heat. Here a bayonet thrust met him and brought him down, a great wound in his brave breast, but he did not yield; dropping to his knees, pressing his unbroken arm upon the gaping wound-bracing himself against a dead comrade the colors still flew; an inspiration to the men about him, a defiance to the foe. At last, when the shattered ranks fell back, sullenly and slowly retreating, it was seen by those who watched him that he was painfully working his way downward, still holding aloft the flag, bent evidently on saving it, and saving it as flag had rarely if ever been saved before. Now and then he paused at some impediment; it was where the dead and dying were piled so thickly as to compel him to make a detour. Now and then he rested a moment, to press his arm tighter against his torn and open breast. Slowly, painfully, he dragged himself onward-step by step down the hill, inch by inch across the ground-to the door of the hospital; and then, while dying eyes brightened, while dying men held back their souls from the eternities to cheer him, gasped out: "I did-but do--my duty, boys-and the dear -old flag-never once-touched the ground"; and then away from the reach and sight of its foes, in the midst of its defenders, who loved and were dying for it, the flag at last fell. The next day a flag of truce went up to beg the body of the heroic young chief who had so bravely led that marvelous assault. It came back without him. A ditch, deep and wide, had been dug; his body and those of twenty-two of his men, found dead upon and about him, flung into it in one common heap; and the word sent back was: "We have buried him with his niggers."' It was well done. Slavery buried these men, black and white together-black and white in a common grave. Let liberty see to it, then, that black and white be raised together in a life better than the old. A TRIBUTE TO THE MEN OF THE MAINE By ROBERT G. COUSINS, Lawyer; Member of Congress from Iowa, 1892. Born in Cedar County, Iowa, 1859. Delivered in the House of Representatives March 21, 1898; the House having under consideration the bill for the relief of the sufferers by the destruction of the U.S.S. Maine in the harbor of Habana, Cuba, March 15, 1898. Mr. Speaker: Whether this measure shall prevail, either in the form in which it has come from the committee or in the form as proposed in the amendment, it is both appropriate and just; but hardly is it mentionable in contemplation of the great calamity to which it appertains. It will be an incidental legislative foot-note to a page of history that shall be open to the eyes of this Republic and of the world for all time to come. No human speech can add anything to the silent gratitude, the speechless reverence, already given by a great and grateful nation to its dead defenders and to their living kin. No act of Congress providing for their needs can make a restitution for their sacrifice. Human nature does, in human ways, its best, and still feels deep in debt. Expressions of condolence have come from every country and from every clime, and every nerve of steel and ocean cable has carried on electric breath the sweetest, tenderest words of sympathy for that gallant crew who manned the Maine. But no human recompense can reach them. Humanity and time remain their everlasting debtors. It was a brave and strong and splendid crew. They were a part of the blood and bone and sinew of our land. Two of them were from my native State of Iowa. Some were only recently at the United States Naval Academy, where they had so often heard the morning and the evening salutation to the flag-that flag which had been interwoven with the dearest memories of their lives, that had colored all their friendships with the lasting blue of true fidelity. But whether they came from naval school or civil life, from one State or another, they called each other comrade—that gem of human language which sometimes means but a little less than love and a little more than friendship, that gentle salutation of the human heart which lives in all the languages of man, that winds and turns and runs through all the joys and sorrows of the human race, through deed and thought and dream, through song and toil and battle-field. No foe had ever challenged them. The world can never know how brave they were. They never knew defeat; they never shall. While at their posts of duty sleep lured them into the abyss; then death unlocked their slumbering eyes but for an instant to behold its dreadful carnival, most of them just when life was full of hope and all its tides were at their highest, grandest flow; just when the early sunbeams were falling on the steeps of fame and flooding all life's landscape far out into the dreamy, distant horizon; just at that age when all the nymphs were making diadems and garlands, waving laurel wreaths before the eyes of young and eager nature-just then, when death seemed most unnatural. Hovering above the dark waters of that mysterious harbor of Habana, the black-winged vulture watches for the dead, while over it and over all there is the eagle's piercing eye sternly watching for the truth. Whether the appropriation carried by this resolution shall be ultimately charged to fate or to some foe shall soon appear. Meanwhile a patient and a patriotic people, enlightened by the lessons of our history, remembering the woes of war, both to the vanquished and victorious, are ready for the truth and ready for their duty. "The tumult and the shouting dies The captains and the kings depart- THE SOLDIER'S FAITH By OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, Jurist, Professor, Author; Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, 1899-. Born in Boston, Mass., 1841. Taken from an address delivered on Memorial Day, May 30, 1895, at a meeting called by the graduating class of Harvard University. See "Speeches by Oliver Wendell Holmes," published by Little, Brown & Co., Boston, Mass., 1896; also Harvard Graduate's Magazine, December, 1895. By permission of the author. The ideals of the past for men have been drawn from war, as those for women have been drawn from motherhood. For all our prophecies, I doubt if we are ready to give up our inheritance. Who is there who would not like to be thought a gentleman ? Yet what has that name been built on but the soldier's choice of honor rather than life? To be a soldier or descended from soldiers, in time of peace to be ready to give one's life rather than to suffer disgrace,—that is what the word has meant; and if we try to claim it at less cost than a splendid carelessness for life, we are trying to steal the good-will without the responsibilities of the place. We will not dispute about tastes. The man of the future may want something different. But who of us could endure a world, although cut up into five-acre lots and having no man upon it who was not well fed and well housed, without the divine folly of honor, without the senseless passion for knowledge outreaching the flaming bounds of the possible, without ideals the essence of which is that they never can be achieved? I do not know what is true. I do not know the meaning of the universe. But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt, that no man who lives in the same world with most of us can doubt, and that is, that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use. Most men who know battle know the cynic force with which the thoughts of common sense will assail them in times of stress; but they know that in their greatest moments faith has trampled those thoughts under foot. If you have been in line, suppose on Tremont street mall, ordered simply to wait and to do nothing, and have watched the enemy bring their guns to bear upon you down a gentle slope like that from Beacon street, have seen the puff of the firing, have felt the burst of the spherical case-shot as it came toward you, have heard and seen the shrieking fragments go tearing through your company, and have known that the next or the next shot carries your fate; if you have advanced in line and have seen ahead of you the spot which you must pass where the rifle bullets are striking; if you have ridden by night at a walk toward the blue line of fire at the deadangle of Spottsylvania, where for twenty-four hours the soldiers were fighting on the two sides of an earthwork, and in the morning the dead and dying lay piled in a row six deep, and as you rode have heard the bullets splashing in the mud and earth about you; if you have been on the picket-line at night in a black and unknown wood, have heard the spat of the bullets upon the trees, and as you moved have felt your foot slip upon a dead man's body; if you have had a blind, fierce gallop against the enemy, with your blood up and a pace that left no time for fear,-if, in short, as some, I hope many, who hear me have known, you have known the vicissitudes of terror and of triumph in war, you know that there is such a thing as the faith I spoke of. You know your own weakness and are modest; but yon know that man has in him that unspeakable somewhat which makes him capable of miracle, able to lift himself by the might of his own soul unaided, able to face annihilation for a blind belief. It is only War, when you are at it, is horrible and dull. when time has passed that you see that its message was divine. I hope it may be long before we are called again to sit at that master's feet. But some teacher of the kind we |