PART FIRST.
THE OLD MANSION.
I.
“Young, beautiful, poor, and alone in Paris, what will become of her?”
It was the third time Dr. Leblanc had repeated these words in the presence of his sister, Mademoiselle Josephine, who remained so mute that she might have been thought deaf, had not the irregular click of her knitting-needles, and two or three indistinct exclamations as she paused in her work, testified to a preoccupation quite equal to that of her brother. The latter at first manifested his by swiftly striding up and down the apartment in which they were, but now he resumed his usual place in the chimney-corner opposite his sister, opened and shut his snuff-box noisily, taking a useless profusion of pinches, which he forgot to convey to their destination, and tapping the floor with his foot in a manner that expressed great agitation or extreme perplexity.
Mademoiselle Josephine continued to knit without replying, and seemed no less absorbed than her brother. At length she said:
“At least, if she were not, as you say, so young and so beautiful!”
“And so poor and alone in the world, you should add. A sensible remark, indeed! It is evident if she were old, ugly, rich, and surrounded by friends, her situation would be
very different. I am indebted to you, Josephine, for the discovery.”
“Do not be impatient, brother. I am only repeating what you have just said. To continue the subject: if she only had a different air—”
“Well, go on!”
“And another name—”
“Another name! Why so? What has her name to do with the matter?”
“A name which was not ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous! The name of her father? Poor Gerard d’Yves’ name was very respectable, and even noble, I believe. He committed a thousand extravagances and ruined himself. He then became an artist, and displayed talent enough to have repaired his fortunes had he been wise. Besides, he was of a good family, and his name—”
“I am not alluding to his name, but to his daughter’s.”
“Well?”
“Well, brother, do you think this young girl’s name bears any resemblance to a Christian name?”
“Fleurange? I acknowledge it is perhaps an odd name. Her father had a taste for odd things, and hearing the name of Fior Angela in Italy, he translated it.”
“Her mother should have had more sense.”
“Her poor mother died when she
was born, so she had nothing to do with it.”
“Did you not say her mother had a brother who was a professor in some city in Germany?”
“Yes, at Leipsic; but who knows where to find him now? Her whole family disapproved of her marriage, which was finally effected without her father’s consent. Poor Margaret lived only a year, and Gerard, who remained a widower, declined all intercourse with his wife’s relatives. He remained many years in Italy, and placed his daughter, as soon as she was five years old, in some convent near Perugia. He took her away only two months before he came here, already ill, to linger and die three days ago in this poor child’s arms, leaving her entirely alone in the world.”
“But was it not very injurious to his daughter’s interests to withhold her thus from all intercourse with her maternal relatives?”
“He began to realize it himself, but only when it was too late. During his illness, finding his case daily growing more serious, he made some efforts to ascertain what had become of Ludwig Dornthal, of whom we have just spoken, who was Margaret’s favorite brother, and never faltered in his affection for her. But he could ascertain nothing respecting him. Ludwig had married, and, long before, left Leipsic to settle in some other part of Germany, he could not find out what, and this fruitless effort was a source of pain, which was not the least he suffered during his last hours. He reproached himself, and not without reason, for the frightful loneliness in which he was about to leave his daughter. The poor, unhappy man bitterly expiated the imprudent and thoughtless act of alienating himself from those whose pardon he should rather have implored, or at
least accepted. But it was the consequence of his disposition, which was affectionate, enthusiastic, and fascinating, I imagine, when he was young, but weak, violent, and thoughtless. He was born neither to be happy himself, nor to make others happy, and his daughter would have been almost as great an object of pity, had he lived, as she is now.”
“Poor child!” said Mademoiselle Josephine, raising her small black eyes, with an expression almost celestial lighting up her pale and wrinkled face. After a moment’s silence, she added: “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb! You will see, brother, that some good luck will befall her, or we shall have some fortunate inspiration.”
“Well, the sooner the better, for I have none. Your confidence truly excites my admiration.”
“I trust in God,” simply replied Mademoiselle Josephine.
“Parbleu! and I too,” said the doctor. “I truly believe in his goodness; I hope in his mercy; but in this case—”
“You would prefer to have the affair in your own hands?”
“Come, come, Josephine, let us stick to the point this time. It is eight o’clock, and we must positively go for that poor child. She is more lonely than ever to-day, for the sister who nursed her father, and remained with her after his death, left this morning. She must not, after so sad a day, pass this first night all alone up there.”
“Certainly not,” said the other.
The doctor continued: “She has not left that little room in the fourth story for a fortnight, with the exception of this morning, when she followed her father to the grave, and since her return how do you imagine she has been occupied? Here, look at this.”
Mademoiselle Josephine took the
paper her brother held out, and glanced over it. It was a list of the poor artist’s debts.
“The whole amounts to five hundred francs, which are here. She asked me to settle the bills and procure the receipts.”
“I see that, according to her calculation, one-fourth of this sum is intended for the physician who attended her father,” said Mademoiselle Josephine slowly.
“Who, in such a case, will not accept it, of course.”
“Of course not,” said his sister. “Out of this sum one hundred and twenty-five francs will be returned to her, then?”
“Yes, sister, and that will be the amount of her fortune.”
“While we are talking, then, she has absolutely nothing?”
“Nothing at all.”
Their conversation at this point was interrupted by a low knock at the door, and almost immediately the girl of whom they had been talking appeared before them. She stopped and leaned against the wall. The doctor sprang toward her.
“Poor child!” he exclaimed. “While we were idly talking, she was faint from exhaustion and fatigue.”
She had, in truth, fallen into a chair against the wall, and seemed losing consciousness. Mademoiselle Josephine hastened to support her head, and bathe her pale brow and colorless cheeks with cold water. Every movement of the doctor’s elderly sister had become prompt and decided. At a sign from her brother, she disappeared an instant, but returned almost immediately with a vial and a glass of water in her hand.
“That is it,” said the doctor. He let fall a few drops into the glass, which he then held to the young girl’s lips. Two or three swallows seemed to revive her.
“Excuse me,” she said, raising her head, and forcing herself to rise. “Excuse me, both of you. I did not think myself so weak, and did not intend to give you so much trouble when I came to see you.”
“Do not talk now, but drink the remainder of this.”
Fleurange put the glass to her lips, but returned it to the doctor without tasting it. “I cannot,” she said, “I feel dizzy. I do not know what ails me—perhaps it is the surprise I have just had. Here, monsieur, read this. It was to show you this letter I came down.”
The doctor took the letter, but, before reading it, led Fleurange to the fire, while the active Josephine, divining her brother’s wishes, placed on the table a bowl of soup and some bread and wine.
Fleurange took Mademoiselle Josephine’s hand between her own: “Thank you,” she said in a low tone. “Yes, I think it was that: I am generally strong, but—but—”
“I dare say you have not eaten anything since yesterday?”
“No; and I am hungry.”
The doctor briskly rubbed his spectacles, and abruptly opened his snuffbox, while the young girl hastily took the slight repast, which brought a lively and unusual color to her cheeks. Her face was generally very pale. Her large eyes, calm and mild, gray rather than blue, shaded by lashes black as her hair, gave her a peculiar and striking appearance. But notwithstanding this peculiarity, notwithstanding her paleness, the delicacy of her features, and the pliancy of her form, which swayed like a reed at every movement, if obliged to characterize in two words the general impression produced by the appearance of Fleurange d’Yves, those words would be: simplicity and energy. Doctor Leblanc was doubtless
right in thinking that one so young, beautiful, and destitute needed protection, and yet it required only a glance to see that she, better than any else, could protect herself.
The doctor still held in his hand the letter she had given him. It was dated at Frankfort.
“My Dear Niece: It was only yesterday, and by the most unforeseen chance, we at last learned the state of your father’s health and where he lives. None of us have seen him since his marriage with my poor sister Margaret twenty years ago. You know there was at that time a profound hatred against France throughout our country, and my father would never consent to receive a Frenchman as his son-in-law. Then my poor sister (God forgive her!) left the paternal roof to marry the man of her choice. My father was exceedingly grieved, very angry, and at first implacable, but before his death he forgave her. She was past knowing it. From that time we lost all trace of your father. We only learned he had left Pisa with his child, and, for a long time, had given up all hope of ever seeing him again, or knowing my poor sister’s daughter, when yesterday a stranger, passing through this city, accidentally showed me a picture he had just purchased at Paris—the work, he said, of a dying artist. This painting represented Cordelia kneeling beside her father, and the canvas bore the name of Gerard d’Yves. The painter’s address was given us by the owner of the picture, and I hasten to profit by it to tell you, my dear child, that your mother’s relatives have not forgotten the tie that binds them to you. If you ever need a shelter, you can find one beneath our roof. My wife and children already regard poor Margaret’s daughter with affection. The
latter have thought of her from infancy as an absent sister whose return they awaited. If God restores your father’s health, bring him among us. If otherwise ordered, come yourself, my dear child. The stranger who put us on your track told us the artist’s daughter was the original of his Cordelia. If the resemblance is correct, it does not diminish our desire to see you. Come soon, then, my dear niece. At all events, answer this letter promptly, and be assured of the affectionate regard of your uncle,
“Ludwig Dornthal.”
“Josephine! Josephine!” exclaimed the doctor. “Here, read this: but, first, embrace me. Yes, you were right. Your trust was better than my wisdom! Yes, yes, God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. Poor child, embrace me also.”
Fleurange rose: “Oh! very willingly,” said she as she threw herself sobbing into the doctor’s arms. Fatigue, grief, and the emotion caused by the unforeseen and unhoped-for offer of a refuge at the very moment of extreme need, all combined to agitate her mind, excite her nerves, and exhaust her strength. Her heart swelled with the emotion she could not repress, and tears unrestrained came to her eyes, rolled down her cheeks, and fell like rain on her clasped and icy hands, while a convulsive movement agitated her breast, and her trembling lips gave utterance to a feeble cry.
The doctor allowed her to weep a long time in silence, not uttering a word to increase her agitation, and yet saying nothing to repress it. At length the paroxysm subsided, and Fleurange rose quite confused.
“Excuse me once more,” said she; “I am distressing you, instead of showing my gratitude as I ought. I could not restrain myself, but I think
I can safely promise it will not happen again. I seldom give way to tears.”
She uttered these words in a firm tone, drying her tears, and throwing back her hair with her two hands as if to cool her brow, then she rose.
“Where are you going, pray?” asked Mademoiselle Josephine in an abrupt tone of authority.
“Why,” stammered Fleurange, “I am going up-stairs. I—”
“Perhaps you are thinking to spend the night all alone in the cabinet next the chamber—the chamber—” She stopped. Fleurange turned pale, and her lips trembled as she replied:
“What can I do? It is sad, it is painful, I know well; but it must be done. Besides, I am not afraid: I feel I am under your roof.”
“Well, for the present you shall also be under the protection of our lock and key,” said the kind Josephine: and, taking Fleurange by the arm, she led her into a little chamber next her own, where a small bed surrounded by white curtains was in readiness for the young girl. This little chamber, with its walls covered with blue paper, and lit up with a good fire, had a most cheering aspect.
“Here, child, is your chamber and your bed,” said she. “Come, come, no thanks, and, above all, no tears! Go to bed at once without giving yourself the time to think, still less to say a word. You think you are not going to sleep, but you are mistaken. On your knees? Well, I consent to that, but let it be a short prayer. That is right. Now stop till I gather up your thick hair. Is your head easy on that pillow? Well, I am glad. May God, and all good angels, watch over you! Allow me to kiss your forehead. Good-night!”
Mademoiselle Josephine lowered the curtains of the bed, and softly
left the chamber, while the poor orphan, in fact, lost all remembrance of the sorrows and joys of the day in a profound and beneficent sleep.
The chamber to which Mademoiselle Josephine had taken Fleurange rightfully belonged to the doctor’s niece, now at school in one of the convents at Paris, but which she occupied during her vacation. However, it was far from being vacant the remainder of the year. Mademoiselle Leblanc was one of those persons who are devoted to the searching out of the unfortunate, and the alleviation of their woes. In such cases, he who seeks finds, and that without difficulty, consequently a week seldom passed without offering a good reason for opening the blue chamber for a few days’ shelter to some poor girl out of work and destitute of a home, or to a poor abandoned child, or some one recovering from illness but too feeble to resume work. The doctor heartily approved of this. He would gladly have added to his dwelling a veritable succursale for the accommodation of his poor patients, and if he was not yet rich enough for that, though he reaped the benefit of his skill and celebrity, it was partly because he gave away with one hand what he received in the other, and that with a generosity not always in conformity with prudence. When there was a question of benevolence between the brother and sister, one was not more disposed than the other to count the cost. They had invented a proverb, worthy of the Gospel, which they made use of in reply to the remonstrances of their friends: “He who gives alms, grows rich,” they said; and they continued to enrich themselves in this way by giving themselves up, both of them, to a noble excess of charity. Fortune, in fact, had not been unfavorable
to them, and thus far had remained unfulfilled the sinister prophecies of those who take as a devise quite a different proverb, respecting charity, too well known and too often acted upon in the world. Doctor Leblanc and his sister knew nothing, it is true, of the luxury of elegant quarters and fine equipages. They still lived in a street of the Latin quarter where they were born; an old servant was the sole assistant of the cook; and Mademoiselle Josephine continued to preserve order and neatness around her with her own hands. But at all times they were magnificent in their own way; and the artists they encouraged, the scholars befriended, and the sick gratuitously attended and generously aided, added to the renown of the distinguished physician and gave to his name a reputation he did not seek. Simple and learned, healing the body and respecting the soul, he loved his profession as a mission from heaven, and practised it as a sacred ministry with respect and with love.
II.
When Fleurange opened her eyes on the following morning, it was late, for it was broad daylight and in the month of December. She must have slept very profoundly, for she had not heard any one kindle the fire already blazing in the chimney. Her slumbers must have been such as in youth succeed great fatigue or prolonged efforts to endure anxiety and grief in silence. The fit of weeping the evening before and the long repose of the night had brought double refreshment to the exhausted strength of the young girl, and her first sensation was one of delicious comfort.
But her remembrances soon became more distinct, and the anguish of the first awakening after a great misfortune made her heart sink within her. She had, it is true, known her father but little. The convent where she had been reared was not even in the town where he dwelt, and she saw him but seldom during her childhood. But the days when he appeared at the convent were to both great festivals. It was difficult to understand how a father so glad to see his child could voluntarily have allowed her to grow up away from him. But the time of reunion came at last, and for several weeks they rambled around Italy together. In unveiling all its wonders to a mind naturally capable of appreciating them, the artist felt all the enthusiasm of his youth revive. But it was a flame only rekindled to be extinguished. Soon came symptoms of illness, the sad return to Paris, the fluctuations of disease, which enfeeble the mind as well as the body, and separated the child from her father while he was yet alive, and she night and day at his bedside. His look that gave back no answering glance, the words she murmured in his ear without making him understand, convinced her of her loss before the separation by death which soon followed.
“O father! father scarcely known and so soon lost!” Such was Fleurange’s cry, and perhaps an involuntary reproach mingled with her accents of grief. She did not suspect it was a sublime and paternal instinct that had influenced the poor artist in separating from his child. He wished her to be self-reliant; he wished her to be pious and pure; he wished her rare mental gifts only to be developed when order, an immutable
and divine order, was established in her soul; finally, he desired her to be all that he himself lacked, and God blessed this desire.
In a beautiful spot near Perugia, he found at the head of a charity school one of those women whom the world itself would honor and venerate if it comprehended them. By the world, I mean the mass of light and scoffing people who are hostile to every sentiment in which they have no share, and, above all others, to religious sentiments. Yet this world is, on the whole, suspicious rather than unjust, and incredulous than false: if it sees the semblance of evil, it immediately supposes it real; if it sees the appearance of goodness, it at once imagines this appearance deceitful; but when virtue is unquestionably manifest, irrecusable in its simplicity and truth, and succeeds in being regarded in a true light, the world—even the world of which we have been speaking—generally bows down before it. The thing is rare, it is true, more so than it should be, because the most perfect natures aim not at displaying themselves, but at concealment; and the world to which I refer seeks not to discover, but to deny, their existence.
Madre Maddalena was one of these great hidden souls. No one ever spoke of her, or of her little monastery, intended for the education of poor children, but where a limited number of girls of a more elevated class were also admitted. Like so many other monasteries in Italy, this one was in a poetic and charming situation, but not one of those visible afar off on the lofty summits that command views which ravish the eye and transport the soul—views that kindle a desire in the most indifferent heart to keel before them, and that have inspired Christians to
perpetuate prayer amid them in permanent sanctuaries.
The Convent of Santa Maria al Prato was, on the contrary, in a deep valley, and surrounded by a landscape like those in which Perugino and Raphael placed their divine creations or their sacred representations. Afar off were mountains whose outlines were clearly defined on the horizon in soft and harmonious colors; a stream wound through olive groves, now and then encircling rustic dwellings—the evident handiwork of a people with an instinctive taste for the arts; the sombre verdure of a knot of pines or cypresses contrasted here and there with the azure of the morning sky or the purple tints of evening: such were the principal features of the landscape. The beauty of such a scene subdues and reposes, as that of sublime summits transports and exalts, and seems designed for meditation and labor, as the other for contemplation and ecstasy.
It was to this retreat Fleurange’s father was providentially led—perhaps guided by the protective inspiration we love to attribute to mothers who are fond of their children. It was in the hands of Madre Maddalena that he left his daughter as soon as she was five years old, and, until the day she was eighteen, he only saw her twice a year. But from year to year he felt more sure of having realized the aim he had proposed respecting her. Fleurange had, nevertheless, no proof to give him of her progress under the form of prizes obtained or crowns conferred. The solemn occasions when such trophies are distributed were unknown at Santa Maria al Prato, as well as the examinations for which the memory is burdened for a day with facts that are often remembered no longer. In fact, they did not aim at giving her varied instruction, but they taught
her how to learn, and gave her a taste for study, work, and silence.
She was naturally sincere and courageous; she also became skilful and active. Madre Maddalena seemed to have foreseen that this young person, so sheltered in her early years, would one day be unusually exposed to the rough combat of life. She probably did not foresee that Fleurange would soon be left alone; but what she had read of her father’s nature, what she knew of his history, made her comprehend that prudence and a certain premature experience would serve as a safeguard to his daughter. What would have been true had her father lived, was no less so now his death left her entirely to herself.
Fleurange resisted the temptation of remaining in bed absorbed in sad thoughts. She hastily rose, and was quite ready when Mademoiselle Josephine entered her chamber for the third time. A smile enlivened the features of the elderly maiden when she saw the effect of a good night’s rest on the countenance of her protégée. The latter, affected and grateful, and retaining the Italian habits of her childhood, bent to kiss the hand of her benefactress.
“Do not kiss my old hand,” said Mademoiselle Josephine, “but my cheek, if you like; now, let us not keep my brother waiting. It is nine o’clock, our breakfast-hour which never varies.”
Fleurange followed her hostess to the breakfast-room, which was next the parlor. The furniture of these two rooms had not been renewed for more than fifty years, but nothing seemed dilapidated, thanks to the exquisite neatness that everywhere reigned.
The doctor was already seated at the table. His sister took her place
opposite, giving Fleurange a seat between them.
“You have quite recovered,” said the doctor, extending his hand to the young girl. “I am very glad to see it; but, for fear of relapse, you must remain under my eye for some days to come. Everything has been arranged, and from this time till your departure you will return no more to the fourth story.”
“What can I say, monsieur? You are both so kind, and I love you so much that I accept alms from your hands without shame and almost without pain.”
“I forbid you making use of so shocking a word,” said Mademoiselle Josephine.
“Yet it is really alms,” said Fleurange in a sad but firm tone, “for I have nothing of my own, and if in want of a piece of bread to-day, I should have to extend the hand of a beggar.”
“Come, come! you are not reduced to that yet, thank God! But let us drop this, and speak of something more important. You must answer your uncle’s letter without delay.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Fleurange. And after a short silence, she added: “I am going to ask him to be kind enough to receive me for a month.”
“But from his letter, he seems disposed to offer you a much more extended hospitality than that.”
“Perhaps so, but I am only willing to accept it till I have found the means of living without being a burden on him.”
“What is your intention, then?”
“I do not know,” said Fleurange; “but there are many means of gaining a, livelihood, are there not? Well, I shall endeavor to find one not beyond my strength.”
The doctor looked at her, and then said: “There are certainly many
things not beyond your strength, but yet unsuitable for you.”
“Why?” asked Fleurange.
“They would be unsuitable for one of your age and condition.”
“Why so?” repeated she.
“I will explain myself after you tell me what you think of doing.”
“Come!” said Mademoiselle Josephine impatiently. “There is no need of so much circumlocution in telling her that, when one is young and pretty, caution is needful. If the child does not know that, the sooner she is warned, the better it will be for her.”
“Young and pretty,” repeated Fleurange quietly without the slightest embarrassment. “Yes, I know that will be a great obstacle to me in my position. It would be much better to be homely and ten years older. I had already thought of that. It is very unfortunate; but what can be done?”
The doctor smiled. He had never heard any woman admit her own beauty with so little vanity. Fleurange’s simplicity, the childlike candor of her large eyes, the expression of which was yet grave and thoughtful, struck him, and he felt an increase of the interest which up to this moment had been excited by the young girl’s destitute condition, rather than herself. He resumed, still smiling:
“As to this misfortune, you must resign yourself to it, at least for twenty years to come.” But seeing that Fleurange did not smile in return, but, on the contrary, became more and more thoughtful, he continued: “Besides, if you ever come to that, we will find a means for surmounting the difficulty.”
Fleurange’s face expanded. “Oh! thank you, monsieur; if you could realize how much courage I have. And then,” she added, “I assure
you there are a great many things I know how to do.”
“For instance?” said the doctor.
“First, the instruction of children, to which I think myself adapted. I love them, and they are generally fond of me also, and readily obey me.”
“What else?”
“I know Italian and German (for I have made it a special point to understand my mother’s native language thoroughly). My father thought me also a good reader, and preferred my voice and accent to those of any of the numerous readers and speakers he had heard. His fondness perhaps blinded him to my defects; yet he might have been right, and I could try.”
“Hem!” said the doctor. “There is much to be said for and against that talent.”
“Finally, monsieur, I can do all kinds of work. I know how to sew well—to wash, iron, and sweep. I could even cook a little.”
The doctor again regarded the noble countenance of the young girl while she thus complacently enumerated the humble and laborious employments she thought herself capable of. She was evidently sincere. Her ability and willingness to do all she said could not be doubted. He was affected, and remained silent.
But Mademoiselle Josephine exclaimed with enthusiasm: “That is what I call an education! And who, my dear child, taught you so many reasonable and useful things?”
Tears of emotion filled Fleurange’s eyes. “It was my dear Madre Maddalena,” she replied.
This answer elicited fresh inquiries, to which Fleurange replied by minutely relating the way in which her childhood had passed. The doctor’s satisfaction increased with every word of her account, which, nevertheless,
made a breach in two of his prejudices.
Without any antipathy to pretty faces, they inspired him with a kind of mistrust, or at least of solicitude, which his long experience had doubtless very often warranted. But in regarding this young girl, so self-reliant and so modest, so courageous and so delicate, and who seemed ready to struggle so bravely against the difficulties of life, how could he be angry with her for being beautiful, and how help overlooking it in one sense?
The doctor had also a singular and, considering his belief as a whole, an inconsistent prejudice against convents. He seemed to have retained this point of agreement with those whom he habitually opposed on every other subject. And here was an education which accorded not only with all his ideas, but with all his whims—a conventual education. He would be obliged to somewhat modify his opinions on this subject, as well as on some others, and he resigned himself to it with a good grace.
They finally resumed the subject of the letter to Frankfort. The doctor and his sister already began to look forward with sorrow to the departure of their young protégée, but they felt it was for her interest not to delay joining the relatives who had invited her at so opportune a moment. By their advice, Fleurange immediately began her letter. Short and to the point, it was soon completed, and she gave it to Mademoiselle Josephine. The latter began to read it with an air of satisfaction, but when she came to the signature, a cloud suddenly appeared on her face.
“What is it?” said Fleurange. “I have made some mistake or blunder?”
“No, you have not: the letter is
very well, it could not be better, but, but—”
“What, then? Tell me frankly, I beg of you.”
“Well, it is—indeed, I dare not tell you.”
“Pray tell me,” said Fleurange, “what has displeased you? There is nothing in the letter I am not willing to correct according to your advice.”
“It is—but you cannot change that.”
But what is it, then, dear mademoiselle? You really frighten me,” insisted Fleurange with a disturbed air.
“You cannot change your baptismal name,” said the other, at length.
“My baptismal name?” exclaimed Fleurange with surprise. “Does my name displease you to such a degree? I am sorry, for Madre Maddalena liked it so much! She said it signified the flower of the angels—the fairest of all the angels—the angel Gabriel, whom she considered my patron. And she called me Gabrielle as often as Fleurange.”
“Gabrielle!” cried Mademoiselle Josephine eagerly. “Gabrielle! Ah! that is a name everybody can understand. So that is the meaning of Fleurange, according to your Madre Maddalena? Then I beseech, I conjure you, to assume that name and give up the other!”
The doctor had for some minutes been occupied in reperusing Professor Dornthal’s letter, which he kept the evening before; he now raised his eyes, and attended to the conversation. While Fleurange was still hesitating what reply to make to Mademoiselle Josephine’s singular request, he said:
“I do not understand my sister’s persistency on this point. As to my own opinion, it is opposed to hers. But it may be that the simpler of the two names will be more in conformity
with the tastes of the good German family that awaits you, and perhaps Gabrielle would have a better reception than Fleurange. Besides,” he continued, smiling, “your young cousins beyond the Rhine would doubtless pronounce the name in a way to diminish its charm and deprive it of all meaning according to the pious and poetical interpretation you have just given it.”
“That might be,” said Fleurange, smiling in return. “Anyhow, I will do as you advise respecting it.”
“We will take it into consideration,” said the doctor. Then, glancing once more over the professor’s letter, he continued: “Do you know the name of the stranger who, by buying the last picture your father painted, has unwittingly rendered you so great a service?”
“I do not. That picture was sold with the remainder when, at the beginning of his fatal relapse, my father saw his finances diminishing, and lost the hope of ever repairing them. My poor father!” she continued with a trembling voice, “he was very ill the day he made me sit in order to finish that picture—” Fleurange suddenly stopped and blushed. The doctor’s look seemed to demand an explanation, and she continued artlessly, but not without confusion: “The owner of the picture is perhaps the stranger who visited the studio that day. At least, I acknowledge the idea has repeatedly occurred to me.”
“For what reason?”
“Because he was so delighted with Cordelia, and begged permission to see it after its completion. But my father, from that day, was obliged to give up the use of the brush, and the picture was sold as he left it, with the others.”
“Was this amateur a German?”
“I do not know. He spoke French very well, but with a slight accent, I know not what.”
“Was he some great lord?”
“I do not know—I have never seen a great lord.”
“But what kind of an air had this visitor—God bless him!” interrupted Mademoiselle Josephine.
“A lofty and noble air, a remarkable physiognomy, and a grave and sonorous voice,” replied Fleurange. “But, in spite of the gratitude I perhaps owe him, the remembrance of his visit always troubles and depresses me.”
“Why so?” said Josephine.
“Because it was the cause of the last and fatal crisis of my father’s malady, who at that time even could not bear the slightest agitation. I do not know the words the stranger murmured as he glanced at me, but they greatly excited my father, who requested me in a tremulous voice to leave the studio. As a general thing, he never allowed me to enter it at the hour for visitors. The evening of that day he spoke to me in an agitated manner of the lone condition in which I should soon be left, and gave me some incoherent counsels, which were his last words. He never recovered his full mind after that.”
“Poor man!” said the doctor; but he did not pursue the subject that led to this account. Fleurange’s fleeting blush disappeared, and she was again pale and calm as before, her pen in hand ready to correct her letter according to the doctor’s advice. After a final deliberation between the young girl and her elderly friends, it was decided that the letter should be sent after it was signed Gabrielle d’Yves.
III.
The day Margaret married Gerard d’Yves, the aged Sigismund Dornthal blotted out his daughter’s name from his will, and gave orders that it should never be uttered in his presence. Notwithstanding this, softened by illness, and urged by his second son Ludwig, Margaret’s favorite brother, he soon consented to send her his forgiveness and blessing, but when they reached Pisa poor Margaret had just expired! In the fury of his despair, which increased the impetuosity and thoughtlessness of his character, Gerard tore up the letter containing the long-delayed pardon, and only replied in these two words: “Too late!”
It was thus the aged Dornthal was informed of his daughter’s death. He himself died shortly after, ignorant of the existence of the child to whom she had given birth. His property was divided between his two sons, but Ludwig, devoted to study, and already in possession of a professor’s chair at Leipsic, entirely abandoned to his elder brother the administration of their common fortune, and Heinrich Dornthal became the sole head of the commercial and banking houses founded by Sigismund. He thenceforth made use of his brother’s capital as well as his own, paying him regularly his income, without any interference in his business on Ludwig’s part. The latter was at the same time pursuing so brilliant a career as to attract the attention of all the learned men of Germany to his labors. One of these, a resident of Frankfort, invited him to pass at his house the annual vacations of the numerous students who attended his lectures. The result of these visits was that this professor’s daughter became Ludwig Dornthal’s wife, and, in the course of time, the
mother of his five children. The professor, when he married, resigned his position at Leipsic to settle in his wife’s native place. There, free from a professor’s duties, he had leisure to write books that constantly added to his reputation and increased his income, which the flourishing business of the commercial house alone made sufficient.
Such was, in a few words, the condition of the new home that awaited Fleurange. A second letter came promptly in reply to hers. Her uncle expressed the liveliest joy at having found her, and invited her very particularly to arrive at Frankfort in time for Christmas, so dear to the Germans as the time of family reunions. To do this she would have to leave Paris, at the very latest, on the twenty-first of December, for at that time it took three days and nights for the journey to Frankfort. The doctor and his sister, though sorry to part with their young protégée, hastened the preparations for her departure. They were touched by the cordial tone of this unknown uncle’s letters, and predicted a happy life for her in his family, which they did not wish to defer. But every day added to their attachment to Fleurange and to her tender gratitude to them.
“If this continued a week longer,” said the doctor, “I could not part with that child.”
“Then she must start soon,” replied Mademoiselle Josephine; “it is for her good, and we should do wrong to keep her with us.”
Fleurange said nothing, but her eyes turned sadly from one of her old friends to the other. At length came the last day she was to pass with them. She made an effort to repress her tears, that she might not
distress them, and quietly put up her modest packages, actively aided by the doctor and his sister.
“An English proverb which I think very reasonable,” said the doctor, “places the hospitality which speeds the parting guest on a level with that which welcomes his coming: it is that which I am now showing you, my dear Fleurange.”
Fleurange had just hastily finished the repast always so sad before a journey. The doctor perceived her courage failing. He was himself greatly affected by her pale and youthful countenance, and in thinking of the long and lonely journey she was about to undertake, at the end of which she would be received by people, perhaps kind, but wholly unknown. Nevertheless, he resumed with an encouraging voice:
“Come, come, child, everything looks favorable yonder; show your courage, and do not allow yourself to be cast down.”
“You are right,” said Fleurange, rising. “I feel I have reason to bless God, and I only desire to be grateful. Be sure, at all events, that I shall be courageous.”
It was eight o’clock in the evening: the fiacre was waiting at the door to take her to the diligence. She went out, accompanied by the doctor and his sister, who entered the carriage with her. The night was dark, and the snow falling in great flakes, which the young girl, reared beneath the sky of Italy, now saw for the first time in her life. The spectacle excited curiosity mingled with fear. The new and the unknown seemed to surround her on every side, and these two things, generally so attractive to those of her age, bore now an aspect more calculated to depress her young heart than to expand it. She involuntarily shivered, and drew around her slender form
the thick cloak that felt too thin to protect her from the severity of the weather, to which she was so unaccustomed. They all remained silent for some moments. Fleurange pressed Mademoiselle Josephine’s hand, and carried it from time to time to her lips, in spite of the efforts of the latter to prevent it.
Mademoiselle Josephine, on her side, with a faltering voice renewed a multitude of counsels, which had already been repeated a thousand times—among others, to write to them often and regularly. Then she slipped on her arm a small basket which her provident kindness had filled with everything that could be useful to her on the way, as well as more than one souvenir which, when far distant, would recall her old friends.
They arrived too quickly at their destination. “I have bespoken a place for you in the coupé,” said the doctor, getting out of the carriage. “You will be in company with one of my patients, still very feeble, but who will absolutely go to Germany to rejoin her husband. She has two children with her, and they will be your only travelling companions.”
“Thank you,” said Fleurange. “The prayers of the orphan are said to draw down blessings: may you both experience the effect of mine!” She could not utter another word. She threw her arms for the last time around Mademoiselle Josephine’s neck, and the next instant, leaning on the doctor’s arm, she was crossing with some difficulty the littered court at the end of which they found the diligence. The snow had delayed them on the way, and now rendered every step difficult. The other passengers had taken their places, and they were only waiting for Fleurange. The horses were harnessed, and to the noise of their stamping the driver added his impatient exclamations.
“Come, come! We are off!” he repeated in a rough voice. Fleurange, hurried, pushed about, stunned, and frightened, had only time to press the doctor’s hand once more and spring into the coupé. The door was instantly shut. A fearful clashing of irons, mingled with cries, blows of the whip, and vociferations, above which could be heard: “Adieu! à revoir! à bientôt!” with other exclamations much less harmonious, and the heavy diligence was in motion. Fleurange, now free from the necessity of any restraint, allowed herself the solace of giving vent to her feelings and letting her tears flow freely and abundantly.
She continued to weep for a long time without the least attempt at repressing her emotion. Why should she? She was alone, entirely alone now. She had never been so to such a degree before. All the events of the past faded away in the distance, and the future offered nothing to replace them. She was separated from all whom she had loved from her infancy, either by death or indefinite absence. Would it be so always? Was that to be her lot on earth? Would she never be permitted to love with assurance, trust, and a sense of repose? Was she to be always thus torn from places and persons at the very moment her heart began to cling to them?—her heart, so tender and ardent, which she had so often felt beating with tenderness and joy, with admiration and enthusiasm? And while her eyes peered out through the darkness of night at objects that seemed in the obscurity like pale phantoms, her imagination set before her, as in a magic mirror, all the different scenes of her past life: the beautiful cloister of Santa Maria al Prato, with the terrace at the top, where the eye could wander so far, and the sweet and noble features of
Madre Maddalena; then came the varied remembrances connected with her father; first, the rapid vision of Italy in all its splendor, then the terrible and dismal days at Paris, and finally, at the darkest hour of all; the beneficent forms of her old friends, whom she never wished to leave, but whom she had just bidden farewell—perhaps farewell for ever!
It was impossible for Fleurange, at this moment, to control her sad thoughts. But, now and then, her reason recalled those who awaited her, the welcome she had a right to expect, and the goodness of Divine Providence in opening such a refuge; but in vain—consolation seemed unable to find an entrance into her soul, and, in spite of her nature, despondency obtained the mastery.
“If they are kind, and I love them,” she said to herself bitterly, “I shall soon have to leave them. If, on the contrary, they —” Here her imagination had free course and depicted the future in the darkest colors. But this new reverie had not the clearness of the first, and before long her anticipations began to mingle in vague confusion with her remembrances. Little by little, fatigue, the motion of the vehicle, and the influence of night lulled the young girl asleep, and transformed into uneasy and indistinct dreams all the thoughts that had successively assailed her.
Fifteen minutes after, she was suddenly awakened. Something quite heavy had fallen against her shoulder and thence into her lap. She sat up, and, groping in the obscurity, her hand came in contact with the long silky hair of a child. From the first, she had rather supposed than seen a pale, sick young woman in the opposite corner of the coupé, with her arm thrown around a child beside her, against whom slept
another still smaller. It was the latter who had just suddenly changed his position. Fleurange began to comprehend the case, and bent down to raise him softly to a more comfortable seat in her lap. Then she drew his little sleepy head against her, and kissed the sweet face now near her own. This trifling incident had the sudden and unforeseen effect of putting to flight all the phantoms her imagination had been conjuring up to increase her sorrows. She recalled her interior murmuring with remorse.
“O my God!” she cried, pressing the child in her arms, “if I love this poor little one, whose features I have not yet seen, if I am ready to watch the night long over his slumbers, what wilt not thou, who art my Father, do for thy child?” She raised her eyes a moment in prayer, not with her lips, but in her heart. The snow had ceased falling. The clouds passing away, the heavens appeared brilliant with stars. The cloud had also passed away from Fleurange’s soul, and a mysterious light from on high was infused therein. She gazed at the starry sky with delight, then closed her eyes, and again slept sweetly, the child in her arms sleeping as profoundly as herself.
TO BE CONTINUED.
SEVERAL CALUMNIES REFUTED; OR, EXECUTIVE DOCUMENT No. 37.[130]
In addition to the secular press, which seldom misses an opportunity of saying something ungracious of the Catholic Church, we have published in the United States over a hundred so-called religious newspapers, the principal stock-in-trade of which seems to be unlimited abuse of everything Catholic, and unqualified misrepresentation of all who profess or teach the doctrines of our faith. No dogma or point of discipline of Catholicity ever finds favor in the eyes of the individuals who fill the columns of those publications, and no man or woman who may see fit to devote his or her life to the dissemination of the Gospel is safe from the malice or scurrility of their pens.
For the honor of the American character we are sorry to say that we have daily evidence of this blind prejudice and reckless disregard of truth on the part of this class of editors, many of whom arrogate to themselves the title of “reverend”; but we have some consolation in knowing that the more intelligent members of the sects are fast growing tired and ashamed of such senseless appeals to their passions and ill-founded traditions and that the time is not far distant when such efforts to sustain a sinking and indefensible cause will be encouraged only by the ignorant and wilfully blind.
These repeated and continuous attacks on the church are not the work of any one sect or confined to any particular locality, but are general
with all Protestants, and extended over the whole country. As long as they are confined to newspapers, and afford employment and remuneration to a number of persons who probably could not gain a livelihood in any other manner, we scarcely consider them worthy of serious attention; but we have had recently placed before us an official document, printed at the public expense for the edification of the United States Senate—and no doubt widely circulated throughout the Union under the convenient frank of many pious members of Congress—in which are reproduced calumnies so gross, and falsehoods so glaring, that we consider it our duty not only to call public attention to it, but to demand from our rulers in Washington by what right and authority they print and circulate under official form a tissue of fabrications, misrepresentations, and even forgeries, against the religion, and the ministers of that religion, which is professed by five or six millions of free American citizens.
This document, known as Executive Document No. 37, XLIst Congress, IIId Session, was furnished by Mr. Delano, Secretary of the Interior, in compliance with a resolution of the Senate, passed February 2, 1871, and is composed exclusively of information supplied by Rev. H. H. Spaulding to A. B. Meacham, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, who in his letter of transmittal says:
“I am respectfully requested by the Rev. H. H. Spaulding, the oldest living Protestant missionary in Oregon, to place on file in your department the accompanying documents, giving a history of the early missionary work and labors of Dr. Marcus Whitman, himself, and others; the progress and civilization of the Indians under their charge, without aid from the government; also, a history of the massacre of Dr. Whitman and others; also, resolutions of Christian associations
in answer to Executive Document No. 38, House of Representatives, and a variety of historical information, which it would seem proper to have on file, or placed in some more permanent form for future history.”
It may be remarked that the letter from which the above is an extract is dated on the 28th of January, just five days before the passage of the Senate resolution, and evidently in anticipation of such action on the part of that body. “No one,” says a distinguished senator, “except the few in the secret, knew anything of the matter until the document was printed. All the previous proceedings were as of course.” The documents that were thus to be “placed in a more permanent form for future history,” apart from their uniformly infamous character, are perhaps the strangest in origin and composition that have ever been presented for the information of any deliberative body, much less one of the gravity and importance of the Senate of the republic. They consist mainly of extracts from the religious press, so-called; inflammatory letters from jealous and disappointed preachers, including the Rev. H. H. Spaulding himself; depositions written out by that indefatigable hater with his own hand, and changed in many essential points after having been sworn to and removed from the control of the deponents; false quotations from The Account of the Murder of Dr. Whitman, by the Very Rev. J. B. A. Brouillet, V.G., and others’ statements of the massacre; an address from the professors of that advanced educational institution called Oberlin College, Ohio; answers to leading queries addressed to Oregon officials, based on a false and supposititious statement of facts; and, lastly, a report adopted and endorsed by eight associations, including the Old School, New School,
Cumberland, and United Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, and the “Christian Church of Oregon,” and claiming to represent thirty thousand brother members, all of whom, though differing radically in other respects, are suspiciously unanimous in denouncing the “Jesuits,” and equally positive in affirming a previous condition of affairs, their knowledge of which must of necessity have depended solely on the statements of the veracious Rev. H. H. Spaulding. In style, the documents are unique, and have a very strong family resemblance. It is a judicious mixture of sanctimonious cant seldom heard outside of a camp-meeting, with a dash here and there of Shakespeare and the modern poets, to give it variety, we suppose.
Now, whence this solemn assembly of presbyteries and conferences, this pile of affidavits and newspaper extracts, and the desire of the Senate to be enlightened as “to the early labors of the missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Oregon, commencing in 1836”? Simply this. On the week commencing on the 29th of November, 1847, more than twenty-four years ago, a certain missionary to the Cayuse Indians, named Dr. Whitman, who had resided among them for several years, was, with his wife and twelve other Americans, brutally murdered by the savages; and it is now attempted by Spaulding, who was his friend, and missionary to the Nez Perces, a neighboring tribe, to fix the guilt of this foul outrage on the missionary priests who in that year accompanied the Rt. Rev. A. M. A. Blanchet, Bishop of Nesqualy, to Oregon, and who, it is alleged, instigated the Indians to commit the deed in order to get rid of the Protestant missions. At the
time of the slaughter, there was with others under Dr. Whitman’s roof a young woman named Bewley, whom one of the chiefs desired to have for his wife; and it is also asserted that not only did the priests encourage her to yield to the Indian’s wishes, but forced her from the shelter of their home and refused her any protection whatever. Other charges growing out of this sad calamity, such as baptizing children with the innocent blood of their victims on their hands, inhumanity to the prisoners left unharmed, attempting the precious life of Spaulding, supplying the Cayuses with guns and ammunition, etc., are likewise alleged, but the first two are the principal counts in this clerical indictment.
The slaughter of so many persons naturally created a great sensation in Oregon at the time, but for months after no one thought of attributing it to the interference of the Catholic missioners. However, Spaulding, whose mind had become disturbed by the contemplation of the dangers he had escaped, and having to abandon his mission among the Nez Perces, and finding himself unemployed, gradually began to give a new version of the affair, and in conversation, preaching, and writing at first hinted, and next broadly asserted, that the “Jesuits” were at the bottom of the whole matter. Considering that the shock to his nervous system was so great that he never entirely recovered from it, and that the repetition of the falsehoods was so persistent, it is charitable to suppose that he eventually came to believe them as truths; for no man in his right senses would persist in forcing on the world such a compilation of improbable statements and downright falsehoods as are contained in Pub. Doc. No. 37.
As there are always many persons, made credulous by ignorance or
prejudice, willing to credit any anti-Catholic slander, the Rev. Father Brouillet, the only priest near the scene of the crime, wrote and published, in 1853, a full and authentic account of the whole transaction, which was so clear and circumstantial that even the greatest opponents of the Catholic priesthood were silenced. In 1857, a special agent of the Treasury Department, J. Ross Browne, made a tour in the far West, and in reporting on the condition of the aborigines, and the potent causes of war between them and the white settlers, embodied in his statement Father Brouillet’s pamphlet, which together formed Pub. Doc. No. 38, against which all the powers of the presbyteries and conferences of Oregon, under the fitting leadership of a crazy preacher, are now directed, after a silence of more than ten years. Is it any wonder that it is so often remarked that the only bond of union, the sole vitalizing principles, of the sects are their hatred to Catholicity?
A glance at the history of the early Indian mission in Oregon is necessary to a clear understanding of the subject. It is well known that for many years that portion of our common country was debatable ground, and, while our government claimed the sovereignty and appointed officials to administer its affairs, the Hudson Bay Company held possession and virtually controlled the inhabitants, nearly all of whom were Indians or half-breeds. Under the direction of the company, the natives were honest, peaceable, and well disposed. Captain Bonneville, who visited the Nez Perces in 1832, says of them:
“Simply to call these people religious would convey but a faint idea of the deep hue of piety and devotion which pervades their whole conduct. Their honesty is
immaculate, and their purity of purpose, and the observance of the rites of their religion, are most uniform and remarkable. They are certainly more like a nation of saints than a horde of savages.”
“This was a very enthusiastic view to take of the Nez Perces’ character,” says a Protestant authority, Mrs. Victor, “which appeared all the brighter to the captain by contrast with the savage life which he had witnessed in other places, and even by contrast with the conduct of the white trappers. But the Nez Perces were intellectually and morally an exception to all the Indian tribes west of the Missouri River. Lewis and Clarke found them different from any others; the fur-traders and the missionaries found them the same. To account for this superiority is indeed difficult. The only clue to the cause is the following statement of Bonneville. ‘It would appear,’ he says, ‘that they had imbibed some notions of the Christian faith from Catholic missionaries and traders who have been among them. They even had a rude calendar of the fasts and festivals of the Romish Church, and some traces of its ceremonial. These have become blended with their own wild rites, and present a strange medley, civilized and barbarous.’”[131] It was in this happy and quiet condition that the first Protestant missionaries from the United States found the Indians. They were Methodist, and arrived in 1834, remaining for ten years. “No missionary undertaking,” says Rev. Stephen Olin, himself one of the laborers, “has been prosecuted by the Methodist Episcopal Church with higher hopes and more ardent zeal.... This particular mission, involved an expenditure of forty-two thousand dollars in a single year. At the end of six years, there
were sixty-eight persons connected with this mission, men, women, and children, all supported by this society.”[132] And the same writer adds: “How such a number of missionaries found employment in such a field it is not easy to conjecture, especially as the great body of the Indians never came under the influence of their labors.” Dr. E. White, Sub-Indian Agent, writes, in 1843: “The Rev. Mr. Lee and associates are doing but little for the Indians.... With all that has been expended, without doubting the correctness of the intention, it is most manifest to every observer that the Indians of this lower country, as a whole, have been very little benefited.”[133]
The two Methodist stations established, at Clatsop’s Plains and Nesqualy were speedily abandoned, and that at the Dalles is described, in Traits of American Indian Life, as being in a most fearful condition. “The occurrence,” the author says, alluding to a murder by a converted Indian which he had witnessed, “is but the type of a thousand atrocities daily occurring among these supposed converts.” And we have the authority of Mr. Gray for saying that “the giving of a few presents of any description to them induces them to make professions corresponding to the wish of the donor.” The success of the missionaries at Willamette was, if possible, still more disheartening. Mr. Olin says that of those who held relations with them none remained in 1842; and Alexander Simpson, who visited the valley about the same time, found the mission to consist of but four families, those of a clergyman, surgeon, a schoolmaster, and an agricultural overseer. It is not strange, then, that two years afterwards
the missions were entirely abandoned, and have never been attempted to be re-established. “Had they met vice with a spotless life,” says Gray, “and an earnest determination to maintain their integrity as representatives of religion and a Christian people, the fruits of their labor would have been greater.” We are forced, therefore, to conclude that the author of The River of the West is justified in saying on this and other indisputable authority, “so far from benefiting the Indians, the Methodist mission became an actual injury to them”—the Indians.
Thus ended the first chapter in the history of the progress and civilization of the Indians in Oregon, to which we desire to call the respectful attention of the United States Senate. We have the testimony of Captain Bonneville, endorsed by Mrs. Victor, regarding the honesty and piety of the natives in 1832, before the arrival of the Methodists. After nine years of missionary labor, we have the following grave statement from no less an authority than one of their own clergymen:
“The Indians want pay for being whipped into compliance with Dr. White’s laws, the same as they did for praying to please the missionaries during the great Indian revival of 1839” (p. 157).
“As a matter of course, lying has much to do in their system of trade, and he is the best fellow who can tell the biggest lie—make men believe and practise the greatest deception” (p. 158).[134]
The Methodists having selected Lower Oregon as the field of their labors, the Presbyterians chose the upper or eastern portion of the territory. They arrived in 1836, three in number, afterwards increased to twelve, and backed up by the Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Dr. Marius Whitman settled at Wailatpu
among the Cayuses and Walla Wallas, and Messrs. H. H. Spaulding and W. H. Gray at Lapwai, with the Nez Perces. In 1838, the Spokane mission was established by Messrs. Walker and Ellis. Their prospects of success were at first most brilliant. The savages received them kindly and listened to them attentively. “There was no want of ardor in the Presbyterian missionaries,” says The River of the West. “They applied themselves in earnest to the work they had undertaken. They were diligent in their efforts to civilize and christianize their Indians.” But they made a fatal mistake at the very beginning, which not only reflects on their personal honesty, but shows that they knew nothing of the character of the people they came to instruct. Mr. John Toupin, who was for many years interpreter at Fort Walla Walla, gave, in 1848, the following account of the establishment of those missions:
“I was there when Mr. Parker, in 1835, came to select places for Presbyterian missions among the Cayuses and Nez Perces, and to ask lands for these missions. He employed me as interpreter in his negotiations with the Indians on that occasion. Mr. Pombrun, the gentleman then in charge of the fort, accompanied him to the Cayuses and the Nez Perces. Mr. Parker, in company with Mr. Pombrun, an American, and myself, went first to the Cayuses upon the lands called Wailatpu, that belonged to the three chiefs—Splitted Lip, or Yomtipi; Red Cloak, or Waptachtakamal; and Tilankaikt. Having met them at that place, he told them that he was coming to select a place to build a preaching-house, to teach them how to live, and to teach school to their children; that he would not come himself to establish the mission, but a doctor or a medicine-man would come in his place; that the doctor would be the chief of the mission, and would come in the following spring. ‘I come to select a place for a mission,’ said he, ‘but I do not intend to take your lands for nothing. After the doctor is come,
there will come every year a big ship loaded with goods to be divided among the Indians. These goods will not be sold, but given to you. The missionaries will bring you ploughs and hoes to teach you how to cultivate the land, and they will not sell, but give them to you.’
“From the Cayuses Mr. Parker went to the Nez Perces, about one hundred and twenty-five miles distant, on the lands of Old Button, on a small creek which empties into the Clearwater, seven or eight miles from the actual mission, and there he made the same promises to the Indians as at Wailatpu. ‘Next spring there will come a missionary to establish himself here and take a piece of land; but he will not take it for nothing; you shall be paid for it every year: this is the American fashion.’ In the following year, 1836, Dr. Whitman arrived among the Cayuses and began to build. The Indians did not stop him, as they expected to be paid as they said.
“In the summer of the year 1837, Splitted Lip asked him where the goods which he had promised him were; whether he would pay him, or whether he wanted to steal his lands. He told him that, if he did not want to pay him, he had better go off immediately, for he did not want to give his lands for nothing.”[135]
But the doctor and his co-laborers did not pay for the lands, nor indeed fulfil any of the promises of Mr. Parker, and thus the expected neophytes received their first lesson in duplicity, which eventually destroyed all confidence in the honesty and truthfulness of their teachers, and led directly to the massacre of Whitman and some of his companions, and to the total destruction of the Presbyterian missions. This latter event occurred late in 1847. Let us see what had been done in the eleven previous years by the agents of the Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. In 1842, they had but three stations. “At each of these,” says The River of the West, “there was a small body of land under cultivation, a few cattle
and hogs, a flouring and saw mill, and a blacksmith’s shop.” In 1843, Mr. Spaulding writes to Dr. White, the Sub-Indian Agent: “But two natives have as yet been admitted into the church. Some ten or twelve others give pleasing evidence of having been born again.”[136] It seems, then, that it took twelve missionaries seven years to convert two savages, at an expense of over forty thousand dollars for one year at least! Can the English Protestant mission for converting the Hebrews in Jerusalem show any return more preposterous than this?
But the years intervening between this time and their entire discontinuance show no converts at all. Business was entirely suspended, as far as spiritual affairs were concerned. Mr. Thomas McKay, an intimate friend of Whitman, under date September 11, 1848, says, “The doctor often told me that for a couple of years he had ceased to teach the Indians, because they would not listen to him”; and John Baptist Gervais about the same time assures us that “Mr. Spaulding told me himself, last fall, that for three or four years back he had ceased entirely to teach the Indians because they refused to hear him”—a fact which that unscrupulous apostle corroborated in a conversation with Dr. Ponjade, in the preceding August. “The Indians,” he said, “are getting worse every day for two or three years back; they are threatening to turn us out of the missions. A few days ago, they tore down my fences, and I do not know what the Missionary Board of New York means to do. It is a fact that we are doing no good: when the emigration passes, the Indians run off to trade, and return worse than when we came among them.”[137] Even as
early as 1839, a missionary of the Spokanes, writing to Dr. Whitman, said that the failure of that mission was so strongly impressed on his mind, he felt it necessary “to have cane in hand, and as much as one shoe on, ready for a move.” “I see,” he adds, “nothing but the power of God that can save us.” When we consider this condition of affairs in connection with the brutal massacre at Wailatpu by Dr. Whitman’s immediate neighbors and even some members of his household and congregation, at a time of profound peace, we can form some adequate idea of the benefits of the “progress and civilization of the Indians under their [Presbyterian] charge.” Will the United States Senate, in its laudable search after information, consult some of the authorities, who are with one exception Protestant, which we have quoted?
The Catholic missions may be said to have commenced in 1838. In that year, two Catholic priests passed Walla Walla on their way from Canada to Fort Vancouver. In 1839 and 1840, one of them, Father Demers, occasionally visited Walla Walla, for a short time, to give instruction to the Indians, many of whom were in the habit of visiting him, particularly the Cayuses and Nez Perces at the fort. This presence excited the wrath of Dr. Whitman, and he presumed so far as to reprimand in severe language the gentleman in charge of the post. “From the time the Jesuits arrived,” says Gray, “his own [H. H. Spaulding’s] pet Indians had turned Catholics, and commenced a quarrel with him. These facts seemed to annoy him, and led him to adopt a course opposed by Smith, Gray, and Rodgers.” The visits of the Catholic missionaries were, however, few and far between, till the 5th of September, 1847,
when the Rt. Rev. Bishop A. M. A. Blanchet arrived at Fort Walla Walla, accompanied by the Superior of the Oblates and two other clergymen, to establish permanent missions in Eastern Oregon. It was the design of the bishop to locate a mission on the lands of Towatowe (Young Chief), a Catholic Indian, who had offered him his own house for that purpose. The Young Chief, however, being absent hunting, Dr. Blanchet was delayed at the fort, longer than he anticipated, and while there was visited by Protestant missionaries and Indian chiefs alike. The former treated him with great incivility and disrespect. Dr. Whitman, we are told by an eye-witness, “made a furious charge against the Catholics, accusing them of having persecuted Protestants, and even of having shed their blood wherever they had prevailed. He said he did not like Catholics; ... that he should oppose the missionaries to the extent of his power.... He spoke against the Catholic Ladder (a picture explaining the principal points of Catholic faith), and said that he would cover it with blood to show the persecution of Protestants by Catholics. He refused to sell provisions to the bishop, and protested that he would not assist the missionaries unless he saw them in starvation.”[138] The temper of the savages was milder than their would-be evangelizers. On the 26th of October, Young Chief came to the fort, and asked for a priest to be sent to teach his young people. He repeated the offer of his house, but suggested as a substitute the lands of his relative Tilokaikt, upon which Dr. Whitman was settled. On November 4, the four chiefs of the Cayuses assembled at Walla Walla, and after a long “talk” agreed to let the bishop
have a site for a mission and as much ground to cultivate as was necessary to support the priests. The bishop “told them,” says Father Brouillet, “that he would not make presents to the Indians; that he would give them nothing for the land he asked; that in case they worked for him he would pay them for their work and no more.” The author just quoted was sent among the Cayuses to select a proper site, but, not finding one suitable, accepted Young Chief’s offer, a camp fully twenty-five miles from Dr. Whitman’s residence, in the midst of another tribe altogether. As one of the many traits of Christian charity which distinguishes the Catholic missionaries in every part of the world, it may be mentioned that, during the conference at the fort, one of the chiefs spoke of Dr. Whitman in very harsh terms, accusing him of dishonesty and mercenary motives. Bishop Blanchet reproved him instantly, sternly telling him that the doctor was a good man, and that he, the chief, had a bad heart to say so; and when Father Brouillet was offered, by Tilokaikt, Whitman’s own mission for Catholic purposes for nothing, he positively and peremptorily declined it. And yet Pub. Doc. No. 37 would have us believe that the Catholics coveted Whitman’s Station, and were resolved to have it at any cost. On November 27, the bishop, with his secretary and Father Brouillet, proceeded to the new station at Umatilla. On the day following, Sunday, they were visited by Whitman, and on Monday by Spaulding, who remained for supper, both these gentleman, it seems, having modified their views during the previous two months’ intercourse with the missionaries. It was on this latter day, between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, that Whitman and his companions were murdered. The
account of that horrible event, as related by Father Brouillet, who was on the ground two days after, is still highly interesting. In a letter to Colonel Gilliam, three months later, when the facts were fresh in his memory, and every resident of the neighborhood was in a position to disprove anything he might say that was false, he writes:
“Before leaving Fort Walla Walla, it had been decided that, after visiting the sick people of my mission on the Umatilla, I should go and visit those of Tilokaikt’s camp, for the purpose of baptizing the infants, and such dying adults as might desire this favor; and the doctor and Mr. Spaulding having informed me that there were many sick persons at their missions, I was confirmed in the resolution, and made preparations to go as soon as possible.
“After having finished in baptizing the infants and dying adults of my mission, I left on Tuesday, the 30th of November, late in the afternoon, for Tilokaikt’s camp, where I arrived between seven and eight o’clock in the evening. It is impossible to conceive my surprise and consternation when, upon my arrival, I learned that the Indians the day before had massacred the doctor and his wife, with the greater part of the Americans at the mission. I passed the night without scarcely closing my eyes. Early next morning I baptized three sick children, two of whom died soon after, and then hastened to the scene of death to offer to the widows and orphans all the assistance in my power. I found five or six women and over thirty children in a condition deplorable beyond description. Some had lost their husbands, and others their fathers, whom they had seen massacred before their eyes, and were expecting every moment to share the same fate. The sight of those persons caused me to shed tears, which, however, I was obliged to conceal, for I was, the greater part of the day, in the presence of the murderers, and closely watched by them, and, if I had shown too marked an interest in behalf of the sufferers, it would only have endangered their lives and mine; these, therefore, entreated me to be on my guard. After the first few
words that could be exchanged under the circumstances, I inquired after the victims, and was told that they were yet unburied. Joseph Stainfield, a Frenchman, who was in the service of Dr. Whitman, and had been spared by the Indians, was engaged in washing the corpses, but, being alone, he was unable to bury them. I resolved to go and assist him, so as to render to those unfortunate victims the last service in my power to offer them.”
The reverend father then goes on to relate how, after comforting the women and children as well as he could, and having been told by the chief “to say to them that they need fear nothing, they shall be taken care of and well treated,” he set out toward his mission, in order to intercept Spaulding and warn him of his danger. He was accompanied by his interpreter, and closely followed by a son of the chief, who, it afterward appeared, was going to his uncle Camastilo to acquaint him of the slaughter. His meeting with Spaulding is graphic, and, if not for the hideous surroundings, would be amusing. He says:
“In a few minutes after, while they were thus engaged in smoking, I saw Mr. Spaulding coming toward me. In a moment he was at my side, taking me by the hand and asking for news. ‘Have you been to the doctor’s?’ he inquired. ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘What news?’ ‘Sad news.’ ‘Is any person dead?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Who is dead—is it one of the doctor’s children?’ (He had left two of them very sick.) ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Who, then, is dead?’ I hesitated to tell. ‘Wait a moment,’ I said, ‘I cannot tell you now.’ While Mr. Spaulding was asking me those questions, I had spoken to my interpreter, telling him to entreat the Indian in my name not to kill Mr. Spaulding, which I begged of him as a special favor, and hoped that he would not refuse it to me. I was waiting for his answer, and did not wish to relate the disaster to Mr. Spaulding before getting it, for fear he might by his manner discover to the Indian what I had told him, for
the least motion like flight would have cost him his life, and probably exposed mine also. The son of Tilokaikt, after hesitating some moments, replied that he could not take it upon himself to save Mr. Spaulding, but that he would go back and consult the other Indians, and so he started back immediately to his camp. I then availed myself of this absence to satisfy the anxiety of Mr. Spaulding. I related to him what had passed. ‘The doctor is dead,’ said I; ‘the Indians have killed him, together with his wife and eight other Americans, on Monday last, the 29th, and I have buried them before leaving to-day.’ ‘The Indians have killed the doctor—they will kill me also if I go to the camp!’ ‘I fear it very much,’ said I. ‘What, then, shall I do?’ ‘I know not. I have told you what has happened. Decide now for yourself what you had best do. I have no advice to give you in regard to that.’ ‘Why has that Indian started back?’ he inquired. ‘I begged him to spare your life,’ said I, ‘and he answered me that he could not take it upon himself to do so, but that he would go and take the advice of the other Indians about it; that is the reason why he started back.’ Mr. Spaulding seemed frightened and discouraged. ‘Is it possible! is it possible!’ he exclaimed several times. ‘They will certainly kill me.’ And he was unable to come to any decision. ‘But what could have prompted the Indians to this?’ he inquired. ‘I know not,’ said I; ‘but be quick and decide, you have no time to lose. If the Indians should resolve not to spare your life, they will be here very soon, as we are only about three miles from their camp. ‘But where shall I go?’ ‘I know not; you know the country better than I. All I know is that the Indians say the order to kill all Americans has been sent in all directions.’ Mr. Spaulding then resolved to fly. His asked me if I were willing to take charge of some loose horses he was driving before him. I told him I could not, for fear of becoming suspicious to the Indians. I told him, however, that if the interpreter was willing to take them under his charge at his own risk, he was perfectly at liberty to do so. To this the interpreter agreed. I gave Mr. Spaulding what provisions I had left, and hastened to take leave of him, wishing him with all my heart a happy escape, and promising to pray for him.... The interpreter had not left
Mr. Spaulding (after pointing out a byroad) more than twenty minutes, when he saw three armed Cayuses riding hastily toward him in pursuit of Mr. Spaulding. Upon coming up to the interpreter, they seemed much displeased that I had warned Mr. Spaulding of their intentions, and thereby furnished him an opportunity to escape.’ The priest ought to have minded his own business, and not to have interfered with ours,’ they said in an angry tone, and started immediately in pursuit of him.”[139]
This Spaulding escaped to tell the tale, and to traduce the character of the priest that saved his life at the risk of his own. At first, he was inclined to acknowledge the obligation, for in a letter to his “reverend and dear friend,” as he styles Bishop Blanchet, eight days after, he writes: “The hand of the merciful God brought me to my family after six days and nights from the time my dear friend furnished me with provisions and I escaped from the Indians.” This effort of gratitude was, however, too much for him to sustain, and, accordingly, we find published in The Oregon American (p. 13) the following choice specimen of bigotry and base ingratitude, “worse than the sin of witchcraft.” He says:
“It has been said by some of my friends in this country that they felt greatly mortified to see me in the dust at the bishop’s feet begging for my life.... This is not the first time that Protestants (that is, heretics) have lain prostrate at the feet of the Pope of Rome. I saw my life, under God, in the hands of the bishop and the priests. I had a right to ask it again. I seemed to see the hands of these priests wet with the blood of our associates.... I stopped not to ask whose hands placed the bishop’s foot upon my neck, the lives of so many human beings were worth the struggle.”
Can the force of prejudice and deception go further than this? Here is a man, who, if not an open enemy
of the missionaries, was certainly a violent opponent, whose life was saved by one of them at a most critical moment at imminent danger to his own, who was shown the pathway by which he might escape the fury of the savages whose hatred he had awakened by long years of injustice, and who was even supplied with food from the poor priest’s scrip, turning round on his benefactors when he attained a place of safety, and vilifying the church and religion to whose lesson of charity he owed his miserable existence. This is the man, too, upon whose authority the “Christian Associations of Oregon” have undertaken to brand the heroic priests of that section as instigators of murder; and who has undertaken to inform the Senate, and provide Mr. Delano with matters for history “in a more permanent form.”
And here it may be well to dispose of some of the minor charges. Pub. Doc. No. 37, at page 30, says of the scenes of the Whitman massacre:
“They [the Indian children] leaped and screamed for joy, throwing handfuls of blood around, drinking down the dying agonies of their victims as a precious draught. These blood-stained little savages were to receive the sacred ordinance of baptism a few hours after, at the hands of the priest of God—the mangled bodies yet lying unburied around, the food of dogs and wolves by night, and of hogs and vultures by day, seeming to pay down to the Indians for what they had done.”
We are not aware that in the whole course of Protestant history there is to be found a more deliberate, cool, and atrocious tissue of falsehoods than the above. Two days, not a few hours, after the murder, three sick children were baptized, of whom two were so ill that they died the same day. Are those some of the children who leaped and screamed for joy?
The baptism took place two miles from Whitman’s Station, so that the bodies of the slain could not well have been lying around. The dogs and wolves, hogs and vultures, are purely the creation of the Rev. H. H. Spaulding’s imagination, and would, in vulgar parlance, be styled “piling on the agony.” Before the arrival of Father Brouillet, Joseph Stainfield had already washed the corpses, and, with the assistance of the good priest, they were buried. The insinuation in the last line is worthy of Spaulding, and shows to what extremes a man will go whose sense of truth and even decency has become completely blunted.
Another charge against the missionaries is that they acted inhumanly with the captives, and that Father Brouillet, who promised to return to them, neglected to do so. It is true he did not do so, and the prisoners may thank Mr. Spaulding for his not returning. Had he not been as solicitous about saving that individual’s life, and thereby enable him to go down to the grave at an old age with a load of falsehood and forgeries on his soul, he would never have incurred the ill-feeling of the Indians of Wailatpu, or be himself kept a prisoner in Young Chief’s tent for two or three weeks. But his thoughts and those of his fellow-missionaries were with the unfortunates, and his every effort was used, and successfully too, for their liberation. While Spaulding, from his mission with the Nez Perces, was writing lying letters to his “reverend and dear friend,” Bishop Blanchet, soliciting his good offices with the Indians with regard to the captives, amongst whom was his own daughter, that ecclesiastic was calling around him the chiefs of the Cayuses, admonishing them to treat their captives kindly, promising to write to the American governor for terms of peace, and attending a council at
Fort Walla Walla, at which the Indians consented and actually did liberate the prisoners, the ransom being paid by the agents of the much abused Hudson Bay Company. Spaulding himself was then virtually a prisoner among the Nez Perces, with whom he lived eleven years, and “was very much beloved,” if we may believe his own statement.
We now come to what we may be permitted to call the first grand falsehood, as set forth in Pub. Doc. No. 37, for the information of the Senate and the benefit of history, namely, that the Whitman murderers were instigated by the “Jesuits.” This calumny is repeated in several places and in many forms in this extraordinary public document, and may be supposed to be crystallized in the two following paragraphs:
“When the Jesuits and English had, by means of Indian runners, excited the surrounding tribes to butcher the Protestant missionaries and American emigrants at Wailatpu, and to exterminate the American settlements on the Pacific, the Nez Perces refused to join them, and rushed at once to the defence of their beloved teacher, Mrs. Spaulding, and rescued her and her infants from a band of forty of the murderers; then, second, fled to the scene of the eight days’ carnage, and by their influence stopped the bloody work of the Jesuits.” (Resolutions adopted by the Pleasant Butte Baptist Church of Linn Co., Oregon, Oct. 22, 1869.)
“This Brouilette [Brouillet], it is proved in part by his own testimony, was present at the massacre, doing nothing to save the victims, but baptizing the children of the murdering Indians, and otherwise stimulating them to their work of death.” (Report of the Committee of the Presbytery of Steuben, adopted by the Christian Associations of Oregon, 1869.)
Surely this is history run mad. In fact, so gross are the misstatements that we are inclined to think that Spaulding either forged the signatures or interpolated
the resolutions of the associations—a proceeding which, it will appear further on, he was perfectly capable of doing. Now, it is well known, and stated even by Spaulding (Pub. Doc. No. 37), that the so-called “Jesuits,” namely, Bishop Blanchet and his priests, had only been in that part of the country a short time—Father Brouillet says two months, but Spaulding reduces it to six weeks; that no Catholic mission had been established within hundreds of miles of Whitman’s Station till two days previous to the mission, when one was commenced at Umatilla, twenty-five miles distant, among a tribe of the Cayuses, who had no act or part in the crime; that there never was a Catholic missionary, Jesuit or otherwise, in the camps of Tilokaikt, where Whitman resided till two days after the massacre, but once, and that for a short time when Father Brouillet was invited by the chief to go and procure a site for a mission, in which he failed; and, finally, that the Indians who did the bloody deed were near neighbors of the doctor, the worst being a member of his household; and that every one of them were Protestants, as Spaulding himself partly admits[140] (Ex. Doc. No. 37). Even the Rev. Gustavus Hines, who is named as one of the
assistants in the compilation of this document, says in his History of Oregon, in describing a council of chiefs in 1843: “Tilokaikt, a Cayuse chief, rose and said, ‘What do you read the laws for before we take them? We do not take the laws because Tanitan says so. He is a Catholic, and as a people we do not follow his worship!” The story of Father Brouillet having been on the scene of massacre stimulating the Indians in their work of death is a poor fabrication, for the doctor visited the bishop and his two priests at Umatilla, twenty-five miles distant, late on Sunday, the 28th, and on the 29th, the day of the slaughter, Spaulding himself supped with them at the same place. The ridiculous reference to the Nez Perces, under the supposition that they were Protestants, is simply absurd. The fact is that Spaulding says, in his letter to his “reverend and dear friend” the bishop, the Nez Perces only promised to protect him and the American settlers if troops were not sent against the Cayuses, and that they demanded and received from Mr. Ogden, of Walla Walla, clothing, ammunition, and tobacco before they would release their “beloved teacher,” her husband and infants. The only Nez Perces who fled to the scene to stop “the bloody work of the Jesuits” were two messengers of that tribe who bore his treacherous letter to the bishop, begging him to assure the Cayuses that he would use every effort to prevent the troops from being sent against them, and which he afterwards declared was meant to deceive both the bishop and the Indians.[141] No sooner, however, was he out of danger than he used his best efforts to bring on a war. “I recollect distinctly,” says Major Magone, “that he was not in favor of killing all the
Cayuses, for he gave me the names of four or five that he knew to be friendly, and another whom I marked as questionable: the balance, if I am not very much mistaken, he would have to share one fate.” Truly, this was strange advice from a minister of the Gospel of peace, and from one who wished the bishop to assure the Indians “that we do not wish Americans to come from below to avenge our wrongs,” etc.
But apart from the credibility of the witness Spaulding, and the impossibility of the Catholic missionaries stirring up the Protestant Indians to the work of death, even if they so desired, not to speak of their early, continuous, and indignant denials of every statement and assertion put forth by the Oregon fanatics, we have the evidence of several persons, all Protestants we are inclined to believe, who were either in the neighborhood at the time, or arrived soon after. R. T. Lockwood, an old resident of Oregon and a prominent contributor to the press, relates the following conversation which he had in 1851 with one of the Indians who was a spectator of the murder:
“Q. Do the Indians generally want the Catholic priests among them, and, if so, why do they prefer them to such men as Dr. Whitman?
“A. No, not generally; yet a considerable number do, and prefer them because they do not try to get our land away from us.
“Q. Did the priests that came among you, a little before the massacre, encourage the killing of Dr. Whitman and the others?
“A. No. The killing of Dr. Whitman was resolved on before the priests came.
“Q. Are you a Catholic Indian?
“A. No, sir.”
Some time after, Mr. Lockwood met a Mrs. Foster, one of the survivors. “I asked her,” he says, “if she
thought the priest had anything to do with the massacre, and she said she did not think he did, as he appeared very much pained, and was very kind and tender towards the survivors. I asked her, also, if she thought that the priest did all he safely could, and she answered, ‘I do.’” This impartial and well-informed gentleman winds up his letter thus: “Suffice it to say that, in all I ever heard said in regard to this lamentable massacre (and it has been much) prior to the last two years, there was not the slightest intimation of you or any other Catholic priest being implicated, or in any way responsible therefor.”[142]
“Why is the Catholic exempt from danger? Why can the Hudson Bay Company employee remain amid these scenes of blood and Indian vengeance against the white race, at peace, undisturbed, and, what is more loathsome, neutral in such a conflict?” asks the Hon. Elwood Evans of Spaulding, in 1868. The answer is simple. Because the Catholic priests treat the Indians with uniform kindness and justice; because they neither deceive them with false promises nor appropriate their lands and labor without payment, and because, being ministers of peace, they are opposed to strife; all of which Whitman, Spaulding, and his missionary companions did not and were not. And this brings us to the real cause of the massacre. For the sake of the Senate which desires information, and for Mr. Delano’s future history, we will give a few extracts from authorities which, if at all prejudiced, would be on the side of the Protestant view:
“‘I came to select a place for a mission,’ said he, ‘but I do not intend to
take your lands for nothing. After the doctor is come, there will come every year a big ship, loaded with goods to be divided among the Indians. These goods will not be sold, but given to you. The missionaries will bring you ploughs and hoes, to teach you to cultivate the land, and they will not sell but give them to you.’... And there [among the Nez Perces] he made the same promises to the Indians as at Wailatpu.” (Mr. John Toupin’s Statement, in 1848, of the Foundation of the Presbyterian Missions by Mr. Parker, in 1835.)
“Two years ago. 1846, a Cayuse came to my house in the Willamette settlement, and stopped with me over two weeks. During that time he often spoke of Dr. Whitman, complaining that he possessed the lands of the Indians, on which he was raising a great deal of wheat, which he was selling to the Americans, without giving them anything; that he had a mill upon their lands, and that they had to pay him for grinding their wheat, a big horse for twenty sacks. He said they told him to leave, but that he would not listen to them.” (Ib.)
“A man of easy, don’t-care habits, that could become all things to all men, and yet a sincere and earnest man, speaking his mind before he thought the second time, giving his views on all subjects without much consideration, correcting them when good reasons were presented, yet, when fixed in the pursuit of an object, adhering to it with unflinching tenacity. A stranger would consider him fickle and stubborn.” (Character of Dr. Whitman by a brother missionary, Rev. W. H. Gray.)
“The Americans had done them much harm. Years before, had not one of their missionaries suffered several of their people, and the son of their chiefs, to be slain in his company, yet himself escaped? Had not the son of another chief (Elijah), who had gone to California to buy cattle, been killed by Americans for no fault of his own?... So far as regarded the missionaries, Dr. Whitman and his associates, they were divided, yet so many looked on the doctor as an agent in promoting the settlement of the country with whites, it was thought best to drive him from the country, together with all the missionaries, several years before. Dr. Whitman had known that the Indians were displeased with his settlement among them. They had told him of
it; they had treated him with violence, they had attempted to outrage his wife, had burned his property, and had several times warned him to leave their country, or they should kill him.” (River of the West, p. 400.)
“The fulfilment of the laws which the agent recommended for their adoption, ... occasioned suspicions in the minds of the Indians generally that the whites designed the ultimate subjugation of their tribes. They saw in the laws they had adopted a deep-laid scheme of the whites to destroy them and take possession of their country. The arrival of a large party of emigrants about this time, and the sudden departure of Dr. Whitman to the United States, with the avowed intention of bringing back with him as many as he could enlist for Oregon, served to hasten them to the above conclusions.... The great complaint of the Indians was that the Boston people [Americans] designed to take away their lands, and reduce them to slavery.” (Rev. Gustavus Hines, D.D., assistant of Spaulding, in Pub. Doc. No. 37, on the Nez Perces in 1843, History of Oregon, p. 143.)
“They [the Indians] were demanding unreasonable pay for their lands upon which the stations were erected, and paying but little or no attention to their American teachers.” (Gray’s History of Oregon, p. 365.)
“The fact is also shown that, as far back as 1835, the Indians west of the Rocky Mountains protested against the taking away of their lands by the white races, and this was one of the alleged causes of the murder of Dr. Whitman.” (J. Ross Browne, Special Agent of the Treasury, Report to the Com. of Indian Affairs, Dec. 4, 1857.)
Thus we find that, whatever credit may be claimed for Dr. Whitman as a colonist, his course toward the people whom he was sent to evangelize was anything but just or Christian; for he not only did not pay for his own land, but helped others to steal also, and he admits himself that for some years he had utterly neglected the spiritual and mental duties of his mission. But there were other and not less potent causes at work. Of his “esteemed friend Dr. Whitman,”
Sir James Douglass, chief factor of the Hudson Bay Company, writes on December 9, ten days after the massacre:
“He hoped that time and instruction would produce a change of mind—a better state of feeling toward the mission, and he might have lived to have seen his hopes realized, had not the measles and dysentery, following in the train of immigrants from the United States, made frightful ravages this year in the upper country. Many Indians have been carried off through the violence of the disease, and others through their own imprudence. The Cayuse Indians of Wailatpu, being sufferers in this general calamity, were incensed against Dr. Whitman for not exerting his supposed supernatural power in saving their lives. They carried this absurdity beyond the point of folly. Their superstitious minds became possessed of the horrible suspicion that he was giving poison to the sick instead of wholesome medicine, with the view of working the destruction of the tribe, his former cruelty probably adding strength to their suspicions. Still, some of the reflecting had confidence in Dr. Whitman’s integrity, and it was agreed to test the effects of the medicine he had furnished on three of their people, one of whom was said to be in perfect health. They unfortunately died, and from that moment it was resolved to destroy the mission. It was immediately after burying the remains of these three persons that they repaired to the mission and murdered every man found there.”
Several other contemporary writers confirm this calm statement of events, which in themselves were enough to drive ignorant and desperate savages (for it must be borne in mind that Dr. Whitman had given up instructing them for some years to attend to his wheat and horses) to commit any act of murder or rapine. To show that the “horrible suspicion” of having been poisoned was not a mere groundless suspicion on the part of the Indians, we present the following testimony:
“I spent the winter of 1846 in Dr. Whitman’s employment. I generally worked at the saw-mill. During the time I was there, I observed that Dr. Whitman was in the habit of poisoning wolves. I did not see him put the poison in the baits for the wolves; but two of his young men of the house, by his order, were poisoning pieces of meat, and distributing them in the places where the wolves were in the habit of coming, at a short distance around the establishment of the doctor. The doctor once gave me some arsenic to poison the wolves that were around the saw-mill.... Some Indians who happened to pass there took the meat and ate it; three of them were very sick, and were near dying.... Mr. Gray, who was then [1840] living with the doctor, offered us as many melons to eat as we liked, but he warned us at the same time not to eat them indiscriminately, as some of them were poisoned. ‘The Indians,’ said he, ‘are continually stealing our melons. To stop them, we have put a little poison on the bigger ones, in order that the Indians who will eat them might be a little sick.’” (Statement of John Young, corroborated by Augustine Raymond.)
In addition to these acts of imprudence, the doctor, it seems, had earned for himself an unenviable unpopularity. He was constantly extorting overpay in horses from them, and threatening them with soldiers and emigrants if they refused it. After having a quarrel with them on one occasion, “during which they insulted him, covered him with mud,” and even attempted his life, “he started for the United States, telling the Indians that he was going to see the great chief of the Americans, and that when he would return he would bring with him many people to chastise them; the Indians had been looking to his return with great fear and anxiety.”[143] At another time, in the fall of 1847, he said to the Indians at Walla Walla in the presence of several white men, “Since you are so wicked, such robbers, we shall send
for troops to chastise you, and next fall we will see here five hundred dragoons, who will take care of you.” But even Doctor Whitman, “fickle and obstinate” as he was, could not entirely overlook the dangers that beset him for so many years, and at the solicitation of his friend had been preparing to leave his station long before the arrival of the Catholic missionaries. Mr. Thomas McKay, whom the doctor had invited to stop the winter of 1847-8 with him for protection, says, “He told me repeatedly, during the last two years especially, that he wished to leave, as he knew the Indians were ill-disposed toward him, and that it was dangerous for him to stay there; but that he wished all the chiefs to tell him to go away, in order to excuse himself to the Board of Foreign Missions.” Dangerous and fatal mistake, which cost the lives of thirteen innocent people, and closed the unfortunate man’s earthly career!
Now for the affair of the young woman Miss Bewley, who is described in Pub. Doc. No. 37, p. 35, indifferently as an “amiable young saint,” a “dear girl,” and “an angel.” It is charged that, when Five Crows demanded her for his wife, and she refusing to go with him, the bishops and priests urged her to go, and even thrust her out-of-doors when she refused. So little credence was given this specific calumny, for many years after the alleged occurrence, that the only mention we find made of it in The Murder of Dr. Whitman is the following paragraph:
“Before taking leave of the chiefs, the bishop said to them all publicly, as he had also done several times privately, that those who had taken American girls should give them up immediately. And then all entreated Five Crows to give up the one he had taken, but to no purpose.”
Now let us hear Father Brouillet’s account of the affair in contradiction to Miss Bewley’s deposition:
“We did,” says the reverend gentleman, “all that charity could claim, and even more than prudence seemed to permit. We kept her for seventeen days in our house, provided for all her wants, and treated her well, and if she had minded us, and heeded our advice and entreaties, she would never have been subjected to that Indian. When she came first to our house, and told us that Five Crows had sent for her to be his wife, we asked her what she wanted to do. Did she want to go with him, or not? She said she did not want to go with him. ‘Stay with us, then, if you like; we will do for you what we can,’ was our offer. When the evening came, the Indian chief called for her. The writer then requested his interpreter to tell him that she did not want to be his wife, and that, therefore, he did not want her to go with him. The interpreter, who was an Indian, allied by marriage to the Cayuses, and knew the chiefs disposition well, would not provoke his anger, and refused to interpret. The writer, then making use of a few Indian words he had picked up during the few days he had been there, and with the aid of signs, spoke to the Indian himself, and succeeded in making him understand what he meant. The Indian rose furiously and without uttering a word went away. The young woman then got frightened, and wanted to go for fear he might come back and do us all an injury. The writer tried to quiet her, and insisted that she should remain at our house, but to no avail; she must go, and off she went. The Indian, still in his fit of anger, refused to receive her, and sent her back. She remained with us three or four days undisturbed; until one evening, without any violence on the part of the Indian, or without advising with us, she went with him to his lodge. She came back the next morning, went off again in the evening, and continued so, without being forced by the Indian, and part of the time going by herself, until at last she was told to select between the Indian’s lodge and our house, as such a loose way of acting could not be suffered any longer. That was the first and only time that she offered any
resistance to the will of the Indian; but, indeed, her resistance was very slight, if we can believe her own statement.”
This is a very different account from that sworn to by Miss Bewley, but written by Spaulding, as he says himself, Ex. Doc. No. 37, p. 27: “I would go to an individual, and take down in writing what he or shete knew, and then go before a magistrate, and the individual would make an oath to the statement, the officer certifying.” There is no mention that the parties were permitted to read what their amanuensis took down, and all who are acquainted with such ex-parte depositions know how easily it would be to alter their sense and meaning by an unscrupulous person—which we are about to show Spaulding to be. In this very statement there are two interpolations, one of eight lines on page 35 of Ex. Doc. No. 37, beginning with the words “I arose,” and one of six on the following page, at “The next day,” which materially alter the whole meaning of the document. This alteration of a sworn statement by any but the affiant is at common law forgery, and ought to entitle the person who makes it to the delicate attention of the prosecuting attorney of his county. Whether the saint and angel, Miss Bewley, is now aware of the forgery connected with her name we know not, but we trust that the Senate will make a note of it for the benefit of future historians. But Spaulding, who is described by his co-missionary Gray as “quite impulsive and bitter in his denunciations of a real or supposed enemy,” in endeavoring to make out a case, is not content with altering one affidavit. That of Mr. Osborne (Ex. Doc. No. 37, p. 32) is also materially changed in several places from the original, and the official reports of Mr. McLane (Ex. Doc. p. 33) and of Dr. White are
doctored in a manner that we venture to say would render it difficult for the writers themselves to recognize them. Even the plain statements of The Murder of Dr. Whitman are garbled in a most palpable and scandalous manner.
As to the other auxiliary charges against the Catholic missionaries, and the answers of Abernethy and a few others to questions propounded by Spaulding, we do not consider them worthy of serious attention. They are all directly or indirectly the creatures of Spaulding’s fertile imagination, who, if not crazy as Colonel Gilliam said, has allowed his hatred of Catholicity to carry him down to fearful depths of crime, to calumny, falsehood, and forgery. His motives are apparent, the gratification of his lust for revenge, and his hatred of our faith; that of the associations who have signed his outrageous statements is the present flourishing existence of the Catholic missions in every part of Oregon; and the end proposed is to compass their destruction by appealing to the religious prejudices of the authorities at Washington. We have too much confidence in the wisdom and good sense of the Executive and Congress to suppose that they will be influenced by such inflammatory appeals—bearing on their face the palpable impress of dishonesty and prejudice—and attempts to disturb the good fathers in their labor of love, as well as of hardships and suffering; and we expect soon to hear of those fanatics receiving a fitting rebuke in our Senate for attempting to make that august body the vehicle of perpetuating the vilest sort of falsehoods and slanders against the Catholics of this country.
[130] Ex. Doc. No. 37, U. S. Senate, XLIst Cong., IIId Session. 1870-1.
[131] Victor’s The River of the West, p. 400.
[132] Works of Stephen Olin, vol. ii. pp. 427, 428.
[133] Gray’s Hist. of Oregon, pp. 231, 246.
[134] History of Oregon. By G. Hines.
[135] Murder of Dr. Whitman, pp. 23, 24.
[136] Gray’s History of Oregon, p. 235.
[137] Murder of Dr. Whitman, p. 89.
[138] Murder of Dr. Whitman, p. 46.
[139] Murder of Dr. Whitman, pp. 53-55.
[140] The five Cayuses who were hung in Oregon City, June 3, 1850, as accomplices in the massacre, were all Protestants, and remained so till they received their death sentence. All the others who are known as murderers, among whom were Lumsuky, Tamahas, and the two sons of Tilokaikt, were also Protestants. Joseph Stainfield, Jo Davis, and the other half-breed, who, it is said, plundered the dead, if anything, were certainly not Catholics. Three of the condemned on the morning of the execution solemnly declared that the Catholic missionaries had nothing whatever to do with the murder. The following letter to the Bishop of Walla Walla, from the Archbishop of Oregon City, will be found interesting:
Oregon City, June 2, 1850.
The supposed Cayuse murderers will be executed to-morrow. They have abandoned Dr. Whitman’s religion and have become Catholics. I am preparing them for baptism and for death.
F. N. Blanchet,
Archbishop of Oregon City.
[141] Oregon American.
[142] Letter of R. T. Lockwood to Very Rev. J. B. A. Brouillet, V.G., Sept. 29, 1871.
[143] Toupin’s statement.
AFFIRMATIONS.
“Why does man go about organizing systems, when he himself must be reorganized?”
“The thing to be done will not unite the doers.”
“When man forgets what he is, he soon is put into a state of uneasiness, and made to suffer in pain what was designed for him to be pleasure.”
“We are always learning the way that heaven acts, but are very shy to invite it to act upon us, and are very unwilling to submit to the preparatory process.”
“Self-improvement by the selfish spirit is the most deceitful of all deceits.”
“While you persevere in washing a man’s face with dirty water, it will never be clean; you must get pure water to wash with.”
“A child is a religious being prior to its being an intellectual being; and must not be turned away from the divine order.”
AN AFTERNOON AT ST. LAZARE.
We paid a visit yesterday (Sunday) to St. Lazare, and all that we saw and heard there struck us as so interesting, and so entirely different from our preconceived notions concerning that ill-famed centre of crime and punishment, that we cannot but think our readers will likewise be interested in hearing a detailed and accurate account of it.
We had been told that the famous pétroleuse, charged with the murder of Monseigneur Surat, was still there, and we could not resist the opportunity offered us by a friend of going to see this extraordinary type of female ferocity—the woman who put a pistol to the prelate’s head, and, when he mildly asked her what he had done to her that she should hate him so, replied: “You are a priest!” and shot him on the spot. On arriving, however, we found that she had left for Versailles the night before. There were still fourteen of her terrible compeers remaining out of the four hundred and thirty that had been taken on the barricades and in the general saturnalia of the Commune and locked up in St. Lazare.
We visited the prison from beginning to end. Nothing surprised us so much as the gentleness of the régime, and the absence of all mystery or personal restraint in the management of the prisoners. The jail had nothing of the repulsive paraphernalia of a prison about it, and but for its massive walls, its vast proportions, and a certain indescribable gloom in the atmosphere, inseparable, we suppose, from the mere presence of such a population, one might very well
have mistaken it for an orphanage or any ordinary asylum conducted by a religious community.
The salles are magnificently spacious and lofty, with broad, high windows opening on courts; there are four courts—préaux they are called—one after another, within the precincts of the prison; the beds are like hospital beds; and there was nothing in the dress of the women, or the manner of the nuns toward them, to tell an uninitiated visitor that they were not patients rather than prisoners and malefactors of the worst kind. There was the same silence brooding over the place, the same quiet regularity in all the arrangements, the same supernatural sort of cleanliness that one never sees anywhere but in convents. The population of the prison varies from 1,200 to 1,800, and the government of these dangerous and desperate subjects is committed to the sole charge of a community of religious called Sœurs de Marie-Joseph. They are fifty in all. Their dress is black serge, with a black veil lined with a light-blue one. They were founded at the close of the last century by a Lyonnese lady, whose name the superioress told us, but we forgot it.
It was just two o’clock when we arrived, and the superioress and another nun gave up assisting at vespers in order to show us over the house, which from its immense size takes two hours to visit in detail. The prisoners are divided into several categories, and are kept distinctly separate from each other. There are first the Prévenues, who are put in
on an accusation which has not been investigated; then the Détenues, against whom proof is forthcoming, and who are awaiting their trial; then there are the Jugées, of whom the categories are various, as will be seen. These classes are never allowed to come in contact, even accidentally, with each other; they do not even meet at meals. Those who are condemned to one year’s imprisonment remain at St. Lazare, but if the sentence extends to a year and a day, they are sent off to one of the Succursales. When their term is expired (those who are sentenced to a year only), they may continue at St. Lazare if they choose. Many of them, touched with grace, and sincerely converted from their evil courses, dread going back to old scenes and temptations that have proved so fatal to them, and beg to be kept as filles de service for the work of the house, or in the workshops, etc., and they are never refused. The superioress said they made very active official servants, and it is very seldom they fall away from their good resolves, and have to be expelled or punished. We were passing through one of the passages when a sudden noise of voices from the court made us go to the window and look out. We saw a troop of prisoners pouring out into the yard; they were running about, laughing and chatting, and apparently enjoying their momentary liberty with the zest of school-boys.
“Who are these, ma mère?” we inquired.
“Hélas!” The exclamation was accompanied by a sufficiently expressive gesture.
“They are generally a very numerous class here,” she explained; “but just now there are but some two hundred of them; the pétroleuses were largely recruited from their
ranks, and great numbers of them have been sent on to Versailles.”
Some one asked if these unfortunates were more refractory than the other prisoners, thieves, etc.
“As a rule, they are less so,” replied the nun; “we hardly ever are obliged to have recourse to the gardiens with them, and we have more frequent conversions amongst them than any other class of prisoners. There comes a time to many of them, especially if they have had any seeds of religious belief sowed in their minds in childhood, when the future both of this world and the next comes on them with a sense of horror, and then grace has an easy task with them. I could tell you of miracles wrought in the souls of these poor sinners that would sound like tales out of the lives of the saints, and we have had deathbeds among them little short of saintly. But, again, we too often see all our efforts fail, and they reject grace with a sort of demoniacal obduracy, and go back to their old lives without a moment’s passing compunction: nothing seems to touch them or frighten them.”
We asked if the nuns were not afraid of them, if they never threatened or insulted them.
“Oh! never!” replied the superioress emphatically; “the command we have over them, and the way they yield obedience and respect to us, is almost miraculous. You see these poor outcasts down there; I suppose there is nothing in the world more lost or degraded than they are; they are the lowest specimens of the lowest stratum of vice and every species of depravity. Well, the youngest nun in the community is as safe in the middle of them as if they were all honest mères de famille. I have been a religious twenty-two years, and out of that ten years at St. Lazare, and I have never known them use
an expression to any of us that called for reprimand.”
We may add that she said the great majority of these offenders were girls from the provinces, young and inexperienced for the most part, and who come to Paris expecting to make their fortune, and unprepared for the temptations awaiting them in this great trap for souls.
We saw the words Oratoire Israelite, Oratoire Protestant, painted over two doors, and the latter suggested the inquiry whether there were occasionally any English women amongst the inmates of St. Lazare.
“Oh! yes, I am sorry to say we have a good many English,” said the mother; and then, shaking her head and smiling, she added: “And I am sorry to tell you that they are the most unmanageable of all, for they are generally given to drink, and when this is the case they are like mad-women and we can do nothing with them. A little while ago we had one who got into such a fearful fit of fury that it was necessary to put her in the lock-up; her shrieks were so loud that they were heard half over the place, and terrified the young détenues; toward evening she grew so outrageous that the gardiens were sent to put her into the strait-waistcoat—they are powerful men with strong hands and iron nerves, and trained to the work—but she baffled four of them for two hours; they were not able to seize or hold her; at last they gave it up in despair, and said: It is no use, we must go for les sœurs! One of them came to fetch me, and beg me to come or send some one to help them. He was trembling in every limb, and the perspiration was pouring from his face as if he had been wrestling with a wild animal. I took one of the nuns with me, and we went down to the prison, where we were obliged to spend the whole
night with the prisoner, coaxing and caressing her, before we got her to calm down and cease shrieking.”
We asked to what class in life the English culprits generally belonged—if they were exclusively of the lowest? The superioress said, on the contrary, they were often persons very comme il faut in their manners, and evidently had had an education far above the class of domestic servants—some of them were in fact quite like ladies; she believed they were mostly governesses, or teachers who come over to Paris in search of situations or lessons, and, not finding either, are driven by hunger and despair to steal, or do worse; but theft is generally the offence of the English prisoners.
“Sometimes, indeed,” said the superioress, “it makes us laugh to hear the account of the thefts they commit, there is often something so comical in the way they do it, and the cunning and dexterity they display are beyond belief; the most accomplished French filou cannot hold a candle to them.”
Sad as this testimony was, it could not be quite a surprise to any one living in Paris who had seen much of the class of English alluded to, but it will come probably as a new and terrible revelation to many in England; and if this paper should fall into the hands of any lone, friendless English girl hesitating about coming to Paris to earn her bread, the writer prays God she may ponder on the foregoing statement, and think twice before embarking on so perilous a venture.
Several salles are filled with a class of prisoners called jeunes insoumises; they are all very young, some merely children of the day; they are not always actual criminals, sometimes they are only subjects with dangerous propensities beyond the control of parents, and they are sent here to be trained to better ways;
especial pains are directed to these juvenile offenders, and the result is often very consoling. The superioress said they had lately had a baby of six years old brought in for stealing. “It was only a cake that tempted the poor little mite,” said the mother deprecatingly, “but she was very naughty and unmanageable otherwise, and the parents were glad of a pretext to get rid of her for a time.”
It was not only of such innocent culprits as this that the superioress spoke with indulgence, her large-hearted charity took in all the lost inhabitants of the dismal abode in which she dwelt and toiled; and there was something unspeakably touching in the way she every now and then seemed to try as it were to excuse the worst among them, to plead for them indirectly by showing up any remnant of good in them. We met the women we mentioned our seeing out at recreation on their way along a corridor; they walked singly, with their arms crossed; we were quite close to them as they passed us; and anything more ignoble than their features it would be difficult to conceive—the expression of the faces was scarcely human; they resembled vicious animals in human shape rather than women. This struck us all so forcibly that we could not help making the remark to the superioress. She seemed positively hurt, as if we had said something personally unkind to her, and, on my expressing some pagan surprise at it, she broke out into such a tender pleading for “those dear souls whom our Lord longs for and that cost him so dear” that, though I felt thoroughly rebuked, I could not be sorry for having called out her protest. It was like having laid one’s hand roughly and unawares on a vibrating instrument that sent out a strain of heavenly music.
“Oh!” she continued, with such a look as I shall never forget, “if we only knew what the value of a soul is, how precious it is in the eyes of God, we would never look with disgust at the poor wretched body that holds it; but I assure you when one comes near to those poor sinners the disgust soon wears off, and we think of nothing but their souls, their precious, immortal souls, that were bought at such a price!”
The more we listened to her and observed her, the less surprised we were at the universal respect, worship I might almost call it, that greeted her presence everywhere—it was so spontaneous and so free from anything like fear or servility. As soon as she appeared at the door of a work-room, or a class, or a dormitory, the prisoners rose immediately to salute her; and several times I noticed some of them make signs to others who were not looking, or touch them on the shoulder, to stand up and welcome the mother. She generally said a word to them en passant: “Good-morning, my children! Are you behaving well?” etc., and then there was a ripple of curtsies and a perfect clamor of “Yes, mother, thank you!” and the hard, bad faces would brighten for one moment with a smile.
The influence of the nuns with the prisoners is indeed little less than a permanent miracle, Among other instances of it, the superioress told us the following: “A desperate woman, charged with misdemeanors of the worst kind, was brought to the prison. She was the daughter of a butcher, and,” added the superioress, laughing, “I beg you to believe that her manners were just what might have been expected.” A few days after her arrival she broke out into a fit of mad fury, and the gardiens had to be sent for to take her to the cachot; but as soon as she saw them enter the salle,
she drew a huge pair of scissors from her pocket—how she came by it we never discovered—and, holding it open and pointed at them with one hand, she beckoned them with the other to come on, yelling all the while like a raging lioness. The men tried to terrify her, to dodge her, but it was all useless, she baffled every attempt to seize her. They gave it up as hopeless, and came for me. She no sooner saw me than she cried out: ‘Send them away, and I will go with you; but I will never move a foot with these men!’ I sent them away, and told her to give me the scissors; she gave it at once, and then I took her by the hand and led her off without a word.
“On another occasion, one section of prisoners got up a scheme for killing the gardiens. They were to tie their wooden sabots into clusters of eight together, and when the gardiens came to convey some refractory subject to the cachot, the others were to fling several batches of these formidable missiles at their heads. The effect must have been fatal, but fortunately there was some delay in the appearance of the gardiens, and the prisoners, having all ready, grew impatient, and at last, losing all control, they began to yell and call out for them and brandish their sabots furiously. The nun who was in waiting ran down to warn the gardiens not to come up, and then came to tell me what had happened, and to consult about sending for the soldiers, who are always ready at the poste outside the prison; the gardiens were frightened, and advised this being done. I thought, however, the storm would subside without having recourse to such an extreme measure. I was not the least afraid of the women personally; I knew they would never lay a finger on one of us, whatever their fury might
be, so I walked into the midst of them.
“‘What is this row about?’ I said. ‘I am ashamed of you; let me hear no more of it.’ Then taking the ringleader—we always know the one to pitch upon—I told her I must put her in prison; she made no resistance, only stipulating that the gardiens were not to touch her.”
“Are the gardiens cruel to them that they hate them so much?” I asked.
“No, never,” she answered; “they have no opportunity for it if they felt so inclined; but they represent strength and justice, whereas the nuns represent only weakness and pity; the prisoners resent the one, but not the other.”
Some one asked the superioress if she had ever known a conspiracy attempted to kill or hurt any of the sisters. She replied never, on which we related to her an episode of the Roman prisons, told us recently by the Papal Nuncio. The female prisons in Rome are, like St. Lazare, conducted entirely by nuns, without even the moral support of a poste at the gates to enforce their authority. One day a plot was organized for doing away with the nuns and making their own escape from the prison. The prisoners were sixty in number and the nuns twelve, so the scheme offered little serious difficulty. It was agreed that on a certain day when all the community were assembled with the prisoners in the workroom, the latter were to seize the nuns and fling them out of the windows into the yard. The signal agreed upon was the close of the work-hour, when the superioress clapped her hands for them to put aside their work. The secret was so well kept that not a hint transpired, but the superioress felt instinctively there was something abnormal brewing.
She had no apprehension at the moment, however, and gave the signal as usual when the clock struck the hour. No one moved. She repeated it. Still no one stirred. She gave it a third time more emphatically, and then the leader of the band walked straight up to her and struck her a blow on the face. The meek disciple of Jesus quietly knelt down, turned the other cheek, and said:
“If I have done you any harm, tell me so, but if not, why do you strike me?”
The woman fell upon her knees, burst into tears, and confessed everything. When the superioress had heard her to the end, she said:
“Now, my daughter, I must take you to the dungeon; you know this is my duty.”
“Yes, mother, I know it is,” and she gave her hand, and let herself be led away as meekly as a lamb.
How omnipotent is the power of love, and how lovely this world would be if love were allowed to rule over it everywhere!
Before we had finished our inspection of the house, we went to benediction in the prison chapel. There was a short sermon first on the gospel of the day. About eight hundred of the prisoners were present. Some were yawning, and evidently only there because they could not help themselves, others assisted with edifying devotion, but all were respectful in their attitude and demeanor. The organ was played by one of the nuns, and the choir, was formed of prisoners from the class already alluded to. The singing was not very scientific, but it struck us all as peculiarly touching, the more so, no doubt, from the associations connected unconsciously with the choristers. The superioress said it was looked upon as a great privilege to sing in the choir, and it is held
out as a reward for sustained efforts and good conduct. As we saw the little altar lighted up, and the golden rays of the monstrance shining down upon the singular congregation, one could not but think what a grand and beautiful manifestation of redeeming love it was, this presence of the God of holiness, a willing prisoner in such a temple. There were the Sisters of Marie-Joseph, women of the purest, most unblemished lives, self-devoted victims to the God who died on Calvary for outcasts and sinners, kneeling side by side in unloathing sisterhood with the vilest offscourings of this great Babylon. A sight wonderful beyond all human understanding if the mystery were not explained to us by the voice from out the little crystal prison-house: “I came to seek sinners, and to dwell with them.... And whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do likewise to me.... And there is more joy in heaven for the return of one sinner than for ninety-nine of the just.”
And many are the joys given to him and his saints by the inmates of this great emporium of sinners. Last All Saints’ day five hundred of the prisoners approached the sacraments, some in the most admirably penitent spirit, but all of their own free will, and for the moment at least with hearts touched by grace and turned away from evil. They were prepared for the feast by a retreat of eight days, preached by a Marist father.
After benediction we resumed our inspection, and came finally to the pétroleuses. There was nothing in the room where they were, or their surroundings, to distinguish them from the other prisoners, and if the superioress had not whispered to us as we were entering the dormitory that these were the women, we should never have suspected the bright, orderly
room to be the den of wild beasts it was. An American lady who was of our party amused the nuns by asking repeatedly: “But where are the wicked ones?” She could not persuade herself—and indeed it was difficult—that the hundreds of women we saw so gently ruled, and held as it were with silken cords, were the most dangerous and abandoned characters of the metropolis. The fourteen pétroleuses were not dressed in the prison livery, but wore their own clothes: some of them were very spruce and comfortable, but all were tidy and clean—none of them had a poverty-stricken look. They were nearly all of them standing in sullen silence beside their beds; one woman was dandling a baby, a white-faced, shrivelled little object, tricked out in a fine blue frock with little flounces. We think we said there had been four hundred and thirty of these pétroleuses in the prison. The superioress said they had behaved very well there, and never once obliged the soldiers to interfere. They were cold-blooded, defiant creatures, but this was not their sphere of action; they bore no ill-will to the sisters; quite the contrary, many shed tears on going away. They fell into the discipline of the prison with great docility as to hours and rules, and seldom broke silence. On one point only they were intractable—they would not work.
“It’s bad enough to be conquered and butchered by Versailles,” they would answer, “but we are not going to work for them.” And neither threats nor entreaties could induce them to take a needle in their hand, or to sit down to a sewing-machine. It was no use explaining to them that they would not be working for Versailles, that they would work for themselves, and might buy extra food at the cantine with their day’s earnings;
no, they got it into their heads that Versailles would in some way or other be the better for their working, and nothing could get it out of them. The very name of Versailles used to rouse them to fury; it was like a red rag to a bull. They boasted of their exploits during the Commune as things to glory in. One swore she had set fire to five buildings, and her only regret was that she had been too late to set fire to St. Lazare. Many of her companions expressed the same regret with quiet effrontery, that would have been amusing if it had not been so appalling. Every one of them declared that if it were to begin over again, they would do just the same, only better, because now they had more experience.
“And what is your opinion, ma mère?” we said; “do you think it will begin again, and that the pétroleuses are still in existence, or was it a type born with the Commune, and passed away with it?”
She replied unhesitatingly that she believed it would begin again, and that the pétroleuses would come out in greater force than ever; that they were neither daunted nor disarmed by the failure of the Commune, but rather infuriated by defeat, and more resolute and reckless than before—reckless to a degree that only bad women can be, and ready to stake body and soul on their revenge. She said that the conduct of Versailles was weak and ill-judged beyond her comprehension; that they had far better have left these women free at once on the plea that they were women, if they did not mean to deal out their deserts to them; but now these desperate creatures were exasperated by incarceration, and by a mockery of a trial that either liberated them or sentenced them to a punishment they knew perfectly well
the government did not mean to carry out. It was like letting loose so many bloodhounds on France to set these women at large again.
“We have seen them de près,” continued the superioress, “and we are one and all convinced that the next attempt will be worse than the first; we have terrible days in store—the pétroleuses have not said their last word.”
Speaking of the Commune led to our asking about her own experiences under it. It appears that the employees at St. Lazare, the director, inspector-general, and their assistants, were among the first turned out, and agents of the Hôtel de Ville installed in their places. The first thing these guardians of public justice did was to set free one-half of the population, such as were available for the public services; and able servants they proved themselves on the barricades and as incendiaries. To account for and in some measure palliate the superhuman ferocity displayed by the women of the Commune, we may as well mention here a fact not generally known, and which was told to us by a distinguished medical man, who was here all through that terrible saturnalia, and by a Sister of Charity, who could also speak from personal knowledge. It would seem that the snuff dealt out to the people from the government manufactories was mixed in large proportions with gunpowder. The effect of this ingredient, taken in very small quantities, is to excite the brain abnormally, but taken in large ones it brings on a kind of savage delirium tremens. The wine distributed to the pétroleuses on the barricades and elsewhere was also heavily charged with some such element of madness. It seems to us that it is rather a consolation to hear this, for though it reveals a diabolical instinct of soul-hatred in the few, it
explains, on the other hand, how it was that occasionally we saw young and hitherto mild, inoffensive women suddenly transformed into demons.
The superioress said that for the first three weeks that the nuns did duty for the Commune, nothing could exceed the respect and consideration they received from them.
“They were as docile as little girls to us,” she said, “and never did anything without coming to consult us. The inspecteur-general named by the Commune happened to have formerly been a clerk at the prison. My surprise when I saw him in his new character, and with such credentials, was great; but he seemed himself very much ashamed, and when I asked him what had induced him to join the Commune, he replied that it was really devotion to the nuns; he had accepted the office because he knew we would want a protector, and he preferred being on the spot to watch over us. It was not laughing matter, or I could have laughed at his audacity. And he actually pleaded this argument on his trial at Versailles, and was acquitted on it! He had always been a well-conducted, honest man, and I am not sure but in the bottom of his heart this good intention toward us may not have been mixed up with a great many other less worthy ones. During all the time he was in constant communication with me, he never had the courage once to raise his eyes to my face. He told us a good deal about what was going on outside, and especially what the women were doing. He spoke in enthusiastic praise of their spirit and courage. He said the fort of Montrouge was lost one day but for a girl of seventeen, who, seeing the soldiers demoralized, and the gunners abandoning their guns and turning to fly, rushed up to one of them, and seized a
light and put it to the cannon, and so mocked the cowards, and taunted them all with cowardice and want of mettle, that she rallied every man of them and saved the place. But for this Versailles would have taken it. Ten minutes later, and the defence was abandoned. ‘Had it not been for this plucky little diablesse, we were lost!’ he exclaimed. Such traits as this prepared us for the pétroleuses of a few weeks later, but he only saw patriotism and valor in them.”
Things went on very amicably between the gentlemen of the Commune and the sisters for three weeks. Then a change came over them. They were not openly rude, but there was what the superioress described as restrained fury in their manner toward the nuns, and the latter felt that the blood-fever was rising in them, and that they would soon break out into open mutiny. The superioress felt this more strongly than the rest, and she was sorely perplexed how to get her flock out of the way of the wolves while it was yet time. It was no easy matter, for, as she quaintly said, “One cannot send off fifty religious like fifty pins, in a box by mail,” and in the present state of mind of the Communists, to awake suspicion was to have the whole community seized and locked up forthwith. The first thing to be done was to procure permission from the Hôtel de Ville. She had been obliged to go of late several times to the prefecture on one business or another connected with her functions in the prison, so the authorities there knew her, and had always treated her with marked civility. She said that the first time she went there the faces of the so-called officials struck her as demoniacal, they were all of them half-drunk—men taken from the gutters of Belleville and Villette to fill offices of whose
commonest outward forms they had no idea, yet they were as deferential to herself and the nun who accompanied her as so many priests might have been. This did not prevent her saying to her companion as soon as they were alone: “Well, if we did not believe in hell, the faces we have seen to-day would have revealed it to us.”
She applied for a permission to leave, and got it without any difficulty. She kept it in her pocket all that day, and the next morning she seemed to hear a voice saying to her interiorly: Now is the moment; send them off! The exodus was planned well, and carried out so discreetly, the nuns going in threes and fours at a time, that not a shadow of suspicion dawned on the employees—their jailers as they now considered them. All that day the superioress kept constantly with them, never letting them lose sight of her for a quarter of an hour at a time, coming and going perpetually, and making future arrangements for one thing or another, so as to put them more completely off the scent. It was only when evening came and there were but eight nuns in the house besides herself, that the flight was discovered. The rage of the director was undisguised. But if he could not catch the fugitives, he could revenge himself on the devoted ones who had shielded their flight at the peril of their own lives. The superioress was at work in the midst of the little remnant of her flock, when he rushed into the room, pistol in hand. A few words passed between them, angry on his part, calm and resolute on hers, then with an oath he left the room abruptly.
“I knew as well as if he had told me,” she said, “that he was gone to see if there was a vacant cell to put me in. I did not feel terrified—God gives such strong graces in moments
like that!—but I felt the same kind of internal voice saying to me: Now is your time; take the others and fly!
“We hurried down the stairs just as we were and went out. We turned to the left, and walked on as fast as we could, without running, toward the Gare du Nord. We could hardly have turned the corner of the street when the director was in pursuit of us. Les Détenues, who saw us leave the house and take to the left, called out to him: To the right, citoyen! They are not forty yards ahead! He followed the direction, and this saved us. We reached the station just as the train was about to move. The guards saw us coming, and cried out to us to make haste and jump in. ‘But our tickets! We have not taken them!’ I said.
“‘Never mind, jump in! You will pay at the other end,’ and they hustled us into the nearest carriage. We had not seated ourselves when the director appeared on the platform pistol in hand, and crying out frantically to the train to stop. But it moved on, and landed us safely at Argenteuil.”
A few days after the Sœurs Marie-Joseph had cleared out from St. Lazare, the nuns of Picpus were taken there. This the superioress thought was one reason why the officials were anxious to get them out of their way; they meant to put the others there, and they did not want any inconvenient witnesses of their own proceedings.
When we had seen all that was to be seen in the vast building, the superioress took us to the private chapel of the community. It was formerly the cell of St. Vincent of Paul, that is to say, the space occupied by the sanctuary; the altar stands where his little bed used to be, and the window step is worn away by the pressure of his feet, when his increasing infirmities
obliged him to have recourse to the solace of a footstool. The prison itself was formerly a Lazarist monastery; the refectory is exactly as it was in the time of St. Vincent, unchanged in all except its occupants; and the great, sombre corridors echoed for twenty years to the footsteps of the sweet apostle of charity. His memory is held in great veneration throughout the prison, and the population speak of him with a sort of rough, filial affectionateness that, the nuns told us, is often very touching; they seem to look on him as a friend who ought to stand by them.
I had nearly forgotten one incident in our visit that had a peculiar beauty of its own. We were passing by the open door of what seemed an infirmary; all the beds were occupied, and there were several nuns sitting in the room, when one of them ran out and said:
“Oh! ma mère, you will not pass without coming to say bonjour to our old women. Ever since they heard you were showing the house, they have been watching for you.”
The superioress said it was late, and she really had not time just now, but the nuns begged harder, and said that the old women knew she was going into retreat that evening, so they would not see her for eight days, and the old women, seeing they were in danger of being refused, began to cry out so piteously that the mother, asking us if we would not mind walking down the ward, yielded, and we went in. These old women are all infirm and incurable, and have been sent as such from one hospital or another to St. Lazare. Their delight when the superioress came in and spoke a word to each was almost rapturous. I stood to speak to one old soul, but instead of detailing her own aches and pains after the usual manner of those dear, blessed,
garrulous poor people, she burst out confidentially into ecstatic praises of notre mère—how sweet and kind she was, and how she loved them all, and what she did for them, and what an angel she was altogether, “as indeed all the good sisters were,” the good soul made haste to assure us. We found, on comparing notes with our friends, that those to whom they spoke had improved the opportunity in the same way. It seemed quite a treat to them to find an audience for their grateful praises of the Sœurs. Indeed, as far as our view of them went, the Sisters of Marie-Joseph fully justify the love they receive so plentifully. The superioress is what the French would call une maîtresse femme, a combination of energy and gentleness, with a certain frank brightness of manner that is very winning to a stranger, and must be a great help, independent of stronger agencies, in enabling her to win the confidence and disarm the rebellious spirit of the women she has to deal with. It was wonderful to watch her as she passed on from salle to salle, saying just the right little word to all of them, and bringing a smile on all the faces, old and young, good and bad. Her manner, while it was perfectly simple and familiar, never lost its dignity; but there was not the faintest shadow of that spirit which too often hinders the salutary influence of virtue over vice—keep off; for I am holier than you! With these infirm old women she was affectionate and caressing as a mother, petting them like children, and encouraging their fearless familiarity toward herself. They had been here all through
the Commune, they told us, and witnessed from their windows—the infirmary is on the ground floor—all the scenes enacted in the court by ces dames, as they mockingly styled them, who had come to replace the Sœurs. But the worst of that terrible interval to them was the terror they were in of being burnt to death. They saw the flames rising on all sides from the conflagrations in the neighborhood of St. Lazare, and they were in momentary expectation of seeing the prison itself fired. The doors were opened for them to fly, but “à quoi bon, puisque nous n’avions pas de jambes pour fuir?” they observed jocosely. This was the last salle we saw. Before the superioress took leave of the incurables, she asked them to pray for the nuns during their retreat, which was to begin that evening. They promised in chorus that they would, and one said: “We will offer up all our suffering this week for the good sisters,” and all the others pledged themselves to do the same.
So ended our visit to St. Lazare. It was a sad and yet an unutterably consoling one. We hear a great deal about the atheism and immorality and wickedness of Paris—and God knows there is plenty of them—but there is much also that is bright and pure and beautiful mixed up with the bad, if only we looked for it and proclaimed it. We would find the pearls of purity, and the rubies of charity, and the emeralds of hope, and the salt of the Holy Spirit, scattered everywhere amidst the general corruption, healing and redeeming it.
THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION [144]
The Labor Question has become one of the most formidable questions—perhaps the most formidable question—of the day; and the worst feature of the question is that, though it has been looming up in the distance for nearly a century, and constantly coming nearer and nearer, and more and more pressing for a solution, the statesmen, reformers, and philanthropists of no country seem to know what answer to give it, or how to treat it. There is no lack of nostrums, and every petty politician is ready with his “Morrison pill”; but no one gives a satisfactory diagnosis of the case, and the remedies offered or applied have served thus far only to aggravate the symptoms of the disease.
There is a very general conviction among the workingmen themselves that, in the distribution of the joint products of capital and labor, capital gets the lion’s share. Capitalists, or they who can command capital or its substitute, credit, grow rich, become millionaires, from the profits of the labor they employ, while the laborer himself, with the most rigid economy and frugality, can barely keep soul and body together, and not always even that. Yet, if we look at the millions deposited by the laboring classes in our savings-banks, and the large sums collected from them for eleemosynary and other purposes not necessarily included in the expenses of living, this statement
seems exaggerated. Then, too, the majority of the millionaires with us, and, perhaps, in England and France, began life as workmen, or, at least, without capital and with very little credit.
It is not easy to say precisely what the special grievances of the workingmen are, at least in our country, since comparatively few of the wealthy or easy classes of to-day inherited their wealth, or had to start with any appreciable advantages, pecuniary, educational, or social, over their compeers who have remained in the proletarian class. The International Association of Workingmen do not tell us very distinctly what their special grievances are, nor can we gather them from the eloquent lecture of their mouthpiece, Mr. Wendell Phillips, the candidate of the labor unions of Massachusetts for governor of that state. The evils he complains of, if evils, grow out of what is called “modern civilization,” and seem to us to be inseparable from it. This is also clearly his opinion, and The Dublin Review shows that it is the view taken by the Internationals in England and France. Mr. Phillips says:
“Modern civilization is grand in seeming large and generous in some of its results, but, at the same time, hidden within are ulcers that confront social science and leave it aghast. The students of social science, in every meeting that gathers itself, in every debate and discussion, confess themselves at their wits’ end in dealing with the great social evils of the day. Nobody that looks into the subject but recognizes the fact that the disease is very grave and deep; the superficial observer does not know the
leak in the very body of the ship, but the captain and crew are suffering the anticipation of approaching ruin. Gentlemen, I am not here with the vain dream that we shall ever abolish poverty. My creed of human nature is too bitter for that. There will always be men that drink, and as long as there are such, there will always be poor men—shiftless men. There are always half-made men—nobody knows why they were born.
“Is civilization a failure? Stretch out your gaze over all the civilized world. There are, perhaps, in Christendom two or three hundred millions of people, and one-half of them never have enough to eat. And even in this country one-half of the people have never had enough of mental food. All over the world one-half of Christendom starves either bodily or mentally. That is no exaggeration. You may go to France or England, and find a million of men that never saw meat once a year. Take your city, and go down into the very slums of existence, where human beings by the thousands live year in and year out in dwellings which no man in Fifth Avenue would trust his horses in for twelve hours. I will take the great social spectre that confronts social science the world over—prostitution, the social ulcer that eats into the nineteenth century. And everybody who studies the subject will confess that the great root from which it grows is that the poverty of one class makes it the victim of the wealth of another. Give woman her fair chance in her own fields of enterprise, and ninety-nine out of a hundred will disdain to buy diamonds and velvets with the wages of shame. Give man his fair chance in the world of labor and enterprise, and ninety-nine out of a hundred men will disdain to steal. The grog-shops of the great cities have always appointed the municipalities as their own standing, committees. And this is at once the cause and effect of the poverty of the masses. I have known men who were intemperate in Boston cured by being sent to Paris. Why? Because in the brighter life, the more generous stimulant, the great variety of interest in the European capital, he found something that called out his nobler nature, starved out his appetites. So it is with the intemperance of a nation; and to cure it, you must supplement their life with the stimulus of the soul. Why is
it that three-fourths of the criminals are of the poorer classes? Why do the students of crime tell you that when you have taken out about fifteen per cent. of the criminals, consisting of the enterprising, energetic, and intelligent, the rest are below par bodily and mentally? Because they are the children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren of persons who were bodily and mentally weak. Out of these weak ones the devil selects his best tools. Feed that class better, and you will empty your prisons.”
This plainly enough attributes the evils the workingmen seek to remedy to modern civilization, which enables the few to become rich and leaves the many poor, destitute, festering in ignorance and vice. M. Desmoulins, in his Apology for the Internationals, as quoted by The Dublin Review, says: “The Parisian Red, far from being out of the pale of human nature, is only a spontaneous product of what is pompously styled modern civilization—a civilization that, resting to this hour on war between nation and nation, town and town, farm and farm, men and men, is still in many respects sheer barbarism.” As far as we are able to collect the views of the Association, it attributes the undefined grievances of the proletarian class to no one specific cause, but to modern civilization in general. In this, if the workingmen confine their objection to material civilization—the only civilization the age boasts or recognizes—we are not disposed to quarrel with them. Yet we all remember the outcry raised in all classes of society and from all quarters against the Holy Father, because he refused to form an alliance of the church with modern civilization, and for his supposed condemnation of it in the Syllabus. The International Association of Workingmen, whose members are spread over nearly the whole world, and are numbered by millions,
is a vast organized revolt against this boasted civilization of this nineteenth century. And so far it is not wholly without excuse, and even much may be said in its defence, though their proposed substitute for it may be utterly indefensible.
Modern material civilization, dating from the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, and more especially from the accession of the House of Hanover to the English throne, and the accession to power in England of what in the time of Swift and Addison was called the Urban party—money-changers, bankers, traders, merchants, and manufacturers—has been based on capital employed in trade and industry, in opposition to capital invested in land and agriculture. It is a shopkeeping and manufacturing and maritime civilization, essentially and eminently a burgher civilization, and resulting especially in the burgher class, or, as the French say, the bourgeoisie. A civilization based on material interests, and proposing the multiplication and amassing of material goods, necessarily produces the state of things which excites the opposition of Mr. Phillips and the Internationals. It creates necessarily an antagonism between the interests of capital and labor, and therefore between the employers, as representatives of capital, and the employed, or workmen. The interest of capital is to get labor at as low a rate of wages as possible; the interest of labor is to get as high a rate of wages as possible. This antagonism is inevitable.
Employers in vain pretend that the interests of capital and labor are the same. They are not so under a civilization based on Mammon, or under a civilization that seeks only the advancement of material interests, and invests capital only for the sake of material profit. In the struggle,
the stronger party, under a material system, is always sure to succeed. And this is always the party of capital; for labor seeks employment to live—capital, for profit or gain; and the capitalist can forego profit more easily than labor can forego employment, since to live is more urgent than to gain. This secures the advantage always to the capitalist. The inequality which necessarily results cannot be overcome by equality of suffrage, or the extension of suffrage to the proletarian class, as politicians pretend; for, though numbers may triumph at the polls, the stronger interest, as our American experience proves, is sure to carry the victory in the halls of legislation. “The stronger interest in a country,” said Mr. Calhoun to the writer, “always in the long run wields the power of the country.”
Universal suffrage, which was defended on the ground that it would tend to protect labor against capital, has in fact a contrary tendency, and in practice almost invariably favors capital. The whole of our legislation—which so favors capital or its substitute, credit, or which mortgages the future for the present, and makes debt supply the place of capital, covers the towns with money or business corporations, and builds up huge monopolies—has grown up under a system of universal suffrage. In an age and country where material interests predominate, what the people, capitalists or proletarians, ask of government is, laws that facilitate the acquisition of wealth; but when such laws are enacted, not more than one man in a hundred can avail himself of the facilities they afford.
The great scientific discoveries of which we boast, and which have wrought such marvellous changes in our modern industrial world, were, as
to their principles, made in a less material age than the present, before the modern burgher civilization was fairly inaugurated; but their application to the mechanic arts, to production and transportation, whether by sea or land, has been made since, and chiefly within the last one hundred years. The introduction of labor-saving machinery has, to an extent not easily estimated, superseded human labor, broken up the small domestic industries, as carding, spinning, and weaving, carried on in the bosom of the family, and securing it a modest independence, and small farming, carried on chiefly by the father and his sons, and built up in their place large industries and large farming, beyond the reach of people of no means or small means but their labor, and in which human labor is employed only in the form of labor at wages. The introduction of machinery, or the working of mills or farms by machinery driven by steam or by horse-power, requires capital, or an outlay possible only to large capital or combinations of small capital. Take, for instance, the steam carder, spinner, and weaver; the mule, jenny, and power-loom; the patent mower, reaper, and horse-rake; threshing and winnowing machines—hardly any of them heard of or only beginning to be heard of in our own boyhood, at least in this country; take the railway and the locomotive—and you can easily see that modern industry, and in a measure even agriculture, fall necessarily into the hands of large capitalists, individual or corporate, and cannot be prosecuted on a small scale, at least profitably. We have corporations for condensing milk and making butter and cheese, regardless of our youthful friend the dairymaid, and for supplying us with ice. Perhaps nothing has tended so much to enlarge the inequality between
capital and labor as the introduction of labor-saving machinery in nearly all branches of industry.
We do not make war on labor-saving machinery, which, we have heard it said, increases the power of capital six hundred million fold, though that seems to us hardly credible. We could not now do well without it. We could not well dispense with our cotton and woollen factories, and go back to the hand-cards, and spinning-wheel, and hand-loom which, in our own boyhood, were in every farmer’s house; but we cannot forget that the independence of the laborer—now a laborer at wages, and obliged to make cash payments for what he consumes—has gone with them to the advantage of the capitalist. We could not well dispense with railways, and yet there is no denying that they are monopolies, that labor cannot compete with them, and that they impose a heavy tax on labor. They also tend to convert the independent laborer into a workman at wages, and the freeman into the slave of machinery, to enrich a few railway presidents and directors, and stock-jobbers. Then, those great corporations, without souls, are not only stronger than the laborer, but stronger than the government. No great feudal lords in France or England were ever more formidable to the crown than such corporations as the Pennsylvania Central, the New York Central, the Union Pacific, with our National Bank system, are to the government, state or general. Neither state legislatures nor Congress can control them, and they have already made both simply their factor or agent.
There is a truth which cannot be denied expressed in the following paragraph from Mr. Phillips’ lecture:
“Now, look at it. You say, why do you find fault with civilization? Tonight is a cold night, and you will go home to parlors and chambers warmed with the coal of Pennsylvania. Why don’t you have it here for $3 and $4 a ton? Why don’t you have it here at an advance of $1 or $2 over what it is sold for at the mouth of the pit? Because of the gigantic corporations and vast organizations of wealth. The capitalists gather three or four millions of tons in your city—sell it when they please, at such rates as they please, and the poor man struggling for his bread is the sufferer. A rich man is careful; he won’t put his foot in any further than allows of its being pulled back. If he heard a groan coming from the people at something he did, he would withdraw his investment, for nothing is more timid than wealth. But let that man take $100,000 or so and put it in with nine others, and make a capital of $1,000,000; then he is as bold as Julius Cæsar. He will starve out 13,000 coal miners. The London Spectator says that the colossal strength of Britain has reason to dread the jointure of $456,000,000 of railroad capital. How much more should America have reason to dread such combinations, when Britain has more than ten times our wealth!”
Yet is there not some compensation to the proletarian class in the very system which tends so fearfully to increase their numbers and dependence? Grant that coal might be delivered from the mines in Pennsylvania in this city at $3 a ton; but suppose there were no railroads and no railway monopolies, could or would coal from the same mines be delivered in this city as cheap as it now is? Suppose there were no railways between this city and the great West, would wheat, flour, beef, pork, and the other necessaries of life be cheaper for the laboring class in this city than they now are? Railway companies may charge exorbitant rates of freight, and yet the laboring classes get the chief necessaries of life cheaper than they
would, other things being equal or unchanged, without them. Those things might be cheaper in the localities where they are produced, but not elsewhere. The evil of these monopolies and corporations is not so much in the enhanced cost of living chargeable to them, as their multiplication of the class dependent on capital for employment; and in their power to shape the action of the government to their special interests. It is far better for the workman to depend on a single wealthy individual who is likely to have a soul than on a soulless corporation. The combination of capital in corporations for industrial or trading purposes founds an aristocracy, or ruling class, far more humiliating and crushing to the class below them than aristocracies founded on land and birth, education and manners.
This is the view taken by the Internationals. They war specially against the rule of the burgher class, which is now supreme in society, as formerly were the church, kings, and nobilities. In this opposition to the rule of the burgher class, supposing the means and methods of their warfare just and honorable, we confess we might sympathize with the Internationals, as we have always sympathized with the working-classes. We never have been able to get up much liking for an aristocracy based on Mammon, who, Milton tells us, was the meanest of all the angels that fell, and who, even in heaven, went about head down, and his eyes fixed on the gold of heaven’s pavement. It is well for no country when its ruling class are the moneyed or business class. Yet it would be difficult to say, as to our country at least, what class can be better trusted with the government, or what class has more virtue, more nobility of sentiment, chivalric feeling, nobler
aims, or higher purpose. Nothing better from the proletarian class could be expected, and, judging from the Paris Commune, nothing so good. The workingmen have all the love of money, all the sordid passions, low views, and degrading vices that can be charged to the burgher class, and, perhaps, fewer redeeming qualities. Civilization has descended to the burgher. What would it gain by descending to the proletary? But let us listen once more to Mr. Phillips:
“I think our civilization is better than anywhere in the world. Now, gentlemen, you say to me, What do you intend to do? Every man has a different theory, and I have no panacea. My theory is only this: I know that a wrong system exists, and that the only method in these states of turning the brains of the country on one side is to bring it into conflict, and organize a party. If I should ask one of your editors to-night to let me indite an article on labor and capital, very likely he would refuse me, or if he granted it, it might be because a fanatic like me would sell a copy or two. But if you will give me 50,000 votes on one side, and the balance impartially divided between your Fentons and Conklings and Seymours, I will show you every journal in the city of New York discussing the question with me. Labor is too poor to edit a column in a New York journal, but when it comes in the shape of votes, then those same journals cannot afford to disregard it. Now, let us organize it. The ultimate view which we aim at is co-operation, where there is no labor as such, and no capital as such—where every man is interested proportionately in the results. How will you reach it? Only by grappling with the present organizations of power in the nation. It is money that rivets the chains of labor. If I could, I would abolish every moneyed corporation in the thirty states. Yet I am not certain that that would be a wise measure, because it seems probable that the business of the nineteenth century can hardly be carried on without corporations; but if it be true that facility and cheapness of production are solely to be reached by
the machinery of corporations, then I say, gentlemen, that the statesmanship of this generation is called upon to devise some method by which wealth may be incorporated and liberty saved. Pennsylvania has got to find out some method by which Harrisburg may exist without being the tail to the kite of the Pennsylvania Central.
“I think, in the first place, we ought to graduate taxes. If a man has a thousand dollars a year and pays a hundred, the man that has five thousand a year ought to pay five hundred. I would have a millionaire with forty millions of dollars taxed so highly that he would only have enough to live comfortably upon.”
That our civilization is the best in the world, it is patriotic to believe, and under several aspects it no doubt is so, or at least was so, a few years ago; but the burgher influence, which decides the action of government, is fast preventing this from continuing to be so. We were intended by nature to be a great agricultural people, and we have labored with all the force of the government and artificial contrivances to become, spite of nature, a great manufacturing and commercial people, like the people of Great Britain, as if our territory were as limited as that of the British Isles. Whatever advantages we possessed over the nations of the Old World in the beginning, we owed to the extent, cheapness, and fertility of our vast tracts of unoccupied lands, which enabled the working-man, after a few years of labor at wages, to become a land-owner, and to become the cultivator of his own Sabine farm. But the influence of the ruling classes, with its chief seats in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, has been steadily exerted since 1824 to deprive the country of these advantages, and to create as large a proletarian class as possible, so that no doubt, if, aside from the vast public works, or rather, the so-called internal improvements undertaken by
private corporations, and which give for the time employment to large numbers of workmen, skilled and unskilled, we now offer any advantages to the laborer over those he has abroad—at any rate, if we do, those advantages are fast disappearing.
We are no more favorable to the system of corporations than is Mr. Phillips; and the writer of this for years opposed with whatever abilities he had their creation and multiplication. He did so till he saw opposition could avail nothing to check their growth. No opposition can avail anything now, since the abolition of slavery has, in a great measure, identified the great planting interests of the South with the burgher interests of the North, as it was intended to do. For this Mr. Phillips is himself in no small degree responsible, and as an International, or a leader in the labor movement, he is only trying to undo what he hoped to do as an abolitionist. Philanthropy is an excellent sentiment when directed by practical wisdom and knowledge; but, when blindly followed, it creates a hundredfold more evil than it can cure, even if successful in its special aims. Even Mr. Phillips doubts if the corporation system can be safely abolished. We tell him there is no power in the country that can abolish it, because it governs the general government and nearly all the state governments. Give Mr. Phillips the fifty thousand votes he asks for, and the party he wishes to organize, he would, no doubt, become a power in elections, and could command an important place in the government for himself, and places also for his friends; but, however important the place to which he might be elected or appointed, he would find himself impotent to effect anything against the system he opposes,
or in favor of the system he approves.
Mr. Phillips tells us that his main reliance is on the “education of the masses.” So do we, only we protest against calling the people who have rational souls “the masses,” as if they were piles or heaps of brute matter. But education given by the burgher civilization as educator, or suffered to be freely given by it, will tend to perpetuate that civilization, or the very system, social and industrial, which Mr. Phillips and the Internationals war against, not to displace or reform it. Let the education of all the children of the land be entrusted to a society whose principles were so admirably summed up and approved by a former governor of Massachusetts, namely, “Let the government take care of the rich, and the rich will take care of the poor,” how much would the education given do to elevate or meliorate that society? No order of civilization or society ever does or ever can educate in reference to a higher ideal than its own. Hence the reason why the state or secular society cannot be a fit educator of children and youth, and why all education can be safely entrusted only to the spiritual society whose ideal is the God-man, perfect, and the highest conceivable.
Purely secular education proceeds on the assumption that men and nations always act as well as they know, or that all individuals and nations will act uniformly in reference to their own interests so far as they know them—an assumption disproved by every one’s daily experience, as well as by the universal experience of mankind. Mr. Phillips ought to know that men who ought to know better are often carried away by their lusts, their passions, the force of events, and social and other influences, to act in direct
opposition to their better judgment. There are comparatively few of us who cannot say with the heathen poet:
“Video meliora, proboque,
Deteriora sequor.”
Men do wrong or fail to follow the right less from ignorance than from passion and infirmity of will. Society could not subsist if founded on what the philosophers in the last century called enlightened self-interest, or what Jeremy Bentham called “utility,” or “the greatest happiness” principle. What is wanted is something stronger than interest, something stronger than passion, which, while it enlightens the intellect, gives invincible firmness to the will.
The only power that can control this system, the evils of which Mr. Phillips points out, while its social and industrial tendencies he deplores, and adjust the various conflicting interests of society on the principles of justice and equity, is and must be supernatural. The English system of checks and balances, of restraining or balancing one interest by another, is a delusion, as the failure of the experiment fully proves. It restrains the weaker interests, but strengthens the stronger, makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer, and hence in no country do you find larger accumulations of wealth, and side by side with them a deeper or more widespread poverty or more squalid wretchedness. There are no resources in the order of nature for a people that adopts the burgher system, and makes material interests the great aim of life, from which power can be drawn adequate to overcome the evils of the system against which the Internationals wage their relentless war. We can find no deliverance in the natural order, and must seek it, if anywhere, in the supernatural, that is, in
religion—and in a religion that speak with a supernatural authority, infuses into the soul a supernatural energy, and lifts it above the world and its systems or civilizations, above all earthly goods, and fixes its affections on the Unseen and the Eternal—a religion that gives light to the intellect and firmness to the will. It is only education in and by this religion that can avail anything.
But religion is precisely what the Internationals reject, hate, or despise—what the great body of the workmen in our towns, cities, and manufacturing villages have ceased to believe, and even with those of the so-called proletarian class generally who do not formally reject religion, it has ceased to be a power, to have any hold on the conscience, and has become a vague tradition or a lifeless form. It is pretty much the same with the burgher class, and was so with them before it was so with the proletarian class. Modern civilization itself is based on atheism, or the purely material order. Hence the evils the Internationals seek to remedy are the natural and inevitable result of the new order of civilization, not yet two centuries old. The Internationals see it, and make war on the existing civilization for that very reason. But on what principles, and in what interest? On the principles and in the interests of that very civilization itself. Their success would simply oust the burgher and put the proletary in his place. They introduce or propose not a higher and a nobler civilization, but, so far as there is any difference, a still lower and more degrading civilization.
The revolution that has been going on in society since the close of the fourteenth century has had several phases. The first phase was the union of the burghers and the sovereigns against the Pope and the feudal
nobility, and resulted in the triumph of absolute monarchy in the sixteenth century and the seventeenth. The second phase was the union of the burghers, or the tiers état, and the people or a portion of them against monarchy and the church, which issued in establishing the supremacy of the burghers. The third phase is that in the midst of which we now are, and is—monarchy and the church gone or assumed to be gone—that of the proletaries against burghers. Neither of the preceding phases of the revolution effected the good hoped for, or satisfied the revolutionary appetite, but really aggravated the social evils it was sought to remedy. The friends of the revolution said it did not go far enough, and stopped short of the mark. It has now descended to the bottom, to the lowest stratum, or to the lowest deep, and proposes to wrest the power from the burgher class and rest it in the proletarian class. It is some consolation to know that we at length have reached the last phase of the revolution, and that after its failure, as fail it will, nothing worse is to be feared. “When things are at worst, they sometimes mend.”
The principal objection to the Internationals is not that they oppose what is called modern civilization, or that they seek to remedy undeniable social evils; but that they seek to do it on false principles, by inadequate means, and unlawful and even horrible methods, and can only lose even by success.
The International has absorbed all the other labor unions, and may be said to represent the whole proletarian class in Europe and America, and its leaders are avowed atheists; they reject the entire supernatural order, disdain or contemn all forms of religion, and seek to redress the material by the material. This
alone is sufficient in itself to condemn them. They reject not only religion, but also government, or the entire political and civil order. They will have no God, no king, no aristocracy, no democracy, no law, no court, no judges, but simply—we can hardly say what. Practically, they will fall under the authority of irresponsible and despotic leaders, governing in the name of nobody, and by their own passions or interests alone. They may aim at positive results, but at present their means are only adequate to the work of destruction. Thus an organized and secret, and, when practicable, open war on all religion, on God, on all authority, all law, and especially on capital or individual property. What positive result is to follow, Mr. Phillips confesses his inability to tell.
From Mr. Phillips we learn that they aim at the destruction of the whole modern industrial system, and propose that the workmen shall take possession of the establishments created by capitalists, incorporated or not, and run them on their own account, and share the profits among themselves, without any indemnification to the owners. As to land, no individual is to own it or any portion of it—it is to be made common, and open, as to the usufruct, to any one who chooses to occupy it. Mr. Phillips says:
“I have another proposition. I think when a man has passed five years in the service of a corporation, though he may not have bought a dollar of its stock, he is in a certain sense a stockholder. He has put his labor and persistency there, and I think every man who has been employed in a corporation for a year or two should have a voice in its financial management. In Japan, when a man dies, his land is left to the state. Do you not think that is a wiser plan than ours? The land becomes more valuable through the labor of the whole country, and not by that of the man who eats off of it.
Our great hope in the future is in the education of the masses, for they will yet be our rulers. New York stood aghast at the defalcation of millions of dollars, but will you submit to be robbed of hundreds of millions by monopolists? Fifth Avenue cannot afford to let the Five Points exist. You cannot get wealth enough to fortify you against discontented ignorance within your reach. The lesson taught by Chicago is that wealth cannot afford to neglect poverty.”
How the matter would be adjusted if two or more men should happen to insist on occupying the same house and lot we do not know. They would all have an equal right, or one would have as good a right to it as another, and, there being no authority, no law, and none of them having any moral or religious principle, they would most likely, all having the pride and obstinacy natural to the human heart, be obliged to settle the question by fighting it out, and leaving the house and lot as the prize to the victor. Might or craft would then settle the right. Society and mankind would fall back into a state of war, in which might is the only rule of right, and which Hobbes contends was their natural state, out of which they were happy to get by the surrender of all their natural rights or natural liberty to any one who would consent to be their king, and in return would maintain them in a state of peace.
The Paris Commune, endorsed by Mr. Phillips, and which was led on and approved by the Internationals, tells us not only the principles of the Association, but its method of carrying them out and reducing them to practice. We cite here a passage from The Dublin Review on the principles and spirit of the Commune:
“M. Auguste Desmoulins is one of those fanatical believers in the infallibility of the unknown, to whom the past is all superstition, the present all corruption, and the future the one reality of
life. He is inaccessible to conviction either in the way of holy water or the way of petroleum; and with him, as with all those of his school, the mind has become so far softened that the terminology which has hitherto served not merely among Christians and Jews, but among such heathens as the Greeks and Romans, the Turks, the Indians, the Red Indians, to distinguish between right and wrong, has ceased to convey a meaning. The world is not a mere Babel of tongues nowadays: it is, outside the church, a far worse Babel of thought. In the following passage, which really sums up the argument of his paper in a sufficiently trenchant and complete form, M. Desmoulins does not hesitate to convey his opinion that the coveting of one’s neighbor’s goods is suggested by, or at least connected with, a sentiment of justice; that the daily bread earned by labor is much more keenly enjoyed by a man who does not believe in God, or heaven, or hell; and that as neither the French workman nor his master believes in a future state, it is only natural and quite right that the workman should heal the difference between them here by robbery:
“‘The Parisian workman is often obliged to visit the handsome quarters of the town, while new buildings are ever thrusting him further away beyond the old barriers into vile habitations. In this condition, which is made for him. anything helps to irritate him. How can he find content in a home that is narrow, ill-lighted, foul, nearly without air, when he compares this wretched hole, for which he pays so dear, with the sumptuous chambers that he has either built or decorated in the rich quarters? It is easy to denounce in eloquent homilies the spirit of envy that devours the lower classes. We should recognize that a true notion of justice mixes with the feeling.
“‘The desire to enjoy the fruits of his labor is especially likely to spring up in the mind of the French workman, who does not believe, any more than his master, in the reparations of a future life; who does not perceive for the right of the master any other sanction than the material fact of possession; and whom, besides, universal suffrage invests with a share of sovereignty equal to that of the capitalist. Whatever may be said by those who have been justly called mammonite writers, we can easily understand that the proletary who has just given his vote finds it hard to resign himself to social serfage at the very moment when he feels himself politically sovereign. This striking contrast between his rights as citizen and his condition of pariah in society, accompanies him everywhere, reproduces itself in every act of his life, and adds a perpetual gloom to exhausting labor and never-abating privations.’
“This passage contains the essence of
M. Desmoulins’ apology for the Commune; and it supplies, we submit, matter for reflection in its every line. The statesmen and the classes in society who delight in seeing the influence of religion weakened or destroyed, never seem to realize until it is too late that they are sure to be the especial victims of their own success. The great truths of life hang together and sustain each other:
‘All is contained in each:
Dodona’s forest in an acorn’s cup.’
The man who scorns to love God, how shall he continue to love his neighbor? The man who has said, ‘There is no God,’ is he not on the point of also saying, ‘Lust is lawful,’ ‘Property is robbery’?”
We copy also from the same Review a letter from General Cluseret from this city to a member of the Society:
“New York, 17th February.
“My Dear Varlin: I have just received your welcome letter of the 2d. It explains the delay in replying to my application. Need I say that I accept, and will set to work at once in endeavoring to be useful to my brethren in poverty and toil? The newspaper which I told you of is not yet established. I think it better not to renew my attempts in that direction, considering the late events in France, and the numerous letters I have received from my friends, who are unanimous in recalling me to Europe.
“In all probability, I shall be there next summer, but, in the interval, I shall have arranged international relations between the different French and American groups, and selected one person or several persons (at the discretion of the French committee) of proved zeal and capability, to replace me. As you say, we shall surely, infallibly triumph if we persist in demanding success from our organization. But we must remember that the aim of our Association is to associate (solidariser) the greatest number for action. Let us, then, be liberal; let us round off our angles; let us be really brethren, not in words, but in deeds; let not such mere terms as doctrine and individuality separate those whom common suffering, which means a common
interest, has united: we are all and all, we must acknowledge that; if we are beaten, it is our own fault. I have not been able to picture our people to myself during the late troubles. What has been the attitude of the workmen’s societies, and what are their present dispositions? Certainly, we must not sacrifice our ideas to politics, but we must not detach ourselves from them, even momentarily. In my mind, the meaning of all that is going on is simply this, that the Orleans are slipping little by little close to power, and paring his nails for L. N., so that one fine morning they will merely have to substitute themselves for him.
“Now, we ought to be ready, physically and morally, for that day. On that day, we, or nothing. Until then I shall probably remain quiet, but on that day, I affirm—and you know my ‘Nay’ never means ‘Yea’—Paris shall be ours, or Paris shall exist no longer. This will be the decisive moment for the accession of the people.—Yours ever, Cluseret.
“You are mistaken in believing, for a moment, that I am neglecting the socialist in favor of the political movement. No; it is only from a purely socialistic point of view I am pursuing the revolutionary work; but you must thoroughly know we can do nothing in the direction of social reform if the old political system be not annihilated. Let us not forget that at this moment the Empire exists merely in name, and that government consists in party abuse. If, under these grave circumstances, the socialist party permits itself to be lulled to sleep by the abstract theory of sociological science, we may wake up one fine morning to find ourselves under new masters, more dangerous for us than those we have at present, because they would be younger, and consequently more vigorous and more powerful.”
We have personally known General (?) Cluseret, and we know him to be a man who acts from deliberation, not impulse, who means what he says, and who can be restrained from going straight to his end by no religious principle, moral scruple, or sentiment of mercy, pity, or compassion. His disposition is as stern and
inexorable as a physical law of nature. When he threatened to burn Paris rather than surrender it, he meant it, and he was the man to do it or to see that it was done if within the limits of the possible. Mr. Phillips seems also to appear, at least, to threaten incendiarism as a means of accomplishing his purpose. What means this, the closing sentence of his lecture: “The lesson taught by Chicago is that wealth cannot afford to neglect poverty”? Does this mean that the Internationals burnt Chicago? or does it simply mean that other cities may be burnt as well as Chicago, and will be, if wealth continues to neglect poverty or refuses to yield to the demands of the International Association of Workingmen? This gives the question a startling aspect. Certain it is that the Association holds itself free to introduce its socialism or communism by murder, assassination, robbery, plunder, and conflagration at the pleasure or dictation of its chiefs. Take the following letter, read and endorsed by Mr. Phillips before a New York audience:
“Before proceeding to speak of it, you will allow me to read a notice which has been placed in my hand, and in the object of which I sympathize cordially, because the great foreign movement can be commemorated by it. The French Commune has always seemed to me to deserve the cordial respect of every lover of the progress of the masses throughout the world. I have no doubt that in due time its good name will be vindicated, and its leaders lifted to the unqualified respect of the civilized world. The notice I hold in my hand is as follows:
“‘To the Workingmen of New York, friends of humanity, enemies of bloodshed, and lovers of justice: Citizens! The recent barbarous executions in France, in cold blood, six months after all struggles are over, and the ferocity with which the conquerors pursue their victims, are a disgrace and shame to humanity. We must not allow the human race to be stained by the shedding of its own blood without a protest. You, workingmen, would you let your friends
the workingmen be murdered because they have defended our rights in any part of the world? No! certainly not without raising your voice and making it heard across the ocean. To give effect to these purposes, a grand funeral procession will take place in New York on Sunday, the 10th of December, at 1 o’clock, forming opposite the Cooper Institute. All men, without distinction of party, of race, of nationality, friends of justice and freedom, are invited to join. By order of the Committee of Arrangements of the Federal Council.’
“I hope every man who loves his fellow will show himself there. There was never nobler blood shed, never more high-minded and disinterested effort made in the long history of Freedom’s struggle, than in Paris, when, in defiance of all the oligarchies of Europe, that city stood up for the individual and for liberty in the nineteenth century.”
The impudence of the writers of this letter is sublime, and only surpassed by that of the lecturer in endorsing it. Why, these fellows would persuade us that they are “enemies of bloodshed and lovers of justice,” meek as lambs, timid as sheep, and harmless as doves—they who, without a shadow of justice or excuse, made the streets of Paris run with the blood of the innocent, the noble, and the saintly. “Enemies of bloodshed”!—they whose hands are reeking with blood! Yes, to having their own blood shed, but not to the shedding of the blood of others. “Enemies of bloodshed and lovers of justice”! Good God! can hypocrisy or self-delusion go so far? Let the assassination of Generals Le Comte and Clement Thomas, the horrible murders, when it was known that the cause of the Commune was lost, of the holy and unoffending Archbishop of Paris, of Jesuit fathers, and a dozen Dominican friars and lay brothers, to say nothing of other murders hardly less horrible, reply to that false pretence. It would seem that these miscreants count for nothing the blood they shed without authority, in violation of law, religion, morality, and every principle of justice, and every sentiment of humanity; it
is only when justice overtakes them, and, after trial and conviction by legitimate authority, orders them and their fellow-criminals to be shot or sends them to the guillotine in punishment for their crimes, that they have a horror of bloodshed! Then, and only then, they ring out their dastard cry against injustice and for the sympathy of that humanity they have so greatly outraged! The men who have been executed by the government at Versailles deserved their fate—men without a single virtue or noble quality except personal bravery in face of death. Deluded were they? Yes, as every great criminal, murderer, or assassin is deluded.
What most excites our indignation is to find an educated and refined American gentleman, of no mean ability and rare eloquence, and past middle age, coming forward before an American audience to express in a written lecture deep and unreserved sympathy with, and approval of, these horrors and abominations, equal to those of ‘93, and applauded by his auditors for such an outrage on common morality and decency. Yet it is no more than we might have been prepared for, since Mr. Phillips only gave a logical expression to the principles he had always defended as an abolitionist; and while there are fools enough among us who imagine that the issues of the war have endorsed them and they have been sanctioned by the God of battles. We love our country, and have been proud of our countrymen; but, if they have fallen so low as to applaud the Paris Commune and its horrid butcheries and profanations, we can only say, Alas for them!
It may have become unsafe to oppose the Internationals, since the police has taken them under its protection, and granted them their impudent demands. We are surrounded
by Internationals—our city is at the mercy of men who are restrained by no law, by no religion, by no morality, by no sentiment of humanity, from using any means or methods they judge likely to serve their ends, and New York is hardly less wealthy and more combustible than Paris. Herein is there a grave danger. At its head are men who are in dead earnest, desperate men, who shrink from nothing likely to further their ends. We are not surprised that Prussia and Austria have taken the alarm—consulted together as to the means of protecting themselves and society against their machinations. France keeps them in check only by her army, and knows not how soon even the army may fraternize with them—and fraternize with them it certainly will if it loses all hope of restoring the Empire or the monarchy. Great Britain is now using them, but will soon find herself obliged to suppress them, as she did or as she attempted to suppress the Thugs in India, if she means to preserve her institutions. Here they will make trouble, for each party will bid for their votes, and fear to offend them for fear of losing an election; but they can acquire less power out of our cities here than elsewhere, unless they enroll in their ranks the recently emancipated negroes, and rouse their savage instincts to dispossess the planters and to take possession of their plantations; for the passion for individual property is too strong in our agricultural laborers, and the facilities for individuals to rise from proletaries to capitalists, or to the ownership of land, are too great to afford them, when it comes to the test, any appropriate support. Yet they will confuse our politics, corrupt still more the morals of our community, and defeat any wise and salutary action of the government. They
will strengthen the burgher class and corporations in towns by compelling many who are not favorable to these classes and interests to support them, as the only means left of saving society from lapsing into complete barbarism.
We shall probably return at an early day to this subject, for it is really the great question of the hour.
[144] 1. The Dublin Review. Article IX.: The International Society. London. October, 1871.
2. The Labor Movement. Lecture of Wendell Phillips. Steinway Hall. New York Tribune, Dec. 7, 1871.
ON CATHOLIC LIBRARIES.
It must be confessed that the Catholics of this country, in proportion to their numerical strength and untiring zeal for the interests of religion, do not present that proportionately large class of readers which we find among the Protestant sects. Their exertions in building churches, schools, and charitable institutions have been beyond all praise, and have constantly elicited the admiration and astonishment of their opponents; but as yet very little organized effort has been made by the influential portion of the laity to place within easy reach of their humbler co-religionists the means of cheap and instructive reading. The more intelligent and wealthy are too often content to purchase a few standard Catholic works, and after perusing them with more or less attention place them with their other books on the shelves of their libraries, there to remain secluded from public view, and of comparatively little value to any person but their owners. The less favored class, who for obvious reasons are unable to indulge in this luxury, are still practically cut off from one of the chief sources of knowledge and amusement—good books—and are necessarily compelled from uncontrollable circumstances to go through life with their minds and tastes undeveloped, and their time dissipated in idleness, or wasted over the trashy and deleterious contents of the many
cheap story newspapers and novels which the American press is constantly scattering broadcast over the land.
This melancholy fact is most observable in the ranks of our adult immigrant population, who, coming from countries where education was almost unattainable, money scarce, and books dear, have not generally acquired either ability or taste for reading, though it has been remarked that even among them, when an opportunity is at all presented, the desire for information is excited in a remarkable degree, and only requires a reasonable impetus to develop it still more. Still, from the fact of their usually limited means and comparatively unsettled modes of life, they are as yet unable to purchase or retain any appreciable collection of desirable publications.
The remedy for this defect in our growing Catholic society lies, in our opinion, in the formation of local libraries, suitable in variety and extent to the wants and capacity of particular localities. There are at least twenty-five hundred centres of Catholic population in America where very respectable collections of books could be purchased and placed in some safe and accessible place, say in the school-rooms or church basements, and half as many more, particularly in our Western settlements, where at least a few good
books would be of great advantage to the hardy tillers of the soil, and where, even if there be no public place to deposit them, there is always some prominent settler who would willingly assume the honorary office of librarian. Experiments of both plans have been tried in many of our large city parishes, and in a few isolated instances in the country, with marked success.
The advantages of libraries conducted on this system are numerous, and ought to be apparent to every one, not the least of which would be cheapness. Let us suppose, for instance, that, in any given locality, fifty persons would each subscribe two dollars. This would create a capital of one hundred dollars, or sufficient to purchase, on an average, one hundred and fifty volumes, great and small, of readable books, from any of our large publishing-houses in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore. Thus, for two dollars, a subscriber would have, for reading or reference, the practical ownership of works at least fifty times the value of his contribution, and, by charging new members a small fee for the use of each volume, a fund might be created to purchase new books as they appeared from time to time. In this manner, and with proper attention, a library of dimension commensurate with the growing wants of the neighborhood would be brought into existence without much expense to any particular class of the community.
But the moral effect of the establishment of such small centres of intelligence would be incomparably greater. For the adults, it would at once be an attraction and a source of occupation, tending powerfully to withdraw them from those pursuits, not always edifying, in which unoccupied minds too often indulge, to
the detriment of their health and morals. It would be the means of generating a taste for mental improvement, and of making them more confident among their companions, and more proficient and reflective in their various pursuits; for it is a well-recognized truth, that as a man, be he artisan, trader, or farmer, acquires those habits of thought which can only be derived from study, he becomes more skilful and methodical in his peculiar calling. The youth of both sexes, however, would reap the greatest advantages. There are hundreds of thousands of children of Catholic parents among us who can read, and, what is more, will read. The young American mind, no matter of what parentage, is a hungry and an investigating mind, and must have some sort of food, do or say what we will. If it cannot have good literary food, it will have what is poisonous, and in this lies the secret of the success of the sensational story papers, and the no less deleterious tales that, in a few years, have made fortunes for their publishers. It is well known that one of the former class, published in this city, boasts of a weekly circulation of three hundred thousand copies, and another of nearly as great a number. If we go into the large workshops of the principal cities, or the factories of New England, where so many young persons are engaged, at the hour allotted for dinner we will see every second boy and girl devouring with more eagerness than their food the contents of some flashy journal or specimen of what is generally known as “yellow-covered literature,” in which vice is hidden under a thin veil of romance only to make it the more seductive. Now, the way to check this insidious and widespread evil is not by complaining of or railing at it, but by placing
within easy reach, and in accessible places sound and attractive Catholic works. The impetuous mind of youth may be compared to a rapid stream, which, dammed up or checked in its career, is sure sooner or later to overflow its boundaries to the destruction of its surroundings, but which, if its course is directed by skilful and experienced hands, not only ceases to be dangerous, but becomes a source of usefulness and power. To give this direction to the expanding intellect of the rising generation, and to turn to good use what might by neglect or repression become an evil and a curse, is one of the first and plainest duties of parents, for the proper performance of which they will be held to a strict accountability. It is not enough for them to see that their offspring attend church on Sundays and holy-days, that they go to Sunday-school regularly, and say their prayers night and morning, if they allow them afterwards to ponder from hour to hour over sickly romances; nor will it serve to send their children to school to learn to spell and read, if the knowledge thus gained be turned to the enervation of their minds and the corruption of their morals. Education is not in itself an end, it is only the means to an end, and that end is the knowledge of God’s law, and the best way of conforming one’s conduct to its requirements so as to secure our eternal salvation. There is no excuse for a Catholic parent for not putting into the hands of his children entertaining and moral books, nor is there any palliation for any one professing our holy faith, and who has arrived at the years of discretion, for encouraging or reading the thousand-and-one works of fiction which we see every day exposed on news-stands and in cheap book-stores, and which are
not only immoral in tone and spirit, but in effect positively anti-Christian. Besides books of a serious and practical character, we have numerous works of fiction, published in this country and easily obtained, of the highest order of talent united to rare dramatic force and interest, which are detrimental neither to morals nor religion. The writings of Griffin, Banim, Huntington, Julia Kavanagh, Mrs. Sadlier, Mrs. Anna Dorsey, Lady Fullerton, Lady Herbert, and many others that we could name, are of this character, and are worthy to be read by the highest as well as the lowest in society. Of works treating on history, science in its various departments, biography, travels, etc., Catholic in tone, and elaborate or elementary in arrangement, we have a large and varied supply; and new productions under these heads are constantly appearing, more fascinating to the cultivated taste than even the productions of our best novelists. But it has been objected that these publications are too dear; that poor people cannot afford to spend ten or fifteen dollars on a few books. Granted; but, if they can have the use of four or five score for a couple of dollars by subscribing to a parochial library, is not the objection removed? This is what local libraries, and they alone, can do.
Now, what would be the effect of this system of libraries on the general tone of public opinion? Decidedly most salutary. In addition to driving from circulation many of the demoralizing newspapers, periodicals, and books which even non-Catholics denounce as immoral, and for the suppression of some of which the aid of legislative action has been invoked, it would create and foster a pure literary taste among no inconsiderable portion of our diverse population, and, apart from its direct
moral effect, would render it more valuable and more reproductive in a material point of view. Many of the most important political, social, and commercial problems of the day, on the true solution of which depends the future welfare of our republic, can only be properly comprehended by reference to the history of the past, and to the biographies of the great statesmen who succeeded or failed in founding or destroying nations and empires. And even in the discussion of minor questions affecting our interests or liberties, some acquaintance with the antecedents of our country is absolutely necessary to enable us to form proper opinions of their merits. In individual cases, one of the compensations for declining years and one of the highest claims to respect is experience; but to the reader of history, no matter what his age, the accumulated experience of at least thirty centuries is accessible, and not only controls his judgment and enlarges his knowledge, but vastly enhances his social and political status. But this experience, to be of any value, must be based on truth and undoubted facts. It must arise from the just appreciation of unbiassed statements and philosophical deductions, stripped of all that false assertion and unlimited prejudice which have characterized so many European and American writers for the last three centuries. Hence the need of Catholic books and Catholic readers—for, in this as in commercial matters, the demand regulates the supply—and the creation of new facilities for the spread of reliable information.
Take the case of the History of England by Lingard. Before the appearance of that excellent work, we venture to say that seven-eighths of the reading population in every part of the world believed more or less in
the falsehoods and forgeries with which the pages of the English historians of the post-Reformation period were crowded. Many more such instances of recent successful vindication of the truth of history might be cited, not the least valuable and complete being the production of our own countrymen, such as that very able and learned refutation of D’Aubigné’s History of the Reformation[145] and the Life of Mary, Queen of Scots,[146] which has lately appeared, and in which the slanders and aspersions so repeatedly heaped on the memory and character of that beautiful but ill-starred sovereign are condemned, exposed, and, it is to be hoped, finally disposed of. The first of these works is the most elaborate and reliable book we have on that important epoch, when every throne in Europe was shaken to its base, and when men’s passions, let loose by the preaching of the heresiarchs of England and the Continent, threatened to destroy every vestige of temporal and spiritual authority. There is no period in the history of Christendom about which so many falsehoods and such mendacious calumnies have been invented and circulated by prejudiced writers; and it was only on the appearance of the book in question that we have had, at least in English, any comprehensive and truthful account of the origin and progress of that rebellion against God’s church and laws. This country, from its settlement to the present, the origin and growth of its institutions from their inception in the early part of the seventeenth century till their fruition in our present constitution, though full of incident and fraught with lessons of the highest political wisdom, is yet imperfectly known and
but little understood. Is it not, then, worth a little sacrifice on the part of parents to place before their children, who ere long are to become the rulers of the state, a correct and impartial account of the birth of religious liberty on this continent, of the dangers, trials, and struggles our forefathers endured in order to build up and transmit to posterity the blessings of a free government? Yet such knowledge can only be obtained through books, and books, so far as the majority of Catholics are concerned, are almost unattainable, except through co-operation. Then, again, we are often taunted by such hackneyed phrases as the darkness of the middle ages, the ignorance of the monks, the corruption of the Papacy, the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, and such other fabrications of Protestant authors. Are we to allow our children to go forth in the midst of a reading and, in a religious sense at least, a hostile people, unprepared to intelligently refute such calumnies, and unable to account for the various agencies by which the Catholic Church at all times sought to eliminate civilization from barbarism, light from darkness, and Christianity from paganism at first, and from heresy and infidelity subsequently? They must have great—too great, perhaps—confidence in the faith of their children thus to submit them to so severe a test; and yet how few reliable books dealing with those subjects do we find provided for young Catholics by those whose duty it is to direct their conduct and shield them from the temptations and snares of the world! How many parents, intent on rewarding their children by presents, ever think of presenting them with good books, which would not only gratify their tastes and improve their minds, but would be, at least to them, a perpetual source of consolation?
Far different are the tactics of our opponents, who are never tired of devising measures to instil into the minds of the youth of their own faith all the errors of Protestantism under the most attractive guise possible, and at the same time to weaken the faith and pervert the judgment of our children. It is perhaps not generally known that every school district in this state, outside the large cities, is supplied with a library of select works, under the charge of the school trustees, and every child in the district is allowed free access to it, with the privilege of borrowing one volume at a time. These libraries were originally supplied at the expense of the public, and are annually increased by new purchases, the funds being derived from the state library fund. When we state that those libraries were furnished by a publishing-house in this city the first success of which in business was due to the production of Maria Monk, the works of Eugene Sue, and others of a kindred character, and that the compilers and abridgers, who claim the authorship of them, have been remarkable for bigotry even in this age of Protestant intolerance, it is scarcely necessary to point out the danger to our young Catholics of the free circulation of such books among them. In country places, the absence of the noise, excitement, and attractions of city life naturally leads to a desire for reading and a remarkable tendency to discussion, and it is there that good Catholic books are most required. Our children must mix with those of the sects, and will be compelled to listen to a repetition of the fabrications and falsehoods against their religion which are weekly dealt out in the Protestant churches, daily commented on in the household, and which fill the pages of the books of the district libraries and local newspapers.
This is the poison that is carrying off so many of our juvenile co-religionists, more dangerous to their souls than the deadly upas would be to their bodies, and against which we must provide some antidote. If one of our boys is confronted with quotations from Hume or Macaulay, he must be prepared to answer them on the undoubted authority of Lingard; if he be taunted with the poverty or ignorance of the Catholics of Ireland, he can show whence came this penury and destitution by reference to McGee’s, Cusack’s, or any of the numerous histories of that country; he ought to be prepared to oppose Archbishop Spalding to D’Aubigné, Meline to Froude, the history of the Maryland settlers (the founders of religious liberty on this continent) to the eulogiums on the intolerant Puritans, the “Irish Settlers” to the Know-Nothing organs—in fact, truth and light wherever falsehood and darkness are to be found. The truth has nothing to lose, but everything to gain, by full and free discussion. It is only error that shrinks from thorough investigation. But we must take care that our sons and daughters are well supplied with plain and useful facts regarding their faith and religion before they are subjected to the ordeal through which all young Catholics must pass who mingle freely in Protestant society, lest through their ignorance the cause they espouse should be weakened by their imperfect advocacy.
Neither ought we to hesitate in learning lessons from our adversaries when it is possible to do so. If the children of darkness are wiser than the children of light in their generation, it is no reason why we should be guilty of folly. Apart from the falsity of their teachings, we have often had occasion to admire the systematic perseverance with which the
Protestant sects have endeavored to disseminate their peculiar views throught the medium of cheap and attractive publications. All that art and skill can do has been done to render them pleasing to the eye and agreeable to the mind. The highest literary talent is employed and well rewarded, because the result of their labors is extensively circulated, and, even when persons are unable or unwilling to purchase, the purse of the wealthy is always open to enable them to obtain books free of cost, while our children are too often allowed to begin life but half-instructed, and to continue in it illiterate and untaught. Were our schools as efficient and as numerous as we wish and as we hope one day to see them, we might assure ourselves that all this might be taught in them; but they are not, nor can they be for some years, and we cannot ignore the fact or wait for the slow operation of time to perfect and extend their influence. We must endeavor by some means or other to supply the deficiency, so far, at least, as this generation is concerned. Besides, there will always be a large number of children of the working-classes who cannot remain long at any school, but must go into the world to earn their bread. With these the most critical period of their lives is from the time they pass from the control of the teacher till they reach manhood or womanhood, for then their characters for good or evil are formed. For this class of toilers, good books are not only a recreation and a solace, but an absolute necessity; but, being limited in means, we hold that it is only through the means of local libraries that they can gratify their wishes and find opportunities for mental improvement.
Literature itself would also gain much by the establishment of these libraries. How often has it been remarked
that, out of the large number of Catholic young men of brains and education which our colleges and academies turn out annually, there are so few writers. The explanation is that for them authorship is neither a remunerative nor an appreciated employment. The professions of law and medicine and the attractions of commerce and trade are constantly drawing into their vortices the best energies and talent of our young graduates, many of whom with proper encouragement and patronage might, as authors, render incalculable service to the cause of truth and morality. What is required to utilize this large amount of natural gifts and acquired knowledge is simply the more extensive circulation of works already published; the increase in the number of new books on subjects of general interest, in style and treatment more in accordance with modern forms than those published years ago; but, above all, the cultivation of a correct standard of literary excellence among the people, and the creation of a widespread class of readers and thinkers.
The objection to the dearness of Catholic publications would also be removed by this means. It is well known to those conversant with the publishing business that, in proportion to the increase of the circulation of a given book, the expense of its production per copy is diminished in an inverse ratio. A book of which three thousand copies are sold at two dollars each would be more remunerative to both publisher and author at even one dollar if twenty thousand copies were disposed of. The publisher, also, in his contract with the author and in view of the uncertainty of his sales, naturally adds to the cost of production and to his fair percentage of profit a certain amount for probable losses by having a portion
of his edition left on his shelves unsold. The establishment of local libraries would obviate the necessity of this additional cost. With, say, twenty-five hundred of these institutions, each ready and willing to subscribe for one or more copies of any really meritorious book that might appear, its success would be assured beyond doubt, the outlay of the publisher would be nearly reimbursed, and his risk, for which all book-buyers have now to pay, would be sensibly and materially diminished if not altogether done away with. Thus even individual purchasers as well as subscribers to libraries would be benefited in the reduction of price; and, while the bookseller would not suffer in the profits of his sales, the general public as well as the author would be sensibly the gainers.
As to what ought to constitute the necleus of a small library, some difficulty may be experienced in diverse tastes and opinions. In view of the multiplicity of good books constantly being imported or published in this country, it is nearly impossible to make a list of such as would be most desirable and useful without leaving out others perhaps as equally deserving of attention. Of works of fiction we have enough and more than enough in the productions of the authors above named and others of a less pretentious order, but, as this sort of reading is simply a matter of choice, each one must judge for himself in the selection.
Devotional and controversial works are numerous, and a few at least, such as the writings of St. Liguori, Father Faber, Dr. Manning, and Cardinal Wiseman, the Guide for Catholic Young Women, Following of Christ, Catholic Christian Instructed, Lenten Monitor, as well as several others, should be always found in Catholic libraries. In history, as far as the English language
is concerned, we are not so rich. We have, it is true, four or five histories of Ireland, possessing peculiar merits, and exhibiting more or less defects, but all full of useful information. Lingard’s England, entire or abridged, is decidedly the best of that country. Shea’s History of the Catholic Missions in the United States, McSherry’s Maryland, Bishop Bayley’s Church in New York, McGee’s Irish Letters and Catholic History, De Courcey’s and Shea’s Catholic Church in America, go far to supply the defect, at least in part. Then there are the Works of Archbishop Hughes, one of the great prelates of the church in America, and the writings of Dr. O. A. Brownson, particularly his Essays and American Republic, than whom no man of our day, it is safe to say, writes with more vigor or with a clearer understanding of his subject. The works of Bishop England are, we regret to say, too little known, and, being for some time out of print, are now almost unattainable. Darras’s Church History, the only complete history of the church yet published in our language, should, if possible, be read by every Catholic, and find a conspicuous place in all our libraries. The Lives of Deceased Prelates of the United States, by Clarke, which has just been published, is a very valuable book, containing a great deal of remote and contemporary history; and if Mr. Shea could be induced by proper encouragement to further develop the subjects he has selected for his books, as we feel certain of his ability to do so, a great deal of additional matter connected with the struggles and sufferings of the early pioneers of religion, now almost forgotten or unknown, would be placed before the public. In biography, which maybe called history in detail, our resources are abundant. We have, besides numerous
lives of Christ, a complete Lives of the Popes, Butler’s Lives of the Saints, several of St. Patrick, St. Vincent de Paul, Curé of Ars, and some two hundred separate lives of the holy men and women who in every age of the church were conspicuous for their sanctity, wisdom, and devotion to the faith, a list of which may be chosen from the catalogue of any of our principal publishers; and last, though not least, is Montalembert’s great work, The Monks of the West, an American edition of which is just published.
So far as materials are concerned, we have a plenitude of them of every variety and in all departments of literature, and we have endeavored to show that very little money is required to purchase them. What is wanted is organization and action. For these we must depend to a great extent on the local pastors, and on the half a dozen leading laymen who are most generally to be found in every congregation. There is a homely proverb, but nevertheless true, that “what is everybody’s business is nobody’s business.” Let one or two influential men in each parish think seriously over the matter, call their associates together, and explain to them the advantages to be derived by themselves and their children from cheap and good reading, collect the subscriptions, put themselves in communication with any of our Catholic booksellers, and the work is done. The first and most important step thus taken, the future welfare of the library is assured. It is unnecessary to say that such a movement ought to and would receive the warmest encouragement from their spiritual superiors. Apart from the benefits arising from the reading of moral books to the cause of religion, the spirit of mutual intercourse, interchange of thought, and
friendly co-operation engendered by reading the same book, and meeting at stated times for a common object, would lead insensibly to the formation of a compact and efficient organization, exceedingly useful when the interests of charity, education, or the church are to be subserved. Not only this, but, knowing how overtaxed are the attention and time of so many of our missionary priests in providing the means of building churches and schools, as well as attending to the spiritual wants of their scattered flocks, we consider that an intelligent body of young people, such as we would naturally expect to see connected with a library society, would form a valuable lay staff of workers whose pleasure it would be to aid their pastor in all his material transactions. The more intelligent Catholics become, the less trouble, in two ways, they entail on their spiritual guide. They become aware easily of his wants, or rather the wants of the church of which he is to them the representative, and need little inducement to contribute their means freely for the benefit of charity or religion, while, at the same time, they make the most efficient agents in influencing the actions of others with whom they are daily brought in contact.
Firmly believing that the spread of these societies throughout this country would have a most marked and beneficent effect, morally and mentally, on our rapidly growing Catholic population, we submit these remarks to the serious consideration of the reverend clergy, and of those laymen who have been favored with more wealth and a better education than the majority of their fellow-Catholics. We must not forget that we live in an age of great mental activity and progress, so-called. Let us keep pace with our neighbors in everything that leads to the acquisition of true knowledge, but let our progress be in the right direction, and worthy of the name we bear, and of the religion we profess.
[145] History of the Protestant Reformation. By the Most Rev. M. J. Spalding, D.D. Baltimore.
[146] Mary, Queen of Scots. By James F. Meline. New York. 1871.
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
The Life of Philip Thomas Howard, O.P., Cardinal of Norfolk, etc. By Father C. F. Raymond Palmer, O.P. London: Thomas Richardson & Son. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.
It affords us sincere pleasure to be able to speak of this book in terms of unqualified praise, without in the least being subjected to the charge of flattery. The subject chosen by Father Palmer is the career of an ecclesiastic who not only filled a prominent part in the history of his times in his native country, England, but of the church throughout Europe; and whose private virtues were even more edifying than his mental capacity was remarkable. The scion of one of the noblest houses in Great Britain, and living at a time when every lure was held out to genius and rank to join the so-called Reformers, he not only remained true to the Catholic traditions of his family, but, forsaking the world altogether, he became, in spite of all opposition, an humble friar and a follower of the illustrious St. Dominic. His labors for the good of his order on the Continent as well as in England were incessant,
and so successful that in a few years he was raised to the dignity of a prince of the church. Several times he was entrusted with important diplomatic missions by his sovereign, Charles II., and for many years occupied the position of grand almoner to Catharine of Braganza, the queen-consort. In addition to the biography of Cardinal Howard, we have a very full and interesting sketch of the history of the Dominican order, that glorious corporation of friar-preachers, whose labors extended to every part of the known world, and whose blood may be said to have been shed in the cause of Christ wherever the foot of man has trod. Father Palmer’s treatment of the subject is in every way worthy of so great a theme. He does not, as too many biographers are apt to do, fall in love with his hero, and lose himself in senseless rhapsody and panegyric, but lets deeds and their results speak for themselves. Neither does he assume for the order, of which he himself is a worthy member, too much credit for its long-continued and extensive propagandism of the faith; but, keeping his praise within just bounds, makes the amplest acknowledgment to other missionaries when an opportunity offers. The author’s style, also, is admirable. It is plain, bold, and exceedingly clear, and reminds us a good deal of the old days of classic English, which, we are sometimes tempted to fear, have departed for ever.
Sermons by the Fathers of the Congregation of St. Paul the Apostle. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872. 12mo, pp. 331.
This, the sixth volume of sermons, twenty-two in number, delivered by the Paulist Fathers of this city, has just been published, and in point of variety, ability, and adaptability to the everyday wants of Catholic congregations, may fairly be said to be equal, at least, to any of the preceding volumes from the same source.
On first reading this valuable collection of sermons, the impression most likely to be produced on a layman is surprise at the remarkable simplicity of style, earnestness of argument, and, above all, the practical application to the present condition of society, of the inspired texts upon which the sermons are based. Men of the most ordinary comprehension can understand them, and we can imagine few minds so contracted or hearts so callous as to be proof against their unadorned logic and impressive appeals. It has sometimes been our good fortune to have heard, as we have often read, exhortations of more brilliancy, pathos, and even intellectual power, but we are not aware that, compressed within the limits of an ordinary-sized book, there is to be found in the English language a greater amount of wholesome truths, well and clearly stated, or better calculated to go directly to the heart and conscience of the reader. Of this character pre-eminently are the sermons on “How to Pass a Good Lent,” “Humility in Prayer,” and “The Sins and Miseries of the Dram-Seller.” In some respects the latter differs from all others in the collection—in its forcibleness of rhetoric, and vividness, almost painful, of description. Reading it in the silence of our library, we almost shudder at the, alas! too truthful picture drawn therein of the drunkard’s fate in this world, and the not less certain retribution which awaits his mercenary tempter, here or hereafter. It is one of the most powerful arguments against the use and sale of intoxicating liquors we have read since the days of Father Mathew, and ought to be in the hands of every advocate of temperance, clerical and lay, in the land. The three sermons treating of the temporal and spiritual authority of the Sovereign Pontiff are clear, distinct, and well-timed, and, besides being historically accurate, are replete with logical deductions, one following and hinging on the
other so harmoniously that conviction, even to a biassed mind, seems to follow as a matter of course.
But on a second and more critical perusal of this book, we are certain to discover new and equally commendable features. We feel as if we were in the presence of Catholic priests speaking to their spiritual children. There is an absence of all harshness or terrorism, and of that bitterness which too often accompanies the discussion of controversial subjects. While our errors are reproved and our sins denounced, hope and mercy are not denied us; the path of duty is plainly pointed out, but we are encouraged to tread its thorny ways, and we rise from the study of the Sermons conscious of our faults and weaknesses, without despairing, and with a renewed purpose of amendment. No one can read attentively the first and last of this series, on “Remembrance of Mercies” and “Fraternal Charity,” without feeling softened and chastened in spirit. It is not, however, the mere contents of the sermons that we most admire. It is their suggestiveness. To a reflective mind there is matter enough in them to form the groundwork of a hundred discourses, and still the subjects would not be exhausted. This feature alone will extend their good influence far beyond the limits of one book or one pulpit. As we have come to a grand truth boldly stated, or a deduction logically and lucidly drawn, we have frequently found ourselves closing the book, and, following the drift of the reverend preacher’s argument, preaching sermons to ourselves. If such be its effects on ordinary minds, how much more valuable will be the uses of this book to the younger members of the priesthood in the performance of the duties of their holy calling? And it is for them especially, we presume, it is intended.
Besides, as we are all aware, there are many persons with the best dispositions who, from family or other
reasons, are frequently unable to hear a sermon on every Sunday and holyday of obligation, not only in country parishes, but even in our crowded cities. To this class the present volume ought to be of great value, affording them, as it does, an opportunity of reading in the seclusion of their homes, what they are debarred from hearing delivered orally. It is one of the rules of the faithful to consecrate a portion of each Sunday to hearing sermons, but, when this cannot be done, the reading of pious books is substituted, and we know of none recently published better calculated to edify and instruct a devout Catholic, or one so practical in its application to the wants and necessities of the present generation, as this collection of sermons; and it is for this reason that we heartily commend it to the laity of the United States.
Macaronic Poetry. Collected, with an Introduction, by James Appleton Morgan, A.M. New York: Hurd & Houghton. 1872.
Of the many excellent specimens of the typography of the Riverside Press, the above-named work is one of the handsomest; and this merit is enhanced by the fact that the great variety of languages and characters, ancient and modern, used in its pages called for the best efforts of typographical skill and resources.
The title of the work gives but a modest idea of the wealth and diversity of its contents, which are creditable to the taste and industry of the author. We find in it not only all the most celebrated macaronic masterpieces, from the “Pugna Porcorum,” of about three hundred lines, every word of which begins with the letter P, thus:
“Plaudite, Porcelli, Porcorum pigra propago
Progreditur, plures Porci pinguedine pleni.
Pugnantes pergunt, pecudum pars prodigiosa,” etc., etc.,
down to Dr. Maginn’s “Second Ode to Horace,” commencing,
“Blest man, who far from busy hum,
Ut prisca gens mortalium.”
Then there are the literary trifles of the dipogrammatists and the pangrammatists, and curiosities in acrostics, telestics, anagrams, palindromes, sidonians, rhymed bagatelles, cento verses, chain verses, alliterative verses, and epitaphs. There are also some specimens of queer prescriptions, the whole family of which are but imitations of the celebrated recipe pasted on the door of the pharmacy in the Convent of the Capuchin Friars at Messina:
“Pro presenti corporis et æterna animæ salute.
RECIPE.
“Radicum fidei
Florum spei
Rosarum charitatis
Liliorum puritatis
Absynthé contritionis
Violarum humilitatis
Agarici satisfactionis
Ano quantum potes:
Misceatur omnia cum syrupe confessionis;
Terentur in mortario conscientiæ;
Solvantur in aqua lacrymarum;
Coquantur in igne tribulationis, et fiat potus.
Recipe de hoc mane et sera.”
Any one may find much literary amusement in the volume, and to the Latin scholar in particular it affords material for many an hour of pleasant relaxation.
The Taking of Rome by the Italian Army, considered in its Causes and Effects. By C. M. Curci, S.J. Translated from the Italian by the Duke Della Torre. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1871.
It is a matter of congratulation that we have among us at least one Italian gentleman of high rank, character, and education, who is a thoroughly loyal and devoted adherent of the Holy See. We are greatly indebted to the Duke Della Torre for translating F. Curci’s brochure, prefixing to it a most sensible and excellent preface, and getting it published by our most eminent New York firm. The pamphlet itself is an able production of an able and celebrated writer. The only great fault in it is the discouraging tone it
takes regarding the prospects of the temporal sovereignty of the Pope in the future—a point which has been strongly animadverted upon already in Europe. In so far as past facts are concerned, it is a thorough and unanswerable exposure of the fraud, violence, and perfidy of the Sub-Alpine government, and of the treachery and timidity of the policy of other European cabinets in their relations with the Pontifical States.
Florence O’Neil; or, The Siege of Limerick. By Agnes M. Stewart. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co.
The eventful life and troublous times of James II. of England must always be a period of history mournfully interesting to every Catholic heart—those days of persecution, when throughout England a price was set upon the head of any priest who dared labor for the salvation of souls, all the penal laws against Catholics (some of them but lately repealed) being in full force.
The touching story of Florence O’Neil, who is represented as living in very constant intimacy with the royal exiles, carries us through those dark days, and gives us pictures of the court of the reprobate, hard-hearted daughter of James, where Florence was kept an unwilling captive for many months. Her journal during that time is written with charming simplicity, and the whole story has sufficient mingling of truth with the narrative to fill us with pity even for those crowned heads who lived harassed with anxious fears lest the sceptre so hastily and unjustly assumed should be as hastily snatched from their grasp; trusting nobody, never at rest from plottings and replottings even in their own household. In contrast with this, we have the devoted domestic life at the Château St. Germaine, sketched with a delicate and refined touch, giving us a lovely picture of wedded bliss in the union of James with his beautiful and tenderly attached wife—more
perfect than usually falls to the lot of common mortals, not to speak of royalty. It is cheering to know that these good hearts, to whom life brought so much disappointment and trouble, found rest and peace and hope in the bosom of the church, which offers to her faithful children the kingdom of heaven and an imperishable crown. Florence O’Neil appears in a beautiful dress, and is well worthy of careful perusal.
The Rise and Fall of the Irish Franciscan Monasteries, and Memoirs of the Irish Hierarchy in the Seventeenth Century. By the Rev. C. P. Meehan, M.R.I.A.
A Memoir of Ireland, Native and Saxon. By Daniel O’Connell, M.P. Dublin: James Duffy. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.
The second edition of these two small works, which have attained a well-deserved popularity in Ireland and England, will doubtless be equally appreciated in this country, particularly by our adopted citizens, who, claiming the former nation as their birthplace, love to look back on her past glories and her continuous struggles for civil and religious freedom. Father Meehan’s book, though ostensibly confined to the history of the Franciscan establishments and the Irish hierarchy, contains also a brief but lucid and well-arranged account of the principal events of the seventeenth century in Ireland, embracing the wars of the Parliamentarians and Cromwell against the Nationalists, and the inception of the contest between the partisans of William and James. On such subjects Mr. Meehan is a reliable and judicious authority, for he has made them the study of a life-time. We remember him fully a quarter of a century ago, when curate of SS. Michael and John’s Church, Dublin, and when every moment that he could spare legitimately from the duties of his calling was devoted to his loved studies—the history and archæology of his native land; and we are happy to
find that time has neither quenched the fire of his patriotism nor weakened that mental activity which characterized his earlier works.
O’Connell’s memoir, like everything that fell from the pen or lips of that great agitator, is full of vigor and sound logic. A portion of the book is devoted to a general summary of the wrongs and struggles of the Irish race from the invasion in 1172 down to our day, but the greater part is occupied by historical quotations and running commentaries, illustrating that long, dreary period of war, desolation, and persecution. Though in fact contained in a comparatively small compass, it is a masterly indictment against England, prepared with all the system and acumen of an able jurist, and is invaluable as a historical document from the number of references it contains. It was only issued towards the close of the great author’s career, and may be supposed to be an epitome of his varied readings and long personal experience.
The Pearl of Antioch: A Picture of the East at the End of the Fourth Century. By the Abbé Bayle. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co. 1871.
In the preface to this interesting story of the early times, we have a bright and truthful comment on the different claims of works of fiction that have been written to make religion attractive: giving to Cardinal Wiseman (what rightfully belongs to him) the glory of having been the author of the truly Christian romance in the fascinating narrative of Fabiola. The writer of The Pearl of Antioch professes to follow at a modest distance that illustrious dignitary of the church. He gives us in the story of Pelagia a graphic description of life in Antioch, Alexandria, and Constantinople at the close of the fourth century, when the church, resting from the fierce persecutions that had marked her earlier years, was surrounded with master-minds who committed themselves to no religion, condemning
none formally, endeavoring to possess at the same time the esteem of both Christians and pagans. The delineation of the vacillating spirit of many of the finest intellects among the Greeks, their proud, patronizing ways towards God’s church, cannot but remind the careful reader of the position of many of the so-called intellectual giants of to-day.
The multiplicity of characters introduced, and the demand for mythological research which is necessary to make the story clear in all its parts, are rather detrimental to the unity of the tale; nevertheless, the story of Pelagia herself, and Nicephorus her lover, with their remarkable conversion and subsequent abandonment of the world, is very touching, and wrought out with simplicity and earnestness—the wonderful faith of Pelagia contrasting with the criticisms and doubts, and the ingenious hypotheses of Hypatia, whose strange life and fearful death have been the comment of historian and novelist.
The book contains many pages full of interest concerning Simon Stylites and the wonders of his life, besides several chapters devoted to charming descriptions of the monks who flocked in those times to monasteries in the deserts of Nitria and Tabenna, along the borders of the Nile, and even to Mount Sinai. One of the most attractive features of the volume will be found in the delightful conversations of these monks, enlivened with legends of those olden times, and pervaded throughout with a lovely, Christ-like spirit, which makes their religion an object of admiration even to the wise pagans around them.
Japan in Our Day. Compiled and arranged by Bayard Taylor. New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 1872. 1 vol. 12mo.
This is the first volume of the Illustrated Library of Travel, Exploration, and Adventure, now in course of publication by Messrs. Scribner,
& Co. and edited by Bayard Taylor. To those who take an interest in Japanese affairs the volume will prove interesting, as containing the latest information with regard to that country so long almost unknown.
Sadliers’ Catholic Directory, Almanac, and Ordo for the Year of our Lord 1872. With full Report of the various Dioceses in the United States and British North America, and a List of the Archbishops, Bishops, and Priests in Ireland. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co., 31 Barclay Street.
The Almanac for this year has appeared. The sewing, type, and paper are much better than in former years. There are not so many mistakes in this as we noticed in the previous volume. We are aware there are many difficulties connected with the publication of a statistical work which nothing but the utmost patience and perseverance will overcome, and are therefore pleased to notice even slight improvements.
The American Home Book of In-door Games, Amusements, and Occupations. By Mrs. Caroline L. Smith (Aunt Carrie). Illustrated. Boston: Lee & Shepard. New York: Lee, Shepard & Dillingham. 1872.
This book is one of the best of its kind. The selection of games, amusements, etc., is very good, and the directions given in regard to them are short, simple, and clear. It cannot fail to add to the happiness of any home it may enter.
The Wonders of Water. From the French of Gaston Tissandier. Edited, with numerous Additions, by Schele De Vere, D.D., LL.D. New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 1872. 1 vol. 12mo.
A most interesting and useful little volume, containing valuable information in regard to the uses of water, the history of artesian wells, ancient and modern water-works, etc., etc. The book is elegantly got up and well illustrated.