Or perhaps the mother lingers long enough to see a son get on the wrong road, and his former kindness becomes rough reply when she expresses anxiety about him.  But she goes right on, looking carefully after his apparel, remembering his every birthday with some memento, and when he is brought home worn out with dissipation, nurses him till he gets well and starts him again, and hopes, and expects, and prays, and counsels, and suffers, until her strength gives out and she fails.  She is going, and attendants, bending over her pillow, ask her if she has any message to leave, and she makes great effort to say something, but out of three or four minutes of indistinct utterance they can catch but three words:  “My poor boy!” The simple fact is she died for him.  Life for life.  Substitution!

About twenty-four years ago there went forth from our homes hundreds of thousands of men to do battle for their country.  All the poetry of war soon vanished, and left them nothing but the terrible prose.  They waded knee-deep in mud.  They slept in snow-banks.  They marched till their cut feet tracked the earth.  They were swindled out of their honest rations, and lived on meat not fit for a dog.  They had jaws all fractured, and eyes extinguished, and limbs shot away.  Thousands of them cried for water as they lay dying on the field the night after the battle, and got it not.  They were homesick, and received no message from their loved ones.  They died in barns, in bushes, in ditches, the buzzards of the summer heat the only attendants on their obsequies.  No one but the infinite God who knows everything, knows the ten thousandth part of the length, and breadth, and depth, and height of anguish of the Northern and Southern battlefields.  Why did these fathers leave their children and go to the front, and why did these young men, postponing the marriage-day, start out into the probabilities of never coming back?  For the country they died.  Life for life.  Blood for blood.  Substitution!

But we need not go so far.  What is that monument in Greenwood?  It is to the doctors who fell in the Southern epidemics.  Why go?  Were there not enough sick to be attended in these Northern latitudes?  Oh, yes; but the doctor puts a few medical books in his valise, and some vials of medicine, and leaves his patients here in the hands of other physicians, and takes the rail-train.  Before he gets to the infected regions he passes crowded rail-trains, regular and extra, taking the flying and affrighted populations.  He arrives in a city over which a great horror is brooding.  He goes from couch to couch, feeling of pulse and studying symptoms, and prescribing day after day, night after night, until a fellow-physician says:  “Doctor, you had better go home and rest; you look miserable.”  But he can not rest while so many are suffering.  On and on, until some morning finds him in a delirium, in which he talks of home, and then rises and says he must go and look after those patients.  He is told to