Part 13 (1/2)

A wise physician skilled our wounds to heal Is more than armies to the public weal

Soure of Dr Joseph Hutchinson, one of the best Aeons For some years, in the streets of Brooklyn, he was a faure on horseback He rode superbly, and it was his custom to make his calls in that way He died in this year Daniel Curry was another significant, superior man of a different sort, who also died in the summer of 1887 He was an editor and writer of the Methodist Church At his death he told one thing that will go into the classics of the Church; and five hundred years beyond, when evangelists quote the last words of this inspiredvision that cament before the throne, and knew not what to do on account of his sins He felt that he was lost, when suddenly Christ saw him and said, ”I will answer for Daniel Curry” In this world of vast population it is wonderful to find only a few men who have helped to carry the burden of others with distinction for themselves Most of us are driven

In the two years and a half that our Democratic party had been in power, our taxes had paid in a surplus to the United States treasury of 125,000,000 The whole country was groaning under an infamous taxation

Most of it was spent by the Republican party, three or four years before, to iation on rivers with about two feet of water in theinia I saw one of these dry creeks that was to be improved Taxation caused the war of the Revolution It had becoovernment that rolled over all our public interests Politicians were afraid to touch the subject for fear they ht offend their party I touch upon it here because those who live after me may understand, by their own experience, the infaovernment taxation

We had our school for scandal in Aood for the soul, but our newspaper headlines over-reached this ideal purpose They cultivated liars and encouraged their lies The peculiarity of lies is their great longevity They are a productive species and would have overwhelton except for his hatchet Once born, the lie may live twenty, thirty, or forty years At the end of a man's life sometimes it is healthier than he ever was Lies have attacked every occupant of the White House, have irritated every ood wohbour; to-morrow it is after you It travels so fast that aIt listens at keyholes, it can hear whispers: it has one ear to the East, the other to the West An old-fashi+oned tea-table is its jubilee, and a political can is its heaven Avoid it you may not, but e, a persecution

Nothing more offensive to public sentiment could have occurred than the attempt made in New York in the autumn of 1887 to hinder the appointment of a new pastor of Trinity Church, on the plea that he can labour It was an outrage on religion, on the Church, on common sense As a nation, however, ere safe There was not another place in the world where its chief ruler could travel five thousand miles, for three weeks, unprotected by bayonets, as Mr Cleveland did on his Presidential tour of the country It was a universal huzzah, frowumps, Republicans, and Democrats We were a safe nation because we destroyed Coo, in Noveallows It took tencould have beenhu the first to publicly propose execution by electricity Mr Edison, upon a request froed it I was particularly horrified with the blunders of the hangman's methods, because I was in a friend's office in New York, when the telegraph wires gave instantaneous reports of the executions in Chicago I made notes of these flashes of death

”Now the prisoners leave the cells,” said the wire; ”now they are ascending the stairs”; ”now the rope is being adjusted”; ”now the cap is being drawn”; ”now they fall” Had I been there I would probably have felt thankful that I was brought up to obey the law, and could understand thepowers One of these enerous, I was told, but was e; and so he becaot his antipathy for all prosperous people froate nobleman, and his mother a poor, h up in society Chief as was an American instinct for lawfulness in the midst of lawless tee aspassing into shadowland the robed figure of an upright e Greenwood of Brooklyn, in November, 1887, was a reminder of such matters He had seen the nineteenth century in its youth and in its old age Froht side of all its questions of public welfare We could, appropriately, hang his portrait in our court rooms and city halls The artist's brush would be ta face of dear old Judge Greenwood in the portrait gallery of my recollections

The national event of this auturess, which put squarely before us the reat question of our national problem, and called for oratory and statesmanshi+p to answer it The whole of Europe was interested in the subject I advocated free trade as the best understanding of international trading, because I had talked with the leaders of political thought in Europe, and I understood both sides, as far as my capacity could compass them In America ere frequently compared to the citizens of the French Republic because of our nervous force, our restlessness, but ere nation of President Grevy in France re-established this fact

Though an American President becomes offensive to the people, ait patiently till his four years are out, even if we are not very quiet about it We are safest e keep our hands off the Constitution The demonstration in Paris emphasised our Republican wisdom Public service is an altar of sacrifice for all orshi+p there

The death of Daniel Manning, ex-Secretary of the Treasury, in December, 1887, was another proof of this He fell prostrate on the steps of his office, in a sickness that no medical aid could relieve Four years before no one realised the strength that was in him He threw body and soul into the whirlpool of his work, and was left in the rapids of celebrity In the closing notes of 1887, I find recorded the death of Mrs William Astor What a sublime lifetime of charity and kindness was hers! Mrs Astor's will read like a poem It had a beauty and a pathos, and a power entirely independent of rhythmical cadence The docu, with its bequests of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the poor and needy, the invalids and the churches It put a warrizzled face of the old year It was a benediction upon the co years

THE TWELFTH MILESTONE

1888

It seeins when he has passed fifty Not until then can he be a master builder As I sped past the fifty-fifth milestone life itself became better, broader, fuller My plans ider, the distances I wanted to go stretched before e lifetime This I knew, but still I pressed on, indifferent of the speed or strain There were indications that th had not been dissipated, that the years were merely notches that had not cut deep, that had scarcely scarred the surface of the trunk The soul, the er

The conservation of the soul is not so profound a uardianshi+p of the gateways through which i one's inner self from wasteful associations

The influence of e read is of chief i of 1888 I received innumerable requests from people all over New York and Brooklyn for advice on the subject of reading In the deluge of books that were beginning to sweep over us many readers were drowned The question of what to read was being discussed everywhere

I opposed the majority of novels because they were made chiefly to set forth desperate love scrapes Much reading of love stories makes one soft, insipid, absent-minded, and useless Affections in life usually work out very differently The lady does not always break into tears, nor faint, nor do the parents always oppose the situation, so that a ro of these stories makes fools of men and women Neither is it advisable to read a book because someone else likes it It is not necessary to waste time on Shakespeare if you have no taste for poetry or dramatime with Sir William Hamilton when metaphysics are not to your taste When you read a book by the page, every fewahead to see how many chapters there are before the book will be finished, you had better stop reading it There was even a fashi+on in books that was absurd People were bored to death by literature in the fashi+on

For a while we had a Tupper epide blank verse--very blank Then caid, involved, twisted and breakneck sentences, each noun with ashad wives Then followed a roion and roion, and we prided ourselves on being sceptical and independent in our literary tastes My advice was simply to make up one's mind what to read, and then read it Life is short, and books are arret croith rubbish, ed, in which you would not be ashamed to have the whole world enter

There was so much in the world to provoke the soul, and yet all persecution is a blessing in some way The so-called modern literature, towards the close of the nineteenth century, was beco of i We were the slaves of our newspapers; eacha library was thrown on our doorstep But what a jumbled, inconsequent, muddled-up library! It was the best that could be h I believe there were conservative people who opened it only to read thefast enough

In January, 1888, that well-known Ae Joseph Neilson, died He was an old friend ofwhile he was an invalid, but he kept this knowledge from the world, because he wanted no public demonstration The last four years of his life he was confined to his roo, interested in all the affairs of the world, after a life of active work in it He belonged to that breed which has developed the brain and brawn of American character--the Scotch-Irish If Christianity had been a fallacy, Judge Neilson would have been just the man to expose it He who on the judicial bench sat in solemn poise of spirit, while the ablest jurists and advocates of the century were before him to be prompted, corrected, or denied, was not the ion of sophistry or mere pretence Chief Justice Salion as he had studied a law case, and concluded that it was divine Judge Neilson's decisions will be quoted in court roo as Justice holds its balance The supremacy of a useful life never leaves the earth--its influence remains behind

The whole world, it see spiritualised by the influences of those whose great ible and material benefits, years after they themselves were invisible It was an elereat botanist, in England; in the relieved anxieties in Berlin; in the jubilation in Dublin; by the gathering of noble; and in the dawn of this new year I could see a tendency in European affairs to the unification of nations

The Ger for the supremacy of Europe As I foresaw events then, the tould first conquer Europe, and the stronger of the tould s the other