The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1896-09-03
A GREAT DAY.

spectators were there to welcome them.
st. Paul weather was on it's good be-
havior, and the menace of the early
morning yielded to a cool cloudiness
that made it an ideal day for march
ing. Down the great avenue and be-
tween the triumphal pillars came the
seemingly endless ranks Of the sur
vivors of the struggle that marks the
second crisis of our existence.
Everywhere there was such a recep-
ton as stirred the very soul Of the
most careless onlooker, and moved to
deep feeling and even to tears these
rugged relics of many a fierce and
bloody field. Children strewed flowers
in their path, emblematic Of the beau
ty and sweetness of patriotic self-sac-
rifice. Two thousand other children,
formed into the semblance of a ma
tional flag and constituting one of the
most unique and inspiring spectacles
possible to imagine, sent up from
childish threats the old war songs, and
gray heads were barred as the moving
column passed the splendid spectacle.
Everywhere youth and innocence were
made the symbol of all that these men
struggled and suffered to preserve; ev-
erywhere the contrast between the
fresh fruits Of what they won for us
and their own lives, passing so swiftly
into the sere and yellow leaf, was en-
phasized.
Nor was the earnestness of the day
confined to those who participated ac-
lively in it's celebration. 1t was a
privilege and a lesson in patriotism to
move about the streets while the great
procession passed. to see the moisture
rise to eyes that are wont to know
only the keen vision Of the business
chance; to see how all minor and
meaner thoughts were sunk for the
time in the great wave of feeling that
swept over this community as it re-
called the daring, the valor, the suffer-
ing and the victory of the days gone
by. This will be the greatest success
Of a day of which we all feel proud;
if from it we may date a new rever-
ence for our country; new sense of
duty owed to her; a new realization Of
our common destiny; a new devotion
to the unity, the glory and perpetuity
of the republic; new dawning in our
own hearts of the noble sentiment put
into words of beauty long ago: 'Dulce
ct decorum est, pro patria mori''
THE PRICE THEY PAID.
1t was a heavy price those men paid
who marched in the grand parade #
veterans down Sixth street yestel day
for the right to be there We are &C
customed to think of that price as
one measured by hardships, wounds,
health permanently impaired and lives
shortened by the strain and stress of
the service. These, indeed, were fac
tors in the total cost, but they are not
ALL hardly the greatest. Young men
nowadays, in the struggles Of our in
dustrial life, overwork and break
down and fall out of the ranks, be-
come prematurely old, or sacrifice
health to the demands of business and
their ambition to keep at the head
But these are serving themselves, and
the recompense is the stimulus and the
end, while they served their country
without recompense or thought of it,
for no one regarded then, nor would
regard now the pittance of pay re-
ceived in deprecated money as being
compensation for the services rendered.
To measure all the factors of the
price they paid, one of this generation
must think what it would mean to the
young men, the youth of today, should
they leave their occupations and give
three or four years to work that was
temporary, to be abandoned when ac-
compliShed, and the life Of the civilian
resumed. What are the average bows
of eighteen now doing? They are in
schools, colleges, in offices working
their way up into business life, in the
shops, learning the trades that are to
be their life work. More than that they
are at the age when character is de-
Veloplng and forming, and when what
the future man will be is being rapidly
made. That is where these men were
thirty-fve years ago. Their enlistment
meant the abandonment for an indef-
mite term of all their pursuits. If thew
were students it meant the permanent
suspension of their studies, the stop
page of the education of the schools.
for the period of such drill had passed
when they laid down the musket.
DOTTED the blue and resumed the civil.
ian's garb. To thousands and thou
sands of them it meant a return to
the work of civil life with educations
incomplete and with the necessity of
getting into harness and working for
a livelihood pressing sharply on them.
They came back to the vocations of
peace, obliged to enter them with
the loss of the three or four years that
the youth of our day are giving to
preparation.
The young men from the farm and
the shops shared the sacrifices of the
students. They, too, had to enter the
industrial army without the instruc-
ton that would have been gained in
the years that they We're in the army.
They had to begin where they had left
off, continuing an apprenticeship at an
age when they should have been mas
tiers of their calling, and going to the