Orleans County monitor. [volume] (Barton, Vt.) 1872-1953, 1898-04-11

| bering. his every birthday with some
| memento, and when lie is brought
! home worn out with dissipation nurses
him till he gets we'll and starts him
again and hopes and expects and prays
and counsels and suffers until 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 utterance they can
catch but three words, my poor boy!"
The simple fact is she died for him.
Life for life! Substitution!
About SO years ago there went forth
from our northern and southern homes
hundreds of thousands of men to do bat
tie. All the poetry of war soon vanish
ed, and left them nothing but the terri
BILE prose- They waded knee deep in
mud. They slept in snow banks. They
marched till their cut feet tracked the
earth. asey were swindled out Of their
honest rations and lived on meat not fit
for 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 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
- hot 10
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
principle they died. Life for life!
Blood for blood Substitution!
Principle of Self Sacrifice.
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? Oh, 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 re-
gions he passes crowded rail trains, reg
uIar and extra, taking the flying and
affrighted populations. He arrives in
a city over which a great horror is
brooding. He goes from couch to
couch, feeling the pulse and studying
symptoms and prescribing day after
day, night after night, until a fell
low 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 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 be fights his attendants until 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 sac
rifice-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, 81 was sick and ye Wis
tied me- Life for lifei Blood for
blood Substitution!
In the legal profession I see the same
principle of self sacrifice. In 1916 Will
liam Freeman, a pauperized 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 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 awk-
ward. 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:
Substitution.
st speak now in the hearing of peo-
pie who have prejudged prisoner and
condemned me for pleading in his be-
half. He is a convict, a pauper, a negro,
without intellect, sense Or emotion. My
child with an affectionate smile disarms
my careworn face of its frown whenever
cross my threshold. The beggar in the
street obliges me to give because he
says God bless you as pass. My dog
caresses me with fondness if I will but
smile on him. My horse recognizes me
when / fill his manger. What reward,
what gratitude what sympathy and
affection can | expect here? There the
prisoner sits. Look at him. Look at the
assem- blage around you. Listen to their
i'll suppressed censures and excited fears
and tell me where among my neighbors
or my fellow men, where, even in his