JAMES NORTH.
" I WILL " : the words will live in the memory of the people of Bedminster. The effect of the lesson conveyed by the devetion and hardihood of James North will be increased by the fact of his youth and by his success ; though the last could add nothing to the moral greatness of the act. Called upon to descend the coal- mine in search of their comrades, the men around, older and stronger, must have felt the rebuke to their less courageous hu- manity, when James North, a" modest and even effeminate-looking lad," stepped forward and said, "I will." Of course, as the sequel proved, more would have answered the appeal if they had thought it likely to be successful ; and his success, proving the logical force of his bolder instincts, will serve, as such stories have done before, to keep manly courage up to that highest mark of hoping against hope where others are to be rescued. A double confirmation was given to this higher reasoning when North came in controversy with one of the two men he had first rescued. He maintained that the larger number in the lower shaft could not possibly hare survived; but North joined the other, who insisted that they might have done so. The attempt at rescue was no sudden and dashing exploit it was necessary that partial repairs should be executed, and the air below in some degree renewed, not to disarm the descent of danger, but, as North and his companions found, to render it even practicable. North's hardy hopefulness was fully confirmed : after a suspense of thirty- eight hours, terrible for those above, still more terrible for those below, the whole of the men who had been buried eight hundred feet deep in darkness and poisonous air were brought up alive. It is interesting to observe that North found many companions to join him in his second and third descent, although the extreme danger of the attempt had been actually ascertained. The shaken walls of the shaft threatened those who slowly passed up or down with destruction the air was so charged with noxious gases that the men were obliged to crawl upon the ground. But the certain knowledge of these dangers had been counterbalanced by the ex- ample, and by the proof in the first instance that possibly they might not be brayed in vain. North set the chance of his own death against the hope, however faint, of saving many others ; and he was rewarded by success. He has renewed to those whose lot leads them into constant danger the faith that while there is hope, or even after hope has died in less courageous minds, they will not be abandoned. The example might usefully be contemplated by the Government, which is re- sponsible for delaying the search after Franklin and his comrades. But it should be of wider application. Humanly speaking, the worst visitation that can befal man or woman is the sense of being abandoned by fellow creatures; a calamity, we believe, which a perfectly healthy morality would spare even to the most self-aban- doned. The economical ethics of our day, pushed to extravagant lengths, have preached a sort of wholesale abandonment of those who are sunk deeper than the lowest of the North-side Colliery,— a doctrine upheld under the euphonius name of "self-reliance." It has been lames North's fortune to renew the sublime example which refuted that doctrine.
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