WARREN HARDING'S 4,000-MILE FUNERAL The tremendous extent and genuineness of the public mourning surprized and startled even the somewhat case-hardened correspondents of the country's large newspapers, and left them fumbling for words adequately to express the attitude of the throng. "National sorrow,' 'Universal mourning,' and the like are trite phrases on such occasions as these," telegraphs Charles Michaelson, staff correspondent of the New York World, from Washington on the day of the funeral, but "AS GOD FASHIONED HIM" ROM SAN FRANCISCO across the continent to Washington, then back to Marion, Ohio, the funeral train of President Harding took its way, bringing forth "the most wide-spread public sorrow and reverence ever witnessed in the history of the world." So our publicists tell us, almost with one accord, and there is a note of awe, almost of bewilderment, in their testimony to the magnitude and meaning of this great funeral. The amazing outpouring of people, the sincerity of their feeling, remarks one editorial observer, "dominates every story sent by correspondents, thoroughly accustomed to crowds." The unity of America, it seems, somehow found expression in this funeral of the nation's chief-a funeral, as the editor of the Pittsburgh Post points out, which has no counterpart in history, "in the aggregate of those who gathered to show their respect for the departed chief." They came by millions to pay their tribute. The assemblage at Chicago alone, stretching along the railroad for twenty-five miles, is estimated at 1,500,000. The crowds along the route in Ohio were "so close together as to virtually suggest an aisle of mourners extending across the entire commonwealth," and in Pennsylvania and Maryland it was much the same. What had these people come out to see? One editor replies: The President is quoted as having said, in the course of a private conversation, a few weeks before he died: "I know my limitations; I know how far removed from greatness I am. But be that as it may, I intend to approach every problem with good-will in my heart instead of hatred. Most questions which are settled by armed force are never permanently settled. Problems can be solved fundamentally only as they are worked out in a spirit of neighborly good-will. . . . "People may think of me as they please, but I shall continue to be as I am, just Warren G. Harding as he is and as God fashioned him -a man who is trying the best he knows how to throw into the discard age-old, discordant ways of doing things, ways which never have succeeded in bringing happiness into the world." It was not a spectacular pageant they gathered to see; there were no speeches or music. Only a somber train carrying the ly of the dead President. But the people gathered-by milin the aggregate-to stand with bowed heads as the train ed by, or silently to pass up floral offerings wherever pt. They are necessary to describe the emotion of the day in Washington, Women sobbed and openly wept as the cortège passed up Pennsylvania Avenue bringing the dead from the White House to the Capitol. "Mob psychology" is another frequent phrase to explain the phenomenon of uncontrolled grief of strangers for a public man, but it does not adequately explain. It takes more than the contagion of sentiment to account for people standing for hours under a sun so hot that hundreds were prostrated. There was the sense of personal loss as well as of community regret in to-day's sorrowing. Something of the feeling that inspired the crowd was understood and told by one of the "doughboys' who guarded the President's bier the continent. A special dispatch, dated on board the Harding funeral train at Cumberland, Mary land, runs: across Everybody has noted the four immobile figures placed with mathematical exactness about the President's bier. Day or night the people who peered in at the windows have marked them, marveled at their rigidity and wondered that men could stand so still. "That is all part of the business of being a soldier," said the spokesman of the squad that had just come off duty. "But you don't want to get the idea that it doesn't mean more to us than just holding a pose. I've been twenty-seven years in the Army, and I am prouder of this than any service I've had." He, like all others of the guard of honor, wears certain ribbons that tell of big things done, which gives a measure of his appreciation of this particular function. Photographed by Underwood & Underwood mourning, a nation bound together tenderly, but firmly, in universal recognition of the solemnity and pathos of this homecoming. Never before was there such a crossing. "In the history of this country or of any country, there has been no funeral pilgrimage to compare in sustained solemnity with the transit of the continent from sea to sea by the train that has brought the dead President home," agrees the editor of the Philadelphia Public Ledger. This writer goes on: The martyred Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley were convoyed or met on the way to the last resting-place by thousands, silenced and sorrowing, but the funeral journeys were relatively brief. Such state processionals as that of Queen Eleanor from Grantham to Westminster Abbey are among the "old, unhappy, far-off things" of history. But this home-coming of President Harding was with a diference. There was nothing i functory, official, coldly planned in the spontaneous reaction of the people of the land along the whole 3,000 miles. From paintless log cabins children came, barefooted, berry-stained, to watch and feel that train go by. The farmer boy paused at his work in the hayfield and doffed his hat. At the crossroads were merchants and daylaborers. Housekeeper and maid stood on the porch together. The windows of the factories were filled with men and women, employers and employed, reverently hushed. The veterans of old wars and new stood side by side in salutation of the Commander-in-Chief for whom the flags were everywhere half-masted. Infants were held high in their mothers' arms and bidden to remember. Motor-cars flocked on the AS THE FUNERAL TRAIN LEFT SAN FRANCISCO It was the beginning of the greatest funeral in history, a crossing that revealed "the power of the ties that bind all members of the one great family in a single household that is the United States." "Why," he continued, "I wouldn't give up the memory of it for anything you could offer me. Hard? Not so very. You see we only stand at attention when we are at stations, or when anybody comes into the room-that is anybody but Mrs. Harding. When she comes our orders are to draw the curtains and leave her alone with him. "Some woman that talk about courage that woman is the nerviest I ever met. They all have got it on men at that. Take some of these Cabinet fellows that come in to stand by their chief. Their lips do a lot more trembling and they show more tears than she does. And hers is the 'rough end of it. "The thing that thrilled me most about it is how the crowds stand all day and all night waiting to honor the President. It's finer in the small towns than in the big ones. Through Nevada people came hundreds of miles over the damndest country in the world to take off their hats to the dead Chief. The whole thing makes you take a long breath and be sure the country is where it should be." This feeling that, in some peculiarly vital way, Warren Harding's funeral has shown "the country is where it should be" runs through many of the innumerable columns of newspaper comment. "Not even during the war was there such a manifestation of the love for the Union, as personified by the fallen leader," says the Washington Post. This last journey of President Harding's will never be forgotten, adds the Boston Herald, for It represents the unity of the nation, all divisions of party and creed submerged and forgotten in the common emotion that fills all hearts. Think of it. From the Golden Gate, across the mountains and the plains, across great rivers, through swarming cities, over the mountains again, at last to halt under the shadow of the great dome of the Capitol! And all the way an avenue of highways and boats clustered at the bridges over rivers great and small. A path was cloven through sorrowful-not curioushumanity, and in the populous centers the throngs were dense in all-night vigil as well as by the light of day. One impulse moved the plowboy in his lonely furrow and the crowd in the metropolis. 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