Connecticut western news., 1898-04-14


 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 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 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? It 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 vials 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. ular and extra, taking the flying and affrighted populations. He arrives in city over which great horror is breeding. He goes from couch to couch, feeling the pulse and studying symptoms and prescribing day after day, night after night, until a fel- low physician says, Doctor, you had better go home and rest; you look mis- erable. But he cannot rest while SC 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 he 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. rifce-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, "I was sick and ye vis- ited me-" Life for lifel Blood for blood Substitution
 In the legal profession see the same principle of self sacrifice. In 1846 Will liam Freeman, pauperized and idiotio negro, was at Auburn, N. r., 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 suuh an ungrateful task. All were silent save one, young lawyer with feeble voice that could hardly be heard outside the bar, pale and thin and awk- ward. It 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 uttering these beautiful words:
 Substitution.
 II speak now in the hearing of peo- pie who have prejudged prisoner and condemned me for pleading in his be- half. He is convict, pauper, negro, without intellect, sense or emotion. My child with an affectionate smile disarms my oareworn face of its frown whenever I cross my threshold. The beggar in the street obliges me to give because he says God bless you as 1 pass. My dog caresses me with fondness if I will but smile on him. My horse recognizes me when 1 fill his manager. What reward, what gratitude, what sympathy and affection can l expect here? There tho prisoner sits Look at him. Look at the assem blaze around you. Listen to their ill suppressed censures and excited fears and tell me where among my neigh bors or my fellow men, where, even i'll his heart, can expect to find sentiment, a thought, not to say of reward or of acknowledgment or even of recognition. Gentlemen, you may think of this evi- dence 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 it is that my shadow falls on you instead of his own.
 The gallows got it's victim, but the post mortem examination of the poor creature showed to all the surgeons and 10 all the world that the public were wrong and William H. Seward was right, and that hard, stony step of obloquy in the Auburn courtroom 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 Am 5rican politics. Nothing sublimer was ever seen in an American courtroom than William H. Seward. without reward, standing between the furious populace and the loathsome imbecile. Substitu. tion!
 In the realm of the fine arts there was as remarkable an instance. A brilliant but hypercritioised painter, Joseph William Turner, was met by a volley of abuse from all the art galleries of Europe. His paintings, which have since won the applause of all civilized nations, "The Fifth Plague of Egypt, " Fishermen on Lee Shore In Squally Weather,' "Calais Pier, "The Sun Rising Through Mist" and "Dido Building Carthage, were then targets for critics to shoot at. In defense, of this outrageously abused man, young au. thor of 24 years, just one year out o1 college, came forth with his pen and wrote the ablest and most famous essay on art that the world ever saw or ever will see-John Ruskin s Modern Paint ers." For IF years this author fought the battles of the maltreated artist and after, ill poverty and broken hearted ness, the painter had died and the pub lie tried to undo their cruelties toward him, by giving him big funeral and burial in St. Paul's cathedral, his old time friend took out of tin box 19, 00C pieces of paper containing drawings by the old painter, and through many weary and uncompeasated months as sorted and arranged them for public ob servation. People say John Ruskin ir his old day is cross, misanthropic and morbid, Whatever he may do that he ought not to do and whatever he may H. L II T.