LEST WE FORGET

Tomorrow marks the recurrence of that day which we have set aside for fifty years in memory of our gallant dead. The whole people with universal remembrance pays honor in its utmost to those who so freely died that their nation might remain unbound and undivided. They made the last dark sacrifice of life that this generation, and generations whose immensity we may not know, might enjoy the liberty and the strength of the great republic they had loved.

This day of tribute is not a sectional day. Those who lost no less than those who won are honored for their bravery, and the oblivion of self with which they defended the cause which they believed just to the very annihilation of self. Like good Americans they fought for the right as it was given to them to see the right. The bravest and the wisest man can do no more.

On this day in every cemetery from Arlington and Gettysburg, where those who died in battle lie now in state, to the obscure graves in Missouri and Kansas, where after battle men were buried as they fell, the crossed flags of a united nation float in remembrance of their sacrifice. The roses of victory and the lilies of defeat are indistinguishable in the strength of a common tradition, for where brave men meet, there all is victory.

In the Spanish war, thirty years after Appopatomax, the South gave of her strongest and her best for the union from which, but for the course of war, she would have severed. That marked the end of the last sectional distrust, and the full unity of a single Americanism.

It is enough to make those young men who now are entering into the inheritance of tradition and power which great men have built and left, stand half abashed before their own arrogance and their own indifference to the past, remembering that all they enjoy of liberty and power has been earned by the blood of those who held liberty and power above the poor boon of existence. We cannot be untrue to those who have given so much. We cannot leave a lesser inheritance to the future than we have received from the past.

Let us honor fully the historic dead. We may know that other men in a later age will pay a like honor to us, if we prove worthy, and fulfill our destiny in a way not undeserving of remembrance.