lie down; but he fights his attendants until he falls back, and is weaker and weaker, and dies for people with whom he had no kinship, and far away from his own family, and is hastily put away in a stranger’s tomb, and only the fifth part of a newspaper line tells us of his sacrifice—­his name just mentioned among five.  Yet he has touched the furthest height of sublimity in that three weeks of humanitarian service.  He goes straight as an arrow to the bosom of Him who said:  “I was sick and ye visited Me.”  Life for life.  Blood for blood.  Substitution!

In the legal profession I see the same principle of self-sacrifice.  In 1846, William Freeman, a pauperized and idiotic negro, was at Auburn, N.Y., on trial for murder.  He had slain the entire Van Nest family.  The foaming wrath of the community could be kept off him only by armed constables.  Who would volunteer to be his counsel?  No attorney wanted to sacrifice his popularity by such an ungrateful task.  All were silent save one, a young lawyer with feeble voice, that could hardly be heard outside the bar, pale and thin and awkward.  It was William H. Seward, who saw that the prisoner was idiotic and irresponsible, and ought to be put in an asylum rather than put to death, the heroic counsel uttering these beautiful words: 

“I speak now in the hearing of a people who have prejudged prisoner and condemned me for pleading in his behalf.  He is a convict, a pauper, a negro, without intellect, sense, or emotion.  My child with an affectionate smile disarms my care-worn face of its frown whenever I cross my threshold.  The beggar in the street obliges me to give because he says, ‘God bless you!’ as I pass.  My dog caresses me with fondness if I will but smile on him.  My horse recognizes me when I fill his manger.  What reward, what gratitude, what sympathy and affection can I expect here?  There the prisoner sits.  Look at him.  Look at the assemblage around you.  Listen to their ill-suppressed censures and their excited fears, and tell me where among my neighbors or my fellow-men, where, even in his heart, I can expect to find a sentiment, a thought, not to say of reward or of acknowledgment, or even of recognition?  Gentlemen, you may think of this evidence what you please, bring in what verdict you can, but I asseverate before Heaven and you, that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, the prisoner at the bar does not at this moment know why it is that my shadow falls on you instead of his own.”

The gallows got its victim, but the post-mortem examination of the poor creature showed to all the surgeons and to all the world that the public were wrong, and William H. Seward was right, and that hard, stony step of obloquy in the Auburn court-room was the first step of the stairs of fame up which he went to the top, or to within one step of the top, that last denied him through the treachery of American politics.  Nothing sublimer was ever seen in an American court-room than William H. Seward, without reward, standing between the fury of the populace and the loathsome imbecile.  Substitution!