I have careful records of about five hundred death-beds, studied particularly with reference to the modes of death and the sensations of the dying. The latter alone concern us here. Ninety suffered bodily pain and distress of one sort or another, eleven showed mental apprehension, two positive terror, one expressed spiritual exaltation, one bitter remorse. The great majority gave no sign one way or the other; like their birth, their death was "a sleep and a forgetting." The preacher was right: in this matter man hath no preeminence over the beast—as the one dieth, so dieth the other.
PRACTICAL TRAINING FOR NATIONAL GUARD.
Good Soldiers Must Know How to Shoot
Straight and How to Handle Themselves
in the Field.
A large delegation of members of the Interstate National Guard Association was received by the President on January 22d. He strongly impressed certain practical recommendations in regard to the training of both militia and regular army. Parade-ground marching and tactical maneuvers are, he said, nowhere near as important as training which will make men good soldiers in time of war, and he continued:
As war is carried on nowadays, ninety per cent of the ordinary work done either on the parade ground or in the armory, either by a militia regiment or a regular regiment, amounts to nothing whatever in the way of training except so far as the incidental effect it has in accustoming the men to act together and to obey; but they are not going to fight shoulder to shoulder when they get out into the field. It is absolutely not of the slightest consequence what their alignment is, but it is of vital consequence that they shall know how to take cover, how to shoot, and how to make themselves at home under any circumstances.
THE NEGRO'S CHANCE IN THE SOUTH.
Booker T. Washington, the Negro
Educator, of Tuskegee, Pleads the
Right of His Race to Work.
Speaking of the future of the people of his race, President Booker T. Washington says in the American Illustrated Magazine:
Whatever special difficulties the negro has to face, whatever obstacles race prejudice or his own history may place in his way, the negro, under freedom, has the right to work, at least in the South, and work for the best things the world offers. He has the opportunity to make himself useful and to share the benefits that his genius and his labor confer on those around him. That is, it seems to me, what emancipation means, in practise, to the negro. That is, after all, nearly all that it could mean.