In Memoriam

Recalling the time five years ago when Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding was inaugurated as President of the U. S., when Charles E. Hughes, Andrew W. Mellon, Albert B. Fall, Harry M. Daugherty and others were called to take charge of the destinies of the nation, when onetime President Taft was called from his retirement to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, when a unique conference for the limitation of naval armaments assembled in Washington, when Woodrow Wilson, broken in health, retired from the old white mansion at 1601 Pennsylvania Ave. and went to live quietly in a house on S Street in the northwestern part of Washington--Vice President Dawes, taking in his hand an historic trowel, laid a great marble slab upon a steel casket containing masonic emblems.

So the cornerstone of the great $800,000 memorial to President Harding was laid at Marion, Ohio. A multitude, somewhat damped by a spring shower, looked on and listened. The Republican Glee Club of Columbus, Ohio, the boys' band of the Ohio Soldiers' and Sailors' Orphans' Home gave musical selections. Representatives of many fraternal lodges to which the late President belonged deposited emblems of their orders in the steel casket set in the cement foundation. Then Mr. Dawes, with the very trowel which the Mason-President last used--at Ketchikan, Alaska, in laying the cornerstone of a masonic lodge--placed the marble slab in place.

There were fitting expressions in memory of Warren G. Harding by the notable speakers:

Mr. Dawes: "His willingness at all times to sacrifice his own convenience and happiness for the service and pleasure of others really cost him his life."

Senator Willis: "How fortunate it was for the country that at its head was to be found this quiet, industrious, painstaking, courageous leader."

Governor Donahey of Ohio: "The memory of Warren G. Harding needs no sculptured sarcophagus, or marble temple to insure its perpetuity."