men that they do not say that if someone would come over here and start
a bright, spicy newspaper he could drive us out of town and make money.
The best friends we have, when they talk to newspaper men in other towns
are not above saying that our paper is so generally hated that it would
be no trouble to put it out of business. That is what people said of the
General in the eighties. They do not say it now.

For the fight is over with him. And he is walking on an old battlefield,
reviewing old victories, not knowing that another contest is waging
further on. Sometimes the boys in the _Statesman_ office get their money
Saturday night, and sometimes they do not. If they do not, the General
grandly issues "orders" on the grocery stores. Then he takes his pen in
hand and writes a stirring editorial on the battle of Cold Harbor, and
closes by enquiring whether the country is going to forget the grand
principles that inspired men in those trying days.

In the days when the _Statesman_ was a power in the land, editorials
like this were widely quoted. He was department commander of the G. A.
R. at a time when such a personage was as important in our State as the
Governor. The General's editorials on pensions were read before the
Pensions Committee in Congress and had much weight there, and even in
the White House the General's attitude was reckoned with. When he
rallied the old soldiers to any cause the earth trembled, but now the
General's editorials pass unheeded. When he calls to "the men who
defended this country in one great crisis to rise and rescue her again,"
he does not understand that he is speaking to a world of ghosts, and
that his "clarion note" falls on empty air. The old boys whom he would
arouse are sleeping; only he and a little handful survive. Yet to him
they still live; to him their power is still invincible--if they would
but rally to the old call. He believes that some day they will rally,
and that the world, which is now going sadly wrong, will be set right.
With his hands clasped behind him, looking through his steel-rimmed
glasses, from under his shaggy brows, he walks through a mad world,
waiting for it to return to reason. In his fiery black eyes one may see
a puzzled look as he views the bewildering show. He is confused, but
defiant. His head is still high; he has no thought of surrender. So, day
after day, he riddles the bedlam about him with his broadsides, in the
hourly hope of victory.

It was