New national era. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1870-1874, 1872-11-28
From the Washington Daily Chronicle
A Sermon i'm Stone.

Ihings OF a very commonplace and every
day character are sometimes the evidences
OF marked changes in the physical, social, or
political worlds. A dove, bearing an olive
branch in its beak, was by no means re-
markable sight, and yet, to the anxious Noah,
1t was the conclusive witness of ruined
earth restored. And now, in a retired studio
of Washington city, the shaping of a plaster
cast, which (thanks to Grecian genius for
having imagined and realized the sculptors
skill y has at no time within the last three
thousand years been an extraordinary occur
renee, is, in its silent teachings, the expo
nent of as great a change as that which inter-
yened between the postdiluvian era and the
days before the flood. If any reader be dis
posed to question the truth of this assertion,
he surely will not do so after having attended
to the recital of the following brief state
ment:
Five and twenty years ago a stranger took
up his abode in one of the cities of Western
New York. His name might, perhaps, have
been known to few persons in the place as
that of one whose impassioned eloquencc had
thrilled large and admiring audiences in New
England and the British Isles; but, even to
the most of them, and to the great mass of
the fellow-tOwnsmen Of his adoption, he was,
in every respect, Pariah. And why? Be-
cause he was of indisputable African extrac-
ton, and more than this, because he was an
escaped slave, and was exempt from arrest
and rendition to servtude under the laws
then existing only by the fact that the right to
his own body had been purchased and secured
to himself through the kindness of a few SYM
pathizing friends. Under these unfavorable
circumstances he entered upon his career as
the editor of a weekly publication, and as an
earnest lecturer in the interest of the anti
slavery movement. To-day that same man,
so despised only quarter of century ago,
is held by all in admiring regard ;land the
proof of this is that his name now heads the
Presidential electoral ticket of the Republic
can party in the Empire State, and that his
bust has been ordered by number of his
fellow-citizens as fitting adOrnment for one
of their public halls is, in all probability,
unnecessary to state in addition that the city
which thus proposes to honor itself by fit
ting tribute of honor to one of its worthiest
residents is Rochester, New York; and that
the citizen thus singled out for admiring re-
cognition is the wOrld-known Frederick
Douglass.
In the execution of the commission intr,lst-
ed to him the artist, Mr.. johnson M. Mundy,
has given no uncertain proof of his eminent
skill as sculptor. With fidelity to which
only true genius could attain he has so repro
duced the lineaments of his distinguished
model that no one who has ever seen Mr..
Douglass in life will fail to recognize him
readily in his counterfeit prcsentment. So,
when the proposed bust in marble will have
been completed and placed upon its allotted
pedestal, it will convey to coming genera
tons a clear idea of that gifted orator, who
could hold in check the emotions of multi
tudes, moving them to tears by his pathetic
appeals, convulsing them with laughter by
fo nf or hnartc
to swell Indignantly by the fierce torrent of
his invectvc.
But, for every one verscd in our national
history, whether from actual experience or
from books, this bust will serve another pur-
pose than that of merely giving an idea OF the
personal appearance of Frederick Douglass.
1t will be chiseled illustration of those con-
stitutiOnal amendments that secured freedom,
civic rights, and political enfranchisement to
four millions of human beings. In its marble
purity it will be as a spotless dove, giving as
surance that the fierce deluge of wrong and
blood has abated, and that the dry land of
liberty and equality has reappeared, never
again to be submerged by the dark and angry
waters of oppression. 1t will be fraught to
the full with moral teachings. For, if in the
onward sweep of humanity the fugitive slave
of one day may become the representative
man of the next, this bust, in the thought
that gave it birth and in the purpose for
which it is intended, will stand out as q
sure exemplar of the great truths that the
prejudiccs of men are short-lived; that their
sense of justice is always in the end triumph
ant, and that, no matter how dark may be
the present, or how unpromising the future's
outlook, earnest manhood, with its endOw-
ments of high mental and moral worth, has
ALWAYS good assurance of its ultimate reward.
GEORGE b. VAsHON.