The Bolivar bulletin. (Bolivar, Tenn.) 1888-1946, 1897-04-02

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 were 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 obsequies No one but the in
finite God whU knows everything,
knows the ten-thousandth part of the
length and br:adth, 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 go so far. What is
that monument in Greenwood? 1t is
to the doctors who fell in the southern
epidemics. Why go? We're there not
enough sick to be attended in these
northern ATTITUDES? Oh, yes; but the
doctor puts few medical books in his
valise, and some pitfalls 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 rail
trains, regular and extra, taking the
flying and affrighted populations. He
arrives in 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 fellow-physi-
clan says: doctor you had better
go home and rest; you look mis-
cradle" But he can not rest while so
many are suffering. On and on, until
some morning finds him in a delirium,
in which he talks of home, and then
rises and says he must go and look af-
ter those patients. He is told to lie
down; but he fights his attendants I'M
til 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 sacrifice-his name just mentioned
among five. Yet he has touched the
furthest height of sublimity in that
three weeks of humanitarian service.
He goes straight as an arrow to the
busom of Him who said: II was sick
and We visited me-" Life for life.
Blood for blood. Substitution!
In the legal profession 1 see the same
principle of self-sacrifce. In 1916, Will
liam Freeman, a pauperized and idiotic
negro, was at Auburn, n. Y, on trial
for murder. He had slain the entive
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 attor-
ney 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. 1t was William II. Seward,
who saw that the prisoner was idiOtic
and irresponsible, and ought to be put
in an asylum rather than put to death,
the heroic counsel uttering these beau
tiful words:
II speak now in the hearing of peo-
pie who have prejudged prisoner and
me for pleading in his be-
half. He is a convict, a pauper, a
negro, without intellect, sense, or emo
ton. My child with an affectiOnate
smile disarms my care-worn face of its
frOwn whenever l cross my threshold.
The beggar in the street obliges me to
give because he says: God bless you!
as 1 pass. My dog caresses me with
fondness if 1 will but smile on
him. My horse recognizes me when
l fill his manager. What reward,
what gratitude, what sympathy
and affection can L expect here?
There the prisoner sits. Look at him.
Look at the assemblage around you.
Listen to their Unsurpassed censures
and their excited fears, and tell me
where among my neighbOrs or my fell
low-men, where, even in his heart, l
can expect to find a sentiment, a
thought, not to say of reward or of
acknowledgment, or even of recogni-
ton? Gentlemen, you may think of
this evidence what you please, bring
in what verdict you can, but L assever-
ate before Heaven and you, that, to
the best of my knowledge and belief,
the prisoner at the bar does not at this
know why it is that my shad-
ow falls ON you instead of his own"
The gallows got its victim, but the
examination of the poor
creature showed to all the surgeons and
to all the world that the public was
wrong, that William III. Seward was
right, and that hard, stony step of
obloquy in the Auburn court room was
the 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
the treachery of American
politics. Nothing sublimer was ever
seen in an American court room than
H. Seward, without reward,
between the fury of the
populace and the loathsome imbecile.
In the realm of the fine arts there
was as remarkable an instance. A
brilliant but unprecedented painter,
Joseph William Turner, was met with
a volley of abuse from all the art gal
leries of Europe. His paintings, which
have since won the applause of all
civilized nations, The Fifth Plague of
Egypt" Fishermen on Lee Shore in
Squally Weather" ''Calais Pier The
Sun Rising Through Mist" and dido
Carthage" were then tar
gets for critics to shoot at. In
defense of this outrageously abused
man, a young author of "a years
just one yeaI-out of college, came forth
with his pen, and wrote the ablest and