Years of duty and trial, anxiety and care have bowed her form, whitened her hair, dimmed her eyes and robbed her cheeks of their maiden bloom; but O, our mother is still to us our beautiful mother. Her heart is as young and loving as when in infancy, in youth and in riper years it throbbed responsive to our plaints; her hands are as beautiful in our eyes as when in our childhood they were laid caressingly upon our heads, and her dimpled fingers smoothed our hair or wooded back to order our truant tresses, and her voice, though less resonant than in the years when she called us from play to duty, has the same cadence as when bending over us she sang the cradle song which lulled to sleep and to dreams.
O, our mother! beloved more than any wealth of words could express, your children on this anniversary day of your wedding fifty years ago, offer you, aye shower upon you in the name of filial devotion, all the holiest treasures of garnered affection.
“We give thee all, we can no more,
Though poor the offering be;
Our hearts—our love is all the store
And this we bring to thee.”
We hear the wedding bells ringing in celebration of the nuptials of our aged parents—our ears are attuned to their merry chimes and our hearts respond with all the joyousness of a wedding march, for peace and happiness and contentment crown the hour. We do not ask what the future has in store, we only know that we have the bride and groom in our presence, and that it is an inexpressible joy to pledge them anew our unfaltering devotion and our eternal love.
The Issue
Speech at Girard, Kas., May 23, 1908
[Note.—Girard, Kansas, is a quiet little city built about a capacious plaza or square. This plaza is carpeted with Nature’s emerald and roofed with the protecting branches of the catalpa and the elm tree. When the news came that Debs had again been chosen as the candidate of the Socialists for that station in our public affairs of most comprehensive service to the people, the citizens, without reference to political faiths, gathered upon this green out of compliment to their fellow-townsman who had been thus honored for the third time by such signal confidence on the part of so many earnest people of the nation at large. These good people of Girard had seen bevies of children following this arch “undesirable citizen” to and from his work, and about the town in his resting hours, for almost the entire period of his residence here, and now it had come to pass that he was loved by every man, woman and child here. They sent for him. Eli Richardson, the “Hot Cinders” Socialist, affectionately known for so long a time as “Baldy,” explained in a few dramatic words the occasion of the gathering, and presented Debs with the remark, “You can pin your faith to a man loved by children.” The address which follows, wholly impromptu, is perhaps the most remarkable ever delivered, and came hot from the foundry of his mighty genius and fresh from the loom of his kindly, loyal, loving soul.]