50 the generals of ' Napoleon. [Cheers.] No general under heaven can accomplish anything if, in addition to the enemy in front, he has also to fight against an army of detractors and advisers in his rear. [Prolonged applause.] If he is incompetent, take the responsibility and remove him ; but while he is in command let him command. We can raise the three hundred thousand men ; but if the spirit of meddlesome interference at Washington, controlling the operations of generals in the field, does not meet the contempt it deserves in the indignant rebuke of our whole people, then our energies will be wasted again, and in the fullness of national calamity we will be left but to lament over the madness and folly of our temporary rulers. [Loud applause.] Three cheers were given for Judge DALY. SPEECH OF HON. DAVID S. CODDINGTON. Hon. D. S. CODDINGTON was the next speaker. He was greeted with applause, and said : FELLOW-CITIZENS, In this hour of alienation, tumult, and disaster, no man, however humble, has a right to sit still when the nation has sprung to its feet, and the Union lies bleeding upon its back. [Cheers.] We have come here in the darkest hour of National existence to declare before the world that the unity and nationality of America shall Hot be dissolved, either in the swamps of the Chickahominy or the Council Chambers of Paris or London. [Great applause.] We are all, under moral martial law, now bound to obey every draft upon the brain, the heart, the purse, and the life, to serve a Government, whose authority has dropped upon us with the gentleness of a flower, and yet shielded us with the strength of a giant. We may have our weaknesses, and these weaknesses may serve to point an English sneer, or round a Southern taunt ; but they never yet have succeeded in vitiating the grander points of our National character, neither have they, for one moment, obstructed the beneficent action of our hitherto unassailable institutions. [Cheers.] If secession is right, then all order, all regulated society, is wrong. If secession cannot be put down without war, then war is the highest duty and best business of the American citizen more profitable than merchandise, more beautiful than poetry, and, for the time being, as sacred as the ministry itself. True, we may fail sometimes ; so do all business and sciences until experience teaches them. By degrees we shall learn the art of blood, and mayhap the foe will find the Yankee shop-boy an efficient chronic portable slaughter-house. So far we have fought half tiger and half brother. No half man accomplishes much. We must be all tiger now, that we may be all brothers by and by. [Laughter and applause.] If fevers and blunders have wasted the strength and tampered with the glory of our armies, the beautiful enthusiasm of this day's proceedings illustrates how heartily and abundantly we try to redeem our errors and relieve our heroes. Was it not a sublime spectacle to see the President of the United States pouring the balm of his sympathizing Presidential
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