Lord Birkenhead on the Heroes.of the Road In the presence of a great muster of cyclists from all parts of the country, tle Lord Chancellor unveiled an obelisk which has been erected: on the green at Meriden, Warwickshire, as a national tribe ute to the memory of cyclists who fell in the war. "he site has been happily chosen, the memorial being in proximity to the stone cross which marks the reputed geographical centre of England, and overlooking the highway from Lon. don to Holyhead, which passes through Coventry and Birmingham, and thus links the homes of thy cycle industry.
'A simple granite erection, the obelisk is dedicated to the large number of clubman, private riders, and athletes who served as units in cyclists' battalions or es members of various arms of United Services throughout the period of hostilities.
The Lord Chancellor said the men whom tl{ey mourned belonged to the nomocracy of road locomotion. No great motor-cars, no mechanical devices. marked the method by which, in the country roads, they acquired a knowledge of these beautiful islands, or by which, along the tracks of our vacecourses, they illustrated their endurance and fortitude. Of class in 1914 could it be said that the appeal was more generally responded to than it could be said of the class whose Heroes they commemorate that day. In every scene of the theatre of war, in days before the means of mechanical transport were carried to its later perfection, these men assembled. They carried in the presence of death itself those messages the accuracy of which alone secured the lives of their comrades, and he remembered well, in the early days of the war, the degree of dependence that was placed on the humble bicycle.
THeroisw tx Souirepe.
Hy was addressing many men of whom it was certain that through those years of sacrifice and peril they, day by day and night by night, more fortunate in the results than those they com. memoraged, were running the risk of life as those ran it in the trenches. He thought it was the peculiar claim to our admiration of the cyclists that almost all their work, with its anxieties and its dangers, was performed in solitude. They had not the incen-tivo that came from comradeship. Their tasks were as dangerous as the task of any man in the war, and they rode across the plains stawn with death in those foreign countries with the same composure, the same courage, and the same indifference that they had ridden along the pleasant country lanes of Warwickshire.
In conclusion, the Lord Chancellor said:—"Let me impress upon
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.