Carson City daily appeal. [volume] (Carson City, Nev.) 1907-1930, 1915-04-30
Percy Shaw.
JOURNEYS OF LIBERTY BELL

This trip to the Pacific coast will be the ninth journey OF the DELL
since it W hung in the old state house hundred years ago. During
the revolutionary war it IA hurried away to Allentown, to preserve it
from the British captors of Philadelphia, but after its restoration it a
unmolested until 1885, when it vas sen to the New Orleans exposition
in the belief that this would help to alay the lingering feelings OF sec
honaHsm. The effect WI good, one interesting ceremony being homage
to the emblem of the Union by Jefferson Davis, sometime president OF n
Confederate states.
With this as a precedent, five other worlds fairs succeeded in get
ting the bell as a patriotic attracton-New Orleans in 1885, Chicago in
1893, Atlanta in 1895, Charleston in 1902 and ST Louis in 1904. 1t figured
also at the Bunker Hill celebration in Boston in 1908.
On each oil these occasions there were murmurs against sending the
ancient relic away from its safe and appropriate shrine, say the Phna-
delphia North American.
Whenever W e read that the emblem should be kept secluded amid
the appropriate surroundings OF its original home w e recall that the
stat house is situated in the fifth ward of Philadelphia.
We Ii upon the political history Of that section of the city, and
ar moved to wonder whether. ii the bell we're possessed of consciousness,
it would feel at home-whether it would be grathed to know that within
the shadow of Independence Hall the sacred principles of sef-sovernment
Tor years were made a hideous mockery; that there the debauchery OF
the ballot reached its infamous perfection and polticaly-protected crime
hourshed in purchased security.
Thus it is that We find it hard to believe that the bell would be IN
the remotest degree "cheapened' by a journey to other parts OF the
country, where the political air is purer and the conception OF public
affairs somewhat higher than in the neighborhood Of its historic resting
place.
If appropriateness is to be the test, we "a conceive of n o seen more
deserving of a visit from the bell than the great exposition now being
held n the Pacific coast. There is pre-emnent historic fitness in asso-
ciatng the birth OF the nation with the celebration of its greatest material
achievement, the completion OF the Panama canal
And let us Phladephians. the most fervidly patriotic of us, concede
Americans who inhabt the territory through which the bell will pass
the great middle west,t the eagles mes of the nation" and the splendid
states that lie among the mountains and beyond.
There are n o truer Anne ncans than the sons of the hardy pioneers
who tanned the westcrnw wilderness and who added its imperial domains to
the United States, despite the ignorance and sneers Of easern statesmen.
And their ancestors n 1esst than ours, were numbered among the patriots
who sprang to arms at the summons OF the bell one hundred and thirty
nine years ago.
Let u be proud that VIZ have such a relic to lend to our brethren
out there, and thankful that the American spirit is typihed by such a
object of reverence, rather than by captured cannon or brass helmets