Samantha at the St. Louis ExpositionHolley, Marietta
General
Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition
Holley, Marietta
Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904 : Saint Louis, Mo.) -- Fiction
Sez Josiah, "I guess I'll go down to Grandpa Huff's room and borry the
World." But I kep' thinkin' on't after he left about war and what it
wuz. Rivers of human blood flowin' through ruined countries, follered by
the horrible specters of pestilence, disease and famine, moral and
financial ruin. Acres and acres of graves filled with forms once full of
throbbing life and hope and dreams of future happiness, cut down like
grass before the mower. Wives, mothers, sisters, sweethearts see the sun
of their life's joy go down in blackness, their heaven of love and
happiness changed into a hell of misery by somebody's quarrel,
somebody's greed and ambition. How many of the common soldiers who make
up the great body of the army know or care about the right or wrong of
their cause. They go into the fight like dumb-driven cattle, suffer and
die and make their loved ones die a hundred deaths jest because they are
hired to do it, hired to murder their fellow men, jest as you would hire
a man to cut down a grove of underbrush. They go out to this wholesale
slaughter to kill or be killed, to meet all the black awful influences
that foller the armies, go gayly to the sound of bugle and drum.
It is the common people who bleed and die, it is the hearts of the
common people that are wrung; it is their wives and orphan children who
have to struggle along and strive and die, or live and suffer by this
cause.
And who can tell the moral, physical and financial ruin, the sickenin'
and terrible effects of evil habits formed there, the sin and woe that
like a black cloud follers the army? The recordin' angel himself can't
do the sum till the day of judgment, not till then can he add up the
broad, ever-widenin' effects of evil and sorrow that follers a great war
and that shall go on and on till time shall be no more.
Calm judicial eyes lookin' back at this problem from the happy days when
Peace and Love shall rule the world, from the era when Courts of
Arbitration will settle national differences, will look back on the
bloody godless warfare of to-day with more horrow than we do on the
oncivilized doin's of our savage ancestors.
It is strange, hain't it, to think eighteen centuries of Christian
teaching hain't wiped the blood stains off the face of the earth, as it
would like to? Yes, indeed! our Lord's words are luminous with Charity,
Peace and Love. But the vengeful black clouds of war sweep up between
the nations and the Sermon on the Mount and hides its words so they
can't, or don't heed 'em.
And I d'no what's goin' to be done. I guess them that don't believe in
war must keep on givin' in their testimony, keep peggin' away at Public
Opinion and constant droppin' will wear away stun.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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