Show The A Precious Holiday By FLORENCE BITTNER For many there is no more stirring sight than that of the Statue of Liberty silhouetted against the sky-a proud embodiment of freedom's As another Independence Day she stands as a silent reminder of the freedoms so many have fought and died THE FREEDOM enjoyed by citizens of this nation is broadly a fact of thought process and life style This heritage of freedom reaches back to that first colony established at Plymouth in The Pilgrims were a strict exacting people not inclined to view opposing views with but for the day in which they they were free They had to be strong willed and single minded to leave their native land and journey into a wild inhospitable wilderness where the best they could expect would be years of privation and hardship and hunger and cold and hostile IT IS easy for us in our concern for physical comfort and material prosperity to ignore the sacrifices made to found this but it is fitting that on the birthday of this most unique nation that we pause and remember and express Within months after arriving in the new the Plymouth Colony was Of the Mayflower passengers who survived the hazardous ocean voyage to step ashore on that bleak and forbidding only 56 lived through the first EVEN a tragedy which took 46 lives would make national and even international and when that loss of life represented nearly half the it was a very grave The first colony was in its choice of a William Bradford was an orphan at eight and a religious dissenter at the unbelievable age of 12 in a day when religious dissenters usually met early and unpleasant Bradford brought with him the stamp of independent free thinking self ruled men who have been the hallmark of this THE the the independent the self-made man who owed and would accept allegiance to no one except his own This was the mold into which the classic American was By all that colony at Plymouth should have perished or given up and returned BUT through sickness and through threat of starvation and Indian through the howling storms of winter and the drenching rains of Plymouth A foothold had been a starting place where other colonists could come and find food and shelter for those important first months till they could become self THOSE hardy first-comers left an indelible imprint upon the society which they founded which can be seen today and which is woven into the stuff of the Declaration of dence and the Independence Day on July was approximately the halfway point in our nation's By the time the colonists severed the ties that bound them to the old they had years experience in self A strong free people had been raised who were capable of forming and sustaining a new It was this broadly based free citizenry which made the American Revolution one of the very few successful revolutions in all CELEBRATIONS commemorating the sign- ing of the Declaration of Independence will take many flags festooning homes and the most important celebration which must not be omitted is the quiet determination which every American must carry in his heart to perpetuate the ideals of justice and freedom which were so painfully won and which must remain our most precious |