Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 117, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 May 1916 — UNITY OF NATION PROVED [ARTICLE]

UNITY OF NATION PROVED

Great Southerner Long Ago Pointed Out How Complete Has Been Its Restoration. From an address delivered by ITenry Watterson at the National cemetery, Nashville, Tenn., Decoration day, 1877. We are assembled, my countrymen, to commemorate the patriotism and valor of the brave men who died to save the Union. Jhe season brings its tribute to the scene; pays its homage to the dead; inspires the living. There are images of tranquillity all about us; in the calm sunshine upon the ridges; in the tender shadows that creep along the streams; in the waving grass and grain that mark God’s love and bounty; in the flowers that bloom over the many graves. There is peace everywhere in this land today.

Peace on the open seas, In all our sheltered bays and ample streams, Peace where’er our starry banner gleam*, And peace in every breeze. The war is over. It is for us to bury its passions with its dead; to bury them beneath a monument raised by the American people to American manhood and the American system, in order that “the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” The Union is, indeed, restored when the hands that pulled down that flag come willingly and lovingly to-put it up again. I come with a full heart and a steady hand to salute the flag that floats above me —my flag and your flag—the flag of the free heart’s hope and home —the star spangled banner of our fathers —the flag that, uplifted triumphantly over a few brave men, has never been obscured, destined by the God of the universe to "waft on Its ample folds the eternal song of freedom to all mankind, emblem of the power on earth which is destined to exceed that on which it was said that the sun never went down.