Macon beacon. [volume] (Macon, Miss.) 1859-1995, 1914-07-17

shield herself from the courts process Ii TIE hour
of her States sore need.
Fairly analysed, that Is the truth in q nutshell.
Here's another impartial view Of the situation as
it affects Miss Plunkett:
She waS aware that her testimony was wanted
by the State. AS a lover Of truth and justice. and
one willing to protect the innocent and defend the
injured. it was her bounden duty-an unacceptable
obligation, If you please, Of q person Of high char.
acter, willing, If not eager. to observe the splendid
spirit Of nobIeSse ObH0e-to come, when apprized
of the fact her testimony in the case was needed.
before the court and there tell the truth, the whole
truth and nothing but the truth.
To decline and flee from the constabularies OF
the court as she did, TO evade the responsibility Of
doing her duty whether that duty-the giving Of
her testimony-was favorable or unfavorable to
the prisoner at the bar, was not only weak and
cowardly but unwontanly and a distinct disregard
of the best interests of good government and the
obligation of righteous citizenship and civic virtue.
Consider the circumstances;
There, at the bar, stands the prisoner, the Lieu
tenant Governor Of Mississippi and the distin-
guished friend Of Miss Plunkett.
He is being tried under an indictment charging
him with a grievously disgraceful felony.
of a character to help lift the load of infamy hang
ing as a Damocletian sword over his name and
fame and the happiness Of his home-then by every
rule of right, of love and duty, she owed it to her.
self and to %womanhood to give him the benefit of
all she knew that would 60 to exculpate and set
him free.
The gentleness of spirit and the courage Of con-
science and Of love, the qualities that make true
the lines Of Bayard Taylor
'The bravest are the tenderest-
The loving are the daring"
and the sublime heroism of her sex which inspired
another poet to write of woman,
''Not she with traitr'o Gus kiss her Saviour stung,
Not she denied him with unholyitongue;
She, while apostles shrank, could danger brave,
Last at the cross and earliest at his grave"
all. all of these called, and called loudly at that,
upon her to face the music-to take the stand and,
in the purity of her own heart and the conscious
ness of her own innocence, to tell all she knew to
bring out the facts and develope the truth in the
case,
On the other hand: 49,.
If her testimony was favorable to the State, if it
tended to establish the Lieutenant Governors
guilt, her first certain highest duty to the State
than which next to duty to God and the duty of
wife to husband, from which last the maidenly
modest Miss Plunkett, happily is free, there can De
that she stand by her colors and tell the truth
though the heavens should fall.
Turn upon Miss Plunkett's conduct all the light
possible, and view it as we may, II truth be the
object of search, there is but one logical deduction
to be drawn from it, to-wit:
She is either guilty OF lnhdellty to mississippi
the land of her birth and the home of her immedi-
ate forebears-which is but another name for dis
loyalty to "God and Home and Native Land" or
she Is guilty Of faithlesspess to her friend, Bilbo.
That is the two-horned dilemma she has erected.
Worse still:
Upon the one or the other horn of this dilemma of
her own creation she has so firmly impaled herself
that all the ~logicians and sophists on earth. from
India's coral strand to Greenland's icy mountains, "
cannot rescue her in safety from the perilous place
she occupies.