CARICATURING THE GREAT

As it is proverbially impossible for persons of similar nationality to estimate the position in history of one of their great national figures, it is interesting to hear the opinion of Major General Sir Frederick Maurice, of England, on Robert E. Lee.

Stripped of its generalities and particulars culled from history books, General Maurice's lecture consists of very little that will further the cause of historical research. He seems to have read up on his subject with commendable thoroughness, and to have added to the material thereby acquired the original conjectures of a mediocre mind; but unfortunately the total result is neither stimulating nor invaluable.

After running over the main points of Lee's career, General Maurice observes, "The Lee that I see was an essentially simple-minded man with a keen sense of duty and a perfect trust in God's providence. His nature was not such as to make him eager to investigate the complexities of involved political questions, and his military training was calculated to give him a strange distaste for such investigations." A caricature more libelous could hardly be conceived. To call Lee a simple-minded man is as unjust as in these days of Modernism to suggest that he had a perfect trust in God's providence.

Lee was not simple-minded; he was one of the greatest brains produced in the Civil War, ruled by a rigid integrity. His preliminary internal struggle on the question of loyalty to his state as against loyalty to the Union was decided not by a puritanical conception of duty, as General Maurice would have one believe, but by the dictates of a high sense of personal honor. He must have realized that the life of the nation was jeopardized by the Southern secession, but when Virginia called him, he felt that he could not give his allegiance elsewhere. There is no grander picture in history than that of Lee, his mind with the North and his soul with the South, aligning himself with the stars and bars of the Confederacy.