“‘Oh! for one hour of blind old Dandole.’
no clear tradition has descended of the place where the war-worn bones of the soldier-pilgrim lie. Sent, like Moses, to guide and guard a feeble people to a promised land of power that he might never see, no man knoweth his burial-place until this day.
“More than one hundred years ago, the following paragraph appeared in the Boston “News-Letter,” dated Boston, January 22, 1770: “We hear from Plymouth that the 22d day of December last was there observed by a number of gentlemen, by the name of the Old Colony Club, in commemoration of the landing of their ancestors in that place.”
“The fourth toast on that occasion, a hundred and one years ago, was, “To the memory of that brave man and good officer, Capt. Miles Standish.”
“Over the graves of the guests at that dinner,—
“‘For fifty years the grasses have been growing.’
But the principle of public fidelity shares the immortality of God and Truth. Reverence for it never dies till the decay of nations. And to-day we come together, the dwellers in the city and the dwellers on the shore, men of every age and all professions, to dedicate one spot of this parental soil for an enduring monument to the same Myles Standish of the same unfaded record. The sunlight of near three hundred years, that has shone fatal on many a reputation since his baby eyes first saw the light of England, has only brought out the lasting colors of his fame.
“Believing, as I firmly do, that he was a useful, a necessary citizen, because he was ‘that brave man and good officer’ at a time when soldierly qualities were essential to the very life of the infant colony, it seems to me providential for the colonists that one of their number was, by temper and training, unable to sympathize with that soft tenderness for human life which is wont to characterize saintly-minded men, like the Rev. Mr. Robinson, who, when he heard of the marvelous conflict where Standish, with three or four others, in a locked room, killed the same number of hostile chiefs that were gathering their tribes to exterminate the English, uttered these sorrowful words: ‘Oh! that you had converted some before you had killed any!’
“The soldier practised that terrible piece of economy which no saint of the company would have dreamed of doing with his own hand. To borrow the diction of the time, the gauntlet of the man of wrath was the fold of the lambs of God. It was fortunate for us who believe in Plymouth Rock, that one trained soldier, who had faced war conducted by the Duke of Alva, came out in the Mayflower.
“Myles Standish represented the true idea of public service, vigorous fidelity, and trained fitness for his place. In his single heroic person he presented the true idea of the army,—skilled military force in loyal subordination to the civil authority. The confidence that the colony reposed in him to execute their most difficult commands as a soldier, seems to prove that he revered, in the words of Mr. Robinson’s farewell sermon, ‘the image of the Lord’s power and authority which the magistrate beareth.’