Bisbee daily review., 1908-11-28
SPLENDID SCENES 1T THE
 UNWILLING IF HE PHIL SHERIDAN MONUMENT l

by the presence here today of you men of the Grand Army, you the comrades of the dead general, the men who served with and under him. In ali history we have no greater in stance of subordination of self, Of the exalting of a lofty focal over merely material well being among the peo- pie of a great nation, than was shown by our own people In the civil war.
 And you, the men who wore the blue, would be the first to say that this same lofty indifference to the things of the body, when compared to the things of the soul, was shown by your brothers who wore the gray. Dreadful was the suffering, dreadful the loss, of the civil war. Yet il stands alone among wars in this. thst. now that the wounds are healed, the memory of the mighty deeds of yaIor performed on one side no less than on the other has become the common heritage of all our people in every quarter of this cou8try. The com pleteness with whicE this Is true IS shown by what is occurring here to- day. We meet together to raise a monument to a great Union general, in the presence of many of the sur yivors of the Union army; and the secretary of war, the man at the head of the army, who, by virtue of his office, occupies special relation to the celebration, is himself man wnO fought in the Confederate service. Few indeed have been the countries where such conjunction would have been possible, and blessed indeed are we that in our own beloved land 1t IS not only possible, nut seems so en- tireIy natural as 70 excite no com. ment whatever.
 There is another point iB General Sheridan's career which it is good TOT all of us 10 remember. Whereas Grant, Sherman, and Thomas were of the old native American stock, the parents of Sheridan, like the parents of FarTagut. were born on the other side of the water. Any one of the five was just as much a type of the real American, of what is best in America, as the other four. We should keep steadily before our minds the fact that Americanism is a question of principle, of purpose, of idealism, of character; that 1t is not matter of birthplace, or creed, or line of descent. Here fin this country the representatives of many old-world races are being fused together into a new type the main features of which are already determined, ana were determined at the time of the revolutionary war; for the erucible m which all the new types are melted into one was shaped from 1776 to 17S9 and our nationality was definitely fix- ed in all it's essentials by the men of Washington's day. The strains wilt not continue to exist separately ln this country as in tic old world. They will be combined ial one; and Of this new type those man will best repre- sent what is IoftieSt in the nation past. what is finest in her hope TOT the future, who stand each solely on his worth as a man; who scorn to do evil to others, and rho refuse to sub init to wrongdoing themselves; who have in them no taint of weakness; who never fear to fight when fight ing is demanded by a sound and high morality, but who Eope by their lives to bring ever nearer the day when justice and peace shall prevail within our own borders and in our relations with all foreign powers.
 Much of the usefulness of any car eer must lie in the impress that 1t makes upon, and the lessons that it teaches to, the generations that come after We of this generation have our own problems to solve, and the condi- tion of our solving them is that we shall all work together as American citizens without regard to differences of section or creed or birthplace, copy ing not the divisions which so lament ably sundered our fathers one from another, but the spirit of burning de- votion to duty which drove them for ward, each to do the right as 1t was given him to see the right, in the great years when Grant, Farragut, Sherman, Thomas, and Sheridan, when Lee and Jackson, and the John stons, the valiant men of the north and the valiant men of the south, fought to finish the great civil war They did not themselves realize. tD the bitterness of the struggle, that the blood and the grim suffering marked the death throes of what was worn out. and the birth bangs of a new and more glorious national life Mighty is the heritage which we hare l received from tbe men of the mighty days We. in our turn. must gird up our loins to meet the new issues with | the same stern courage and resoiute adherence 10 an ifeal. which marked our fathers who belonged to the gen ! eration of the man in whose honor
 we commemorate tbis monument to- day.