Enduring Quality of Monument
It is a staggering thought that this vast monument will veritably outlast the ravages of time and
remain for centuries without end as a monument not alone to the soldiers of the Confederacyor to
the women of the South, but also to the achievements of the twentieth century. Geologists
estimate that this mountain erodes at the rate of one fourth of an inch in 1, 000 years! Think
what that means-this monuments will endure forever, or into another geologic age! Perhaps,
when all life has perished from the earth and the whirling planet enters a new phase, that
evidence of the imagination and handiwork of man of this century will carry into mute ages its
great story of the valor of the soldiers of the South. Or, as has been said by Mr. Randolph:
"Since remote antiquity mankind has strivento erect a monument which time could not
destroy, but never has the yearning been realized. Stonehenge is a jumble of granite slabs.
Those marvelous temples east of the Mediterranean whose black marble columns were
transported from the headwaters of the Nile are but mounds of debris. The Pyramids of
the Pharoahs are slowly crumbling. The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome
have faded and fallen."
But this monument cannot fall; it is part of the earth: it will be one of the last parts of earth to
crumble. The Parthenon is gone: the Colesium at Rome is only a mass of stones for tourists to
photograph: records, histories, and buildings decay even as even the Pyramids are decaying after
3, 000 years, but in this imperishable natural stone at its natural place on earth will be the
inscriptions that may comprise the Rosetta Stone for future ages.
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