The semi-weekly messenger. [volume] (Wilmington, N.C.) 1897-1908, 1898-04-22

brought home worn out with dissipa-
tion nurses him till he gets well and
starts him again and hopes and ex-
poets and prays and counsels and suf-
fers until her strength gives out and
she fails. She is going, and attend
ants bending over her pillow, ask her
If she has any message to leave, and
she makes great effort to say some
thing, but out of three OF -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 thirty-eight years ago there
went forth from our northern and
southern homes hundreds of thousands
of men to do battle. 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 banks. They marched till
their cut feet tracked the earth. They
| were swindled out of their honest ra-
tons and lived on meat not fit for a
dog. They had jaws fractured, and
eyes extinguished and limbs shot
away. Thousands Of them cried for
water as they lay on the field the night
after the battle and got it not. They
were homesick and received no mes
sage from their loved one They died
in barns, in bushes, in bitches, the buzz
yards of the summer heat the only at
tendants on their o~bsequies. No one
but the infinite God, who knows every
thing, knows the ten t%housandth part
80 Tho 11nr+h a-I I~4.l+L 4-l lo.$h
and height of 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
coming back? For a principle
they died. Life for life! Blood for
blood! substitution!
PRINCIPLE OF SELF SACRIFICE.
But we need not go far. What is
that monument in the cemetery? 1t is
to the doctors who fell in the southern
epidemics. Why go? Were 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 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 ar
rives in a city over which a great hor-
rOr is %brOoding. He goes from couch
to couch, feeling the pulse and study
ing the symptoms and prescribing day
after day, night after night, until a
fellow 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 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 until
he falls back, and is weaker and weak
err, 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 a newspaper line tells us of his
sacrifice-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, Il was sick
and visited me-" Life for life! Blood
for blood! Substitution!
In the legal profession 1 see the
same principle of self sacrifice. In
1916 William Freeman, a pauperized
and idotic negro, was at Auburn, N.
Y, on trial for murder. He had slain
the entire Van Ness family. The
foaming wrath of the entire commun-
ity 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 out side the
bar, pale and thin and awkward. 1t
was William H. Seward, VINO saw that
the prisoner was idotic and irresponsi-
BILE and ought to be put in an asylum
rather than put to death, the heroic
counsel uttering these beautiful words:
SUBSTITUTION.
II speak now in the hearing of a
people who have prejudged prisoner
IN SohuCIIlhSu IIC III plOduiA6 III AlS
behalf. He is a convict, a pauper a,
negro, without intellect, sense or emo
ton. My child with an affectionate
smile disarms my careworn face of it's
frown whenever I cross my threshold.
The beggar in the street obliges me to
give because he says God bless you as
I pass. My dog caresses me with fond
ness if I will but smile on him. My
horse recognizes me when I fill his
manger. What reward, what graft
tude, what sympathy and affection can
l expect here? There the prisoner sits.
Look at him. Look at the assemblage
around you. Listen to their ill sup
pressed %censures and excited fears and
tell me where among my neighbors or
my fellow men, where, even in his
heart, l can expect to find a sentiment,
a thought, not to say of reward or of
acknowledgement or even of recogni-
fior Narf10~nnr xo,, -0r ALs-Ix -