'TIS NOT MY BUSINESS

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 1, 1880

'TIS NOT MY BUSINESS.

Mrs. Mary T. Lathrop delivered a most powerful address at the Ocean Grove Camp-meeting. We are indebted to her for the following incident:-

A wealthy man in St. Louis was asked to aid in a series of temperance meetings, but he scornfully refused. After being further pressed he said: "Gentlemen, 'tis not my business!"

A few days after, his wife and two daughters were coming home on the lightning express. In his grand carriage, with liveried attendants, he rode to the depot, thinking of his splendid business, and planning for the morrow. Hark! did some one say "Accident?" There are twenty-five railroads centering in St. Louis; if there has been an accident it is not likely it has happened on the ----- and Miss. Railroad. Yet it troubles him. 'Tis his "business" now. The horses stopped on the instant, and upon inquiry he finds it has occurred twenty-five miles distant on the ----- and Miss. He telegraphs to the superintendent: "I will give you five hundred dollars for an extra engine." The answer flashes back "No!"

"I will give one thousand dollars for an engine."

"A train of surgeons and nurses has already gone forward; we have no other."

With white face and anxious brow that man paced the station to and fro. "'Tis his "business" now. In a half hour, perhaps, which seemed to him a century, the train arrived. He hurried toward it, and in the tender found the mangled and lifeless forms of his wife and one of his daughters. In the car following lay his other daughter, with her dainty ribs crushed in, and her precious life oozing slowly away.

A quart of whisky, drank fifty miles away by a railroad employe was the cause of the catastrophe.

Who dares say of this tremendous question, "'Tis not my business?"—Morning.