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G. A. R. There is trouble in the camp of the executive committee of the G. A. R. The committee invited President Cleveland to attend the next meeting of the national emcampment at St. Louis, and the invitation has been accepted. The committee is said to be in recption of a bushel or two of indignant letters from posts all over the country, protesting that it is not the desire of the veterans of the war to have Mr. Cleveland review the Grand Army, and that if the present programme is adhered to their posts will not attend the grand encampment. Gen. Tuttle, department commander of Iowa, in an interview with Gen Noble and Gov. Stannard said: "The Grand Army does not propose to lend itself to any political scheme, and they won't boom Cleveland. Just as sure as I am here they will insult and snub him if he comes here." "If they do," said Gen. Noble, "I'll never put my foot inside a Grand Army post again. I respect the president because he is president." And so the conversation ran on, both generals waxing warm and defiant. The delemma is a difficult one. The responsibility is with the committee, however. It should have remembered that while the committee might sink its personal feelings toward Cleveland as a man and enjoy an official contact with Cleveland as president and the luster that might be reflected upon themselves, there will be no such compensation to the rank and file of the Grand army boys. They remember with tingling nerve the numerous flings that the president, in his hundred vetoes of pension bills, indulged in during the late session of congress. With execrable taste he could not confine himself in these messages to the discussion of the evidence in the cases that were before him, but injected a sneer here and there at the invalid soldier, generally in many of these curious documents. Hence it was a mistake for the committe to invite the president to appear at St. Louis as the honored guest of the Grand Army. The old soldier has a little reverence for office comgined with a great appreciation of unadorned manhood as any class of men on earth. It could not be otherwise with the training they got in those four years of war, where they learned to measure men not by the intensity of their uniform and the number of bars or stars on their shoulder straps, but by their intelligence and bearing under fire. The veteran is a pitiless critic of official pretension. He will not be restrained by any awe of office from manifesting his opinion of a man he considers a fraud, no matter what be his title or government salary. He was held down for those long years of bloody experience by army regulations and discipline and compelled to outward respect and obedience to men in office, sometimes thoroughly despised as in every way his inferior, and the consequence was that flummery of high station, unaccompanied by high deserving, has no hold upon his imagination, and he glories in an opportunity to give freedom to his opinions now that he is no longer constrained by his oath as soldier to blindly respect and obey his superior in rank. So if the majority of the veterans who shall congregate at St. Louis this summer happen to be of the class that considers the president an active enemy of themselves and the widows and children of their departed comrades, no considerations of official respect will withhold from them rough demonstrations of their disapproval that the soldier has learned so well to deliver at proper occasion. But the committee have gone too far to retreat and the only alternative is for the veterans who cherish hostility to the president as a man to say away, or for the president to reconsider his acceptance, or for the committee to make up their minds to endure much unpleasantness when the grand review is ordered. |
This issue of THE JOURNAL contains more reading matter by nearly one half than was ever before printed in a single issue of any Nebraska newspaper. The paper could have consisted of fifty papers instead of thrity-two, as well as not, but of quality rather than quantity is always carefully considered in these headquarters. In another column Representative Caldwell makes some pertinent inquiries relative to the appraisement of "state lots in Lincoln" occupied by the B. & M. Railroad company. Mr. Caldwell dissents from the interpretation put on the act by the county commissioners, and insists that the lots should be appraised at their value when title was taken by the company, and not at the value when the company occupied the lots without title. The Lincoln end of the Omaha Slop-jar - a paper known to the police of the state as the Omaha Bee - thinks THE JOURNAL was paid for its opinion on the paving question. The Slop-Jar, from end to end and in the middle, is unable to conceive of how any paper can have opinions without a price. But the poor thing can't help it. It was raised that way. Al. Fairbrother of the Omaha Bee is a Lincoln visitor. He was a caller at the (sic) THE JOURNAL editorial rooms yesterday. He came up to shake hands with the boys and grown men who make this great family newspaper, and to brand as unmixed with truth the statement of the esteemed Democrat to the affect that he is going to jump his job and go to Europe. He will vacate for six weeks, but instead of going east he will go to the northern lakes to hunt and fish and swim. He will resume work on the Bee upon his return. THE JOURNAL wishes him a time of rest of the largest size. Canon Fleming, a chaplain of Queen Victoria, has been stricken with a new disease - new in name. "Unconscious cerebration" is what the disorder is called, and is applied in these days when a famous author appropriates as his own the works of another distinguished author. When the party builty of this business is not distinguished he is credited with plagiarism. If he is a newspaper man and caught at such work, friend and enemies rise up in a body to say that he is a pirate and a thief. But with Canon Fleming it is "unconscious cerebration." He was stricken in this way: In honor of the queens' birthday the distinguised divine published a volume of sermons. Some of them were good - too good fro a Johnny Bull - and some were bad enough. The editor of the Pall Mall Gazette went to examining the work, aned one of the first sermons encountered was identified by him as one that had been preached along in 1876 by Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage, the eminent American minister of Brooklyn. The reverend canon has tried to explain the matter, but the Gazette declares that the explanation is worse than the piracy. Do not, says a capable adviser, run away with the idea that you were born a genius, and that by a single stroke of the pencil you will some time immortalize yourself. It is better to dig away under the impression that you are a dunce than to loll on the sofa waiting for an inspiration. It was Turner, the great painter, who said, "I have no secret but hard work." |
