I d’no nor Josiah don’t, whether it wuz right and best to influence the souls of the young till they burnt at white heat with the spirit that our Lord said his disciples must avoid, for said he: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”
Well, it is a deep question, deeper than I’ve got a line to measure; and Josiah’s line and mine both tied together don’t begin to touch the bottom on’t, for we’ve tried it time and agin. We’ve argyed aginst each other about it, and jined on and hitched our arguments together, and they didn’t touch bottom then, nor begin to. As Mrs. Browning said (a woman I set store by, and always did, I’ve hearn Thomas J. read about her so much): “A country’s a thing men should die for at need.”
Yes, to die for, if its safety is imperilled, that I believe and Josiah duz, but I have eppisoded about it a sight, I’ve had to. I methought how this nation wuz stirred to its deepest depths; how it seethed and boiled with indignation and wrath because three hundred of its sons wuz killed by ignorant and vicious means; how it breathed out vengeance on the cause that slew them; how it called To Arms! To Arms! Remember the Maine! But how cool and demute it stood, or ruther sot, and see every year sixty thousand of its best sons slain by the saloon, ten-fold more cruel deaths, too, since the soul and mind wuz slain before their bodies went. No cry for vengeance as the long procession of the dead wheeled by the doors of the law-makers of the land; no cry: “To arms! to arms! Remember the Saloon.” And more mysterious still, I eppisoded to myself, it would have looked to see the Government rig out and sell to the Spaniards a million more bombs and underground mines to blow up the rest of our ships and kill thousands more of our young men. Wouldn’t it have looked dog queer to the other nations of the world to have seen it done?
But there they sot, our law-makers, and if they lifted 60 their eyes at all to witness the long procession of the dead drift by, sixty thousand corpses yearly slain by the Saloon, if they lifted their eyes at all to look at the ghastly procession, they dropped ’em agin quick as they could so’s not to delay their work of signin’ licenses, makin’ new laws, fixin’ over old ones, and writin’ permits to the murderers to go on with their butchery. Queer sight! queer in the sight of other nations, in the sight of men and angels, and of me and Josiah.
Well, to stop eppisodin’ and resoom backwards for a spell. Alan Thorne hearn that cry: “To arms! To arms!” And his very soul listened. His grandfathers on both sides wuz fighting men; at school and college he’d been trained in a soldier regiment, and had been steeped full of warlike idees, and they all waked up at his cry for vengeance. He had just got to go; it wuz to be. Heaven and Waitstill couldn’t help it; he had to go; he went.
Well, Waitstill read his letters as well as she could through her blindin’ tears; letters at first full of love––the very passion of love and tenderness for his sweetheart, and deathless patriotism and love for his country.
But bime-by the letters changed a little in their tones––they wuzn’t so full of love for his country. “The country,” so he writ, “wuz shamefully neglecting its sons, neglecting their comfort.” He writ they wuz herded together in quarters not fit for a dog, with insufficient food; putrid, dretful food, that no dog would or could eat. No care taken of their health––and as for the health of their souls, no matter where they wuz, if half starved or half clad, the Canteen was always present with ’em; if they could git nothin’ else for their comfort, they could always git the cup that the Bible sez: “Cursed is he that puts it to his neighbor’s lips.” Doubly cursed now––poisoned with adulteration, makin’ it a still more deadly pizen.
Well, sickened with loathsome food he could not eat, half starved, the deadly typhoid hovering over the wretched 61 soldier, is it any wonder that as the tempter held the glass to his lips (the tempter being the Government he wuz fightin’ for) the tempted yielded and drank?
The letters Waitstill got grew shorter and cooler, as the tempter led Alan deeper and deeper into his castle of Ruin where the demon sets and gloats over its victims. When the Canteen had done its work on the crazed brain and imbruted body, other sins and evils our Government had furnished and licensed, stood ready to draw him still further along the down-grade whose end is death.
Finally the letters stopped, and then Waitstill, whose heart wuz broke, jined the noble army of nurses and went forward to the front, always hunting for the one beloved, and, as she feared, lost to her. And she found him. The very day that Alan Thorne, in a drunken brawl, killed Arvilly’s husband with a bullet meant for another drunken youth, these wimmen met. A rough lookin’ soldier knelt down by the dead man, a weepin’ woman fell faintin’ on his still, dead heart; this soldier (’twas Arville) wuz sick in bed for a week, Waitstill tendin’ him, or her I might as well say, for Arville owned to her in her weakness that she wuz a woman; yes, Waitstill tended her faithfully, white and demute with agony, but kep’ up with the hope that the Government that had ruined her lover would be lenient towards the crime it had caused. For she reasoned it out in a woman’s way. She told Arvilly “that Alan would never have drank had not the Government put the cup to his lips, and of course the Government could not consistently condemn what it had caused to be.” She reasoned it out from what she had learnt of justice and right in the Bible.