Way down in Texas, at Hempstead, is a faithful band of fifteen C. L. S. C. workers of the class of ’88. They are college folks, the president of the institution—Soule College—to which they belong being the president of the circle. They are very enthusiastic over the course, and do a great deal of work.
EDITOR’S OUTLOOK.
GENERAL GRANT’S ILLNESS.
The pathetic interest surrounding the illness of General Grant recalls the intenser, but not more persistent, emotions of the days when President Garfield lay dying. The strong and sustained popular interest in the illness of General Grant is shown by the constant attention of the press to the theme. No day is allowed to pass without a telegraphic bulletin informing the nation how well or ill the distinguished patient slept the last night, and reporting any change for the better or the worse. We are all gathered about the invalid chair, in which the illustrious sufferer spends his wearisome days; and any word which drops from his lips flies on the wires all over the country. It is not a passion, or a folly, or a nullity. It is a piece of modern Providential education. What distinguished patient, ever before Garfield had so large and so near an audience of sympathy? And who does not see in the strong-flowing tide of sympathy for General Grant another lesson of the same kind? Eminence has been honored before; but these thought-laden wires take us into the very chamber of the patient and set us all upon muffled words of regret, and pity, and sorrow. We are learning, hardly knowing it, how eminence claims our regard and commands our attention, and how rapidly we can forget our criticisms and our antagonisms when Death knocks at the great man’s door. There is nothing political, nothing sensational, in this illness. No public fortunes, or hopes, or fears hang upon the event. General Grant is dying; that is all; but the man who has filled so large a space in his country’s history, and dwelt so long in the world’s eye, can not die without quickening all pulses, and awakening every soul to pitiful attention. Great worlds of mysterious human powers of interest and sympathy seem to open before us, and invite us within the awe and solemnity of their spiritual skies. It is better—we see why, now—to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting. No day of triumph in General Grant’s life had such an uplifting and educating power as is borne along in the arms of these days’ sickness and sorrow. Dying so among us, the illustrious patient does indeed die for us—his death lifting us into better life.
There are many smaller lessons. What an education in gunshot wounds we got at the bedside of Garfield! What a window into one of the awfully mysterious diseases we are looking through at the bedside of Grant! Before the end comes, cancer will have parted with much of its mystery. What doctors know the nation will know; and the education will save human lives; perhaps impel men to closer and more effectual search for the causes and remedies of this terrible disease. A human interest, such as we are feeling throughout the nation and the world, has a stimulating power which no man can measure. It may be that out of Grant’s dying of cancer may come discoveries of permanent and universal value to mankind.