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Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866-7

by Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke · English · Gutenberg #41755 · 1,208,835 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866-7

Author: Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke


        
Release date: January 1, 2013 [eBook #41755]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GREATER BRITAIN: A RECORD OF TRAVEL IN ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES DURING 1866-7 ***




Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)






[Illustration: A CINGHALESE GENTLEMAN.]

[Illustration: VIEW FROM THE BULLER, NEW ZEALAND.]




GREATER BRITAIN.

_A RECORD OF TRAVEL_

IN

ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES

DURING 1866-7.

BY

CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE.

_TWO VOLUMES IN ONE._

WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

[Illustration]

PHILADELPHIA:

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO.

1869.




TO

MY FATHER

I Dedicate

THIS BOOK.

C. W. D.




PREFACE.


IN 1866 and 1867, I followed England round the world: everywhere I was
in English-speaking, or in English-governed lands. If I remarked that
climate, soil, manners of life, that mixture with other peoples had
modified the blood, I saw, too, that in essentials the race was always
one.

The idea which in all the length of my travels has been at once my
fellow and my guide--a key wherewith to unlock the hidden things of
strange new lands--is a conception, however imperfect, of the grandeur
of our race, already girding the earth, which it is destined, perhaps,
eventually to overspread.

In America, the peoples of the world are being fused together, but they
are run into an English mould: Alfred‘s laws and Chaucer‘s tongue are
theirs whether they would or no. There are men who say that Britain in
her age will claim the glory of having planted greater Englands across
the seas. They fail to perceive that she has done more than found
plantations of her own--that she has imposed her institutions upon the
offshoots of Germany, of Ireland, of Scandinavia, and of Spain. Through
America, England is speaking to the world.

Sketches of Saxondom may be of interest even upon humbler grounds: the
development of the England of Elizabeth is to be found, not in the
Britain of Victoria, but in half the habitable globe. If two small
islands are by courtesy styled “Great,” America, Australia, India, must
form a Greater Britain.

C. W. D.

76 SLOANE STREET, S. W.
1_st November_, 1868.




CONTENTS

OF

THE FIRST VOLUME.


PART I.

 CHAPTER                            PAGE

    I. VIRGINIA                        3

   II. THE NEGRO                      16

  III. THE SOUTH                      27

   IV. THE EMPIRE STATE               33

    V. CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT         43

   VI. CANADA                         55

  VII. UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN         69

 VIII. THE PACIFIC RAILROAD           78

   IX. OMPHALISM                      86

    X. LETTER FROM DENVER             91

   XI. RED INDIA                     102

  XII. COLORADO                      110

 XIII. ROCKY MOUNTAINS               115

  XIV. BRIGHAM YOUNG                 122

   XV. MORMONDOM                     127

  XVI. WESTERN EDITORS               131

  XVII. UTAH                         144

 XVIII. NAMELESS ALPS                152

   XIX. VIRGINIA CITY                166

    XX. EL DORADO                    179

   XXI. LYNCH LAW                    190

  XXII. GOLDEN CITY                  207

 XXIII. LITTLE CHINA                 218

  XXIV. CALIFORNIA                   227

   XXV. MEXICO                       233

  XXVI. REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT       239

 XXVII. BROTHERS                     249

XXVIII. AMERICA                      258


PART II.

  I. PITCAIRN ISLAND                 271

 II. HOKITIKA                        278

III. POLYNESIANS                     293

 IV. PAREWANUI PAH                   299

  V. THE MAORIES                     319

 VI. THE TWO FLIES                   328

VII. THE PACIFIC                     334


APPENDIX.

A MAORI DINNER                       339




CONTENTS

OF

THE SECOND VOLUME.


PART III.

CHAPTER                               PAGE

   I. SYDNEY                             7

  II. RIVAL COLONIES                    15

 III. VICTORIA                          22

  IV. SQUATTER ARISTOCRACY              38

   V. COLONIAL DEMOCRACY                44

  VI. PROTECTION                        55

 VII. LABOR                             65

VIII. WOMAN                             75

  IX. VICTORIAN PORTS                   79

   X. TASMANIA                          83

  XI. CONFEDERATION                     94

 XII. ADELAIDE                          98

XIII. TRANSPORTATION                   109

 XIV. AUSTRALIA                        123

  XV. COLONIES                         130


PART IV.

  I. MARITIME CEYLON                   141

 II. KANDY                             154

III. MADRAS TO CALCUTTA                161

 IV. BENARES                           171

    V. CASTE                           178

   VI. MOHAMMEDAN CITIES               191

  VII. SIMLA                           202

 VIII. COLONIZATION                    217

   IX. THE “GAZETTE”                   224

    X. UMRITSUR                        233

   XI. LAHORE                          245

  XII. OUR INDIAN ARMY                 249

 XIII. RUSSIA                          255

  XIV. NATIVE STATES                   267

   XV. SCINDE                          280

  XVI. OVERLAND ROUTES                 289

 XVII. BOMBAY                          298

XVIII. THE MOHURRUM                    305

  XIX. ENGLISH LEARNING                312

   XX. INDIA                           320

  XXI. DEPENDENCIES                    333

 XXII. FRANCE IN THE EAST              339

XXIII. THE ENGLISH                     346




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.


VOLUME I.

                                             PAGE

VIEW FROM THE BULLER        Frontispiece.

A CINGHALESE GENTLEMAN      Frontispiece.

PROFILE OF “JOE SMITH”                  }     150

FULL FACE OF “JOE SMITH”                }

PORTER ROCKWELL                               154

FRIDAY‘S STATION--VALLEY OF LAKE TAHOE        176

TEAMING UP THE GRADE AT SLIPPERY FORD, IN THE
    SIERRA                                    178

VIEW ON THE AMERICAN RIVER--THE PLACE WHERE
    GOLD WAS FIRST FOUND                      180

THE BRIDAL VEIL FALL, YOSEMITE VALLEY   }     228

EL CAPITAN, YOSEMITE VALLEY             }


MAPS.

ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC RAILROAD                  78

LEAVENWORTH TO SALT LAKE CITY                  92

SALT LAKE CITY TO SAN FRANCISCO               158

NEW ZEALAND                                   278


VOLUME II.

THE OLD AND THE NEW: BUSH SCENERY--COLLINS
    STREET EAST, MELBOURNE                     24

GOVERNOR DAVEY‘S PROCLAMATION                  86


MAPS.

AUSTRALIA AND TASMANIA                         16

OVERLAND ROUTES                               290




PART I.

AMERICA.




GREATER BRITAIN.

CHAPTER I.

VIRGINIA.


From the bows of the steamer _Saratoga_, on the 20th June, 1866, I
caught sight of the low works of Fort Monroe, as, threading her way
between the sand-banks of Capes Charles and Henry, the ship pressed on,
under sail and steam, to enter Chesapeake Bay.

Our sudden arrival amid shoals of sharks and kingfish, the keeping watch
for flocks of canvas-back ducks, gave us enough and to spare of idle
work till we fully sighted the Yorktown peninsula, overgrown with
ancient memories--ancient for America. Three towns of lost grandeur, or
their ruins, stand there still. Williamsburg, the former capital, graced
even to our time by the palaces where once the royal governors held more
than regal state; Yorktown, where Cornwallis surrendered to the
continental troops; Jamestown, the earliest settlement, founded in 1607,
thirteen years before old Governor Winthrop fixed the site of Plymouth,
Massachusetts.

A bump against the pier of Fort Monroe soon roused us from our musings,
and we found ourselves invaded by a swarm of stalwart negro troopers,
clothed in the cavalry uniform of the United States, who boarded us for
the mails. Not a white man save those we brought was to be seen upon the
pier, and the blazing sun made me thankful that I had declined an
offered letter to Jeff. Davis.

Pushing off again into the stream, we ran the gantlet of the Rip-Raps
passage, and made for Norfolk, having on our left the many exits of the
Dismal Swamp Canal. Crossing Hampton Roads--a grand bay with pleasant
grassy shores, destined one day to become the best known, as by nature
it is the noblest, of Atlantic ports--we nearly ran upon the wrecks of
the Federal frigates _Cumberland_ and _Congress_, sunk by the rebel ram
_Merrimac_ in the first great naval action of the war; but soon after,
by a sort of poetic justice, we almost drifted into the black hull of
the _Merrimac_ herself. Great gangs of negroes were laboring laughingly
at the removal, by blasting, of the sunken ships.

When we were securely moored at Norfolk pier, I set off upon an
inspection of the second city of Virginia. Again not a white man was to
be seen, but hundreds of negroes were working in the heat, building,
repairing, road-making, and happily chattering the while. At last,
turning a corner, I came on a hotel, and, as a consequence, on a bar and
its crowd of swaggering whites--“Johnny Rebs” all, you might see by the
breadth of their brims, for across the Atlantic a broad brim denotes
less the man of peace than the ex-member of a Southern guerrilla band,
Morgan‘s, Mosby‘s, or Stuart‘s. No Southerner will wear the Yankee
“stove-pipe” hat; a Panama or Palmetto for him, he says, though he keeps
to the long black coat that rules from Maine to the Rio Grande.

These Southerners were all alike--all were upright, tall, and heavily
moustached; all had long black hair and glittering eyes, and I looked
instinctively for the baldric and rapier. It needed no second glance to
assure me that as far as the men of Norfolk were concerned, the saying
of our Yankee skipper was not far from the truth: “The last idea that
enters the mind of a Southerner is that of doing work.”

Strangers are scarce in Norfolk, and it was not long before I found an
excuse for entering into conversation with the “citizens.” My first
question was not received with much cordiality by my new acquaintances.
“How do the _negroes_ work? Wall, we spells nigger with two ‘g‘s,’ I
reckon.” (Virginians, I must explain, are used to “reckon” as much as
are New Englanders to “guess,” while Western men “calculate” as often as
they cease to swear.) “How does the niggers work? Wall, niggers is
darned fools, certain, but they ain‘t quite sich fools as to work while
the Yanks will feed ’em. No, sir, not quite sich fools as that.” Hardly
deeming it wise to point to the negroes working in the sun-blaze within
a hundred yards, while we sat rocking ourselves in the veranda of the
inn, I changed my tack, and asked whether things were settling down in
Norfolk. This query soon led my friends upon the line I wanted them to
take, and in five minutes we were well through politics, and plunging
into the very war. “You‘re a Britisher. Now, all that they tell you‘s
darned lies. We‘re just as secesh as we ever was, only so many‘s killed
that we can‘t fight--that‘s all, I reckon.” “We ain‘t going to fight the
North and West again,” said an ex-colonel of rebel infantry; “next time
we fight, ’twill be us and the West against the Yanks. We‘ll keep the
old flag then, and be darned to them.” “If it hadn‘t been for the
politicians, we shouldn‘t have seceded at all, I reckon: we should just
have kept the old flag and the constitution, and the Yanks would have
seceded from us. Reckon we‘d have let ’em go.” “Wall, boys, s‘pose we
liquor?” closed in the colonel, shooting out his old quid, and filling
in with another. “We‘d have fought for a lifetime if the cussed
Southerners hadn‘t deserted like they did.” I asked who these
“Southerners” were to whom such disrespect was being shown. “You didn‘t
think Virginia was a Southern State over in Britain, did you? ’cause
Virginia is a border State, sir. We didn‘t go to secede at all; it was
them blasted Southerners that brought it on us. First they wouldn‘t give
a command to General Robert E. Lee, then they made us do all the
fighting for ’em, and then, when the pinch came, they left us in the
lurch. Why, sir, I saw three Mississippi regiments surrender without a
blow--yes, sir: that‘s right down good whisky; jess you sample it.” Here
the steam-whistle of the _Saratoga_ sounded with its deep bray. “Reckon
you‘ll have to hurry up to make connections,” said one of my new
friends, and I hurried off, not without a fear lest some of the group
should shoot after me, to avenge the affront of my quitting them before
the mixing of the drinks. They were but a pack of “mean whites,” “North
Carolina crackers,” but their views were those which I found dominant in
all ranks at Richmond, and up the country in Virginia.

After all, the Southern planters are not “The South,” which for
political purposes is composed of the “mean whites,” of the Irish of the
towns, and of the Southwestern men--Missourians, Kentuckians, and
Texans--fiercely anti-Northern, without being in sentiment what we
should call Southern, certainly not representatives of the “Southern
Chivalry.” The “mean whites,” or “poor trash,” are the whites who are
not planters--members of the slaveholding race who never held a
slave--white men looked down upon by the negroes. It is a necessary
result of the despotic government of one race by another that the poor
members of the dominant people are universally despised: the “destitute
Europeans” of Bombay, the “white loafers” of the Punjaub, are familiar
cases. Where slavery exists, the “poor trash” class must inevitably be
both large and wretched: primogeniture is necessary to keep the
plantations sufficiently great to allow for the payment of overseers and
the supporting in luxury of the planter family, and younger sons and
their descendants are not only left destitute, but debarred from earning
their bread by honest industry, for in a slave country labor is
degrading.

The Southern planters were gentlemen, possessed of many aristocratic
virtues, along with every aristocratic vice; but to each planter there
were nine “mean whites,” who, though grossly ignorant, full of
insolence, given to the use of the knife and pistol upon the slightest
provocation, were, until the election of Lincoln to the presidency, as
completely the rulers of America as they were afterward the leaders of
the rebellion.

At sunset we started up the James on our way to City Point and Richmond,
sailing almost between the very masts of the famous rebel privateer the
_Florida_, and seeing her as she lay under the still, gray waters. She
was cut out from a Brizilian port, and when claimed by the imperial
government, was to have been at once surrendered. While the dispatches
were on their way to Norfolk, she was run into at her moorings by a
Federal gunboat, and filled and sank directly. Friends of the
Confederacy have hinted that the collision was strangely opportune;
nevertheless, the fact remains that the commander of the gunboat was
dismissed the navy for his carelessness.

The twilight was beyond description lovely. The change from the auks and
ice-birds of the Atlantic to the blue-birds and robins of Virginia was
not more sudden than that from winter to tropical warmth and sensuous
indolence; but the scenery, too, of the river is beautiful in its very
changelessness. Those who can see no beauty but in boldness might call
the James as monotonous as the lower Loire.

After weeks of bitter cold, warm evenings favor meditation. The soft
air, the antiquity of the forest, the languor of the sunset breeze, all
dispose to dream and sleep. That oak has seen Powhatan; the founders of
Jamestown may have pointed at that grand old sycamore. In this drowsy
humor, we sighted the far-famed batteries of Newport News, and
turning-in to berth or hammock, lay all night at City Point, near
Petersburg.

A little before sunrise we weighed again, and sought a passage through
the tremendous Confederate “obstructions.” Rows of iron skeletons, the
frame-works of the wheels of sunken steamers, showed above the stream,
casting gaunt shadows westward, and varied only by here and there a
battered smoke-stack or a spar. The whole of the steamers that had plied
upon the James and the canals before the war were lying here in rows,
sunk lengthwise along the stream. Two in the middle of each row had been
raised to let the government vessels pass, but in the heat-mist and
faint light the navigation was most difficult. For five and twenty miles
the rebel forts were as thick as the hills and points allowed; yet, in
spite of booms and bars, of sunken ships, of batteries and torpedoes,
the Federal monitors once forced their way to Fort Darling in the outer
works of Richmond. I remembered these things a few weeks later, when
General Grant‘s first words to me at Washington were: “Glad to meet
you. What have you seen?” “The Capitol.” “Go at once and see the
Monitors.” He afterward said to me, in words that photograph not only
the Monitors, but Grant: “You can batter away at those things for a
month, and do no good.”

At Dutch Gap we came suddenly upon a curious scene. The river flowed
toward us down a long, straight reach, bounded by a lofty hill crowned
with tremendous earthworks; but through a deep trench or cleft, hardly
fifty yards in length, upon our right, we could see the stream running
with violence in a direction parallel with our course. The hills about
the gully were hollowed out into caves and bomb-proofs, evidently meant
as shelters from vertical fire, but the rough graves of a vast cemetery
showed that the protection was sought in vain. Forests of crosses of
unpainted wood rose upon every acre of flat ground. On the peninsula,
all but made an island by the cleft, was a grove of giant trees,
leafless, barkless, dead, and blanched by a double change in the level
of the stream. There is no sight so sad as that of a drowned forest,
with a turkey-buzzard on each bough. On the bank upon our left was an
iron scaffold, eight or ten stories high,--“Butler‘s Lookout,” as the
cleft was “Butler‘s Dutch Gap Canal.” The canal, unfinished in war, is
now to be completed at State expense for purposes of trade.

As we rounded the extremity of the peninsula an eagle was seen to light
upon a tree. From every portion of the ship--main deck, hurricane deck,
lower deck ports--revolvers, ready capped and loaded, were brought to
bear upon the bird, which sheered off unharmed amid a storm of bullets.
After this incident, I was careful in my political discussions with my
shipmates; disarmament in the Confederacy had clearly not been extended
to private weapons.

The outer and inner lines of fortifications passed, we came in view of a
many-steepled town, with domes and spires recalling Oxford, hanging on a
bank above a crimson-colored foaming stream. In ten minutes we were
alongside the wharf at Richmond, and in half an hour safely housed in
the “Exchange Hotel,” kept by the Messrs. Carrington, of whom the father
was a private, the son a colonel, in the rebel volunteers.

The next day, while the works and obstructions on the James were still
fresh in my mind, I took train to Petersburg, the city the capture of
which by Grant was the last blow struck by the North at the melting
forces of the Confederacy.

The line showed the war: here and there the track, torn up in Northern
raids, had barely been repaired; the bridges were burnt and broken; the
rails worn down to an iron thread. The joke “on board,” as they say here
for “in the train,” was that the engine-drivers down the line are
tolerably cute men, who, when the rails are altogether worn away,
understand how to “go it on the bare wood,” and who at all times “know
where to jump.”

From the window of the car we could see that in the country there were
left no mules, no horses, no roads, no men. The solitude is not all
owing to the war: in the whole five and twenty miles from Richmond to
Petersburg there was before the war but a single station; in New England
your passage-card often gives a station in every two miles. A careful
look at the underwood on either side the line showed that this forest is
not primeval, that all this country had once been plowed.

Virginia stands first among the States for natural advantages: in
climate she is unequaled; her soil is fertile; her mineral wealth in
coal, copper, gold, and iron enormous, and well placed; her rivers good,
and her great harbor one of the best in the world. Virginia has been
planted more than two hundred and fifty years, and is as large as
England, yet has a free population of only a million. In every kind of
production she is miserably inferior to Missouri or Ohio, in most,
inferior also to the infant States of Michigan and Illinois. Only a
quarter of her soil is under cultivation, to half that of poor, starved
New England, and the mines are deserted which were worked by the very
Indians who were driven from the land as savages a hundred years ago.

There is no surer test of the condition of a country than the state of
its highways. In driving on the main roads round Richmond, in visiting
the scene of McClellan‘s great defeat on the Chickahominy at
Mechanicsville and Malvern Hill, I myself, and an American gentleman who
was with me, had to get out and lay the planks upon the bridges, and
then sit upon them, to keep them down while the black coachman drove
across. The best roads in Virginia are but ill kept “corduroys;” but,
bad as are these, “plank roads” over which artillery have passed,
knocking out every other plank, are worse by far; yet such is the main
road from Richmond toward the west.

There is not only a scarcity of roads, but of railroads. A comparison of
the railway system of Illinois and Indiana with the two lines of
Kentucky or the one of Western Virginia or Louisiana, is a comparison of
the South with the North, of slavery with freedom. Virginia shows
already the decay of age, but is blasted by slavery rather than by war.

Passing through Petersburg, the streets of which were gay with the
feathery-brown blooms of the Venetian sumach, but almost deserted by
human beings, who have not returned to the city since they were driven
out by the shot and shell of which their houses show the scars, we were
soon in the rebel works. There are sixty miles of these works in all,
line within line, three deep: alternations of sand-pits and sand-heaps,
with here and there a tree-trunk pierced for riflemen, and everywhere a
double row of _chevaux de frise_. The forts nearest this point were
named by their rebel occupants Fort Hell and Fort Damnation. Tremendous
works, but it needed no long interview with Grant to understand their
capture. I had not been ten minutes in his office at Washington before I
saw that the secret of his unvarying success lay in his unflinching
determination: there is pith in the American conceit which reads in his
initials, “U. S. G.,” “unconditional-surrender Grant.”

The works defending Richmond, hardly so strong as those of Petersburg,
were attacked in a novel manner in the third year of the war. A strong
body of Federal cavalry on a raid, unsupported by infantry or guns, came
suddenly by night upon the outer lines of Richmond on the west.
Something had led them to believe that the rebels were not in force, and
with the strange aimless daring that animated both parties during the
rebellion, they rode straight in along the winding road, unchallenged,
and came up to the inner lines. There they were met by a volley which
emptied a few saddles, and they retired, without even stopping to spike
the guns in the outer works. Had they known enough of the troops opposed
to them to have continued to advance, they might have taken Richmond,
and held it long enough to have captured the rebel president and senate,
and burned the great iron-works and ships. The whole of the rebel army
had gone north, and even the home guard was camped out on the
Chickahominy. The troops who fired the volley were a company of the
“iron-works battalion,” boys employed at the founderies, not one of whom
had ever fired a rifle before this night. They confessed themselves that
“one minute more, and they‘d have run;” but the volley just stopped the
enemy in time.

The spot where we first struck the rebel lines was that known as the
Crater--the funnel-shaped cavity formed when Grant sprang his famous
mine: 1500 men are buried in the hollow itself, and the bones of those
smothered by the falling earth are working through the soil: 5000 negro
troops were killed in this attack, and are buried round the hollow where
they died, fighting as gallantly as they fought everywhere throughout
the war. It is a singular testimony to the continuousness of the fire,
that the still remaining subterranean passages show that in
countermining the rebels came once within three feet of the mine, yet
failed to hear the working parties. Thousands of old army shoes were
lying on the earth, and negro boys were digging up bullets for old lead.

Within eighty yards of the Crater are the Federal investing lines, on
which the trumpet-flower of our gardens was growing wild in deep rich
masses. The negroes told me not to gather it, because they believe it
scalds the hand. They call it “poison plant,” or “blister weed.” The
blue-birds and scarlet tannagers were playing about the horn-shaped
flowers.

Just within Grant‘s earthworks are the ruins of an ancient church,
built, it is said, with bricks that were brought by the first colonists
from England in 1614. About Norfolk, about Petersburg, and in the
Shenandoah Valley, you cannot ride twenty miles through the Virginian
forest without bursting in upon some glade containing a quaint old
church, or a creeper-covered roofless palace of the Culpeppers, the
Randolphs, or the Scotts. The county names have in them all a history.
Taking the letter “B” alone, we have Barbour, Bath, Bedford, Berkeley,
Boone, Botetourt, Braxton, Brooke, Brunswick, Buchanan, Buckingham. A
dozen counties in the State are named from kings or princes. The
slaveowning cavaliers whose names the remainder bear are the men most
truly guilty of the late attempt made by their descendants to create an
empire founded on disloyalty and oppression; but within sight of this
old church of theirs at Petersburg, thirty-three miles of Federal
outworks stand as a monument of how the attempt was crushed by the
children of their New England brother-colonists.

The names of streams and hamlets in Virginia have often a quaint English
ring. On the Potomac, near Harper‘s Ferry, I once came upon “Sir John‘s
Run.” Upon my asking a tall, gaunt fellow, who was fishing, whether this
was the spot on which the Knight of Windsor “larded the lean earth,” I
got for sole answer: “Wall, don‘t know ’bout that, but it‘s a mighty
fine spot for yellow-fin trout.” The entry to Virginia is
characteristic. You sail between capes named from the sons of James I.,
and have fronting you the estuaries of two rivers called after the King
and the Duke of York.

The old “F. F. V.’s,” the first families of Virginia, whose founders
gave these monarchic names to the rivers and counties of the State, are
far off now in Texas and California--those, that is, which were not
extinct before the war. The tenth Lord Fairfax keeps a tiny ranch near
San Francisco; some of the chief Denmans are also to be found in
California. In all such cases of which I heard, the emigration took
place before the war; Northern conquest could not be made use of as a
plea whereby to escape the reproaches due to the slaveowning system.
There is a stroke of justice in the fact that the Virginian oligarchy
have ruined themselves in ruining their State; but the gaming hells of
Farobankopolis, as Richmond once was called, have much for which to
answer.

When the “burnt district” comes to be rebuilt, Richmond will be the most
beautiful of all the Atlantic cities; while the water-power of the
rapids of the James, and a situation at the junction of canal and river,
secure for it a prosperous future.

The superb position of the State-house (which formed the rebel capitol),
on the brow of a long hill, whence it overhangs the city and the James,
has in it something of satire. The Parliament-house of George
Washington‘s own State, the State-house, contains the famed statue set
up by the general assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia to the hero‘s
memory. Without the building stands the still more noteworthy bronze
statue of the first President, erected jointly by all the States in the
then Union. That such monuments should overlook the battle-fields of the
war provoked by the secession from the Union of Washington‘s loved
Virginia, is a fact full of the grim irony of history.

Hollywood, the cemetery of Richmond, is a place full of touching sad
suggestion, and very beautiful, with deep shades and rippling streams.
During the war, there were hospitals in Richmond for 20,000 men, and
“always full,” they say. The Richmond men who were killed in battle were
buried where they fell; but 8000 who died in hospital are buried here,
and over them is placed a wooden cross, with the inscription in black
paint, “Dead, but not forgotten.” In another spot lie the Union dead,
under the shadow of the flag for which they died.

From Monroe‘s tomb the evening view is singularly soft and calm; the
quieter and calmer for the drone in which are mingled the trills of the
mocking-bird, the hoarse croaking of the bull-frog, the hum of the
myriad fire-flies, that glow like summer lightning among the trees, the
distant roar of the river, of which the rich red water can still be
seen, beaten by the rocks into a rosy foam.

With the moment‘s chillness of the sunset breeze, the golden glory of
the heavens fades into gray, and there comes quickly over them the
solemn blueness of the Southern night. Thoughts are springing up of the
many thousand unnamed graves, where the rebel soldiers lie unknown, when
the Federal drums in Richmond begin sharply beating the rappel.




CHAPTER II.

THE NEGRO.


In the back country of Virginia, and on the borders of North Carolina,
it becomes clear that our common English notions of the negro and of
slavery are nearer the truth than common notions often are. The London
Christy Minstrels are not more given to bursts of laughter of the form
“Yah! yah!” than are the plantation hands. The negroes upon the Virginia
farms are not maligned by those who represent them as delighting in the
contrasts of crimson and yellow, or emerald and sky-blue. I have seen
them on a Sunday afternoon, dressed in scarlet waistcoats and gold-laced
cravats, returning hurriedly from “meetin’,” to dance break-downs, and
grin from ear to ear for hours at a time. What better should we expect
from men to whom until just now it was forbidden, under tremendous
penalties, to teach their letters?

Nothing can force the planters to treat negro freedom save from the
comic side. To them the thing is too new for thought, too strange for
argument; the ridiculous lies on the surface, and to this they turn as a
relief. When I asked a planter how the blacks prospered under freedom,
his answer was, “Ours don‘t much like it. You see, it necessitates
monogamy. If I talk about the ‘responsibilities of freedom,’ Sambo says,
‘Dunno ’bout that; please, mass’ George: me want two wife.’” Another
planter tells me, that the only change he can see in the condition of
the negroes since they have been free is that formerly the supervision
of the overseer forced them occasionally to be clean, whereas now
nothing on earth can make them wash. He says that, writing lately to his
agent, he received an answer to which there was the following
postscript: “You ain‘t sent no sope. You had better send sope: niggers
is _certainly_ needing sope.”

It is easy to treat the negro question in this way; easy, on the other
hand, to assert that since history fails us as a guide to the future of
the emancipated blacks, we should see what time will bring, and
meanwhile set down negroes as a monster class of which nothing is yet
known, and, like the compilers of the Catalan map, say of places of
which we have no knowledge, “Here be giants, cannibals, and negroes.” As
long as we possess Jamaica, and are masters upon the African west
coast, the negro question is one of moment to ourselves. It is one, too,
of mightier import, for it is bound up with the future of the English in
America. It is by no means a question to be passed over as a joke. There
are five millions of negroes in the United States; juries throughout ten
States of the Union are mainly chosen from the black race. The matter is
not only serious, but full of interest, political, ethnological,
historic.

In the South you must take nothing upon trust; believe nothing you are
told. Nowhere in the world do “facts” appear so differently to those who
view them through spectacles of yellow or of rose. The old planters tell
you that all is ruin,--that they have but half the hands they need, and
from each hand but a half day‘s work: the new men, with Northern energy
and Northern capital, tell you that they get on very well.

The old Southern planters find it hard to rid themselves of their
traditions; they cannot understand free blacks, and slavery makes not
only the slaves but the masters shiftless. They have no cash, and the
Metayer system gives rise to the suspicion of some fraud, for the
negroes are very distrustful of the honesty of their former masters.

The worst of the evils that must inevitably grow out of the sudden
emancipation of millions of slaves have not shown themselves as yet, in
consequence of the great amount of work that has to be done in the
cities of the South, in repairing the ruin caused during the war by fire
and want of care, and in building places of business for the Northern
capitalists. The negroes of Virginia and North Carolina have flocked
down to the towns and ports by the thousand, and find in Norfolk,
Richmond, Wilmington, and Fort Monroe employment for the moment. Their
absence from the plantations makes labor dear up country, and this in
itself tempts the negroes who remain on land to work sturdily for wages.
Seven dollars a month--at the rate equal to one pound--with board and
lodging, were being paid to black field hands on the corn and tobacco
farms near Richmond. It is when the city works are over that the
pressure will come, and it will probably end in the blacks largely
pushing northward, and driving the Irish out of hotel service at New
York and Boston, as they have done in Philadelphia and St. Louis.

Already the negroes are beginning to ask for land, and they complain
loudly that none of the confiscated lands have been assigned to them.
“Ef yer dun gib us de land, reckon de ole massas ’ll starb de niggahs,”
was a plain, straightforward summary of the negro view of the negro
question, given me by a white-bearded old “uncle” in Richmond, and
backed by every black man within hearing in a chorus of “Dat‘s true, for
shore;” but I found up the country that the planters are afraid to let
the negroes own or farm for themselves the smallest plot of land, for
fear that they should sell ten times as much as they grew, stealing
their “crop” from the granaries of their employers.

At a farm near Petersburg, owned by a Northern capitalist, 1000 acres,
which before emancipation had been tilled by one hundred slaves, now
needed, I was told, but forty freedmen for their cultivation; but when I
reached the place, I found that the former number included old people
and women, while the forty were all hale men. The men were paid upon the
tally system. A card was given them for each day‘s work, which was
accepted at the plantation store in payment for goods supplied, and at
the end of the month money was paid for the remaining tickets. The
planters say that the field hands will not support their old people;
but this means only that, like white folk, they try to make as much
money as they can, and know that if they plead the wants of their wives
and children, the whites will keep their aged people.

That the negro slaves were lazy, thriftless, unchaste, and thieves, is
true; but it is as slaves, and not as negroes, that they were all these
things; and, after all, the effects of slavery upon the slave are less
terrible than its effects upon the master. The moral condition to which
the planter class had been brought by slavery, shows out plainly in the
speeches of the rebel leaders. Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-President of
the Confederacy, declared in 1861 that “Slavery is the natural and moral
condition of the negro.... I cannot permit myself to doubt,” he went on,
“the ultimate success of a full recognition of this principle throughout
the civilized and enlightened world ... negro slavery is in its
infancy.”

There is reason to believe that the American negroes will justify the
hopes of their friends; they have made the best of every chance that has
been given them as yet; they were good soldiers, they are eager to learn
their letters, they are steady at their work: in Barbadoes they are
industrious and well conducted; in La Plata they are exemplary citizens.
In America the colored laborer has had no motive to be industrious.

General Grant assured me of the great aptness at soldiering shown by the
negro troops. In battle they displayed extraordinary courage, but if
their officers were picked off they could not stand a charge; no more,
he said, could their Southern masters. The power of standing firm after
the loss of leaders is possessed only by regiments where every private
is as good as his captain and colonel, such as the Northwestern and New
England volunteers.

Before I left Richmond I had one morning found my way into a school for
the younger blacks. There were as many present as the forms would
hold--sixty, perhaps, in all--and three wounded New England soldiers,
with pale, thin faces, were patiently teaching them to write. The boys
seemed quick and apt enough, but they were very raw--only a week or two
in the school. Since the time when Oberlin first proclaimed the
potential equality of the race by admitting negroes as freely as white
men and women to the college, the negroes have never been backward to
learn.

It must not be supposed that the negro is wanting in abilities of a
certain kind. Even in the imbecility of the Congo dance we note his
unrivaled mimetic powers. The religious side of the negro character is
full of weird suggestiveness; but superstition, everywhere the handmaid
of ignorance, is rife among the black plantation hands. It is thought
that the punishment with which the shameful rites of Obi-worship have
been visited has proved, even in the City of New Orleans, insufficient
to prevent them. Charges of witchcraft are as common in Virginia as in
Orissa; in the Carolinas as in Central India the use of poison is often
sought to work out the events foretold by some noted sorceress. In no
direction can the matter be followed out to its conclusions without
bringing us face to face with the sad fact that the faults of the
plantation negro are every one of them traceable to the vices of the
slavery system, and that the Americans of to-day are suffering beyond
measure for evils for which our forefathers are responsible. We
ourselves are not guiltless of wrong-doing in this matter: if it is
still impossible openly to advocate slavery in England, it has, at
least, become a habit persistently to write down freedom. We are no
longer told that God made the blacks to be slaves, but we are bade
remember that they cannot prosper under emancipation. All mention of
Barbadoes is suppressed, but we have daily homilies on the condition of
Jamaica. The negro question in America is briefly this: is there, on the
one hand, reason to fear that, dollars applied to land decreasing while
black mouths to be fed increase, the Southern States will become an
American Jamaica? Is there, on the other hand, ground for the hope that
the negroes may be found not incapable of the citizenship of the United
States? The former of these two questions is the more difficult, and to
some extent involves the latter: can cotton, can sugar, can rice, can
coffee, can tobacco, be raised by white field hands? If not, can they be
raised with profit by black free labor? Can co-operative planting,
directed by negro over-lookers, possibly succeed, or must the farm be
ruled by white capitalists, agents, and overseers?

It is asserted that the negro will not work without compulsion; but the
same may be said of the European. There is compulsion of many kinds. The
emancipated negro may still be forced to work--forced as the white man
is forced in this and other lands, by the alternative, work or starve!
This forcing, however, may not be confined to that which the laws of
natural increase lead us to expect; it may be stimulated by bounties on
immigration.

The negro is not, it would seem, to have a monopoly of Southern labor in
this continent. This week we hear of three shiploads of Chinese coolies
as just landed in Louisiana; and the air is thick with rumors of labor
from Bombay, from Calcutta, from the Pacific Islands--of Eastern labor
in its hundred shapes--not to speak of competition with the whites, now
commencing with the German immigration into Tennessee.

The berries of this country are so large, so many, so full of juice,
that alone they form a never-failing source of nourishment to an idle
population. Three kinds of cranberries, American, pied, and English; two
blackberries, huckleberries, high-bush and low-bush blueberries--the
latter being the English bilberry--are among the best known of the
native fruits. No one in this country, however idle he be, need starve.
If he goes farther south, he has the banana, the true staff of life.

The terrible results of the plentiful possession of this tree are seen
in Ceylon, at Panama, in the coastlands of Mexico, at Auckland in New
Zealand. At Pitcairn‘s Island the plantain grove has beaten the
missionary from the field; there is much lip-Christianity, but no
practice to be got from a people who possess the fatal plant. The
much-abused cocoa-nut cannot come near it as a devil‘s agent. The
cocoa-palm is confined to a few islands and coast tracts--confined, too,
to the tropics and sea-level; the plantain and banana extend over
seventy-degrees of latitude, down to Botany Bay and King George‘s Sound,
and up as far north as the Khyber Pass. The palm asks labor--not much,
it is true; but still a few days’ hard work in the year in trenching,
and climbing after the nuts. The plantain grows as a weed, and hangs
down its bunches of ripe tempting fruit into your lap as you lie in its
cool shade. The cocoanut-tree has a hundred uses, and urges men to work
to make spirit from its juice, ropes, clothes, matting, bags, from its
fiber, oil from the pulp; it creates an export trade which appeals to
almost all men by their weakest side, in offering large and quick
returns for a little work. John Ross‘s “Isle of Cocoas,” to the west of
Java and south of Ceylon, yields him heavy gains; there are profits to
be made upon the Liberian coast, and even in Southern India and Ceylon.
The plantain will make nothing; you can eat it raw or fried, and that is
all; you can eat it every day of your life without becoming tired of its
taste; without suffering in your health, you can live on it exclusively.
In the banana groves of Florida and Louisiana there lurks much trouble
and danger to the American free States.

The negroes have hardly much chance in Virginia against the Northern
capitalists, provided with white labor; but the States of Louisiana,
Mississippi, Florida, and South Carolina promise to be wholly theirs.
Already they are flocking to places in which they have a majority of the
people, and can control the municipalities, and defend themselves, if
necessary, by force; but if the Southerners of the coast desert their
country, the negroes will not have it to themselves, unless nature
declares that they shall. New Englanders will pour in with capital and
energy, and cultivate the land by free black or by coolie labor, if
either will pay. If they do pay, competition will force the remaining
blacks to work or starve.

The friends of the negro are not without a fear that the laborers will
be too many for their work, for, while the older cotton States appear to
be worn out, the new, such as Texas and Tennessee, will be reserved by
public opinion to the whites. For the present the negroes will be
masters in seven of the rebel States; but in Texas, white men--English,
Germans, Danes--are growing cotton with success; and in Georgia and
North Carolina, which contain mountain districts, the negro power is not
likely to be permanent.

We may, perhaps, lay it down as a general principle that, when the negro
can fight his way through opposition, and stand alone as a farmer or
laborer, without the aid of private or State charity, then he should be
protected in the position he has shown himself worthy to hold, that of a
free citizen of an enlightened and laboring community. Where it is found
that when his circumstances have ceased to be exceptional, the negro
cannot live unassisted, there the Federal government may fairly and
wisely step in and say, “We will not keep you; but we will carry you to
Liberia or to Hayti, if you will.”

It is clear that the Southern negroes must be given a decisive voice in
the appointment of the legislatures by which they are to be ruled, or
that the North must be prepared to back up by force of opinion, or if
need be, by force of arms, the Federal Executive, when it insists on the
Civil Rights Bill being set in action at the South. Government through
the negroes is the only way to avoid government through an army, which
would be dangerous to the freedom of the North. It is safer for America
to trust her slaves than to trust her rebels--safer to enfranchise than
to pardon.

A reading and writing basis for the suffrage in the Southern States is
an absurdity. Coupled with pardons to the rebels, it would allow the
“boys in gray”--the soldiers of the Confederacy--to control nine States
of the Union; it would render the education of the freedmen hopeless.
For the moment, it would entirely disfranchise the negroes in six
States, whereas it is exactly for the moment that negro suffrage is in
these States necessary; while, if the rebels were admitted to vote, and
the negroes excluded from the poll, the Southern representatives, united
with the Copperhead wing of the Democratic party, might prove to be
strong enough to repudiate the Federal debt. This is one of a dozen
dangers.

An education basis for the suffrage, though pretended to be impartial,
would be manifestly aimed against the negroes, and would perpetuate the
antipathy of color to which the war is supposed to have put an end. To
education such a provision would be a death-blow. If the negroes were to
vote as soon as they could read, it is certain that the planters would
take good care that they never should read at all.

That men should be able to examine into the details of politics is not
entirely necessary to the working of representative government. It is
sufficient that they should be competent to select men to do it for
them. In the highest form of representative government, where all the
electors are both intelligent, educated, and alive to the politics of
the time, then the member returned must tend more and more to be a
delegate. That has always been the case with the Northern and Western
members in America, but never with those returned by the Southern
States; and so it will continue, whether the Southern elections be
decided by negroes or by “mean whites.”

In Warren County, Mississippi, near Vicksburg, is a plantation which
belongs to Joseph Davis, the brother of the rebel president. This he has
leased to Mr. Montgomery--once his slave--in order that an association
of blacks may be formed to cultivate the plantation on co-operative
principles. It is to be managed by a council elected by the community at
large, and a voluntary poor-rate and embankment-rate are to be levied on
the people by themselves.

It is only a year since the termination of the war, and the negroes are
already in possession of schools, village corporations, of the Metayer
system, of co-operative farms; all this tells of rapid advance, and the
conduct and circulation of the _New Orleans Tribune_, edited and
published by negroes, and selling 10,000 copies daily, and another
10,000 of the weekly issue, speaks well for the progress of the blacks.
If the Montgomery experiment succeeds, their future is secure.




CHAPTER III.

THE SOUTH.


The political forecasts and opinions which were given me upon
plantations were, in a great measure, those indicated in my talk with
the Norfolk “loafers.” On the history of the commencement of the
rebellion there was singular unanimity. “Virginia never meant to quit
the Union; we were cheated by those rascals of the South. When we did go
out, we were left to do all the fighting. Why, sir, I‘ve seen a
Mississippian division run away from a single Yankee regiment.”

As I heard much the same story from the North Carolinians that I met, it
would seem as though there was little union among the seceding States.
The legend upon the first of all the secession flags that were hoisted
was typical of this devotion to the fortunes of the State: “Death to
abolitionists; South Carolina goes it alone;” and during the whole war
it was not the rebel colors, but the palmetto emblem, or other State
devices, that the ladies wore.

About the war itself but little is said, though here and there I met a
man who would tell camp stories in the Northern style. One planter, who
had been “out” himself, went so far as to say to me: “Our officers were
good, but considering that our rank and file were just ‘white trash,’
and that they had to fight regiments of New England Yankee volunteers,
with all their best blood in the ranks, and Western sharpshooters
together, it‘s only wonderful how we weren‘t whipped sooner.”

As for the future, the planter‘s policy is a simple one: “Reckon we‘re
whipped, so we go in now for the old flag; only those Yankee rogues must
give us the control of our own people.” The one result of the war has
been, as they believe, the abolition of slavery; otherwise the situation
is unchanged. The war is over, the doctrine of secession is allowed to
fall into the background, and the ex-rebels claim to step once more into
their former place, if, indeed, they admit that they ever left it.

Every day that you are in the South you come more and more to see that
the “mean whites” are the controlling power. The landowners are not only
few in number, but their apathy during the present crisis is surprising.
The men who demand their readmission to the government of eleven States
are unkempt, fierce-eyed fellows, not one whit better than the brancos
of Brazil; the very men, strangely enough, who themselves, in their
“Leavenworth constitution,” first began disfranchisement, declaring that
the qualification for electors in the new State of Kansas should be the
taking oath to uphold the infamous Fugitive Slave Law.

These “mean whites” were the men who brought about secession. The
planters are guiltless of everything but criminal indifference to the
deeds that were committed in their name. Secession was the act of a pack
of noisy demagogues; but a false idea of honor brought round a majority
of the Southern people, and the infection of enthusiasm carried over
the remainder.

When the war sprang up, the old Southern contempt for the Yankees broke
out into a fierce burst of joy, that the day had come for paying off old
scores. “We hate them, sir,” said an old planter to me. “I wish to God
that the _Mayflower_ had sunk with all hands in Plymouth Bay.”

Along with this violence of language, there is a singular kind of
cringing to the conquerors. Time after time I heard the complaint, “The
Yanks treat us shamefully, I reckon. We come back to the Union, and give
in on every point; we renounce slavery; we consent to forget the past;
and yet they won‘t restore us to our rights.” Whenever I came to ask
what they meant by “rights,” I found the same haziness that everywhere
surrounds that word. The Southerners seem to think that men may rebel
and fight to the death against their country, and then, being beaten,
lay down their arms and walk quietly to the polls along with law-abiding
citizens, secure in the protection of the Constitution which for years
they have fought to subvert.

At Richmond I had a conversation which may serve as a specimen of what
one hears each moment from the planters. An old gentleman with whom I
was talking politics opened at me suddenly: “The Radicals are going to
give the ballot to our niggers to strengthen their party, but they know
better than to give it to their Northern niggers.”

_D_.--“But surely there‘s a difference in the cases.”

_The Planter_.--“You‘re right--there is; but not your way. The
difference is, that the Northern niggers can read and write, and even
lie with consistency, and ours can‘t.”

_D_.--“But there‘s the wider difference, that negro suffrage down here
is a necessity, unless you are to rule the country that‘s just beaten
you.”

_The Planter_.--“Well, there of course we differ. We rebs say we fought
to take our State out of the Union. The Yanks beat us; so our States
must still be in the Union. If so, why shouldn‘t our representatives be
unconditionally admitted?”

Nearer to a conclusion we of course did not come, he declaring that no
man ought to vote who had not education enough to understand the
Constitution, I, that this was good _prima facie_ evidence against
letting him vote, but that it might be rebutted by the proof of a higher
necessity for his voting. As a planter said to me, “The Southerners
prefer soldier rule to nigger rule;” but it is not a question of what
they prefer, but of what course is necessary for the safety of the Union
which they fought to destroy.

Nowhere in the Southern States did I find any expectation of a fresh
rebellion. It is only Englishmen who ask whether “the South” will not
fight “once more.” The South is dead and gone; there can never be a
“South” again, but only so many Southern States. “The South” meant
simply the slave country; and slavery being dead, it is dead. Slavery
gave us but two classes besides the negroes--planters and “mean whites.”
The great planters were but a few thousand in number; they are gone to
Canada, England, Jamaica, California, Colorado, Texas. The “mean
whites”--the true South--are impossible in the face of free labor: they
must work or starve. If they work, they will no longer be “mean whites,”
but essentially Northerners--that is, citizens of a democratic republic,
and not oligarchists.

As the Southerners admit that there can be no further war, it would be
better even for themselves that they should allow the sad record of
their rising to fade away. Their speeches, their newspapers continue to
make use of language which nothing could excuse, and which, in the face
of the magnanimity of the conquerors, is disgraceful. In a Mobile paper
I have seen a leader which describes with hideous minuteness Lincoln,
Lane, John Brown, and Dostie playing whist in hell. A Texas cutting
which I have is less blasphemous, but not less vile: “The English
language no longer affords terms in which to curse a sniveling,
weazen-faced piece of humanity generally denominated a Yankee. We see
some about here sometimes, but they skulk around, like sheep-killing
dogs, and associate mostly with niggers. They whine and prate, and talk
about the judgment of God, as if God had anything to do with them.” The
Southerners have not even the wit or grace to admit that the men who
beat them were good soldiers; “blackguards and braggarts,” “cravens and
thieves,” are common names for the men of the Union army. I have in my
possession an Alabama paper in which General Sheridan, at that time the
commander of the military division which included the State, is styled
“a short-tailed slimy tadpole of the later spawn, the blathering
disgrace of an honest father, an everlasting libel on his Irish blood,
the synonym of infamy, and scorn of all brave men.” While I was in
Virginia, one of the Richmond papers said: “This thing of ‘loyalty’ will
not do for the Southern man.”

The very day that I landed in the South a dinner was given at Richmond
by the “Grays,” a volunteer corps which had fought through the
rebellion. After the roll of honor, or list of men killed in battle, had
been read, there were given as toasts by rebel officers: “Jeff.
Davis--the caged eagle; the bars confine his person, but his great
spirit soars;” and “The conquered banner, may its resurrection at last
be as bright and as glorious as theirs--the dead.”

It is in the face of such words as these that Mr. Johnson, the most
unteachable of mortals, asks men who have sacrificed their sons to
restore the Union to admit the ex-rebels to a considerable share in the
government of the nation, even if they are not to monopolize it, as they
did before the war. His conduct seems to need the Western editor‘s
defense: “He must be kinder honest-like, he aire sich a tarnation
foolish critter.”

It is clear, from the occurrence of such dinners, the publication of
such paragraphs and leaders as those of which I have spoken, that there
is no military tyranny existing in the South. The country is indeed
administered by military commanders, but it is not ruled by troops.
Before we can give ear to the stories that are afloat in Europe of the
“government of major-generals,” we must believe that five millions of
Englishmen, inhabiting a country as large as Europe, are crushed down by
some ten thousand other men--about as many as are needed to keep order
in the single town of Warsaw. The Southerners are allowed to rule
themselves; the question now at issue is merely whether they shall also
rule their former slaves, the negroes.

I hardly felt myself out of the reach of slavery and rebellion till,
steaming up the Potomac from Aquia Creek by the gray dawn, I caught
sight of a grand pile towering over a city from a magnificent situation
on the brow of a long, rolling hill. Just at the moment, the sun,
invisible as yet to us below, struck the marble dome and cupola, and
threw the bright gilding into a golden blaze, till the Greek shape
stood out upon the blue sky, glowing like a second sun. The city was
Washington; the palace with the burnished cupola the Capitol; and within
two hours I was present at the “hot-weather sitting” of the 39th
Congress of the United States.




CHAPTER IV.

THE EMPIRE STATE.


At the far southeast of New York City, where the Hudson and East River
meet to form the inner bay, is an ill-kept park that might be made the
loveliest garden in the world. Nowhere do the features that have caused
New York to take rank as the first port of America stand forth more
clearly. The soft evening breeze tells of a climate as good as the world
can show; the setting sun floods with light a harbor secure and vast,
formed by the confluence of noble streams, and girt with quays at which
huge ships jostle; the rows of 500-pounder Rodmans at “The Narrows” are
tokens of the nation‘s strength and wealth; and the yachts, as well
handled as our own, racing into port from an ocean regatta, give
evidence that there are Saxons in the land. At the back is the city,
teeming with life, humming with trade, muttering with the thunder of
passage. Opposite, in Jersey City, people say: “Every New Yorker has
come a good half-hour late into the world, and is trying all his life to
make it up.” The bustle is immense.

All is so un-English, so foreign, that hearing men speaking what Czar
Nicholas was used to call “the American tongue,” I wheel round,
crying--“Dear me! if here are not some English folk!” astonished as
though I had heard French in Australia or Italian in Timbuctoo.

The Englishman who, coming to America, expects to find cities that smell
of home, soon learns that Baker Street itself, or Portland Place, would
not look English in the dry air of a continent four thousand miles
across. New York, however, is still less English than is Boston,
Philadelphia, or Chicago--her people are as little Saxon as her streets.
Once Southern, with the brand of slavery deeply printed in the foreheads
of her foremost men, since the defeat of the rebellion New York has to
the eye been cosmopolitan as any city of the Levant. All nationless
towns are not alike: Alexandria has a Greek or an Italian tinge; San
Francisco an English tone, with something of the heartiness of our
Elizabethan times; New York has a deep Latin shade, and the democracy of
the Empire State is of the French, not of the American or English type.

At the back, here, on the city side, are tall gaunt houses, painted red,
like those of the quay at Dort or of the Boompjes at Rotterdam, the
former dwellings of the “Knickerbockers” of New Amsterdam, the founders
of New York, but now forgotten. There may be a few square yards of
painting, red or blue, upon the houses in Broadway; there may be here
and there a pagoda summer-house overhanging a canal; once in a year you
may run across a worthy descendant of the old Netherlandish families;
but in the main the Hollanders in America are as though they had never
been; to find the memorials of lost Dutch empire, we must search Cape
Colony or Ceylon. The New York un-English tone is not Batavian. Neither
the sons of the men who once lived in these houses, nor the Germans
whose names are now upon the doors, nor, for the matter of that, we
English, who claim New York as the second of our towns, are the to-day‘s
New Yorkers.

Here, on the water‘s edge, is a rickety hall, where Jenny Lind sang when
first she landed--now the spot where strangers of another kind are
welcomed to America. Every true republican has in his heart the notion
that his country is pointed out by God for a refuge for the distressed
of all the nations. He has sprung himself from men who came to seek a
sanctuary--from the Quakers, or the Catholics, or the pilgrims of the
_Mayflower_. Even though they come to take the bread from his mouth, or
to destroy his peace, it is his duty, he believes, to aid the
immigrants. Within the last twenty years there have landed at New York
alone four million strangers. Of these two-thirds were Irish.

While the Celtic men are pouring into New York and Boston, the New
Englanders and New Yorkers, too, are moving. They are not dying. Facts
are opposed to this portentous theory. They are going West. The unrest
of the Celt is mainly caused by discontent with his country‘s present,
that of the Saxon by hope for his private future. The Irishman flies to
New York because it lies away from Ireland; the Englishman takes it upon
his road to California.

Where one race is dominant, immigrants of another blood soon lose their
nationality. In New York and Boston the Irish continue to be Celts, for
these are Irish cities. In Pittsburg, in Chicago, still more in the
country districts, a few years make the veriest Paddy English. On the
other hand, the Saxons are disappearing from the Atlantic cities, as the
Spaniards have gone from Mexico. The Irish here are beating down the
English, as the English have crushed out the Dutch. The Hollander‘s
descendants in New York are English now; it bids fair that the Saxons
should be Irish.

As it is, though the Celtic immigration has lasted only twenty years,
the results are already clear: if you see a Saxon face upon the
Broadway, you may be sure it belongs to a traveler, or to some raw
English lad bound West, just landed from a Plymouth ship. We need not
lay much stress upon the fact that all New Yorkers have black hair and
beard: men may be swarthy and yet English. The ancestors of the
Londoners of to-day, we are told, were yellow-headed roysterers; yet not
one man in fifty that you meet in Fleet Street or on Tower Hill is as
fair as the average Saxon peasant. Doubtless, our English eastern
counties were peopled in the main by low-Dutch and Flemings: the Sussex
eyes and hair are rarely seen in Suffolk. The Puritans of New England
are sprung from those of the “associated counties,” but the victors of
Marston Moor may have been cousins to those no less sturdy Protestants,
the Hollanders who defended Leyden. It may be that they were our
ancestors, those Dutchmen that we English crowded out of New
Amsterdam--the very place where we are sharing the fate we dealt. The
fiery temper of the new people of the American coast towns, their
impatience of free government, are better proofs of Celtic blood than
are the color of their eyes and beard.

Year by year the towns grow more and more intensely Irish. Already of
every four births in Boston, one only is American. There are 120,000
foreign to 70,000 native voters in New York and Brooklyn. Montreal and
Richmond are fast becoming Celtic; Philadelphia--shades of Penn!--can
only be saved by the aid of its Bavarians. Saxon Protestantism is
departing with the Saxons: the revenues of the Empire State are spent
upon Catholic asylums; plots of city land are sold at nominal rates for
the sites of Catholic cathedrals, by the “city _step_-fathers,” as they
are called. Not even in the West does the Latin Church gain ground more
rapidly than in New York City: there are 80,000 professing Catholics in
Boston.

When is this drama, of which the first scene is played in Castle Garden,
to have its close? The matter is grave enough already. Ten years ago,
the third and fourth cities of the world, New York and Philadelphia,
were as English as our London: the one is Irish now; the other all but
German. Not that the Quaker City will remain Teutonic: the Germans, too,
are going out upon the land; the Irish alone pour in unceasingly. All
great American towns will soon be Celtic, while the country continues
English: a fierce and easily-roused people will throng the cities, while
the law-abiding Saxons who till the land will cease to rule it. Our
relations with America are matters of small moment by the side of the
one great question: Who are the Americans to be?

Our kinsmen are by no means blind to the dangers that hang over them.
The “Know-Nothing” movement failed, but Protection speaks the same voice
in its opposition to commercial centers. If you ask a Western man why
he, whose interest is clearly in Free Trade, should advocate Protection,
he fires out: “Free Trade is good for our American pockets, but it‘s
death to us Americans. All your Bastiats and Mills won‘t touch the fact
that to us Free Trade must mean salt-water despotism, and the ascendency
of New York and Boston. Which is better for the country--one New York,
or ten contented Pittsburgs and ten industrious Lowells?”

The danger to our race and to the world from Irish ascendency is perhaps
less imminent than that to the republic. In January, 1862, the mayor,
Fernando Wood, the elect of the “Mozart” Democracy, deliberately
proposed the secession from the Union of New York City. Of all the
Northern States, New York alone was a dead weight upon the loyal people
during the war of the rebellion. The constituents of Wood were the very
Fenians whom in our ignorance we call “American.” It is America that
Fenianism invades from Ireland--not England from America.

It is no unfair attack upon the Irish to represent them as somewhat
dangerous inhabitants for mighty cities. Of the sixty thousand persons
arrested yearly in New York, three-fourths are alien born: two-thirds of
these are Irish. Nowhere else in all America are the Celts at present
masters of a city government--nowhere is there such corruption. The
purity of the government of Melbourne--a city more democratic than New
York--proves that the fault does not lie in democracy: it is the
universal opinion of Americans that the Irish are alone responsible.

The State legislature is falling into the hands of the men who control
the city council. They tell a story of a traveler on the Hudson River
Railroad, who, as the train neared Albany--the capital of New York--said
to a somewhat gloomy neighbor, “Going to the State legislatur’?” getting
for answer, “No, sir! It‘s not come to that with me yet. Only to the
State prison!”

Americans are never slow to ridicule the denationalization of New York.
They tell you that during the war the colonel of one of the city
regiments said: “I‘ve the best blood of eight nations in the ranks.”
“How‘s that?” “I‘ve English, Irish, Welsh, Scotch, French, Italians,
Germans.” “Guess that‘s only seven.” “Swedes,” suggested some one. “No,
no Swedes,” said the colonel. “Ah! I have it: I‘ve some Americans.”
Stories such as this the rich New Yorkers are nothing loth to tell; but
they take no steps to check the denationalization they lament. Instead
of entering upon a reform of their municipal institutions, they affect
to despise free government; instead of giving, as the oldest New England
families have done, their tone to the State schools, they keep entirely
aloof from school and State alike. Sending their boys to Cambridge,
Berlin, Heidelberg, anywhere rather than to the colleges of their native
land, they leave it to learned pious Boston to supply the West with
teachers, and to keep up Yale and Harvard. Indignant if they are pointed
at as “no Americans,” they seem to separate themselves from everything
that is American: they spend summers in England, winters in Algeria,
springs in Rome, and Coloradans say with a sneer, “Good New Yorkers go
to Paris when they die.”

Apart from nationality, there is danger to free government both in the
growth of New York City, and in the gigantic fortunes of New Yorkers.
The income, they tell me, of one of my merchant friends is larger than
the combined salaries of the president, the governors, and the whole of
the members of the legislatures of all the forty-five States and
territories. As my informant said, “He could keep the governments of
half a dozen States as easily as I can support my half dozen children.”

There is something, no doubt, of the exaggeration of political jealousy
about the accounts of New York vice given in New England and down
South, in the shape of terrible philippics. It is to be hoped that the
overstatement is enormous, for sober men are to be found even in New
York who will tell you that this city outdoes Paris in every form of
profligacy as completely as the French capital outherods imperial Rome.
There is here no concealment about the matter; each inhabitant at once
admits the truth of accusations directed against his neighbor. If the
new men, the “petroleum aristocracy,” are second to none in their
denunciations of the Irish, these in their turn unite with the oldest
families in thundering against “Shoddy.”

New York life shows but badly in the summer-time; it is seen at its
worst when studied at Saratoga. With ourselves, men have hardly ceased
to run from business and pleasures worse than toil to the comparative
quiet of the country house. Among New Yorkers there is not even the
affectation of a search for rest; the flight is from the drives and
restaurants of New York to the gambling halls of Saratoga; from winning
piles of greenbacks to losing heaps of gold; from cotton gambling to
roulette or faro. Long Branch is still more vulgar in its vice; it is
the Margate, Saratoga the Homburg of America.

“Shoddy” is blamed beyond what it deserves when the follies of New York
society are laid in a body at its door. If it be true that the New York
drawing-rooms are the best guarded in the world, it is also true that
entrance is denied as rigidly to intellect and eminence as to wealth. If
exclusiveness be needed, affectation can at least do nothing toward
subduing “Shoddy.” Mere cliqueism, disgusting every where, is ridiculous
in a democratic town; its rules of conduct are as out of place as kid
gloves in the New Zealand bush, or gold scabbards on a battle-field.

Good meat, and drink, and air, give strength to the men and beauty to
the women of a moneyed class; but in America these things are the
inheritance of every boy and girl, and give their owners no advantage in
the world. During the rebellion, the ablest generals and bravest
soldiers of the North sprang, not from the merchant families, but from
the farmer folk. Without special merit of some kind, there can be no
such thing as aristocracy.

Many American men and women, who have too little nobility of soul to be
patriots, and too little understanding to see that theirs is already, in
many points, the master country of the globe, come to you, and bewail
the fate which has caused them to be born citizens of a republic, and
dwellers in a country where men call vices by their names. The least
educated of their countrymen, the only grossly vulgar class that America
brings forth, they fly to Europe “to escape democracy,” and pass their
lives in Paris, Pau, or Nice, living libels on the country they are
believed to represent.

Out of these discordant elements, Cubans, Knickerbockers, Germans,
Irish, “first families,” “Petroleum,” and “Shoddy,” we are forced to
construct our composite idea--New York. The Irish numerically
predominate, but we have no experience as to what should be the moral
features of an Irish city, for Dublin has always been in English hands;
possibly that which in New York appears to be cosmopolitan is merely
Celtic. However it may be, this much is clear, that the humblest
township of New England reflects more truly the America of the past, the
most chaotic village of Nebraska portrays more fully the hopes and
tendencies of the America of the future, than do this huge State and
city.

If the political figure of New York is not encouraging, its natural
beauty is singularly great. Those who say that America has no scenery,
forget the Hudson, while they can never have explored Lake George, Lake
Champlain, and the Mohawk. That Poole‘s exquisite scene from the
“Decameron,” “Philomela‘s Song,” could have been realized on earth, I
never dreamt until I saw the singers at a New Yorker‘s villa on the
Hudson grouped in the deep shades of a glen, from which there was an
outlook upon the basaltic palisades and lake-like Tappan Zee. It was in
some such spot that De Tocqueville wrote the brightest of his brilliant
letters--that dated “Sing Sing”--for he speaks of himself as lying on a
hill that overhung the Hudson, watching the white sails gleaming in the
hot sun, and trying in vain to fancy what became of the river where it
disappeared in the blue “Highlands.”

That New York City itself is full of beauty the view from Castle Garden
would suffice to show; and by night it is not less lovely than by day.
The harbor is illuminated by the colored lanterns of a thousand boats,
and the steam-whistles tell of a life that never sleeps. The paddles of
the steamers seem not only to beat the water, but to stir the languid
air and so provoke a breeze, and the lime-lights at the Fulton and Wall
Street ferries burn so brightly that in the warm glare the eye reaches
through the still night to the feathery acacias in the streets of
Brooklyn. The view is as southern as the people: we have not yet found
America.




CHAPTER V.

CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT.


“Old Cambridge! Long may she flourish!” proposed by a professor in the
University of Cambridge, in America, and drunk standing, with three
cheers, by the graduates and undergraduates of Harvard, is a toast that
sets one thinking.

Cambridge in America is not by any means a university of to-day. Harvard
College, which, being the only “house,” has engrossed the privileges,
funds, and titles of the university, was founded at Cambridge, Mass., in
1636, only ninety years later than the greatest and wealthiest college
of our Cambridge in old England. Puritan Harvard was the sister rather
than the daughter of our own Puritan Emmanuel. Harvard himself, and
Dunster, the first president of Harvard‘s College, were among the
earliest of the scholars of Emmanuel.

A toast from the Cambridge of new to the Cambridge of old England is one
from younger to elder sister; and Dr. Wendell Holmes, “The Autocrat,”
said as much in proposing it at the Harvard alumni celebration of 1866.

Like other old institutions, Harvard needs a ten-days’ revolution:
academic abuses flourish as luxuriantly upon American as on English
soil, and university difficulties are much the same in either country.
Here, as at home, the complaint is that the men come up to the
university untaught. To all of them their college is forced for a time
to play the high-school; to some she is never anything more than school.
At Harvard this is worse than with ourselves: the average age of entry,
though of late much risen, is still considerably under eighteen.

The college is now aiming at raising gradually the standard of entry:
when once all are excluded save men, and thinking men, real students,
such as those by whom some of the new Western universities are attended,
then Harvard hopes to leave drill-teaching entirely to the schools, and
to permit the widest freedom in the choice of studies to her students.

Harvard is not blameless in this matter. Like other universities, she is
conservative of bad things as well as good; indeed, ten minutes within
her walls would suffice to convince even an Englishman that Harvard
clings to the times before the Revolution.

Her conservatism is shown in many trivial things--in the dress of her
janitors and porters, in the cut of the grass-plots and college gates,
in the conduct of the Commencement orations in the chapel. For the
dainty little dames from Boston who came to hear their friends and
brothers recite their disquisitions none but Latin programmes were
provided, and the poor ladies were condemned to find such names as Bush,
Maurice, Benjamin, Humphrey, and Underwood among the graduating youths,
distorted into Bvsh, Mavritivs, Beniamin, Hvmphredvs, Vnderwood.

This conservatism of the New England universities had just received a
sharp attack. In the Commencement oration, Dr. Hedges, one of the
leaders of the Unitarian Church, had strongly pressed the necessity for
a complete freedom of study after entry, a liberty to take up what line
the student would, to be examined and to graduate in what he chose. He
had instanced the success of Michigan University consequent upon the
adoption of this plan; he had pointed to the fact that of all the
universities in America, Michigan alone drew her students from every
State. President Hill and ex-President Walker had indorsed his views.

There is a special fitness in the reformers coming forward at this time.
This year is the commencement of a new era at Harvard, for at the
request of the college staff, the connection of the university with the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts has just been dissolved, and the members
of the board of overseers are in future to be elected by the university,
instead of being nominated by the State. This being so, the question had
been raised as to whether the governor would come in state to
Commencement, but he yielded to the wishes of the graduates, and came
with the traditional pomp, attended by a staff in uniform, and escorted
by a troop of Volunteer Lancers, whose scarlet coats and polish recalled
the times before the Revolution.

While the ceremony was still in progress, I had been introduced to
several of the foremost rowing men among the younger graduates of
Harvard, and at its conclusion I accompanied them to their river. They
were in strict training for their university race with Yale, which was
to come off in a week, and as Cambridge had been beaten twice running,
and this year had a better crew, they were wishful for criticisms on
their style. Such an opinion as a stranger could offer was soon given:
they were dashing, fast, long in their stroke; strong, considering their
light weights, but terribly overworked. They have taken for a rule the
old English notions as to training which have long since disappeared at
home, and, looked upon as fanatics by their friends and tutors, they
have all the fanatic‘s excess of zeal.

Rowing and other athletics, with the exceptions of skating and base
ball, are both neglected and despised in America. When the smallest sign
of a reaction appears in the New England colleges, there comes at once a
cry from Boston that brains are being postponed to brawn. If New
Englanders would look about them, they would see that their climate has
of itself developed brains at the expense of brawn, and that if national
degeneracy is to be long prevented, brawn must in some way be fostered.
The high shoulder, head-voice, and pallor of the Boston men are not
incompatible with the possession of the most powerful brain, the keenest
wit; but it is not probable that energy and talent will be continued in
future generations sprung from the worn-out men and women of to-day.

The prospect at present is not bright; year by year Americans grow
thinner, lighter, and shorter-lived. Ælian‘s Americans, we may remember,
though they were greatly superior to the Greeks in stature, were
inferior to them in length of life. The women show even greater signs of
weakness than the men, and the high, undulating tones which are
affectation in the French, are natural to the ladies of America; little
can be expected of women whose only exercise is excessive dancing in
overheated rooms.

The American summer, often tropical in its heat, has much to answer for,
but it is the winter which makes the saddest havoc among the younger
people, and the boys and girls at school. Cooped up all day in the close
air of the heated school-house, the poor children are at night made to
run straight back to the furnace-dried atmosphere of home. The
thermometer is commonly raised indoors to eighty or ninety degrees Fahr.
The child is not only baked into paleness and sweated bit by bit to its
death, but fed meantime, out of mistaken kindness, upon the most
indigestible of dainties--pastry, hot dough-nuts, and sweetmeats taking
the place of bread, and milk, and meat--and is not allowed to take the
slightest exercise, except its daily run to school-house. Who can wonder
that spinal diseases should prevail?

One reason why Americans are pale and agueish is that, as a people, they
are hewers of primeval forest and tillers of virgin soil. These are the
unhealthiest employments in the world; the sun darts down upon the
hitherto unreached mould, and sets free malarious gases, against which
the new settlers have no antidotes.

The rowing men of Harvard tell me that their clubs are still looked on
somewhat coldly by the majority of the professors, who obstinately
refuse to see that improved physical type is not an end, but a means,
toward improvement of the mental faculties, if not in the present, at
least in the next generation. As for the moral training in the virtues
of obedience and command, for which a boat‘s crew is the best of
schools, that is not yet understood at Harvard, where rowing is confined
to the half dozen men who are to represent the college in the annual
race, and the three or four more who are being trained to succeed them
in the crew. Rowing in America is what it was till ten years since at
old Cambridge, and is still at Oxford--not an exercise for the majority
of the students, but a pursuit for a small number. Physical culture is,
however, said to be making some small progress in the older States, and
I myself saw signs of the tendency in Philadelphia. The war has done
some good in this respect, and so has the influx of Canadians to
Chicago. Cricket is still almost an unknown thing, except in some few
cities. When I was coming in to Baltimore by train, we passed a meadow
in which a match was being played. A Southerner to whom I was talking at
the time, looked at the players, and said with surprise: “Reckon they‘ve
got a wounded man ther’, front o’ them sticks, sah.” I found that he
meant the batsman, who was wearing pads.

One of the most brilliant of Harvard‘s thinkers has taken to
carpentrying as a relief to his mental toil; her most famed professor is
often to be found working in his garden or his farm; but such change of
work for work is possible only to certain men. The generality of
Americans need not only exercise, but relaxation; still, with less
physical, they possess greater mental vitality then ourselves.

On the day that follows Commencement--the chief ceremony of the academic
year--is held once in three summers the “Alumni Celebration,” or meeting
of the past graduates of Harvard--a touching gathering at all times, but
peculiarly so in these times that follow on the losses of the war.

The American college informal organizations rest upon the unit of the
“class.” The “class” is what at Cambridge is called “men of the same
year,”--men who enter together and graduate together at the end of the
regular course. Each class of a large New England college, such as
Harvard, will often possess an association of its own; its members will
dine together once in five years, or ten--men returning from Europe and
from the far West to be present at the gathering. Harvard is strong in
the affections of the New England people--her faults are theirs; they
love her for them, and keep her advantages to themselves, for in the
whole list of graduates for this year I could find only two Irish names.

Here, at the Alumni Celebration, a procession was marshaled in the
library in which the order was by classes; the oldest class of which
there were living members being called the first. “Class of 1797!” and
two old white-haired gentlemen tottered from the crowd, and started on
their march down the central aisle, and out bareheaded into the blaze of
one of the hottest days that America had ever known. “Class of 1800!”
missing two years, in which all the graduates were dead; and out came
one, the sole survivor. Then came “1803,” and so on, to the stalwart
company of the present year. When the classes of 1859 and 1860, and of
the war-years were called, those who marched out showed many an empty
sleeve.

The present triennial celebration is noteworthy not only for the efforts
of the university reformers, but also for the foundation of the Memorial
Hall, dedicated as a monument to those sons of Harvard who fell while
serving their country in the suppression of the late rebellion. The
purity of their patriotism hardly needed illustration by the fire of
young Everett, or the graceful speech of Dr. Holmes. Even the splendid
oratory of Governor Bullock could do little more than force us to read
for ourselves the Roll of Honor, and see how many of Harvard‘s most
distinguished younger men died for their country as privates of
Massachusetts Volunteers.

There was a time, as England knows, when the thinking men of Boston, and
the Cambridge professors, Emerson, Russell Lowell, Asa Gray, and a dozen
more of almost equal fame, morally seceded from their country‘s
councils, and were followed in their secession by the younger men. “The
best men in America stand aloof from politics,” it was said.

The country from which these men seceded was not the America of to-day:
it was the Union which South Carolina ruled. From it the Cambridge
professors “came out,” not because they feared to vex their nerves with
the shock of public argument and action, but because the course of the
slaveholders was not their course. Hating the wrongs they saw but could
not remedy, they separated themselves from the wrong-doers; another
matter, this, from the “hating hatred” of our culture class in England.

In 1863 and 1864 there came the reckoning. When America was first
brought to see the things that had been done in her name, and at her
cost, and, rising in her hitherto unknown strength, struck the noblest
blow for freedom that the world has seen, the men who had been urging on
the movement from without at once re-entered the national ranks, and
marched to victory. Of the men who sat beneath Longfellow, and Agassiz,
and Emerson, whole battalions went forth to war. From Oberlin almost
every male student and professor marched, and the university teaching
was left in the women‘s hands. Out of 8000 school-teachers in
Pennsylvania, of whom 300 alone were drafted, 3000 volunteered for the
war. Everywhere the teachers and their students were foremost among the
Volunteers, and from that time forward America and her thinkers were at
one.

The fierce passions of this day of wakening have not been suffered to
disturb the quiet of the academic town. Our English universities have
not about them the classic repose, the air of study, that belong to
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Those who have seen the lanes of Leyden, and
compared them with the noisy Oxford High Street, will understand what I
mean when I say that our Cambridge comes nearest to her daughter-town;
but even the English Cambridge has a bustling street or two, and a
weekly market-day, while Cambridge in New England is one great academic
grove, buried in a philosophic calm which our university towns can never
rival so long as men resort to them for other purposes than work.

It is not only in the Harvard precincts that the oldness of New England
is to be remarked. Although her people are everywhere in the vanguard of
all progress, their country has a look of gable-ends and steeple-hats,
while their laws seem fresh from the hands of Alfred. In all England
there is no city which has suburbs so gray and venerable as are the
elm-shaded towns round Boston: Dorchester, Chelsea, Nahant, and Salem,
each seems more ancient than its fellow; the people speak the English of
Elizabeth, and joke about us, ”---- speaks good English for an
Englishman.”

In the country districts, the winsome villages that nestle in the dells
seem to have been there for ten centuries at least; and it gives one a
shock to light on such a spot as Bloody Brook, and to be told that only
one hundred and ninety years ago Captain Lathrop was slain there by Red
Indians, with eighty youths, “the flower of Essex County,” as the
Puritan history says.

The warnings of Dr. Hedges, in reference to the strides of Michigan,
have taken the New Englanders by surprise. Secure, as they believed, in
their intellectual supremacy, they forgot that in a Federal Union the
moral and physical primacy will generally both reside in the same State.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, at one time the foremost upholder of
the doctrine of State rights, will soon be seen once more acting as its
champion--this time on behalf of herself and her five sister States.

Were the six New England Commonwealths grouped together in a single
State, it would still have only three-fourths of the population of New
York, and about an equal number of inhabitants with Pennsylvania. The
State of Rhode Island is one-fourth the size of many a single
Californian county. Such facts as these will not be long lost sight of
in the West, and when a divergence of interests springs up, Ohio will
not suffer her voice in the Senate to continue to be neutralized by that
of Connecticut or Rhode Island. Even if the Senate be allowed to remain
untouched, it is certain that the redistribution of seats consequent
upon the census of 1870 will completely transfer political power to the
central States. That New England will by this change inevitably lose her
hold upon the destinies of the whole Union is not so clear. The
influence for good of New England upon the West has been chiefly
seminal; but not for that the less enormous. Go into a State such as
Michigan, where half the people are immigrants--where, of the remaining
moiety, the greater part are born Westerners, and apparently in no way
of New England--and you will find that the inhabitants are for the most
part earnest, God-fearing men, with a New England tone of profound
manliness and conviction running through everything they say and do. The
colleges in which they have been reared are directed, you will find, by
New England professors, men trained in the classic schools of Harvard,
Yale, or Amherst; the ministers under whom they sit are, for the most
part, Boston men; the books they read are of New England, or old English
of the class from which the writers of the Puritan States themselves
have drawn their inspiration. To New England is chiefly due, in short,
the making of America a godly nation.

It is something in this age to come across a people who believe strongly
in anything, and consistently act upon their beliefs: the New Englanders
are such a race. Thoroughly God-fearing States are not so common that
we can afford to despise them when found; and nowhere does religion
enter more into daily life than in Vermont or Massachusetts.

The States of the Union owe so huge a debt of gratitude to New England,
that on this score alone they may refrain from touching her with
sacrilegious hands. Not to name her previous sacrifices, the single
little State of Massachusetts--one-fourth the size of Scotland, and but
half as populous as Paris--sent during the rebellion a hundred and fifty
regiments to the field.

It was to Boston that Lincoln telegraphed when, in 1861, at a minute‘s
notice, he needed men for the defense of Washington. So entirely were
Southerners of the opinion that the New Englanders were the true
supporters of the old flag, that “Yankee” became a general term for
loyalists of any State. America can never forget the steady heroism of
New England during the great struggle for national existence.

The unity that has been the chief cause of the strength of the New
England influence is in some measure sprung from the fact that these six
States are completely shut off from all America by the single State of
New York, alien from them in political and moral life. Every Yankee
feels his country bounded by the British, the Irish, and the sea.

In addition to the homogeneousness of isolation, the New Englanders,
like the Northern Scotch, have the advantages of a bad climate and a
miserable soil. These have been the true agents in the development of
the energy, the skill, and fortitude of the Yankee people. In the war,
for instance, it was plain that the children of the poor and rugged
Northeastern States were not the men to be beaten by the lotus-eaters
of Louisiana when they were doing battle for what they believed to be a
righteous cause.

One effect of the poverty of soil with which New England is afflicted
has been that her sons have wandered from end to end of the known world,
engaging in every trade, and succeeding in all. Sometimes there is in
their migrations a religious side. Mormonism, although it now draws its
forces from Great Britain, was founded in New England. At Brindisi, on
my way home, I met three Yankees returning from a Maine colony lately
founded at Jaffa, in expectation of the fulfillment of prophecy, and
destruction of the Mohammedan rule. For the moment they are intriguing
for a firman from the very government upon the coming fall of which all
their expectations have been based; and these fierce fanatics are making
money by managing a hotel. One of them told me that the Jaffa colony is
a “religio-commercial speculation.”

New England Yankees are not always so filled with the Puritan spirit as
to reject unlawful means of money-making. Even the Massachusetts common
schools and prim Connecticut meeting-houses turn out their black sheep
into the world. At Center Harbor, in New Hampshire, I met with an
example of the “Yankee spawn” in a Maine man--a shrewd, sailor-looking
fellow. He was sitting next me at the ordinary, and asked me to take a
glass of his champagne. I declined, but chatted, and let out that I was
a Britisher.

“I was subject to your government once for sixteen months,” my neighbor
said.

“Really! Where?”

“Sierra Leone. I was a prisoner there. And very lucky, too.”

“Why so?” I asked.

“Because, if the American government had caught me, they would have
hanged me for a pirate. But _I wasn‘t a pirate_.”

With over-great energy I struck in, “Of course not.”

_My Neighbor.--“No; I was a slaver.”_

       *       *       *       *       *

Idling among the hills of New Hampshire and the lakes of Maine, it is
impossible for a stranger, starting free from prejudice, not to end by
loving the pious people of New England, for he will see that there could
be no severer blow to the cause of freedom throughout the world than the
loss by them of an influence upon American life and thought, which has
been one of unmixed good. Still, New England is not America.




CHAPTER VI.

CANADA.


There is not in the world a nobler outlook than that from off the
terrace at Quebec. You stand upon a rock overhanging city and river, and
look down upon the guardship‘s masts. Acre upon acre of timber comes
floating down the stream above the city, the Canadian songs just
reaching you upon the heights; and beneath you are fleets of great
ships, English, German, French, and Dutch, embarking the timber from the
floating-docks. The Stars and Stripes are nowhere to be seen. Such are
the distances in North America, that here, farther from the sea than is
any city in Europe west of Moscow, we have a seaport town, with
gunboats and three-decker; morning and evening guns, and bars of “God
save the Queen,” to mark the opening and closing of the port.

The St. Lawrence runs in a chasm in a flat table-land, through which
some earlier Niagara seems to have cut for it a way. Some of the
tributaries are in sight, all falling from a cliff into the deep still
river. In the distance, seaward, a silver ribbon on the rock represents
the grand falls of Montmorenci. Long villages of white tiny cots
straggle along the roads that radiate from the city; the great black
cross of the French parish church showing reverently from all.

On the north, the eye reaches to the rugged outlines of the Laurentian
range, composed of the oldest mountains in the world, at the foot of
which is Lake St. Charles, full of fiord-like northern beauty, where at
a later time I learnt to paddle the Indian canoe of birch bark.

Leaving the citadel, we are at once in the European middle ages. Gates
and posterns, cranky steps that lead up to lofty gabled houses, with
sharp French roofs of burnished tin, like those of Liege; processions of
the Host; altars decked with flowers; statues of the Virgin; sabots;
blouses; and the scarlet of the British linesman,--all these are seen in
narrow streets and markets, that are graced with many a Cotentin lace
cap, and all within forty miles of the down-east Yankee State of Maine.
It is not far from New England to old France.

Quebec Lower Town is very like St. Peter Port in Guernsey. Norman-French
inhabitants, guarded by British troops, step-built streets, thronged
fruit-market, and citadel upon a rock, frowning down upon the quays,
are alike in each. A slight knowledge of the Upper Normandy patois is
not without its use; it procured me an offer of a pinch of snuff from an
old _habitante_ on board one of the river boats. Her gesture was worthy
of the _ancien regime_.

There has been no dying-out of the race among the French Canadians. They
number twenty times the thousands that they did a hundred years ago. The
American soil has left their physical type, religion, language, laws,
and habits absolutely untouched. They herd together in their rambling
villages, dance to the fiddle, after mass on Sundays, as gayly as once
did their Norman sires, and keep up the fleur-de-lys and the memory of
Montcalm. More French than the French are the Lower Canadian
_habitants_.

Not only here, but everywhere, a French “dependency” is France
transported; not a double of the France of to-day, but a mummy of the
France of the time of the “colony‘s” foundation. In Säigon, you find
Imperial France; here the France of Louis Quatorze. The Englishman
founds everywhere a New England--new in thought as in soil; the
Frenchman carries with him to California, to Japan, an undying
recollection of the Palais Royal. In San Francisco there lives a great
French capitalist, who, since 1849, has been the originator of every
successful Californian speculation. He cannot speak a word of English,
and his greatest pleasure, in a country of fruits and wine, is to bid
his old French servant assure him, upon honor, that his whole dessert,
from his claret to his olives, has been brought for him from France.
There is much in the colonizing instinct of our race, but something,
perhaps, in the consideration that the English are hardly happy enough
at home to be always looking back to what they have left in the old
country.

There is about this old France something of Dutch sleepiness and
content. There is, indeed, some bustle in the market-place, where the
grand old dames, in snowy caps, sit selling plums and pears; there is
much singing made over the lading of the timber-ships; there are rafts
in hundreds gliding down the river; old French carts in dozens, creaking
and wheezing on their lumbering way to town, with much clacking of whips
and clappering of wooden shoes. All these things there are, but then
there are these and more in Dol, and Quimper, and Morlaix--in all those
towns which in Europe come nearest to old France. There is quiet bustle,
subdued trade, prosperity deep, not noisy; but the life is sleepy; the
rafts float, and are not tugged nor rowed; the old Norman horses seem to
draw the still older carts without an effort, and the very boys wear
noisy shoes against their will, and make a clatter simply because they
cannot help it.

In such a scene it is impossible to forget that British troops are here
employed as guardians of the only true French colony in the world
against the inroads of the English race. “Nos institutions, notre
langue, nos lois,” is the motto of the _habitants_. Their newspapers are
filled with church celebrations, village fêtes, speeches of “M. le Curé”
at the harvest-home, announcements by the “scherif,” speech of M.
Cartier at the consecration of Monseigneur Laroque, blessings of bells,
of ships; but of life, nothing--of mention of what is passing in
America, not a word. One corner is given to the world outside America:
“Emprunt Pontifical, Emission Américaine, quatre millions de piastres,”
heads a solid column of holy finance. The pulse-beat of the continent
finds no echo here.

It is not only in political affairs that there is a want of energy in
French or Lower Canada; in journeying from Portland to Quebec, the
moment the frontier was passed, we seemed to have come from a land of
life to one of death. No more bustling villages, no more keen-eyed
farmers: a fog of unenterprise hung over the land; roads were wanting,
houses rude, swamps undrained, fields unweeded, plains untilled.

If the Eastern Townships and country round Quebec are a wilderness, they
are not a desert. The country on the Saguenay is both. At Quebec in
summer it is hot--mosquitoes are not unknown: even at Tadousac, where
the Saguenay flows into the St. Lawrence, there is sunlight as strong as
that of Paris. Once in the northern river, all is cold, gloomy,
arctic--no house, no boat, no sign of man‘s existence, no beasts, no
birds, although the St. Lawrence swarms with duck and loons. The river
is a straight, cold, black fiord, walled in by tremendous cliffs, which
go sheer down into depths to which their height above water is as
nothing; two walls of rock, and a path of ice-cold, inky water. Fish
there are, seal and salmon--that is all. The “whales and porpoises,”
which are advertised by the Tadousac folks as certain to “disport
themselves daily in front of the hotel,” are never to be seen in this
earth-crack of the Saguenay.

The cold, for summer, was intense; nowhere in the world does the limit
of ever-frozen ground come so far south as in the longitude of the
Saguenay. At night we had a wonderful display of northern lights. A
white column, towering to the mid-skies, rose, died away, and was
succeeded by broad white clouds, stretching from east to west, and
sending streamers northward. Suddenly there shot up three fresh silvery
columns in the north, northwest, and northeast, on which all the colors
of the rainbow danced and played. After moonrise, the whole seemed
gradually to fade away.

At Ha Ha Bay, the head of navigation, I found a fur-buying station of
the Hudson‘s Bay Company; but that association has enough to answer for
without being charged with the desolation of the Saguenay. The company
has not here, as upon the Red River, sacrificed colonists to minks and
silver-foxes. There is something more blighting than a monopoly that
oppresses Lower Canada. As I returned to Quebec, the boat that I was
aboard touched at St. Paschal, now called Rivière du Loup, the St.
Lawrence terminus of the Grand Trunk line: we found there immense
wharves, and plenty of bells and crosses, but not a single ship, great
or small. Even in Virginia I had seen nothing more disheartening.

North of the St. Lawrence religion is made to play as active a part in
politics as in the landscape. Lower Canada, as we have seen, is French
and Catholic; Upper Canada is Scotch and Presbyterian, though the
Episcopalians are strong in wealth and the Irish Catholics in numbers.

Had the Catholics been united, they might, since the fusion of the two
Canadas, have governed the whole country: as it is, the Irish and French
neither worship nor vote together, and of late the Scotch have had
nearly their own way.

Finding themselves steadily losing ground, the French threw in their lot
with the scheme for the confederation of the provinces, and their clergy
took up the cause with a zeal which they justified to their flocks by
pointing out that the alternative was annexation to America, and
possible confiscation of the church lands.

Confederation of the provinces means separation of the Canadas, which
regain each its Parliament; and the French Catholics begin to hope that
the Irish of Upper Canada, now that they are less completely overshaded
by the more numerous French, will again act with their co-religionists:
the Catholic vote in the new confederation will be nearly half the
whole. In Toronto, however, the Fenians are strong, and even in Montreal
their presence is not unknown: it is a question whether the whole of the
Canadian Irish are not disaffected. The Irish of the chief city have
their Irish priests, their cathedral of St. Patrick, while the French
have theirs upon the Place d‘Armes. The want of union may save the
dominion from the establishment of Catholicism as a State Church.

The confederation of our provinces was necessary, if British North
America was to have a chance for life; but it cannot be said to be
accomplished while British Columbia and the Red River tract are not
included. To give Canada an outlet on one side is something, but
communication with the Atlantic is a small matter by the side of
communication at once with Atlantic and Pacific through British
territory. We shall soon have railways from Halifax to Lake Superior,
and thence to the Pacific is but 1600 miles. It is true that the line is
far north, and exposed to heavy snows and bitter cold; but, on the other
hand, it is well supplied with wood, and if it possess no such fertile
tracts as that of Kansas and Colorado, it at least escapes the frightful
wilds of Bitter Creek and Mirage Plains.

We are now even left in doubt how long we shall continue to possess so
much as a route across the continent on paper. Since the cession of
Russian America to the United States, a map of North America has been
published in which the name of the Great Republic sprawls across the
continent from Behring‘s Straits to Mexico, with the “E” in “United”
ominously near Vancouver‘s Island, and the “T” actually planted upon
British territory. If we take up the _British Columbian_, we find the
citizens of the mainland portion of the province proposing to sell the
island for twenty million dollars to the States.

Settled chiefly by Americans from Oregon and California, and situated,
for purposes of reinforcement, immigration, and supply, at a distance of
not less than twenty thousand miles from home, the British Pacific
colonies can hardly be considered strong in their allegiance to the
crown: we have here the _reductio ad absurdum_ of home government.

Our hindering trade, by tolerating the presence of two sets of
custom-houses and two sets of coins between Halifax and Lake Superior,
was less absurd than our altogether preventing its extension now. Under
a so-called confederation of our American possessions, we have left a
country the size of civilized Europe, and nearly as large as the United
States--lying too, upon the track of commerce and highroad to China--to
be despotically governed by a company of traders in skins and peltries,
and to remain as long as it so pleases them in the dead stillness and
desertion needed to insure the presence of fur-bearing beasts.

“Red River” should be a second Minnesota, Halifax a second Liverpool,
Esquimault a second San Francisco; but double government has done its
work, and the outposts of the line of trade are already in American, not
British hands. The gold mines of Nova Scotia, the coal mines and forests
of British Columbia, are owned in New England and New York, and the
Californians are expecting the proclamation of an American territorial
government in the capital of Vancouver‘s Island.

As Montana becomes peopled up, we shall hear of the “colonization” of
Red River by citizens of the United States, such as preceded the
hoisting of the “lone star” in Texas, and the “bear flag” in California,
by Fremont; and resistance by the Hudson‘s Bay Company will neither be
possible, nor, in the interests of civilization, desirable.

Even supposing a great popular awakening upon colonial questions, and
the destruction of the Hudson‘s Bay monopoly, we never could make the
Canadian dominion strong. With the addition of Columbia and Red River,
British America would hardly be as powerful or populous as the two
Northwestern States of Ohio and Illinois, or the single State of New
York--one out of forty-five. “Help us for ten years, and then we‘ll help
ourselves,” the Canadians say; “help us to become ten millions, and then
we will stand alone;” but this becoming ten millions is not such an easy
thing.

The ideas of most of us as to the size of the British territories are
derived from maps of North America, made upon Mercator‘s projection,
which are grossly out in high latitudes, though correct at the equator.
The Canadas are made to appear at least twice their proper size, and
such gigantic proportions are given to the northern parts of the Hudson
territory that we are tempted to believe that in a country so vast there
must be some little value. The true size is no more shown upon the map
than is the nine-months’ winter.

To Upper Canada, which is no bad country, it is not for lack of asking
that population fails to come. Admirably executed gazettes give the
fullest information about the British possessions in the most glowing of
terms; offices and agencies are established in Liverpool, London, Cork,
Londonderry, and a dozen other cities; government immigration agents and
information offices are to be found in every town in Canada; the
government immigrant is looked after in health, comfort, and religion;
directions of the fullest kind are given him in the matters of money,
clothes, tools, luggage; Canada, he is told by the government papers,
possesses perfect religious, political, and social freedom; British
subjects step at once into the possession of political rights; the
winter is but bracing, the climate the healthiest in the world. Millions
of acres of surveyed crown lands are continually in the market. To one
who knows what the northern forests are there is perhaps something of
satire in the statement that “there is generally on crown lands an
unlimited supply of the best fuel.” What of that, however? The intending
immigrant knows nothing of the struggle with the woods, and fuel is fuel
in Old England. The mining of the precious metals, the fisheries,
petroleum, all are open to the settler--let him but come. Reading these
documents, we can only rub our eyes, and wonder how it is that human
selfishness allows the Canadian officials to disclose the wonders of
their El Dorado to the outer world, and invite all men to share
blessings which we should have expected them to keep as a close preserve
for themselves and their nearest and dearest friends. Taxation in the
States, the immigrants are told, is five and a half times what it is in
Canada, two and a half times the English rate. Laborers by the thousand,
merchants and farmers by the score, are said to be flocking into Canada
to avoid the taxation of the Radicals. The average duration of life in
Canada is 37 per cent. higher than in the States. Yet, in the face of
all these facts, only twenty or two and twenty thousand immigrants come
to Canada for three hundred thousand that flock annually to the States,
and of the former many thousands do but pass through on their way to the
Great West. Of the twenty thousand who land at Quebec in each year, but
four and a half thousand remain a year in Canada; and there are a
quarter of a million of persons born in British America now naturalized
in the United States.

The passage of the immigrants to the Western States is not for want of
warning. The Canadian government advertise every Coloradan duel, every
lynching in Montana, every Opposition speech in Kansas, by way of
teaching the immigrants to respect the country of which they are about
to become free citizens.

It is an unfortunate fact, that these strange statements are not
harmless--not harmless to Canada, I mean. The Provincial government by
these publications seems to confess to the world that Canada can live
only by running down the great republic. Canadian sympathy for the
rebellion tends to make us think that these northern statesmen must not
only share in our old-world confusion of the notions of right and wrong,
but must be sadly short-sighted into the bargain. It is only by their
position that they are blinded, for few countries have abler men than
Sir James Macdonald, or sounder statesmen than Cartier or Galt; but,
like men standing on the edge of a cliff, Canadian statesmen are always
wanting to jump off. Had Great Britain left them to their own devices,
we should have had war with America in the spring of 1866.

The position of Canada is in many ways anomalous: of the two chief
sections of our race--that in Britain and that in America--the latter is
again split in twain, and one division governed from across the
Atlantic. For such government there is no pretext, except the wishes of
the governed, who gain by the connection men for their defense, and the
opportunity of gratifying their spite for their neighbors at our
expense. Those who ask why a connection so one-sided, so opposed to the
best interests of our race, should be suffered to continue, are
answered, now that the argument of “prestige” is given up, that the
Canadians are loyal, and that they hate the Americans, to whom, were it
not for us, they must inevitably fall. That the Canadians hate the
Americans can be no reason why we should spend blood and treasure in
protecting them against the consequences of their hate. The world should
have passed the time when local dislikes can be suffered to affect our
policy toward the other sections of our race; but even were it
otherwise, it is hard to see how twelve thousand British troops, or a
royal standard hoisted at Ottawa, can protect a frontier of two thousand
miles in length from a nation of five and thirty millions. Canada,
perhaps, can defend herself, but we most certainly cannot defend her; we
provoke much more than we assist.

As for Canadian “loyalty,” it appears to consist merely of hatred toward
America, for while we were fighting China and conquering Japan, that we
might spread free trade, our loyal colonists of Canada set upon our
goods protective duties of 20 per cent, which they have now in some
degree removed, only that they may get into their hands the smuggling
trade carried on in breach of the laws of our ally, their neighbor. We
might, at least, fairly insist that the connection should cease, unless
Canada will entirely remove her duties.

At bottom, it would seem as though no one gained by the retention of our
hold on Canada. Were she independent, her borders would never again be
wasted by Fenian hordes, and she would escape the terrible danger of
being the battle-field in which European quarrels are fought out. Canada
once republican, the Monroe doctrine would be satisfied, and its most
violent partisans would cease to advocate the adoption of other than
moral means to merge her territories in the Union. An independent Canada
would not long delay the railway across the continent to Puget Sound,
which a British bureau calls impossible. England would be relieved from
the fear of a certain defeat by America in the event of war--a fear
always harmful, even when war seems most unlikely; relieved, too, from
the cost of such panics as those of 1861 and 1866.

Did Canada stand alone, no offense that she could give America would be
likely to unite all sections of that country in an attempt to conquer
her; while, on the other hand, such an attempt would be resisted to the
death by an armed and brave people, four millions strong. As it is, any
offense toward America committed by our agents, at any place or time, or
arising out of the continual changes of policy and of ministry in Great
Britain, united to the standing offense of maintaining the monarchical
principle in North America, will bring upon unhappy Canada the whole
American nation, indignant in some cause, just, or seeming just, and to
be met by a people deceived into putting their trust in a few regiments
of British troops, sufficient at the most to hold Quebec, and to be
backed by reinforcements which could never come in time, did public
opinion in Great Britain so much as permit their sailing. In all history
there is nothing stranger than the narrowness of mind that has led us to
see in Canada a piece of England, and in America a hostile country.
There are more sons of British subjects in America than in Canada, by
far; and the American looks upon the old country with a pride that
cannot be shared by a man who looks to her to pay his soldiers.

The independence of Canada would put an immediate end to much of the
American jealousy of Great Britain--a consideration which of itself
should outweigh any claim to protection which the Canadians can have on
us. The position which we have to set before us in our external dealings
is, that we are no more fellow-countrymen of the Canadians than of the
Americans of the North or West.

The capital of the new dominion is to be Ottawa, known as “Hole in the
Woods” among the friends of Toronto and Montreal, and once called
Bytown. It consists of the huge Parliament-house, the government
printing-office, some houseless wildernesses meant for streets, and the
hotel where the members of the legislature “board.” Such was the
senatorial throng at the moment of my visit, that we were thrust into a
detached building made of half-inch planks, with wide openings between
the boards; and as the French Canadian members were excited about the
resignation of Mr. Galt, indescribable chattering and bawling filled the
house.

The view from the Parliament-house is even more thoroughly Canadian than
that from the terrace at Quebec--a view of a land of rapids, of pine
forests, and of lumberers’ homes, full of character, but somewhat bleak
and dreary; even on the hottest summer‘s day, it tells of winter storms
past and to come. On the far left are the island-filled reaches of the
Upper Ottawa; nearer, the roaring Chaudière Falls, a mile across--a mile
of walls of water, of sudden shoots, of jets, of spray. From the
“caldron” itself, into which we can hardly see, rises a column of
rainbow-tinted mist, backed by distant ranges and black woods, now fast
falling before the settler‘s axe. Below you is the river, swift, and
covered with cream-like foam; on the right, a gorge--the mouth of the
Rideau Canal.

When surveyed from the fittest points, the Chaudière is but little
behind Niagara; but it may be doubted whether in any fall there is that
which can be called sublimity. Natural causes are too evident; water,
rushing to find its level, falls from a ledge of rock. How different
from a storm upon the coast, or from a September sunset, where the
natural causes are so remote that you can bring yourself almost to see
the immediate hand of God! It is excusable in Americans, who have no
sea-coast worthy of the name, to talk of Niagara as the perfection of
the sublime; but it is strange that a people who have Birling Gap and
Bantry Bay should allow themselves to be led by such a cry.

Niagara has one beauty in which it is unapproached by the great
Chaudière: the awesome slowness with which the deep-green flood, in the
center of the Horseshoe Fall, rolls rather than plunges into the gulf.




CHAPTER VII.

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN.


From the gloom of Buffalo, the smoke of Cincinnati, and the dirt of
Pittsburg, I should have been glad to escape as soon as might be, even
had not the death from cholera of 240 persons in a single day of my
visit to the “Queen City” warned me to fly north. From a stricken town,
with its gutters full of chloride of lime, and fires burning in the
public streets, to green Michigan, was a grateful change; but I was full
of sorrow at leaving that richest and most lovely of all States--Ohio.
There is a charm in the park-like beauty of the Monongahela valley,
dotted with vines and orchards, that nothing in Eastern America can
rival. The absence at once of stumps in the cornfields, and of untilled
or unfenced land, gives the “Buckeye State” a look of age that none of
the “old Eastern States” can show. In corn, in meadow, in timber-land,
Ohio stands alone. Her indian-corn exceeds in richness that of any other
State; she has ample stores of iron, and coal is worked upon the surface
in every Alleghany valley. Wool, wine, hops, tobacco, all are raised;
her Catawba has inspired poems. Every river-side is clothed with groves
of oak, of hickory, of sugar-maple, of sycamore, of poplar, and of
buckeye. Yet, as I said, the change to the Michigan prairie was full of
a delightful relief; it was Holland after the Rhine, London after Paris.

Where men grow tall there will maize grow tall, is a good sound rule:
limestone makes both bone and straw. The Northwestern States, inhabited
by giant men, are the chosen home of the most useful and beautiful of
plants, the maize--in America called “corn.” For hundreds of miles the
railway track, protected not even by a fence or hedge, runs through the
towering plants, which hide all prospects save that of their own green
pyramids. Maize feeds the people, it feeds the cattle and the hogs that
they export to feed the cities of the East; from it is made yearly, as
an Ohio farmer told me, “whisky enough to float the ark.” Rice is not
more the support of the Chinese than maize of the English in America.

In the great corn-field of the Northwestern States, dwells a people
without a history, without tradition, busy at hewing out of the forest
trunks codes and social usages of its own. The Kansas men have set
themselves to emancipating women; the “Wolverines,” as the people of
Michigan are called, have turned their heads to education, and are
teaching the teachers upon this point.

The rapidity with which intellectual activity is awakened in the West is
inexplicable to the people of New England. While you are admiring the
laws of Minnesota and Wisconsin, Boston men tell you that the
resemblance of the code of Kansas to that of Connecticut is consequent
only on the fact, that the framers of the former possessed a copy of
this one New England code, while they had never set eyes upon the code
of any other country in the world. While Yale and Harvard are trying in
vain to keep pace with the State universities of Michigan and Kansas,
you will meet in Lowell and New Haven men who apply an old Russian story
to the Western colleges, and tell you that their professors of
languages, when asked where they have studied, reply that they guess
they learned to read and write in Springfield.

One of the difficulties of the New England colleges has been to
reconcile university traditions with democracy; but in the Western
States there is neither reconciliation nor tradition, though
universities are plenty. Probably the most democratic school in the
whole world is the State University of Michigan, situate at Ann Arbor,
near Detroit. It is cheap, large, practical; twelve hundred students,
paying only the ten dollars entrance fee, and five dollars a year during
residence, and living where they can in the little town, attend the
university to be prepared to enter with knowledge and resolution upon
the affairs of their future life. A few only are educated by having
their minds unfolded that they may become many-sided men; but all work
with spirit, and with that earnestness which is seen in the Scotch
universities at home. The war with crime, the war with sin, the war with
death--Law, Theology, Medicine--these are the three foremost of man‘s
employments; to these, accordingly, the university affords her chiefest
care, and to one of these the student, his entrance examination passed,
often gives his entire time.

These things are democratic, but it is not in them that the essential
democracy of the university is to be seen. There are at Michigan no
honor-lists, no classes in our sense, no orders of merit, no
competition. A man takes, or does not take a certain degree. The
university is governed, not by its members, not by its professors, but
by a parliament of “regents” appointed by the inhabitants of the State.
Such are the two great principles of the democratic university of the
West.

It might be supposed that these two strange departures from the systems
of older universities were irregularities, introduced to meet the
temporary embarrassments incidental to educational establishments in
young States. So far is this from being the case that, as I saw at
Cambridge, the clearest-sighted men of the older colleges of America are
trying to assimilate their teaching system to that of Michigan--at least
in the one point of the absence of competition. They assert that toil
performed under the excitement of a fierce struggle between man and man
is unhealthy work, different in nature and in results from the loving
labor of men whose hearts are really in what they do: toil, in short,
not very easily distinguishable from slave labor.

In the matter of the absence of competition, Michigan is probably but
returning to the system of the European universities of the Middle Ages,
but the government by other than the members of the university is a
still stranger scheme. It is explained when we look to the sources
whence the funds of the university are drawn--namely, from the pockets
of the taxpayers of the State. The men who have set up this corporation
in their midst, and who tax themselves for its support, cannot be called
on, they say, to renounce its government to their nominees, professors
from New England, unconnected with the State, men of one idea, often
quarrelsome, sometimes “irreligious.” There is much truth in these
statements of the case, but it is to be hoped that the men chosen to
serve as “regents” are of a higher intellectual stamp than those
appointed to educational offices in the Canadian backwoods. A report was
put into my hands at Ottawa, in which a superintendent of instruction
writes to the Minister of Education, that he had advised the ratepayers
of Victoria County not in future to elect as school trustees men who
cannot read or write. As Michigan grows older, she will, perhaps, seek
to conform to the practice of other universities in this matter of her
government, but in the point of absence of competition she is likely to
continue firm.

Even here some difficulty is found in getting competent school
directors; one of them reported 31½ children attending school. Of
another district its superintendent reports: “Conduct of scholars about
the same as that of ‘Young America’ in general.” Some of the
superintendents aim at jocosity, and show no want of talent in
themselves, while their efforts are to demonstrate its deficiency among
the boys. The superintendent of Grattan says, in answer to some numbered
questions: “Condition good, improvement fair; for ¼ of ¼ of the year in
school, and fifteen-sixteenths of the time at play. Male teachers most
successful with the birch; female with Cupid‘s darts. Schoolhouses in
fair whittling order. _Apparatus_: Shovel, none; tongs, ditto; poker,
one. Conduct of scholars like that of parents--good, bad, and
indifferent. No minister in town--sorry; no lawyer--good!” The
superintendents of Manlius Township report that Districts 1 and 2 have
buildings “fit (in winter) only for the polar bear, walrus, reindeer,
Russian sable, or Siberian bat;” and they go on to say: “Our children
read everything, from Mr. Noodle‘s Essays on Matrimony to Artemus Ward‘s
Lecture on First Principles of American Government.” Another report from
a very new county runs: “Sunday-schools afford a little reading-matter
to the children. Character of matter most read--battle, murder, and
sudden death.” A third states that the teachers are meanly paid, and
goes on: “If the teaching is no better than the pay, it must be like the
soup that the rebels gave the prisoners.” A superintendent, reporting
that the success of the teachers is greater than their qualifications
warrant, says: “The reason is to be found in the Yankeeish adaptability
of even Wolverines.”

After all, it is hard even to pass jokes at the expense of the
Northwestern people. A population who would maintain schools and
universities under difficulties apparently overwhelming was the source
from which to draw Union volunteers such as those who, after the war,
returned to their Northern homes, I have been told, shocked and
astonished at the ignorance and debasement of the Southern whites.

The system of elective studies pursued at Michigan is one to which we
are year by year tending in the English universities. As sciences
multiply and deepen, it becomes more and more impossible that a “general
course” scheme can produce men fit to take their places in the world.
Cambridge has attempted to set up both systems, and, giving her students
the choice, bids them pursue one branch of study with a view to honors,
or take a less valued degree requiring some slight proficiency in many
things. Michigan denies that the stimulus of honor examinations should
be connected with the elective system. With her, men first graduate in
science, or in an arts degree, which bears a close resemblance to the
English “poll,” and then pursue their elected study in a course which
leads to no university distinction, which is free from the struggle for
place and honors. These objections to “honors” rest upon a more solid
foundation than a mere democratic hatred of inequality of man and man.
Repute as a writer, as a practitioner, is valued by the Ann Arbor man,
and the Wolverines do not follow the Ephesians, and tell men who excel
among them to go and excel elsewhere. The Michigan professors say, and
Dr. Hedges bears them out, that a far higher average of real knowledge
is obtained under this system of independent work than is dreamt of in
colleges where competition rules. “A higher average” is all they say,
and they acknowledge frankly that there is here and there a student to
be found to whom competition would do good. As a rule, they tell us this
is not the case. Unlimited battle between man and man for place is
sufficiently the bane of the world not to be made the curse of schools:
competition breeds every evil which it is the aim of education, the duty
of a university to suppress: pale faces caused by excessive toil,
feverish excitement that prevents true work, a hatred of the subject on
which the toil is spent, jealousy of best friends, systematic
depreciation of men‘s talents, rejection of all reading that will not
“pay,” extreme and unhealthy cultivation of the memory, general
degradation of labor--all these evils, and many more, are charged upon
the competition system. Everything that our professors have to say of
“cram” these American thinkers apply to competition. Strange doctrines
these for young America!

Of the practical turn which we should naturally expect to discover in
the university of a bran-new State I found evidence in the regulation
which prescribes that the degree of Master of Arts shall not be
conferred as a matter of course upon graduates of three years’ standing,
but only upon such as have pursued professional or general scientific
studies during that period. Even in these cases an examination before
some one of the faculties is required for the Master‘s degree. I was
told that for the medical degree “four years of reputable practice” is
received, instead of certain courses.

In her special and selected studies, Michigan is as merely practical as
Swift‘s University of Brobdingnag; but, standing far above the ordinary
arts or science courses, there is a “University course” designed for
those who have already taken the Bachelor‘s degree. It is harder to say
what this course includes than what it does not. The twenty heads range
over philology, philosophy, art, and science; there is a branch of
“criticism,” one of “arts of design,” one of “fine arts.” Astronomy,
ethics, and Oriental languages are all embraced in a scheme brought into
working order within ten years of the time when Michigan was a
wilderness, and the college-yard an Indian hunting-ground.

Michigan entered upon education work very early in her history as a
State. In 1850, her legislature commissioned the Hon. Ira Mayhew to
prepare a work on education for circulation throughout America. Her
progress has been as rapid as her start was good; her natural history
collection is already one of the most remarkable in America; her medical
school is almost unequaled, and students flow to her even from New
England and from California, while from New York she draws a hundred men
a year. In only one point is Ann Arbor anywhere but in the van: she has
hitherto followed the New England colleges in excluding women. The State
University of Kansas has not shown the same exclusiveness that has
characterized the conduct of the rulers of Michigan: women are admitted
not only to the classes, but to the professorships at Lawrence.

This Northwestern institution at Ann Arbor was not behind even Harvard
in the war: it supplied the Union army with 1000 men. The 17th Regiment
of Michigan Volunteers, mainly composed of teachers and Ann Arbor
students, has no cause to fear the rivalry of any other “record;” and
such was the effect of the war, that in 1860 there were in Michigan 2600
male to 5350 female teachers, whereas now there are but 1300 men to 7500
women.

So proud are Michigan men of their roll of honor, that they publish it
at full length in the calendar of the university. Every “class” from the
foundation of the schools shows some graduates distinguished in their
country‘s service during the suppression of the rebellion. The Hon.
Oramel Hosford, Superintendent of Public Instruction in Michigan,
reports that, owing to the presence of crowds of returned soldiers, the
schools of the State are filled almost to the limit of their capacity,
while some are compelled to close their doors against the thronging
crowds. Captains, colonels, generals, are among the students now humbly
learning in the Ann Arbor University Schools.

The State of Michigan is peculiar in the form that she has given to her
higher teaching; but in no way peculiar in the attention she bestows on
education. Teaching, high and low, is a passion in the West, and each of
these young States has established a university of the highest order,
and placed in every township not only schools, but public libraries,
supported from the rates, and managed by the people.

Not only have the appropriations for educational purposes by each State
been large, but those of the Federal government have been upon the most
splendid scale. What has been done in the Eastern and the Central States
no man can tell, but even west of the Mississippi twenty-two million
acres have already been granted for such purposes, while fifty-six
million more are set aside for similar gifts.

The Americans are not forgetful of their Puritan traditions.




CHAPTER VIII.

THE PACIFIC RAILROAD.


When the companions of the explorer Cartier found that the rapids at
Montreal were not the end of all navigation, as they had feared, but
that above them there commenced a second and boundless reach of deep,
still waters, they fancied they had found the long-looked-for route to
China, and cried, “La Chine!” So the story goes, and the name has stuck
to the place.

[Illustration]

Up to 1861, the Canadians remained in the belief that they were at least
the potential possessors of the only possible road for the China
trade of the future, for in that year a Canadian government paper
declared that the Rocky Mountains, south of British territory, were
impassable for railroads. Maps showed that from St. Louis to San
Francisco the distance was twice that from the head of navigation on
Lake Superior to the British Pacific ports.

America has gone through a five years’ agony since that time; but now,
in the first days of peace, we find that the American Pacific Railroad,
growing at the average rate of two miles a day at one end, and one mile
a day at the other, will stretch from sea to sea in 1869 or 1870, while
the British line remains a dream.

Not only have the Rocky Mountains turned out to be passable, but the
engineers have found themselves compelled to decide on the conflicting
claims of passes without number. Wall-like and frowning as the Rocky
Mountains are when seen from the plains, the rolling gaps are many, and
they are easier crossed by railway lines than the less lofty chains of
Europe. From the heat of the country, the snow-line lies high; the
chosen pass is in the latitude of Constantinople or Oporto. The dryness
of the air of the center of a vast continent prevents the fall of heavy
snows or rains in winter. At eight or nine thousand feet above the sea,
in the Black Hills, or Eastern Piedmont, the drivers on the Pacific line
will have slighter snow-drifts to encounter than their brothers on the
Grand Trunk or the Camden and Amboy at the sea-level. On the other hand,
fuel and water are scarce, and there is an endless succession of smaller
snowy chains which have to be crossed, upon the Grand Plateau or basin
of the Great Salt Lake. Whatever the difficulties, in 1870 the line will
be an accomplished fact.

In the act creating the Pacific Railroad Company, passed in 1862, the
company were bound to complete their line at the rate of a hundred miles
a year. They are completing it at more than three times that rate.

When the act is examined, it ceases to be strange that the road should
be pushed with extraordinary energy and speed, so numerous are the baits
offered to the companies to hasten its completion. Money is to be
advanced them; land is to be given them for every mile they finish--on a
generous scale while the line is on the plains, on three times the scale
when it reaches the most rugged tracts. These grants alone are estimated
at twenty millions of acres. Besides the alternate sections, a width of
four hundred feet, with additional room for works and stations, is
granted for the line. The California Company is tempted by similar
offers to a race with the Union Pacific, and each company is struggling
to lay the most miles and get the most land upon the great basin. It is
the interest of the Eastern Company that the junction should be as far
as possible to the west; of the Western, that it should be as far as
possible to the east. The result is an average laying of three, and an
occasional construction of four, miles a day. If we look to the progress
at both ends, we find as much sometimes laid in a day as a bullock train
could travel. So fast do the headquarters “cities” keep moving forward,
that at the Californian end the superintendent wished me to believe that
whenever his chickens heard a wagon pass, they threw themselves upon
their backs, and held up their legs, that they might be tied and thrown
into the cart for a fresh move. “They are true birds of passage,” he
said.

When the iron trains are at the front, the laying will for a short time
proceed at the rate of nine yards in every fifteen seconds; but three or
four hundred tons of rails have to be brought up every day upon the
single track, and it is in this that the time is lost.

The advance carriages of the construction train are well supplied with
rifles hung from the roofs; but even when the Indians forget their
amaze, and attack the “city upon wheels,” or tear up the track, they are
incapable of destroying the line so fast as the machinery can lay it
down. “Soon,” as a Denver paper said, during my stay in the Mountain
City, “the iron horse will sniff the Alpine breeze upon the summit of
the Black Hills 9000 feet above the sea;” and upon the plateau, where
deer are scarce and buffalo unknown, the Indians have all but
disappeared. The worst Indian country is already crossed, and the red
men have sullenly followed the buffalo to the south, and occupy the
country between Kansas State and Denver, contenting themselves with
preventing the construction of the Santa Fé and Denver routes to
California. Both for the end in view, and the energy with which it is
pursued, the Pacific Railroad will stand first among the achievements of
our times.

If the end to be kept in view in the construction of the first Pacific
Railroad line were merely the traffic from China and Japan to Europe, or
the shortest route from San Francisco to Hampton Roads, the Kansas route
through St. Louis, Denver, and the Berthoud Pass would be, perhaps, the
best and shortest of those within the United States; but the
Saskatchewan line through British territory, with Halifax and Puget
Sound for ports, would be still more advantageous. As it is, the true
question seems to be, not the trade between the Pacific and Great
Britain, but between Asia and America, for Pennsylvania and Ohio must be
the manufacturing countries of the next fifty years.

Whatever our theory, the fact is plain enough: in 1870 we shall reach
San Francisco from London in less time than by the severest traveling I
can reach it from Denver in 1866.

Wherever, in the States, Forth and South have met in conflict, North has
won. New York has beaten Norfolk; Chicago, in spite of its inferior
situation, has beaten the older St. Louis. In the same way, Omaha, or
cities still farther north, will carry off the trade from Leavenworth,
Lawrence, and Kansas City. Ultimately Puget Sound may beat San Francisco
in the race for the Pacific trade, and the Southern cities become still
less able to keep their place than they have been hitherto. Time after
time, Chicago has thrown out intercepting lines, and diverted from St.
Louis trade which seemed of necessity to belong to her; and the success
of the Union Pacific line, and failure of the Kansas road, is a fresh
proof of the superior energy of the Northern to the Southern city. This
time a fresh element enters into the calculation, and declares for
Chicago. The great circle route, the true straight line, is in these
great distances shorter by fifty or a hundred miles than the straight
lines of the maps and charts, and the Platte route becomes not only the
natural, but the shortest route from sea to sea.

Chicago has a great advantage over St. Louis in her comparative freedom
from the cholera, which yearly attacks the Missourian city. During my
stay in St. Louis, the deaths from cholera alone were known to have
reached 200 a day, in a population diminished by flight to 180,000. A
quarantine was established on the river; the sale of fruit and
vegetables prohibited; prisoners released on condition that they should
work at burying the dead; and funeral corteges were forbidden. Chicago
herself, unreached by the plague, was scattering handbills on every
Western railroad line, warning immigrants against St. Louis.

The Missourians have relied overmuch upon the Mississippi River, and
have forgotten that railroads are superseding steamboats every day.
Chicago, on the other hand, which ten years ago was the twentieth city
in America, is probably by this time the third. As a center of thought,
political and religious, she stands second only to Boston, and her
Wabash and Michigan Avenues are among the most beautiful of streets.

One of the chief causes of the future wealth of America is to be found
in the fact that all her “inland” towns are ports. The State of Michigan
lies between 500 and 900 miles from the ocean, but the single State has
upon the great lakes a coast of 1500 miles. From Fort Benton to the sea
by water is nearly 4000 miles, but the post is a much-used steamboat
port, though more distant, even in the air-line, from the nearest sea
upon the same side the dividing range, than is the White Sea from the
Persian Gulf. Put it in which way you would, Europe could not hold this
river.

A great American city is almost invariably placed at a point where an
important railroad finds an outport on a lake or river. This is no
adaptation to railways of the Limerick saying about rivers--namely, that
Providence has everywhere so placed them as to pass through the great
towns; for in America railways precede population, and when mapped out
and laid, they are but tramways in the desert. There is no great wonder
in this, when we remember that 158,000,000 acres of land have been up to
this time granted to railroads in America.

One tendency of a costly railroad system is that few lines will be
made, and trade being thus driven into certain unchanging routes, a
small number of cities will flourish greatly, and, by acting as housing
stations or as ports, will rise to enormous wealth and population. Where
a system of cheap railways is adopted, there will be year by year a
tendency to multiply lines of traffic, and consequently to multiply also
ports and seats of trade--a tendency, however, which may be more than
neutralized by any special circumstances which may cause the lines of
transit to converge rather than run parallel to one another. Of the
system of costly grand trunk lines we have an instance in India, where
we see the creation of Umritsur and the prosperity of Calcutta alike due
to our single great Bengal line; of the converging system we have
excellent instances in Chicago and Bombay; while we see the plan of
parallel lines in action here in Kansas, and causing the comparative
equality of progress manifested in Leavenworth, in Atchison, in Omaha.
The coasts of India swarmed with ports till our trunk lines ruined Goa
and Surat to advance Bombay, and a hundred village ports to push our
factory at Calcutta, founded by Charnock as late as 1690, but now grown
to be the third or fourth city of the empire.

Of the dozen chaotic cities which are struggling for the honor of
becoming the future capital of the West, Leavenworth, with 20,000
people, three daily papers, an opera house, and 200 drinking saloons,
was, at the time of my visit in 1866, somewhat ahead of Omaha, with its
12,000, two papers, and a single “one-horse” theater, though the
northern city tied Leavenworth in the point of “saloons.”

Omaha, Leavenworth, Kansas City, Wyandotte, Atchison, Topeka, Lecompton,
and Lawrence, each praises itself and runs down its neighbor.
Leavenworth claims to be so healthy that when it lately became
necessary to “inaugurate” the new grave-yard, “they had to shoot a man
on purpose”--a change since the days when the Southern Border Ruffians
were in the habit of parading its streets, bearing the scalps of
abolitionists stuck on poles. On the other hand, a Nebraska man, when
asked whether the Kansas people were fairly honest, said: “Don‘t know
about honest; but they _do_ say as how the folk around take in their
stone fences every night.” Lawrence, the State capital, which is on the
dried-up Kansas River, sneeringly says of all the new towns on the
Missouri that the boats that ply between them are so dangerous that the
fare is collected in installments every five minutes throughout the
trip. Next after the jealousy between two Australian colonies, there is
nothing equal to the hatreds between cities competing for the same
trade. Omaha has now the best chance of becoming the capital of the far
West, but Leavenworth will no doubt continue to be the chief town of
Kansas.

The progress of the smaller cities is amazing. Pistol-shots by day and
night are frequent, but trade and development are little interfered with
by such incidents as these; and as the village cities are peopled up,
the pioneers, shunning their fellows, keep pushing westward, seeking new
“locations.” “You‘re the second man I‘ve seen this fall! Darn me, if
‘taint ’bout time to varmose out westerly--y,” is the standing joke of
the “frontier-bars” against each other.

       *       *       *       *       *

At St. Louis I had met my friend Mr. Hepworth Dixon, just out from
England, and with him I visited the Kansas towns, and then pushed
through Waumego to Manhattan, the terminus (for the day) of the Kansas
Pacific line. Here we were thrust into what space remained between
forty leathern mail-bags and the canvas roof of the mule-drawn
ambulance, which was to be at once our prison for six nights, and our
fort upon wheels against the Indians.




CHAPTER IX.

OMPHALISM.


Dashing through a grove of cottonwood-trees draped in bignonia and ivy,
we came out suddenly upon a charming scene: a range of huts and forts
crowning a long, low hill seamed with many a timber-clothed ravine,
while the clear stream of the Republican fork wreathed itself about the
woods and bluffs. The block-house, over which floated the Stars and
Stripes, was Fort Riley, the Hyde Park Corner from which continents are
to measure all their miles; the “capital of the universe,” or “center of
the world.” Not that it has always been so. Geographers will be glad to
learn that not only does the earth gyrate, but that the center of its
crust also moves: within the last ten years it has removed westward into
Kansas from Missouri--from Independence to Fort Riley. The contest for
centership is no new thing. Herodotus held that Greece was the very
middle of the world, and that the unhappy Orientals were frozen, and the
yet more unfortunate Atlantic Indians baked every afternoon of their
poor lives in order that the sun might shine on Greece at noon; London
plumes herself on being the “center of the terrestrial globe;” Boston is
the “hub of the hull universe,” though the latter claim is less
physical than moral, I believe. In Fort Riley the Western men seem to
have found the physical center of the United States, but they claim for
the Great Plains as well the intellectual as the political leadership of
the whole continent. These hitherto untrodden tracts, they tell you,
form the heart of the empire, from which the life-blood must be driven
to the extremities. Geographical and political centers must ultimately
coincide.

Connected with this belief is another Western theory--that the powers of
the future must be “continental.” Germany, or else Russia, is to absorb
all Asia and Europe, except Britain. North America is already cared for,
as the gradual extinction of the Mexican and absorption of the Canadians
they consider certain. As for South America, the Californians are
planning an occupation of Western Brazil, on the ground that the
continental power of South America must start from the head-waters of
the great rivers, and spread seaward down the streams. Even in the
Brazilian climate they believe that the Anglo-Saxon is destined to
become the dominant race.

The success of this omphalism, this government from the center, will be
brought about, in the Western belief, by the necessity under which the
nations on the head-waters of all streams will find themselves of having
the outlets in their hands. Even if it be true that railways are beating
rivers, still the railways must also lead seaward to the ports, and the
need for their control is still felt by the producers in the center
countries of the continent. The Upper States must everywhere command the
Lower, and salt-water despotism find its end.

The Americans of the Valley States, who fought all the more heartily in
the Federal cause from the fact that they were battling for the freedom
of the Mississippi against the men who held its mouth, look forward to
the time when they will have to assert, peaceably but with firmness,
their right to the freedom of their railways through the Northern
Atlantic States. Whatever their respect for New England, it cannot be
expected that they are forever to permit Illinois and Ohio to be
neutralized in the Senate by Rhode Island and Vermont. If it goes hard
with New England, it will go still harder with New York; and the Western
men look forward to the day when Washington will be removed, Congress
and all, to Columbus or Fort Riley.

The singular wideness of Western thought, always verging on
extravagance, is traceable to the width of Western land. The immensity
of the continent produces a kind of intoxication; there is moral
dram-drinking in the contemplation of the map. No Fourth of July oration
can come up to the plain facts contained in the Land Commissioners’
report. The public domain of the United States still consists of one
thousand five hundred millions of acres; there are two hundred thousand
square miles of coal lands in the country, ten times as much as in all
the remaining world. In the Western territories not yet States, there is
land sufficient to bear, at the English population rate, five hundred
and fifty millions of human beings.

It is strange to see how the Western country dwarfs the Eastern States.
Buffalo is called a “Western City;” yet from New York to Buffalo is only
three hundred and fifty miles, and Buffalo is but seven hundred miles to
the west of the most eastern point in all the United States. On the
other hand, from Buffalo we can go two thousand five hundred miles
westward without quitting the United States. “The West” is eight times
as wide as the Atlantic States, and will soon be eight times as strong.

The conformation of North America is widely different to that of any
other continent on the globe. In Europe, the glaciers of the Alps occupy
the center point, and shed the waters toward each of the surrounding
seas: confluence is almost unknown. So it is in Asia: there the Indus
flowing into the Arabian Gulf, the Oxus into the Sea of Aral, the Ganges
into the Bay of Bengal, the Yangtse Kiang into the Pacific, and the
Yenesei into the Arctic Ocean, all take their rise in the central
table-land. In South America, the mountains form a wall upon the west,
whence the rivers flow eastward in parallel lines. In North America
alone are there mountains on each coast, and a trough between, into
which the rivers flow together, giving in a single valley 23,000 miles
of navigable stream to be plowed by steamships. The map proclaims the
essential unity of North America. Political geography might be a more
interesting study than it has yet been made.

In reaching Leavenworth, I had crossed two of the five divisions of
America: the other three lie before me on my way to San Francisco. The
eastern slopes of the Alleghanies, or Atlantic coast; their western
slopes; the Great Plains; the Grand Plateau, and the Pacific
coast--these are the five divisions. Fort Riley, the center of the
United States, is upon the border of the third division, the Great
Plains. The Atlantic coast is poor and stony, but the slight altitude of
the Alleghany chain has prevented its being a hinderance to the passage
of population to the West: the second of the divisions is now the
richest and most powerful of the five: but the wave of immigration is
crossing the Mississippi and Missouri into the Great Plains, and here
at Fort Riley we are upon the limit of civilization.

This spot is not only the center of the United States and of the
continent, but, if Denver had contrived to carry the Pacific Railroad by
the Berthoud Pass, would have been the center station upon what Governor
Gilpin, of Colorado, calls the “Asiatic and European railway line.” As
it is, Columbus in Nebraska has somewhat a better chance of becoming the
Washington of the future than has this block-house.

Quitting Fort Riley, we found ourselves at once upon the plains. No more
sycamore and white-oak and honey-locust; no more of the rich deep green
of the cottonwood groves; but yellow earth, yellow flowers, yellow
grass, and here and there groves of giant sunflowers with yellow blooms,
but no more trees.

As the sun set, we came on a body of cavalry marching slowly from the
plains toward the fort. Before them, at some little distance, walked a
sad-faced man on foot, in sober riding-dress, with a repeating carbine
slung across his back. It was Sherman returning from his expedition to
Santa Fé.




CHAPTER X.

LETTER FROM DENVER.


MONDAY, _3d September._

MY DEAR ----,

Here we are, scalps and all.

On Tuesday last, at sundown, we left Fort Riley, and supped at Junction
City, the extreme point that “civilization” has reached upon the plains.
Civilization means whisky: post-offices don‘t count.

It was here that it first dawned upon us that we were being charged 500
dollars to guard the United States Californian mail, with the
compensation of the chance of being ourselves able to rob it with
impunity. It is at all events the case that we, well armed as the mail
officers at Leavenworth insisted on our being, sat inside with forty-two
cwt. of mail, in open bags, and over a great portion of the route had
only the driver with us, without whose knowledge we could have read all
and stolen most of the letters, and with whose knowledge, but against
whose will, we could have carried off the whole, leaving him gagged,
bound, and at the mercy of the Indians. As it was, a mail-bag fell out
one day, without the knowledge of either Dixon or the driver, who were
outside, and I had to shout pretty freely before they would pull up.

On Wednesday we had our last “squar’ meal” in the shape of a breakfast,
at Fort Ellsworth, and soon were out upon the almost unknown plains. In
the morning we caught up and passed long wagon trains, each wagon drawn
by eight oxen, and guarded by two drivers and one horseman, all armed
with breech-loading rifles and revolvers, or with the new “repeaters,”
before which breech-loaders and revolvers must alike go down. All day we
kept a sharp look-out for a party of seven American officers, who, in
defiance of the scout‘s advice, had gone out from the fort to hunt
buffalo upon the track. About sundown we came into the little station of
Lost Creek. The ranchmen told us that they had, during the day, been
driven in from their work by a party of Cheyennes, and that they had
some doubts as to the wisdom of the officers in going out to hunt.

Just as we were leaving the station, one of the officers’ horses dashed
in riderless, and was caught; and about two miles from the station we
passed another on its back, ripped up either by a knife or buffalo horn.
The saddle was gone, but there were no other marks of a fight. We
believe that these officers were routed by buffalo, not Cheyennes, but
still we should be glad to hear of them.

The track is marked in many parts of the plains by stakes, such as those
from which the Llano Estacado takes its name; but this evening we turned
off into devious lines by way of precaution against ambuscades, coming
round through the sandy beds of streams to the ranches for the change of
mules. The ranchmen were always ready for us; for, while we were still a
mile away, our driver would put his hand to his mouth, and give a “How!
how! how! how--w!” the Cheyenne warhoop.

[Illustration]

In the weird glare that follows sunset we came upon a pile of rocks,
admirably fitted for an ambush. As we neared them, the driver said:
“It‘s ’bout an even chance thet we‘s sculp ther’!” We could not avoid
them, as there was a gully that could only be crossed at this one
point. We dashed down into the “creek” and up again, past the rocks:
there were no Indians, but the driver was most uneasy till we reached
Big Creek.

Here they could give us nothing whatever to eat, the Indians having, on
Tuesday, robbed them of everything they had, and ordered them to leave
within fifteen days on pain of death.

For 250 miles westward from Big Creek we found that every station had
been warned (and most plundered) by bands of Cheyennes, on behalf of the
forces of the confederation encamped near the creek itself. The warning
was in all cases that of fire and death at the end of fifteen days, of
which nine days have expired. We found the horse-keepers of the company
everywhere leaving their stations, and were, in consequence, very nearly
starved, having been unsuccessful in our shots from the “coach,” except,
indeed, at the snakes.

On Thursday we passed Big Timber, the only spot on the plains where
there are trees; and there the Indians had counted the trunks and
solemnly warned the men against cutting more: “Fifty-two tree. You no
cut more tree--no more cut. Grass! You cut grass; grass make big fire.
You good boy--you clear out. Fifteen day, we come: you no gone--ugh!”
The “ugh” accompanied by an expressive pantomime.

On Thursday evening we got a meal of buffalo and prairie dog, the former
too strong for my failing stomach, the latter wholesome nourishment, and
fit for kings--as like our rabbit in flavor as he is in shape. This was
at the horse-station of “The Monuments,” a natural temple of awesome
grandeur, rising from the plains like a giant Stonehenge.

On Friday we “breakfasted” at Pond Creek station, two miles from Fort
Wallis. Here the people had applied for a guard, and had been answered:
“Come into the fort; we can‘t spare a man.” So much for the value of the
present forts; and yet even these--Wallis and Ellsworth--are 200 miles
apart.

We were joined at breakfast by Bill Comstock, interpreter to the
fort,--a long-haired, wild-eyed half-breed,--who gave us, in an hour‘s
talk, the full history of the Indian politics that have led to the
present war.

The Indians, to the number of 20,000, have been in council with the
Washington Commissioners all this summer at Fort Laramie; and, after
being clothed, fed, and armed, lately concluded a treaty, allowing the
running on the mail-roads. They now assert that this treaty was intended
to apply to the Platte road (from Omaha and Atchison through Fort
Kearney), and to the Arkansas road, but not to the Smoky Hill road,
which lies between the others, and runs through the buffalo country; but
their real opposition is to the railroad. The Cheyennes (pronounced
Shíans) have got the Camanches, Appaches, and Arrapahoes from the south,
and the Sioux and Kiowas from the north, to join them in a
confederation, under the leadership of Spotted Dog, the chief of the
Little Dog section of the Cheyennes, and son of White Antelope,--killed
at Sand Creek battle by the Kansas and Colorado Volunteers,--who has
sworn to avenge his father.

Soon after leaving Pond Creek, we sighted at a distance three mounted
“braves,” leading some horses; and when we reached the next station, we
found that they had been there openly proclaiming that their mounts had
been stolen from a team.

All this day we sat with our revolvers laid upon the mail-bags in front
of us, and our driver also had his armory conspicuously displayed, while
we swept the plains with many an anxious glance. We were on lofty
rolling downs, and to the south the eye often ranged over much of the
130 miles which lay between us and Texas. To the north the view was more
bounded; still, our chief danger lay near the boulders, which here and
there covered the plains.

All Thursday and Friday we never lost sight of the buffalo, in herds of
about 300, and the “antelope”--the prong-horn, a kind of gazelle--in
flocks of six or seven. Prairie dogs were abundant, and wolves and
black-tail deer in view at every turn.

The most singular of all the sights of the plains is the constant
presence every few yards of the skeletons of buffalo and of horse, of
mule and of ox; the former left by the hunters, who take but the skin,
and the latter the losses of the mails and the wagon-trains through
sunstroke and thirst. We killed a horse on the second day of our
journey.

When we came upon oxen that had not long been dead, we found that the
intense dryness of the air had made mummies of them: there was no
stench, no putrefaction.

During the day I made some practice at antelope with the driver‘s
Ballard; but an antelope at 500 yards is not an easy target. The driver
shot repeatedly at buffalo at twenty yards, but this only to keep them
away from the horses; the revolver balls did not seem to go through
their hair and skin, as they merely shambled on in their usual happy
sort of way, after receiving a discharge or two.

The prairie dogs sat barking in thousands on the tops of their mounds,
but we were too grateful to them for their gayety to dream of
pistol-shots. They are no “dogs” at all, but rabbits that bark, with all
the coney‘s tricks and turns, and the same odd way of rubbing their
face with their paws while they con you from top to toe.

With wolves, buffalo, antelope, deer, skunks, dogs, plover, curlew,
dottrel, herons, vultures, ravens, snakes, and locusts, we never seemed
to be without a million companions in our loneliness.

From Cheyenne Wells, where we changed mules in the afternoon, we brought
on the ranchman‘s wife, painfully making room for her at our own
expense. Her husband had been warned by the Cheyennes that the place
would be destroyed: he meant to stay, but was in fear for her. The
Cheyennes had made her cook for them, and our supper had gone down
Cheyenne throats.

Soon after leaving the station, we encountered one of the great
“dirt-storms” of the plains. About 5 P.M. I saw a little white cloud
growing into a column, which in half an hour turned black as night, and
possessed itself of half the skies. We then saw what seemed to be a
waterspout; and, though no rain reached us, I think it was one. When the
storm burst on us we took it for rain, and halting, drew down our canvas
and held it against the hurricane. We soon found that our eyes and
mouths were full of dust; and when I put out my hand I felt that it was
dirt, not rain, that was falling. In a few minutes it was pitch dark,
and after the fall had continued for some time, there began a series of
flashes of blinding lightning, in the very center and midst of which we
seemed to be. Notwithstanding this, there was no sound of thunder. The
“norther” lasted some three or four hours, and when it ceased, it left
us total darkness, and a wind which froze our marrow as we again started
on our way. When Fremont explored this route, he reported that the high
ridge between the Platte and Arkansas was notorious among the Indians
for its tremendous dirt-storms. Sheet lightning without thunder
accompanies dust-storms in all great continents; it is as common in the
Punjab as in Australia, in South as in North America.

On Saturday morning, at Lake station, we got beyond the Indians, and
into a land of plenty, or at all events a land of something, for we got
milk from the station cow, and preserved fruits that had come round
through Denver from Ohio and Kentucky. Not even on Saturday, however,
could we get dinner, and as I missed the only antelope that came within
reach, our supper was not much heavier than our breakfast.

Rolling through the Arrapahoe country, where it is proposed to make a
reserve for the Cheyennes, at eight o‘clock on Saturday morning we
caught sight of the glittering snows of Pike‘s Peak, a hundred and fifty
miles away, and all the day we were galloping toward it, through a
country swarming with rattlesnakes and vultures. Late in the evening,
when we were drawing near to the first of the Coloradan farms, we came
on a white wolf unconcernedly taking his evening prowl about the
stock-yards. He sneaked along without taking any notice of us, and
continued his thief-like walk with a bravery that seemed only to show
that he had never seen man before; this might well be the case, if he
came from the south, near the upper forks of the Arkansas.

All this, and the frequency of buffalo, I was unprepared for. I imagined
that though the plains were uninhabited, the game had all been killed.
On the contrary, the “Smoky district” was never known so thronged with
buffalo as it is this year. The herds resort to it because there they
are close to the water of the Platte River, and yet out of the reach of
the traffic of the Platte road. The tracks they make in traveling to
and fro across the plains are visible for years after they have ceased
to use them. I have seen them as broad and as straight as the finest of
Roman roads.

On Sunday, at two in the morning, we dashed into Denver; and as we
reeled and staggered from our late prison, the ambulance, into the
“cockroach corral” which does duty for the bar-room of the “Planters’
House,” we managed to find strength and words to agree that we would fix
no time for meeting the next day. We expected to sleep for thirty hours;
as it was, we met at breakfast at seven A.M., less than five hours from
the time we parted. It is to-day that we feel exhausted; the
exhilaration of the mountain air, and the excitement of frequent visits,
carried us through yesterday. Dixon is suffering from strange blains and
boils, caused by the unwholesome food.

We have been called upon here by Governor Gilpin and Governor Cummings,
the opposition governors. The former is the elected governor of the
State of Colorado which is to be, and would have been but for the fact
that the President put his _big toe_ (Western for _veto_) upon the bill;
the latter, the Washington-sent governor of the Territory. Gilpin is a
typical pioneer man, and the descendant of a line of such. He comes of
one of the original Quaker stocks of Maryland, and he and his ancestors
have ever been engaged in founding States. He himself, after taking an
active share in the foundation of Kansas, commanded a regiment of
cavalry in the Mexican war. After this, he was at the head of the
pioneer army which explored the _parcs_ of the Cordilleras and the
Territory of Nevada. He it was who hit upon the glorious idea of placing
Colorado half upon each side of the Sierra Madre. There never, in the
history of the world, was a grander idea than this. Any ordinary
pioneer or politician would have given Colorado the “natural” frontier,
and have tried for the glory of the foundation of two States instead of
one. The consequence would have been, lasting disunion between the
Pacific and Atlantic States, and a possible future break-up of the
country. As it is, this commonwealth, little as it at present is, links
sea to sea, and Liverpool to Hong Kong.

The city swarms with Indians of the bands commanded by the chiefs Nevara
and Collorego. They are at war with the six confederate tribes, and with
the Pawnees--with all the plain Indians, in short. Now, as the Pawnees
are also at war with the six tribes, there is a pretty triangular fight.
They came in to buy arms, and fearful scoundrels they look. Short,
flat-nosed, long-haired, painted in red and blue, and dressed in a gaudy
costume, half Spanish, half Indian, which makes their filthiness appear
more filthy by contrast, and themselves carrying only their Ballard and
Smith-and-Wesson, but forcing the squaws to carry all their other goods,
and papooses in addition, they present a spectacle of unmixed ruffianism
which I never expect to see surpassed. Dixon and I, both of us, left
London with “Lo! the poor Indian,” in all his dignity and
hook-nosedness, elevated on a pedestal of nobility in our hearts. Our
views were shaken in the East, but nothing revolutionized them so
rapidly as our three days’ risk of scalping in the plains. John Howard
and Mrs. Beecher Stowe themselves would go in for the Western “disarm at
any price, and exterminate if necessary” policy if they lived long in
Denver. One of the braves of Nevara‘s command brought in the scalp of a
Cheyenne chief taken by him last month, and to-day it hangs outside the
door of a pawnbroker‘s shop, for sale, fingered by every passer-by.

Many of the band were engaged in putting on their paint, which was
bright vermilion, with a little indigo round the eye. This, with the
sort of pigtail which they wear, gives them the look of the gnomes in
the introduction to a London pantomime. One of them--Nevara himself, I
was told--wore a sombrero with three scarlet plumes, taken probably from
a Mexican, a crimson jacket, a dark-blue shawl, worn round the loins and
over the arm in Spanish dancer fashion, and embroidered moccasins. His
squaw was a vermilion-faced bundle of rags, not more than four feet
high, staggering under buffalo hides, bow and arrows, and papoose. They
move everywhere on horseback, and in the evening withdraw in military
order, with advance and rear guard, to a camp at some distance from the
town.

I inclose some prairie flowers, gathered in my walks round the city.
Their names are not suited to their beauty; the large white one is “the
morning blower,” the most lovely of all, save one, of the flowers of the
plains. It grows with many branches to a height of some eighteen inches,
and bears from thirty to fifty blooms. The blossoms are open up to a
little after sunrise, when they close, seldom to open even after sunset.
It is, therefore, peculiarly the early riser‘s flower; and if it be true
that Nature doesn‘t make things in vain, it follows that Nature intended
men--or, at all events, _some_ men--to get up early, which is a point
that I believe was doubtful hitherto.

For the one prairie flower which I think more beautiful than the blower
I cannot find a name. It rises to about six inches above ground, and
spreads in a circle of a foot across. Its leaf is thin and spare; its
flower-bloom a white cup, about two inches in diameter; and its buds
pink and pendulent.

All our garden annuals are to be found in masses acres in size upon the
plains. Penstemon, coreopsis, persecaria, yucca, dwarf sumach, marigold,
and sunflower, all are flowering here at once, till the country is
ablaze with gold and red. The coreopsis of our gardens they call the
“rosin-weed,” and say that it forms excellent food for sheep.

The view of the “Cordillera della Sierra Madre,” the Rocky Mountain main
chain, from the outskirts of Denver is sublime; that from the roof at
Milan does not approach it. Twelve miles from the city the mountains
rise abruptly from the plains. Piled range above range with step-like
regularity, they are topped by a long white line, sharply relieved
against the indigo of the sky. Two hundred and fifty miles of the mother
Sierra are in sight from our veranda; to the south, Pike‘s Peak and
Spanish Peak; Long‘s Peak to the north; Mount Lincoln towering above
all. The views are limited only by the curvature of the earth, such is
the marvelous purity of the Coloradan air, the effect at once of the
distance from the sea and of the bed of limestone which underlies the
plains.

The site of Denver is heaven-blessed in climate as well as loveliness.
The sky is brilliantly blue, and cloudless from dawn till noon. In the
mid-day heats, cloud-making in the Sierra begins, and by sunset the
snowy chain is multiplied a hundred times in curves of white and purple
cumuli, while thunder rolls heavily along the range. “This is a great
country, sir,” said a Coloradan to me to-day. “We make clouds for the
whole universe.” At dark there is dust or thunder-storm at the mountain
foot, and then the cold and brilliant night. Summer and winter it is the
same.




CHAPTER XI

RED INDIA.


“These Red Indians are not red,” was our first cry when we saw the Utes
in the streets of Denver. They had come into the town to be painted as
English ladies go to London to shop; and we saw them engaged within a
short time after their arrival in daubing their cheeks with vermilion
and blue, and referring to glasses which the squaws admiringly held.
Still, when we met them with peaceful paintless cheeks, we had seen that
their color was brown, copper, dirt, anything you please except red.

The Hurons, with whom I had stayed at Indian Lorette, were French in
training if not in blood; the Pottawatomies of St. Mary‘s Mission, the
Delawares of Leavenworth, are tame Indians: it is true that they can
hardly be called red; but still I had expected to have found these wild
prairie and mountain Indians of the color from which they take their
name. Save for paint, I found them of a color wholly different from that
which we call red.

Low in stature, yellow-skinned, small-eyed, and Tartar-faced, the
Indians of the plains are a distinct people from the tall, hook-nosed
warriors of the Eastern States. It is impossible to set eyes on their
women without being reminded of the dwarf skeletons found in the mounds
of Missouri and Iowa; but, men or women, the Utes bear no resemblance to
the bright-eyed, graceful people with whom Penn traded and Standish
fought. They are not less inferior in mind than in body. It was no
Shoshoné, no Ute, no Cheyenne, who called the rainbow the “heaven of
flowers,” the moon “the night queen,” or the stars “God‘s eyes.” The
plain tribes are as deficient, too, in heroes as in poetry: they have
never even produced a general, and White Antelope is their nearest
approach to a Tecumseh. Their mode of life, the natural features of the
country in which they dwell, have nothing in them to suggest a reason
for their debased condition. The reason must lie in the blood, the race.

All who have seen both the Indians and the Polynesians at home must have
been struck with innumerable resemblances. The Maori and Red Indian
wakes for the dead are identical; the Californian Indians wear the Maori
mat; the “medicine” of the Mandan is but the “tapu” of Polynesia; the
New Zealand dance-song, the Maori tribal scepter, were found alike by
Strachey in Virginia and Drake in California; the canoes of the West
Indies are the same as those of Polynesia. Hundreds of arguments, best
touched from the farther side of the Pacific, concur to prove the
Indians a Polynesian race. The canoes that brought to Easter Island the
people who built their mounds and rock temples there, may as easily have
been carried on by the Chilian breeze and current to the South American
shore. The wave from Malaya would have spent itself upon the northern
plains. The Utes would seem to be Kamtchatkans, or men of the Amoor,
who, fighting their way round by Behring Straits, and then down south,
drove a wedge between the Polynesians of Appalachia and California. No
theory but this will account for the sharp contrast between the
civilization of ancient Peru and Mexico, and the degradation in which
the Utes have lived from the earliest recorded times. Mounds, rock
temples, worship, all are alike unknown to the Indians of the plains; to
the Polynesian Indians, these were things that had come down to them
from all time.

Curious as is the question of the descent of the American tribes, it has
no bearing on the future of the country--unless, indeed, in the eyes of
those who assert that Delawares and Utes, Hurons and Pawnees, are all
one race, with features modified by soil and climate. If this were so,
the handsome, rollicking, frank-faced Coloradan “boys” would have to
look forward to the time when their sons’ sons should be as like the
Utes as many New Englanders of to-day are like the Indians they
expelled--that, as the New Englanders are tall, taciturn, and
hatchet-faced, the Coloradans of the next age should be flat-faced
warriors, five feet high. Confidence in the future of America must be
founded on a belief in the indestructible vitality of race.

Kamtchatkans or Polynesians, Malays or sons of the prairies on which
they dwell, the Red Indians have no future. In twenty years there will
scarcely be one of pure blood alive within the United States.

In La Plata, the Indians from the inland forests gradually mingle with
the whiter inhabitants of the coast, and become indistinguishable from
the remainder of the population. In Canada and Tahiti, the French
intermingle with the native race: the Hurons are French in everything
but name. In Kansas, in Colorado, in New Mexico, miscegenation will
never be brought about. The pride of race, strong in the English
everywhere, in America and Australia is an absolute bar to
intermarriage, and even to lasting connections with the aborigines. What
has happened in Tasmania and Victoria is happening in New Zealand and
on the plains. When you ask a Western man his views on the Indian
question, he says: “Well, sir, we can destroy them by the laws of war,
or thin ’em out by whisky; but the thinning process is plaguy slow.”

There are a good many Southerners out upon the plains. One of them,
describing to me how in Florida they had hunted down the Seminoles with
bloodhounds, added, “And sarved the pesky sarpints right, sah!”
Southwestern volunteers, campaigning against the Indians, have been
known to hang up in their tents the scalps of the slain, as we English
used to nail up the skins of the Danes.

There is in these matters less hypocrisy among the Americans than with
ourselves. In 1840, the British government assumed the sovereignty of
New Zealand in a proclamation which set forth with great precision that
it did so for the sole purpose of protecting the aborigines in the
possession of their lands. The Maories numbered 200,000 then; they
number 20,000 now.

Among the Western men there is no difference of opinion on the Indian
question. Rifle and revolver are their only policy. The New Englanders,
who are all for Christianity and kindliness in their dealings with the
red men, are not similarly united in one cry. Those who are ignorant of
the nature of the Indian, call out for agricultural employment for the
braves; those who know nothing of the Indian‘s life demand that
“reserves” be set aside for him, forgetting that no “reserve” can be
large enough to hold the buffalo, and that without the buffalo the red
men must plow or starve.

Indian civilization through the means of agriculture is all but a total
failure. The Shawnees are thriving near Kansas City, the Pottawatomies
living at St. Mary‘s mission, the Delawares existing at Leavenworth; but
in all these cases there is a large infusion of white blood. The
Canadian Hurons are completely civilized; but then they are completely
French. If you succeed with an Indian to all appearance, he will
suddenly return to his untamed state. An Indian girl, one of the most
orderly of the pupils at a ladies’ school, has been known, on feeling
herself aggrieved, to withdraw to her room, let down her back hair,
paint her face, and howl. The same tendency showed itself in the case of
the Delaware chief who built himself a white man‘s house, and lived in
it thirty years, but then suddenly set up his old wigwam in the
dining-room, in disgust. Another bad case is that of the Pawnee who
visited Buchanan, and behaved so well that when a young Englishman, who
came out soon after, told the President that he was going West, he gave
him a letter to the chief, then with his tribe in Northern Kansas. The
Pawnee read the note, offered a pipe, gravely protested eternal
friendship, slept upon it, and next morning scalped his visitor with his
own hand.

The English everywhere attempt to introduce civilization, or to modify
that which exists, in a rough-and-ready manner which invariably ends in
failure or in the destruction of the native race. A hundred years of
absolute rule, mostly peaceable, have not, under every advantage, seen
the success of our repeated attempts to establish trial by jury in
Bengal. For twenty years the Maories have mixed with the New Zealand
colonists on nearly equal terms, have almost universally professed
themselves Christians, have attended English schools, and learnt to
speak the English language, and to read and write their own; in spite of
all this, a few weeks of fanatic outburst were enough to reduce almost
the whole race to a condition of degraded savagery. The Indians of
America have, within the few last years, been caught and caged, given
acres where they once had leagues, and told to plow where once they
hunted. A pastoral race, with no conception of property in land, they
have been manufactured into freeholders and tenant farmers; Western
Ishmaelites, sprung of a race which has wandered since its legendary
life begins, they have been subjected to homestead laws and title
registrations. If our experiments in New Zealand, in India, on the
African coast have failed, cautious and costly as they were, there can
be no great wonder in the unsuccess that has attended the hurried
American experiments. It is not for us, who have the past of Tasmania
and the present of Queensland to account for, to do more than record the
fact that the Americans are not more successful with the red men of
Kansas than we with the black men of Australia.

The Bosjesman is not a more unpromising subject for civilization than
the red man; the Ute is not even gifted with the birthright of most
savages, the mimetic power. The black man, in his dress, his farming,
his religion, his family life, is always trying to imitate the white. In
the Indian there is none of this: his ancestors roamed over the
plains--he will roam; his ancestors hunted--why should not he hunt? The
American savage, like his Asiatic cousins, is conservative; the African
changeable, and strong in imitative faculties of the mind. Just as the
Indian is less versatile than the negro, so, if it were possible
gradually to change his mode of life, slowly to bring him to the
agricultural state, he would probably become a skillful and laborious
cultivator, and worthy inhabitant of the Western soil; as it is, he is
exterminated before he has time to learn. “Sculp ’em fust, and then talk
to ’em,” the Coloradans say.

Peace commissioners are yearly sent from Washington to treat with
hostile tribes upon the plains. The Indians invariably continue to fight
and rob till winter is at hand; but when the snows appear, they send in
runners to announce that they are prepared to make submission. The
commissioners appoint a place, and the tribe, their relatives, allies,
and friends, come down thousands strong, and enter upon debates which
are purposely prolonged till spring. All this time the Indians are kept
in food and drink; whisky even is illegally provided them, with the
cognizance of the authorities, under the name of “hatchets.” Blankets,
and, it is said, powder and revolvers, are supplied to them as necessary
to their existence on the plains; but when the first of the spring
flowers begin to peep up through the snow-drifts on the prairies, they
take their leave, and in a few weeks are out again upon the war-path,
plundering and scalping all the whites.

Judging from English experience in the north, and Spanish in Mexico and
South America, it would seem as though the white man and the red cannot
exist on the same soil. Step by step the English have driven back the
braves, till New Englanders now remember that there were Indians once in
Massachusetts, as we remember that once there were bears in Hampshire.
King Philip‘s defeat by the Connecticut volunteers seems to form part of
the early legendary history of our race; yet there is still standing,
and in good repair, in Dorchester, a suburb of Boston, a frame-house
which in its time has been successfully defended against Red Indians. On
the other hand, step by step, since the days of Cortez, the Indians and
half-bloods have driven out the Spaniards from Mexico and South
America. White men, Spaniards, received Maximilian at Vera Cruz, but he
was shot by full-blooded Indians at Queretaro.

If any attempt is to be made to save the Indians that remain, it must be
worked out in the Eastern States. Hitherto the whites have but pushed
back the Indians westward: if they would rescue the remnant from
starvation, they must bring them East, away from Western men and Western
hunting-grounds, and let them intermingle with the whites, living,
farming, along with them, intermarrying, if possible. The hunting Indian
is too costly a being for our age; but we are bound to remember that
ours is the blame of having failed to teach him to be something better.

After all, if the Indian is mentally, morally, and physically inferior
to the white man, it is in every way for the advantage of the world that
the next generation that inhabits Colorado should consist of whites
instead of reds. That this result should not be brought about by cruelty
or fraud upon the now existing Indians is all that we need require. The
gradual extinction of the inferior races is not only a law of nature,
but a blessing to mankind.

The Indian question is not likely to be one much longer: before I
reached England again, I learnt that the Coloradan capital had offered
“twenty dollars a piece for Indian scalps with the ears on.”




CHAPTER XII.

COLORADO.


When you have once set eyes upon the never-ending sweep of the Great
Plains, you no longer wonder that America rejects Malthusianism. As
Strachey says of Virginia, “Here is ground enough to satisfy the most
covetous and wide affection.” The freedom of these grand countries was
worth the tremendous conflict in which it was, in reality, the foremost
question; their future is of enormous moment to America.

Travelers soon learn, when making estimates of a country‘s value, to
despise no feature of the landscape; that of the plains is full of life,
full of charm--lonely, indeed, but never wearisome. Now great rolling
uplands of enormous sweep, now boundless grassy plains; there is all the
grandeur of monotony, and yet continual change. Sometimes the grand
distances are broken by blue buttes or rugged bluffs. Over all there is
a sparkling atmosphere and never-failing breeze; the air is bracing even
when most hot; the sky is cloudless, and no rain falls. A solitude which
no words can paint, and the boundless prairie swell, convey an idea of
vastness which is the overpowering feature of the plains.

Maps do not remove the impression produced by views. The Arkansas River,
which is born and dies within the limit of the plains, is two thousand
miles in length, and is navigable for eight hundred miles. The Platte
and Yellowstone are each of them as long. Into the plains and plateau
you could put all India twice. The impression is not merely one of size.
There is perfect beauty, wondrous fertility, in the lonely steppe; no
patriotism, no love of home, can prevent the traveler wishing here to
end his days.

To those who love the sea, there is a double charm. Not only is the roll
of the prairie as grand as that of the Atlantic, but the crispness of
the wind, the absence of trees, the multitude of tiny blooms upon the
sod, all conspire to give a feeling of nearness to the ocean, the effect
of which is we are always expecting to hail it from off the top of the
next hillock.

The resemblance to the Tartar plains has been remarked by Coloradan
writers; it may be traced much farther than they have carried it. Not
only are the earth, air, and water much alike, but in Colorado, as in
Bokhara, there are oil wells and mud volcanoes. The color of the
landscape is, in summer, green and flowers; in fall-time, yellow and
flowers, but flowers ever.

The eastern and western portions of the plains are not alike. In Kansas
the grass is tall and rank; the ravines are filled with cottonwood,
hickory, and black walnut; here and there are square miles of
sunflowers, from seven to nine feet high. As we came west, we found that
the sunflowers dwindled, and at Denver they are only from three to nine
inches in height, the oddest little plants in nature, but thorough
sunflowers for all their smallness. We found the buffalo in the eastern
plains in the long bunch-grass, but in the winter they work to the west
in search of the sweet and juicy “blue grass,” which they rub out from
under the snow in the Coloradan plains. This grass is crisp as hair, and
so short that, as the story goes, you must lather before you can mow it.
The “blue grass” has high vitality: if a wagon train is camped for a
single night among the sunflowers or tall weeds, this crisp turf at once
springs up, and holds the ground forever.

The most astounding feature of these plains is their capacity to receive
millions, and, swallowing them up, to wait open-mouthed for more. Vast
and silent, fertile yet waste, fieldlike yet untilled, they have room
for the Huns, the Goths, the Vandals, for all the teeming multitudes
that have poured and can pour from the plains of Asia and of Central
Europe. Twice as large as Hindostan, more temperate, more habitable,
nature has been placed here hedgeless, gateless, free to all--a green
field for the support of half the human race, unclaimed, untouched,
awaiting smiling, hands and plow.

There are two curses upon this land. Here, as in India, the rivers
depend on the melting of distant snows for their supplies, and in the
hot weather are represented by beds of parched white sand. So hot and
dry is a great portion of the land, that crops require irrigation. Water
for drinking purposes is scarce; artesian bores succeed, but they are
somewhat costly for the Coloradan purse, and the supply from common
wells is brackish. This, perhaps, may in part account for the Western
mode of “prospecting” after water, under which it is agreed that if none
be found at ten feet, a trial shall be made at a fresh spot. The
thriftless ranchman had sooner find bad water at nine feet than good at
eleven.

Irrigation by means of dams and reservoirs, such as those we are
building in Victoria, is but a question of cost and time. The
never-failing breezes of the plains may be utilized for water-raising,
and with water all is possible. Even in the mountain plateau, overspread
as it is with soda, it has been found, as it has been by French farmers
in Algeria, that, under irrigation, the more alkali the better corn
crop.

When fires are held in check by special enactments, such as those which
have been passed in Victoria and South Australia, and the waters of the
winter streams retained for summer use by tanks and dams; when artesian
wells are frequent and irrigation general, belts of timber will become
possible upon the plains. Once planted, these will in their turn
mitigate the extremes of climate, and keep alike in check the forces of
evaporation, sun, and wind. Cultivation itself brings rain, and steam
will soon be available for pumping water out of wells, for there is a
great natural store of brown coal and of oil-bearing shale near Denver,
so that all would be well were it not for the locusts--the scourge of
the plains--the second curse. The coming of the chirping hordes is a
real calamity in these far-western countries. Their departure, whenever
it occurs, is officially announced by the governor of the State.

I have seen a field of indian-corn stripped bare of every leaf and cob
by the crickets; but the owner told me that he found consolation in the
fact that they ate up the weeds as well. For the locusts there is no
cure. The plovers may eat a few billions, but, as a rule, Coloradans
must learn to expect that the locusts will increase with the increase of
the crops on which they feed. The more corn, the more locusts--the more
plovers, perhaps; a clear gain to the locusts and plovers, but a dead
loss to the farmers and ranchmen.

The Coloradan “boys” are a handsome, intelligent race. The mixture of
Celtic and Saxon blood has here produced a generous and noble manhood;
and the freedom from wood, and consequent exposure to wind and sun, has
exterminated ague, and driven away the hatchet-face; but for all this,
the Coloradans may have to succumb to the locusts. At present they
affect to despise them. “How may you get on in Colorado?” said a
Missourian one day to a “boy” that was up at St. Louis. “Purty well,
guess, if it warn‘t for the insects.” “What insects? Crickets?”
“Crickets! Wall, guess not--jess insects like: rattlesnakes, panther,
bar, catamount, and sichlike.”

“The march of empire stopped by a grasshopper” would be a good heading
for a Denver paper, but would not represent a fact. The locusts may
alter the step, but not cause a halt. If corn is impossible, cattle are
not; already thousands are pastured round Denver on the natural grass.
For horses, for merino sheep, these rolling table-lands are peculiarly
adapted. The New Zealand paddock system may be applied to the whole of
this vast region--Dutch clover, French lucern, could replace the Indian
grasses, and four sheep to the acre would seem no extravagant estimate
of the carrying capability of the lands. The world must come here for
its tallow, its wool, its hides, its food.

In this seemingly happy conclusion there lurks a danger. Flocks and
herds are the main props of great farming, the natural supporters of an
aristocracy. Cattle breeding is inconsistent, if not with republicanism,
at least with pure democracy. There are dangerous classes of two
kinds--those who have too many acres, as well as those who have too few.
The danger at least is real. Nothing short of violence or special
legislation can prevent the plains from continuing to be forever that
which under nature‘s farming they have ever been--the feeding ground for
mighty flocks, the cattle pasture of the world.




CHAPTER XIII.

ROCKY MOUNTAINS.


“What will I do for you if you stop here among us? Why, I‘ll name that
peak after you in the next survey,” said Governor Gilpin, pointing to a
snowy mountain towering to its 15,000 feet in the direction of Mount
Lincoln. I was not to be tempted, however; and as for Dixon, there is
already a county named after him in Nebraska: so off we went along the
foot of the hills on our road to the Great Salt Lake, following the
“Cherokee Trail.”

Striking north from Denve

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