The Courier

The Courier cannot refrain from directing Governor Holcomb's attention to the conduct of the state of Maine in hiring an engine and seven Pullman sleepers for the sick soldiers of the Maine regiment at Chickamauga.

One hundred and twenty Maine soldiers sick with typhoid and malarial fever and other diseases, were loaded into that train and started for the north. "Off they went to Cincinnati, to Cleveland, to Buffalo, to Albany, Boston and on to Portland and the country of pine trees and granite.

Supplies, ordered ahead by telegraph, were furnished for them without money or price chiefly by the Red Cross.

Delayed ten hours at Cleveland by a breakdown, their train was sent to the lake shore where it got the cool lake breezes. All those sick soldiers got back to Maine alive and most of them improved very decidedly on the journey."

Very different conduct this from that of the governor of Nebraska who let the boys who had volunteered perhaps to death and sickness, certainly to hardship, go without paying the heroic lads the seven or eight dollars which they had earned, and that would have kept them from the forlorn penniless condition in which they actually left the state. Governor Holcomb could have easily paid them with state funds but with the hard heartedness which made him a successful money loaner before chance and his size made him governor, the chief executive of the state of Nebraska sent the volunteers out of the state penniless.

The boar black pig whose fame is forever united with the governor's history could not have shown his instincts more truly. When he was a private citizen a little cruelty in levying on a spotted cow called Speck, or on the orphan's only pig, was no disgrace to the state because it is impossible to keep heartless money grubbers out of a neighborhood. But the acts of a governor of a state reflect upon the state either glory or disgrace and it is so considered by other states.