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The Life and Labors of Jonathan B. Turner

By Edmund J. James.

On the 5th of February, 1575, more than three hundred years ago, the towers of the cathedral of St. Peter in the old city of Leyden looked down upon a wonderful flower crowned procession. "It was preceded," says Motley in his Rise of the Dutch Republic, "by a military escort consisting of the citizen militia and the five companies of infantry stationed in the city. Then came, drawn by four horses, a splendid triumphal chariot on which sat a female figure arrayed in snow white garments. This was the Holy Gospel. She was attended by the Four Evangelists who walked on foot at each side of her chariot. Next followed Justice, with sword and scales, mounted, blindfold, upon a unicorn, while those learned doctors, Julian, Papinian, Ulpian and Tribonian, rode on each side, attended by two lackeys and four men at arms. After these came Medicine, on horseback, holding in one hand a treatise of the healing art, in the other, a garland of drugs. The curative goddess rode between the four eminent physicians, Hippocrates, Galen, Dioscorides and Theophrastus, and was attended by two footmen and four pike bearers. Last of the allegorical personages came Minerva, prancing in complete steel, with lance at rest, and wearing her Medusa shield. Aristotle and Plato, Cicero and Vergil, all on horseback, with attendants in antique armor at their back, surrounded the daughter of Jupiter, while the city band, discoursing eloquent music from hautboy and viol, came upon the heels of the allegory. Then followed the mace-bearers and other officials, escorting the orator of the day, the newly appointed professors and doctors, the magistrates and dignitaries, and the body of the citizens generally, completing the procession.

Commencement Address at the University of Illinois, June 12, 1912.

Marshalled in this order, through triumphal arches and over a pavement strewed with flowers, the procession moved slowly up and down the different streets and along the quiet canals of the city. As it reached the Nuns' Bridge, a barge of triumph, gorgeously decorated, came floating slowly down the sluggish Rhine. Upon its deck, under a canopy enwreathed with laurels and oranges, and adorned with tapestry, sat Apollo, attended by the Nine Muses, all in classical costume. At the helm stood Neptune with his trident. The Muses executed some beautiful concerted pieces; Apollo twanged his lute. Having reached the landing place, this deputation from Parnassus stepped on shore, and stood awaiting the arrival of the procession. Each professor as he advanced was gravely embraced and kissed by Apollo and all the Nine Muses in turn, who greeted their arrival, besides, with the recitation of an elegant Latin poem. This classical ceremony terminated, the whole procession marched together to the cloister of St. Barbara, the place prepared for the new university, where they listened to an eloquent oration by the Rev. Caspar Kolhas, after which they partook of a magnificent banquet. With this memorable feast, in the place where famine had so lately reigned, the ceremonies were concluded."

This was on the fifth of February 1575.

The same author in describing the condition of the people of the city of Leyden on the first of October of the preceding year, that is, four short months before, while the city was being besieged by the Spaniards, declared that they were literally starving. Bread, maltcake and horseflesh, had entirely disappeared. Dogs, cats, rats and other vermin were esteemed luxuries. A small number of cows kept as long as possible for their milk still remained, but a few were killed from day to day, and distributed in minute proportions, hardly sufficient to support life, among the famishing population. Starving wretches swarmed daily around the shambles where these cattle were slaughtered, contending for any morsel which might fall, and lapping eagerly the blood as it ran along the pavement, while the hides, chopped and boiled, were greedily devoured. Women and children all day long were

seen searching gutters and dunghills for morsels of food, which they disputed fiercely with the famishing dogs. The green leaves were stripped from the trees and every living herb was converted into human food; but these expedients could not avert starvation. The daily mortality was frightful. Infants starved to death on the maternal breasts which famine had parched and withered. Mothers dropped dead in the streets, with their dead children in their arms. In many houses the watchmen in their rounds, found a whole family of corpses, father, mother and children, side by side; for a disorder called the plague, naturally engendered of hardship and famine, now came, as if in kindness to abridge the agony of the people. The pestilence stalked at noonday through the city, and the doomed inhabitants fell like grass beneath its scythe. From six to eight thousand human beings sank before this scourge alone, and yet the people resolutely held out, women and men mutually encouraging each other to resist the foreign foe, an evil more horrible than pest or famine.

When the rescuers of the city entered it on the 31st of October, the coast was lined with the famishing population. As they rode through the canals every human being that could stand, came forth to greet the preservers of the city. Bread was thrown from every vessel among the crowd. The poor creatures who for two months, had had no wholesome food and who had lately been starving, snatched the blessed gift at last too liberally bestowed. Many choked themselves to death in the greediness with which they devoured their bread. Others became ill with the effects of plenty thus suddenly relieved from starvation.

Such, in brief, is the drift of the story of the siege and relief of Leyden, a little city in the center of Holland, with fewer than fifty thousand inhabitants, which had undergone two dreadful sieges within a little more than a year; and had finally seen the entire territory surrounding it, engulfed by the waves of the ocean conjuring a noble relieving fleet to reach its walls.

The service that Leyden had done to Holland by resisting the attempt of the Spanish armies to subdue it, was realized

and appreciated by its sister states which made up the Dutch Confederacy, and they wished to give to this people some evidence of their appreciation. And the story goes that the great William of Orange asked the people of Leyden, whose members had been reduced by famine possibly fully fifty per cent. and whose wealth had been largely swept away by the fire, the sword and the flood, what they desired, which they preferred of two things that Holland might give, exemption from taxation for the common purpose, for a generation to come, or the founding of a university. These poverty stricken Dutchmen, gaunt and haggard with hunger, in the midst of their sand covered fields and ruined city, did not hesitate a moment to choose the university. And so this institution was founded, and opened with the pageant I have described above, and the name of Leyden from that time to the present has been an honorable one in the world of letters and learning and science. At some periods of modern history the University of Leyden was distinctly the leading center of life and light and sweetness for the entire world of European civilization. And there has never been a time in the ebb and flow of human culture, from the founding of the university to the present, when it did not include within its faculty some names of world wide fame and world wide importance.

A little over a hundred years ago, the great Napoleon touched with his finger the fabric which had been erected by Frederick the Great through long toil, and with masterly ability, and it seemed to crumble into dust. The French armies swept over Northern Germany, and a French emperor dictated from the white palace of the King the terms on which the German nation might continue to exist. There have been few periods in German history more humiliating, filled with more degrading examples of self seeking, of narrow outlook and of selfish exploitation, than the years which immediately preceded and followed the battle of Jena.

The successor of the great Frederick was left with a mere fragment of the Prussian state. And the conditions under which he might govern this were so humiliating that they would have forced a more generous spirit into an early grave.

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