Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 October 1898 — New Race Of Heroes. [ARTICLE]

New Race Of Heroes.

A. J. Beveridge, the peer of any orator in the state, delivered the following glowing words of praise of our army at Williamsport last week: “What is that old saying about the idiocy of him who changed horses while crossing a stream ? It would be like discharging a workingman because he was efficient and true. It would be like court martialing Grant and dismissing his heroes in dishonor because they took Vicksburg and Peach Tree Creek, the Wilderness and all those fields of glory, of suffering and of death. Soldiers of’6l! A generation has passed and you have reared a race of heroes worthy of your blood—heroes of El Caney, San Juan and Cavite, of Santiago and Manila. Aye, and two hundred thousand more as brave as they who waited in their camps with an agony of impatience the battle call, ready to court the hellish hardships

of the trenches—the very sweets of fate—if they could only fight for the flag. For every tented field was full of Hobsons, Roosevelts, Wheelers and their men: full of the kind of soldiers that in regiments of rags, starving with bare feet in the snows of winter, made Valley Forge immortal; full of the same kind of boys that endured the hideous hardships of the Civil war, drank from the filthy roadside pools as they marched through the swamps of death, ate food alive with weavels and even corn pioked from the horses camp, slept in the blankets of the blast with sheets of sleet for covering, breakfasted with danger and. dined with death and came back—with a laugh and shout and song of joy, American soldiers, pride of their country and the envy of the wojfckL. For tjhat is the kind of of 1898 are, not withstanding the slanders of politicians and the leprous press which tries to make the world believe that our soldiers are suckling babes and womanish weaklings and our government in war a corrupt machine, fattening off the suffering of our armies. In the name of patriotism I arraign these maligners of the sold-ier-hood of our nation. I call to the witness stand that Bayard of our armies, Gen. Joe Wheeler. I call that Hotspur of the south, Fitzhugh Lee. I call the 200,000 men themselves, who went to war fjr the business of war And I put all these against the vandals of politics who are blackening their fame as soldiers and as men. I call history to the witness stand.’’