The Falls City tribune., 1909-12-03

ly a force as a preacher, and it was
not entirely certain that he would
have done the people. or himself any
interfered with the great career that
fate had in store for his opponent. in
the years to come. They were two
originals of the first elass-diamonds
in the rough, and though dissimilar
as antitheses possibly a be, physi-
cally and mentally, they were both
nevertheless eminently representa-
tive of those moral and political fore
es. that in a later time enabled our
nation to throw off the slough of a
darker age, and become what its
projectors intended it to be,-a re-
public in which all power resides in
its people, and all rule the emanation
of an enlightened Christian public
sentiment. The eminent German ply
losopher. Johann Gottlieb Fiehte, was
never SO right than when he said
You will not be surprised If here
again we revert to Christianity as
the principle of all public morality in
modern tines | use the word
Christianity in precisely the same
sense-that strong %sinuous, unbreak-
able thread, that runs all through the
warp and wool of nineteen hundred
years of world history, the miracle
of all the miracles.
In the course of my life it has fall
IN to my lot to witness the acts of
others of the Cartwright order, that
is, in his and their missionary capaci-
ties on the outskirts of civilization.
Right here In Richardson county, fif-
actment of similar scenes that obtain
ed in the vanguard of that break
oyer the A~lleghanies at the close of
the Eighteenth, and the beginning of
the Nineteenth centuries, and thence
has spread itself onward to the
shores of the far Pacific in the west.
Our pioneers were no worse, and
probably no better, than others sim
ilarly situated, but that they needed
out saying. | have already said
something of the general moral status
of the several towns in the county,
and IF our Indian neighbors to the
south, and | need not enlarge on the
facts, but 1t in my way now to
say something of the ways and means
employed to better their conditions in
that respect.
In those days we had two object
lessons sharply defined before us,
whether they were understood and APP
preciated or not, and it is safe to
able results might have been easily
deduced. Over the river was a peo-
pie who belonged to the prehistoric
ages. They, and their kind had in
habited the wilds of this continent for
thousands and thousands of years,
but had made no more progress to-
wards civilization, than the birds and
squirrels in the trees, OF the beav-
ers or the offers in the streams, AS
the morning of creation beheld them,
we saw them then. Contact of the
whites with such a race was benefit
|'cial to neither, but meant obstruction
for one of them, speedy, sure, and
certain. Where they mingled to any
extent, the standard of morality Of
the one was not elevated, while the
ly lowered. This we saw in the ear
~ days in the case of Rulo. In point
of moral citizenship, it will now com
pare fayorably with other towns in
the county, but it was far otherwise
in the time of its first settlement.
From the day | first saw it in 1858,
when its population was largely made
up of mixed blood Indians, male and
female, and the consequent nondes-
cript riff-raff which that order of So
ciety almost universally collects about
it, to the autumn of 1864, there was
little evidence of that Christian civil
ization which had been the distingu-
ishing feature of the great army of
the pioneers in this country, in its