After the accession of President Arthur, there occurred floods on the lower Mississippi, whereby one hundred thousand people lost their homes. The administration was not in any way to blame for this.
In 1883 the Brooklyn Bridge across East River was completed and ready for jumping purposes. It was regarded as a great engineering success at the time, but it is now admitted that it is not high enough. A person jumping from it is not always killed.
The same year the Civil Service Bill became a law. It provides that competitive examinations shall be made of certain applicants for office, whereby mail-carriers must prove that they know how to teach school, and guards in United States penitentiaries are required to describe how to navigate a ship.
Possibly recent improvements have been made by which the curriculum is more fitted to the crime, but in the early operations of the law the janitor of a jail had to know what length shadow would be cast by a pole 18 feet 6¼ inches high on the third day of July at 11 o'clock 30 min. and 20 sec. standing on a knoll 35 feet 8⅛ inches high, provided 8 men in 9 days can erect such a pole working 8 hours per day.
In 1883 letter postage was reduced from three cents to two cents per half-ounce, and in 1885 to two cents per ounce.
In 1884 Alaska was organized as a Territory, and after digging the snow out of Sitka, so that the governor should not take cold in his system, it was made the seat of government.
Chinese immigration in 1882 was forbidden for ten years, and in 1884 a treaty with Mexico was made, a copy of which is on file in the State Department, but not allowed to be loaned to the author for use in this work.
Grover Cleveland and Thomas A. Hendricks were nominated and elected at the end of President Arthur's term, running against James G. Blaine and John A. Logan, the Republican candidates, also Benjamin F. Butler and A. M. West, of Mississippi, on the People's ticket, and John P. St. John and William Daniel on the Prohibition ticket. St. John went home and kept bees, so that he could have honey to eat on his Kansas locusts, and Daniel swore he would never enter the performing cage of immoral political wild beasts again while reason remained on her throne.
In 1886 a Presidential succession law was passed, whereby on the death of the President and the Vice-President the order of succession shall be the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of War, the Attorney-General, the Postmaster-General, and the Secretaries of the Navy and of the Interior. This gives the Secretary of Agriculture an extremely remote and rarefied chance at the Presidency. Still, he should be just as faithful to his trust as he would be if he were nearer the throne.
May 4, 1886, occurred a terrible outbreak of Chicago Anarchists, whereby seven policemen sent to preserve order were killed by the bursting of an Anarchist's bomb. The Anarchists were tried and executed, with the exception of Ling, who ate a dynamite capsule and passed into rest having had his features, and especially his nose, blown in a swift and earnest manner. Death resulted, and whiskers and beer-blossoms are still found embedded in the stone walls of his cell. Those who attended the funeral say that Ling from a scenic point of view was not a success.