Bisbee daily review., 1906-01-24
DIRECTORS.

leaning but slightly toward mercy, found their hero in Cromwell, who
 read his Bible and prayed much, yet ] was responsible for the awful ven geance wrecked on Drogheda and for
 the horrors of Dunbar. Stirring ages
 like those of the Crusades. of the Mo hammedan conquest. of fifteenth and sixteenth century discoveries and ex- 1 plorations and of great industrial
 transformations, will have heroes of | action-Richard the Lion-Hearted,
 Mohammed, Columbus, Raleigh, Ste
 phenson, and Edison.
 The prosaic, materialistic age is
 accused of having neither heroes nor clements of heroism. In the busy years of the decades of the forties
 and fifties of the last century, men said that heroic qualities were dying
 or dead and that luxury and avarice
 ruled society; men like Carlyle and
 Ruskin railed at the degeneracy of
 man of that time, both in England and
 in America. But there came days
 from 1861 to 1865, like that July day in 1863, on the hills at Gettysburg, when the best that New England and the North had bred in the lap of ease and refinement stood steadfast all the long morning amid shot and shriek. ing shell, waiting for orders which seemed an eternity in coming; when
 the high-strung, masterful men of the leisurely South strove nightly against a mighty foe; and those days demonstrated once for all that heroic elements were strong and dominant even in a commercial and money-get- ting generation, that the cry for good old days when alone heroic men had
 walked the earth, was silly and pessi- mistic.
 Who. then, is the hero? Certainly not the ,doer. of a single heroic deed
 under the powerful stress of the moment or the impulse of occasion.
 Such an act can no more make a hero than one great gift for charity or for education can make a saint
 Rather is the hero the man who
 stands stesdfastly through the years doing that thing. or those things, which to the great multitude seem supremely desiratle, and which each man Of the crowd would himself like to do. The revelation of these quail
 ties in a man, the showing forth of heroic elements, is often painfully slow. even century-iong, for 1t is with difficulty that common souls recoE- only common virtues strengthened and competed, and as it were. raised : to the fourth or tenth power. No , man was commoner, of his time and
 Of his crude, genuine western commu- ! nifty, than was Abraham Lincoln in l 1856, and when he appeared a few years later before a great audience in Cooper Union in New York. the | wise and gifted and refined looked at his great, gaunt figure in its wrinkled
 and ill-fitting clothes, and mentally
 asked, What is this that has been : brought before Us out of the West?
 Even in Washington in 1861 and 1862
 his qualities were unrecognized, and 1t was not until the northern part Of ] the nation had borne his body in rev erent silence half way across the con
 tinent to its resting place in his own life began to be vaguely understood. He who had been considered but as
 hill, 8 pile of unsighuy granite, be- l came a great peak, a peoples land mark of wisdom and patriotism. 1 The common virtues whose inten- sification and tenacity give them he roic qualities are CD devotion to righteousness-cIear headed, patient, calculating. zealous devotion to right
 eouEness both personal, social, civic
 and international, as illustrated in
 Lincoln, in WilbeTforce in his long fight in England against colonial slav-
 cry; in Roosevelt, Jerome and Folk: (2) honesty of the commonest, most
 Jld fashioned sort, honesty which
 pays debts when the law would give
 easy release, as Mark Twain at six ty years showed kL= heroisaa in pay ing the creditors of the baukruI' pub l fishing house with which bi1 name
 was connected; though for this pur-
 pose he had no other resource than
 reputation and voice; honesty which
 Is just now having such a heartening revival, honesty which has always been abundant, else the magnificent fabric of modern industry and pros perity could never have been built up. (3) The prophetic element-the ca pacity to show forth the best spirit of sn age. to give men sympathetic. interpretstive leadership. and 10 pre-