The L'Anse sentinel. (L'Anse, L.S., Mich.) 18??-current, 1897-04-03

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 boyp The simple
fact is she died for him. Life for life.
Substitution!
About thirty-six 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 n
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 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 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 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 rail
trains, regular and extra, taking the
flying and affrighted populations. lie
arrives in city over which 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-
erable.' But he can not rest while sc
many are suffering. On and on, until
some morning finds him in u 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 un
til he falls back, and is weaker ant
weaker, and dies for people with whom
he had no kinship, and far away from
his own family, and is hastily pu
away in strangers tomb and only thu
fifth part of n newspaper line tells us o
his sacrifice-his name just mentioned
among i've. Yet he has touched tn,
furthest height of sublimity in tina
three weeks of humanitarian service
busom of Him who said: Il was sicl
and we visited me-" Life for life
Blood for blood. Substitution.
In the legal profession | see the sam,
principle of self-sacrifice. In 1916, vii
liam Freeman, n pauperizcd and idioti'
negro, was ut Auburn, n. u, on tria
for murder. He had slain the entiv'
Van Nest family. The foaming wratl
of the community could be kept off hin
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 heart
outside the bar, pale and thin anC
awkward. 1t was William III. Seward
who saw that the prisoner was idioti'
and irresponsible, and ought to be put
hin an asylum rather than put to death
the heroic counsel uttering these beau
tiful words:
~ speak now in the hearing of a PEG
pie who have prejudged prisoner ant
condemned me for pleading in his be
half. He is u convict, n pauper, ;
negro, without intellect sense, or emo
ton. My child with an affectionat'
smile disarms my care-worn face of it
frown whenever l cross my threshold
The beggar in the street obliges me t.
give because he says: God bless you
as 1 pass. My dog caresses me will
fondness if L will but smile OF
him. My horse recognizes me wheI
fill his Manager. What reward
what gratitude, what sympath,
and affection can l expect here
There the prisoner sits. Look at him
Look at the assemblage around you
Listen to their Unsurpassed censure
and their excited fears, and tell M
where among my neighbors or my fel
low-men, where, even in his heart,
can expect to find sentiment,
thought, not to say of reward or o
acknowledgement or even of recogni
ton? Gentlemen, you may think o
this evidence what you please, brinl
in what verdict you can, but assever
ate before Heaven and you, that, Il
the best of my knowledge and belief
the prisoner at the bar does not at thi
moment know why it is that my shad
| o,x, fo1le o,, yo,, IN toad IF hia own y