Democratic Northwest and Henry County news. [volume] (Napoleon, O. [Ohio]) 1894-1905, 1897-03-25


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 flt for
dog; they had jaws all fractured, and
ayes extinguished, and limbs shot away.
Thousands Of them cried for water as they
Iay dying on the field the night after the
battle and got 1t 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 infinite God, who knows every
thing, knows the ten-thousandth part Of
the length and breadth and depth and
height of the anguish of the northern and
southern battleflelds Why did these fa-
theirs leave their children and go to the
front, and why did these young men, post
poning the marriage day, start out into the
probabilities of never coming back? For
tho country they died. Life for life. Blood
for blood. Substitution
CaSss Of Heroism.
But we need not go SO far. What is thas
monument in Greenwood? 1t is to tho
doctors who fell in the southern cpidcmics.
Why gos 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 walls of mcdi-
cine 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, regu-
lar and extra, taking the flying and af-
frighted populations. He arrives in q city
over which great horror is brooding. He
goes from couch to couch, feeling of the
pulse and studying symptoms and prescrib-
ing day after day, night after night, until
a fellow physician says: doctor, you had
better go home and rest. You look mis-
erable." But he cannot 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 after those patients.
He is told to lie down, but he fights his at
tendants until he falls back and is weaker
and weaker and dies for people with whom
he had no kinship, and far away firm 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 farthest height of sublim-
ity in that three weeks of humanitarian
service. He goes straight as an arrow to
the bosom of him who said, "I was sick,
and ye visited me-" Life for life. Blood
for blood. Substitution!
In the legal profession I sec the same
principle of self sacrifice In 1846 William
Freeman, pauperizcd 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 con-
stables. Who would volunteer 20 be his
counsel? No attorney wanted to sacrifice
his popularity by such an ungrateful task.
All were silent, save one u 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 beautiful words:
~ speak now in the hearing of people
who have prejudged the prisoner and con-
a convict, pauper, negro, without intel
lect, sense or emotion. My child, with an
affectionate smile, disarms my careworn
| face Of its frown whenever 1 cross my
threshold. The beggar in the street obliges
me to give because he says, God bless
| your as pass. My dog caresses me with
fondness If will but smile on him. My
horse recognizes me when fill his manger.
| What reward, what gratitude, what sym.
pathy and affection can 1 expect herei
| There the prisoner sits Look at him.
Look at the assemblage around you. Lis.
ten to their i'll suppressed censures and
| their excited fears and tell me where among
my neighbors or my fellow men, where,
even in his heart, 1 can expect to find q
| sentiment, q thought, not to say of reward
or of acknowledgment, 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 1t
is that my shadow falls On you instead OF
his own"
The gallows got its victim, but the post
|
showed to all the surgeons and to all the
world that the public was wrong, that Will
liam H. 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
through the treachery of American politics.
| Nothing sublimer was ever seen in an
| American courtroom than William 81.
! Seward, without reward, standing between
! the fury of the populace and the loathsome
imbecile. Substitution!
| What Ruslin Did.
| In the realm of the fine arts there was as
remarkable an instance A brilliant but
hypercriticised painter, Joseph William
Turner, was met by volley of abuse from
all the art galleries of Europe. His paint
ings, which have since won the applause OF
all civilized nations-"The Fifth Plague OF
Egypt, %" Fishermen on a Lee Shore In
Squally Weather." "Calais Pier" "Tho
Sun Rising Through MIST and "Didc
Building Carthage then targets foi
critics to shoot at. In defense of this out
rageously abused man, q young author OF
| "a years, just one year out of college, came
forth with his pen and wrote the ablest and
most famous essays ON art that the world
ever saw, or ever will see--John Ruskin's
Modern Painters. For II years this au
thor fought the battles of the maltreated
artist, and after, in poverty and broken
heartedness, the painter had died, and the
public tried to undo their cruelties toward
him by giving him big funeral and burial
in ST. Pauls cathedral, his old time friend
took out of tin box 10000 pieces of paper
containing drawings by the old painter
and through many weary and uncompen
sated months assorted and arranged them
for public observation. People say John
Ruskin in his old days is cross, misan
thropic and morbid. Whatever he may dc
that he ought not to do, and whatever he
may say that he ought not to say between
/ u. At.