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LIFE OF STEPHEN H. BRANCH. 2

LET THE FIREMEN STAND TO THEIR GUNS! 3

LAMENTATIONS OF A GRAHAMITE. 7

FOR AMERICAN YOUTH TO READ, AND FOR THIEVES AND TRAITORS TO PONDER. 12

SATURDAY, MAY 22, 1858.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1857, by

STEPHEN H. BRANCH,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.

Life of Stephen H Branch.

very silly, as ointment will soon cure it." He said: "I knew a man who applied ointment five years, and his itch got worse every year." This was a bomb that quickened my pulsation. I then said: "Perhaps you have got the salt rheum, and I advise you to consult Dr. Plympton immediately." He said: "I'll go now, and I want you to go with me." As Plympton was the Superintendent of my itch, I did not know what response to make. But as he might be absent, or if at home, determined to remain without while Terry went in, I at length said: "Well, I will go with you," and over we went to the Doctor's, who, to my great joy, was not in. I then told Terry that I must go to my room, and get my lessons, but that he mast remain until Dr. Plympton returned, and he said he would. Terry rushed into my room in about an hour, a shade paler than a ghost, and exclaimed:--"Branch! the Doctor says that I must have caught the itch from you, as it is precisely like yours." If a cannon ball had entered the window, it could not have thrilled my frame like the disclosures of Plympton, which I regarded as safe with him as myself. But the old cat was out, and I had to face her sharp claws. So I told poor Terry the whole story, and that if he had not locked the door, and forced me to sleep with him, he would not have caught the itch. He mildly chided me for not disclosing that I had the itch, as, if I had, he certainly would have unlocked the door with much pleasure, and let me out. But he forgave me, and asked me to room with him, so that we could apply the itch ointment together, before the same fire, and talk the matter over, and compare symptoms, and sympathize with each other, and eat and sleep together with impunity, and read distinguished itch authors, and go to Dr. Plympton's together, until we got cured. I told Terry that if we did all that, we would so thoroughly inocculate each other with the itch, that all the doctors of the globe could not wrench it from our blood, and that we would transmit the itch to our posterity for ten thousand years, and then it would not be entirely out of the system. Terry looked amazed, and said he felt faint, and called for gin and water, and stared like an

Egyptian Daddy, Or Tiemann Granny, Or Peter Mummy, Or Edward Sonny, Some five thousand years old, Whose wills were never sold, Nor their offices for gold, As we oft have been told; Who loved their constituents Far better than stimulants, Or their sons and brothers, And a good many others. O, fiddle-de-dee, Ye Coopers three, You'll not cheat me, No, sirs-ree, While I'm free, As you'll see!

And Terry said he hoped I would excuse him, as he felt nervous, and would like to go to bed, and I bade him good night, and went to see Plympton, and assured him that if he told the students I had the itch, it would mortify my feelings, and spread, and terrify all Cambridge, and I might be mobbed, and he most solemnly vowed that he would make no further disclosures. And I returned to the College, and saturated my body with ointment, and retired, and sweat, and scratched all night, and did not close my weary eyes until the Cambridge rooster crowed.

Let the Firemen Stand to their Guns!

FIREMEN OF NEW YORK:--The columns of almost every public journal are closed against you. The hand of almost every editor is uplifted to strike you down. The scurvy politicians, to a man, are against you, and the insurance corporations are spending their money freely to distract and subvert your organization, for the first time since the Indians transmitted their fire department to the pale faces. And why this unhallowed alliance of the press, politicians, and insurance corporations, for your demolition? I will tell you. The press would blot out Alfred Carson, because he dared attack them, and silence their base libels on his good name; the corrupt politicians would bury yourselves and Carson in one common ruin, because you have driven their Aldermanic cronies back to their dreary abodes of reflection and remorse, and the biting neglect of meritorious citizens; and the insurance companies have secretly united to destroy you, because you and your predecessors have been so kind and true to them and their ancestors for one or two centuries. Ingratitude is of rare occurrence among honorable men, but from soulless corporations it is to be expected, although they are composed of creatures who profess to have souls.

A paid fire department is the ostensible cry of the press; but your chastisement is their leading motive, because you have clung like brothers to your Chief, against their maledictions. Their first object is to render you obnoxious with the people. And how would they effect this? Not by honorable means, but by branding you indiscriminately as thieves, even while some of you are imploring, in the name of a humane God, to be extricated from burning ruins, and when the thrilling cries of your deceased comrades could be heard in their editorial closets; and, when extricated, these editors send you, editorially, to the hospital or to Greenwood, as a gang of worthless thieves. They thus degrade and lacerate the bleeding hearts of your distracted kindred; and, to make sure of their victims, living and dead, they devise a hellish plot to entrap your noble Chief Engineer to testify against your departed companions, whose testimony before the Coroner's Jury, was most shamefully perverted by almost every press in the city. And these editors do all this to operate on the people, and in favor of a paid fire department.

Firemen, you do not merit this degradation and this cruel persecution from the press, simply because you have conscientiously testified your undeviating devotion to your Chief, who has shared your perils for so many years, while those who would degrade and destroy you, are sweetly reposing on feather beds, and making glorious dividends from your gratuitous and perilous labors.

The editors prate about the thievish propensities of firemen, as though there were no thieves among the editors; but these editors must be a most infernal set of scamps from their glowing accounts of each other. And the editors prognosticate no more thefts if the firemen are only paid good fat salaries, and are called brigadiers, or brigade firemen. These brigadiers must come direct from Heaven, if there be not, here and there, a devil among them. Louis Napoleon elected himself Emperor through his fire brigades, and other similar organizations; and Matsell, backed by a large portion of the press and the politicians, may have some mischievous game in view, for he is in his shirt sleeves for a fire brigade.--Brigadier Matsell! How that would sound! And a Brigadier of two Departments, viz.: the fire and the police. O, there's much in that. Did not Matsell once attempt to wear a white fireman's cap? and did not Anderson make him take it off? And did not Matsell order a general alarm at the fire in Forsyth street the other day? Oh, firemen, why will you repose on a volcano?

With power equally distributed among the nations of Europe, there would be no cause for war. Nicholas thinks he can resist all Europe in arms: hence the present war. What mainly preserves the union of the States is the equality of representation of States in the American Senate, through which the reserved rights of the States are chiefly protected. And what will preserve the city of New York from conflagration, and best protect the ballot-box, and promote the best interests of the city, will be for the press to be far less grasping in its desires for universal power, through its advocation of, and its subsequent intimate connection with, the leading officers of dangerous political organizations, which must ultimately result in their absorption of the right of suffrage, and perhaps in the destruction of the city itself. Let the press and the public organizations studiously move in their respective spheres, like the States and the General Government,--a serious collision, or too friendly intimacy, being equally fatal to both, and to all concerned.

The Press has power enough, and quite as much as the people can safely allow them. The public corporations have more power than is consistent with the public safety, and the purity and exercise of the elective franchise. But I repeat, that with a police department, and paid fire department, and other public corporations, and the press, all united in a specified object, God have mercy on the city of New York. Farewell, then, to the right of suffrage in this city. The paid firemen and the paid policemen, openly or tacitly sustained by the press, would utterly block up and control the passages leading to the ballot-boxes, permitting only those to vote who could give the countersign. This fearful consolidation of power in the first American city might lead to the most deplorable results to the whole country. We have not existed eighty years as a Republic, which is a very brief period in the silent and trackless footsteps of centuries. The American eagle might fall to-morrow from his projecting cliff, never to rise. Rome ruled, and finally destroyed the Roman Empire. So with Athens and Alexandria, and other ancient cities. Paris, through political organizations, rules France. These associations, controlled by a bold, reckless, and accomplished leader, can make France a republic to-day, and a despotism to-morrow. London, through her public corporations, which were gradually stolen from the people, controls the British empire, on whose vast possessions the sun never sets. And why should not New York, with similar organizations, and controlled by a crafty, irresponsible, unscrupulous, and unbridled press, ultimately reduce the Whole country to despotism and degrading vassalage? Some of our leading and most honorable statesmen will tell you that the city of New York controls the national conventions of either party, and the national politics, through half a dozen bloated political scamps, located in this city and Albany.

Firemen of New York, and other citizens, are you prepared to incur these perils? If not, arise and resist the superhuman efforts to disgrace and destroy you! Grasp and hold with giant strength the little you have left of the right of suffrage;--cling, with undying firmness and affection, to your noble organization; resist the attempts to saddle this tax-ridden city with an additional tax of nearly one million of dollars, for the support of a paid fire department, and avert the possible contingency that some mushroom scoundrel may, at no remote day, haughtily dispense the curses of monarchy or unlimited despotism on the ruins of your country!

A paid fire department, composed of a limited number of hired mercenaries, could not protect this city so effectually as a voluntary system. It could be done in the cities of Europe, where the habitations are composed of bricks, granite, marble, and other substances impervious to fire, but not in New York, where almost every edifice is a pile of shavings, or combustible matter. Moreover, hired civilians are the same as hired soldiers. Both work for pay, and not for public utility and renown. But the volunteer firemen of New York are as zealous and courageous as the soldiers of the Revolution, while paid firemen would evince the slothfulness and cowardice of the British in that memorable contest. Any man contending for liberty, and his wife and children, can easily rend to fragments three cowardly mercenary combatants, and a volunteer fireman of New York, panting for deeds of valor, and the love and respect of his fellow men, can effect more than half a dozen paid lazzaroni, who go to their perilous task as slaves go to the field.

For years the press of New York has disgusted and insulted the firemen, by striving to make the people believe that the police were more efficient at fires than the firemen; and most of these puffs are written at Matsell's and the Captains' offices. We now begin to see the motive of this, which was two-fold. First, to make the police system popular with the people--and it has required an immense deal of puffing to make it even tolerable with the people. And, secondly, to prepare the people for another police organization in the form of a paid fire department. We shall not recur to the past, but will recur to the future files of the press, and we will venture the prediction that, ere many days, it will be publicly announced that poor Matsell has either broken his thigh at a fire, or had his coat burned entirely from his back, or that he has saved the lives of seventy-five policemen, by ordering them down stairs just as the fatal crash was about to come; or, fancying himself Chief Engineer, he has actually struck a general alarm, as in Forsyth street. Or it may be announced that Captains Brennan, Leonard, or some other daring policemen, have quenched a tolerably large conflagration before the firemen arrived; and that, at the same terrific fire, they saved the lives of several men, women, and children, at the imminent risk of losing their own valuable lives.

This base stuff, and these monstrous lies, which daily fill the columns of the Press, concocted by the Police Department as early and valuable news, may have rendered the Police Department a little more tolerable with the people, but, at the same time, it has created a breach and a deadly hatred between the policemen and the firemen that will not be effaced while the present race of editors shall exist. And if they would atone for the mischief they have thus created, and would have more friendly relations subsist between the Police and Fire Departments, the sooner they stop such disgusting nonsense the better for them, and for the city at large.

STEPHEN H. BRANCH.

May 14, 1854.

And now, firemen, be vigilant, or you are lost. You are surrounded by spies and internal foes, who talk in favor of the Volunteer System, and yet in ambush are toiling unceasingly against it. The Fire Department swarms with these hypocrites, who are mostly politicians, and employed to stab your Volunteer System by the chief robbers of the politicians, who desire to strangle the rights of the people, and rob and oppress them with taxation, through two such overshadowing political organizations as the Fire and Police Departments.

Stephen H. Branch's Alligator.

NEW YORK, SATURDAY, MAY 22, 1858.

LAMENTATIONS OF A GRAHAMITE.

A MELANCHOLY POSTSCRIPT!--We called last evening to read these lamentations to the Doctor of Mrs. Doughty's daughter, and we learned that he was reposing in the dark and silent caverns of the globe. O, the rats and mice and pigmies and shadows and phantoms of life's funny and tearful and mysterious fandango. We open our eyes in the sweet twilight of the morning, and behold the gorgeous panorama of the Universe, and form the warmest attachments, and go to our rest at sunset, never to awake! Peace to the soul and ashes of Dr. David Perry, who is the lamented Physician of our narrative, who was the student of Dr. Cheesman, and preserved the life of ourself and brother and other kindred and friends.

For American Youth to Read, and for Thieves and Traitors to Ponder.

With the Declaration of Independence in his right hand, John Adams, on the Fourth of July, 1776, rose and said:

"Mr. President:--Read this Declaration at the head of the Army; every sword will be drawn from its scabbard, and the solemn vow uttered to maintain it or perish on the bed of honor. Publish it from the pulpit: religion will approve of it, and the love of religious liberty will cling around it, resolved to stand with it or fall with it. Send it to the public halls--proclaim it there--let them hear it who heard the first roar of the enemy's cannon--let them see it who saw their sons and their brothers fall on the field of Bunker's Hill, and in the streets of Lexington and Concord, and the very walls will cry out in its support. Sir, I know the uncertainty of human affairs; but I can see--see clearly through this day's business. You and I may not live to the time when this Declaration shall be made good,--we may die--die colonists--die slaves--die, it may be, ignominiously and on the scaffold.--Be it so--be it so. If it be the pleasure of Heaven that my country shall require the poor offering of my life, the victim shall be ready at the appointed hour of sacrifice, come when that hour may. But while I do live, let me have a country, or at least the hope of a country, and that a free country. Through the thick gloom of the present I see the brightness of the future, as the sun in Heaven. We shall make this a glorious, an immortal day. When we are in our graves, our children will honor it. They will celebrate it with thanksgivings, with bonfires and illuminations. On its annual return they will shed tears, copious, gushing tears--not of subjection and slavery--not of agony and distress--but of gratitude, of consolation, and of joy. And I leave off as I began--that live or die--survive or perish--I am for the Declaration. It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment--Independence now, and Independence forever!"

Reflections at the grave of CHARLES A. JESUP, who reposes in the suburbs of Westport, Ct.; written by Stephen H. Branch, in his early years:--

To thy loved tomb I've come to day, To sing of thee a mournful lay: Not in the strain I used to sing, For life is now a weary thing.

As I came here, I gladly found A pretty bird upon thy mound: It lingered long, and sang as though Departed worth reposed below.

I can but think, as I look round, That you once played upon this ground: The hills! the stream! the velvet lawn! E'en house I see where thou wast born!

Where thou wast born? Alas! where died, And all our best affections tried: Aye, on that drear, autumnal day, When, round thee, dying, all did pray.

That was, indeed, a cruel year, To cut down one to kin so dear; So full of promise, and so young, To whom we all so fondly clung.

Was't not enough, with fatal blow, A nation to o'erwhelm in woe? In that fell year, a chieftain died-- Brave Harrison--his country's pride.

But we'll not chide--'twas God's decree: Thy day was come--He wanted thee: Thy sudden death spread gloom--indeed, Caused many a manly heart to bleed.

Yon weary farmers cease to plough, To mingle with sweet twilight now, Which warns me to depart this place, And wend my way at rapid pace.

Hear Charley! all the past I see! Our fav'rite walks! thy happy glee! O God! farewell! in tears I leave! My heart would here forever cleave!

The following meritorious gentlemen are wholesale agents for the Alligator.

Ross & Tousey, 121 Nassau street. Hamilton & Johnson, 22 Ann street. Samuel Yates, 22 Beekman street. Mike Madden, 21 Ann street. Cauldwell & Long, 23 Ann street. Boyle & Gibson, 32 Ann street and Hendrickson & Blake, 25 Ann street.

Advertisements--One Dollar a line

IN ADVANCE.

THE RED FLAG will be unfurled on Saturday, May 15th, with most terrific cuts, by the sanguinary editor, at Bennett, Sickles, Rynders, Old Buck, and even BRANCH, though to that Dear Boy he is in no degree a "stern parient." Give your orders--down with the dust--3 cents each--at the office, 102 Nassau street.

THERE IS SOMETHING MYSTERIOUS IN THE PICAYUNE.

You are sincerely warned not to look at THE PICAYUNE.

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