From the Easy Chair, Volume 2

by George William Curtis

But it did, and the bewilderment and consternation of this simple devotee were pitiful. He had but one article in his faith, and that was now destroyed. He had staked everything upon the certainty of the Almighty Dollar, and he had lost. But there was something not less noticeable than his unquestioning faith. It was that his faith was so generally held. For what gave the universal and intense interest to the Tweed trial? Here was a common thief, except in the amount of his theft, of whose guilt nobody had any doubt, against whom, as the judge said, the evidence was a mathematical demonstration, and his conviction was hailed as a kind of national deliverance and vindication of human justice. There was but one reason for this, and it was the feeling that money would free him. Of course it was known that the judge could not be bought, nor the Attorney-General, nor the prosecution. Tweed might as well have offered to buy the moral law. But public knowledge ended there. And in the degree of the universality of the belief that somehow, by actual bribery, or by legal quirk or shift or sham, money would buy him off, is the value of the lesson of his conviction, which is that the utmost power of money fails before firm, sagacious, and intelligent honesty. There is not a saloon in New York in which the Tweed contempt of honorable motives is the sole faith which has not had an astounding revelation, and learned that money is not omnipotent.

Those saloons have learned one other thing—that stealing is the same crime, whether it be the theft of public or of private property. The Robin Hood jollity that surrounded Tweed, his familiar name, the "Boss," the laughing stories that were told of him, showed that he was held in very different estimation from an ordinary thief. The baser newspapers evidently regarded him as the French nobleman regarded himself who was firmly convinced that the Almighty would think twice before condemning such a gentleman as he. So when Tweed went to the Tombs the same feeling attended him. The officers could not believe that it was really meant so rich a man, who had lived in so fine a house, and had spent money so profusely, should be treated as a common offender. The wretch who steals a loaf to feed his starving children must have short shrift, and Black Maria despatches him at the earliest moment. But a "statesman" who steals millions of dollars from the people—really the law must think twice before handling him impolitely! A day or two after he had been taken to jail, on his way to the penitentiary, the papers said, as if he had been a beloved prisoner of state whom cruel governments might torture, but whom the people would still honor: "A great many improvements have been made in his cell by his friends, and it has now quite a cosey, comfortable appearance. The floor is covered with a carpet of a dark green ground. The walls are hung with dark green cloth, and the panes in the windows, opening on Centre Street, which were cracked and broken a few days ago, have been newly glazed. In the centre of the room is a large round table, at which the 'Boss' takes his three regular meals, served up in the best manner from the prison restaurant. There is a luxurious leather-covered lounge in one corner, and five chairs, including a large, comfortable rocking-chair. Besides these few articles of furniture are a wash-stand and a book-case. The prisoner is plentifully supplied with reading matter; and as for creature comforts, the solicitude of his friends and relatives leaves nothing to be desired except liberty. Crowds of people have called to see him for the past two days, but none were admitted without passes from the Commissioners."

This feeling was akin to that which inspires the proverb and the practice that "all's fair at the Custom-house." When Robin Hood stepped politely to the door of my Lord Bishop's carriage and requested him to alight under the greenwood tree, and proceeded to rifle the carriage of all the treasure that his lordship was conveying, he was not felt to be a common thief. Far from it; he was the people's tax-gatherer in green. He scattered with a free hand among the poor the money which the rich man could lose without feeling it. Nobody suffered. My Lord Bishop was admonished that he had the poor always with him, and the poor rejoiced in his involuntary largess. So "the boys" thought of Tweed. While the "Boss" was king there was always money about, as they said; and when did Robin Hood himself ever bestow fifty thousand dollars in a lump upon the poor? Besides, who could say that he was robbed? The rich could not feel it; and was any poor orphan defrauded by him, any poor widow pinched, any honest laborer burdened?

Yes, they were. It was public money that he stole. And what is public money? It is the taxes. And who pay the taxes—the rich? No, the poor, the producers. They come out of the rent of the tenement-house; out of the price of tea and sugar and coal; out of the pittance of the widow and orphan, and the small wages of the laborer. It was from the poor who cowered gratefully over the coal that he gave them that he stole the coal. His confederate, Sweeny, planted hyacinths in the city parks, and for every flower some poor soul was pinched. Gay Robin Hood strips the baron, and the poor bless him as he flings them the gold. Then the baron goes home to his castle and wrings teeth out of the jaws of Isaac of York, to force him to give money. Then Isaac of York advances at a more ruinous rate than yesterday the interest upon the money he lends. So when Tweed steals from the public treasury he picks every private pocket. Every stroke of his hammer, if he hammers stone with other thieves, refreshes in the public mind these familiar truths. It is humiliating that the conviction of an evident offender in a court of law should be a cause of public congratulation. But, on the other hand, it is cheering that shameless crime intrenched in every way, and defying the course of law, should by that course be quietly convicted and surely punished.

COMMENCEMENT.

T is a changed college world since Nat. Willis's Philip Slingsby was the hero of many a maiden's dream, and the stories of Willis reflected the modest gayety of the society of his time. Nahant was then a summer resort of importance, and had not become, as one of its denizens said in later years, only "cold Boston." Willis's heroes, like Byron's, were largely himself, and it was but a thin veil that covered in them persons familiar in the society that he knew, and incidents drawn from his own experience.

He was the college hero of his time. But his Scripture poems, which had great vogue and were printed in all the "classbooks" and "readers," and his "Burial of Arnold," a young and brilliant Senior at Yale, and his bright and blithe "Saturday Afternoon," are quite passed out of current knowledge. They are not the kind of verse which is produced in college now. Their Byronic sentimentality is not to the taste of the college club and Greek Letter Society man of to-day; and Charles Coldstream, who looks on listlessly at the college athletic games, leaves enthusiasm to "the Fresh," and has "really never read those things of Willis's."

Yet the dominant emotions of Commencement this year were very much what they were when Philip Slingsby dared the waltz, and even the more emancipated belles shuddered a little as they slid into the charmed circle. Youth and hope and the passion which "is not all a dream" are forever renewed, and if the fashion changes, the substance remains. In the crowded church at Commencement this year, with the gay dresses and the flowers and the music and the soft summer air breathing in at the open doors and windows, there are still palpitating bosoms, and a color that comes and goes, and glances that meet and mingle—"read the language of those wandering eye-beams—the heart knoweth."

It was "Nat. Willis" yesterday, in a high-collared coat and an ample cravat such as Brummel wore, and even D'Orsay. It is a quaint and a droll costume, as you see it in those old Fraser pictures of English authors "'tis sixty years since." But in that guise it is you, sir, of to-day, and if your oration is spoken to one auditor, in all that lovely throng in the gallery, whose heart answers "pity Zekle" to your pitapat, do you think that the divine Una's grandmother was never young, and that the droll high-collared coats did not cover hearts as sensitive and hopes as high as the faultless summer attire of Nameless, Jun., class of '90? The actors change, but the spectacle is the same. Even the members of the reverend and venerable the corporation, those bald and white-haired worthies who seem vaguely always to have been sitting unchanged in the front pews, like those austere senators of Rome of whom the tradition tells us that they sat motionless although the invader came—even they are living monuments, and on their hearts, as on tablets, the story of the wandering eye-beams is engraved.