The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1897-04-29

enough left to die. They fade away.
Some call it consumption, some call it
nervous prostration; some call it inter-
mittent or malarial indisposition; but
| call it martyrdom of the domestic
circle. Life for life. Blood for blood.
Substitution.
| Or perhaps the mother fingers long
enough to see a son get on the wrong
road, and his former kindness becomes
rough reply when she expresses anxiety
about him. But she goes right on,
looking carefully after his apparel, re-
membering his every birthday with
some memento, and when he is brought
home worn out with dissipation, nurses
him till he gets well, and starts him
| again, and hopes, and expects, and
prays, and counsels, and suffers, until
her strength gives out and she fails.
She is going, and attendants, bending
over her pillow, ask her if she has any
message to leave, and she makes great
effort to say something, but out of
three or four minutes of indistinct
utterances they can catch but three
words: MY poor boy.' The simple
fact is she died for him. Life for life.
Substitution!
About thlrty-slX years ago there went
forth from our northern and southern
homes hundreds of thousands of men
to do battle for their country. All the
poetry of war soon vanished, and left
them nothing but the terrible prose
They waded knee-deep in mud. They
slept in snowbanks. They marched
till their cut feet tracked the earth.
They were Swindled out of their honest
rations, and lived on meat not fit for a
dog. They had jaws all fractured, and
eyes eXtinguished, and limbs shot away.
Thousands of them cried for water
as they lay dying on the field
the night after the battle and
got it not. They We're homesick,
and received no message from their
loved ones. They died in barns, in
bushes, in bitches, the buzzards of the
summer heat the only attendants on
their obscquies. No one but the in
finite God who knows everything,
knows the ten-thousandth part of the
length and breadth, and depth. and
height of the anguish of the northern
and southern battle fields. Why did
these fathers leave their children and
go to the front, and why did these
young men, postponing the marriage
day, start out into the probabilities of
never coming back? For the country
they died. Life for life. Blood for
blood. Substitution!
But we need not 60 so far. What is
| ~,
to the doctors who fell in the southern
epidemics. Why go? We're there not
enough sick to be attended in these
northern latitudes: Oh, yes; but the
doctor puts few medical books in his
, valise, and some phials of medicine,
and leaves his patients here in the
hands of other physicians, and takes
the rail train. Before he gets to the
infected regions he passes crowded raj
trains, regular and extra, taking the
, flying and atfrighted populations. He
arrives in a city over which great
horror is brooding. He goes from
couch to couch, feeling of the
pulse and studying symptoms, anc
prescribing day after day, nigh
after night, until fellow-physi
clan says: doctor you had better
: 60 home and rest; you look mis-
. erable.' But he can not rest while 81
many are suffering. On and on, unit
some morning finds him in delirium
+ in which he talks of home, and the1
, rises and says he must go and look af
ter those patients. He is told to Ii,
: down; but he fights his attendants un
+ til he falls back, and is weaker an,
weaker, and dies for people with whom
p he had no kinship, and far away from
his own family, and is hastily pu
s away in a strangers tomb, and only tn
, fifth part of a newspaper line tells us o
$ his sacrifice-his name just mentioned
among five. Yet he has touched tn
furthest height of sublimity in tha
! three weeks of humanitarian service
r He goes straight as an arrow to tn
s busom of Him who said: 81 was sicl
I and We visited me-" Life for life
/ Blood for blood. Substitution.
In the legal profession l see the sam
;. principle of self-sacrifice. In 1916, Wi
= liam Freeman, a pauperized and IDIOT
k negro, was at Auburn, n. Y, on tria
;. 1OI lt ldN lHc CHClN
q Van Nest family. The foaming wrat
= of the community could be kept off hiI
:: only by armed constables Who woul
O volunteer to be his counsel? No attol
|. ney wanted to sacrifice his popularit
e by such an ungrateful task. All wer
is silent save one, young lawyer wit
a feeble voice, that could hardly be hear
e outside the bar, pale and thin an
r. awkward. 1t was William H. Sewart
G who saw that the prisoner was idiot
Ie and irresponsible, and ought to be pr
D in an asylum rather than put to dealt
st the heroic counsel uttering these bea
= tiful words:
or II speak now in the hearing Of pc
20 pie who have prejudged prisoner ar
Is condemned me for pleading in his b
le half. He is a convict, pauper,
h negro, without intellect, sense, or EN-
of ton. My child with an affectiona
SIS smile disarms my careworn face of
r. frown whenever l cross my threshol
er The beggar in the street obliges me
er give because he says: God bless 20