The Hope Pioneer

San Diego Union: The Grand Army of the Republic is not in the habit of beating about the bush. It usually employs very plain and direct language in resolutions adopted at its annual encampments.

Some critics might even say that on occasions where, for example, a pension commissioner is concerned—its utterances are brutally blunt.

It calls a spade a spade, and usually eschews those little refinements by which ideas are conveyed by indirection. The records of the encampment just closed at San Francisco, however, show that when the Grand Army chooses to use the rapier rather than the bludgeon, it knows how to send the steel in to the hilt, and give it a twist besides.

The reference is to the Miles resolution which the old soldiers passed by unanimous vote. It read:

Resolved, that we congratulate that splendid soldier, exemplary commander, and patriotic citizen, Gen. Nelson A. Miles, upon his attainment of a distinguished and honorable retirement, after a matchless record as a soldier of over forty-two years service without just criticism of his official conduct, which began as a lieutenant in the Twenty-second Massachusetts infantry, progressing by the brightest grades of heroic patriotism from Manassas to Appomattox, during the greatest of all civil wars from 1861 to 1865, and illuminating his record by his great military achievements as a successful Indian fighter, and again, as a gallant, judicious military disciplinarian and organizer.

This resolution was right and proper. It commends in fitting terms the foremost soldier of the republic. But is there a man, woman or child in the United States, or its possessions, who will mistake the significance of these words 'without just criticism of his official conduct'?

Gen. Miles has been criticized by his superiors. The criticism was emphasized by the shabby order placing him on the retired list, and couched in the identical terms that would have been used in retiring an obscure subaltern.

The Grand Army of the Republic has replied to that emphasized criticism, and it has done so in a manner for which the country will be grateful.