Connecticut western news., 1902-06-05

Ing. Inlnk or the poverty W0lcn the young widow had to face, with four or five children at her back! Today We honor the dead soldiers who wore the blue and the gray. We ought also to honor the wives and mothers, the sweethearts and the sisters, who were willing to give those soldiers as sac rifce, as we'll as the heroes who were willing to die.
 To show what the women at home had to suffer want to read what is perhaps the saddest letter ever penned by mortal hand. It was written by Abraham Lincoln to humble woman who lived in Massachusetts. Many such letters could have been written to other women, north and south, who were called upon to suffer in the same way and perhaps to make equally great sacrifices:
 Dear Madam have been shown in the files of the war department a statement of the adJutant general of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously upon the field of bat tie. feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should at tempt to beguile you from loss so over whelming, but cannot refrain from ten
 
 found in the thanks of the republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement and leave you only the cher ished memory of the loved and the lost
 the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. Yours very sincerely and respectfully,
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
 But, though the noble women of the north and south may have suffered greatly, yet by their very sufferings God was able to heal the wounds, the bleeding wounds, of this nation. The breaking hearts of the north reached out toward the breaking hearts of the south, and they found that in their troubles they were sisters. Some of the bereft mothers had sons fighting in both armies. As such mother sat in her family plot between the two graves between the grave of her boy in blue and that of her boy in gray-she prayed that the past civil strife might be for ever buried. She pleaded with earnest prayer because her boys who died had come from the same cradle and had looked up into the eyes of the same mother.
 When Bunker monument was being dedicated, the crowd was so great that by the pressing and pushing panic was threatened. The presiding officer tried in vain to still the tumult. Then the orator of the day arose, and Daniel Webster's deep voice called out, Stand backw Some of the people cried, Ut is impossible to stand backr' Then Web ster's flashing eye swept over the null titude as he answered.: Don't use that word impossible in a place like this. Nothing Is impossible at Bunker hill." Some pessimists said that the bitter ness of the civil war would never end. But, as Daniel Webster said in, ref erence to Bunker hill, so nothing was impossible in the suffering presence of broken hearted American womanhood. Their common grlefs and sorrows for ever forbade men to revive the horrors of our civil strife.
 Our Conaecrated Homes. The dead of our American battle fields are intensely alive today because they have proved that the strength of this country is to be found in the multi tudes of It's consecrated homes and not in the size of it's standing armies. When the civil war broke out, there were not enrolled upon the muster of the war department more than 25,0OO men. The traveller could go up and down the length and breadth of the land without seeing an American soldier in uniform except in few forts built for protec- ton against the Indians and in places like Governors island and Fort Sum- ter. All Europe was shaking under the tramp of the martial hosts which were marshaled upon every frontier; yet in America there were not enough soldiers to make respectable looking national awkward squad. But no sooner did the bugle blast of war sound than the volunteers came from everywhere. They came from the pine woods of Maine and the Louisiana plantations, from among the California flowers and the Alabama cottonfields, from the Da- kota prairies and the Mississippi flat boats, from the Pennsylvania mines and the South Carolina tobacco fac tories. They came by the tens of thou sands. They came by the hundreds of | thousands. They came by the million. They came to prove for all time that for this country, at least, there Is no need of a great standing army.
 When war breaks out, a nation has to use the ships which it has constructed i in times of peace. It takes years to build floating fighting machine. But
 what have said is true in reference to a standing army. This country, which | iB a few months could produce well disciplined armies, as the army of the ! south and the army of the north, does | not need, save in times of war, to call | the keenest brains, the strongest arms and the brawniest bodies from the avo- cations of peace and have the nation i grooming under the weight of useless
 taxation. It does not need to have few | CT merchants, fewer schoolteacherS, fewer lawyers and ministers and me | chanics and farmers in order to have more privates and lieutenants and cap
 tains and majors and colonels and gen. erals If we have the right kind of
 homes, there will be officers and pri- yates ready to protect the country from
 foreign foe whenever they are needed.
 And what kind of fighting men did i these volunteers make? The very best | the world has ever seen! When the
 American civil war opened, the Euro
 pean monarchies looked upon 1t as a
 war of mobs. These foreign nations
 supposed it to be a disorganized mass
 But when the civil war was over and
 Count yon Moltke, the great German
 strategist, the general who brought to | a successful iSSuo tho Auctro- pruSaiap m
 war in 1866 and the Franco-German
 war of 1871, studied the campaign in
 the south he said: ''The American war
 was not collection of struggling pyg
 mics. It was war of giantsp' | Deeds of Herolsm.
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