Celebration At Hamburg

CELEBRATION AT HAMBURG

Memory of the Soldiers Fittingly Honored

MEMORIAL ORATION

Was Delivered by Mr. David A. Hammond, of Ann Arbor, to Large Audience

Hamburg, Mich, May 29.—Memorial Day services were held here today. This was because of the fact that the local G. A. R. Post have to take part in memorial services elsewhere tomorrow.

Mr. David A. Hammond, president of the Democrat Publishing company, of Ann Arbor, delivered the oration. The central theme of his discourse was the inhumanity of war except as waged in a righteous cause. Such a cause as brought the conflict of 1861-65 or the recent strife which gave Cuba her liberty. Our aggressive measures in the Philippines were shown to be far from those principles which only should give US reason for entering into a conflict with foreign people. Among other things Mr. Hammond said:

"It is becoming and profitable in the highest sense that the living should eternize the memory of those who died for the country.

"People to all ages have, in some such way as we are doing today, manifested their appreciation of the sacrifices made by those who have offered themselves a sacrifice that the nation might live.

"On this day the nation is most completely one. Party lines are forgotten, differences of religious creed do not count. North and south, foreign and native born, white and black, are distinctions without a difference; but from ocean to ocean, from the lakes to the gulf all are united in paying grateful and loving tribute to the nation's dead. No face is forgotten, no mound is passed by. If there be sunken graves and tangled and overgrown graves, they are not of soldiers. All these are as green as their memory.

"We revere the memory of our soldier dead, not because they were soldiers merely, but because they were soldier in a great and just cause, one that appeals to the best that is in mankind. War is the greatest of conflagrations. Viewed from any standpoint and in any aspect, it is horrible. When waged in wantonness. as is the case when the war is resorted to for territorial aggrandizement, for wealth or for plunder, it is a return to savagery; when it is waged for the partition of a territory of a nation, it is one of the worst of outrages and when resorted to by the strong against the weak through motives of covetousness and for the purpose of destroying the governments which the people have set up, it is one of the blackest of crimes. But when it is resorted to in order to maintain the unity of a nation, to protect the liberty of the people and to secure the blessing of freedom for themselves and their postertiy, then it is justified before God and man and it is fit that those who offer themselves a sacrifice in such. warfare should be held in loving remembrance by all the beneficiaries of their heroic service. Because we believe the brave men whose deaths we commemorate by the exercises of this day died in such a holy cause, we hold them worthy of all honor and entitled to eternal remembrance.

"The following words of Garrett Putnam Serviss with reference to the great incarnated spirit of war, Napoleon the Great, express the outlook on this subject which I believe we should hold in these beginning years of the twentieth century which is to be the highest fruition of all those which have preceded it:

" 'Let not the bitterest enemy of Napoleon deny to him the name and fame of the greatest maker of war and the greatest winner of victories that the world has ever known. Greater than Caesar, greater than Hannibal, greater than Alexander. Let him have all the glory; let him be the great representative figure in the Valhalla of Mars, and then let us rejoice that he belongs to our time, for thus he predicts the day-break. There is no hour so dark as that which precedes the dawn. We may well believe that history will never frame another Napoleon. She has done her best in that line, and now she turns to nobler things. Let the century that knew him wrap the tattered flags of war about it and lie down to dreams of slaughter, but let us look forward across that new century, whose sunrise now brightens the hills of coming time, believing that it will usher in the thousand years, the ten thousand years, aye, the endless era of peace universal.' "

During the address Mr. Hammond was enthusiastically applauded by his audience, which was made up of most of the residents of Hamburg and many persons from the surrounding country.