The election of Abram S. Hewitt as mayor of New York in 1886 restored the confidence of the best people. Behind him was a record absolutely beyond criticism, before him a great Christian opportunity. We made the mistake, however, of ignoring the great influence upon our civic prosperity of the business impulse of the West. We in New York and Brooklyn were a self-satisfied community, unmindful of our dependence upon the rest of the American continent. My Western trips were my recreation. An occasional lecture tour accomplished for me what yachting or baseball does for others. My congregation understood this, and never complained of my absence. They realised that all things for me turned into sermons. No man sufficiently appreciates his home unless sometimes he goes away from it. It made me realise what a number of splendid men and women there were in the world Man as a whole is a great success; woman, taking her all in all, is a great achievement, and the reason children die is because they are too lovely to stay out of paradise.
Three weeks in the West brought me back to Brooklyn supremely optimistic. There was more business in the markets than men could attend to. Times had changed. In Cincinnati once I was perplexed by the difference in clock time. They have city time and railroad time there. I asked a gentleman about it.
"Tell me, how many kinds of time have you here?" I asked. "Three kinds," he replied, "city time, railroad time, and hard time."
There was no "hard time" at the close of 1886. The small rate of interest we had been compelled to take for money had been a good thing. It had enlivened investments in building factories and starting great enterprises. The 2 per cent. per month interest was dead. The fact that a few small fish dared to swim through Wall Street, only to be gobbled up, did not stop the rising tide of national welfare. We were going ahead, gaining, profiting even by the lives of those who were leaving us behind.
The loss of the Rev. J. Hyatt Smith restored the symbol and triumph of self-sacrifice. In the most exact sense of the word he was a genius. He wasted no time in his study that he could devote to others, he was always busy raising money to pay house rent for some poor woman, exhausting his energies in trying to keep people out of trouble, answering the call of every school, of every reformatory, every philanthropic institution. Had he given more time to study, he would hardly have had an equal in the American pulpit. He depended always upon the inspiration of the moment. Sometimes he failed on this account. I have heard him when he had the pathos of a Summerfield, the wit of a Sidney Smith, and the wondrous thundering phraseology of a Thomas Carlyle. He had been everywhere, seen everything, experienced great variety of gladness, grief, and betrayal. If you had lost a child, he was the first man at your side to console you. If you had a great joy, his was the first telegram to congratulate you. For two years he was in Congress. His Sundays in Washington were spent preaching in pulpits of all denominations. The first time I ever saw him was when he came to my house in Philadelphia, ringing the door bell, that he might assuage a great sorrow that had come to me. He was always in the shadowed home. How much the world owes to such a nature is beyond the world's gift to return. His wit was of the kind that, like the dew, refreshes. He never laughed at anything but that which ought to be laughed at. He never dealt in innuendoes that tipped both ways. We were old friends of many vicissitudes. Together we wept and laughed and planned. He had such subtle ways of encouragement—as when he told me that he had read a lecture of mine to his dying daughter, and described how it had comforted her. His was a life of profound self-sacrifice, but "weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning."
The new year of 1887 began with a controversy that filled the air with unpleasant confusion. A small river of ink was poured upon it, a vast amount of talk was made about it. A priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Father McGlynn, was arraigned by Archbishop Corrigan for putting his hand in the hot water of politics. In various ways I was asked my opinion of it all. My most decided opinion was that outsiders had better keep their hands out of the trouble. The interference of people outside of a church with its internal affairs only makes things worse. The policy of any church is best known by its own members. The controversy was not a matter into which I could consistently enter.
The earth began its new year in hard luck. The earthquake in Constantinople, in February, was only one of a series of similar shakes elsewhere. The scientists were always giving us a lot of trouble. Electric showers in the sun disturbed our climate. Comets had been shooting about the sky with enough fire in their tails to obliterate us. Caracas was shaken, Lisbon buried, Java very badly cracked. It is a shaky, rheumatic, epileptic old world, and in one of its stupendous convulsions it will die. It's a poor place in which to make permanent investments. It was quite as insecure in its human standards as in its scientific incompetence.
Our laws were moral earthquakes that destroyed our standards. We were opposed to sneak thieves, but we admired the two million dollar rascals. Why not a tax of five or ten thousand dollars to license the business of theft, so that we might put an end to the small scoundrels who had genius enough only to steal door mats, or postage stamps, or chocolate drops, and confine the business to genteel robbery? A robber paying a privilege of ten thousand dollars would then be able legally to abscond with fifty thousand dollars from a bank; or, by watering the stock of a railroad, he would be entitled to steal two hundred thousand dollars at a clip. The thief's licence ought to be high, because he would so soon make it up.
A licence on blasphemy might have been equally advantageous. It could be made high enough so that we could sweep aside all those who swear on a small scale, those who never get beyond "By George!" "My stars!" or "Darn it!" Then, again, the only way to put an end to murder in America is by high licenced murderers. Put a few men in to manage the business of murder. The common assassins who do their work with car hooks, dull knives or Paris green, should be abolished by law. Let the few experts do it who can accomplish murder without pain: by chloroform or bulldog revolvers. Give these men all the business. The licence in these cases should be twenty thousand dollars, because the perquisites in gold watches, money safes, and plethoric pocket-books would soon offset the licence.
High licences in rum-selling had always been urged, and always resulted in dead failures; therefore the whole method of legal restraint in crime can be dismissed with irony. The overcrowding in the East was crushing our ethical and practical ambition. That is why the trains going westward were so crowded that there was hardly room enough to stand in them. We were restoring ourselves in Kansas and Missouri. After lecturing, in the spring of 1887, in fifteen Western cities, including Chicago, St. Louis, and westward to the extreme boundaries of Kansas, I returned a Westerner to convert the Easterner. In the West they called this prosperity a boom, but I never liked the word, for a boom having swung one way is sure to swing the other. It was a revival of enterprise which, starting in Birmingham, Ala., advanced through Tennessee, and spread to Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri. My forecast at this time was that the men who went West then would be the successes in the next twenty years. The centre of American population, which two years before had been a little west of Cincinnati, had moved to Kansas, the heart of the continent. The national Capital should have been midway between the Atlantic and the Pacific, in which case the great white buildings in Washington could have been turned into art academies, and museums and libraries.