Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 5.djvu/296

 WORKMEN AND HEROES terials and months to their careful watching through the press. It was the prin- ciple of justice ingrained in the man's deepest nature that forced him to know all that could be known or said upon both sides before speaking. It was this thoroughness, this absolute fairness, that made of his work and of his inartistically constructed books the tremendous and lasting success which they were. Deeply religious, he naturally reflected the spirit of the religious teachings of the times, which savored more of the terrors of the law than of mercy and for- giveness to evil-doers ; that found more worship in denying self the indulgences of soft living than in the partaking of the harmless pleasures and sweets of life, giving a good God thanks for His good gifts. Through all the life and writ- ings of Howard one constantly hears the minor chord of infinite sadness wrought into his life by his motherless infancy, his unloved boyhood, his years of in- validism, his ceaseless mourning for his wife Henrietta, the bitterness of death in the cup held to his lips by his unfortunate son, and over and above all, the con- stant atmosphere of crime, cruelty, sin, and suffering in which he spent the last sixteen years of his life. Life to him came to mean sin, suffering, and sorrow in the world about him, and for himself work, work, incessant work, in the effort to do what one man. could to lift or lighten the burden under which the whole earth groaned. Death came to him where he would have most wished it might, and took him directly from labor to reward. And throughout the coming ages the world will be the better because in the last half of the eighteenth century there lived, labored, and died in the midst of his labors one John Howard, the Philanthropist. ETHAN ALLEN* BY GERTRUDE VAN RENSSELAER WICKHAM (1738-1789) AS Ethan Allen a hero or a humbug ? a patriot or a pretender? Ask Vermont and she cries " Nulli secundus ! " Ask New York and the reply is "Ad referendum." The differentiation antedates the American Revolution and the part Ethan Allen played in that historic drama. It is an inheritance of loving loyalty and gratitude that quivers in the answer of one State, the tra- ditional antagonisms of prejudice that speak in the other. But for Ethan Allen, Vermont would have had no separate existence. But for Ethan Allen, New York's northeastern boundary would have been the Con- necticut River. Therefore, on one shore of Lake Champlain the disputed shield Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.