a man of pure faith and courage," says a New York newspaper. "Hi.* statue may weH stand in the Capitol as a symbol of our reunited nation, which is healing its wounds in a spirit of mutual forgiveness and love." In a few years, no, doubt, there will be , ?:o trace uf the oIJ bitterness betweei the North and'the b'outK 1 .. J i