Orleans County monitor. [volume] (Barton, Vt.) 1872-1953, 1897-03-22

Ing carcfnlly after his apparel, remem-
bering 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 some
thing, but cut of three or four minutes
of indistinct utterance they can catch
but three words, My Poor boy!'' The
simple fact is she died for him. Life for
life Substitution
About SO years ago there went forth
from our northern and southern homes
hundreds OF thousands of men to do bat
tie for their country. All the poetry of
war soon vanished and left them moth
ing but the terrible prose They waded
knee deep in mud They slept in snow
Tanks. They marched till their cut feet
tracked the earth. They were Gwindled
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 were homesick and received
no message from their loved ones. They
died in barns, i'll bushes, in bitches, the
buzzards of the summer heat the only
attendants on their obsequies. No one
but the infinite God, who knows every
thing, knows the n-thousandth part of
the length and breadth and depth and
height of the anguish Of the northern
and southern battlefields. 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!
Life For Life.
But we need not go SO far. What is
that monument i'll Greenwood? 1t is to
the doctors who fell in the southern ep-
idemics. Why go? We're there not enough
sick to be attended in these northern
ATTITUDES? Oh, yes! But the doctor puts
a few medical books in his valise, and
some walls of medicine, and leaves his
patients here in the hands Of other ply
sicians and takes the rail train. Before
he gets to the infected regions he passes
crowded rail trains, regular and extra.
taking the flying and affrighted popula-
tions. He arrives in a city over which a
great horror is brooding. He goes from
couch to couch, feeling of the pulse and
studying symptoms and prescribing day
after day, night after night, until a fell
low physician says: Doctor, you had
better go home and rest. You look mis-
cradle But he cannot rest while so
many are suffering. On and on until
some morning finds him III delirium,
in which he talks of home, and then
rises and says he must go and look after
those patients. He is told to lie down,
but he fights his attendants until he
falls back and is weaker and weaker,
and dies for people with whom he had
no kinship, and far away from his own
family, and is hastily put away in a
strangers tomb. and only the fifth part
of newspaper line tells Us of his sacri-
fice-his name just mentioned among
five Yet he has touched the farthest
height of sublimity in that three weeks
of humanitarian service. He goes
straight as an arrow to the bosom Of
him who said, 81 was sick, and ye Wis
tied me- Life for life Blood for blood
Substitution!
In the legal profession I see the same
principle Of self sacrifice. In 1916 Viii
liam Freeman, a pauperized and idiotic
negro, was at Auburn, n. Y, on trial
for murder He had slain the entire
Van Nest family The foaming wrath
of the community could be kept off him
only by armed constables Who would
volunteer to be his counsel? No attorney
wanted to sacrifice his popularity by
such al ungrateful task. All were silent
save one-a young lawyer with feeble
voice that could hardly be heard outside
the bar, pale and thin and awkward. 1t
was William Ell. Seward, who saw that
the prisoner was idiotic and irresponsi-
BILE and ought to be put in an asylum
rather than put to death, the heroic
counsel uttering these beautiful words:
81 speak now in the hearing of peo-
pie who have prejudged prisoner and
condemned me for pleading in his be-
half. He is a convict, q pauper, negro,
without intellect, sense Or emotion. My
child with an affectionate smile disarms
my careworn face of its frown whenever
I cross my threshold. The beggar in the
street obliges me to give because b
says, God bless you'll as pass. My dog
caresses me with fondness if / will but
smile on him. My horse recognizes me
when fill. his Manager. What reward,
what gratitude, what sympathy and af
lection can I expect here? There the
prisoner sits. Look at him. Look at the
assemblage around you. Listen to their
i'll suppressed censures and their excited
fears and tell me where among my neigh
bors OF my fellow men, where even q
his heart I can expect to find a sent
ment, a thought, not to say of reward
of aclLnn1y led o11a a1at Of