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Mail Tribune 100, Nov. 10, 1922 By Alissa Corman Nov 10, 2022 12:00 AM A A News from 100 years ago The following news items were drawn from the archives of the Mail Tribune 100 years ago Nov. 10, 1922 ARMISTICE DAY We sometimes hear complaints against the custom of national memorial days made by those short-sighted, materialistic people who arrogate to themselves the word “practical,” but who in the most far-reaching sense of that word, are the least practical of citizens. Wiser heads have managed from generation to generation, to gain control of our destinies. Such men have always realized one cardinal defect of human nature — the shortness of its memory for the great moments of history, its significant instructive crises of achievement and warning. A great object is achieved, a great danger is passed. In the hour of triumph and escape men rend the skies with jubilations, crowd them with flags, irradiate them with bonfires. Never was such a moment. Left to themselves, however, a week or two would suffice for the achievement to become a commonplace, the danger to be forgotten. But, those wiser, far-seeing ones, as they look on at “the tumult and the shouting,” perceive the eternal significance of such moments. Great moments of achieved freedom. For those there must be consecrated monuments, commemorative days forever set apart, lest men should, through forgetfulness, fall into bondage again. The world has recently gone through one of the gravest crises in its history. But already, like men who have survived a tidal wave that has laid their city in ruins, we have begun to minimize the danger that threatened us. It is past and gone, and once more we return to our work and our play. The dead that died for us sleep and the grass grows. Yet, as the sea but waits its hour to sweep once more against our careless walls, so the danger that was will surely menace us again, unless we make sure that its lesson shall never be forgotten, and so school our minds against it that not only shall it never again catch us unawares, but that it shall in time be wiped out from the category of permitted things. Armistice Day has been decreed that it shall keep alive in a symbol, from year to year, the memory of the horror of the cruelest war ever fought, the memory of the cast gladness that swept the world as its nightmare came to an end, the memory of the universal resolution that no such infamy should ever stain the human record again. In the past war has been regarded as a necessity, the only method of deciding conflicting issues between races and nations, and its evils have been systematically concealed beneath the various bedazzlements of its fictitious glory so that we forget. But the time has come for us to see the monster as it is. Whatever be the matters in dispute between nations, it is now realized as imperative that some other way of deciding them must be found. Differences must inevitably arise, but the sword shall no longer deal with them. Surely, if slowly, a League of Common Sense has been forming among the most advanced peoples of the earth which condemns war as obsolete as it is criminal. — Elks Magazine. — Alissa Corman; [email protected]