[Dr. Halsey was asked to write a chapter giving his experience in the hospitals at Frederick. He could not be induced to do so. The entire war topic was repugnant to him. “I always feel,” he said in 1890, “like using an oath whenever the subject is brought up.” He never could believe that real necessity for the war was compatible with public intelligence. He felt fortified in this view by the success with which he had seen slavery peacefully abolished elsewhere in the world. England had abolished it in her own colonies long before our Civil War and without loss of blood. In Russia millions of slaves were freed without war and the same result had been achieved without domestic conflict in Brazil. One of these countries was ruled by an autocrat and two of the three comprise in part scarcely more than semi-civilized people and yet they effected great economic revolutions by means entirely peaceful.
Nor could he forget that slavery in the northern States had been abolished without war. He knew that this was not due to higher moral sense on the part of the northern people, but to causes purely economic. Slavery in the North did not pay and hence it was abolished. He believed this would ultimately have been the result in the South, a view which the tremendous changes wrought in agricultural labor by machinery since the war has steadily tended to confirm in many thoughtful minds.
When the war afterwards became a war to save the Union, and the Emancipation Proclamation had eliminated slavery from the issue, he knew how entirely the situation and the motives for the war had changed; but never to his last day did he fail to regard the war, in its immediate origin, as a public iniquity in which extremists at the North and South alike had dyed their hands in innocent blood. He knew that secession sentiments were not exclusively the property of South Carolina and Mississippi and that Abolitionists at the North, who have since been held in great honor and almost made national heroes, openly advocated it, long before the Southern leaders fled to it as a desperate resort.[122]]
In 1865 I became interested with a partner in the first drug store[123] opened in the village, which finally came into my hands alone and made necessary my withdrawing from the active practice of my profession. Failing health at last compelled me to dispose of the drug store in the spring of 1888.
Thus briefly have I reviewed my personal history in the past half century. Notwithstanding its length it has occupied much more time than I expected when starting it. Yet, had I included all points of any special interest as they passed my mind’s eye in panoramic order, perhaps I could have occupied a far larger space. The urgent wish of my children was the first inducement. The pleasure derived from thus reviewing my life in leisure moments has been the fullest compensation. If readers have been in any like proportion gratified, this truly has been an additional as well as unexpected pleasure.
I cannot refrain from attempting as a final addendum a look into the probable and possible developments of the next fifty years. While I am neither a prophet nor a son of a prophet, yet in view of what the past fifty years have brought out in utilizing and subjecting the primary elements to the practical benefit of mankind, I have no hesitation in placing myself on record as anticipating as great or greater achievements in the same direction. Who would have called a man sane fifty years ago that should have sincerely said we would ever talk with another living thousands of miles away? or that one’s voice could be stirred up and again given to another’s auditory sense years after?
In view of this and other equally incredible developments, how long before the air will be as safely navigable as the earth or water? It is but a question of time when principles of economy will secure us against extravagant waste of fuel. The earth is fast being gridironed with railroads driven by the consumption of coal, but only a small per cent of the heat evolved is utilized. The other ninety per cent or so is complete waste. Geology says coal will eventually be exhausted and wood is already practically destroyed as fuel.
The child is now living who will see heating, lighting, washing, cooking, etc., done at central points, and supplies distributed wherever needed. He will also see the fact recognized and generally adopted that Omniscience in creating and developing our wonderful Universe had some loftier, more ennobling object in view than to allow the few to enslave the masses simply for power and gain. God speed the time when the old saying of Robert Burns, “man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn” will cease to be true.