At the close of the year 1870, the department of Illinois, where the Grand Army had its birth, had been reduced from over three hundred posts, and a membership of forty thousand, to less than twenty-five posts, and these barely existing in name; and two years later its entire membership was but two hundred and thirty-eight. Indiana, with two hundred and seventy-nine posts, and thirty thousand membership, had become utterly disorganized; Iowa, with one hundred and forty-four posts, had ceased to have a recognized existence; the thirty posts in Kansas had dwindled to nine; Minnesota had shrunk from twenty-five to two posts; the one hundred and twenty-nine posts in Missouri had no department existence; in Wisconsin, of seventy-nine, less than a dozen were left, and in Pennsylvania, one hundred and forty-three out of two hundred and twenty-four had been disbanded. At the session of the National Encampment in May, 1870, the Adjutant-General reported that only three departments, Massachusetts being one, could give the exact number of the members upon their rolls, and the national headquarters were then involved in over $3,000 of indebtedness. But in Massachusetts, the founders of the Grand Army of the Republic wisely bolted and double-barred the doors against the intrusion of partisan topics, and the growth of the organization was steady and continuous. In January, 1868, comrade A. B. R. Sprague was elected to succeed Commander Cushman, and at the end of his term was able to report seventy-three posts, with a membership of six thousand one hundred and eighty-nine. How well the department of Massachusetts kept, through these early years, the Grand Army banner in the front, is evidenced by the following:-- The percentage in this department alone of the entire membership in the United States was, in 1872, 38 per cent; 1873, 42 per cent; 1874, 43 per cent; 1875, 38 per cent; 1876, 32 per cent; 1877, 33 per cent; 1878, 30 per cent; 1879, 21 per cent. From the latter year, because of the rapid growth in Pennsylvania and New York, and of the reorganization and great increase of the departments in western states, this percentage was rapidly decreased to six per cent in 1885, but for ten successive years the official national reports accord to Massachusetts, in all respects, the position of "the banner department." In April, 1868, Commander-in-chief Logan issued his order for the observance annually of the thirtieth of May as a Memorial Day, "for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of those who died in defence of their country during the late rebellion," and the ceremony into which so much of tenderness and patriotic love has since been wrought, was most heartily inaugurated in this department.