Year: 1876

There is unfortunately, a class

 of men to be found in every coun-

 try and neighbOrhood who are

 never satisfied unless they are

 eternally in hot water. They go

 around growing and snarling

 with their backs up like an infuri-

 ated tom cat, having no peace

 themselves nor allowing anybody

 else to have any. Truly the fools,

 are not all dead, and never will

 be until the millennium dawns

 upon the earth. Harmless fool

 ishness we can and do have sym

 pathy for, because it proceeds

 from some mental defect for

 which the party is not. responsi-

 hle. It may be inherited from a

 line of crack Drained ancestry, or it may result from some cerebral

 Arrangement. In either case the

 possessor is entitled to pity. But

 that other class, who claim to be

 smart, but whose fOoIishness is

 prompted by malice, ill.will and

 cussedness of disposition, we have

 very little patience with, and we

 have all along been praying that

 the fool-killer would come along

 and Kill them all of. God knows

 we love peace and good will and

 good fellowship, and our expan- sive, bosom overfiows with the

 milk of human kindness, but we are sometimes terribly annoyed

 by the class Of men first above al- luded to. We don't know of what

 use they are:in the world. unless as Josh Billings says, "they are allowed to exist like spiinters, just to stick into somebody" The above remarks are suggested by the fact that we have been pur- sued with venom, and falsehood because we sometime since con- sidered it our duty to defend the public schools from the combined attack of Chief Justice and Priest. For our conscientious action in that respect we have been .wanton- ly persecuted by a few ultramon- tane' bigots, whose little souls would rattle in hollow mustard seed. A very few of them in their petty spite have withdrawn their patronage from our paper. We'll, let them go. Where we have lost one patron for the above implied cause, we have gained three, and what is more; we have retained the approbation of our own conscience. What we wrote and printed about that matter, was the eternal truth, and we can the record in our files with pride and satIfaction, and there is not one word that we wrote that, "dying, we would wish to blot" To use an ArkansGaO BastI, eff we said anything that we are sorry for, we are glad of it."

 We do not wish to speak de- fiantIy, but we have been wrong ed and are indignant. We never anybody's religion. We believe in the fullest exercise of that liberty by which the Spirit | of God and the Constitution of tn e 1 United States make us FREE We-were contending for a princi- ple. We will always stand by and defend what we concieve to be the truth and the right, and if we die in our tracks we cannot | die in nobler cause. God grant that when we are called, we may | be found in the harness of truth.

 Like Fitz James, when Rode rick Dhu blew his whistle and his bristling hosts arose on every side, backed himselfagainst a rock and | shouted, "COme one, come all this rock shall fly from it's firm base as soon as l." So we, our humble self, while backed by the rock of eternal truth, feaf not the assaults of men or devils. We