Editor’s note: World War I was still fresh in people’s minds when this editorial appeared in the Arizona Daily Star on Sunday, May 30, 1920. The Ruskin quote is by John Ruskin, an English writer, art critic and social reformer who died in 1900:
THEY WHO HAVE GONE
The path from the cradle to the grave is short. Measured in the light of all time, the life of man is but a flickering flame, a tiny spark, a flash of fire and embers. But that is not all of life. It is but the least noteworthy of some lives — of the lives of those who were truly great. For their earthly careers ended not at the grave. They live on. They live through all the time that follows.
The sum total of all the world has today, of all civilization, all knowledge, all love, all happiness, all understanding, all the joys, comforts and pleasures of existence, are the fruits of lives lived before, humans who have gone on, beings who existed, struggled, developed, drove ahead, and left behind them when they entered the tomb a better world, a happier human family, a more desirable existence for their children and their children’s children.
That is something to remember this Decoration Day when the living strew flowers of memory upon the graves of the dead.
There is no better time to strongly urge upon the living mind to remember — with Ruskin:
“Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can benefit those that come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.”
Voices now are heard from the stilled lips of those who gave their all that this nation might be a united nation of free men.
The product of their handiwork, a great and free people reaching from ocean to ocean, from Canada’s border to the Gulf, this is how the dead of the Civil War speak, and that voice will be heard as long as the United States endures.
So, too, with those who gave of their life in other wars, and so, too, with those heroic figures of peace who, at the cost of time and effort and even life itself, pressed a nation forward and upward.
Their deeds speak everlastingly.
The heroes who died on the battlefields of France were not silenced by the German bullets. Nor by the shrouds, nor the heap of blood-stained earth, nor by the time that has passed by since they fell that the world might be a better place in which to live. Their voices crying for freedom of mankind, freedom from militarism, from war, from hated autocracy, are heard this day, heard here across the wide bosom of the ocean, cross thousands of miles of land. They are heard in heated tropic and the frigid polar home of man. They will never be silenced.
On no other day is this thought so ardently impressed upon the living mind as upon Decoration Day, when the grateful benefactors of the heroic dead pay tribute to their memory. Then, indeed, do the living come to a full realization of the voice speaking from the graves Over There, speaking distinctly and earnestly the words of liberty, of civilization’s supreme need, of human progress.
Freedom, For All, Forever!
