The Seattle post-intelligencer. [volume] (Seattle, Wash. Terr. [Wash.]) 1888-1914, 1892-05-30

soldier ought not to be forgotten when
Memorial day with its dirges, its flowers
and its tender speech again makes its
appeal to the sensbilities of every good
citizen.
This reflection is enough to make every
thoughtful citizen go once a year and
teach his growing children that he has
flowers and obeisance for those who gave
up love and wife and lands and life for a
cause. The people ought to be manly end
thoughtful enough to stand up once
year in the presence of those Union
graves and be counted as still for that
Union forever and forever. The dead
soldiers fight was not for a cornfeld, but
for a country; not for family, but for the
veal of millions yet to be. The fight was
for the nation, and, therefore. the people
should stand uncovered on Memorial day
before the dead soldiers grave, for patri-
otto memories are the real strength of a
nation. Men and women, who refuse to
laugh or sneer at sacrifice for ideas. are in
peace or war the very life, the salt, the
stamina of the state.
OF the great army of farmers and traders
and craftsmen that went to war from 1861
to 1865. not only the living but the dead
are with us; the dead that make Virginia
sacred soil to US, not simply because the
grave of Washington is there, for Virginia
is sanctified because saturated by the
blood and fertilized by the bones of thou
sands of our sons who have become the
phosphates of Virginia's fields, where the
green corn of spring is now breaking and
the wild flowers waving in tender bloom
from the commingled dust of the heroic
children of every Northern state.
This year the long, pealing dirges of
Memorial day will sound to all our ears
as though touched with more than their
wonted note of woe. for our little army of
veterans shows gaps that are fearful men,
cries; the little army dwindles, but the
the roll of the dead on the field of
honor is always growing and never dies.
The dead of the war have their imperisLable
monument in the work they died to
achieve. The coral insect tolls till its
slowly accommodating pile rises reef above
the water, and then dies. Moses, who
only came In sight of the Promised Land,
was grander character than any who en-
tered into its joys, and so the workers
who died with their harness on without
recognition are immortal because of the
eternal nobility of their work.
And yet to men of fifty years of age, to
whom memorial day brings back thrilling
memories of thirty years ago when young
mothers beckoned their husbands back
with their babies while they cried forward
and farewell with their lips, the thought
that obscures this occasion Is that our
bravest and our best are
Tho voiceless. who have known
The cross, but not the crown of glory"
They never lived to swell the jubilee of
the restored Union; they "died for me
and you" without knowing whether we
were victors or vanquished ere the thick
fog of rebellion had fairly lifted before the
searching, dissipating, pervasive sunlight
Of courageous and patriotic nation
reused to the full exercise of its vast re-
sources of light and heat.
When an nation is not decent enough to
pay some degree of pious respect to the
memory of patriot dead the fibre of our
national manhood will be rotten beyond
redemption. Not all the art of Italy;
not all the culture of the schools; not all
the wealth and wiles of Wall street will
save a nation that has no sentiment Of re-
spect for those who died in defense of a
great free state with all those inestimable
blessings that a free state implies.
OF what avail is plow or sail,
Or land or lie. if freedom fail