Connecticut western news., 1897-03-25

thing, knows the ten thousandth part of the length and breadth and depth and height of the anguish of the northern and southern battlefelds. 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 backi 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 in Greenwood? It 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 latitudes? Oh, yesi But the doctor puts few medical books in his valise, and some vials of medicine, and leaves his patients here in the hands of other phy- 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 city over which a great horror is breeding. He goes from couch to couch, feeling of the pulse and studying symptoms and prescribing day after day, night after night, until a fel- low physician says: Doctor, you had better go home and rest. Ycu look mis- erable.'' But he cannot rest while so many are suffering. On and on until some morning finds him in 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, l.-A lo a-E okk ha 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 saori- fice-his name just mentioned among Ave. 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, II was sick, and ye wis tied me-" Life for life. Blood for blood. Substitution
 In the legal profession see the same principle of self sacrifice. In 1848 Will. liam Freeman, 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 an 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. It was William H. Seward, who saw that ble and ought to be put in an asylum rather than put to death, the heroic counsel uttering these beautiful words: 1T speak now in the hearing of peo- pie who have prejudged prisoner and condemned me for pleading in his be- half. He is convict, 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 he says, God bless youP as l pass. My dog caresses me with fondness if I 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 herep There the prisoner sits. Look at him. Look at the assemblage around you. Listen to their ill suppressed censures and their excited fears and tell me where among my neigh bors or my fellow men, where even in his heart can expect to find a senti. ment, a thought, not to say of reward or of acknowledgement, or even of recog
 milton? Gentlemen, you may think of this evidence what you please, bring in what verdict you can, but asseverate before heaven and you that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, the prisoner at the bar does not at this moment know why it is that my shadow falls on you instead of his own."
 | The gallows got its victim, but the | post mortem examination of the poor creature showed to all the surgeons and to all the world that the public was | wrong, that William H. Seward was | right and that hard, stony step of ob- | loquy in the Auburn courtroom was the 1 first step of the stairs of fame up which he went to the top, or to within one step of the top, that last denied him through |
 Nothing sublimer was ever seen in an | American courtroom than William H.
 Seward. without reward, standing be-
 tween the fury of the populace and the
 loathsome imbecile. Substitution
 A Painters Pencil.
 | In the realm of the fine arts there
 was as remarkable an instance. A bril-
 liant but hypercriticised painter, Joseph
 William Turner, was met by volley of
 rope. His paintings, which have since
 won the applause of all civilized na-
 tions-''The Fifth Plague of Egypt, ''
 "Fishermen on a Lee Shore In Squally
 Weather" Calais Pier," "The Sun
 Rising Through Mist" and "Dido Build
 ing Carthage''-were then targets fo1
 critics to shoot at In defense of this
 outrageously abused man a young au-
 thor of 2a years, just one year out o1
 college, came forth with his pen and
 wrote the ablest and most famous essays
 on art that the world ever saw or eve,
 will see - John Ruskin's "Moderr
 Painters, For F years this autho,
 fought the battles of the maltreated art
 ist, and after, in poverty and broker
 heartedness, the painter had died and
 the public tried to undo their crueltiei
 toward him by giving him big fxnera
 and burial in St. Paul's cathedral hii
 old time friend took out of tin bo1
 5000 pieces of paper containing draw
 ings by the old painter, and through
 many weary and uncompensated month
 assorted and arranged them for publi,
 observation. People say John Ruskin il
 his old days is cross misanthropic ant
 morbid. Whatever he may do that h,
 ought not to do and whatever he ma,
 say that he ought not to say between
 now and his death he will leave thi
 world insolvent as far as it has any ca