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Show General W. J. Palmer AFTER a long period of suffering from a fatal accident, a week ago General William Wil-liam J. Palmer died at Colorado Springs. With tho world filled with men like him, or could a nation be made up of men like him, it would realize -the old Greek idea where all men were perfect per-fect physically and mentally. In his youth he joined the army; he fought four years through the great war; from a captain ho advanced to a brigadier general. When the war closed and ho went back to the walks of peace, in searching for a life work, he came west to Colorado, linked his fortunes with that state wjien it was little more than a wilderness, and by his magnetism and sagacity he enlisted the help of a few men to build a few miles of railroad. Ho continued to build railroads fo .hirty years. He has been one of the very strongest factors that has made Colorado a great state. Other men have made vast fortuned in Colorado, but the most of them in doing that were thinking simply of themselves. With General Palmer, self was the secondary consideration always; his thought was to build up a great state, to establish enterprises en-terprises that would give thousands of poor men employment, so that, while he made a fortune in his work, that was of secondary importance to him, for the real thought of his life was that this human life of ours is but a trust to be accounted ior, and that the way to serve God was to serve God's poor and wipe away as many tears from human eyes as possible, to remove from the path of the poor as many thorns and sharp stones as possible. "When his work culminated and old age came on, he disposed of his interests, then in one day he gave away a million dollars of the profits of I his work, to the faithful men who had served under him and, as before, so since, his path has bem lined with charities. He was high-minded; his judgment was as clear as crystal; ho could mark out an enterprise enter-prise and, with a prescience superb, figure out in advance what the results of such an enterprise, if carried through, would be. And so he has been serving the state and his fellow men through all these years and goes down to the grave covered cov-ered with honors. Colorado never lost so valuable a citizen as he has been; the United States never had a more valuable man in the usual acceptation of that term, for he was a patriot who held his life as nothing if his country needed it; who had an honest pride to make the community where he lived richer and stronger and happier. He filled every duty of a citizen to the end," and the loss of such a man is what the loss of a great general is in 'a battle, what the loss of the master is when a great ship is laboring in the piled up billows and the gale. Peace to the great man's sleep and, for the youth of America, the study of his life is one of the most valuable they can pursue, for there the story is told how a strong man, out of nothing noth-ing wrought a fortune, and while accumulating that fortune was a providence to all those who were near him; who lived a life without reproach; re-proach; who triumphed in all he undertook, and whoso grave will, for all time to come, be a sacred one in the state of his adoption. |