THE PROPOSED CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL IN DRUID HILL

Very natural and general surprise has been excited by the determination of the Council committee on parks to report unfavorably the ordinance granting permission to the Daughters of the Confederacy to erect in Druid Hill Park a monument to Maryland soldiers and sailors of the Confederate army and navy. As far as we are aware, the committee assigned no reason for its action, doubtless because it had no good reason to give. There could be but one ground of objection, and that is so petty and preposterous that it is difficult to believe that the members of the committee could have been influenced by it. If opposition to the ordinance is due to sectional feeling, the fact should be brought out when the measure comes before the Council, in order that the community may have an opportunity to express its admiration for the broad and progressive statesmanship which would exclude from Druid Hill Park a monument to Maryland’s Confederate dead. It will really be genuinely interesting to know who are the political Rip Van Winkles in the City Council responsible for thus libeling Baltimore as a Sleepy Hollow of narrow prejudice, and advertising themselves as “back numbers” who have not yet realized that the civil war is over and that this is a reunited country, which is as proud of Southern valor and heroism as of Northern.

If there are such sleepy-headed old gentlemen in the Council their younger and more progressive associates would be doing a charitable act to rouse them thoroughly and let them know what time of day it is. They should be informed that the world and this country have moved considerably since they went to sleep thirty years ago, and that a good many things of importance have happened.

The old sectional bitterness no longer has any lodgment among the masses of the people and the Union is moving on, not to the tune of old John Brown’s body, but to that of fraternity and patriotism. It might be well to tell them – what it will probably amaze them to hear – that we have had another war while they have been dreaming, and that we have just emerged from a conflict with Spain, in which ex-Confederate generals were honored with responsible positions and in which they won the highest distinction.

It may astonish them as much as it did Irving’s hero when he heard the people about him denouncing King George to read what the republican President of the United States said yesterday in a Southern city and to a Southern audience. In an address to the Georgia Legislature Mr. McKinley declared:

“Sectional lines no longer mar the map of the United States. Sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we bear each other. Fraternity is the national anthem, sung by a chorus of forty-five States and our Territories at home and beyond the seas. The Union is once more the common atlas of our love and loyalty, our devotion and sacrifice *** Every soldier’s grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor. And while when those graves were made we differed widely about the future of the government the differences were long ago settled by the arbitrament of arms. The time has now come in the evolution of sentiment and feeling, under the providence of God, when in the spirit of fraternity we should share with you in the care of the graves of the Confederate soldiers. The cordial feeling which now happily exists between the North and the South prompts this gracious act, and if it needed further justification it is found in the gallant loyalty to the Union and the flag so conspicuously shown in the year just passed by the sons and grandsons of these heroic dead.”

In might also be suggested to our councilmanic Rip Van Winkles that Druid Hill Park already contains several statues which ought to be removed if the Councilmen are to maintain a consistent attitude. The statue of Columbus may be objectionable to many fiery enthusiasts who “remember the Maine” because the gentlemen whom it represents was closely associated several centuries ago with the nation which we have just been fighting. The statue of Wallace, too, may tend to create disorders, and possibly revolution, among our British subjects and the Society of St. George, because it does honor to a man who once made it uncomfortably warm for their ancestors.

It would be well also to point out to the Councilmen who so successfully represent the past instead of the present that the principle which would exclude from Druid Hill Park a monument commemorative of Maryland’s historical attitude, as well as of the gallantry of her sons, would also exclude a statue of Gen. Fitzhugh Lee, of Wheeler, and of other ex-Confederate soldiers who have recently won the admiration of the whole country. We believe a few suggestions on this general line might have a good effect on the opponents of the ordinance, some of whom were probably elected by the votes of ex-Confederates, and who may have forgotten that  circumstances and the fact that they may need some of those votes in the future.

Rip Van Winkle is a pleasing and picturesque figure on the state, but he is strangely out of place among the realities of this modern age, and the sooner the somnolent gentlemen in the City Council fully open their eyes and realize “where they are at,” the better it will be fore their prospects of remaining in public life and the less likely they will be to find their way into dime museums for exhibition as curious relics of the past, along with the fat lady, the living skeleton, the eight-legged mule and other rare and astonishing specimens.