THE "SUICIDE SQUADRON."

An eight-line dispatch from New York brings the news that twenty vessels of the Navy's Suicide Squadron" have reached that port. For over two years they have spent their days and nights in foreign waters sweeping the seas of more than fifty thousand mines that the commerce of the world might pass in safety. This was the work that called for perhaps the sheerest courage of the war. Ploughing undramatically through the dangerous, fog-swept North Sea, constantly in danger of being wiped out by the deadly, unseen mine or the cowardly submarine, they made it possible for the capital ships of the Allied navies to keep the Germans bottled up and the sea-lanes open.

The tumult and the shouting of the war have died away. Tales of stark daring fall on ears that have heard hundreds of such tales before. The seamen of the "Suicide Squadron" will not get, and doubtless do not expect, the welcome that greeted those who returned earlier. Yet the world will be eternally, though silently, grateful to those men who, forsaking the paths of safety and even the comparative ease of showing bravery in the heat of battle, have quietly gone about their hazardous task. Theirs, unassuming and unadvertised, is the highest glory of all.