The Bolivar bulletin. (Bolivar, Tenn.) 1888-1946, 1898-04-22

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-keep 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 dog.
They had jaws fractured, and eyes ex-
tinguished, 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 home
sick, 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 everything
knows the ten thousandth part of the
length, and breadth, and depth, and
height of anguish of the northern and
southern battlefields. 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 principle they
died. Life for life Blood for blood.
Substitution!
But we need not go SO 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? Ga, yes; but the
doctor puts 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
region 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 systems, and prescribing day after
day, night after night, until a fellow
physician says: Doctor, You had bet
ter go home and rest; you look misera-
BILE" But he can not rest while so
many are suffering. On and on, I'M
til some morning finds him in
delirium, in which he talks of home,
and then rises and says he mast go
and look after those patients. He is
told to lie down; but he fights his at
PENDANTS until he falls back, and is
weaker and weaker, and dies for peo-
pie with whom he had no kinshlp, and
far away from his own family, and is
hastily put away in strangers tomb,
and only the fifth part of newspaper
line tells US of his sacrifca-his name
just mentioned among five. Yet he
has touched the furthest height of sub
Unity in that three weeks of humane
tartan service. He goes straight as an
arrow to the bosom of Him who said:
Il was sick and we visited me-" Life
for life. Blood for blood. SubStitu-
ton!
In the legal profession | see the same
principle of self-sacrifce. In 1916, |
William Freeman, pauperized and idi-
otto negro, was at Auburn, n. Y, on |
trial for murder. He had slain the en- |
tire 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 |
by such an ungrateful task.
yer with feeble voice, that could hardly |
be heard outside the bar, pale and thin
and awkward. 1t was William H. |
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
these beautiful words:
l speak now in the hearing of a peo-
pie who have prejudged prisoner and +
condemned me for pleading in his be-
half. He is convict, a pauper, ne
gro, without intellect, sense or emo
ion. My child with an affectionate
smile disarms my carewOrn face of it's
irown whenever l cross my threshold.
The beggar in the street Oblige5 me- to
give because he says: God bless you!7
Is 1 pass My dog caresses me with
'ondness if l will but smile on him.
nanger. What reward, what graft
Jude, what sympathy and affec-
ion can l expect here? There
he prisoner sits. Look at him.
Look at the assemblage around
you. Listen to their Unsurpassed
ensures and excited fears, and tell me
where among my neighbors or my fell
Owmen, where, even in his heart,
,an expect to find a sentiment,
thought, not to say of reward or of &C
or even of recognition.
Gentlemen, you may think of this evil
lence what you please, bring in what
Terdict you can, but asseverate before
heaven and you, that, to the best of
ny knowledge and belief. the prisoner
vt the bar does not at this moment
know why it is that my shadow falls
IN you instead of his own.
The gallOws got its victim, but the
,ost mortem examination of the poor
reature showed to all the surgeons
md to all the world that the public
yere wrong, and William H. Seward
vas right, and that hard, stoney step +
# obloquy in the Auburn court room
vas 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 de-
lied him through the treachery of
american politics. Nothing sublimer
vas ever seen in an American court
Dom than William III. Seward, without
eward, standing between the furious
and the loathsome imbeciIe.
In the realm of the fine arts there !
vas as remarkable an instance. A
brilliant but hypercriticised painter,
oseph William Turner, was met by [
olley of abuse from all the art CALLER [
es of Europe. His paintings, which
ave since won the applause of all civ I
lied nations, THE Fifth Plague of
Egypt, Fishermen on a Lee Shore in
qually Weather" Calais Pier, 1.-The
nn Rising Thrnnrh MiStr and ssDidn