LEST WE FORGET | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 1, 1899

"LEST WE FORGET."

THE sun will set to-night for the last time on a Spanish flag floating over soil of the Western Hemisphere.

It is the last day of the last remnant of a once imperial domain—almost all of two great continents.

When Scipio Africanus was watching the destruction of Carthage, the demolition of the ruins of the imperial city that had only a few years before overtopped Rome, he surprised his jubilant brother officers by suddenly bursting into tears. They looked inquiringly at him. He said, "O my country, this may some day be thy fate!"

He realized even at the moment when young and vigorous Rome was just starting upon her imperial career that the vices of arrogance and luxury and contempt for justice which had laid low her great adversary were already at work upon her.

It was a long shadow of foreboding that fell upon him from across the centuries. But it was a real shadow. It was the shadow of that day of reckoning when fate settled with his country for forgetting the lessons of experience, for shutting her ears against the warnings of her patriots and thinkers, for drinking herself drunk on the strong wines of wealth and power and prosperity.—New York World.