THE HUMANITARIAN REVIEW

Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.

January 1907

(Pages 18-19)

IN MEMORIUM SALADIN.

Saladin is dead! How hard it is to realize that one who but yesterday lived so strenuously in the intellect and sentiment of men and women throughout the reading world today is dead! But, though the Saladin of clay—of flesh and blood and BRAIN—is dead, the Saladin of immortal truths and noble sentiments disseminated in the minds of men still lives and will continue to live as passing on from generation to generation his humanitarian spirit continues to inspire men to think and let think, to be sincere and love the truth, to cherish good and beautiful sentiments, and to live noble lives.

William Stuart Ross (“Saladin”), the Agnostic and Humanitarian, editor of the Agnostic Journal, of London, Eng., and author of many excellent prose and poetical works, died on the morning of November 30th at his home in Brixton. He had been a sufferer from loco-motor ataxia for several years, but his friends outside of his family and near neighbors suspected no danger of a fatal ending at that time, and the news of his death has come to most of his thousands of admirers and devoted friends as a severe shock—as one of them expressed it, “it came ‘like a bolt out of the blue.’ ” Saladin (his pseudonym, by which he was best known), though confined to his bed for about two months preceding his death, continued his editorial writing almost to the last hour. He had been suffering mush from insomnia, and his last words were, “I feel an irresistible desire to sleep. But, strange! It does not come as it usually does.” And then he immediately fell into that “strange” sleep which neither shattered nerves nor agony had been able to affect.”

Victor B. Neuburg, a frequent contributor of verse to Saladin’s paper, has a good article in the A.J. of Dec. 15, in memory of his personal friend, the editor, from which I extract the following specially pertinent sentences:

“Saladin’s creed was one that underlies every religion in the world. . . . Saladin slashed and hewed at the grossly-materialized symbols that form the idols of the unthinking; the popular and absurd gods knew no mercy from him; he was not of a nature to easily brook compromise; he had but to perceive a lie to attack it with all his force. . . . Saladin, in a word, brought a magnificent brain garnished with high culture, and a faithful and magnanimous nature, as an offering upon the two altars of Truth and Freedom. And the sacrifice was not in vain. . . . So strong and idiosyncratic a personality as the dead Chief’s could, in the nature of things, have no peer, and for this reason he leaves no successor—‘his soul was like a star and dwelt apart.’ . . . Such a man as he, born in our superstition-cursed day, could be a leader out of the paths of falsity and a light-bearer through the mists of folly.”

     Mr. J. Kennard wrote an appreciative article for the Journal, from which I select the following:

     “Saladin was a scholar, as is evidenced . . .