For solid and substantial service and for disinterested devotion to the cause of Democracy, the duration of all which stretches through a period of about a half century, none excels the veteran editor, William Wallace Screws, of Montgomery. From the early dawn of manhood to ripened age, Major Screws has been identified with the fortunes of his native state. It is doubtful that another has impressed the thought of the state so uninterruptedly for so long a time as he. There has never been the slightest waver in his fidelity and downright labor for a long period of years. Certainly he has sufficiently won the approval of the people of the state as to be worthy of a place among the men who have constructed the commonwealth to its present stage of advancement. No flash nor picturesqueness, no sensation nor sudden innovation has at any time attached to that which he has done--it has been service rendered as in a treadmill, patiently, persistently, and perseveringly. He has gone down into the depths with his people, has suffered as they have, and has risen along with them through the varying fortunes which have been theirs in the years of the immediate past. Major Screws' native region is Barbour County. His academic training and all indeed he ever had, was at Glennville, a village noted in other days for its educational advantages. He entered life early, for he was admitted to the bar at twenty, after having studied in the law office of Watts, Judge & Jackson, at Montgomery. At the end of a two years' practice, he entered the Confederate service, being among the first to enlist. Like many others, Major Screws was not a secessionist, but he was a patriot, and subordinating his personal views to the expressed judgment of the people of Alabama, he shouldered his musket and went with the first troops that were concentrated at Pensacola. He joined in the capture of the navy yard and of Fort Barancas, and later became a lieutenant in Company H, Fifty-ninth Alabama regiment, and served under General Bragg in Tennessee and Kentucky, participating in the battles of Chickamauga and Knoxville. The last year of the war found Major Screws under Lee in Virginia. During that stressful and distressful period he was an active sharer, and was with the remnant of that brave army that surrendered at Appomattox. It was during his campaigning with the two armies that Major Screws developed his popular ability as a writer. A vigorous and versatile correspondent from the front, he enlivened the columns of the Montgomery Advertiser, then presided over by that brilliant editor, Samuel G. Reid. The keen insight of Major Screws into the situation led him at one time to forecast some of the contemplated movements of Bragg's army, the publication of which led to his arrest by General Bragg, but this was a merely meaningless episode, and only served to develop the fact that the sagacious correspondent had too keen an insight for the comfort of the commanding general.