“Besides all that, we are living in new times, under different conditions from those that existed before the war. It used to be said that in Texas it was taking an unfair advantage of any man to inquire into his life before his migration to that State. If he had conducted himself well since his arrival there, he was entitled to all his reserves with regard to his previous course of life in some other part of the country. Now a like sentiment has grown strong in the South since this war broke out. I don’t mean to suggest that we have lowered our standards of honourable conduct in the least, for we have not done so. But we have revised our judgments as to what constitutes worth. The old class distinctions of birth and heritage have given place to new tests of present conduct. There are companies by the score in this army whose officers, elected by their men, were before the war persons of much lower social position than that of a majority of their own men. In any peacetime organisation these officers could never have hoped for election to office of any kind; but they are fighters and men of capacity; they know how to do the work of war well, and, under our new and sounder standards of fitness, the men in the ranks have put aside old social distinctions and elected to command them the men fittest to command. The same principle prevails higher up. One distinguished major-general in the Confederate service was a nobody before the war; another was far worse; he was a negro trader who before the war would not have been admitted, even as a merely tolerated guest, into the houses of the gentlemen who are to-day glad to serve as officers and enlisted men under his command. Still another was an ignorant Irish labourer who did work for day’s wages in the employ of some of the men to whom he now gives orders, and from whom he expects and receives willing obedience. I tell you, Kilgariff, a revolution has been wrought in this Southern land of ours, and the results of that revolution will permanently endure, whatever the military or political outcome of the war may be. In your case there is no need to cite these precedents, except to show you that the old quixotism—it was a good old quixotism in its way; it did a world of good, together with a very little of evil—is completely gone. There is no earthly reason, Kilgariff, why you should not render a higher and better service to the Confederacy than that which you are now rendering. There is no reason—”