432 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



IN MEMORIAM, ANNUAL MEETING, 1906. 



AX ADDRESS BY HON. S. M. OWEN^ MINNEAPOLIS. 

 (Delivered at Annual Meeting, 1906.) 



To me has been assigned the duty — I feel that am justified in 

 saying, the honorable distinction — of asking you to lay aside for a 

 few minutes thought of the material or earthly affairs that you gather 

 here to discuss, and in their stead give thought to those of our 

 brothers who made up the quota that death demanded of our mem- 

 bership during the past year. 



This should be a particularly impressive hour, because the tribute 

 laid upon this society by the inevitable since its last meeting has been 

 a heavy one, the largest contribution it has ever been asked to make 

 in the same length of time. Nine names have been stricken from 

 our printed membership list and placed upon the tablets of our 

 memory and upon the giant roll of the immortals. 



Those who have passed beyond our physical ken during the year 

 were known to us as William Somerville, O. M. Lord, R. J. Men- 

 denhall, Amasa Stewart, Capt. R. H. L. Jewett, William Oxford, 

 Jonathan Freeman, A. W. Sias, Charles Leudloff and S. D. Hill- 

 man. The last named was your secretary for several years. 



I am not, of course, expected to pay tribute to each of these 

 departed brothers, to comment upon their individual virtues nor 

 extol their achievements 'Twould make an address too lengthy for 

 me to make or you to endure. But I will endeavor to say something 

 in- a general w^ay that may voice the estimation in which we hold all of 

 the grand souls we have known in this life, those whose souls we 

 now know were grand because they fought their good fight heroical- 

 ly, contemplated their defeats philosophically and their victories with 

 modesty ; only grand, good souls can so deport themselves. 



While this should be, and doubtless is, an impressive hour, even 

 a holy one, yet should it be a sad hour? W^e are now face to face 

 with the inevitable, and whether we regard death as the grim boat- 

 man that rows us out upon the dark waters of oblivion and sinks us 

 there ; or as the genial, welcoming-faced gate-keeper to a glorious 

 eternity of consciousness, yet should we contemplate our inevitable 

 surrender to that power with the courage born of the trust that our 

 good mother nature doeth all things well. At the most we know 

 but little of the inevitable fate of the man of clay. To our con- 

 tracted, earth-environed senses death is a ravaging monster. It 

 severs the tenderest ties our hearts experience and enjoy ; it destroys 

 the altars of the home ; he takes from the dependent their depen- 

 dence ; it blights hopes, strangles aspirations and paralyzes endeavor. 

 And yet death is not all bad. It has been written : "It is impossible 

 that anything so natural, so necessary and so universal as death 

 should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to man- 

 kind." We do not need to invoke our theology nor call faith to our 

 aid to prove the truth of this quotation ; our own lives and experi- 

 ences testifv to its truth. 



