FORTY YEARS OF IT

BY RALPH HENRY BARBOUR.

Benton’s Venture.

Around the End.

The Junior Trophy.

Change Signals!

For Yardley.

Finkler’s Field.

Winning His “Y.”

The New Boy at Hilltop.

Double Play.

Forward Pass!

The Spirit of the School.

Four in Camp.

Four Afoot.

Four Afloat.

The Arrival of Jimpson.

Behind the Line.

Captain of the Crew.

For the Honor of the School.

The Half-Back.

On Your Mark.

Weatherby’s Inning.

D. APPLETON & COMPANY, NEW YORK.

FORTY
YEARS OF IT

BY
BRAND WHITLOCK

NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
MCMXIV

Copyright, 1914, by
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1913, by The Phillips Publishing Company
Printed in the United States of America

TO THE MEMORY OF
MY FATHER
ELIAS D. WHITLOCK
WHO DIED DECEMBER 23, 1913
A MINISTER OF THE SANCTUARY, AND
OF THE TRUE TABERNACLE, WHICH
THE LORD PITCHED, AND NOT MAN

INTRODUCTION

The history of democracy’s progress in a mid-Western city—so, to introduce this book in specific terms, one perhaps inevitably must call it. Yet in using the word democracy, one must plead for a distinction, or, better, a reversion, indicated by the curious anchylosis that, at a certain point in their maturity, usually sets in upon words newly put in use to express some august and large spiritual reality. We all know how this materializing tendency, if one may call it that, has affected our notion and our use of the commonest religious terms like faith, grace, salvation, for instance. Their connotation, originally fluid, spiritual and subjective, has become concrete, limited, partial, ignoble. So, too, in our common speech, even above the catchpenny vocabulary of the demagogue or politician, the word democracy has taken on the limited, partial and ignoble connotation of more or less incidental and provisional forms of democracy’s practical outcome; or even of by-products not directly traceable to the action of democracy itself. How often, for example, do we see direct primaries, the single tax, the initiative and referendum posed in a kind of sacramental relation to “fundamental democracy”; or the “essential movement of democracy” measured, say, by the increased returns on the Socialist ticket at some local election!

The permanent value of this book is that it proceeds out of a truly adequate and philosophical conception of democracy. That the collective human spirit should know itself, καταμαθεῖν τὴν φύσιν καὶ ταύτη ἕπεσθαι, that the state, the communal unit, should be, in Mr. Arnold’s phrase, “the expression of our best self, which is not manifold and vulgar and unstable and contentious and ever varying, but one and noble and secure and peaceful and the same for all mankind”; here we have in outline the operation of democracy. One could not give this volume higher praise than to say, as in justice one must say, that it clearly discerns and abundantly conveys the spirit which works in human nature toward this end.

How important it is to maintain this fluid, philosophical and spiritual view of democracy may be seen when we look about us and consider the plight of those—especially the many now concerned in politics, whether professionally or as eager amateurs—who for lack of it confuse various aspects of the political problem of liberty with the social problem of equality. With political liberty or with self-expression of the individual in politics, democracy has, and ever has had, very little to do. It is our turbid thought about democracy that prevents our seeing this. The aristocratic and truculent barons did more for the political freedom of Englishmen than was ever done by democracy; a selfish and sensual king did more to gain the individual Englishman his freedom of self-expression in politics. In our own country it is matter of open and notorious fact that a political party whose every sentiment and tendency is aristocratic has been the one to bring about the largest measures of political enfranchisement. Now, surely, one may heartily welcome every enlargement of political liberty, but if one attributes them to a parentage which is not theirs, if one relates them under democracy, the penalty which nature inexorably imposes upon error is sure to follow. If, therefore, in the following pages the author seems occasionally lukewarm toward certain enfranchising measures, I do not understand that he disparages them, but only that he sees—as their advocates, firmly set in the confusion we speak of, cannot see—that their connection with democracy is extremely indistinct and remote. Equality—a social problem, not to be worked out by the mechanics of politics, but appealing wholly to the best self, the best reason and spirit of man,—this is democracy’s concern, democracy’s chief interest. It is to our author’s praise, again, that he sees this clearly and expresses it convincingly.

By far the most admirable and impressive picture in this book appears to me to be that which the author has all unconsciously drawn of himself. It reveals once more that tragedy—the most profound, most common and most neglected of all the multitude of useless tragedies that our weak and wasteful civilization by sheer indifference permits—the tragedy of a richly gifted nature denied the opportunity of congenial self-expression. What by comparison is the tragedy of starvation, since so very many willingly starve, if haply they may find this opportunity? The author is an artist, a born artist. His natural place is in a world unknown and undreamed of by us children of an age commissioned to carry out the great idea of industrial and political development. He belongs by birthright in the eternal realm of divine impossibilities, of sublime and delightful inconsistencies. Greatly might he have fulfilled his destiny in music, in poetry, in painting had he been born at one of those periods when spiritual activity was all but universal, when spiritual ideas were popular and dominant, volitantes per ora virum, part of the very air one breathed—in the Greece of Pericles, the England of Elizabeth, or on the Tuscan hills at the time of the Florentine Renaissance! But this was not to be. An admirer, jealous of every possible qualification, reminds me that I should call him at least a philosophical artist; yes, but not by nature even that. The toga did not drop upon him readymade from a celestial loom. It was woven and fitted laboriously by his own hands. He sought philosophical consistency and found it and established himself in it; but only as part of the difficult general discipline of an alien life.

What an iron discipline, and how thoroughly alien a life, stands revealed to the eye of poetic insight and the spirit of sympathetic delicacy, on every page of these memoirs. For the over-refined (as we say), the oversensitive soul of a born artist—think of the experience, think of the achievement! The very opposite of all that makes a politician, appraising politics always at their precise value, yet patiently spending all the formative years of his life in the debilitating air of politics for the sake of what he might indirectly accomplish. Not an executive, yet incessantly occupied with tedious details of administrative work, for the satisfaction of knowing them well done. Not a philosopher, yet laboriously making himself what Glanvil quaintly calls “one of those larger souls who have traveled the divers climates of opinion” until he acquired a social philosophy that should meet his own exacting demands.

Is it too much, then, that I invite the reader’s forbearance with these paragraphs to show why our author should himself take rank and estimation with the great men whom he reverently pictures? He tells the story of Altgeld and of Johnson, energetic champions of the newer political freedom. He tells the story of Jones, the incomparable true democrat, one of the children of light and sons of the Resurrection, such as appear but once in an era. And in the telling of these men and of himself as the alien and, in his own view, largely accidental continuator of their work, it seems to me that he indicates the process by which he too has worked out his own position among them as “one of those consoling and hope-inspiring marks which stand forever to remind our weak and easily discouraged race how high human goodness and perseverance have once been carried and may be carried again.”

Albert Jay Nock.

The American Magazine,
New York.

FORTY YEARS OF IT

FORTY YEARS OF IT

I

One hot afternoon in the summer of my tenth year, my grandfather, having finished the nap he was accustomed to take after the heavy dinner which, in those days, was served at noon in his house, told me that I might go up town with him. This was not only a relief, but a prospect of adventure. It was a relief to have him finish his nap, because while he was taking his nap, my grandmother drew down at all the windows the heavy green shades, which, brought home by the family after a residence in Nuremberg, were decorated at the bottom with a frieze depicting scenes along the Rhine, and a heavy and somnolent silence was imposed on all the house. When my grandfather took his nap, life seemed to pause, all activities were held in suspense.

And the prospect was as a pleasant adventure, because whenever my grandfather let me go up town with him he always made me a present, which was sure to be more valuable, more expensive, than those little gifts at home, bestowed as rewards of various merits and sacrifices related to that institution of the afternoon nap, and forthcoming if he got through the nap satisfactorily, that is, without being awakened. They consisted of mere money, the little five or ten cent notes of green scrip; “shin-plasters” they were called, I believe, in those days.

When my grandfather had rearranged his toilet, combing his thick white hair and then immediately running his fingers through it to rumple it up and give him a savage aspect, we set forth.

He wore broad polished shoes, low, and fastened with buckles, and against the black of his attire his stiffly starched, immaculate white waistcoat was conspicuous. Only a few of its lower buttons of pearl were fastened; above that it was open, and from one of the buttonholes, the second from the top, his long gold watch-chain hung from its large gold hook. The black cravat was not hidden by his white beard, which he did not wear as long as many Ohio gentlemen of that day, and he was crowned by a large Panama hat, yellowed by years of summer service, and bisected by a ridge that began at the middle of the broad brim directly in front, ran back, climbed and surmounted the large high crown, and then, descending, ended its impressive career at the middle of the broad brim behind.

I was walking on his left hand, near the fence, but as we entered the shade of the elms and shrubbery of the Swedenborgian churchyard, I went around to his other side, because a ghost dwelt in the Swedenborgian churchyard. My cousin had pointed it out to me, and once I had seen it distinctly.

The precaution was unnecessary, for I had long known my grandfather for a brave man. He had been a soldier, and many persons in Urbana still saluted him as major, though at that time he was mayor; going up town, in fact, meant to go to the town hall before going anywhere else. In the shade he removed his hat, and taking out a large silk handkerchief, passed it several times over his red, perspiring face.

It was, as I have said, a hot afternoon, even for an August afternoon in Ohio, and it was the hottest hour of the afternoon. Main Street, when we turned into it presently, was deserted, and wore an unreal appearance, like the street of the dead town that was painted on the scene at the “opera-house.” Far to the south it stretched its interminable length in white dust, until its trees came together in that mysterious distance where the fairgrounds were, and to the north its vista was closed by the bronze figure of the cavalryman standing on his pedestal in the Square, his head bowed in sad meditation, one gauntleted hand resting on his hip, the other on his saber-hilt. Out over the thick dust of the street the heat quivered and vibrated, and if you squinted in the sun at the cavalryman, he seemed to move, to tremble, in the shimmer of that choking atmosphere.

The town hall stood in Market Square; for, in addition to the Square, where the bronze cavalryman stood on his pedestal, there was Market Square, the day of civic centers not having dawned on Urbana in that time, nor, doubtless, in this.

Market Square was not a square, however, but a parallelogram, and on one side of it, fronting Main Street, was the town hall, a low building of brick, representing in itself an amazing unity of municipal functions—the germ of the group plan, no doubt, and, after all, in its little way, a civic center indeed. For there, in an auditorium, plays were staged before a populace innocent of the fact that it had a municipal theater, and in another room the city council sat, with representatives from Lighttown, and Gooseville, and Guinea, and the other faubourgs of our little municipality. Under that long low roof, too, were the “calaboose” and the headquarters of the fire department. Back of these the structure sloped away into a market-house of some sort, with a public scales, and broad, low, overhanging eaves, in the shade of which firemen, and the city marshal, and other officials, in the dim retrospect, seem to have devoted their leisure to the game of checkers.

On the opposite side of Market Square there was a line of brick buildings, painted once, perhaps, and now of a faint pink or cerise which certain of the higher and more artistic grades of calcimining assume, and there seems to have been a series, almost interminable, of small saloons—declining and fading away somewhere to the east, in the dark purlieus of Guinea.

Here, along this line of saloons, if it was a line of saloons, or, if it was not, along the side of the principal saloon which in those wet days commanded that corner, there were always several carts, driven by Irishmen from Lighttown, smoking short clay pipes, and two-wheeled drays driven by negroes from Guinea or Gooseville. These negro drivers were burly men with shining black skins and gleaming eyes and teeth, whose merry laughter was almost belied by the ferocious, brutal whips they carried—whips precisely like that Simon Legree had wielded in the play in the theater just across the Square, now, by a stroke of poetic justice, in the hands of Uncle Tom himself. But on this day the firemen were not to be seen under the eaves of the market-house; their checker-boards were quite abandoned. The mules between the shafts of these two-wheeled drays hung their heads and their long ears drooped under the heat, and their black masters were curled up on the sidewalk against the wall of the saloon, asleep. The Irishmen were nowhere to be seen, and Market Square was empty, deserted, and sprawled there reflecting the light in a blinding way, while from the yellow, dusty level of its cobbled surface rose, wave on wave, palpably, that trembling, shimmering, vibrating heat. And yet, there was one waking, living thing in sight. There, out in the middle of the Square he stood, a dusty, drab figure, with an old felt hat on a head that must have ached and throbbed in that implacable heat, with a mass of rags upon him, his frayed trousers gathered at his ankles and bound about by irons, and a ball and chain to bind him to that spot. He had a broom in his hands, and was aimlessly making a little smudge of dust, doing his part in the observance of an old, cruel, and hideous superstition.

I knew, of course, that he was a prisoner. Usually there were three or four, sometimes half a dozen, such as he. They were the chain-gang, and they were Bad—made so by Rum. I knew that they were brought out of the calaboose, that damp, dark place under the roof of the market-house, somewhere between the office of the mayor and the headquarters of the fire department; and glimpses were to be caught now and then of their faces pressed against those bars.

When, under the shade of the broad eaves, we were about to enter the mayor’s office, my grandfather motioned to the prisoner out there in the center of the Square, who with a new alacrity dropped his broom, picked up his ball, and lugging it in his arms, came up close to us, so very close that I could see the sweat that drenched his forehead, stood in great beads on his upper lip, matted the hair on his forearms, stained with dark splashes his old shirt, and glistened on his throat and breast, burned red by the sun. He dropped his ball, took off that rag of a hat, raised eyelids that were powdered with dust, and looked at my grandfather.

“How many days did I give you?” my grandfather asked him.

“Fifteen, your honor,” he said.

“How long have you been in?”

“Three days, your honor.”

“Are you the only one in there?”

“Yes, your honor.”

My grandfather paused and looked at him.

“Pretty hot out there, isn’t it?” asked my grandfather.

The prisoner smiled, a smile exactly like that anyone would have for such a question, but the smile flickered from his face, as he said:

“Yes, your honor.”

My grandfather looked out over the Square and up and down. There was no one anywhere to be seen.

“Well, come on into the office.”

The prisoner picked up his ball, and followed my grandfather into the mayor’s office. My grandfather went to a desk, drew out a drawer, fumbled in it, found a key, and with this he stooped and unlocked the irons on the prisoner’s ankles. But he did not remove the irons—he seated himself in the large chair, and leaned comfortably against its squeaking cane back.

“Now,” my grandfather said, “you go out there in the Square—be careful not to knock the leg irons off as you go,—and you sweep around for a little while, and when the coast is clear you kick them off and light out.”

The creature in the drab rags looked at my grandfather a moment, opened his lips, closed them, swallowed, and then....

“You’d better hurry,” said my grandfather, “I don’t know what minute the marshal——”

The prisoner gathered up his ball, hugged it carefully, almost tenderly, in his arms, and, with infinity delicacy as to the irons on his feet, he shuffled carefully, yet somehow swiftly out. I saw him an instant in the brilliant glittering sunlight framed by the door; he looked back, and then he disappeared, leaving only the blank surface of the cobblestones with the heat trembling over them.

My grandfather put on his glasses, turned to his desk, and took up some papers there. And I waited, in the still, hot room. The minutes were ticked off by the clock. I wondered at each loud tick if it was the minute in which it would be proper for the prisoner to kick off those irons from his ankles and start to run. And then, after a few minutes, a man appeared in the doorway, and said breathlessly:

“Joe, he has escaped!”

It was Uncle John, a brother of my grandfather, one of the Brands of Kentucky, then on a visit—one of those long visits by which he and my grandfather sought to make up the large arrears of the differences, the divisions, and the separations of the great war. He was nearly of my grandfather’s age, and like him a large man, with a white though longer beard. At his entrance my grandfather did not turn, nor speak, and Uncle John Brand cried again:

“Joe, he’s gone, I tell you; he’s getting away!”

My grandfather looked up then from his papers and said:

“John, you’d better come in out of that heat and sit down. You’re excited.”

“But he’s getting away, I tell you! Don’t you understand?”

“Who is getting away?”

“Why, that prisoner.”

“What prisoner?”

“The prisoner out there in the Square. He has escaped! He’s gone!”

“But how do you know?”

“I just saw him running down Main Street like a streak of lightning.”

My grandfather took out his silk handkerchief, passed it over his brow, and said:

“To think of anyone running on a day like this!”

And Uncle John Brand stood there and gazed at his brother with an expression of despair.

“Can’t you understand,” he said, speaking in an intense tone, as if somehow to impress my grandfather with the importance of this event in society, “can’t you understand that the prisoner out there in the Square has broken away, has escaped, and at this minute is running down Main Street, and that he’s getting farther and farther away with each moment that you sit there?”

I had a vivid picture of the man running with long strides, in the soft dust of Main Street; he must even then, I fancied, be far down the street; he must indeed be down by Bailey’s, and perhaps Bailey’s dog was rushing out at him, barking. And I hoped he would run faster, and faster, and get away, though I felt it was wrong to hope this. Uncle John Brand seemed to be right; though I did not like him as I liked my grandfather.

“But how could he get away?” my grandfather was asking. “He was in irons.”

“He got the irons off somehow,” Uncle John Brand said, exasperated; “I don’t know how. He didn’t stop to explain!” He found a relief in this fine sarcasm, and then said:

“Aren’t you going to do anything?”

“Well,” said my grandfather, with an irresolution quite uncommon in him, “I suppose I really ought to do something. But I don’t know just what to do.” He sat up, and looked about all over the room. “You don’t see the marshal, do you?”

Uncle John Brand was looking at him now in disgust.

“Just look outside there, will you, John,” my grandfather went on, “and see if you can find him? If you do, send him in, and I’ll speak to him and have him go after the prisoner.”

Uncle John Brand of Kentucky stood a moment in the doorway, finding no words with which to express himself, and then went out. And when he had gone my grandfather leaned back in his chair and laughed and laughed; laughed until his ruddy face became much redder than it was even from the heat of that day.

II

Now that I have set down, with such particularity, an incident which I could not wholly understand nor reconcile with the established order of things until many years after, I am not so sure after all that I witnessed it in that Urbana of reality; it may have been in that Urbana of the memory, wherein related scenes and incidents have coalesced with the witnessed event, or in that Macochee of certain of my attempts in fiction, though I have always hoped that the fiction was the essential reality of life, and have tried to make it so.

I am certain, however, that the incident as related is entirely authentic, for I have recently made inquiries and established it beyond a reasonable doubt, as the lawyers say, in all its details as here given. I say in all its details, save possibly as to that of my own corporeal presence on the scene, at the actual moment of the occurrence. Only the other day I asked a favorite aunt of mine, and she remembered the incident perfectly, and many another similar to it. “It was just like him,” she added, with a dubious, though tolerant fondness. But when, like the insistent, questioning child in one of Riley’s Hoosier poems, I asked her if I had been there, she said she could not remember.

But whether I was there in the flesh or not, or whether the whole reality of that scene, so poignant, and insistent, and indelible, with its denial of the grounds of authority, its challenge to the bases of society, its shock to the orthodox mind (like that of John Brand of Kentucky, a strict constructionist, who believed in the old Constitution, and even then, in slavery), remains in my memory as the result of one of those tricks of a mind that has always dramatized scenes for its own amusement, I was there in spirit, and, indeed, at many another scene in the life of Joseph Carter Brand, whose name my mother gave me as a good heritage. Whatever the bald and banal physical fact may have been, I was either present at the actual or in imagination at the described scene to such purpose that from it I derived an impression never to be erased from my mind.

It is not given to all of us to say with such particularity and emphasis, just what we learned from each person who has touched our existences and affected the trend of our lives, as it was given to Marcus Aurelius, for instance, so that one may say that from Rusticus one received this impression, or that from Apollonius one learned this and from Alexander the Platonic that; we must rather ascribe our little store of knowledge generally to the gods. But I am sure that no one was ever long with Joseph Carter Brand, or came to know him well, without learning that rarest and most beautiful of all the graces or of all the virtues—Pity.

He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble

Here, and in hell.

Perhaps it is not so much pity as sympathy that I mean, but whether it was pity or sympathy, it was that divine quality in man which enables him to imagine the sorrows of others, to understand what they feel, to suffer with them; in a word, the ability to put himself in the other fellow’s place—the hallmark, I believe, of true culture, far more than any degree or doctor’s hood could possibly be.

It may have been some such feeling as this for the negroes that led him, when a young man in Kentucky, to renounce a patrimony of slaves and come north. It was not, to be sure, a very large patrimony, for his father was a farmer in a rather small way in Bourbon County, and owned a few slaves, but whatever the motive, he refused to own human chattels and left Bourbon County, where his branch of the Brands had lived since their emigration from Virginia, to which colony, so long before, their original had come as a Jacobite exile from Forfarshire in Scotland.

My grandfather came north into Ohio and Champaign County, and he had not been there very long before he went back to Virginia and married Lavina Talbott, and when they went to live on the farm he called “Pretty Prairie,” he soon found himself deep in Ohio politics, as it seems the fate of most Ohioans to be, and continued in that element all his life. He had his political principles from Henry Clay,—he had been to Ashland and had known the family,—and he was elected as a Whig to the legislature in 1842 and to the State Senate of Ohio in 1854. There he learned to know and to admire Salmon P. Chase, then governor of Ohio, and it was not long until he was in the Abolitionist movement, and he got into it so deeply that nothing less than the Civil War could ever have got him out, for he was in open defiance, most of the time, to the Fugitive Slave Law.

One of the accomplishments in which he took pride, perhaps next to his ability as a horseman, was his skill with the rifle, acquired in Kentucky at the expense of squirrels in the tops of tall trees (he could snuff a candle with a rifle), and this ability he placed at the service of a negro named Ad White, who had run away from his master in the South, and was hidden in a corn-crib near Urbana when overtaken by United States marshals from Cincinnati. The negro was armed, and was defending himself, when my grandfather and his friend Ichabod Corwin, of a name tolerably well known in Ohio history, went to his assistance, and drove the marshals off by the hot fire of their rifles. The marshals retreated, and came up later with reinforcements, strong enough to overpower Judge Corwin and my grandfather, but the negro had escaped.

The scrape was an expensive one; there were proceedings against them in the United States court in Cincinnati, and they only got out of it years after when the Fugitive Slave Law was rapidly becoming no law, and Ad White could live near Urbana in peace during a long life, and be pointed out as an interesting relic of the great conflict.

This adventure befell my grandfather in 1858, when he had been a Republican for two years, having been a delegate to the first convention of the party in 1856, the one that met in Pittsburgh, before the nominating convention which named Frémont had met in Philadelphia. He had attended that convention with Cassius M. Clay of Kentucky, and shared quarters with him at the hotel.

In 1908, in the Coliseum at Chicago, when the Republican National Convention was in session, there were conducted to the stage one morning, and introduced to the delegates, two old gentlemen who had been delegates to that first convention of the party, and after they had been presented and duly celebrated by the chairman and cheered by the delegates they were assiduously given seats in large chairs, and there, throughout the session, side by side they sat, their hands clasped over the crooks of their heavy canes, their white old heads unsteady, peering out in a certain purblind, bewildered, aged way over that mighty assembly of the power and the wealth, the respectability and the authority, of the nation—far other than that revolutionary gathering they had attended half a century before!

All through the session, now and then, I would look at them; there was a certain indefinable pathos in them, they sat so still, they were so old, there was in their attitude the acquiescence of age—and I would recall my grandfather’s stories of the days when they were the force in the Republic, and the runaway “niggers,” and the rifles, and the great blazing up of liberty in the land, and it seemed to me that Time, or what Thomas Hardy calls the Ironic Spirit, or perhaps it was only the politicians who were managing the convention, had played some grotesque, stupendous joke on those patriarchs. Did their old eyes, gazing so strangely on that scene, behold its implications? Did they descry the guide-post that told them how far away they really were from that first convention and its ideals?

But whatever the reflections of those two aboriginal Republicans, or whatever emotions or speculations they may have inspired in those who saw them,—the torch of liberty being ever brandished somewhere in this world and tossed from hand to hand,—they had done their part in their day, and might presumably be allowed to look on at the antics of men wherever they chose, in peace. They had known Lincoln, no inconsiderable distinction in itself!

Out of that first convention my grandfather, like them, had gone, and he had done his part to help elect Lincoln after Lincoln had defeated Chase in the Chicago convention of 1860, and had been nominated for the presidency. And then, with his man elected, my grandfather had gone into the war that broke upon the land.

He went in with the 66th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a regiment which he was commissioned by Governor Dennison to recruit at Urbana, and when it was marshaled in camp near Urbana its command was offered him, an honor and a responsibility he declined because, he said, he knew nothing of the art of war, if it is an art, or of its science, if it is a science, and so was content with the shoulder-straps of a captain. One of his sons, a lieutenant in the regular army, was already at the front with his regiment, and another son was a captain in the 66th, and later on, when my grandfather had been transferred to the Department of Subsistence, he took his youngest son with him in the capacity of a clerk, so that the men of his family were away to the war for those four years, and the women remained behind, making housewives and scraping lint, and watching, and waiting, and praying, and enduring all those hardships and making all those sacrifices which are so lauded by the poetic and the sentimental and yet are not enough to entitle them to a voice in that government in whose cause they are made.

The situation was made all the more poignant because the great issue had separated the family, and there were brothers and cousins on the other side, though one of these, in the person of Aunt Lucretia, chose that inauspicious time to come over from the other side all the way from Virginia, to pay a visit, and celebrated the report of a Confederate victory by parading up town with a butternut badge on her bosom. She sailed several times about the Square, with her head held high and her crinolines rustling and standing out, and her butternut badge in evidence, and was rescued by my grandmother, who, hearing of her temerity, went up town in desperation and in fear that she might arrive too late. It was a story I was fond of hearing, and as I pictured the lively scene I always had the statue of the cavalryman as a figure in the picture—though of course the statue could not have been in existence during the war, since it was erected as a memorial to the 66th and a monument to its fallen heroes and their deeds. The cavalryman, an officer wearing a romantic cloak and the old plumed hat of the military fashion of that date, and leaning on his saber in a gloomy way, I always thought was a figure of my uncle, that Captain Brand who went out with the 66th, just as I thought for a long time that the Civil War was practically fought out on the northern side by the 66th, which was not so strange perhaps, since nearly every family in Urbana had been represented in the regiment, and they all talked of little else than the war for many years. They called the 66th the “Bloody Sixty-sixth,” a name I have since heard applied to other regiments, but the honorable epithet was not undeserved by that legion, for it had a long and most gallant record, beginning with the Army of the Potomac and fighting in all that army’s battles until after Gettysburg, and then with the 11th and 12th corps it was transferred, under Hooker, to the Army of the Tennessee, at Chattanooga, in time for Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, after which it went with Sherman to the sea, and thus completed the circuit of the Confederacy.

III

My grandfather, however, did not go with his regiment to the West. He had been transferred to the Commissary Department, and he remained with the Army of the Potomac until the close of the war, and it was on some detail connected with his duties in that department that, in 1865, he went into Washington and had the interview with President Lincoln I so much liked to hear him tell about. It was not in the course of his military duty that he went to see the Commander-in-Chief; whatever those duties were they were quickly discharged at the War Department, so that, in the hours of freedom remaining to him before he went back to the front, he did what everyone likes to do in Washington,—he went to see the President. But he went in no military capacity; he went rather in that political capacity he so much preferred to the military, and he went as to the chief he had so long known and loved and followed.

It would be his old friend Chase who presented him to the President, but their conversation was soon interrupted by the entrance of an aide who announced the arrival in the White House grounds of an Indiana regiment passing through Washington, which, as seems to have been the case with most regiments passing through the Capital, demanded a speech from the President. And Lincoln complied, and as he arose to go out he asked my grandfather to accompany him, and they continued their talk on the way. But when they stood in the White House portico, and the regiment beheld the President and saluted him with its lifted cheer, the aide stepped to my grandfather’s side, and much to his chagrin—for he had been held by the President while he finished a story—told him that it would be necessary for him to drop a few paces to the rear. It was a little contretemps that embarrassed my grandfather, but Lincoln, with his fine and delicate perceptions, divined the whole situation, and met it with that kindness which was so great a part of the humor and humanness in him, by saying:

“You see, Mr. Brand, they might not know which was the President.”

It was not long after that he was at Appomattox and the first to issue rations to the hungry Confederates who had just surrendered, and no act of his life gave him quite as much satisfaction as to have been the first to pour his whole supply of hardtack into the blankets of those whom still and always he remembered as of his own blood. And that done, after they had ridden into Richmond, he was relieved and was soon back in Washington calling on Chase again. Chase asked him what he could do for him, and my grandfather said there was but one thing in the world he wanted: namely, to go home; and a request so simple was granted with that alacrity with which politicians grant requests that, in their scope, fall so short of what might have been expected. But it was not long until Chase’s influence was requested in a more substantial matter, and in 1870 my grandfather, with his wife and two younger daughters, was on his way across the Atlantic to Nuremberg, where President Grant had appointed him consul.

It was not, of course, until after his return from the foreign experience that my conscious acquaintance with him began. But when they returned and opened the old house, and filled it with the spoil of their European travel,—some wonderful mahogany furniture and Dresden china, and other objects of far more delight to us children,—he and I began a friendship which lasted until his death, and was marred by no misunderstanding, except, perhaps, as to the number of hours his saddle-horse should be ridden on the gallop, and the German he wished me to read to him out of the little black-bound volumes of Schiller and Goethe, which for years were his companions. He held, no doubt with some show of reason on his side, that if he could master the language after he was sixty, I might learn at least to read it before I was sixteen. The task had its discouragements, not lightened, even in after years, when I read in their famous and delightful correspondence Carlyle’s advice to Emerson to possess himself of the German language; it could be done, wrote Carlyle, in six weeks! But, like Emerson, I was afflicted with the postponement and debility of the blond constitution, and I observed that, except in great moments of unappreciated sacrifice, my grandfather preferred to read his German himself rather than to listen to my renditions.

I have spoken of the house as the old house, and I do that as viewing it from the point of disadvantage of the years that have gone since it grew out of that haze and mist and darkness of early recollections into a place that was ablaze with light at evening and full of the constant wonder and delight of the company of a large family. It was, indeed, an old house then, with a high-gabled roof at one wing, that made an attic which we called, with a sense of its mystery, the “dark room,”—a room, however, not so dark that I could not see to read the old bound volumes of a newspaper an uncle had once edited;—one could lie under the little gable windows and pore over the immense quartos, or more than quartos, and exercise the imagination by reading of some long dead event, and, with a great effort, project one’s self back to that time, and pretend to read with none other than its contemporary impressions.

The cellar of the house was not so interesting, though it was mysterious, and far more terrifying. There was a vast fireplace in the cellar, in which, as Jane, the old colored woman who was sometimes a cook and sometimes a nurse, once solemnly told my cousin and me, the devil dwelt, so that I visited it only once, and there so plainly saw the ugly horns of that dark deity that we fled upstairs and into the sunlight again. It may have been that the crane and the andirons of the old fireplace helped out the impression, though after the original suggestion little was required to strengthen it, and we never went down there again, except to lure a younger cousin as far as the door to shudder in the awful pleasure of witnessing her fear.

This gabled wing had been the original house, and additions had been built to it in two directions, with a wide hall, somewhat after the southern fashion in which so many houses in that part of Ohio were built in those days.

It seems larger in the retrospect than it is in the reality, and I am not endowing it with the spaciousness of a mansion; it was, in fact, a modest dwelling of a dozen rooms, with an atmosphere that was imparted to it by the furniture that had been brought back from Europe, and the personality that filled it.

My grandfather conducted his establishment on a scale of prodigality that had a certain patriarchal air; he had a large family, and he loved to have them all about him, and in the evenings they gathered there at the piano they had bought in Berlin, and when the candles in their curious brass sconces had been lighted, there was music, for the whole family possessed some of that talent which, as President Eliot rightly declares in his lecture on “The Happy Life,” contributes so much real pleasure. My grandfather did not himself sing; or, at least, he sang rarely, and then only one or two Scotch songs, but when he could be induced to do this, the event took on the festal air of a celebration.

His two younger daughters had been educated in music in Germany, and there was something more of music in the house than the mere classic portraits of Mozart and Beethoven which hung on the wall near the painting of the old castle at Nuremberg. They played duets, and once, at least, at a recital given in the town, we achieved the distinction of a number played on two pianos by my mother and her three sisters.

The May festivals in “the City,” as we called Cincinnati in those days, were a part of existence, and my first excursion into the larger world was when my father took me to Cincinnati to hear Theodore Thomas’s Orchestra, which proved to be an excursion not only into a larger world, but eventually into a larger life,—that life of music, that life of a love of all the arts, which provides a consolation that would be complete could I but express myself in any one of them. I did, indeed, attempt some expression of the joys of that experience, for with more pretension than I could dare to-day, I wrote a composition, or paper, on Music which was printed in a child’s publication, and won for me a little prize. It was twenty-two years before I was able again to have any writing of mine accepted and published by a magazine.

IV

Urbana in those days was not without its atmosphere of culture, influenced in a degree by the presence of the Urbana University, a Swedenborgian college which in the days before the war had flourished, because so many of its students came from the southern states. It declined after the war, but even after that event, the presence of so many persons of the Swedenborgian persuasion, with their gentle manners and intellectual appreciation, kept the traditions alive, and the college itself continued, though not so flourishingly, on its endowed foundation.

One of the tutors in it was a young, brown-haired man who several times a day passed by my grandfather’s home on his way to and from his classes, whom afterwards I came to admire for those writings to which was signed the name of Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen. He did not remain long in Urbana, not longer it seems than he could help, and to judge from some of his pictures of various phases of its life, he did not like the town as well as the Urbana folk themselves liked it. It was a rather self-sufficient town, I fancy, and it cared so little for change that it has scarcely changed at all, save as one misses the faces and the forms one used to see there in other days. It was the home of the distinguished family, and the birthplace, too, of John Quincy Adams Ward, the sculptor, and the possession of a personality in itself distinguishes a town.

I was walking with my father across Market Square not long ago; it had shrunk in size and seemed little and mean and sordid, despite the new city hall that has replaced the old, and there was no miserable prisoner idly sweeping the cobblestones, though the negro drivers with their bull whips were snoozing there as formerly.

“They have been there ever since eighteen sixty-six,” said my father, who had gone there in the year he had mentioned on his coming out of college.

His home was in Piqua, a town not far away, where his father had retired to rest after his lifelong labors on a farm he had himself “cleared” in Montgomery County many years before. This paternal grandfather was a large, gaunt, silent man, who spoke little, and then mostly in a sardonic humor, as when, during that awful pioneer work of felling a forest to make a little plantation, he said to his grown sons who were helping to clear away the underbrush of a walnut wood:

“Boys, what little you cut, pile here.”

Few other of his sayings have been preserved, and it may be that he has left behind an impression that he never talked at all because he never talked politics, and not to do that in Ohio dooms one to a silence almost perpetual. He had once been a Democrat, and had participated with such enthusiasm in the campaign of 1856 that he had kept his horses’ tails and manes braided for a month that they might roll forth in noble curls when they were loosened, and the horses harnessed to a carriage containing four veterans of the Revolution, who were to be thus splendidly drawn to the raising of a tall hickory pole in honor of James Buchanan, that year a candidate for president. But the old diplomatist made such a miserable weakling failure of his administration that his Piqua partizan became disgusted and renounced forever his interest in political affairs, and, like Henry I., never smiled again.

But my Grandfather Brand, when he was not talking about poetry or the war, was talking about politics; sometimes world politics, for he was interested in that; sometimes European politics, which he had followed ever since in Paris he had witnessed the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, or national politics, or state politics, or, in default of a larger interest, local politics, which in Ohio, as no doubt elsewhere, sometimes looms largest and most important of all, because, perhaps, as De Tocqueville says, local assemblies constitute the strength of free institutions.

My grandfather was then, at the time of which I am thinking even if I am not very specifically writing about it, mayor—and continued to be mayor for four terms. It was an office that was suited, no doubt, to the leisure of his retirement, and while it gave him the feeling of being occupied in public affairs, it nevertheless left him opportunities enough for his German poets, and for his horses and his farm out at Cable, and the strawberries he was beginning to cultivate with the enthusiasm of an amateur.

In such an atmosphere as that in the Ohio of those days it was natural to be a Republican; it was more than that, it was inevitable that one should be a Republican; it was not a matter of intellectual choice, it was a process of biological selection. The Republican party was not a faction, not a group, not a wing, it was an institution like those Emerson speaks of in his essay on Politics, rooted like oak-trees in the center around which men group themselves as best they can. It was a fundamental and self-evident thing, like life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or like the flag, or the federal judiciary. It was elemental, like gravity, the sun, the stars, the ocean. It was merely a synonym for patriotism, another name for the nation. One became, in Urbana and in Ohio for many years, a Republican just as the Eskimo dons fur clothes. It was inconceivable that any self-respecting person should be a Democrat. There were, perhaps, Democrats in Lighttown; but then there were rebels in Alabama, and in the Ku-klux Klan, about which we read in the evening, in the Cincinnati Gazette.

One of the perplexing and confounding anomalies of existence was the fact that our neighbor, Mr. L——, was a Democrat. That fact perhaps explained to me why he walked so modestly, so unobtrusively, in the shade, so close to the picket fences of Reynolds Street, with his head bowed. I supposed that, being a Democrat, it was only natural for him to slink along. He was a lawyer and a gentleman; my grandfather spoke with him, but from my mind I could never banish the fact that he was a Democrat, and to explain his bent, thoughtful attitude I imagined another reason than the fact that he was a meditative, studious man.

Lawyers, of course, were Republicans, else how could they deliver patriotic addresses on Decoration Day and at the reunions of the 66th regiment? It was natural for a young man to be a lawyer, then to be elected prosecuting attorney, then to go to the legislature, then to congress, then—governor, senator, president. They could not, of course, go any more to war and fight for liberty; that distinction was no longer, unhappily, possible, but they could be Republicans. The Republican party had saved the Union, won liberty for all men, and there was nothing left for the patriotic to do but to extol that party, and to see to it that its members held office under the government.

In those days the party had many leaders in Ohio who had served the nation in military or civil capacity during the great crisis; scarcely a county that had not some colonel or general whose personality impressed the popular imagination; they were looked up to, and revered, and in the political campaigns their faces, pale or red in the flare of the torches of those vast and tumultuous processions that still staged the political contest in the terms of war, looked down from the festooned platforms in every public square. And yet they were already remote, statuesque, oracular, and there was the reverent sense that somehow placed them in the ideal past, whose problems had all been happily solved, rather than in the real present.

V

But up in the northwestern part of the state, still referred to, even in days so late as those, with something of the humorous contempt that attached to the term, as the Black Swamp, there had risen a young, fiery, and romantic figure who ignored the past and flung himself with fierce ardor into a new campaign for liberty. His words fell strangely on ears that were accustomed to the reassurance that liberty was at last conquered, and his doctrines perplexed and irritated minds that had sunk into the shallow optimism of a belief that there were no more liberations needed in the world. It was not a new cry, indeed, that he raised, but an old one thought to have been stilled, and the standard he lifted in the Black Swamp was looked upon by many Ohioans as much askance as though it were another secession flag of stars and bars. Indeed, it had long been associated with the cause of the conquered South, because that section, by reason of its economic conditions, had long espoused the principle of Free Trade.

This young man was Frank Hunt Hurd, then the congressman from the Toledo district, and in that city, where my father was the pastor of a church, he had won many followers and adherents, though not enough to keep him continually in his seat in the House of Representatives.

He served for several alternate terms, the interims being filled by some orthodox nonentity, who was so speedily forgotten that there must have been an impression that for years our district was represented by this one man.

I had heard of him with that dim sense of his position which a boy has of any public character, but I had a real vivid conception of him after that Fourth of July when, during a citizens’ celebration which must have been so far patriotic as to forget, for a time, partizanism, and to remember patriotism sufficiently to include the Democrats, I saw him conducted to the platform by our distinguished citizen, David R. Locke, whom the world knew as “Petroleum V. Nasby.”

He delivered a patriotic oration, and anyone,—even though he were but a wondering boy quite by chance in attendance, standing on the outskirts of the crowd, following some whim which for a while kept him from his sports,—anyone who ever heard Frank Hurd deliver an oration never forgot it afterward.

I have no idea now what it was he said, perhaps I had as little then, but his black hair, his handsome face, his beautiful voice, and the majestic music of his rolling phrases were wholly and completely charming. He was explicitly an orator, a student of the great art, and he formed his orations on the ancient Greek models, writing them out with exordium, proposition, and peroration, and while he did not perhaps exactly commit them to memory, he, nevertheless, in the process of preparing them, so completely possessed himself of them that he poured forth his polished sentences without a flaw.

His speech on Free Trade, delivered in the House of Representatives, February 18, 1881, remains the classic on that subject, ranking with Henry Clay’s speech on “The American System,” delivered in the Senate in 1832. In that address Frank Hurd began with the phrase, “The tariff is a tax,” which acquired much currency years after when Grover Cleveland used it.

Everyone, or nearly everyone, told me of course that Frank Hurd was wrong, if he was not, indeed, wicked, and the subject possessed a kind of fascination for me. In thinking of it, or in trying to think of it, I only perplexed myself more deeply, until at last I reached the formidable, the momentous decision of taking my perplexities to Frank Hurd himself, and of laying them before him.

I was by this time a youth of eighteen, and in the summer when he had come home from Washington I somehow found courage enough to go to the hotel where he lived, and to inquire for him. He was there in the lobby, standing by the cigar-stand, talking to some men, and I hung on the outskirts of the little group until it broke up, and then the fear I had felt vanished when he turned and smiled upon me. I told him that I wished to know about Free Trade, and since there was nothing he liked better to talk about, and too, since there were few who could talk better about anything than he could talk about the tariff, we sat in the big leather chairs while he discoursed simply on the subject. It was the first at several of these conversations, or lessons, which we had in the big leather chairs in the lobby of the old Boody House, and it was not long until I was able, with a solemn pride, to announce at home that I was a Free-Trader and a Democrat.

It could hardly have been worse had I announced that I had been visiting Ingersoll, and was an atheist. Cleveland was president, and in time he sent his famous tariff reform message to Congress, and though I could not vote, I was preparing to give him my moral support, to wear his badge, and even, if I could do no more, to refuse to march in the Republican processions with the club of young men and boys organized in our neighborhood.

For the first time in my life I went on my vacation trip to Urbana that summer with reluctance, for the first time in my life I shrank from seeing my grandfather. The wide front door opened, and from the heat without to the dark and cool interior of the hall I stepped; I prolonged the preliminaries, I went through the familiar apartments, and out into the garden to see how it grew that summer, and down to the stable to see the horses; but the inevitable hour drew on, and at last, with all the trivial things said, all the personal questions asked, we sat in the living-room, cool in the half-light produced by its drawn shades, the soft air of summer blowing through it, the odd old Nuremberg furniture, the painting of the Nuremberg castle presented to my grandfather by the American artist whom he had rescued from a scrape, the tall pier glass, with the little vase of flowers on its marble base, and my grandfather in his large chair, his white waistcoat half unbuttoned and one side sagging with the weight of the heavy watch-chain that descended from its large hook, his white beard trimmed a little more closely, his white hair bristling as aggressively as ever—all the same, all as of old, like the reminders of the old life and all its traditions now to be broken and rendered forever and tragically different from all it had been and meant. He sat there looking at me, the blue eyes twinkling under their shaggy brows, and stretched forth his long white hand in the odd gesture with which he began his conversations. Conversations with him, it suddenly developed, were not easy to sustain; he pursued the Socratic method. If you disagreed with him, he lifted three fingers toward you, whether in menace or in benediction it was difficult at times to determine, and said:

“Let me instruct you.”

For instance:

“Do you know why Napoleon III. lost the battle of Sedan?” he might abruptly inquire.

“No, sir,” you were expected to say. (You always addressed him as “sir.”)

“Let me instruct you.”

Or:

“Do you know who was the greatest English poet?”

“No, sir,” you would say, or, perhaps, in those days you might venture, “Was it Shakespeare, sir?”

Then he would look at you and say:

“Let me instruct you.”

This afternoon then, after I had inspected the premises, noticed how much taller my cousin’s fir-tree was than the one I called mine (we had planted them one day, as little boys, years before), and after I had had a drink at the old pump, which in those days, before germs, brought up such cold, clear water, and after I had ascended to my cool room upstairs, and come downstairs again, and we had idly talked for a little while, as I said, he sat and looked at me a moment, and then said:

“Do you understand this tariff question?”

In those days I might have made the due, what I might term with reference to that situation, the conventional reply, and so have said:

“No, sir.”

In these days I am sure I should. But I hesitated. He had already stretched forth his hand.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He drew in his hand, and for an instant touched with his long fingers the end of his large nose. I plunged ahead.

“I am in favor of Free Trade, sir.”

He did not extend his hand. He looked at me a moment, and then he said:

“You are quite right; we must support Mr. Cleveland in the coming contest.”

And then he sank back in his chair and laughed.

He was always like that, following the truth as he saw it, wherever it led him. But his active days were not many after that; ere long he was kicked by one of his horses, a vicious animal, half bronco, which he insisted on riding, and he was invalided for the rest of his days. He spent them in a wheel-chair, pushed about by a negro boy. It was a cross he bore bravely enough, without complaint, spending his hours in reading of politics, now that he could no longer participate in them, and more and more in reading verse, and even in committing it to memory, so that to the surprise of his family he soon replaced the grace he had always said at table with some recited stanza of poetry, and he took to cultivating, or to sitting in his chair while there was cultivated, under his direction, a little rose garden. He knew all those roses as though they were living persons: when a lady called,—if the roses were in bloom,—he would say to his colored house-boy:

“Go cut off Madame Maintenon, and bring her here.”

Then he would present Madame Maintenon to the caller with such a bow as he could make in his chair, and an apology for not rising. He was patient and brave, yet he did not like to feel the scepter passing from him, and he resented what he considered interferences with his liberties. One day when he had returned from a visit to an old friend, to whose home his colored boy had wheeled him, one of his daughters asked, in a somewhat exaggerated tone of propitiation:

“Well, Father, how did you find Mr. Hovey?”

“I found him master of his own house!” he blazed.

In 1896 he supported Mr. Bryan, and his Republican neighbors said:

“Poor old Major Brand! His mind must be affected!”

It was an effort for him to get out to the polls, but he went, beholding in that conflict, as he could in any conflict however confused and clouded, the issue of free men above any other issue. He did not get out much after that, even when that last summer the few remnants of the 66th regiment gathered in Urbana to hold the annual reunion. He could not so much as get up town to greet his old comrades, and they sent word that in the afternoon they would march in review before his home. He was wheeled out on the veranda, and there he sat while his old regiment, the fifty or sixty gray, broken men, marched past. They saluted as they went by, and he returned the salutes with tears streaming down the cheeks where I had never seen tears before. And he said with a little choking laugh:

“Why, look at the boys!”

It was not long after, that six of us, his grandsons, bore him out of the old home forever. And on his coffin were the two things that expressed him best, I think—his roses and his flag.

VI

The incalculable influence of the spoken word and the consequent responsibility that weighs upon the lightest phrase have so long been urged that men might well go about with their fingers on their lips, oracular as presidential candidates, deliberating each thought before giving it wing. And yet, as Carlyle said of French speech, the immeasurable tide flows on and ebbs only toward the small hours of the morning. Though even then in certain quarters, the tide does not ebb, and in those hours truths are sometimes spoken—for instance, by newspaper reporters, who, their night’s work done, turn to each other for relaxation and speak those thoughts they have not dared to write in their chronicles of the day that is done. The thought itself is only a vagrant, encountered along the way back to such an evening, when a reporter uttered two little words that acquired for me a profound significance.

“Oh, nothing.” Those were the exact words, just those two, and yet a negative so simple contained within itself such an affirmation of an awful truth, that I have never been able to forget them, though for a time I tried. Charlie R—— and I had gone one night, after the paper had gone to press, into a little restaurant in Chicago to get some supper. It was sometime in the year 1891, and, in our idle gossip, the hanging of the anarchists, then an event so recent that the reporters now and then spoke of it, had come up in our talk.

“Where were you when that occurred?” he asked.

“In Toledo,” I answered.

“What did people think of it there?”

“Of the hanging?”

“Yes.”

I looked at him, I suppose, in some astonishment. What did people in Toledo think of the hanging of the Chicago anarchists! Could any question have been more stupid, more banal? What did any people, anywhere, think of it? What was customary, what was proper and appropriate and indispensable under such circumstances? In a word, what was there to do with anarchists except to hang them? Really, I was quite at a loss what to say. It seemed so superfluous, so ridiculous, as though he had asked what the people in Toledo thought of the world’s being round, or of the force of gravity. More than superfluous, it was callous; he might as well have asked what Toledo people thought of the hanging of Haman, the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, or of the suicide of Judas Iscariot. And I answered promptly in their defense:

“Why, they thought it was right, of course.”

He had his elbows on the table and was lighting a cigarette, and as he raised the match, his dark face, with its closely trimmed pointed beard, was suddenly and vividly illuminated by the yellow flame. His eyes were lowered, their vision fixed just then on the interesting process of igniting the end of the cigarette. But about his puckered lips, about his narrowed eyes there played a little smile, faint, elusive, and yet of a meaning so indubitable that it was altogether disconcerting. And in that instant I wondered—it could not be! It was preposterous, absurd!

“Why?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing,” he said.

The end of the cigarette was glowing, little coils of fire in the tiny particles of tobacco; he blew out the match and the smile disappeared from his face with its ruddy illumination, and he tossed the charred stick into his coffee cup.

Were there, then, two opinions? Was it possible that anyone doubted? When anarchists were in question! Still, on that kindly face before me there lingered the shadow of that strange expression, inscrutable, perplexing, piquing curiosity. And yet by some strange, almost clairvoyant process, it had gradually acquired the effect of a persistent, irresistible and implacable authority, in the presence of which one felt—well, cheap, as though there were secrets from which one had been excluded, as though there were somewhere in this universe a stupendous joke which alone of all others one lacked the wit to see. It gave one a disturbed, uneasy sensation, a mauvaise honte.

The innate sense of personal dignity, the instinct to retire into one’s self, the affectation of repose and self-sufficiency which leads one lightly to wave aside a subject one does not understand, to pass it over for other and more familiar topics—these were ineffectual. Curiosity perhaps in a sense much less refined than that in which Matthew Arnold considered it when he exalted it to the plane of the higher virtues, broke down reticence, and, at last I asked, and even begged my companion to tell me what he meant. But he was implacable; he had reached, it appeared, a stage of development in which the opinions of others were of no consequence; an altitude from which he could regard the race of men impersonally, and permit them to stumble on in error, without the desire to set them right. It was quite useless to question him, and in the end the only satisfaction he would give me was to say, with an effort of dismissing the subject:

“Ask some of the boys.”

For a young citizen to whom society is yet an illusion, lying, in Emerson’s figure, before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men and institutions rooted like oak-trees to the center, round which all arrange themselves the best they can, to have one of those oak-trees torn violently up by the roots, is to experience a distinct shock. And by two words, and an expression that played for an instant in lowered eyes, and about lips that were more concerned just then with the flattened end of a fresh cigarette than the divulgence of great truths! Yes, decidedly a shock, to leave one shaken for days. If there were any doubt as to what to do with anarchists, what was the use of going on with the study of the law? I went out from that cheap little restaurant in Fifth Avenue, into Chicago’s depressing midnight streets—and the oak tree never took root again. For, as Charlie R—— had lightly suggested, I asked the boys, and by the boys he meant, of course, the reporters.

They were boys in spirit, though in the knowledge of this world they were as aged men, some of whom had seen so much of life that they were able to dwell with it only by refusing any longer to accept it seriously. They formed in that day an unusual group, gathered in the old Whitechapel Club, and many of their names have since become known to literature. They, or most of them, had worked on the anarchist cases, from the days of the strike in McCormick’s reaper works, down to the night when the vivid pen of Charlie Seymour could describe the spark that soared in a parabolic curve from the alley into Haymarket Square, and then to the black morning of the hanging; and they knew.

It was all very simple, too. If it were not for the tragedy, and the wrong that is so much worse than any tragedy, one might almost laugh at the simplicity. It shows the power of words, the force of phrases, the obdurate and terrible tyranny of a term. The men who had been hanged were called anarchists, when, as it happens, they were men, just men. And out of that original error in terminology there was evolved that overmastering fear which raved and slew in a frenzy of passion that decades hence will puzzle the psychologist who studies the mind of the crowd. And the student of ethics will find in the event another proof of the inerrancy and power of that old law of moral action and reaction, according to which hatred ceaseth not by hatred, but by love alone. It may be found stated accurately and simply in the Sermon on the Mount, and there is still hope that Christendom, after another thousand years or so, may discover it, and drawing therefrom the law of social relations, apply it to human affairs, and so solve the problems that trouble and perplex mankind.

VII

In speaking of the group of newspaper writers who formed the Whitechapel Club, augmented as they were by artists, and musicians and physicians and lawyers, I would not give the impression that they were in any sense reformers, or actuated by the smug and forbidding spirit which too often inspires that species. They were, indeed, wisely otherwise, and they were, I think, wholly right minded in their attitude toward what are called public questions, and of these they had a deep and perspicacious understanding, and it will be easy to imagine that the cursory comments on passing phases of the human spectacle of such minds as those of Charles Goodyear Seymour, Finley Peter Dunne, George Ade, Ben King, Opie Reed, Alfred Henry Lewis, and his brother William E. Lewis, Frederick Upham Adams, Thomas E. Powers, Horace Taylor, Wallace Rice, Arthur Henry, and a score of others were apt to be entertaining and instructive, though they were uttered with such wit and humor that they were never intended to be instructive.

The club had been founded late in the eighties, and although it endured less than ten years, it still lives in the minds of newspaper and literary men as one of the most remarkable of Bohemian clubs. It had its rooms in the rear of a little saloon, conducted by Henry Koster in “newspaper alley,” as Calhoun Place was more generally called, near the buildings of the Chicago News and the Chicago Herald, and it somehow gathered to itself many of the clever men of Chicago who were writing for the press, and a few intimate spirits in other lines of work, but of sympathetic spirit. For a while the club was nameless, but one afternoon a group were sitting in one of the rooms when a newsboy passed through the alley and cried: “All about the latest Whitechapel murder!” Seymour paused with a stein of beer half lifted, and said: “We’ll call the new club the ‘Whitechapel Club.’”

I suppose the grewsome connotations of the name led to our practice of collecting relics of the tragedies we were constantly reporting. When he came back from the Dakotas, where he had been reporting the Sioux War, Seymour brought back from the battles a number of skulls of Indians, and blankets drenched in blood, which were hung on the walls of the club. From that time on it became the practice of sheriffs and newspaper men everywhere to send anything of that kind to the Whitechapel Club. The result was that within a few years it had a large collection of skulls of criminals, and some physicians discovered, or thought they discovered, differences between these skulls and the skulls of those who were not criminals, or, if they were, had not been caught at it.

These and the ropes of hangmen and the various mementos of crimes were the decorations of the club rooms, and on Saturday nights the hollow eyes of those skulls looked down on many a lively scene.

Admission to the club was obtained in a peculiar way. An applicant for membership had his name proposed, and it was then posted on a bulletin-board. He was on probation for thirty days, during which he had to be at the club at least five days in the week, in order to become acquainted with the members. Within that time any member could tear his name down, and that ended his candidacy. When his name finally came up for voting it required the full vote of the club to get him in.

And then we grew prosperous, and acquiring a building farther down the alley, we had it decorated in a somber manner, with a notable table, shaped like a coffin, around which we gathered. But the prosperity and the fame of the club led to its end. Rich and important men of Chicago sought membership. Some were admitted, then more, and as a result the club lost its Bohemian character, and finally disbanded.

VIII

Those who are able to recall the symposium of these minds will no doubt always see the humorous face of Charlie Seymour as the center of the coterie, a young man with such a flair for what was news, with such an instinct for word values, such real ability as a writer, and such a quaint and original strain of humor as to make him the peer of any, a young man who would have gone far and high could he have lived. An early fate overtook him, as it overtook Charlie Perkins and Charlie Almy and Ben King, but their fate had the mellowing kindness of the fact that all who knew them can never think of them, with however much regret, without a smile at some remembered instance of their unfailing humor.

When I mentioned them, I had fully intended to give some instances of that humor, but when it was not of a raciness, it was of such a rare and delicate charm, such a fleeting, evanescent quality, that it is impossible to separate it from all that was going on about it. It is easy enough to recall if not to evoke again the scene in which Ben King and Charlie Almy, sitting for three hours at a stretch, gave a wholly impromptu impersonation of two solemn missionaries just returned from some unmapped wilderness and recounting their deeds in order to inspire contributions; it is not difficult either to recall the slight figure of Charlie Seymour, with his red hair, his comedian’s droll face, and to listen to him recounting those adventures which life was ever offering him, whether on one of his many journeys as a war correspondent to the region of the Dakotas when his friends among the Ogallalla and Brûlé Sioux were on the war-path again, or in some less picturesque tragedy he had been reporting nearer home—say a murder in South Clark Street; but, like so many of the keener joys of life, the charm of his stories was fleeting and gone with the moment that gave them.

His humor colored everything he wrote, as the humor of Finley Peter Dunne colored everything he wrote; and both were skilled in the art of the news story. We were all reading Kipling in those days, and Mr. Dunne was so clever in adapting his terse style to the needs of the daily reportorial life that when one night a private shot a comrade in the barracks at Fort Sheridan, and Mr. Dunne was detailed to report the tragedy, he found it in every detail so exactly like Kipling’s story “In the Matter of a Private,” that he was overcome by the despair of having to write a tale that had already been told. He resisted the temptation, if there was any temptation, nobly and wrote the tale with a bald simplicity that no doubt enhanced its effect. He had not then begun to report the Philosophy of Mr. Dooley, though there was a certain Irishman in Chicago responsive to the name of Colonel Thomas Jefferson Dolan, whom, in his capacity of First Ward Democrat, Mr. Dunne frequently interviewed for his paper without the cramping influences of a previous visitation on the Colonel, and these interviews showed much of the color and spirit of those Dooley articles which later were to make him famous. He already knew, of course, and frequently enjoyed communion with the prototype of Mr. Dooley, Mr. James McGarry, who had a quaint philosophy of his own which Mr. Dunne one day rendered in a little article entitled “Mr. McGarry’s Philosophy.” The familiarity so wounded Mr. McGarry, however (he was a man of simple dignity and some sensitiveness), that Mr. Dunne thereafter adopted another name for the personage through which he was so long and so brilliantly to express himself, though it was not until after the Spanish War that the wide public was to recognize the talent which was already so abundantly recognized by Mr. Dunne’s friends.

Charlie Seymour did not read as much as some of his companions; perhaps it was that fact that gave such an original flavor to what he wrote. His elder brother, Mr. Horatio W. Seymour, was the editor of the Herald, a newspaper famed for the taste and even beauty of its typographical appearance. It looked somewhat like the New York Sun, and under Mr. Seymour was as carefully edited. It was the organ of the Democracy in the northwest, and I suppose no direct or immediate influence was more potent in bringing on the wide Democratic victory in the congressional election of 1890 than the brilliant editorials on the tariff which Mr. Horatio Seymour wrote. They were, I remember, one of the delights of Frank Hurd, and it was through Hurd’s influence that I was on the staff of that paper, reporting political events.

We were all more or less employed in reporting political events in that stirring year, and were kept busy in following and recording the sayings of the orators of both parties. It was characteristic of Mr. Dunne that after a sober column giving the gist of a speech by Joseph B. Foraker, then lately governor, and afterward senator of Ohio, in which he waved the bloody shirt in the fiery manner which in those days characterized him, Mr. Dunne should have concluded his article sententiously: “Then the audience went out to get the latest news of the battle of Gettysburg.”

But it was typical of Charlie Seymour that when he was detailed to accompany Thomas B. Reed, Speaker of the Billion Dollar Congress, he should have been so fascinated by the whiskers of the Illinois farmers who crowded about the rear platform of the Speaker’s train, that he devoted half a column to a description of those adornments which long was celebrated as a classic in the traditions of Chicago reporters, to be recalled by them as they would recall, for instance, certain of the sayings of the late Joseph Medill.

Mr. Medill, of course, moved in an element far above that which was natural to the reporters, and the figure of the great editor of the Tribune filled the imagination completely. I used to like his low-tariff editorials, though they became high-tariff editorials during national campaigns, the rate of percentage of protection rising like a thermometer in the heat of political excitement,—a tendency the rate invariably reveals the nearer its objective is approached.

Mr. Medill, as was well known, was not an admirer of President Harrison, and there came down into our world an evidence of the fact in a story which Mr. Frank Brooks, a political writer on the Tribune, told us. It was at the time that President Harrison made one of those speaking tours which, beginning with President Johnson’s “swing around the circle,” have grown increasingly familiar to those of the electorate who observe their presidents and rush to the railway station to hear them speaking as they flash by. His managing editor had assigned Mr. Brooks to go to Galesburg, catch the President’s special and make the journey with him, and just as he was giving directions as to the column or two which Mr. Brooks was to send in daily, Mr. Medill went shuffling through the editorial room, bearing a great pile of those foreign exchanges he was so fond of reading. The managing editor explained to Mr. Medill the mission he was committing to Mr. Brooks, and the old editor stood a moment looking at them, then raised his ear-trumpet and said in his queer voice:

“What did you say?”

“I said, I’d just been telling Mr. Brooks to go down to Galesburg to-night, catch the President’s special, and send us a column or so each night of his speeches.”

“Uh-huh,” said Mr. Medill, and then he drily added: “What for?”

IX

It was, of course, for a young correspondent who hod an eager curiosity about life, an interesting experience to go on a journey like that, and it was with delight that, one snowy morning in the late autumn of that year, I left Chicago to go on a little trip down through Indiana with James G. Blaine. He was the secretary of state in President Harrison’s cabinet, a position in which, as it turned out, he was unhappy, as most men are apt to be in public positions, though a sort of cruel and evil fascination will not let them give up the vain pursuit of them, vainest perhaps when they are won. When I reached the station that morning, Mr. Blaine was already there, walking up and down the platform arm in arm with his son Emmons. He was a gray man, dressed in gray clothes, with spats made of the cloth of his habit, and there was about him an air of vague sadness, which in his high countenance became almost a pain, though just then, in the companionship of the son he loved, there was, for a little while, the expression of a mild happiness, maybe a solace. His face was of a grayish, almost luminous pallor, and his silver hair and beard were in the same key. William Walter Phelps, then our minister to Germany, was traveling with him, and on our way down to South Bend the constant entrance of plain citizens from the other coaches into our car filled Mr. Phelps with a kind of wonder. Commercial travelers, farmers, all sorts and conditions of men, entered and introduced themselves to Mr. Blaine, and he sat and talked with them all in that simplicity which marks the manners, even if it has departed the spirit of the republic.

“It is a remarkable sight you are witnessing,” said Mr. Phelps to us reporters, “a sight you could witness in no other country in the world. There is the premier of a great government, and yet the commonest man may approach him without ceremony, and talk to him as though he were nobody.”

Fresh from his life at a foreign court, he was viewing events from that foreign point of view, perhaps thinking just then in European sequences, and since there was such simplicity, it was not hard for any of us to have conversation with our premier. Mr. Blaine had just come from Ohio where he had been speaking in McKinley’s district, and he understood the political situation so perfectly that he said, in the frankness of a conversation that was not to be reported, that McKinley was certain to be defeated; indeed he foresaw, though it required no very great vision to do that, the reverse that was to overtake his party in the congressional elections.

With my interest in the tariff question, which then seemed to me so fundamental, I did not lose the opportunity to ask Mr. Blaine about his reciprocity project: but after a while the conversation turned to more personal subjects. When he learned that I was from Ohio, he asked me suddenly if I could name the counties that formed the several congressional districts of the state. I could not, of course, do that, and I supposed no one in the world could do it or ever wish to do it; but he could, and with a naïve pride in the accomplishment he did, and then astounded me by saying that he could almost match the feat with any state in the Union.

It was the only enthusiasm the poor man showed all that day, and when we reached South Bend, there was a contretemps that might have afforded Mr. Phelps further food for reflection on the lack of ceremony in America. When the premier stepped off the train into the wet mass of snow that covered the dirty platform of the ugly little station, there was nowhere to be seen any evidence of a reception for the distinguished guest. There was an old hack, or ’bus, one of those rattling, shambling, moth-eaten vehicles that await the incoming train at every small town in our land, with a team of forlorn horses depressed by the weather or by life, but there was no committee of eminent citizens, no band, nothing. The scene was bare and bleak and cold, and the premier was plainly disgusted.

He stood there a moment and looked about him undecided, while Mr. Phelps with sympathetic concern displayed great willingness to serve, but was as helpless as his chief. The American sovereigns who were loafing by the station shed looked on with the reticent detachment which characterizes the rural American. And then the train slowly pulled out and left us, and Mr. Blaine cast at it a glance of longing and of reproach, as though in its sundering of the last tie with the world of comfort, he had suffered the final indignity. There seemed to be no course other than to take the ’bus, when suddenly a committee rushed up, out of breath and out of countenance, and with a chorus of apologies explained that they had met the wrong train, or gone to another station, and so bore the premier off in triumph to dine at some rich man’s house.

The day seemed to grow worse as it progressed, as days ill begun have a way of doing, and when the premier in the afternoon appeared at the meeting he was to address, his spirits had not improved, and even if they had, the meeting was one to depress the spirits of any man. It assembled in a barren hall, a kind of skating rink, or something of the sort, that would have served better for a boxing match. The audience was small, and standing about in the mud and slush they had “tramped in,” to use our midwestern phrase, they displayed that bucolic indifference which can daunt the most exuberant speaker. It was in no way worthy of the man, and Mr. Blaine spoke with evident difficulty, and so wholly lacked spirit and enthusiasm that it was impossible for him to warm up to his subject. The speech was of that perfunctory sort which such an atmosphere compels, one of those speeches the speaker drags out, a word at a time, and is glad to be done with, and Mr. Blaine bore with his fates a little while, and then almost abruptly closed. He spoke on the tariff issue, and in defense of the McKinley Bill, and in marshaling the evidences of our glory and prosperity, all of which he attributed to the direct influence of the protective tariff system, he mentioned the number of miles of railroad that had been built, and even the increase in the nation’s population! The speech and the occasion afforded an opportunity to a newspaper of the opposition, which in those days of silly partizanship, was not to be overlooked. I went back to the little hotel and wrote my story, and since I had all the while in my mind not only partizan advantage, but the smiles that would break out on the countenances of Charlie Seymour and Peter Dunne and the other boys gathered in the Whitechapel Club I did not minimise the effect of all those babies who had come to life as a result of the protective tariff, nor all those ironical difficulties the day had heaped upon the great man. It was not, perhaps, quite fair, nor quite nice, but it was as fair and as nice as newspaper ethics and political etiquette—if there are such things—require, and Mr. Blaine himself most have had some consciousness of his partial failure, some dissatisfaction with his effort, for I was just about to put my story on the wire at six o’clock when he appeared, with his rich host, and asked for me. I talked to him through the little wicket of the telegraph office, and the conversation began inauspiciously by the rich man’s peremptorily commanding me to let him see my stuff; he wished, he said, to “look it over”! I was not as patient with his presumption then as I think I could be now, for I had not learned that it was the factory system that produces such types, men who bully the women at home and the women and clerks and operatives in their shops, and I denied him the right, of course. He became very angry, and blustered through the little window, while the operator, an old telegrapher I had known in Toledo, sat behind me waiting to send the story clicking into Chicago on The Herald’s wire. After the rich man had exhausted himself, Mr. Blaine took his place at the window and in a mild and calm manner, asked me for my copy, saying that he was not well, and that he had made some slips in his speech which he did not care to have go to the country. It was those unfortunate or fortunate babies of the protective tariff system, and he said that the correspondent of a press association had agreed to make the excisions if I would do so, and he would consider it a favor if I would oblige him.

The charm of his manner had been on me all that day, and I had been feeling sorry for him all day, too, and I was sorrier for him then than ever, and half ashamed of some of the things I had written, but I explained to him that I had been sent by my paper in the hope that he might say something to the disadvantage of his own cause, and that my duty was to report, at least, what he had said. It was one of the hardest “noes” I ever had to say, and at last as he turned away, I regretted, perhaps more than he, and certainly more than he ever knew, that I could not let him revise his speech—since that is what most of us desire to do with most of our speeches.

When that campaign ended in the overthrow of the Republican majority in Congress, and I was sent to interview Ben Butterworth on the result, he said, in his humorous way: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” He was not altogether cast down by the result; in his place in Congress as a representative from a Cincinnati district he had risen to denounce the tariff, and so had his consolation. To me it seemed as if the people had at last entered the promised land, that that was the day the Lord had made for his people, but Mr. Butterworth could point out that our government was not so democratic as the British government, for instance, since it was not so responsive to the people’s will. Over there, of course, after such a reverse the government would have retired, and a new one would have been formed, but here the existing administration would remain in power two years longer, and then, even if it lost in the presidential election over a year must elapse before a new Congress would convene, so that the millennium was postponed a good three years at least.

X

However, there were other interests and other delights with which to occupy one’s self meanwhile, not the least of which was Mr. Butterworth himself. He was then out of Congress and in Chicago as Solicitor General of the World’s Columbian Exposition, for which Chicago was preparing. For a while I was relieved from writing about politics, and assigned to the World’s Fair, and there were so many distinguished men from all over the nation associated in that enterprise that it was very much like politics in its superficial aspects. There was, for instance, the World’s Columbian Commission, a body created under the authority of Congress, composed of two commissioners from each state, appointed by its governor, and that body exactly the size of the senate was like it in personnel and character. The witty Thomas E. Palmer of Michigan was its president, and there were among its membership such men as Judge Lindsay, later senator from Kentucky, Judge Harris of Virginia, who looked like George Washington, and many other delightful and pungent characters. But no personality among them all was more interesting than Colonel James A. McKenzie, Judge Lindsay’s colleague from Kentucky. He was tall and spare of frame, and his long moustache and goatee, and the great black slouch hat he wore made him in appearance the typical southerner of the popular imagination. He was indeed the typical southerner by every right and tradition, by birth, by his services in the Confederate army, by his stately courtesy, by his love of sentiment and the picturesque, by his wit and humor and eloquence, and his fondness for phrases. His humor sparkled in his kind blue eyes, and it overflowed in that brilliant conversation with which he delighted everyone about him; he could entertain you by the hour with his comments on all phases of that life in which he found such zest. He had been known as “Quinine Jim,” because as congressman he had secured the reduction or the abolition of the duty on that drug, so indispensable in malarial lands. He was fond of striking phrases; he it was who had referred to Blaine as a Florentine mosaic; and his reference to Mrs. Cleveland as “the uncrowned queen of America” had delighted the Democratic convention at St. Louis which renominated her husband for the presidency. And again at Chicago, on that memorable night of oratory in 1892 in seconding the nomination of Cleveland on behalf of Kentucky he stood on a chair and referred to his state as the commonwealth “in which, thank God, the damned lie is the first lick, where the women are so beautiful that the aurora borealis blushes with shame, where the whiskey is so good as to make intoxication a virtue, and the horses so fleet that lightning in comparison is but a puling paralytic.”

During one of many pleasant afternoons in the old Grand Pacific Hotel he began to tell us something about the chronic office holders to be found in the capital of his state, as in most states, and said: “If God in a moment of enthusiasm should see fit to snatch them to His bosom I should regard it as a dispensation of divine providence in which I could acquiesce with a fervor that would be turbulent and even riotous.” It was in this stream of exaggeration and hyperbole that he talked all the time, but with the coming of the winter of that year my opportunities of listening to him were cut off. I was sent to Springfield to report the sessions of the legislature. In the spring a bill was under discussion for the appropriation of a large sum in aid of the World’s Fair, and when the usual opposition developed among those country members who have so long governed our cities in dislike and distrust of the people in them, a delegation came down from Chicago to lobby for the measure. It was not long until it was evident that they were not making much headway; the difference, the distinction in their dress and manner, their somewhat too lofty style were only making matters worse. I took it upon myself to telegraph to James W. Scott, the publisher of The Herald, apprising him of the situation, and suggesting that Colonel McKenzie be sent down to reënforce them. I felt that he would perhaps understand the country members better because he understood humanity better, and besides, I wished to see him again and hear his stories and funny sayings. He came, and after he had associated with the members a day or so, and they had seen him draw Kentucky “twist” from the deep pocket of the long tails of his coat, and on one or two occasions had watched him gently pinch into a julep the tender sprigs of mint the spring had brought to Springfield, the appropriation for some reason was made. While he was there he said he wished to visit the tomb of Lincoln, and it was with pride that I got an open carriage and drove him, on an incomparable morning in June, out to Oak Ridge cemetery. He was in a solemn mood that morning; the visit had a meaning for him; he had fought on the other side in the great war, but he had a better conception of the character of the noble martyr than many a northerner, especially of the day when that tomb was built, certainly a nobler conception of that lofty character than is expressed in Mead’s cruel war groups—as though Lincoln had been merely some shoulder-strapped murderer of his fellow men! The Colonel had never been there before, and it was an occasion for him, and for me, too, though every time I went there it was for me an occasion, as my sojourn in Springfield was an opportunity, to induce those who had known Lincoln to talk about him.

The tomb has a chamber in its base where there were stored a number of things; the place, indeed, was a sort of cheap museum, and you paid to enter there and listen to an aged custodian lecture on the “relics,” and thrill the gaping onlooker with the details of the attempt to steal the body, and buy a book about it, if you were morbid and silly enough. The custodian began his lecture in that chamber, and then led you out into the sunlight again, and up on the base of the monument, and showed you the bronze fighters, and at last, took you down into the crypt, on the brow of the little down that overlooks the cemetery.

There at last Colonel McKenzie stood beside the sarcophagus and after a while the custodian came to the end of his rigmarole, and, by some mercy, was still. And I stood aside and looked at the old Confederate officer, standing there in that cool entrance, beside the very tomb of Lincoln. He stood with his arms folded on his breast, his tall form slightly bent, his big hat in his hand, and his white head bowed; he stood there a long time, in the perfect silence of that June morning, with thoughts, I suppose, that might have made an epic.

When at last he turned away and went around to the front of the monument, and we were about to enter our carriage, he turned, and still uncovered, over the little gate in the low fence that enclosed the spot, he paused and gave his hand to the old custodian, and said:

“Colonel, I wish to express to you my appreciation of the privilege I have had this morning of paying my respects at the shrine of the greatest American that ever lived.”

He said it solemnly and sincerely, and then, still holding the delighted old fellow’s hand, he went on in profound gravity:

“And I cannot go away without expressing my sense of satisfaction in the eloquent oration you have delivered on this occasion. I was particularly impressed, sir, by its evident lack of previous thought and preparation.”

XI

That was the legislature which elected John M. Palmer to the United States Senate from Illinois. The election was accomplished only after a memorable deadlock of two months in which the Democrats of the general assembly stood so nobly, shoulder to shoulder, that they were called “The Immortal 101.” When they were finally reënforced by the votes of two members elected as representatives of the Farmers’ Alliance, and elected their man, they had a gold medal struck to commemorate their own heroism. They were not, perhaps, exactly immortal, but they did stand for their principles so stanchly that when they came to celebrate their victory, some of their orators compared them to those other immortals who held Thermopylæ.

Their principle was the popular election of United States senators, and they had a fine exemplar of democracy in their candidate. He had been nominated by a state convention, as had Lincoln, whom General Palmer had known intimately and had supported both for senator and president. He was the last of those great figures of Illinois whom the times immediately preceding the Civil War had so abundantly brought forth. He had commanded an army corps, he had been governor of his state, and in 1872 a presidential possibility in the Republican party. But he had turned to the Democrats, and after he became their senator, the first Illinois had known since Douglas, he became a presidential possibility in the Democratic party; that was in 1892, and whatever chances he had he destroyed himself by coming on from Washington and declaring for Grover Cleveland.

Four years later he was nominated for the presidency by the conservative faction of his party. He told me, when I was finishing my law studies under him, that he had never lost anything politically by bolting any of the several parties he had been in, but had usually gained in self respect by doing so; and if to the politician his whole career presented inconsistencies, to the man of principle he must seem wholly consistent and sincere. Certain it is that he followed that inward spirit which alone can guide a man through the perplexities of life, and so the principle with him came ever before the party.

He was a simple man with simple tastes, and his very simplicity was an element of that dignity which seemed to belong to other times than ours. The familiar figure of him along the quiet streets of Springfield was pleasing to men and to children alike; he would go along erectly and slowly under his great broad hat, a striking figure with his plentiful white hair, his closely trimmed chin whiskers, the broad, smoothly shaven upper lip distinguishing a countenance that was of a type associated with the earlier ideals of the republic, and the market basket he carried on his arm helped this effect. At home he was delightful; he had a viol, and used to play it, if there were not too many about to hear him, and if he were alone, sing a few staves of old songs, like “Darling Nelly Gray,” and “Rosie Lee, Courting Down in Tennessee,” and some of the old tunes he had learned in Kentucky as a boy. He liked poetry, if it were not of the introspective modern mood, and while I have heard of such extraordinary characters, I never believed the stories of their endurance, until I was able to discover in him one man who actually did read Sir Walter Scott’s novels through every year. For the most part he had some member of his family read them to him, and he found in them the naïve pleasure of a child. I used to think I would remember the things he was always saying, and the stories he was always telling about Lincoln or Douglas or Grant, but I never could keep note-books and the more imposing sayings have departed. Yet there flashes before the memory with the detail of a cinematograph that scene of a winter’s evening when I entered the big living-room in his home and there found him with his wife before the great open fire. She was reading aloud to him from “Ivanhoe.”

“Come in, Mr. Brand,” he always addressed me by prefixing “Mr.” to my Christian name. “Come in,” he called in his hearty voice. “We are just storming a castle.”

He lived on to the century’s end, with a sort of gusto in life that never failed, I think, until that day when he attended the funeral of the last of his old contemporaries, General John M. McClernand, that fierce old warrior who had quarreled with Grant and lived on in Springfield until he could fight no more with anyone. Senator Palmer came home from his funeral amused by the fact that McClernand had been buried in the full uniform of a major-general, which he had not worn, I suppose, since Vicksburg. When some member of Senator Palmer’s household asked him if he should like to be buried in his uniform, he shook his head against it, but added:

“It was all right for Mac; it was like him.”

But the end was in his thoughts; Oglesby was gone, and now McClernand as the last of the men with whom he had fought in the great crisis, and he went, pretty soon after that, himself. He had participated in two great revolutionary epochs of his nation, going through the one and penetrating though not so far into the second, a long span of life and experience.

It was perhaps natural that he should not have divined the implications of the second phase as clearly as he did those of the first; and though he had helped to inaugurate the new movement, the latest urge toward democracy in this land, he could not go so far. He was young in ’56 and old in ’96, and as we grow old we grow conservative, whether we would or not, and much, I suppose, in the same way.

XII

Senator Palmer’s victory in 1891, however, had raised the hopes of the Illinois Democracy for 1892, and it was early in that year that I came to know one of the most daring pioneers of the neo-democratic movement in America, and the most courageous spirit of our times.

It was on a cold raw morning that I met Joseph P. Mahony, then a Democratic member of the State Senate, who said:

“Come with me and I’ll introduce you to the next governor of Illinois.”

It was the time of year when one was meeting the next governor of Illinois in most of the hotel corridors, or men who were trying to look like potential governors of Illinois, so that such a remark was not to be taken too literally; but I went, and after ascending to an upper floor of a narrow little building in Adams Street, we entered a suite of law offices, and there in a very much crowded, a very much littered and a rather dingy little private room, at an odd little walnut desk, sat John P. Altgeld.

The figure was not prepossessing; he wore his hair close-clipped in ultimate surrender to an obstinate cowlick; his beard was closely trimmed, too, and altogether the countenance was one made for the hands of the cartoonists, who in the brutal fury that was so soon to blaze upon him and to continue to blaze until it had consumed him quite, could easily contort the features to the various purposes of an ugly partizanship; they gave it a peculiarly sinister quality, and it is one of the countless ironies of life that a face, sad with all the utter woe of humanity, should have become for a season, and in some minds remained forever, the type and symbol of all that is most abhorrent. There was a peculiar pallor in the countenance, and the face was such a blank mask of suffering and despair that, had it not been for the high intelligence that shone from his eyes, it must have impressed many as altogether lacking in expression. Certainly it seldom or never expressed enthusiasm, or joy, or humor, though he had humor of a certain mordant kind, as many a political opponent was to know.

He had been a judge of the Circuit Court, and was known by his occasional addresses, his interviews and articles, as a publicist of radical and humanitarian tendencies. He was known especially to the laboring classes and to the poor, who, by that acute sympathy they possess, divined in him a friend, and in the circles of sociological workers and students, then so small and obscure as to make their views esoteric, he was recognized as one who understood and sympathized with their tendencies and ideals. He was accounted in those days a wealthy man,—he was just then building one of those tall and ugly structures of steel called “sky-scrapers,”—and now that he was spoken of for governor this fact made him seem “available” to the politicians. Also he had a German name, another asset in Illinois just then, when Germans all over the state felt themselves outraged by legislation concerning the “little red school-house,” which the Republicans had enacted when they were in full power in the state.

But my paper did not share this enthusiasm about him; it happened to be owned by John R. Walsh, and between Walsh and Altgeld there was a feud, a feud that cost Altgeld his fortune, and lasted until the day that death found him poor and crushed by all the tragedy which a closer observer, one with a keener prescience of destiny than I, might have read in his face from the first.

The feeling of the paper, if one may so personalize a corporation as to endow it with emotion, was not corrected by his nomination, and The Herald had little to say of him, and what it did say was given out in the perfunctory tone of a party organ. But as the summer wore on, and I was able to report to my editors that all the signs pointed to Altgeld’s election, I was permitted to write an article in which I tried to describe his personality and to give some impression of the able campaign he was making. Horace Taylor drew some pictures to illustrate it, and I had the satisfaction of knowing that it gave Altgeld pleasure, while at the same time to me at least it revealed for an instant the humanness of the man.

He sent for me—he was then in offices in his new sky-scraper—and asked if I could procure for him Horace Taylor’s pictures; he hesitated a moment, and then, as though it were a weakness his Spartan nature was reluctant to reveal, he told me that he intended to have my article republished in a newspaper in Mansfield, Ohio, the town whence he had come, where he had taught school, and where he had met the gracious lady who was his wife. He talked for a while that afternoon about his youth, about his poverty and his struggles, and then suddenly lapsed into a silence, with his eyes fastened on me. I wondered what he was looking at; his gaze was disconcerting, and it made me self-conscious and uneasy, till he said:

“Where could one get a cravat like the one you have on?”

It was, I remember—because of the odd incident—an English scarf of blue, quite new. I had tried to knot it as Ben Cable of the Democratic National Committee knotted his, and it seemed that such a little thing should not be wanting to the happiness of a man who, by all the outward standards, had so much to gratify him as Altgeld had, and I said—with some embarrassment, and some doubt as to the taste I was exhibiting—“Why, you may have this one.”

In a moment his face changed, the mask fell, and he shook his head and said: “No, it would not look like that on me.”

After his election it was suggested to me that I might become his secretary, but I declined; in my travels over the state as a political correspondent I was always meeting aged men, seemingly quite respectable and worthy and entirely well meaning, who were introduced not so much by name as such and such a former governor’s private secretary; though like the moor which Browning crossed, they had

... names of their own,

And a certain use in the world, no doubt.

But I did take a position in the office of the secretary of state that offered the opportunity I had been longing for; I wished to finish my law studies, and, deeper down than any ambition for the bar, I was nourishing a desire to write, or if it does not seem too pretentious, an ambition in literature; and neither of these aims could well be accomplished, say from midnight on, after working all day on a morning newspaper.

It was a pleasant change. Springfield was lovely in the spring, which came to it earlier than it visited Chicago, and it was a relief to escape the horrid atmosphere of a great brutal city which as a reporter it had seemed my fate to behold for the most part at night. There was a sense of spaciousness in the green avenues of the quiet town, and there was pleasant society, and better perhaps than all there were two big libraries in the Capitol, the law library of the Supreme Court and the state library; and after the noisy legislature had adjourned a peace fell on the great, cool stone pile that was almost academic.

Twice or thrice a day Governor Altgeld was to be seen passing through its vast corridors, his head bent thoughtfully, rapt afar from the things about him in those dreams of social amelioration which had visited him so much earlier than they came to most of his contemporaries. He had read much, and during his residence there the executive mansion had the atmosphere of intellectual culture. Whenever I went over there, which I did now and then with his secretary for luncheon or for an evening at cards, our talk was almost always of books.

We were all reading George Meredith in those days, and Meredith’s greater contemporary, Thomas Hardy. “Tess” had just appeared, and it would be about that time that “Jude” was running as a serial in Harper’s Magazine, though with many elisions and under its tentative titles of “The Simpleton” and “Hearts Insurgent”; and we all fell completely under a fascination which has never failed of its weird and mysterious charm, so that I have read all his works, down to his latest poems, over and over again. Hardy is, perhaps, the greatest intelligence on our planet now that Tolstoy, from whom he so vastly differed, is gone, and Altgeld’s whole career might have served him, had he ever chosen to write of those experiences that are less implicit in human nature, and more explicit in the superficial aspects of public careers, as an example of his own pagan theory of the contrariety of human affairs and the spite of the Ironic Spirits.

I was reading, too, the novels of Mr. William Dean Howells, as I always have been whenever there was a moment to spare, and it was with a shock of peculiar delight and a sense of corroboration almost authoritative that I learned that Mr. Howells also had given voice to those very same profound and troubling convictions which Charlie R—— had set me on the track of two years before.

XIII

It was not in any one of Mr. Howells’s novels or essays, except inferentially, that I learned this, but among some musty documents the worms were eating up away down in the foundations of the State House.

My work in the office of the secretary of state involved the care of the state’s archives. The oldest of these were stored in a vault in the cellar of the huge pile, and the discovery had just been made that some kind of insect, which the state entomologist knew all about, was riddling those records with little holes,—piercing them through and through. In consequence a new vault was prepared, and steel filing cases were set up in it, and the records removed to this safer sanctuary.

It was a tedious and stupid task, until we came one day to file what were called the papers in the anarchist case. Officially they related to the application for the commutation of the sentences of the four men, Spies, Engel, Fischer, and Parsons, who had been hanged, and for the pardon of the three who were then confined in the penitentiary at Joliet, Fielden and Schwab for life, and old Oscar Neebe for fifteen years. Fielden and Schwab had been sentenced to death with the four who had been killed, but Governor Oglesby had commuted their sentences to imprisonment for life; Neebe’s original sentence had been for the fifteen years he was then serving. The papers consisted of communications to the governor, great petitions, and letters and telegrams, many sent in mercy, and some in the spirit of reason, asking for clemency, many in a wild hysteria of fear, and the hideous hate that is born of fear, begging the governor to let “justice” take its course.

There were the names of many prominent men and women signed to these communications; among them was a request signed by many authors in England requesting clemency, but there was no appeal stronger, and no protest braver, than that in the letter which Mr. Howells had written to a New York newspaper analyzing the case and showing the amazing injustice of the whole proceeding. Mr. Howells had first gone, so he told me in after years, to the aged poet Whittier, whose gentle philosophy might have moved him to a mood against that public wrong, and then to George William Curtis, but they had advised him to write the protest himself, and he had done so, and he had done it better and more bravely than either of them could have done out of the great conscience and the great heart that have always been on the side of the weak and the oppressed, with a mercy which when it is practised by mankind is always so much nearer the right and the divine than our crude and generally cruel attempts at justice can ever be.

But all these prayers had fallen on official ears that—to use a grotesque figure—were so closely pressed to the ground that they could not hear; and there was nothing to do, since they were so many and so bulky that no latest-improved and patented steel filing-case could hold them, but to have a big box made and lock them up in that for all time, forgotten, like so many other records of injustice, out of the minds of men.

But not entirely; injustice was never for long out of the mind of John P. Altgeld, and during all those first months of his administration he had been brooding over this notable instance of injustice, and he had come to his decision. He knew the cost to him; he had just come to the governorship of his state, and to the leadership of his party, after its thirty years of defeat, and he realized what powerful interests would be frightened and offended if he were to turn three forgotten men out of prison; he understood how partizanship would turn the action to its advantage.

It mattered not that most of the thoughtful men in Illinois would tell you that the “anarchists” had been improperly convicted, that they were not only entirely innocent of the murder of which they had been accused, but were not even anarchists; it was simply that the mob had convicted them in one of the strangest frenzies of fear that ever distracted a whole community, a case which all the psychologists of all the universities in the world might have tried, without getting at the truth of it—much less a jury in a criminal court.

And so, one morning in June, very early, I was called to the governor’s office, and told to make out pardons for Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab. “And do it yourself,” said the governor’s secretary, “and don’t say anything about it to anybody.”

I cannot tell in what surprise, in what a haze, or with what emotions I went about that task. I got the blanks and the records, and, before the executive clerk, whose work it was, had come down, I made out those three pardons, in the largest, roundest hand I could command, impressed them with the Great Seal of State, had the secretary of state sign them, and took them over to the governor’s office. I was admitted to his private room, and there he sat, at his great flat desk. The only other person in the room was Dreier, a Chicago banker, who had never wearied, it seems, in his efforts to have those men pardoned. He was standing, and was very nervous; the moment evidently meant much to him. The Governor took the big sheets of imitation parchment, glanced over them, signed his name to each, laid down the pen, and handed the papers across the table to Dreier. The banker took them, and began to say something. But he only got as far as——

“Governor, I hardly”—when he broke down and wept. Altgeld made an impatient gesture; he was gazing out of the window in silence, on the elm-trees in the yard. He took out his watch, told Dreier he would miss his train—Dreier was to take the Alton to Joliet, deliver the pardons to the men in person, and go on into Chicago with them that night—and Dreier nervously rolled up the pardons, took up a little valise, shook hands, and was gone.

On the table was a high pile of proofs of the document in which Governor Altgeld gave the reasons for his action. It was an able paper; one might well rank it among state papers, and I suppose no one now, in these days, when so many of Altgeld’s democratic theories are popular, would deny that his grounds were just and reasonable, or that he had done what he could to right a great wrong; though he would regret that so great a soul should have permitted itself to mar the document by expressions of hatred of the judge who tried the case. But perhaps it is not so easy to be calm and impersonal in the midst of the moving event, as it is given to others to be long afterward.

But whatever feelings he may have had, he was calm and serene ever after. I saw him as I was walking down to the Capitol the next morning. It was another of those June days which now and then are so perfect on the prairies. The Governor was riding his horse—he was a gallant horseman—and he bowed and smiled that faint, wan smile of his, and drew up to the curb a moment. There was, of course, but one subject then, and I said:

“Well, the storm will break now.”

“Oh, yes,” he replied, with a not wholly convincing air of throwing off a care, “I was prepared for that. It was merely doing right.”

I said something to him then to express my satisfaction in the great deed that was to be so wilfully, recklessly, and cruelly misunderstood. I did not say all I might have said, for I felt that my opinions could mean so little to him. I have wished since that I had said more,—said something, if that might have been my good fortune, that could perhaps have made a great burden a little easier for that brave and tortured soul. But he rode away with that wan, persistent smile. And the storm did break, and the abuse it rained upon him broke his heart; but I never again heard him mention the anarchist case.

XIV

The newspapers were so extravagant in their abuse of Governor Altgeld for his pardon of the anarchists that one not knowing the facts might have received the impression that the Governor had already pardoned most of the prisoners in the penitentiary, and would presently pardon those that remained, provided the crimes they had committed, or were said to have committed, had been heinous enough. The fact was that he issued no more pardons, proportionately at least, than the governors who preceded him, since notwithstanding the incessant grinding of society’s machinery of vengeance the populations of prisons grow with the populations outside of them.

But partizanship was intense in those days; and the fact that Governor Altgeld was responsible for such a hegira from the Capitol at Springfield as Colonel McKenzie had longed to behold in the Capitol at Frankfort exacerbated the bitter feeling. The sentiment thus created, however, did increase the hopes of convicts, and the Governor was continually importuned by their friends—those of them that had friends, which was apt to be a pitifully small percentage of the whole number—to give them back their liberty. A few weeks after the pardons had been issued to the anarchists, George Brennan of Braidwood, then a clerk in the State House, told me a moving story of a young man of his acquaintance, who was then confined in the penitentiary at Joliet. The young man was dying of tuberculosis, and his mother, having no other hope than that he might be released to die at home, had made her appeal to Brennan, and he had seen to the filing of an application in due form, and now he asked me if I would not call the Governor’s attention to it. I got out the great blue envelope containing the thin papers in the case—they were as few as the young man’s friends—and took them over to the Governor, but no sooner had I laid them on his desk and made the first hesitating and tentative approach to the subject, than I divined the moment to be wholly inauspicious. The Governor did not even look at the papers, he did not even touch the big blue linen envelope, but shook his head and said:

“No, no, I will not pardon any more. The people are opposed to it; they do not believe in mercy; they love revenge; they want the prisoners punished to the bitterest extremity.”

I did not then know how right he was in his cynical generalization, though I did know that his decision was so far from his own heart that it was no decision at all, but merely the natural human reaction against all the venom that had been voided upon him, and I went away then, and told Brennan that we must wait until the Governor was in another mood.

Three or four days afterward I met the Governor one morning as he was passing through the rotunda of the State House, his head bent in habitual abstraction, and seeing me in what seemed always some subconscious way he stopped and said:

“Oh, by the way: that pardon case you spoke of the other morning—I was somewhat hasty I fear, and out of humor. If you’ll get the papers I’ll see what can be done.”

I knew of course what could be done, and knew then that it would be done, and I made haste to get the papers, which had been kept on my desk awaiting that propitious season which I had the faith to feel would come sooner or later, though I had not expected it to come quite so soon as that. I already anticipated the gladness that would light up Brennan’s good Irish face when I handed him the pardon for his friend, and I could dramatize the scene in that miner’s cottage in Braidwood when the pardoned boy flew to his mother’s arms. I intended to say nothing then to Brennan, however, but to wait until the pardon, signed and sealed, could be delivered into his hands, but as I was going across the hall to the Governor’s chambers I encountered Brennan, and then of course could not hold back the good news. And so I told him, looking into his blue eyes to behold the first ripple of the smile I expected to see spread over his face; but there was no smile. He regarded me quite soberly, shook his head, and said: