;

instinctive guardian power and their O lowly man of labor! that this magic source of sympathy and com- should deter thee from seeking to enfort for their own offspring. Well joy the blessings of marriage and of may the brightest and bravest babe progeny. If Douglas Jerrold's man wail the gift of its very being, if it has made "all of money," shot through to wail the loss of a father's and a heart so that it might be seen through mother's blessing. It may smile in and yet survive to shoot out of life in health and vigor at the bliss of birth; a way worse than that of being shot it may bound into being with cherub through the heart; or the proud man's joy; it may be the child of fortune; contumely; or the selfish, worldly, it may be wrapped in finest linen and unfeeling, stingy man; or the miser be rocked on softest down, and be or money-monger, whose piety is most tenderly watched and waited on, property, shall say that the poor have waking and sleeping; its cries may no right to marry and give in marbe hushed by sweetest lullaby; it riage, and leave children to tax their may be nourished by the pap of most wealth with an orphan asylum, I reattentive kindness, and grow and pel the impious rebellion against God's bloom in beauty; it may be the pet orders, and tell you that you have not of a princess; but if it has, though in only the right to wedlock, but it is unconscious infancy, lost its mother your duty to love as well as labor! If if it has to coo to another nurse than you have right to space and air, to mother, the time will come when, if light and flowing water, to think and the mother be not there, that child, speak, to read and write and work like the child of the bulrushes, will so it is the highest of your natural surely find out, and know and feel rights to seek the happiness of matrithat even the sweet Termuthis, Pha- mony, the holiest tie on earth. You, raoh's daughter, or her nurse, is not poor but strong young man, are bound its mother-that it can know no other by God's command to seek a helpmate, mother than the Jochebed who is its and to cherish a wife and her childown. "By faith, Moses, when he ren. The very desire to do so shall was come to years, refused to be called elevate your mind, nerve your arm, the son of Pharaoh's daughter." Yes! and inspire your heart with the spirit, the time ever comes to every orphan brave and noble, to strike the sturdy to know and feel-to those, even who blows of manly labor, with a right never, in infancy, knew and felt a good will, to gain the vantage stations parent-that they have no father and of life. And the young maiden, withmother. The hour will some time out a dowry, should learn to spin for come that the orphan will know and some worthy son of toil, and not refeel that some other child has a father fuse the hand of labor, though poor, and a mother, and that it has neither on whose strong arm she can lean the parent. And oh! how sadly old a safety of her virtue, in the love and child is suddenly made when it is purity of wife and mother. That you made first to know and feel it is an will have to labor is best both for orphan ! parents and their offspring. Labor gives the bloom of health and the sinew of strength to progeny, and provides a country with a country's pride-a brave, strong, bold, and noble yeomanry-"its irresistible valor and heroic force." Do you repel this cheerful philanthropy, and morosely ask: "Why does God make orphans of the children of the poor and not so order it that they shall have a sure asylum ?" The question is impious. Leave the solution to Him. It is enough for us

And if this be so sadly true of fortune's favorite and pet, what must be the desolation of the bereavement of poverty's orphan child? Shall the orphans of the poor live? How shall they live? Not live the life of mere physical existence, but morally and intellectually live a life of useful labor and of love? Ah! if no hand be reached forth to help them with a mighty help, they will, intellectually and morally, surely die. Think not,

VOL. I.-NO. I.

2

to know that He once descended from O world, worldly world, wealthy the heavens and became as one of the world, working world, well fed, poorest of us, of no estate: that "the well clothed, well sheltered, well foxes had holes and the birds of the warmed world! O fashionable and air nests, but he had not where to lay proud world! that word "visiting" his head:" that he took from the means that you shall seek to know poor only a little ointment for his feet, and to supply the wants of the poor: and that because he was "not to be that you shall care always for the always with us." But he told us that widows and the orphans of the poor, the poor we "would always have and from your abundance satisfy their with us," and if the poor, then the wants. That you shall always have children of the poor were "always to them to try your virtue and to make be with us," and he left his provision you unselfish, loving, kind and charitafor them too-a Christian charity, a ble-to keep them from stumbling and holy religion which he defined to be falling; to enrich yourselves whilst 'pure and undefiled before God and you fill them; and to make you, the Father"-"to visit the widow and sooner or later, feel that if you do not the fatherless, and to keep one's self do this Christian duty, that if you unspotted from the world." He re- leave them to stumble for want, and buked those who hindered "little thus be offended, you shall be left to children" from coming to him, and the canker and corrosion of selfishness he took them in his arms and blessed and the greed of gold, which will be them, and told us "of such is the worse than having a mill-stone about kingdom of heaven." And he told the neck and being thrown into the us more: "that it were better for one sea! The penalty of the rich or of to have a millstone tied about his the strong who fail to use righteously neck and to be thrown into the sea their wealth or their strength, to help than to offend one of his little ones." the poor and the weak, is sure, if the If I understand these revelations, asylum of the poor and weak on earth orphan children, and orphan children is not. Love is the chief solace of of the poor especially, are some of his the poor, and their only treasures and "little ones," and they in this world jewels are their children. The poor, who do not visit these "little ones" frail, sick mother often shivers in the and assist in providing for them, do blast, but she bares her own nerves them an offense, and incur the divine to shield her babe, and she dies! threat of the mill-stone. The Father Who will shield that babe when she of us all, in his economy of grace, has is taken away? Alas! the orphan of set poverty, helpless poverty, the the poor is bereft of all when father orphans of the poor, before us in the and mother are taken away, and it is world, like many other trials, to prove left alone in the world with poverty our virtue and to test our obedience. and misery! Will you not be with The Infinite Sufferer consented to it too? suffering in his own case, and the poor may not righteously complain that they, as well as the sick and the lame, and the halt and the blind, and the countless other classes of sufferers have to bear every one of their own burdens in this world: the poor will always have to suffer the poverty, but the strong and the rich and the hale had better beware of giving offense to one of these "little ones," by neglecting the widow and not visiting the fatherless of the poor, and thus causing them to stumble and to fall.

But what if that poor orphan is a female child; if feminine weakness be added to the helpless infancy, the poverty, the loneliness of its orphanage e? O woman! born to be a mother, that thou shouldst ever be bereft of a mother, and thy infancy be thus left alone with want, and suffering, and sorrow, and sin! With nerves most delicately attuned to feel, to enjoy, and suffer most acutely; to thrill and quiver at every touch of pleasure or of pain; sensitively affected by any rude contact; capable of

the most unselfish, self-sacrificing and dismal with the exhalation of love, and always yearning for its graves and the gloom of ruins! Fire smile; with perceptions keen and and sulphur have burned and smoked quick to understand and feel every the very earth, and its ashes are arid! tone, and temper, and motive, and Oh! the barrenness and pallor and manner of treatment to thee; thus, in yet the putridity and stench of the the tenderness of thy infancy and stricken corpse of a country! All the innocence, to be dashed on the hard, rivers of plenty have been dried up! jagged pavements of the streets and The grass sprouts and grows from alleys of cities! Well may thy cries blood only; the rains of peace can not be heard above the wails of all the wash it away! Want, want, want, throng of infantile orphanage! Thou cries! Suffering groans! Crime is art the tenderest; thou art the weak- rampant all around these innocents! est; thou art the frailest and yet the Their land is the corpse of the past. most sensitive of them all; ah! more They have no past and no country. still, thou art the most sacred of them None have a country who have no all; thou, thyself, mayest be an hon- home. ored mother, and mayest not be a mother at all, if thou art abused; and thou wilt be abused if angels seek thee not and lead thee not away from exposure to the poverty, suffering, ignorance and vice of helpless orphanage! Thou especially art one of the "little ones whom we are forbidden to "offend." Thy condition is more than miserable if some kind hand does not provide for thee an asylum, and provide that asylum with the best of good things, suitable not only to thy state and condition of orphanage, but to thy sacred sex!

Measured by the love and care of parents for their offspring, and by the divine economy of the relation of parent and child, the fate of orphanage, I repeat, is hard under any condition of the infant; harder still is the orphanage of poverty, and hardest of all is the bereavement of the poor female orphan. How sad to think, then, friends, of a female orphan of poverty, bereft in times like these! Some of these innocents are under two years of age, and their first breath inhaled the sulphurous smoke of civil war! The air of their birth was lurid with the red rage of their countrymen making a charnel-house of their country, whose every field is a graveyard of fathers, husbands, sons, brothers! War has reigned and ravaged nearly all the time of the few years of their existence; and now, that its alarms have ceased, the air of subjugation around them is dank

"Alas poor country! It can not

Be called our mother, but our grave!"

!

Finance has failed. Confederate funds are dross, and Federal currency is sought after and caught at eagerly, but as eagerly passed on from hand to hand for him to pay the forfeit in whose hands it goes out; and gold is kept so close that the needy strong can hardly help themselves. There is no harvest but for those who have most of bread, and what harvest there is has no laborers-no husbandmen. The arms of the laborers were turned into the arms of the invaders, and laborers and invaders are now both consumers of the substance of a people who have been stripped bare, and now have but little to spare These orphans, then, must surely sorely suffer in these times, unless the charity of each and every one of us shall enlarge herself and be mighty in more than ordinary exertion of active love and liberality and self-denial. But, my friends, these times of stagnation and apparent starvation; these times of stunning after sudden shock; these times of strange changes, as startling as bursting bombshells; these times of shifting chances, as trying to the strongest nerves as battle's batteries; these are the times to prove our truth, our piety, our patriotism, our endurance, our constancy, and these are the times, more than ever, to be true to ourselves and to each other! To comrades who

living.

if

There are among these infants not only orphans, orphans of the poor, female orphans, and orphans whose lot has been cast in dreary and desolate times; but some of these are the female orphans of deceased and disabled Confederate soldiers, privates in the ranks which you embattled for your independence. You failed only by the fall of such men. They fell for you, and you fell. Are any afraid or ashamed to embrace them in the fall? Listen, whilst I repeat truths which you must not try and must not dare to forget; truths which, you do not gratefully recognize and openly avow and maintain at all hazards, without the fear of showing sympathy, if not without some reproach; shame! shame! shame! shall so shout and hoot at shrimped, and shriveled, sordid, selfish souls as to shake them like misers' money-bags, until with appalling jars their coinidols shall be jostled out and scattered to street-beggars and vagrants of the "Arts of Industrie!" War itself appalled not the hearts of the Confederate heroes who fell; and war is now over; the cloud has burst; the lightning hath done its scathing; the thunder hath ceased to mutter: in honor's name, then, let craven cringing cease!

are dead as well as to those who are when there was such "imminent danger as not to admit of delay.' The only reason for the delay which could have been demanded of them was to have appealed to the invaders themselves for defense against their own invasion; and whether there was imminent danger or not, events have proved. They have been invaded until every blade of grass has been trodden down, until every sanctuary of temple, and fane, and altar, and home has been profaned. The most of these men had no stately mansions for their homes; no slaves to plow and plant any broad fields of theirs; no stocks or investments in interest-bearing funds. They were poor, but proudly patriotic and indomitably brave. Their country was their only heritage. The mothers and wives and daughters buckled on the belts, and sent husbands and sons and brothers forth, and women toiled for the bread and spun the raiment of "little ones" of "shanty" homes in country, or of shops in town, whilst their champions of defense were in their country's camps, or marches, or trenches, or battles! They faithfully followed leaders whom they trusted and honored. Nor Cabinets, nor Congress, nor Commissariat, nor Quartermaster's Department, nor speculators, nor spies, nor renegades, nor enemy's emissaries, nor poverty, nor privation, nor heat, nor cold, nor sufferings, nor toil, nor danger, nor wounds, nor death could impair their constancy! They fought with a devout confidence and courage which was unconquerable save by starvation, blockade, overwhelming numbers, foreign dupes and mercenaries, Yankeedom, Negrodom, and death! Prodigies of valor, miracles of victories, undoubted and undoubting devotion and endurance to the last, entitled them to honors of surrender which gilded the arms of their victors and extorted from them even cheers on the battlefield where at last they yielded for Peace! Alas! how many thousands had fallen before their few surviving comrades laid down their arms! these men of the ranks their beloved

The noblest bands of men who ever fought or who ever fell in the annals of war, whose glorious deeds history ever took pen to record, were, I exultingly claim, the private soldiers in the armies of the great Confederate cause. Whether right or wrong in the cause which they espoused, they were earnest and honest patriots in their convictions, who thought that they were right to defend their own, their native land, its soil, its altars, and its honor. They felt that they were no rebels and no traitors in obeying their State sovereignties, and they thought that it was lawful to take up arms under their mandates, authorized expressly by the Federal Constitution, to repel invasion or to suppress insurrection,

Of