TRUE HEROISM.

West Coast Times, Issue 2617, 20 August 1877, Page 3

TRUE HEROISM.

The London Weekly Register records the following interesting instances of true heroimi : —

" Heroism has, happily, not died out among us. Tlu: »ge has not altogether dctcrioraUd. Within a 'ornight of each other two I'oblc-htarted Paris doctors have sacrificed their lives in the interest not inen-Iy of science, bnt of humanity. Dr Cintrat was the first to suffer through blood-poisoning, a couple of weeks ngo, when saving the life ot a patient by sucking the virus from a wound. And, more recently, Dr Carriere, at the age of thirtyone, baa succumbed through inhaling from the windpipe of a little girl who was suffering frightfully from a spasmodic attack of croup. It was only the other day, again, that the heart of all England was stirred profoundly by the glorious selfsacrifice of the seven humble colliers who set all hazards to themselves at defiance in laboring for days and nights together with might and main to extricate five of their mates from the horrors of death by starvation. From the Queen downward?, everybody, day after day, watched with breathless anxiety for the news of the result of their splendid exertions. Thege obscure laborers were pot, like the soldier seeking, in the imminent deadly breach or in the cannon's mouth, the bubble reputation. They were working in the bowels ot the earth, in grime and darkness, hewing their way with pick and drill through yard* upon yards of solid coal to get at their accidently-entombed companions. When warned, at the last, from persevering in their effort*, that it was all but certain death to themselves, by reason of the blasts of the pent up air their last blowc upon the thinned barrier would release, with a roar like that of artillery — one of them after the firet momentary hesitation, stepj ed to the front with the quiet remark, ' Well, I'll go in, if 'Us death,' &ix others in rapid succession following his glorious example. And they went in — and, as all England knows full well, they conquered. If ever men earned a bad»e of honor those men earned it. If ever the gold medal of the Royal Humane Society was merited, those seven Welsh colliers have, beyond all question, merited its bestowal upon them, one and all ; for the five miners they rescued were distinctly saved by them from the hazard of drowning, and of drowning as miserably as so many rats caught in a trap or in a drainpipe. And the heroism of these men is by no possibility traceable to an} 7 ignoble motive. It sprang from the purest dictates of humanity. Acts of heroism there, no doubt, will be ia the course of the terrible war now immediately beginning in Eastern Europe, but no nobler instances of in its purest and loftiest form can by sny chance come to light than thosa which, during these last few days, have by sympathy swelled the heart of all England in watching the desperate, but at last triumphant, struggle of these humble and illiterate descendants of the ancient Britons in rescuing their fellow- workers from destruction."