And now, about the Dakota hunt. Well, for beauty of sentiment and sublimity of style, it surpasses anything that has been written on the like subject hitherto.
I have read it over and over again until I became spellbound by the magic of the scene. It brought before my mind the memory of other days when I, too, saw something similar, only in a smaller way, on the fields of Kansas. I feel I have wearied you with much talking and will ask the same forgiveness that Mr. Stone granted you when you shot first.
Sincerely yours,
ROBT. HAMILTON.
The publisher of a disreputable sheet in New York, which makes its living by holding up society and dishing out scandal about men and women, has sued that splendid and fearless paper, Collier’s Weekly, for libel, the occasion of the exposure by Collier’s was a venomous attack by the sheet aforesaid upon the President’s daughter. Collier’s, with its characteristic ability, laid the sheet open to its knife, showing how it held up people for hush money and lived in the gutters of things bad. For all of which it was sued for $100,000 by the aforesaid sheet. In a recent editorial on the subject, Norman Hapgood, the able editor of Collier’s, says: “Men submit to blackmail to protect their wives and sisters from such sheets as this, for in the North the pocketbook has replaced the pistol.”
The South, to people who do not know her, has many faults. One of these is the quickness and certainty with which her men have always meted out tragic justice to the brute, black or white, who tears down the barrier between his own vile passions, whether of malice or murder, and a woman’s purity. Nor has any court or any jury ever convicted the man who used his pistol to protect the name of his women. In such cases, the law considers the man to be temporarily insane, at the sudden destruction of his home and happiness, and though it also recognizes what is called “cooling time” for such frenzy, an old Georgia judge years ago expressed the sentiment of the entire South on this subject when he declared in such a case that “cooling time with this court means ninety-nine years.”
Many sheets of the kind mentioned have tried to build their foul nest in the South, forgetting that here the pocketbook is not the god it is where people live only for money. Its end is invariably the same and the curtain drops to the rapid fire of pistol shots, “and the rest is silence.”
This has come from the old South which taught that money was not all of life, that a man’s word was his bond and a woman’s good character her crown. And words being bonds, men were careful of them, for the man who has to redeem his words with his pistol instead of his pocketbook is more careful how he uses them. We wish Collier’s a speedy vindication. Indeed, we predict the trial will prove something of the same kind of a farce as that of the windy Prof. Trigg, of the Chicago University, who taught the classes that Rockefeller was greater than Shakespeare, that our hymns were all doggerel and much else that was false. He was unwise enough to bring suit for libel against a New York daily which held him up to ridicule. On trial he proved by his own testimony that he was even more ignorant and ridiculous than the defendant had supposed.