TRUE HEROISM.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 223, 10 August 1877, Page 5

TRUE HEROISM.

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

" Heroism has, happily, not died out nraong us. The age has not altogether deteriorated. Within a fortnight of each other two noble-hearted Paris doctors have sacrificed their lives in the interest not merely of science, but of humanity. Dr. Cintrat was the first to suffer through blood-poisoning, a couple of weeks ago, when saving the life of a patient by sucking the virus from a wound And, more recently, Dr. £arriere, at the age of thirty-one, has 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 self-sacrifice of the seven humble colliers who set all hazard 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 downwards, everybody, day after day, watched with breathless anxiety for news of the result of their splendid exertions. These obscure laborers were not, like the soldier, seeking, in the imminent deadly breach or in the cannon's mouth, the bubble reputation. They were working in the bowels of the earth, in grime and darkness, hewing their way with pick and drill through yards "Tiipon yards of solid coal to get at their accidentally-entombed companions. When warned, at the last, from persevering in their efforts, that it was all but certain death to themselves, by reason of the blasts of the pent-up air their last blows upon the thinned barrier would release, with a roar like that of artillery — one of them, after the first momentary hesitation, stepped to the front with the quiet remark, ' Well, I'll go in, if His death,' six 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 badge of honor those seven 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 v trap or in a drain-pipe. And the heroism of these men is by no possibility traceable to any ignoble motive It sprang from the purest dictates of humanity. Acts of heroism there, no doubt, will be in the course of the terrible war now immediately beginning in Eastern Europe, but no nobler instances of it in its purest and loftiest form can by any chance come to light than those which, during these last few days, have by sympathy swelled the hearts 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."