Middlebury register. (Middlebury, Vt.) 1886-1937, 1906-06-22
MEMORIAL DAY ADDRESS
Delivered at Ripton by Charles s.
Dana.


A. r., Ladies and Gentlemen:-I am
pleased to greet the people of Ripton
on this occasion. Most of you are strangers
to me as only once before have | visited
your mountain home, but l wish to con-
graduate you upon your good roads
your bracing mountain air, your pure
water and your picturesque scenery.
We have met today to decorate the
graves of those brave men who died IN
defence of their country.
The annual Memorial Day is fading
more and more into an historical re-
membrance. Years melt mourning into
a memory. The brass hands and waver-
ing procession with weakening steps in
the city streets, the fife and drum pre-
ceding the struggling veterans in the
village bypaths are gazed at by new
generation recently grown to manhood.
To those who think of the story of war
it is simply shaped into chapter in his
tory.
The hurry burly of a busy life has
the turmoil and contention of the by gone
years. Nature as well as man mods into
forgetfulness. The fields furrowed with
cannon balls time has smoothed into
meadows and the yellow coverlet of the
harvest is drawn over the graves of the
dead 1t is human to turn our eyes up
ward not downward, forward not back.
The past is shadow, the future
promise Yet is it not well sometimes
on such a day to step out of the swift
current that sweeping by carries the
gaudy yacht and the broken wreck alike
out TO sea? Is it not well for us so apt
to forget without some such reminder.
to pause and remember how much was
done and won by those who 40 years
ago builded better than they knew.
Their scanty ranks grow thinner
year by year and those who
wore the gilt and the blue are donning
not the confederate but the inevitable
gray. Verify Memorial day streaked
with shadow and sunshine is the declara-
ton day of new era. In its hand the
blood stained flowers of many a battle
field are gathered into one chaplet to
garland the monument of saved civili-
ZatiOn
The civil war was a great war of
righteousness. moreover this was one of
those contests in which it was to the
interest of the vanquished that they
should lose while at the same time the
victors acquired the precious privilege
OF transmitting to those who came after
them as a heritage of honor forever not
only the memory of their own valiant
deeds, but the memory of the deeds
of those who no less valiantly and with
equal sincerity of purpose fought against
the stars in their courses. The men who
went into the army had to submit to
discipline, had to submit to restraint
thrOu gh the government of the leaders
they had chosen as the price of winning.
So we the people can preserve cur
liberty and our greatness in time of
peace only by ourselves exercising the
virtue of honesty, of self restraint and
of fair dealing between man and man.
1t was because you men of the Grand
Army both knew how to use liberty
temporarily and how to defend it at
need, that we and our children and our
children's children shall hold you in
honor forever.
Among the great captains of the Civil
war who won renown on both sides and
there were many, the three great Union
Generals who will go down in history
as having caused the downfall of the
Confederacy, were that intrepid cavalry
leader who swept all before him in the
valley of the Shenandoah, who rode
from Winchester twenty miles away anC
snatched victory from defeat at Cedar
Creek, that invincible Celt, PHILIP
Sheridan, andithat grizzled and battle
scared veteran who broke the backbon,
of the south by his famous march from
Atlanta to the sea, William Tecumsel
Sherman, and then there was the silen
man on horseback, the greatest genera
of the Anglo Saxon race of whom Ros
coe Conkling said, "And when asked
what state he halls from our sole repl,
shall be that he halls from Appomatol
with its famous appletree," LieutenaL
Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Of the presi
dents elected since the war, Grant
Hayes. Garfield Harrison and McKinle.
We're Union soldiers while Roosevelt
served in the war with Spain. No natiol
ever treated its defenders as LIBERAL,
AS ours and it is well our pension ro
amounts to $40 ,000, 900 year. An,
do we realize the many blessings an
privileges which we of this presen
generation in this free land enjoy? An
do you realize that Notwithstanding GU
many great statesmen of the past, tina
we have in the White House at Wash
Ington at the present time, a man VIII