Again, older readers will remember with what fear and trembling they opened their morning papers for many months, fearing to read that England had accorded "belligerent rights" to the Confederacy. They will have a vivid recollection of the eloquent orator, Henry Ward Beecher, as he plead, as no other man could, the cause of the Union in English cities. He was backed up by old John Bright, the descendants of Penn, Gurney and Wilberforce, and the old-time enemies of human slavery. But it took them all to stem the tide. At one time it even seemed that they had won over Gladstone to their interests.

While the great masses of the English people were in sympathy with the Union cause, the moneyed men and commerce sided with the Confederacy: "Cotton was King." They had been struck in a tender place—their pockets and bank accounts. But suppose England had owned Oregon and its great interests, who don't see that all the danger would have been multiplied, and our interests endangered? There is in this no extravagant claim made that all this was done by Marcus Whitman. The Ruler of the Universe uses men, not a man, for its direction and government.

Going back upon the pages of history, the student sees Whittier in his study, and listens to his singing; he sees Mrs. Stowe educating with Uncle Tom in his cabin; he notes Garrison forging thunderbolts in his Liberator; he sees old Gamaliel Bailey with his National Era; he sees Sumner fall by a bludgeon in the Senate; he hears the eloquent thunderings of Hale and bluff old Ben Wade and Giddings and Julian and Chase; he sees Lovejoy fall by the hands of his assassin; he hears the guns of the old "fanatic" John Brown, as he began "marching on;" he sees a great army marshaled for the contest which led up to the election of the "Martyr President," and the crowning victories which redeemed the grandest nation upon which the sun shines from the curse of human slavery. Giving due credit to all, detracting no single honor from any one in all the distinguished galaxy of honored names, and yet the thoughtful student can reach but one conclusion, and that is, that in the timeliness of his acts, in the heroism with which they were carried out, in the unselfishness which marked every step of the way, and in the wide-reaching effects of his work, Dr. Marcus Whitman, as a man and patriot and national benefactor, was excelled by none.

Such unselfish devotion, such obedience to the call of duty, such love of "the flag that makes you free," such heroism, which never even once had an outcropping of personal benefit, will forever stand, when fully understood, as among the brightest and most inspiring pages of American history.

The young American loves to read of Paul Revere. He dwells with thrilling interest upon the ride of the boy Archie Gillespie, who saw the great dam breaking, and at the risk of his life rode down the valley of the Conemaugh to Johnstown, shouting, "Flee for your lives, the flood, the flood!" The people fled and two minutes behind the boy rolled the mighty flood of annihilation. How painter, and poet, and patriot, lingers over the ride of the gallant Sheridan "from Winchester, twenty miles away." All the honor is deserved; he saved an army and turned a defeat into victory.

But how do all these compare with the ride of Whitman? It, too, was a ride for life or death. Over snow-capped mountains, along ravines, traveled only by savage beasts and savage men. It was a plunge through icy rivers, tired, hungry, cold, and yet he rode on and on, until he stood before the President, four thousand miles away! Let us hope and believe that the time will come when Whitman, standing before President Tyler and Secretary Webster, in his buckskin breeches and a dress as we have shown, which was never woven in loom, will be the subject of some great painting. It would be grandly historical and tell a story that a patriotic people should never forget.

Alice Wellington Rollins wrote the following poem, which was published in the New York Independent, and widely copied. The Cassell Publishing Company made it one of their gems in their elegant volume, "Representative Poems of Living Poets," and kindly consent to its use in this volume:

WHITMAN'S RIDE.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear

Of a hero's ride that saved a State.