LAST WINTER
IN
THE UNITED STATES

BEING

TABLE TALK

COLLECTED DURING A TOUR THROUGH THE LATE SOUTHERN CONFEDERATION, THE FAR WEST, THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, &c.

By F. BARHAM ZINCKE

VICAR OF WHERSTEAD AND CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO THE QUEEN

LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET 1868

The right of translation is reserved

TO MY WIFE

I Dedicate these Pages

BECAUSE, WHILE OF ALL WOMEN I AM ACQUAINTED WITH SHE WOULD HAVE BEEN MOST CAPABLE OF ENTERING INTO THE INTEREST OF THE SCENES AND OF THE STATE OF SOCIETY THEY DESCRIBE, SHE DETERMINED, FOR THE SAKE OF HER ONLY CHILD, TO FOREGO THAT PLEASURE; AND URGED ME NOT TO LOSE, FROM CONSIDERATION FOR HER, AN OPPORTUNITY FOR CARRYING OUT A LONG-CHERISHED WISH TO VISIT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Wherstead Vicarage:
Nov. 24, 1868.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION.

No one would now think of writing a continuous narrative of travel in the United States of America. The only alternative hitherto adopted has been that of Essays on American subjects. But towards these the opinion of the reading public has not been so favourable as to make one desirous of adding to their number. There appears, however, to be another form, as yet, I believe, untried, in which he who has travelled in a country, about which people know much, but from which they are still desirous of hearing something more, may present to the reader what he has to say. He may write, I mean, somewhat in the fashion of a book of table-talk. This he may do by confining himself just to what he knows would be listened to with interest in a company of intelligent persons who had some acquaintance with the subject; and by putting what he has to say of this kind with the conciseness, and, if possible, with the point, required in conversation. This would render it necessary that the book should consist rather of paragraphs than of chapters; and that these should frequently have little or no connection; many of them being very brief, because they will contain merely some observation, or the notice of some fact, for which half a dozen lines will suffice. It is in this way that I now propose to write about America, trusting that by so doing I shall spare my readers’ time and patience.

A WINTER
IN
THE UNITED STATES.

CHAPTER I.

THE WINTER VOYAGE RECOMMENDED—A CABIN TO ONE’S SELF MAY THEN BE HAD AT NO ADDITIONAL COST—ADVANTAGES OF TRAVELLING IN AMERICA IN WINTER—A FEELING IN A GALE—THE AMERICANS ON BOARD THE STEAMER—DIVINE SERVICE ON BOARD.

I would recommend the man who begins to feel the effects of long-continued professional labour, or of an idle and luxurious life, if his constitution is still capable of amendment, to try what may be gained by a voyage across the Atlantic, and back again, in winter; with such an interval between the two as he might be able to allow for a tour in the United States. In the summer the weather is likely to be so fine that the only benefit he would derive from his two voyages would be that of breathing the air of the ocean for as many days as he would spend in making them; but in winter there would be almost a certainty of some rough weather; and if after a few days he should prove capable of resisting the usual disturbing effects of such weather at sea, and come to take a pleasure in facing and battling against boisterous winds and tossing waves, I do not know what could more rapidly brace up within him what had begun to fail. Even the mere finding of one’s sea-legs, and the subsequent use of them under difficulties, would not be unattended with advantage, for I suppose it would bring into action and develope muscles not much used at other times. In winter, too, the air would be cool (it is not at all necessarily cold at that season on the track between England and America, except when one nears the American coast), and this coolness of the air would of itself have with many constitutions an invigorating effect. But be the process what it may by which your two ocean voyages bring about their renovating result, that result is that you return to your home a stronger and a hungrier man than you were before you left it.

Advantages of Travelling in Winter.

There is always much inconvenience and discomfort in sharing at sea the few square feet a cabin contains with another man, however gentlemanly he may be; and it is not improbable that one taken promiscuously from a hundred and fifty Transatlantic travellers would possess some habit or infirmity which would render such close companionship almost insufferable. In summer you cannot avoid this misery except at a great cost. To be alone at that season you must pay the fare of the one or two additional berths in your cabin which you wish should remain unoccupied. But in winter the number of passengers being always less than the number of berths, you can stipulate for a cabin to yourself without being put to any additional expense. There are now so many competing lines of steamers to America, that neither on the outward nor homeward voyage will you find any difficulty on this head. And you need not scruple about asking for this accommodation, for it may be granted to you without at all lessening either the profits of the owners of the ship, or the comforts of any one of the passengers.

Travelling also on the terra firma of America in winter has its advantages. At this season of the year you find everybody at home; and if your object is rather to see the people than the country in which they live, this will alone outweigh all other considerations. The Americans being the most locomotive people in the world, are seldom to be found at home in summer. I travelled through the States in the winter and the early spring, and had letters of introduction to persons in every city I stayed at, and in no instance did I find anyone absent from home, with the single exception of a gentleman who happened to be just at that time discharging his duties as Member of Congress at Washington, whereas the letter which had been given me was directed to him at his house at Chicago, where I presented it. In winter, also, one escapes the persecutions of the mosquitoes, and of the creeping things that bite in beds, of the withering heat, and tormenting dust—those inevitable concomitants of travel under an American summer sun.

What is lost by confining one’s travels in America to the (botanically) dead season of the year is, that nothing is seen of the summer and autumn aspects of the vegetation of the country. Its winter aspect, however, is not without interest to the Englishman, whose eye is accustomed to the perennial green of his own parks and meadows, which are generally, indeed, even greener at Christmas than at Mid-summer. While in America I did not see in the winter and early spring a blade of grass that was even faintly tinted with green, from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, or from New York to the Rocky Mountains. I was told that the blue grass of parts of Kentucky and Virginia is an exception, but of this I saw nothing myself. I found the roadsides, pastures, and prairies everywhere clothed in unrelieved drab.

To look out from one of the Cunard Company’s magnificent steam-ships, where everything is going on with the precision of clockwork, while a gale is raging on the ocean around you, and to see that in the Mid-Atlantic you are master of the winds and waves, makes you feel that it is something to be a man.

American Fellow-Passengers.

As I was going to America to see the Americans, I took the first opportunity which presented itself—that of the voyage to America—for weighing and measuring the specimens of that very compound race who happened to be on board the ship in which I was sailing. About half the passengers, forty-five in all, were of German extraction; and about half of this half were of the Hebrew persuasion. One young fellow among these latter, who I suppose might be regarded as a representative of the broad synagogue, delivered it as his opinion, that the time had come when the Jews should give up all their peculiar practices which modern knowledge had proved to be founded in misconceptions and mistakes. He instanced their abstinence from pork, and from the blood of the animals they used for food, and their method of killing animals. One of these Teutonic Americans, a youth with such a width of shoulder, and massiveness of neck and head, that no one could look upon him without being reminded of a buffalo, was an Indian trader from the borders of Kansas. His practice was to give the Indians four dollars’ worth of goods for such a buffalo robe as sells in London for fifty or sixty shillings. It was his opinion that Indians were vermin which should on every opportunity have a dose of lead administered to them. When asked if this was justifiable, ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘they are a set of bloodthirsty, treacherous skunks; and they must all die out, or be shot down, and it can’t matter much to them which it is. It comes to much the same in the end. They shot my brother, and my plan is to take a shot at them whenever I have a chance.’ All these German Americans spoke English as fluently as they did German. Their most prominent idea appeared to be hatred of all aristocracies. That of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland they regarded with their purest hatred, because it seemed to them the most developed and the most powerful. The best mannered people of the party were the Yankee and New York traders; some of these were buyers for large wholesale and retail houses, others on their own account. There were about a dozen of them on board. They were very careful about their dress, and their conversation was pleasing and intelligent. The majority of them were entirely free from the Yankee tone of voice. They were the very reverse of pushing, and they never guessed. In appearance and manners they would have passed amongst ourselves for gentlemen. We had, however, among the passengers one genuine Yankee of the received type. He had been a successful inventor of improvements in machinery, though medicine, not mechanics or engineering, was his business. He thought that anything by which he could make money was as much his business as his profession was. He was always talking, and ready to argue on any subject: if unacquainted with it, that made no difference—he still had a right to express his opinion. His favourite idea was that discussion led to knowledge, and that books came after knowledge, and that therefore they were not of much value. This dictum he fearlessly applied to everything—to history, to science, and to religion. Theoretically he was a strong Negrophilist. He believed that the patriarchs and prophets, that the Saviour of the world and His apostles were all Negroes. He thought that the amount of wealth a man had been able to accumulate was the true measure of a man, because all pursued wealth, and employed in the pursuit the whole of their power. If a man was idle or stupid, he employed what power was left him, after so much had been cancelled by his idleness or stupidity. And therefore—for this was his conclusion—if he could produce several blacks, which he was sure he could do, who had accumulated more wealth than anyone present, then they were better men than any of the present company. I say he was theoretically a Negrophilist, because, although he liked the Negro, he liked him best at a distance. In politics, he held that clever men, and men with ideas, were the bane of the country. They had already got their constitution and their laws. The people did not want a letter of either altered, or anything added to either. All officers, therefore, elected by the people, whether for the general or the local government, were in the position of servants with written instructions. No one would tolerate a domestic servant who, in the face of his instructions, thought for himself; nor ought the people ever to re-elect a public servant who acted in this way. Indeed he held that no man should ever be re-elected, but that all public offices should be made ‘to go as far as possible’ in bringing into notice deserving young men, and in helping them on a little, and in rewarding in a temporary way those who had exerted themselves on behalf of their party. He was always joking; his jokes consisting of grotesque impossibilities and laughable exaggerations. But his unconscious and unfailing conceit, and his assumptions of omniscience, were as ridiculous as his jokes.

On Sunday Divine Service was celebrated in the saloon. The service was that of the Established Church. The Germans absented themselves. The Americans were all present, and behaved very well, many of them making the responses audibly. The Bishop of Ontario read the prayers, and an English clergyman preached. Some of the Americans proposed to him that he should, as they expressed it, ‘hold another meeting’ in the evening; but it would not have been right to drive the Germans a second time on to the deck.

CHAPTER II.

NEW YORK—MENU AT FIFTH AVENUE HOTEL—HOW TRAVEL IN THE STATES MAY BE ARRANGED FOR A WINTER TOUR—THE QUEEN’S BOOK IN AMERICA—EXTERNAL APPEARANCE OF NEW YORK—IGNORANCE OF ENGLISH IMMIGRANTS—INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS—CHILDREN’S AID SOCIETY—NUMBER OF CHURCHES—BROAD VIEWS GENERAL—A SERVICE AT THE REV. H. W. BEECHER’S CHURCH—EPISCOPALIAN BROAD CHURCH CLUB—CHAPELS IN POOR DISTRICTS ANNEXED TO EPISCOPAL CHURCHES IN RICH ONES—AMERICAN CHURCHES WORKED AT HIGH PRESSURE—AN AMERICAN DIVINE’S OPINION OF A MINISTER’S DUTY.

During my first visit to New York I stayed at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which I had been told was the largest and best managed of the monster hotels of the city. I arrived just in time for dinner. On being shown into the dining-saloon, I found between two and three hundred people at table. I had lately been staying at Paris at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, where it was thought we were treated rather liberally in having seven plats at dinner, including two sweets, and one cream or water ice. The ice was served in infinitesimal morsels; and if you asked for a second morsel, it was represented by an additional franc in your bill. With this experience of a great European hotel fresh in my mind, a waiter in the dining saloon of the Fifth Avenue Hotel placed in my hand the bill of fare for the dinner then going on. Seeing almost an interminable printed list of comestibles, and not knowing how these things were managed in America, I supposed that this was the list of dishes the hotel undertook to prepare; and that, had I arrived some hours earlier, and then made my selection, what I might have ordered would have now been ready. The menu contained turtle soup, venison, turtle steaks, soft-shelled crabs, canvas-back ducks; in short, whatever fish, flesh, fowl, vegetable, and fruit were then in season. But the attendant informed me that the paper he had given me was the bill of fare for that day, and that everything mentioned in it was then actually ready; and that I might order whatever I pleased, and it would be immediately brought to me. I made my selection; and while he was bringing what I had ordered, I counted the number of dishes provided that day for our dinner, and found that the total amounted to seventy-five. Nothing was supplied in the scanty way in which everything was doled out at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre; but as a general rule more of everything was set before you than you could require: for instance, instead of setting before you a morsel of ice-cream, a whole mould was left with you till you ordered it to be taken away. The next morning I found fifty-two things mentioned on the bill of fare for breakfast. Luncheon, tea, and supper are also supplied to its guests by this establishment. On the ground-floor are placed the bar, the billiard-room (containing twelve tables), and a kind of after-hour Stock Exchange, in which operations are commenced at eight o’clock P. M. The charge for living in this palatial hotel was five dollars a day in greenbacks; that is, about sixteen shillings, at the then price of gold.

Menu of an American Hotel.

One frequently hears the severity of their winters urged as a reason for not travelling in the United States at that season of the year. My own experience of the unusually severe winter of ’67-68 would go some way towards proving that those who press this consideration do so under a misapprehension. It is possible that by a singular run of good luck I may have always been at a warm place when the weather was cold elsewhere, but it is literally true that during that winter I never once had occasion to put on an overcoat, excepting when I was in Canada at its breaking up. I left New York early in January; went through the South, where I gathered ripe oranges from the trees on which they were hanging; ascended the Mississippi; crossed the prairies and plains to the Rocky Mountains, at the foot of which I found the thermometer, at Denver, standing at 70°; recrossed the prairies to Chicago; and during the whole of this time, whether on foot, or in a railway car, or on or in a coach, did not on any occasion find the weather disagreeable on account of the cold, though I frequently found it in railway cars and in hotels very much warmer than was agreeable. By what I have just said I do not mean that I never fell in with weather that was thermometrically cold, for I walked over the Mississippi on the ice at St. Louis, but that it never felt disagreeably cold. It so happened that whenever the thermometer was low, the air was still, and the sun bright. During this winter it only rained twice, and never snowed but once, at the places at which I happened to be staying. It rained once at Washington, and once at New Orleans, and it was snowing on my return across the prairies to Chicago. On my outward journey over them they were entirely free from snow. Of course if I had remained during the whole of this time at any one place in the northern part of the Union, I should have seen some bad weather. My conclusion, however, is that the traveller may so arrange his tour even for the winter as to be put to very little annoyance by the cold or wet.

The Queen’s Book in America.

Everybody in New York had read the Queen’s book; in every society I found people talking about it; and I never heard it mentioned without expressions of interest and approval, always uttered without any qualifications, and with unmistakable heartiness. They said it made royalty appear to them in a new and more human light, in which they had never regarded it before. They spoke of her as the head of the Anglo-Saxon race, almost as if they had as much part in her as ourselves. I believe that her Majesty’s work has had a greater number of readers, and that a greater number of copies of it have been sold, in the United States than in the United Kingdom.

The exterior appearance of New York is at first disappointing. We are accustomed to find in every capital we visit large and stately buildings, which, as in the case of royal or imperial palaces, public offices, and the hotels of a territorial nobility, are the results of our own existing institutions; or, as in the case of cathedrals, churches, town-halls, and castles, are the result of a state of things belonging to the past history of Europe; and so when we walk through the streets of a city larger than most European capitals, and find none of the buildings we are in the habit of seeing everywhere else, we condemn it as architecturally poor. This feeling is increased in New York by the fact that there is nothing very striking in Broadway, its main street, except its length. The shops, or stores as they are called, are rendered externally quite ineffective by the narrowness of their frontage, and by the way in which they are converted into an advertising frame for names and announcements of various kinds. When you get inside the door you find as extensive and rich an assortment of goods as can be seen in the best shops of London or Paris: there is, however, little indication of this from the outside. But a better acquaintance with the city qualifies to a great extent this first feeling of disappointment. It is irrational to condemn a place for not having what it is impossible could ever have been there. New York cannot have imperial palaces, or mediæval cathedrals, not even great public offices; but in the part of the Fifth Avenue, and of the contiguous streets, which is occupied with the residences of private citizens, it is not surpassed by anything of the same kind in any city of the world. Certainly Belgravia can show nothing like it. There is no stucco, nor are the houses built, as is the case in our streets, in rows of monotonous uniformity, but in some places each separate house differs in design from its neighbours. Sometimes you may find three or four that are alike, but seldom more than half a dozen; and probably those that are alike in general design will vary in the ornamentation of the doors and windows; thus indicating that they are not run up to order, as in Paris, or on speculation, as in London, but that they were built by the people who inhabit them. This variety of façade, where nothing is mean, of course contributes very much to the effect of street architecture. The materials, too, used for building in New York are better and more varied than those used by ourselves. In the best quarters a chocolate-coloured stone is the most common. Brick, which is always painted, and dressed with stone, comes next in frequency; then a stone which in colour is compounded of a yellowish-white with a very perceptible trace of green. Some of the largest stores and hotels, and occasionally a private residence and church, are of white marble. Of this latter material is constructed the imposing office of the New York Herald—I suppose the most magnificent newspaper office in the world.

New York.

The great glory, however, of the city is its Park. It is on the central ridge of the island—on very uneven ground, with the native rock everywhere cropping up through the surface, and with many depressions, in which are pieces of water peopled with various kinds of waterfowl; it is between two and three miles in length, and is throughout kept in faultless order; it has already cost the city twenty millions of dollars, and is one of the more than imperial works of the American democracy.

An English merchant, carrying on business at New York, and who had for several years been the president of the St. George’s Society of that city, and in that capacity brought very much into contact with the English immigrants, assured me that he had often had to blush for the ignorance of his countrymen. ‘Of all the immigrants,’ he said, ‘who came to the United States the Englishman was the least educated, and so the most shiftless. Even the wild Irishman had generally been better taught, and knew more.’

Supplementary Schools.

Among my letters of introduction for New York was one to a gentleman who is personally and actively engaged in the working of some of the most useful institutions of the city. Under his guidance I visited and examined several of their industrial schools, in which the children of the lowest and most vicious part of the Irish and German population of the city are educated. Sixteen of these schools have already been established, and are now at work. They do not at all enter into competition with the common schools, but are a supplement to them, occupying very much the place of our ragged schools. They are partly supported by the city, and partly by voluntary contributions. This is far better than that the city should take upon itself the whole of the cost; because in that case everything would be done by paid agents, who, as experience proves, are seldom able to establish an influence over the classes for whose benefit these institutions are designed; while good and Christian people are generally to be found, who will, for love’s sake and for the work’s sake, go among the disorderly and depraved, and endeavour to awaken whatever dormant sparks of parental affection, of religious sentiment, and of the sense of responsibility may remain within them, and will thus induce them to send their children to school. And not only will these ministers of good words, illustrated and expounded by kindly acts, aid the regular teachers in bringing children into the school, but also in attaching them to the place where they were first made comfortable and happy. In all these schools I either found ladies actually present at the time of my visit, or heard that they were in the habit of being present almost daily. Their chief effort is to instil into the minds of the children a good moral and religious tone, and to bring them to feel that there are such things in human hearts as kindliness and regard for others, and that this kindliness and regard is being directed towards themselves. They also generally superintend the musical instruction, for which purpose each school is supplied with an harmonium. It is thought that music will both attract and humanise children accustomed at home to so much roughness and coarseness. They also teach the girls to make their own clothes; the materials for which, in the case of the poorest and most neglected, are given either at the cost of the school funds, or by some of the well-wishers of the school through these voluntary assistants. This, and meals provided two or three times a week for the most destitute, are used as allurements by which the most neglected children, which are precisely the cases the managers are most desirous of getting hold of, may be brought in.

None of the children found in these schools would ever attend the common schools—their rags and habits would alone render them inadmissible; and it is only by such means and exertions as I have just mentioned that they can be attracted to and fitted for the industrial schools. I was told that notwithstanding the success I witnessed, there was still a lower depth that could not be reached, in which the children remained untaught in the lessons of any school excepting that of vice.

In these matters, then, they have in the great commercial capital of the New World, where land is a drug, and where there are employment and food for everybody, just the same difficulties we have to struggle against in the capital of the old country, and they endeavour to meet them much in the same way as ourselves; though perhaps they may set about doing what they see ought to be done, with more system and energy than we have yet shown.

The same gentleman also took me over the establishments of the Children’s Aid Society. The object of this association is to collect from the streets the newsboys, and any others who may be growing up uncared for, and who have no prospect of being trained up to any employment or trade by which they may gain an honest livelihood, and by the inducement of comfortable lodgings, and some other advantages, to get them to submit to regular habits, and to a certain amount of instruction; and then, when they have become qualified for such situations, to give them an outfit, and find them homes in the farmhouses of the West. This institution was under my friend’s superintendence. It appeared to be a very valuable one, and to be effecting a great deal of good among a large class that could have no other chance of being rescued from degradation, and launched favourably into life. On each of my two visits to New York I saw a band of healthy and hopeful-looking youths it had trained and taught, and had just fitted out, on their way to the railroad which was to take them to their new Western homes.

An Old Principle Resuscitated.

I have mentioned these industrial schools and the Children’s Aid Society in connection with my first visit to New York, because I did not meet with institutions of this kind elsewhere. I shall say nothing about the common schools I saw here, because as I had letters to the superintendents of schools in all the chief cities I visited, and so had opportunities for inspecting these schools wherever I went; and as I intend to bring into one summary the conclusions I arrived at after an inspection of schools from New York to Denver on the plains at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, and from Denver back again to Boston, it will be better that I should only make separate mention of my visits to schools which appeared to possess some peculiarity of method or object.

‘We wish everybody to have a chance, and to enjoy life. We wish for nothing for ourselves which we should not be glad to see others have.’ I first heard this sentiment enounced in the above words by a gentleman whom I met in one of my visits to the Children’s Aid Society. I afterwards heard it expressed by other persons in widely distant parts of the Union. There is nothing new in the sentiment itself to those who are familiar with a book for which deep reverence is professed on both sides of the Atlantic; but I felt—perhaps I was wrong in feeling so—that there was something new in hearing it proclaimed as a principle of conduct, and in finding myself among people who in their system of public education, in many of their charities, and in other matters, distinctly acted upon it.

Few people can have visited the great and wealthy capital of the French empire without being struck with the paucity of churches it contains. Few can have visited New York, which is not even the capital of the State whose name it bears, without being struck with the opposite fact. The latter city abounds in churches, still I saw many additional ones in course of construction. Many of these churches have cost large sums of money, and are of good architectural designs. As a general rule, those who minister in them are very liberally maintained: I was astonished at hearing the amount of the annual collections in some of them.

The clergy are allowed much freedom of expression in America. A gentleman residing in New York, while conversing with me on this subject, made the following statement of what he supposed was the general practice:—‘The way in which we deal with the clergy here is to pay them well, and to encourage them to say exactly what they think. What we pay them for is not other people’s ideas and opinions—that we can find in books—but their own. We expect them to devote a reasonable portion of their time and all the mental powers they possess to theological study, and then to give us the result.’ This broad construction of the duty of a clergyman, as a religious teacher, coincides very much with what I was frequently told, that the broad way of thinking was becoming the common way of thinking in almost all the American churches. Mr. Henry Ward Beecher, though a Presbyterian, is very broad, and never has a seat empty in his church. Sunday after Sunday, three thousand people assemble to hear him preach. In American society religious questions are frequently discussed. No one feels any disposition to avoid them, because expression of opinion is perfectly free. An American lady once said to me across the table, and was heard by everyone present, that ‘every thinking American was of opinion that religion, if not in conformity with the knowledge and sentiments of the times, was a dead thing.’ In New York this expression of opinion appeared perfectly natural; but I suppose that if an English lady entertained ideas of this kind, she would not think it allowable for her to enunciate them in company.

Service at the Rev. H. W. Beecher’s Church.

The most celebrated preacher in America is Mr. Henry Ward Beecher. On the subjugation of the South he was the man selected by President Lincoln from all the great speakers of the United States to pronounce at Fort Sumter, where the war had commenced, an oration which would signalise its conclusion with an eloquence worthy of the occasion. The three thousand sittings his church contains, I was told, are let by auction for sums which on this side of the water would appear fabulous. He returns his income at 8,000l. a year. Of course I went to hear him, and through the assistance of one of his congregation obtained a seat.

The church is very much in the form of a theatre. The stage is occupied by Mr. Beecher himself. Over the stage, however, is a gallery for the organ and choir. There was not, on the occasion upon which I was present, a vacant place in the building. As one looked down from what corresponded with the gallery of a theatre, there appeared to be no aisles in the body of the church, because as soon as the occupants of the pews had taken their places, seats that had been fastened up against the outside of the pews were opened out and instantly filled. The service commenced with the Te Deum, chanted by a choir of ladies and gentlemen. A short prayer was then offered. This was followed by a short lesson from the book of Ecclesiastes, which was all that the service contained from the Holy Scriptures. Six or seven children were now baptised. The baptismal service consisted of several texts bearing more or less on the subject, which were chanted by the choir, Mr. Beecher afterwards sprinkling water upon each in the name of the Trinity. This was succeeded by a long prayer, which was rather a thanksgiving for domestic happiness than a prayer. A hymn was then sung, during the singing of which very few of the vast congregation rose from their seats. There was, of course, no kneeling during the prayers, or in any part of the service, which was concluded with a sermon of more than an hour’s length, taken from the few verses in Ecclesiastes that had been previously read. The sermon was an essay on ‘the art of making old age happy and beautiful.’ This was in connection with the administration of the sacrament of baptism. He spoke very eulogistically of a certain admiral, whose name I could not catch, now residing at Brooklyn, in the neighbourhood of Mr. Beecher’s church, and whom the preacher announced as the specimen old man. He inveighed strongly against all forms of dissipation, on the ground that ‘they take too much out of a man. They are,’ he said, ‘cheques drawn by youth on old age.’ He said ‘he had no objection to balls, provided they were held in the middle of the day and in the open air.’ He should like to see young people dancing on the green turf in summer. But crowded rooms and late hours were prejudicial to health.’ He thanked God that he had never used tobacco in any form. He said, ‘the use of it was a filthy, beastly habit, wasteful of health and of animal power.’ In speaking of excessive drinking, he said ‘that the American had not the excuse which the Englishman had, for the latter had so much water outside, that there was a reason for his never taking any inside.’ This was received by the congregation with great laughter, as were some other sallies contained in the sermon.

The Rev. H. W. Beecher.

According to our ideas, there was a great want of reverence in the service. People talked—some who were in my hearing, of dollars and investments—till the service commenced. One of the officers of the Church wore his hat till the congregation were more than half assembled. Mr. Beecher appeared to me to have but two tones, a very loud one and a quiet impressive one. The latter was very much the better of the two. His manuscript was placed on a desk on the stage. He could leave the desk with his manuscript on it whenever he pleased; and this he frequently did. One has no right to express an opinion of a preacher’s power after having heard only one sermon; all, therefore, that I will say of Mr. Beecher is what I heard said of him. I was told that his popularity never flagged, and that his originality had hitherto proved inexhaustible; for that during the many years he had been before the public, during which time everything he had said had been reported, he had never been known to repeat himself. I was also told that he had been a useful man in calming, as far as the great influence he possessed allowed, the storms both of religious controversy and of political animosity. It must be remembered that a clergyman of Mr. Beecher’s energy and talents has much more prominence and influence in America, where there is no governing class, than it would be possible for him to attain in England.

There is a club—perhaps we should call it a society or association—of Episcopalian Broad Churchmen, the members of which reside in the cities of New York and Philadelphia. I believe clergymen only are members.

Almost every Episcopal church in New York has a chapel attached to it, exclusively for the use of the poor. This has been done because it has been found there, just as is the case with us, that in the cities the poor will not use the same churches as the rich. We have in London, in a few cases, attempted to cure the same evil with the same remedy. The remedy, however, has not been fairly applied, for a better class of persons (the very thing that indisposes the ill-clad poor to be present) has been allowed to appropriate to themselves a large proportion of the sittings in these chapels.

I will mention here a conclusion to which I was brought by my observation of what was going on in the Episcopal Church in different parts of the Union. Among ministers and congregations there are, just as with us, some High Church, some Low Church, some Ritualistic, and some Broad Church. I think the proportion of those that are High Church is greater with them than with ourselves. The real and important difference between us on this head is, that in the American Church every minister and congregation belongs distinctly to one or other of these parties, and that every Church is worked at high pressure.

An American’s Opinion of a Minister’s Duty.

One of the leading divines of America whom I met at New York (he was not a minister of the Episcopal Church) remarked to me that the view taken in America of a minister’s duty was, that he was a teacher. He occupied towards the adults of the congregation precisely the same position that the schoolmaster held with respect to the children. What he had to teach was the history and theory of religion; and to show how, as a rule of life, it bore on the ever-varying circumstances of the day. If he could not teach the people these things he was of no use to them.

This ignores altogether that view of the service which makes it an expression of the devotion and of the religious feelings of the congregation itself.

CHAPTER III.

WHY AN UNREASONABLE FANCY WAS ACTED ON—THE HISTORY OF THE CAUSE OF AMERICAN PROGRESSIVENESS—WHAT PASSES IN AMERICA IMPORTANT TO US—THE NORTHERN STATES SOWN BROADCAST WITH HOUSES.

I had had good times at New York, and I was rather eagerly looking forward to good times at Washington, and so was somewhat disinclined to tarry on the way thither. Still I thought it would be unwise to lose an opportunity which offered itself for seeing something of the second city of the Union, which lay upon my route. I therefore stopped at the place, and having secured comfortable quarters at the best hotel (in America there is a wider difference between the best and second-rate hotels than there is elsewhere), I sallied forth to get some idea of the external appearance of the town. There are occasions, it is said, when imagination overpowers our judgment, and makes fools of us all. I now became, I suppose, an illustration of this process. As I walked along the streets they appeared to me distressingly straight. Their nomenclature, too, was painfully dull and formal. This is a place, I began to think, where men and women profess a form of virtue too exalted for ordinary mortals. Such a city as this appears to be, must be inhabited by people who are not so human as to err, nor so divine as to forgive. If I had not been alone, it would probably have been impossible for so groundless a fancy to have taken possession of my mind. Still I was rational enough, when I had finished my breakfast the next morning, to think of delivering some of my letters of introduction. It seemed best to begin with one addressed to a gentleman whose official position need not now be mentioned. On finding the house I was in search of, I sent in my letter. The gentleman was not himself at home, but his wife opened the letter, and sent out to say that she would see me. I have not the slightest idea that she had any thought of being rude or discourteous. If so, I should not say anything about what passed; for then it would have been the only instance of discourtesy I met with in my travels through the United States, and a single instance of discourtesy would be obliterated by the recollection of helpfulness and kindness everywhere else. It was, however, an instance of precisely what my fancy had been suggesting of the kind of virtue which would be the natural growth of the place. ‘Sir,’ said the lady, without asking me to be seated, or taking a seat herself, and in a tone and with a manner which proclaimed that she belonged to the order of beings who cannot err, and who regard the disposition to forgive as one of the weaknesses of ordinary mortals: ‘Sir, I will not attempt to conceal from you that our feelings are completely changed towards Englishmen. Formerly we used to think that England was always on the side of right. But since we found that, during the late war, she sided with the South, our opinion of England has been reversed; and the reversal of our feelings has accompanied the reversal of our opinion.’

How a Fanciful Idea was Confirmed.

‘Madam,’ I replied, ‘it is true that there were many in England who felt towards the South, just as the schoolboy feels, while he reads Homer’s “Iliad,” about Hector, when he finds him battling manfully against destiny and a host of heroes. His sympathies, if he has any generosity in his character, are naturally enlisted on behalf of the brave man who is acquitting himself so well, and who must in the end he overwhelmed.’

With these two little speeches the brief interview ended. For the moment my fancies seemed hard and established facts. What could I gain by remaining longer in such a place?—and so I left it by the first train.

People look upon the progressiveness and enterprise of the Americans as if it were something sui generis. This, however, is a mistake; the difference is only one of degree, and not of kind. The character of the American, just like every other product, whether in external nature or in man, is the result of a chain of precedent events. In his case the links of this chain can be traced back to dates and events long anterior to the dawn of history, or even to the twilight of tradition, but which, thanks to modern science, are not altogether irrecoverable. Philology reveals to us that race of mankind to which the American belongs, seated at a very remote date somewhere in Central Asia. As there is no ground for supposing that it came from the South, which was occupied by another and very different branch of the human family, or from the West or the North, for reasons with which the philologist and ethnologist will be familiar, we must conclude that if it had not sprung from the soil, it must have come from a more distant east. If then the Aryans of Central Asia had been the product of a migration, of course only those had come who had had the enterprise and the hardihood to go in quest of a new home. This then was the spirit which presided over the race at its birth, and launched it upon its long career. Again and again—we know not how often, for the records of history had not yet begun—the same process must have been repeated. Of this hardy and enterprising race, the most hardy and enterprising again renewed their westward movement. All the while the characteristics of the advancing race were being confirmed and strengthened; the infirm and feeble in body or purpose were ever being left behind, and the primeval and now hereditary impulse to move on at all risks was becoming in those who from time to time sought new homes an ever-strengthening instinct. At last—and this is when ordinary history first takes cognisance of them—we find them settled on the southern and northern shores of the Baltic.

The Cause of American Progressiveness.

After a time the day arrives for another movement, for another winnowing and sifting, far more searching than any of the previous ones. Greater hardihood and enterprise are needed than were ever called for in any of their past movements. The sea has now to be crossed—a new form of danger to be confronted. Those who venture in their open and half-open boats on this great enterprise, to establish a new home for themselves on the other side of the storm-swept waste of waters, must be men who know no fear, and in whom the instinct of moving onward is irrepressible. The result of this supreme effort is the great English nation—the product of all that is best in Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Danes, and Northmen. Such was the long process by which the men were formed who fought at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt; at Blenheim, and Ramilies, and Malplaquet; at Trafalgar, and at Waterloo; on the Ganges, the Nile, and the St. Lawrence; who produced a Bacon, a Shakespeare, and a Newton; who first tried men by their peers, and first governed themselves by their representatives; who broke the papal yoke, and established freedom of religion, of speech, of the press, and of commerce. In their little island they proved themselves the grandest race the world had seen.

But the great drama was not yet complete. The original impulse had ever been gaining strength, and now appeared to culminate. But it was not so. One more effort had to be made. In grandeur and hardihood it transcended all that had yet been achieved. Not a narrow sea, but the broad Atlantic had to be crossed; not a small island, but a new world had to be occupied. The English race must itself be sifted, and none but those who have nerve as firm as that of the Pilgrim Fathers, and the most active instinct of progression, can take part in this mighty enterprise. And so it comes to pass that America is peopled with that which is most enterprising and progressive in that race in which these qualities had been most highly developed. In these respects she receives the cream of the cream, the purest selection of that which was most select.

The long series is now completed. The circuit of the world has been made. The hardy, the inventive, the go-ahead American looks out on the Pacific and towards that side of the old continent from which his first ancestors started on the long career which in his person is now consummated.

The like of this has not been done by any other race of men, or in any other part of the world. In human history it is something quite unique. It is the main stream in the history of man. All other series of events—as, for instance, that which resulted in the culture of mind in Greece, and that which resulted in the empire of Rome—only appear to have purpose and value when viewed in connection with it, or rather as subsidiary to it. Their true place in history is that of affluents to this main stream. And even Christianity itself, which so loudly proclaims its indifference to all national or ethnological distinctions, and its equal regard for every branch of the human family, while it has been rejected by the race to which it was first revealed, has become to the more advanced parts of the Teutonic race, in a greater degree than to any other people, their educator and their strength.

A moment’s comparison of the tone in which we write and speak about America with the tone in which we write and speak about other countries, and of the feelings with which we regard what is passing there with the feelings with which we regard what is passing elsewhere, will show that we look upon American events as fraught with a greater amount of good and of evil to ourselves, than what is happening in all the world besides. Much, for instance, has of late been said and written about what is called the resurrection of Italy, but who expects from that resurrection anything that will affect either the hopes or the fears of mankind? Everybody, however, feels that the future of humanity will be greatly influenced by, and in no small degree depend upon, what is going on in America. Or if we turn to that country which has hitherto been more influential than any other in disturbing, or, which it claims as its right, of directing the course of events on the Continent of Europe, we do not find any causes now in operation which we can suppose likely to result in improving the material circumstances of the French petty proprietors, that is, of the bulk of the French nation, or in giving them more freedom and intellectual energy than they at present possess. The form and character of their government, their church, the division of property that obtains among them, the accepted arrangements and spirit of society, all tend to immobility. In America everyone understands that the stream is all the other way. Mental activity is universal. Public opinion is the opinion of those who in the open arena of public discussion are able to influence the greatest number; and public opinion sweeps away every obstruction.

The Northern States sown with Houses.

The aspect of the country between Philadelphia and Baltimore took me very much by surprise, as I suppose it would anyone whose previous travels had been confined to Europe. I had imagined that old and densely peopled countries, like England and France, must necessarily present to the eye of the traveller an appearance of their being more closely inhabited than a new country like America. But the very reverse of this is the case, and most strikingly so. All the way from Philadelphia to Baltimore I found the country sown with houses. This arises from the fact that every 100 or 150 acres belong to a separate proprietor (large estates being unknown) who has his house upon his small farm, which he cultivates with his own hands and the assistance of his family. As far as the eye can range over the country you see these white farmhouses. And you may now see them all the way from New York to Omaha on the Missouri, 500 miles beyond Chicago, and 1,500 from New York. The traveller in the United States generally derives his idea of the wealth of the people from what he sees in the towns. The rapidity of their growth, the amount of business done in them, the dimensions of their shops, the goodly appearance of the houses of their merchants, justify him in supposing that the Americans are a very wealthy people. But all this wealth of the towns is in fact only a measure of the wealth of the country. The towns become wealthy and flourishing in proportion to the wealth of the country. These tens of myriads, then, of farmhouses, each of which is evidently the home of a well-to-do family, and of which one is never out of sight in the settled districts of the North, are the truest and most interesting indications of the nature and of the amount of the riches of the United States.

CHAPTER IV.

THE LOCOMOTIVE IN THE STREETS—IN BALTIMORE PUBLIC OPINION FIRST BECOMES SOUTHERN—GROWTH AND PROSPECTS OF BALTIMORE—ON TRADING POLITICIANS AND ILL WILL TO ENGLAND—WHY AN AMERICAN TUTOR THOUGHT NECESSARY FOR AN ENGLISHMAN—REPUDIATION—THE MASSES AND MIDDLE CLASSES IN FAVOUR OF IT—ARGUMENTS IN FAVOUR OF IT—AN ARGUMENT USED 2,000 MILES FROM WALL STREET—WHY REPUBLICANS BOUND TO REPUDIATE—AMERICANS ADDICTED TO ABSTRACT REASONING—INSTANCES.

We very often find a difficulty in getting our horses to take quietly the sound of a railway train in motion. It was at Baltimore that I first saw the locomotive dragging a train along the main street of a city. All the precaution that was taken was merely to ring a bell on the top of the engine to warn foot-passengers and drivers of carriages. Many horses were passed, and many crossed the moving train, but I did not observe that in any instance they took the least notice of it. I afterwards saw the same arrangement at Chicago, at New York, and at many other places, and did not anywhere hear that accidents resulted from it.

A Marylander’s Opinion of Government.

Baltimore was the first place in which I found the general sentiment strongly Southern. Balls and bazaars were being got up, while I was there, for the openly avowed purpose of collecting funds to support those families in the South which had been reduced to poverty by the late war. This made me feel as if I were among another people; for in the North I had heard the South spoken of very vindictively, as ‘that they needed more suffering to take their pride out of them;’ and ‘that nothing could be done with the South till the present proprietors had all been swept away, and Northern men substituted for them.’ I am not aware, however, that I ever heard any remarks of this kind made by persons whom we should describe as of the upper class.

There has been a large emigration to Baltimore, from the States of the late Southern Confederacy, of people who would not live under negro domination as long as they had the means of living elsewhere. Many Northern men also had lately settled there, in expectation that the business of the place would rapidly increase. As it has a fine harbour, and the development of the railway system is now connecting it with the whole of the interior, there appears to be no reason why it should not, at no very distant day, become a dangerous rival of Philadelphia and even of New York. I understood that as many as 4,000 houses were built here in the last twelve months.

‘Sir,’ said a Maryland planter to me, ‘many Americans, of whom I am one, think that the English government is the best in the world. No system of government which, like ours, can breed nothing better than trading politicians, can be either generous or just; and must sooner or later fall, overwhelmed by the hatred of some and the contempt of other sections of the community.’ The same gentleman was of opinion that the animosity felt towards England after the revolutionary war had now almost died out among native-born Americans; for instance, there is, he said, not one Fenian lodge in the whole of New England. Whatever ill-will there may be existing at present originates in the Irish, and radiates from them, if in any instances it has spread beyond them. An Englishman who had been long settled in America, and who took part in the conversation, thought differently. He was of opinion, that at all events a strong prejudice existed in the minds of native-born Americans against the English.

While at dinner at my hotel, a gentleman who was seated opposite to me—he was one of the few stout men, I believe the only one, I saw in America—accosted me with the remark ‘that he could not believe what he understood me to say, that I had not yet been a month in the country, because’—for this was his reason—‘I spoke the language so well. Or if I am to believe it,’ he went on, ‘I suppose you had an American tutor to teach you our language.’ I assured him that he had understood me rightly, and that I had never had the advantage of the instruction he considered necessary, nor was there such a great difference between the language of America and that of England as to make Englishmen feel the need of American tutors. ‘That, sir,’ he replied, ‘is by no means in accordance with my experience. I have myself conversed with Englishmen, and found their language very unlike our own. They seldom know where to use and where not to use the initial H. And their language is full of ungrammatical and vulgar expressions, from which ours is entirely free.’

The Language of America.

This gentleman’s mistake can be easily explained; and the explanation will show that it is one into which an American may very possibly fall. It is a remarkable fact that the English spoken in America is not only very pure, but also is spoken with equal purity by all classes. This in some measure, of course, results from the success of their educational efforts, and from the fact which arises out of it that they are, almost to a man, a nation of readers. But not only is it the same language without vulgarisms, in the mouths of all classes, but it is the same language without any dialectical differences over the whole continent. The language in every man’s mouth is that of literature and of society; spoken at San Francisco just as it is spoken at New York, and on the Gulf of Mexico just as on the great lakes. It is even the language of the negroes in the towns. There is nothing resembling this in Europe, where every county, as in England, or every province and canton, has a different dialect. Of this the philological observer I was dining with was ignorant. He only knew that all Americans spoke uniformly one dialect. He naturally therefore supposed that all Englishmen must do the same; and as his acquaintance with Englishmen was confined to poor immigrants, he imagined that their dialect was the language of all Englishmen.

Often, in parts of the country most remote from each other, in wooden shanties and the poorest huts, I had this interesting fact of the purity and identity of the language of the Americans forced on my attention. And at such times I thought, not without some feelings of shame and sorrow, of the wretched vocabulary, consisting of not more than three or four hundred words, and those often ungrammatically used, and always more or less mispronounced, of our honest and hard-working peasantry. As language is the vehicle of ideas, these poor fellows have not been fairly used, and are being deprived of a large portion of the rich intellectual patrimony of Englishmen.

Will the Debt be Paid?

Before I went to America, I felt as certain as one can feel about any future event, that the Americans would pay every cent of their debt. I think still they possibly may. For their own sakes and for the honour of the race I hope they will. But I am not now so positive on this point as I was. Wherever it was allowable in conversation, I introduced the subject of the debt. At first, to my surprise (but after a time I got so accustomed to the expression of the sentiment that I should have been surprised had I heard anything to the contrary), I never met a single person in railway cars, or in hotels, who was in favour of complete payment. Many were in favour of complete repudiation; but far the greater number advocated the plan of immediate payment, by an issue to the public creditors of, as I heard it sometimes put, cartloads of greenbacks. This, of course, would not be very far from repudiation pure and simple: though nominally a payment in full, it would really be only the payment of a few shillings in the pound, as so large an issue would enormously depreciate the value of the greenbacks. This is the plan of Mr. Pendleton of Ohio, who is now the democratic candidate for the next presidency. It must therefore be approved generally by his supporters. The people, at a knowledge of whose sentiments I arrived in the way I have just mentioned, belonged chiefly, I suppose, to the class of storekeepers and travelling traders; though I have sometimes heard persons whose position I knew was better announce the same opinions. On the other hand, however, I never met with any flourishing and respectable merchant, and I may almost say with anyone whom we should describe as belonging to the upper class of society, who admitted for a moment the possibility of repudiation in any form. It seems, then, that in forecasting the probabilities of this question, the class that has numbers on its side must be regarded as pitted against the class that has on its side cultivation, intelligence, and wealth. But even from these few, some, as was once observed to me, ought probably to be discounted; because it is possible that some may be making a cheap profession of honesty, which they know will not, and have no wish ever should, be acted on. And the more certain they may feel of ultimate repudiation, the louder they may declare themselves in favour of payment. The South, whenever it shall have resumed its place in the councils of the Union, will, as most people seem to think, be in favour of the use of the sponge; for how can people be expected to tax themselves to pay for what was the instrument of their humiliation, conquest, and ruin? The question, then, between payment and repudiation, complete or partial, cannot now be decided so clearly and peremptorily against the latter as one could wish.

Of course the argument most commonly used against payment is, that it necessitates such a burden of taxation as is no longer tolerable, that it is impoverishing the whole community, destroying both the home and the foreign trade, and pressing with peculiar and insupportable weight on the humbler classes.

Again, it is urged by many that the amount of their taxation is the one undoubted cause, both of the cost and of the corruption of their government. If they go back to their old amount of taxation, there will be no work for, and, what will be more to the purpose, no funds to maintain, these armies of official bloodsuckers.

I found, too, that there was floating before the minds of some an entrancing vision of what would be the wealth of the country if production were cheapened and trade revived, and if everybody had twice as much money to spend as at present.

Another argument I frequently heard, was made to rest on an attempt to separate in idea the bondholders and public creditors of all kinds from the people; and while it spoke of them as an extremely wealthy class, living in luxury, and doing nothing (a very unrepublican position for anyone to occupy), it suggested the idea that their wealth was derived from the burdens, that is to say, the sufferings, of the masses of the people, who, all the while, were struggling very hard for a bare subsistence. The object of this comparison is to make the bondholder an object of odium, and the tax-payers of the humbler classes objects of commiseration, in the hope that by so doing a rankling sense of injustice might be implanted in the breast of the latter.

Arguments for Repudiation.

At an hotel in a town on the very frontiers of civilisation, two thousand miles away from Wall Street, I heard the question of ‘to pay or not to pay’ debated, and the conclusion in favour of the latter alternative was clinched by the proof of the impossibility of paying. The speaker was an ex-judge, and was a man who spoke and reasoned well,—I mean in such a way as to carry his hearers along with him. His argument on this point was very concise. ‘Just before the war,’ his words were, ‘the Government of the United States published a return, collected by its own officers, of the value of all the property of the people of the United States. The correctness of this return is unquestioned. We know from it both the saleable value of the property of the people and the annual income of that property. The property of the whole people is for purposes of taxation a single estate, but the debt we have incurred, plus the capital represented by our ordinary taxation, is greater in amount than the value of the whole of the property of the people of the United States; and the interest to be paid on the debt, plus the taxation required for other purposes, general and local, is greater than the income of the property of the whole people. And as no private estate can carry a debt greater in amount than the value of the estate, so no country can bear burdens that represent a property, if they were capitalised, greater than the property of the country, and an annual amount of taxation greater than the income of that property. I will not say, then, that the debt must be repudiated, for that would imply that we had some option in the matter; I will only say that it is impossible that it should be paid, either capital or interest. The estate can’t do it. It is an impossibility.’ Both the statements of this argument and the inference drawn from them appeared to the audience unquestionable. There was a murmur of assent, and conviction was expressed on every face.

I will report the firing off of one more shot against the payment of the debt which I was so fortunate as to witness. It is worth mentioning, both for the sake of the entourage and because it involves a style of argument I found very frequently used, and with convincing effect, among the people of the United States.

The Governor of ——, one of the largest States in the Union, had been so good as to invite me to call upon him, that I might be introduced to some friend of his who would be with him on the following day. On being shown into the reception-room, I found the Governor seated in a kind of state, with his back to the fire and his feet on the table. On the opposite side were seated in a row eight or ten persons. They appeared to be a deputation from some town or association, who were then having an interview with the Governor. When the interruption caused by my entrance was over, a tall grey-headed man who had been speaking as I entered resumed his argument. He had rather the look of a well-to-do farmer, not of our stolid type, but of the keen American type. He was quick and incisive in his style of speaking, and dealt much with interrogatories, as is common with persons who have been mastered by an idea, and cannot but think that it must appear to others just in the light in which it appears to themselves. He proceeded:—‘What I want to know is, whether this is not a republic?’ He looked round, and was satisfied with the amount of apparent assent. ‘The next thing I would ask is, what is the meaning of a republic?’ No one was prepared with an answer, and so he proposed one himself. ‘A monarchy is a government where everything is contrived for the advantage of an individual. An aristocracy is a government where everything is contrived for the advantage of a few. But a republic is a government in which whatever is for the advantage of the greater number either is or ought to be law. And now I ask another question: would it not be for the advantage of the greater part of the citizens of this State, and for the greater part of the citizens of the United States, that we should have no debt?’ This was an unassailable position; and so he at once proceeded to the conclusion. ‘Well then, I say, that if this is a republic there ought to be a law passed to free us from this debt. If we are not repudiators we are not republicans.’ I am unable to report any other arguments that were urged by the deputation, for at this point the Governor conducted me into another room.

The method of reasoning contained in the gaunt old gentleman’s argument against the payment of debts by republicans is, as I observed, very frequently used and very well received in the United States. It is worth noticing, because it is a method that is seldom used and never accepted on this side the water. It proceeds by assuming the truth of some abstract propositions, of which neither truth nor falsehood can properly be predicated, but which a half-instructed audience is always ready to accept, and then goes on to apply them to some question on which they appear to have a bearing, and which happens to be interesting at the moment. For instance, I was speaking on the subject of negro suffrage with one of the leading supporters of that concession in the South. An Englishman would probably have confined himself to the consideration of the fitness of the African for so important a part in the government of the country. My American friend contented himself with a kind of numerical formula. ‘Suppose,’ he said, ‘the grown-up male population of the country is represented by the number 100. By excluding the negroes from the franchise, you reduce the voters to about one-half, that is 50. But, in a constituency of 50, a majority of 26 will rule. That is to say, 26 will rule 100. That is bad, but it is not all the evil of the restriction. In small bodies it is generally found that one resolute mind takes the lead. The result therefore would be that one would rule the 100. All this would be the consequence of departing from the simple republican rule of giving the vote equally to all.’ The gentleman had this formularised argument in favour of the admission of the African to equal political power with the white race drawn out on a paper, which he took from his pocket-book and showed me—I quite believe, with the idea that I should find it unanswerable. It was all in vain that I pointed out to him that his argument was so abstract that it omitted all consideration of every one of the actual conditions of the question. He himself was thoroughly persuaded of its conclusiveness.

Americans addicted to Abstract Reasoning.

Another argument of just the same kind, but which aimed at the opposite conclusion, was frequently urged upon me. ‘Have you read,’ I was asked, ‘Bishop ——’s book?’ I forget the name of the ingenious prelate. ‘He has demonstrated that the negro is not a man. No human being was saved from the Flood except Noah’s family, and it is quite impossible that he could have had a negro son. The negro must therefore at that time have been regarded as a brute beast. And as Noah was acting under Divine guidance, he could not have been wrong in his estimate of the negro. And the negro cannot be any better now than he was then, for a brute beast can never become a man. We therefore are justified in looking upon him just as Noah looked upon him, and in supposing that he is of the gorilla race, only a little improved.’

I do not mean that a well-educated American would be at all more disposed to accept this kind of argument than a well-educated Englishman, but that it goes down with multitudes of Americans who have from their youth up had very little time for acquiring any knowledge but that of their business, yet feel themselves called on by the circumstances of American life to form and express opinions on almost every subject; and this is a call to which few are slow in responding.

CHAPTER V.

WASHINGTON—STYLE OF SPEAKING IN CONGRESS—CONGRESS NO NURSERY FOR STATESMEN—SOCIETY IN WASHINGTON—EPISCOPAL CHURCH IN WASHINGTON—SOME OPINIONS OF AN AMERICAN BISHOP—COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTURE—USE OF THE DEPARTMENT—ITS MUSEUM GIVES AN IDEA OF THE VASTNESS OF THE COUNTRY—ITS NATURAL ADVANTAGES—WHAT VARIETY OF PRODUCTIONS HAS DONE FOR ENGLAND WILL BE REPEATED IN AMERICA—SPECIAL EXCELLENCE OF CALIFORNIAN PRODUCTIONS—THE CALIFORNIAN HIMSELF—CALIFORNIA COMPARED WITH ITALY—WHY COLOURED WAITERS PREFERABLE TO WHITE—NEGRO FUNERAL WITH MASONIC HONOURS—AMERICAN BIRDS’ NESTS—BILL FOR MAKING EDUCATION COMPULSORY—COLOURED SCHOOLS—COMPARATIVE INTELLIGENCE OF THE NEGRO—VULGAR ERRORS ABOUT AMERICANS—NIGHT ATTENDANTS AT HOTEL READ ‘OLIVER TWIST’—CAPITOL—TREASURY—PATENT OFFICE—WHAT OUR DIPLOMACY IN AMERICA SHOULD BE—USE OF ICED WATER.

While at Washington I was frequently present at the debates in both Houses. I was not much impressed by the style of speaking either in the Senate or in the Chamber of Representatives. I heard much good common sense, and many of the attacks and defences which are necessary in party warfare, but I heard no eloquence, and nothing even that on this side we should call good speaking. Where eloquence was attempted, it seemed to me to result in declamation. I went away with the idea that both senators and representatives spoke, not like persons who were in the habit of addressing cultivated audiences, but whose style had been formed by the practice of canvassing-speeches and mob-oratory.

Congress no Nursery for Statesmen.

The most striking difference between our parliamentary system and the American Congress is, that ours is as perfect a school as is conceivable for statesmanship, while theirs can never be anything of the kind, except accidentally and in a very slight degree. With us a man who is destined for public life enters Parliament while still young. If there is anything in him, he is generally able to retain his seat. Thus he is all his life through learning the routine of administrative practice and the science of statesmanship. All along every word he utters is set down in black and white, to stand in evidence for or against him, and to be weighed by the House and by the public. And it is the opinion of the House and public, thus formed, that assigns him his place in the hierarchy of party. If he is capable of becoming a statesman, with time and training he becomes one. If the House and the country know that he has shown himself one of the ablest men of his party, high office is his right. He has to thank no one for it but himself. If he has proved himself the ablest man of his party, the first place is his. He has established his claim to it in the face of the world. Nothing of this kind goes on in the American Congress. It may be said to have no personal continuity. A large proportion of Congress—and this happens every fourth year—are new men, thrown up to the surface by the action of local political causes in their respective States; and most of these new men will themselves be superseded by other new men in the ensuing Congress. The idea of forming statesmen does not at all enter into the aim of the American Congress; it hardly seems to regard itself as standing in need of statesmanship, wherever and however acquired. It is rather a machine for ascertaining and carrying out the opinions of the people. A successful local politician, be he a grocer or a shoemaker, a rail-splitter or a tailor, will find his way into the Senate.

The society of Washington, while Congress is sitting, is remarkable for its great variety. There are the heads of the civil and military departments with their subordinates; and the senators and representatives from all parts of the Union, from California, the great West, the highly educated States of New England, and from the commercial and manufacturing States of New York and Pennsylvania. At present we have only to regret the absence of the gentlemen of the South. Many of these persons bring with them their families. The society thus formed is not so vast as that anyone should be lost in it; nor is there much tendency to break up into sets. The influence of the White House, which acts as a centre, and the practice of general receptions, which is universal among official people and persons of distinction, prevent isolation. The variety just mentioned in the component parts of the society of Washington is very perceptible, and contributes largely to its interest and picturesqueness. The only difference I observed between the manners of these republicans and our own, was that they were easier and less constrained than we are; for no one is haunted with the idea of maintaining or of establishing a position, because no one supposes himself better than anybody else; they appeared, too, to possess, in a greater degree than is common among us, that great requisite of good breeding, the double facility of being pleased and of pleasing. I would only add that there seem to be few dull people in American society. There is with them more general animation and enjouement of life than with us.

Episcopal Church at Washington.

On attending morning service at the Church of the Epiphany at Washington, I found on the seat a printed paper containing a letter from the congregation to the minister, announcing that they begged that for the future he would consent to receive an increase to his salary, raising it to £800 a year; and one from the minister to the congregation, thanking them for their liberality. In addition to this salary they had presented him with a furnished house.

Washington, with a population of 120,000, has in the city eight Episcopal churches, and four in the suburb of George Town. There were when I was there two additional congregations in process of formation. At that time they were meeting in an upper room, but it was expected that they would soon be strong enough to build churches for themselves, and to become fully organised. An effort is being made to obtain a bishop for the district of Columbia, and, if possible, to get the consent of the bishops to his being made an archbishop and metropolitan of the American Church.

At the service I attended, there was not a seat vacant in the Church of the Epiphany; but they were all filled with well-dressed persons. In the afternoon of the same Sunday I went to the church of St. John’s, to be present at a Bible class held by the Adjutant-General of the United States army, a man whom any church might be thankful to have among its members, and to hear the catechising conducted by the rector. The children catechised were those of the upper class, for here also I found no ill-dressed people among the congregation. In the evening I went to Trinity Church, where I was told I should see a congregation of the humbler classes. I heard a clergyman conduct the service and preach, who I thought possessed just the qualities which would adapt him for obtaining an influence over those classes, but I saw very few of them in the church.

As I am not aware that any bishop of the American Episcopal Church was at Washington while I was there, I will take this opportunity for offering to the consideration of English Churchmen some remarks that were made to me elsewhere by an American bishop. I run the risk of doing this without permission, because I believe that here at home we are far too ignorant of, not to say indifferent about, what is passing in the minds and hearts too of our American brother-churchmen. He thought that the Episcopal Church in America was the natural, or at all events now the chief, bond of union between the old country and the United States. With very few exceptions, and they are exceptions that are not worth considering, the Episcopalians cherish the recollections of the old country most fondly; whereas it is notorious that the American churches which are connected with English dissent are more or less actuated by feelings, if not of animosity, yet certainly of coldness towards the old country.

Some Remarks of an American Bishop.

The Episcopal Church is a great power in the United States, and is more respected, and more influential in forming and guiding public opinion than even the government and legislature. Its members comprise the great bulk of the most refined and educated class in the country. Those who join us from that class come to us because they regard Romanism as a religion not for men, but only for women and children, while they look upon the other churches as having little devotion and less stability.

The Episcopal Church was opposed to the late war, and though pressure was put upon it, it would not give in to the fierce mania of the moment. This was the case in both sections.

The clergy of the different churches, but more particularly of the Episcopal Church, are, in the existing state of things on this continent, the natural and only aristocracy. The lawyers come next. The politicians are nowhere. The American people have had plenty of time and opportunities enough for weighing the latter, and have found them wanting in everything for which man respects his fellow-man: all the while their respect for the clergy of the Episcopal Church has constantly been becoming deeper.

The five Yankee States, with the exception of Connecticut, which is the most Episcopal State in the Union, are rapidly becoming Unitarian and Universalist. This in some degree accounts for the equivocal character of their acuteness, and for their singular want of magnanimity.

When he was in England, he was struck with the fact that the members of the Government took no notice of the American bishops. In this they showed their ignorance of the public mind in America. They also showed their disregard of the advance of the church to which they profess to belong. He did not suppose they neglected them because they were afraid of giving offence to the other religions communities of America, but simply because they were ignorant about America, and careless about their own church.

The Americans, being a practical people, have established, in connection with the general government at Washington, a department of agriculture, presided over by a commissioner. One of the objects of this department is to form a perfect museum of the agriculture of the United States. This is the act of a practical people, because as America is a new country, in the process of settlement, there must always be immigrants starting, some for one locality and some for another, who are in need of information as to what kinds or varieties of grain, vegetables, and fruit would be most suitable for the soil and climate of their proposed new home; and as to the best methods of cultivation for each crop; and what will be the difficulties they will have to contend with, and what have been ascertained to be the best remedies for these evils. It is possible that each year the value of the information distributed throughout the Union by this department may be many times greater than the cost of the department. If so, the cost is a small price to pay for a very great advantage.

My reason, however, for mentioning this museum of agriculture, is that it contributes very much towards making distinct in one’s mind the idea of the vast extent of the territory of the United States, and its great range of climate. This it does by ocular demonstration. Here are collected into one view specimens of the agricultural and horticultural produce of every State in the Union, from Maine to Florida, and from Massachusetts to California. These specimens range through all the products of the temperate regions of the earth, and descend far down into the list of the products of tropical climes. All the cereals we grow in this country, Indian corn in many varieties, the grape, every description of European fruit—in some cases, as in that of the apple, greatly improved by its transference to America—tobacco, rice, the sweet potato, the sugar-cane, the orange, the banana, ending with the cocoa-nut of the South of Florida.

Natural Advantages of the United States.

Here is a region larger than the whole of Europe, which if it were transferred to the part of the globe which Europe occupies, only retaining its latitude, would reach down to the Sahara of Africa, covering the whole of the Mediterranean. This vast territory contains an inland navigation which is the grandest in the world, and has in no way taxed the labour of man. From its extremest point at the north, at the head of the navigable stream of the Missouri, to its southern point at New Orleans, there is an open course of three thousand miles without a single break, a distance as great as the space which separates London from Timbuctoo, or from Bokhara. And this main artery of communication, the value of which is enhanced a thousand fold by the fact that it runs from north to south, enabling the produce of so many climes to be exchanged, instead of running along the same line of latitude, where there would be little or nothing to exchange, is supplemented on the right and left by 23,000 miles more of the natural navigation of its great affluents. And the vast valley which this system of rivers opens to traffic and travel is so extensive and fertile that it could support the whole population of Europe, and probably will support some day as large a population in far greater material well-being, and with far more highly cultivated intelligence.

If everything throughout this vast territory had been arranged by the most intelligent of mankind, with a view solely to the convenience of its inhabitants, we cannot imagine how it could have been made to contribute to those ends in a higher degree than it does at present. Not only is it capable of producing to a practically unlimited extent every plant that man cultivates, but it is also inexhaustibly rich in the precious and the useful metals, and in mineral fuel. The configuration too of the continent is such as to aid man in many ways in subduing and utilising the soil, for on each side of the grand central valley rises a long range of mountains, the one descending to the Pacific, the other to the Atlantic, which give birth to multitudes of rivers, which connect these vast districts with the two oceans, and supply harbours for carrying on intercourse with all the world.

A Consequence of Variety of Productions.

One of the causes that has most contributed to the wealth and commercial aptitude of the inhabitants of the old country is, that the productions of no two districts in it are precisely similar. The districts, for instance, that breed cattle and sheep are not always those that fatten them, and never those that consume them. So with cereals, one district is good for wheat, another for barley, another for oats, another for beans and peas. Fish that is taken on the coast is consumed in the interior. A similar remark may be made of the various kinds of minerals with which different parts of the island have been enriched. Even the granite of Scotland is wanted in London for its streets. Every town must get its flag-stones from a distance. Each kind of manufacture has certain requirements which render one district more suitable for it than another; so that for the article produced in each manufacturing locality there must be trade between that locality and all others. Hence it comes about that there is a larger interchange of home productions in this country than in any other in the world. In this respect compare Italy with ourselves. All its districts have much the same productions; the result of which is the minimum of home trade. How enormous must be the differences which must result to Italy and ourselves from this dissimilarity in our respective circumstances! I apply this to the United States of America. The cause which has contributed so much to make us wealthy, intelligent, and commercial, is to be found in the United States—with the difference, however, that what has been done here on a very small scale, is there done, and has yet to be done, on an enormous scale. Their variety of products is far greater than ours, and will have to be exchanged to far greater amounts, and so will employ a proportionately greater number of agents. What a vast traffic will it be when the wheat consumed throughout the Union shall be supplied by what are now the North-western States and California, and the mutton and beef shall be supplied by the Western prairies, and the pork by the maize-growing States, and the various metals, precious and useful, and the different forms of manufacture, each by different localities to all the rest!

This Museum of Agriculture and Horticulture gives one the means of comparing the size and quality of the fruits, vegetables, and cereals grown in different parts of the Union. The effects of climate and soil are, as might have been expected, very perceptible. A variety of the apple, for instance, that produces very large and good fruit in Illinois and Michigan, will deteriorate as one goes farther south, till at last it becomes not worth cultivating; while one sees specimens of other varieties, which their nature adapts to the sunnier States. The variety and excellence of the produce of the whole country is very striking, for everywhere in the United States there is light and heat enough and to spare; but what strikes one most of all is, the peculiar and extraordinary excellence of everything that comes from California; for instance, the pear La Belle Angevine, without any of the minute attention that is bestowed on its culture in France, very commonly attains the almost incredible weight of between three and four pounds. And all other kinds of fruit, and every kind of vegetable, grow in the same luxuriant manner. This is something that must be seen to be believed; but when seen, it enables one to understand how in the short space of twenty years this State has passed from an uninhabited wilderness to one of the richest and most powerful States in the Union. With such a climate and soil, to say nothing of its enormous mineral wealth, ‘it is bound,’ to use the local word, to leave New York, and Pennsylvania, and all the old leading States of the Union far behind, and, indeed, every other part of the world, whether new or old.

California compared with Italy.

One cannot become acquainted with half-a-dozen Californians without seeing that man himself has been improved in this wonder-working region—the finest, not only that the Anglo-Saxon race, but that any race of man has ever inhabited. There is a quickness and determination of mind, and a calmness of manner, a quickness of eye and a cleanness of limb about a Californian that you cannot but notice. They have in a thousand ways shown enterprise which astonishes even Americans themselves. But in nothing have they shown it to such an incredible degree as in their agriculture. Their wines are of many kinds, as may be seen in this museum, and some of them are very good. Their garden produce is quite unrivalled. But I will only mention what they have done in the culture of wheat. Twenty years ago there was no agriculture in this State. Twenty years are not time enough here to enable us to make up our minds as to whether we will use the steam-plough. But in these twenty years the clear-sighted and undaunted Californian has learnt how to grow enough wheat to feed the inhabitants of his own State, and in a great degree of the neighbouring States of Oregon and Washington, and the whole population of our British Columbia. And not content with this, he has undertaken the supply of Chili and Peru, and the other republics on the seaboard of the Eastern Pacific. This comes to a great deal—to what is almost beyond belief. To the Californian, however, it is nothing at all. He has for several years been sending wheat the length of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to England. Eight years ago, I saw cargoes of Californian wheat selling at a profit in Liverpool. And last year he capped even this, for he sent both flour and wheat to New York, selling the former at eleven dollars a barrel—that is, two dollars a barrel cheaper than the great millers of Richmond can afford to lay it down at, whose mills are, as it were, just outside the gates of New York. And the latter they sold at a price which, had there been enough of it, would have completely excluded Chicago and the great wheat-producing States of the North-west from the market, and so would have swept away, at a single stroke, the chief part of the business of the great Erie Canal.

Any little change at our own door appears great to us, while the mightiest changes at a distance affect us little: if, however, we are disposed to weigh events in accordance with their intrinsic and real importance, we might compare the rising of the star of this extraordinary community with the lately recovered unity and independence of Italy, which has of late engrossed so much of our attention and interest. California at the present moment contains a population of between six and seven hundred thousand souls—Italy one of twenty-four millions. But if the old Nation and the new State were to try their strength against one another, I believe that this handful of keen-witted and intrepid men would go just where they pleased, and do just what they pleased in any part of Italy; while the Italians, however much of their strength they might put forth, would find themselves quite unable to do anything of the kind with California. How much would a Californian population of twenty-four millions make of Italy! They would have no armies of officials, no brigandage, no debt; their ships would sail on every sea; their influence would be felt all over Europe and throughout the world.

Coloured Waiters.

At Washington, as at Philadelphia and Baltimore, I found the waiters at the hotels were coloured men. I very much preferred this to having the white waiters I had fallen in with at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York: the latter, I thought, felt the degradation of their position. In America, waiting in hotels and railway cars, being domestic servants, and keeping barbers’ shops, are the only employments, with the exception of field-labour in the South, which are really left open to the coloured race. For a white man, therefore, to become a waiter at an hotel, is to sink himself to the level of the black. It is impossible to conceive a native American placing himself in such a situation. It is too poor an employment for him; it is of a servile character; and it is one which, in public opinion and by general practice, has been assigned to the African. Even here, in England, one pities the man whom circumstances have made a footman—when one sees the hosts of men occupied in this way in London and elsewhere, and compares what they are, and their sad prospects, with the fine manly fellows they might have been, and the independence they might have secured for themselves and their children in Canada, the Western States, Brazil, on the Rio Plata, in Natal, Australia or New Zealand, or in other places where the climate is fine, land a drug, and the only thing wanted is men who can work as Englishmen and their descendants alone can and do. The feelings, however, of commiseration with which in England we regard the man whom circumstances have placed in such a position, become in America dashed with somewhat of contempt for the whites who voluntarily place themselves in it. One does not feel in the least degree in this way towards the coloured waiters. It is not in the nature of the black that he should ever work hard enough to cultivate the soil, where the climate is such that the European is capable of labouring in it. He has it not in him to become, and never has become, a settler. One cannot imagine half-a-dozen negroes voluntarily submitting for half-a-dozen years to the incessant toil—the ploughing, the sowing, the weeding, the harvesting, the threshing, the cattle-tending of a Northern farm. It is not only that they are constitutionally lazy, but that they are also of too volatile a disposition for such a life. Nature, however, has fitted them for such employments as domestic service and waiting in hotels. In their case there is an obvious congruity between the employment and the person. When you thank the willing and cheerful black for changing your plate, or ministering in some way to your personal wants, and get in return the almost universal ‘Vara welcome,’ you do not feel in the slightest degree that a good and likely man is being wasted and degraded just for the promotion of your own comfort and convenience.

A Negro Masonic Funeral.

On a Sunday while I was at Washington, I saw a grand negro funeral. The deceased had been a minister in one of their churches, and also a Freemason. He was therefore buried with Masonic honours. They chose for the procession the streets in which, and the day and the hour of the day when, there would be most people to witness it. The order was as follows:—First came a negro on horseback to open the way; then a powerful band. These were succeeded by two hundred Masons, all well dressed, with aprons, scarves, and badges. After these the corpse in a handsome coffin. In order that this might be completely seen, the sides of the hearse were of plate-glass. The corpse was followed by twenty carriages, each drawn by two horses. These carriages contained the ladies of the cortége. I saw no attempt among them, by drawing down blinds or the use of the handkerchief, to conceal their grief. Their bearing, I rather thought, indicated the presence in their sable breasts of the very ancient desire to see and be seen. No whites took any part in the funeral. A great many, however, had assembled to see it pass, all of whom appeared to behave very decorously. There was evidently a great effort on the part of the blacks to appear to advantage. It was a curious and interesting sight. Some of the mulattoes were tall and good-looking, but far the greater part of them were intensely ugly. In the procession was every shade of colour, from ebony to what might have easily passed for the complexion of an European; for in the United States not even light hair and blue eyes with a fair skin can rescue from social exclusion the man who is known to have in his veins a drop of negro blood.

Wherever in the South I mentioned this negro funeral, the same remark was made on the Freemasonry of the negroes. Everyone professed himself ignorant of how the negroes had come by it. No one knew who had admitted them; and no one would acknowledge them as brother-Masons.

On going over the Smithsonian Museum, I was much struck by the superiority of the birds of America to those of Europe in the architectural skill and beauty of their nests.

While I was at Washington, a bill was before Congress for depriving of the franchise every father whose children (up to a certain age) did not attend school at least twelve weeks each year.

It was here that I first saw something of the Freedman’s Bureau. Probably in the first days of emancipation some agency was needed for regulating the movements of the negroes, and for supplying them with information as to their newly acquired rights. I am, however, disposed to think that so extensive a department as this bureau was altogether a mistake. It has cost much, and, as far as I could judge, done some harm and very little good. But of that anon: I will only speak now of my visit to one of the coloured schools I found at Washington under its superintendence. Like all the American schools I visited in towns, it was graded; that is, as we should express it, the school was divided into classes, each class having its own teacher and its own school-room, and being in every particular entirely distinct and separate from all the rest. There were about four hundred children on the books, and the usual number, about fifty, in each grade. It is impossible to exaggerate the advantages of this method of teaching. Each teacher has but one class; therefore the whole of the school-time is actually and actively employed in teaching. One class is not idle while the teacher is attending to another. No child is neglected. All parts of the school are equally cared for. There is much emulation among the teachers, each desiring that his part in the general system shall be done well. Each teacher having only one step or grade to teach, perfects himself in it, and teaches it thoroughly. When it has been completely mastered, the child is passed on to the teacher of the next step or grade, who in his turn goes through the same process; till at last the child, at the end of three years—for each grade requires six months—leaves the school, having passed through all it professes to teach, and generally having acquired it all thoroughly.

Coloured Schools.

As I am not one of those who believe that the intellect of the longest civilised and most highly cultivated race in the world is no better than that of a race of which no branch has ever been civilised or cultivated in any way or degree—or, to put it in other words, that those who have given greater proofs of intelligence than any other race of men are (which is a contradiction in terms) on a level with those who have never given any proofs whatever of intelligence—I carefully notice everything that appears in any way to militate against my side of the question. For this reason I must mention that I was taken by surprise at the quickness and attainments of these four hundred coloured children. I never saw a school in England in which so much readiness was shown in answering questions as to the meaning of words that occurred in the reading lesson, and questions as to the meaning of what had been read. I must, however, remark that this may perhaps have been owing to the excellence of the teachers, who at present are chiefly enthusiasts in the cause of the negro from New England, and to this method of grading the schools. Of course the children were not readier or better taught than white children are in America. And here, besides, comes in the doubt whether the intellectual development of this race, as all travellers in Africa assert, does not stop at the age of fourteen. There was in connection with these schools one for adult negro scholars, which may be regarded as to some extent a contradiction of this opinion, for I will not call it fact.

A great many of our ideas about American manners are mere traditions of an utterly gone-by state of things, as far away from their present manners (for changes are rapidly effected in America) as our own present manners are from those of Squire Western’s and Parson Trulliber’s day. In travelling 8,000 miles, through all parts of the Union, I never once saw, even in the woods of the South, or on the prairies of the West, any more than in New York or Boston, a table d’hôte dinner, served, at the sound of a bell, at one time for all the guests of the house, upon which a scramble ensued for every dish. I should be surprised to hear that this practice now existed in a single hotel in the Union. The method of proceeding, which is now universal, is for every single person, or party of persons, to be served separately. Nor are the middle-class Americans, who are the chief frequenters of hotels, more rapid in despatching their meals than we are. They are the reverse of talkative. They are not inquisitive. They are far more civil and helpful to one another and to strangers than Englishmen are. Those whom we should consider in good society are in a very high degree quiet and unassuming. I never heard an American use the word ‘Siree’ for Sir; nor did I ever hear one ‘guess’; nor was I ever asked to ‘liquor.’ And so one might go on with many other things which were once American practices, but have been utterly abandoned. The fact is that the Americans are the most reasonable and teachable people in the world. Prove to an Englishman that he is wrong, and he will cling to his mistake more closely than before. Prove to the Americans that they are wrong, and the whole people will, as if they were one man, readily abandon their mistake.

Our Diplomacy with America.

I left Washington by an early train. Trains, as is the case with the hours for breakfast and for business, are earlier in the United States than in England. On coming down to the bar of the hotel at 5 A.M., I found that the night service of the hotel had spent their long watch in listening to Mr. Dickens’s ‘Oliver Twist,’ each reading aloud in his turn.

In our diplomatic intercourse with the Government of the United States our method of proceeding ought to be founded on a right appreciation of the character of the people, because it is mainly with the people themselves that we have to do. Everybody reads the newspapers; everybody has his opinion, and what is the opinion of the majority is what is done. Now, speaking generally, the character of the people of the United States is such that the simplest style of diplomacy, or rather no diplomacy at all, is requisite in dealing with them. The Americans are an eminently reasonable people, and can be made to understand what is right. It is not as if we had to deal with Austrian, or Russian, or French diplomatists, with whom, unless we have long been much mistaken, reason and right are not the first considerations. What is requisite, then, in dealing with our cousins on the other side of the water, is, that we should ask for nothing but what we are clearly entitled to—what is our due, and our own; and that having asked for no more than what is rightfully ours, we should not concede one jot or one tittle. In two words—right and firmness—are comprised all that we have to attend to. It is absurd to suppose that we are incapable of making them understand what is our right; and they will respect us if we maintain our right with firmness, and they will despise us if we do not. They would never go to war with us knowing themselves to be in the wrong.

But, just as in trade they are always ready to take advantage of every slip or oversight on the part of those with whom they deal, deeming that men, whether themselves or others, must pay the penalty of carelessness, or ignorance, or even of want of sagacity—carrying this to a point beyond what we should consider quite justifiable—so also in diplomacy they will see what can be made out of all kinds of claims and demands such as their politicians are ever ingenious and forward in suggesting. But they are too just and reasonable a people to persist in being misled, after things have been fully and fairly put before them. Having, then, right clearly on our side, all the art that is required for the double purpose of maintaining our right, and of securing their respect, is firmness.

Washington.

In its public buildings Washington has begun to resemble an European capital. Everyone has seen engravings of the Capitol. It is a large marble building with a central dome, very well placed on an eminence at one end of the city. From some reason arising out of the proprietorship of the land, no private residences or shops have sprung up in its immediate vicinity. The main street, of about a mile in length, connects it with the Executive Mansion, as the President’s house is called in newspaper language. This also is of white marble. It is about as large as the country house of an English gentleman who is in receipt of an income of 10,000l. a year. The ground sinks between the Capitol and the President’s house. Most of the public offices are in the immediate neighbourhood of the latter. The chief part of the city lies around and beyond the President’s house. The Treasury, which has been built since the war, is in its dimensions worthy of the enormous business carried on in it—that is, the printing and issue of the greenback currency. It also is of white stone, I believe a kind of granite. The only other building worthy of notice, either from its dimensions or uses, is the Patent Office. In this is contained a model, or specimen, of everything for which a patent has been issued in the United States. One ought at least to walk through the numerous and spacious and well-filled apartments of this building, to get an idea of the activity of the inventive faculty in America, and of the great honour in which it is held.

I understood from Americans that every facility and security possible are given to persons desirous of taking out patents. Not only is there this museum to enable them to see whether or how the thing has been done before, but there are also persons whose business it is to be thoroughly acquainted with the specifications and objects of all former patents, and who are ready to supply any information on the subject to all applicants. I could not but contrast this instance of American intelligence and wisdom with our English methods for discouraging invention, notwithstanding the fact that mechanical inventions are among the chief foundations and glories of our manufactures.

The Americans are a population of very thirsty souls. I do not know whether the cause of this is the dryness of the climate, or the habits of the people, or both combined. All day long, throughout the winter as well as the other seasons of the year, people are drinking water with ice floating in it. Many persons finish their breakfast with a large tumbler of this. Wherever men congregate, whether in the drawing-rooms of hotels or of private houses, or even in railway-cars, there is to be found the ever-present and ever-needed iced water. I found myself thirstier, and drank a great deal more in America than I had ever done before; and, like the natives, I felt a repugnance to drink water, however cold the weather might be, without ice in it. Now again in England, I am satisfied with perhaps one fourth of the water I needed in the United States, and I have no desire for the ice I regarded almost as a necessary there.

CHAPTER VI.

RICHMOND—WAY BY THE BATTLE-FIELDS—HANDINESS OF AMERICAN SOLDIERS—EFFECT OF SLAVERY ON THE VIRGINIAN LANDSCAPE—APPEARANCE OF AMERICAN FOREST—REPUBLICAN RELATIONS OF FATHER AND SON—STATE OF FEELING IN VIRGINIA—BILLIARDS IN AMERICA—WHY RICHMOND MILLERS UNDERSOLD BY CALIFORNIAN—WHY AMERICAN CITIES ARE LARGE—AMERICAN LIVING—PROSPECTS OF RICHMOND—INDICATIONS OF SOUTHERN CLIMATE IN RICHMOND—CHURCH MATTERS IN RICHMOND—INTEREST THAT ATTACHES TO RICHMOND AND TO THE HEROISM OF THE SOUTH.

To Richmond by the Battle-fields.

In going to Richmond I made the circuit by Gordonsville, that I might visit the battle-fields of the late war which lie so thickly on that route from Washington. I went by Bull’s Run, Culpepper Court House, Manassas Junction, the Rapahannock, the Rapidan, &c. This ground was several times contested. Nothing strikes one now in these sites except the extent of the breastworks and rifle-pits, and of the earthworks for batteries. I was told by a general of engineers who went through the whole war, that American soldiers, especially those in the Northern armies, were always eager of themselves to throw up these defences. It was their custom to set to work upon them even when tired with a long day’s march or severe fighting; and there were occasions when they did this without tools. They acted in this way because they had sufficient intelligence to be fully aware of the advantage to themselves of earthworks of this kind, and therefore were desirous of being provided with them as speedily as possible. Most of the men, too, being young farmers or sons of farmers, had been accustomed to felling timber, and working on the land, so that every regiment was full of ready-made pioneers.

Another advantage possessed in a preeminent degree by the Northern armies, was that—their soldiers having been drawn from all classes and trades—if a corps for wheelwrights’, millwrights’, harness-makers’, or almost for any other kind of work required on the field, was suddenly wanted, it was always to be had ready-made at a moment’s notice.

On passing over these battle-fields one quickly understands why in the late war cavalry was so little used for improving a victory, and why also the attacking army generally appeared to have so great an advantage. In this part of Virginia—and I found it to be so everywhere throughout the South—the clearings are small and few, and far between, all the rest of the country being covered with forest, or with abandoned clearings returning to forest. In such a country cavalry could not have acted, even if, which was seldom the case, the victorious army had had more than was required for outpost duty and other work of the kind. And there being cover everywhere, an advancing force, in coming up for an attack on the enemy, could everywhere find concealment and shelter.

How Slavery Modified the Landscape.

As soon as you enter Virginia you see unmistakable evidences of the recent existence of slavery. The country is not cleared, cultivated, and inhabited in the marvellous manner which so much surprises and pleases one in the North, where each man holds a plot of about a hundred acres, more or less, with his neat homestead planted in the middle of it. Here only a very small proportion of the land is under cultivation: far the greater part has, on the wasteful Southern system (where men owned large estates of several thousand acres, many times as much as they could keep in hand), been worked out, and then abandoned and allowed to return to wood. A respectable house is hardly ever seen along this line of railway. One gets tired of the monotony of the forest, and of the ever-recurring reflection how differently things would have looked, if this glorious State, blessed so highly in its soil and climate, had not been cursed with the blight of slavery.

I was surprised to find how closely the American forests resemble those of Europe. I suppose this settles the point that at some remote epoch of geological time the two continents were united. The two commonest species, and which often constitute the whole forest, are the never-failing pine and the oak. They both reach from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The former, to unscientific eyes, is only a small edition of the Scotch fir; and the oak, in its several varieties, as you pass along the railway, has much the same physiognomy as our English oak. The same may be said of the elm, the ash, the birch, the maples and the poplars. In the woods there is generally no undergrowth; on the embankments and outskirts of the woods a rubus, very like some forms of our English blackberry, is abundant. What is most striking in the forests is the want of fine trees. Except in the Rocky Mountains, I never saw one in the United States. Their oaks and pines die at the top before they have got much beyond what we should call poles. They never seem to branch freely. I suppose their progenitors having grown in the forest for so many thousand years, the race has acquired the habit of growing straight. In the heart, however, of the city of New York, in Broadway between the Fifth Avenue Hotel and the Coleman House, I noticed the trunk (for not much more is now left) of an occidental plane that must once have been a noble specimen of its kind. I was told that in Kentucky and Ohio there were fine trees, but I saw none. I have heard from travelled Americans similar remarks to those I have just been making on the dearth of large trees in the United States. This of course is said of those States that lie to the east of the Alleghany Mountains.

Republican Relations of Father and Son.

We are in the habit of regarding Americans as less domestic than ourselves. I would suggest that their ideas on this subject are somewhat different from ours. It struck me that with them a little republicanism had passed from the State into the home—that children assumed and were allowed a greater degree of independence and equality than with us. This doubtless arises in a great degree from the early knowledge all children have that they will be able and must soon begin to provide for themselves. But it is greatly promoted, I believe, by the fact that the sons do not, as a general rule, leave the paternal roof when they go to school. With us the father never sees his children except in the holidays, and therefore continues to regard them as children, and never learns to regard them as companions. In America the father never loses sight of his child, who thus grows up as his companion, and is soon treated as a companion, and as in some sort an equal. I was often struck with this while listening to conversations between fathers and sons. The father, evidently quite in good faith, would ask the child’s opinion, and inquire of him what he was going to do; as if he had some right to opinions of his own, and to independent action in matters in which he was himself concerned. A little incident in the train as I was on the way to Richmond, illustrated, I thought, this state of things. A father and son of about fourteen years of age were among the passengers, and in the next seat to myself. They had long been talking on a footing of equality in the way I have just mentioned; at last, to while away the time, they began to sing together. First they accompanied each other. Then they took alternate lines; at last alternate words. In this of course they tripped frequently, each laughing at the other for his mistakes. There was no attempt at keeping up the dignity of a parent, as might have been considered necessary and proper with us. There was no reserve. They were in a certain sense already on the equal footing of persons of the same age.

I should have been glad to have fallen in again with this gentleman, as, from the casual conversation I had with him this day in the railway car, I found that he was one of the most cultivated persons I met in my tour through the United States.

I arrived at the Spotswood Hotel at Richmond after dark, and was immediately shown into the supper-room, and placed at a table already occupied by three other persons. We soon entered into conversation. They knew at the first glance, as I found everywhere was the case, that I was an Englishman. ‘Sir,’ said the youngest of the party, who did not appear to be yet twenty years old, ‘you have come to a God-forsaken country. Those who lately had riches are now in want; and the whites are now ruled by the blacks.’

Another gentleman I had met during the day had said to me, that ‘he and many others wished they were living under a king of the English royal family. That Virginians deeply regretted that they had ever been separated from England; but that it was their own doing; for, if they had not helped, the Yankees never could have brought about the separation alone.’

Before I left Richmond, I had heard some of this gallant and most unfortunate people give utterance to the sentiment, ‘that they were so stung by the sense of defeat, that they were ever wishing themselves dead. That everything had been so completely set on the cast of the die, that now, when it had decided against them, they could not find anything to live for. That their sense of honour had been crushed by defeat. That their property had been taken from them. That their black slaves had been made their masters.’

Billiards.

I afterwards met with other Virginians, who, having been impoverished by the war, had voluntarily expatriated themselves that they might, if possible, find elsewhere some support for those who were dependent on them. They were men who had been in the first and the last fight, and had lost everything they possessed. But I never heard from their lips one word of disloyalty to the Union to which they had returned in perfect good faith. They had appealed to the arbitrament of the sword. The decision had been against them; and they had submitted without any reservation to that decision. Their bitterness was only for those trading politicians who, being, as they thought, incapable of understanding honourable men, had sent a Freedman’s Bureau and an army of occupation to oppress and torment those who were now quite as loyal to the Union as themselves, and if they were not, yet were utterly incapable of moving a finger against it.

The rage for athletic exercises, which has spread like wildfire over England, has made some feeble and unsuccessful efforts to lay hold of the mind of Young America. It is quite in harmony with the English love of field sports and outdoor games, but not at all with the habits and predilections of Americans. Their climate, which covers the ground with snow in winter, and is so hot in summer, may be unadapted to, and therefore indispose them for these things. But I believe the chief cause is in their indoor pursuits, which engross so much of their time and thoughts, and in the almost total absence among them of a class possessed of leisure, which from the times of the barons to the present day has always been a large and constantly increasing class amongst us. Billiards appear to have taken very much the place in America which field sports and athletic exercises occupy here. The large billiard rooms of their large hotels are of an evening always full of players and spectators. The American tables have no pockets, except in the four corners. At the hotel at which I stayed while at New York, I saw a man who played his game without cue or mace, merely spinning his ball between his thumb and middle finger. He had attained to such skill in doing this, that he appeared to be able to send the ball just to any point he pleased, with the greatest ease and certainty. I suppose, like Blondin, he had made a single muscular feat the work of his life. I saw billiard tables set up in wooden shanties on the plains of the North Platte, and beyond the plains at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.

I inquired here about the truth of what I had heard at Washington, that the great millers of Richmond had last year been undersold in the market of New York by the millers of California; and I was assured by one of the oldest and largest firms in the city that it was so. This firm, who had so short a water carriage from their own mill to the quays of New York, whose appliances of business were all perfected before the fathers of those now their rivals in California were born, who carry on business on such a scale as to make between seven and eight thousand barrels of flour a-week, cannot sell a barrel of that flour in New York at less than two dollars more than the price at which the Californian sells it. They account for this in the following way. At the time the Californian’s harvest is ripe, he knows for a certainty that for two or three months no rain will fall. He therefore merely cuts his wheat without putting it into stacks or barns, without even gathering it up into sheaves. All this expense in harvesting he is saved. When he has cut the whole of his crop, he takes his machine into the field, and threshes it from the swarth. But this is not all. He gains still more largely in another way. He ploughs his land for wheat, and puts in his seed. The land is naturally so clean, and the climate so favourable, that the dropped grains of the first harvest will give him another crop next year, without a cent of cost, for there will be no ploughing or seeding required. Thus every second crop is a pure gift of nature. It is this that makes Californian wheat, and therefore Californian flour, so cheap. I tell the tale as it was told to me. I remember, however, that Sir Alexander Burns mentions that he saw wheat in the neighbourhood of Bokhara which was a biennial, and that the Bokhara farmer got two crops from one sowing. It is possible he may have got two crops from one sowing, not because on the banks of the Oxus the wheat plant was capable of bearing seed twice, but in this Californian fashion.

Two Crops of Wheat from One Sowing.

American cities are not in the position of our country towns, but of the capitals of European kingdoms. Richmond, for instance, till the disruption of Virginia which took place during the late war, was the capital of a State as large as the whole of England and Wales, with the addition of almost the half of Scotland. And as the sites of these cities were always chosen on account of the facilities they offered for trade and commerce, they have in almost every instance become the emporia for the chief part of the foreign and domestic business of their respective States. This also has generally led to their becoming manufacturing towns. In this way each has come to engross almost everything in the State that contributes to the building up of a great city. Bearing this in mind, we shall cease to wonder at the rapid growth in population, wealth, and trade of such a place as Chicago. It is a measure of the population, the wealth, the production and consumption of the great State of Illinois. Just so also with Cincinnati, St. Louis, and all their other great cities. They are made by the States to which they belong. This of course is not the case with New York, which is the commercial capital of a great part of the Union, or with New Orleans, which is the warehouse through which a large proportion of the produce of the valley of the Mississippi must pass. We must also remember that these large cities are at enormous distances from each other. In some instances, as notably in those of New York and New Orleans, the chief town in the State has not been able to retain the presence of the State legislature; this loss, however, has proved of no great consequence to them.

We are often told that the character of a nation in some degree depends on its kitchen. A traveller therefore who understands all that will be expected of him when he returns home, will not pass by unnoticed the style of cookery, and the materials with which it deals, of the people among whom he makes what I heard in this country called, not unaptly, ‘a tour of observation’; and cookery, whether he chooses to observe it or not, is a matter which at all events is submitted to his observation two or three times a day.

The fact that first struck me in American ‘living’ was its abundance. Butchers’ shops and poulterers’ were, particularly the latter, of more frequent occurrence and better stored than I had ever seen elsewhere. Everybody appears to have plenty to eat, and few appear to neglect their opportunities.

American Living.

But as this is a prosaic subject, I must begin at the beginning. On my voyage out, before I had had time to generalise a conclusion on such a subject, a gentleman among the passengers confided to me, as the result of his own experience, that New England young ladies (of course he did not mean this of the young ladies who belonged to the upper ten thousand) never appeared less amiable than when at breakfast. A long and large experience enabled him to speak with some authority on this subject; though, as I afterwards discovered, he was not a quite unprejudiced commentator. I declined to accept his conclusion, notwithstanding his pointing out to me two young ladies who seemed to confirm it by disposing, each of them every morning, of a beefsteak, while they were considering what they would order for breakfast, and then going through a performance of varieties which was in very good keeping with the prologue.

One ought to be sparing of comment on a neighbour’s way of managing himself. You are not acquainted with his constitution, or with the atmosphere he has to live in, or with the kind of work he has to do; and these things may render advisable in his case what would not suit yourself. But if you know that some of his habits are such as do not generally conduce to a sound sanitary condition, and then see that the doctor is the most frequent visitor in his house, you can hardly help coupling the two facts together in the relation of cause and effect. Now it happens that wherever one is in the United States, the most prominent and abundant affiches are those that recommend different kinds of ‘bitters.’ There are ‘Red jacket bitters,’ and ‘Planters’ bitters,’ ‘French,’ ‘German,’ ‘Mexican,’ and ‘American bitters,’ but no English, which I am disposed to take as a compliment implying that Englishmen need no such restoratives, for it can hardly mean that the name would be no recommendation. And there are bitters from the four quarters of the compass, limiting the range, I suppose, to American soil. All this of course implies that in our neighbour’s case ‘perfect order does not reign in the interior;’ and it struck me that his constant habit of beginning the day with a breakfast that for its variety and solidity would be sufficient for a dinner on this side, had something to do with it. I hazard this, though the reply is obvious that one does not know what is requisite in this way in America. It is possible too that these bitters may not always mean what the traveller is likely to suppose. I say this because, on an occasion when a fractured rail delayed the train on the banks of the Mississippi for several hours, and every one produced what he had in the way of resources for passing away the time, an American I was then with produced from his hand-bag a bottle of what he called ‘Angostura bitters.’ I was rather surprised at his offering me a glass of it, thinking from its name that it must be something medicinal. I found it, however, to be merely a better kind of whiskey a little fortified with spice.

But though one may not be quite up to the mark in judging of the significance of these numerous species of bitters, one at all events is able to understand the constant complaints of Americans themselves on the subject of their health. One never elsewhere met with people who so frequently impart to you the information that they are suffering from dyspepsia. They do things in America on a big scale, and here they have a bigger amount of dyspepsia than any other country in the world. There may be other causes for this, but I still, perhaps very ignorantly, think the breakfast sufficient to account for it. It is a good rule in dietetics, as in many other things, to begin the day quietly. A certain amount of breakfast means a certain amount of work for the digestive machinery; and just the same rule that would apply to your horse will apply to this animal part of your own system. If you were going to give him some work in the afternoon, and again in the evening, or at night, you would spare him in the morning. One’s stomach cannot always be working hard any more than one’s horse can. I heard of a Southern planter who (before the war) never sat down to breakfast with less than six-and-twenty farinaceous preparations before him. I forbear to call them six-and-twenty kinds of bread, as my informant did, because they included dough cakes, buckwheat cakes, slap-jacks, fried hominy, &c. It was by no means meant that the gentleman who was so profuse in furnishing ‘the bread-kind’ department of his breakfast table confined himself to what he found there. These were merely the garniture, and not the substantial part of the replenishment of his matutinal board.

I heard of another gentleman, who bore a name well known in the Union, and who made it his daily practice to conclude this meal with a large bowl of cream; and of a third who, when, in Homeric fashion and phrase, he had appeased the rage of his appetite, would conclude with as many buckwheat cakes as he could lift at one time on his fork, which it was his custom to strike for this purpose through a lofty pile of them. Americans, sooner or later, find breakfasts of this kind harder to digest than they have hitherto found their national debt.

As buckwheat cakes are the usual finale of an American breakfast, I will explain what they are, and how they are to be eaten. The cakes are made from a batter (as the name implies) of buckwheat meal. They are done on a griddle. Each is in diameter about the size of the palm of one’s hand, and in thickness about the sixth of an inch. The usual way of serving them at hotels is three cakes, one on the top of another, to each person; not from any wish to limit the number consumed, but because they cannot be eaten in perfection if more or less than three are brought at one time. You then prepare them yourself, by lifting the uppermost one with your fork, and buttering the upper surface of the middle one (if they are not hot enough to melt the butter they are worthless) you then reverse your pile of three, and lifting what had been the bottom one, repeat the process of buttering. That completed, you pour upon them from a jug, which is always brought with them, enough maple-syrup, or that failing, enough clarified syrup of sugar to cover them. They are now ready, and are by no means to be despised. As the buckwheat, however, is a little oleaginous, the cakes are a little leathery—so much the better, many will say; but this, and the combination of butter and syrup, must, one would think, render them somewhat dyspeptic. Still they are universally approved of, and it is the waiter’s business at an hotel, when he sees you are finishing your breakfast, to ask you ‘if you will have some cakes.’ There would be something to say in favour of concluding a moderate breakfast occasionally in this way, but to make the cakes a daily addition to a varied and solid meal is to presume too much on one’s strength. Who but would be appalled at contemplating the amount of work which half a century of such breakfasts would impose upon himself?

Slap-jacks.

Where buckwheat meal, as in the Western prairies, cannot always be had, a good and orthodox substitute is the slap-jack, which is made and served in precisely the same way, the only difference being that of the material, which is wheaten flour. As this latter preparation is capable, and I think worthy, of acclimatisation, I will mention that the batter from which it is made has no other ingredients than flour, water, and soda. The griddle must be rubbed with a piece of suet before it is heated, and again before it is used. Serve in threes—very hot—with butter and syrup, as with the buckwheat cakes. I picked up this bit of culinary lore at a solitary ranche on the plains, where, having exhausted all the more obvious resources of the place, there was nothing else to do.

At the great hotels five meals a day are allowed. This is too much, not for the hotels, for such liberality is attractive (of course they all have a fixed price per day, ranging from three and a half to five dollars, for bed and board), but it is too much for the guests who avail themselves of it.

I need not go into particulars as to how the great American nation dines. If a man has breakfasted as he ought, and spent the day as he ought, he may dine as he pleases. No people in the world have a greater variety of materials for dining well than they have; perhaps no people so great a variety. Their beef and mutton are (thanks to our climate) not quite up to the English mark, but they are better than any on the continent of Europe. In variety, however, of materials they far exceed us. In Ohio and Kentucky they have naturalised the pheasant. The domestic turkey, as might be expected in the native region of its race, is so abundant as to be almost within everybody’s reach. The same may be said of all kinds of poultry. This results from the great number and smallness of the farms in America, and from the abundance of Indian corn. There is also no scarcity of prairie game and quail. Wild venison is to be had everywhere, which, when properly kept and cooked, as I have seen it at Southern tables, is as tender as chicken, though entirely devoid of fat. I once saw terrapin soup and stewed terrapin on the menu; and thinking that I should frequently see them there again, I let that opportunity for qualifying myself to form some opinion of their merits pass by, and no other opportunity occurred—I suppose because it was not the season for it. I let pass in the same way all opportunities at New York for making myself acquainted with the merits of the buffalo, thinking that I should frequently meet with it in the West. When at Denver I received an invitation to sup on buffalo, which was the only chance I had in the West; and this invitation I was unable to accept. Stewed clams and clam soup are not bad. Soft-shelled crabs are not good. There is a very great variety of wild fowl: at Mobile, and in a still greater degree at New Orleans, I was astonished at the number of species I saw in the market. At the head of all these stands the world-renowned canvas-back. No one, I believe, ever found him inferior to his reputation: of all the feathered tribe he is the tenderest and the most juicy. If he has come from the Potomac, he has a fine flavour of the wild celery, which is there his chief food. The red-head duck has the second place in point of excellence.

American Vivres.

But what I put first on the list of all the good things of America is its oyster. It is two or three times the size of the European bivalve; I think more tender, and certainly of a more delicate flavour. It has also the great merit of being entirely free from any trace of a coppery taste, which habit and necessity only have brought us to tolerate in our own mollusk. To all its other merits it adds this great one—that it exists in incredible and inexhaustible quantities: and we know that it was abundant in the remote epochs of the past; because on the coasts of the Southern States we find long ridges of its shells, which must have been the slow accumulations of the thousands of years during which some savage race, that has left behind it in these mounds no record of any capacity for improvement or progress, was in the habit of fishing it from the contiguous beds, and leaving its shells on the nearest beach. This race has passed away without having left any record of its existence except these heaps of oyster shells. But the descendants of the oysters they lived upon still exist, and their shells are dispersed, by the aid of the locomotive, over the whole continent. How interesting and suggestive a contrast is here! But to keep to our subject: these oysters exist in such abundance that in the Gulf of Mexico I saw them bailed into the boats as fast as the men who were taking them could work their rakes. There are enough of them taken for a large trade with the towns in the interior, to which they are sent either fresh or in tins. Wherever you go you have them in some form or other—scalloped, stewed, uncooked, or in soup—every day; at some places you see them on the bills of fare for breakfast, dinner, and supper. As on my return to England we were supplied with them throughout the voyage, and as our own oysters have of late been selling at a famine price, I do not see why we should not import a part of our supply from America.

As far as I was able to judge from what I saw (my experience was confined to the winter), I thought that in fish we had the advantage of the Americans, both in variety and quality. Their white fish and bass are good. The latter is best when broiled. I mention this as I am not aware that we cook our bass in this way.

Maize enters largely into the dietary of Americans, and is used in a hundred forms. Well-prepared hominy is a good substitute for rice as a vegetable adjunct to roast meat or stews. It ought to be as white as paper, but to prepare it in this way requires a tedious process, for it must be soaked for a long time in a strong lye, to get rid of its yellow skin. Maize bread is good only for a few minutes after it is taken out of the oven. As soon as it ceases to be warm, moist, and soft, it ceases to be eatable. The sweet potatoes of America are as superior to those of Algeria and the south of Europe as Stilton cheese is to that of Suffolk. The best are grown in the sandy soils of the South. In South Carolina from two to five hundred bushels per acre are harvested. Pigs will fatten on them, and men can live on pork and sweet potatoes. But no dependence can be placed on this root, as in some years, for reasons that have not been discovered, they will not keep.

To those who are desirous of introducing a little variety into their Christmas dinner I would recommend an American practice of serving the turkey with hot apple jam. I need hardly say this is a very different thing from apple sauce. There may, however, be some difficulty in getting the jam made, as I do not recollect having often seen it in England. I would also recommend for that festive season an American method of improving mince pies. On this side it is sometimes objected to this time-honoured institution, that there is a ha’p’orth of mincemeat to an intolerable quantity of crust: with their unfailing readiness of invention they have hit on the method of uniting what with us would be two or three dozen small pies, almost all crust, into one large raised pie, which they help in pieces or slices. This completely meets the objection.

The fire which the Confederates kindled in Richmond to destroy the tobacco that was in the city at the time the Northern army were about to enter spread rapidly, as there was a strong wind at the time, and destroyed the whole of the lower part of the town. This was the quarter that was chiefly occupied by the large flour-mills and other manufactories of the place; it contained also many of the largest stores. A great part of what was burnt has been rebuilt, chiefly, I understood, by Northern capital. At the time, however, of my visit the work of reconstruction was at a standstill; and I saw considerable spaces occupied only with the débris of former buildings. One might have expected that factories would not be rebuilt just yet, as trade has been dull everywhere since the war, and as the Virginians themselves, like all the Southern people, are utterly ruined. But that any part of Richmond will ever remain in ruins it is difficult to believe, for one cannot imagine a city more advantageously situated. Nature has made it the commercial centre of a State which in climate, soil, and abundance of water communication is unrivalled in the Union. It may be regarded as the inland point upon which a great extent of natural navigation converges. In the rapids of the James River it possesses within the city great manufacturing power. In tobacco also it has an agricultural product for export which is already enormous, and which, as all the world wants it, may be increased to a practically unlimited extent. Nothing, I think, is needed for enabling it to go ahead as fast as any Western city but just a little time for arranging matters in the town and in the neighbouring country on the new basis, and so launching it on a career of prosperity which nothing henceforth will be likely to check. As far as I am able to judge, the two best speculations in the United States are buying land in Virginia (where it may now be had in abundance at two or three shillings an acre—land that must soon be settled in the Northern fashion) and in California, which will be flooded with immigrants as soon as the Pacific Railroad is opened through, and this is advertised for next year.

Prospects of Richmond.

The upper part of Richmond is occupied with private residences. I was at first surprised at their number, and at the indications they gave of what had been till lately the wealth of their inhabitants. But this surprise ceases when one remembers that it is the capital of, and the only great city in, a rich and large State. Like most American cities it has rows of trees in the streets, and here it is that you first begin to see in the live oaks and magnolias unmistakable indications of the commencement of a Southern climate. Some of the magnolias in the little plots of ground in the fronts of the houses were true specimen plants. I was never tired of looking at them. They had grown with such uninterrupted regularity that there was not a twig, I might say not a leaf, missing in them, to mar the symmetry of their form, which was that of a large cone of the deepest green. Each leaf in size and depth of colour was a noble object in itself. I thought, what would not one give to see these noble trees in flower, and if a man could only have such a tree on his own lawn in England?

Here, as I did wherever I went, I inquired into the position the different churches, and especially the Episcopal Church, occupied in the place; and here, as everywhere else, the Methodists and Baptists appeared to be in the majority. I was taken to hear a very celebrated Presbyterian preacher. As far as I could judge from a single sermon, I thought that the preacher’s excellence consisted entirely in his style, which was more polished and highly wrought than usual. As to his matter, there was not an idea or a sentiment but what one might have heard in the humblest chapel at home.

Of course sermons of this kind indicate the theological calibre of the congregation as well as that of the minister; for ministers and sermons are in the long run made by the congregation. In the evening of the same day I attended service at an Episcopal church. The interior of the building was profusely decorated with Christmas evergreens, and the sermon showed that the preacher was a man of learning and thought.

There are five Episcopal churches in this city. Those who minister in them appear to be well paid. I was told that the two highest salaries were 4,000 and 3,500 dollars. I heard, however, but I do not know to what denominations my informants belonged, and so possibly they may not have been well acquainted with the subject, that the Episcopal Church here is not so active as it is in the North. Of course in the North there is greater intellectual and religious activity, just as there is more doing in agriculture, manufactures, and trade; but if there was to be any exception to this rule, I should have expected to have found it in the Episcopal Church in Richmond, because here the people in hearing and conversation far more closely resemble Englishmen than is the case in the North. They speak, too, more frequently, and with more regard, of the old country, its people, and its institutions. Everybody I saw in the churches in Richmond, just as in the churches of the Northern cities, was well-dressed. The humbler classes appeared neither to have churches for themselves nor places in the churches of the rich. This, as everybody knows, is the weak point in the American voluntary system in their great cities.

Heroism and Sufferings of the South.

Richmond possesses just now an especial interest for the traveller, which attaches to no other city in the United States. It is the city against which the North launched so many mighty hosts, and which was defended with such bravery, skill, and success by Lee, Jackson, Stuart, and other good soldiers whose names will live in history. It was in the streets and houses of this city that the civil and military leaders of the unfortunate Confederacy might have been seen. Here it was that those resolutions were debated and formed which enabled them with such slender resources in materials and men to stand at bay so long against the overwhelming myriads of the North.

In talking, too, with Southern men about the war—the soldiers of the North will understand, and even sympathise with the feeling—you are more deeply stirred than in talking with Northern men. Those who throughout wished the North well, and rejoiced in the issue of the struggle, must still feel in this way. These Southern men fought for a greater stake, for a country and for their property, against fearful odds, and at great disadvantages. The issue was to them that they lost everything except their honour. When you talk to these brave men, and hear of the cruel privations and hardships they went through, of their personal sufferings, of the brothers and sons they lost; when you see them writhing under defeat, and paying heavier penalties than vanquished men have ever paid in modern times, you regard them with mingled feelings of admiration and pity, which cannot be awakened by anything you can hear from those whose warfare has been crowned at every point with complete success.

CHAPTER VII.

HOW SOUTHERNERS DESCRIBE THEIR OWN CONDITION—EACH STATE MUST BE TAKEN SEPARATELY—MISSOURI—TENNESSEE—KENTUCKY—TEXAS—VIRGINIA—GEORGIA—FLORIDA—NORTH CAROLINA—ARKANSAS—SOUTH CAROLINA—LOUISIANA—MISSISSIPPI—WILL THE BLACKS GET THE FRANCHISE?—NO PARTY CONSIDERS THEM FIT—THEY WILL HAVE IT FOR A TIME—THIS WILL WEAKEN THE REPUDIATING PARTY—ALSO THE PARTY HOSTILE TO THIS COUNTRY—THE BLACKS WILL NOT ALL BE REPUBLICAN—THE SOUTH SHOULD HAVE BEEN LEFT ALONE TO SETTLE THE LABOUR QUESTION—THE BUREAU SUGGESTED FALSE IDEAS—THERE WILL BE NO WAR OF RACES—WHAT WILL KILL OUT THE BLACKS—THE RATE OF THIS—FUSION PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE—MEANS OF COMMUNICATION IN THE SOUTH INDICATE ITS CONDITION.

The Condition of the South.

I have been frequently asked what I found was the condition of the South? And the question has been put in such a manner as to imply that the speaker regarded the South as a homogeneous entity, and that he supposed that the causes of its suffering—the war and the abolition of slavery—affected every part of it equally. But the reverse of this would be nearer to the truth. The Southern Confederacy was composed of States very differently circumstanced from each other, except in the one point of their system of labour; and the late war, and the overthrow of their system of labour, have affected those different States very differently. It is difficult to understand to how great a degree this is the case without having oneself gone through the South and seen these differences with one’s own eyes. This is what I did, and I shall now attempt to give a short account of what I saw and heard. My route was through Richmond, Petersburg, Weldon, Wilmington, Charleston, Atlanta, Augusta, and Mobile to New Orleans; then up the valley of the Mississippi by way of Jackson, Memphis, and St. Louis. I had a superabundance of introductions for all the places I visited. I had obtained at Washington letters to all the Generals holding commands in the South, and which were in many cases fortified by duplicates from other quarters. I had also brought with me letters from New York and elsewhere to merchants whose firms ranked among the leading houses of the South, and to others who had been through the war; to men who were endeavouring to resuscitate the industry of their fallen States, and to a gentleman who held one of the highest offices in the late Confederate Government. I had therefore sufficient means for obtaining the information I required.

But the question is, what did one see and hear, and what were the conclusions to which one was brought by personal observation? The fact that first forces itself on the eye in the towns, and often in the rural districts you pass through, is that there are multitudes of negroes loafing about, doing nothing. You see them at every station. When you come to make inquiries as to what they are doing, and how they subsist, and generally as to the state of the country, you are told that they are to be found in shoals in every town where there is a Freedman’s Bureau. They expect something from the Bureau; and, like so many coloured Micawbers, are drawn to the towns in the hope that something or other will turn up. So in the towns; but that in the country districts, where there is no power to restrain the idle and ill-disposed, things are in an actively bad condition—that this class has taken to stealing, and has not left on many properties a sweet potato or head of maize, or the pig that would have fed upon them—that they have made a clean sweep of everything edible. As to the state of the whites, that their condition is far more dreadful both to bear and to contemplate; for the blacks, as soon as they please to do the work they are accustomed to, may escape from their present distress, but that tens of thousands of white families, who lately were living in affluence and refinement, not knowing what it was either to want anything or to do anything for themselves, are now in a state of abject penury, positively of starvation; that many are without the means of procuring hominy and salt pork, the humblest fare in the country. And about this point there can be no doubt; for you have as evidence of the statement not only what Southerners say, but, as I afterwards found on returning to New York, the corroborative evidence of those good Northern people who are themselves subscribing largely to keep these destitute Southern families alive. In addition to all this, everyone tells you that he expects the unspeakable horrors of a war of races, which in their opinion cannot be adjourned for more than two years, as the coloured population are becoming day by day more and more dissatisfied with what the great change has hitherto done for them.

The first observation to be made on these statements is, that they cannot be equally applicable to all the very differently circumstanced States of the late Southern Confederacy. For instance, the State of Missouri, which is one of the most fertile in the Union, and by its climate thoroughly adapted to the Northern farm-system, was instantly benefited by the abolition of slavery. Tennessee and Kentucky will soon be in the same position, for both may very well be cultivated by white labour. The slow rate of progress made by the latter, when compared with the State of Ohio, which is only separated from it by the Ohio river, and has a colder climate, and not a more productive soil, is a proof that slavery, in which alone they differed, was the sole cause of its retardation. Texas was even at the moment very slightly affected by the change, and will now become a more attractive field than ever for white immigration. Here cattle-breeding is the chief occupation, which is one that does not at all require slave labour; and here also cotton has for many years been cultivated by the whites without the compulsory aid of the blacks. Virginia having passed through all the distress which is implied by the passage from the estate to the farm system, will emerge from its present distress a far richer and more populous state than it was before. General Lee’s son, and many others of the noble Virginian race, have already set the example, and are themselves holding the plough and doing all the work of the farm with their own hands. How much more pleasing a picture will the valleys and plains of the Old Dominion then present when every hundred acres shall have its homestead, and support a family of the noblest race of mankind! And in truth how sad a picture have they hitherto presented, while held in large estates, rudely cultivated by the enforced toil of that race which was the lowest and most incapable of all! The northern part of this State is very fertile, and is everywhere intersected with navigable streams, such as would enable the farmer to ship his produce generally from his own door. This is what is called the tide-way district of Virginia. And as all vegetables and fruit grown here, in the natural home of the magnolia, are at least a fortnight earlier than they are to the north of the Potomac, they would command the markets of New York and of the Northern cities. This advantage cannot be snatched from them by any more southern State, as it is the combined result of the character of their soil, of their climate, and of their abundant means of water communication.

Position of each State.

In Georgia, particularly in the upper part of the State, where the ground rises considerably, I heard and saw that successful efforts were being made to effect the change from the estate to the farm system; and, instead of trusting entirely to cotton, to try what could be done by growing wheat and maize, the latter to be turned into pork—in short, to do whatever could be done to adapt their industry to existing circumstances. Florida at present is rather occupied by wild deer than by man; but as it is capable of becoming the chief winter sanitarium for the consumption-scourged North, and also of producing tropical fruits and sugar for the whole Union, it has a fair prospect before it. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the writer of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ and sister of the celebrated Brooklyn preacher, has gone to Florida, with her brother, Mr. Charles Beecher, for the purpose of attempting the cultivation of the sugar cane with free labour. North Carolina is endeavouring to follow the example of its neighbours Virginia and Georgia. Arkansas, which was settled chiefly by the sons of Georgian planters, is showing much of the Georgian spirit. In Alabama great efforts had been made to re-establish the cultivation of cotton on the basis of freedom; and things were promising well, when at the end of 1867 the price of cotton, by a concurrence of adverse accidents, fell to 15 cents or 7½2d. at Liverpool. This depression to a point below the cost of production in any part of the world was felt, I believe, by most of those who attend to these matters, to be only a temporary mishap. The same cotton was selling at the end of the following March at 25 cents—a fully remunerative price; but in most cases the planters had not been able to hold, so that the low price they were obliged to accept has ruined many, and discouraged more. I was told by a Tennessee cotton planter that a price of 20 cents would have contained an ample margin for profit on the cotton he had himself grown, on a large scale, with hired black labour. His contract with those he employed was that he should give them high wages, with more than a proportionate deduction for every hour of absence from work.

Distress in South Carolina.

There now remain unmentioned only the three States of South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi. As far as I could judge, South Carolina was utterly and hopelessly crushed. Its best estates were in the Sea Islands, which, as they were very fertile, and their produce fetched exceptionally high prices, were densely inhabited with blacks; in many of them, however, no white man could live, or even pass a night with impunity. Under these circumstances it might have been expected that as soon as the negroes were emancipated they would take possession of the land in these islands. And so it happened in most of the unhealthy ones; while in those that were healthy the original proprietors equally lost their property by confiscation or forfeiture, or by being ousted in some way or other. The result of this, and of the other losses that arose out of the war, and the utter overthrow of the Confederacy, is that throughout South Carolina the most abject and irrecoverable poverty reigns precisely where formerly there was most abundant wealth. I heard of one gentleman, who before the war had been unable to spend the whole of his large income, being now a porter in a dry goods store; and of another, who formerly had possessed everything which riches could supply, dying in such penury that his family had to beg of their friends contributions for his funeral. For this State there appears to be no resurrection, except in some new order of things, under which a new set of proprietors will occupy the land, and cultivate it with Northern capital, and somewhat in the Northern fashion.

In Louisiana also things were so bad that it was hardly possible to see how they could be worse. In New Orleans I found families who formerly had lived in noble mansions, and exercised a grand hospitality, now occupying quiet lodgings. In some instances I knew of several families clubbing together, and living as it were in common. But here there was a great difference—hope was not dead. They talked confidently of the re-establishment, at all events, of their sugar industry, and of the trade of the city. I saw several sugar estates not far from New Orleans, the very costly machinery upon which had been destroyed during the war. I was told—though, of course, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the figures—that the machinery had been broken up and burnt on twelve hundred out of the seventeen hundred sugar estates of this State.

As far as I could see and hear, the State of Mississippi also was in a very bad way. This seemed to arise from two causes. A larger proportion of the white inhabitants than is the case elsewhere belong to the class called in the South ‘mean whites,’—that is, persons without property, education, or enterprise. And then the planters are unable to borrow what is requisite for enabling them to work their plantations. No one will lend them a cent. This is but a natural consequence of the act of repudiation they adopted at the instigation of Mr. J. Davis, late President of the Southern Confederacy, and whom this State has either the honour or the dishonour of reckoning among her best known men.

This, however, is not the only light in which the South has to be regarded. There is the question of political as well as of industrial reconstruction, and the former is now throughout all the North shaking the very foundations of the Union, and setting the son against the father, and the brother against the brother. The question is being dealt with entirely and exclusively on party considerations, and this Mr. Thaddeus Stevens and other leaders of the Republican party have acknowledged in speech and print. They say universal suffrage, whatever the consequences to the Southern planter, must be conceded to the blacks, in order that the South may return to the Union, not as of old, on the Democratic side, but on the Republican, as the present exigencies of that party and of the Union require. Nothing can secure this except the black vote. All considerations of the fitness of the late slave for the exercise of the franchise is thus dismissed, and nothing insisted on but what is needed by the necessities of the dominant party.

The Negro Franchise.

Of course no man who knows anything of the capacity and of the history of the black race, even if he be of the Republican party, abstractedly thinks that they are qualified for taking part in the government of the country, and of legislating for and governing many of the Southern States.

Will it then be conferred upon them? It may be taken for granted that it will. Many talk of a secret compact—an underground railway, as it is called on the other side—between the President and the Southern leaders, to defeat by their joint efforts the Congressional plan, he being rewarded by the support of the South, when, as Democratic States, it returns to Congress. If such a compact has any existence, it is very unlikely to have any results. As the blacks have been admitted to the conventions throughout the South, for forming the new constitutions under which they are to exercise the franchise, and as the present Congress is determined that they shall have it, one does not see what is to prevent its extension to them. Whether the possession of the boon will be continued to them is another point. But be that as it may, we must, I think, regard the immediate possession of the franchise by the blacks as a certain event, and consider what are likely to be its consequences.

Its first and most obvious effect will be that which it was intended to produce—the weakening, and perhaps the exclusion from power for some time, of the Democratic party. Will this be an evil or an advantage to the Union? As far as I am able to judge, an unqualified advantage. The Democratic candidate of to-day for the Presidency, Mr. Pendleton of Ohio, and so of course the Democratic party itself are in favour of a partial, but very considerable, repudiation of the debt. This would be so disastrous a policy, that no one who wishes well to the Union can wish well to the Democrats. But this plank in their platform may be reshaped or entirely removed. Their permanent distinguishing principle is resistance to the policy of strengthening the central Government at the expense of the liberties and privileges of the separate States, whereas the reverse of this is the distinguishing principle of the great Republican party. It is evident that the Republican policy is that which is best adapted for commanding and calling out for immediate use the resources of the nation, and so during their great war it was decidedly in the ascendent. And since the war, the tendency of legislation and of administration has been in that direction: and this tendency will probably become stronger, at all events it will be more needed, as the United States increase in area and population.

Who are necessarily Hostile to England.

Englishmen also may be reminded that almost all the abuse and insults Americans have heaped upon us have been the manufacture of Democratic brains, and, till Fenianism arose, came chiefly from Southern men. We cannot wish success to that party from which we have never received fair and courteous—I would even say, rational—treatment, and which now encloses in its bosom all our deadliest enemies in the United States. If formerly we regarded the accusations they brought against us, and the motives they imputed to us, as the hallucinations of disordered minds, we must now expect still livelier sallies, in order that they may not fall below the mark of Fenian animosity. In any difficulty which may arise between this country and the United States, the Democratic leaders are precluded, for the sake of the Irish vote, from recognising right or reason; and they must go on in this groove. The Republicans are under no such demoralising necessity. Of course it would be unwise in a traveller or a diplomatist to show decided preferences for any particular party; but it is well to know where you are likely to find friends. The manufacturing and commercial element of the Republican party is alone disposed by circumstances to feel ill-will towards us. But all this will die out as soon as the good sense of the American people has made the discovery of the degree to which they are crippled and impoverished by the pestilent heresy of protection.

But to go back to the subject of the black vote. It does not appear to me that this will always be given on the Republican side. The African will be too ignorant to judge for himself; and though he will never want for Northern advisers, he will have others nearer home, and in some cases will, I think, be influenced by those who employ him; and not unfrequently he may even wish, as the negro is the most imitative of all the races of mankind, to vote, not as his sable brethren, but as his old master votes. The whites will act as one man; the negroes will never be able to do so; and in States where the colours are pretty evenly balanced, a few deserters would incline the scale in favour of the old Southern party.

I mentioned that while in the office of the Freedmen’s Bureau at Washington, before I entered the South, it struck me that its establishment could not be justified on grounds of wisdom. What I saw in the South confirmed this supposition. Mischief, I thought, had been done by it. The whites might safely, and ought in good policy to, have been left to settle the labour question with their old slaves. They quite understood that it would be ruin to themselves if they failed to satisfy them, and that they could only do this by making them feel that they were fairly and kindly treated. The future of the whites entirely depended on this; and they saw the necessity of it so clearly that they might, without any interference on the part of the North, which could do no good, have been left to arrange with the blacks how the new system was to be worked. These were the two parties to the new labour-and-wages contract; and the Freedmen’s Bureau could have no voice in the matter.

Impolicy of the Freedmen’s Bureau.

The industrial question evidently came first, because it is on labour primarily that the existence of a nation depends. But the Bureau establishes itself in some town; and what does this mean? That the blacks need protection—of course from their old masters, for there are no other people on whom to cast this imputation. And what does the Bureau itself give out that it will do? It proposes to educate the negro. This implies that the first thing to be attended to is not labour, but something else, and that a matter which in the order of nature occupies only a secondary place. It implies too that during the time education is being carried on, labour must be suspended, for one cannot be in the school and in the field at the same time. And what is the use and value of education in the eyes of the negro? Just this—that it will fit him for the situation of a clerk, or for keeping a shop. At all events it is no preparation for field labour. In these ways it appears that the Bureau implanted, at a most critical time, false and mischievous ideas which will inflict much suffering both on blacks and whites, and which it will be very difficult to counteract. There would have been no reason why the Government should not have sent, without any flourish of trumpets, a commissioner into each State of the South, to see that the blacks were fairly treated, if the whites had anywhere shown a disposition to treat them otherwise.

As I have already intimated, I frequently heard Southern people expressing an apprehension that a war of races was imminent. Their reasons were that the disappointment felt by the blacks at the smallness of their gains from emancipation was constantly deepening, and that their posture towards the whites was becoming very unsatisfactory. It is impossible, of course, to foresee what ignorant and excitable Africans may do. Still I think a war of races a most improbable event. The blacks have sense enough to know that there would be no chance of their coming victorious out of such a conflict; for they would be outnumbered by the whites, if all the Southern States are regarded as a single unit, which they most assuredly would be for the purposes of such a war; and they would be comparatively unarmed, without resources, and without organisation. They also know that, even if they were able to exterminate all the whites in the South, they would gain nothing by this; for that then they would only be putting themselves in the position of the Indian races, to be ousted from the land whenever it suited the convenience of the North. And they are well aware that in any rising they might contemplate they could expect no help from the Northern force that was sent at the end of the war into each State of the South to coerce the whites and protect the blacks. The feelings of these men, I believe, are well known; at all events, I heard one of them in a railway car in the South give expression to his own feelings on this point, and he did it so as to include his comrades. ‘They have sent us down here,’ his words were, ‘to look after the whites and take care of the blacks. But that is not what we are going to do. We are not going to help niggers to cut white men’s throats. If they move a finger against the whites, we are not going to mind colonels or generals, but will shoot every d—d nigger in the place.’ Nor is it possible to conceive the existence of any other feeling; for in no class in the United States is the antipathy to the negro race so strong as in that from which the army is recruited. This the negro knows very well.

The Blacks must Die Out.

But though I think that no war of this kind is to be dreaded, which would make very short work of the blacks, yet one cannot but think that their eventual extermination by moral and economical causes is inevitable. They have from the dawn of history been the chief export of Africa, but have never anywhere been capable of existing in a state of freedom on the same ground as any superior race. The superior race gets possession of all the means of living, all the trades, all the professions, all the land, and the inferior race is thus pushed out of existence. If Congress were to enact, and future Congresses to maintain the enactment, that south of the Ohio and Potomac no white man was ever to do any kind of field labour, or to follow the trades of carpentering or bricklaying, of shoemaking or tailoring, then there would be means provided for the subsistence of the black race, and it might possibly be kept up even in a state of freedom; but as none of these occupations will eventually be left them, their doom is as certain as anything can be in the affairs of men. Already, if a builder introduces into his yard, or places on any work in which he is engaged, a single coloured carpenter or mason, every person in his employ will strike work unless the man of colour, however unexceptionable he may be in his conduct, and however skilful in his trade, is instantly dismissed. All the stevedores at New Orleans were a few years ago of the coloured race. Some whites having taken to the employment, began to insist on the dismissal of all coloured people; and now there is not to be seen a single coloured stevedore on the quays of New Orleans. And just so eventually it must be with field labour. The South must be completely, or at the least largely, cultivated on the Northern farm-system: and then it will be seen that the whites will no more tolerate the companionship of the blacks in field labour than in anything else. A people who have not the means of living must die out, and so emancipation comes to be extinction.

Those who believe in the obliteration of the black race will speculate on the time required for such a consummation. Suppose then each generation is only able to leave behind it half its own numbers, this would bring the blacks to the vanishing point at about the end of a century, by which time the white population of the United States will probably outnumber that of the whole of Europe. The rate of decrease, however, may be much more rapid. Persons now living can recollect the time when a considerable quarter of the city of Boston was occupied by these people; but now, without emigration, they have almost entirely disappeared. This is attributed by the people of Boston to several causes. In a state of freedom they bring up very few children. The mortality also among them is very great, especially from consumption; and then there is the fact that in the second, or at latest the third generation, the mixed race becomes quite incapable of continuing itself. These facts are distressing to contemplate; but nothing is gained by refusing to look facts in the face, of whatever character they may be. It is an analogous fact that the red man has been swept away from the face of the continent that was his own, all the way from Boston to the Rocky Mountains; and the work of annihilation will soon be complete from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But this ordinance of nature, that a civilised and a savage race cannot coexist on the same soil, is no reason why the inferior race should be treated with unfairness, unkindness, or contempt.

Fusion of Races Impossible.

As to the fusion of the two races, history assures us that nothing of the kind has ever been accomplished, and that it is physically impossible. And it is fortunate for the progress of mankind that nature has put her veto upon it; otherwise that portion of the highest, and most advanced, and most richly endowed race of the human family, which has been placed on the grandest and most favourable stage for fresh development, would be sunk and degraded by admixture with the lowest race of all. The fact that in the long centuries during which the Greeks and the Romans occupied Western Asia and Northern Africa, they were unable to produce a mixed race capable of maintaining itself, may be suggested for the consideration of those who are advocating a scheme of ‘miscegenation’ between the Anglo-Saxon and the negro.

If we form our estimate of the condition of the South from considering the condition of its means of communication, we shall find it bad indeed. While I was there, some of its main lines of railway were running only one passenger train a-day. And, notwithstanding the infrequency of the trains, I observed in all the districts I passed through that there were very few passengers, and very little traffic. What ruin and desolation may be read in this single fact, when one remembers that a few years back the value of the raw produce exported from the Southern States amounted to between fifty and sixty million pounds a-year, and was greater than anything else of the kind in the world. What a vast amount of travelling must such a vast amount of business have given rise to! for not only was fifty or sixty million pounds’ worth of cotton, rice, sugar, turpentine, and tobacco to be sent out of the country, but there was also an equal value in food and manufactured goods to be brought in; for in the South they hardly grew or manufactured anything, except what they exported. Everything they consumed was imported. One cannot but contrast the stirring life which all this must have caused in every town, harbour, and railway, with their present deadness. The rails from Petersburg to Weldon are very much out of order, but one despairs of being able to convey in words an adequate idea of the state of disorder in which they are between the latter town and Wilmington. It was over this line, of 162 miles in length, that, during the war, the blockade-run goods and munitions of war were forwarded to Richmond and the front. At that time there were but small means for repairing or replacing worn-out rails. And as the trade of Wilmington is now dwindled to nothing, and this road is off the main line of communication with the South, there have as yet been no inducements or funds to set it right. The jolting on it is so great that the passengers are incessantly being thrown to a height of several inches from their seat; and that at last produces in some the effect which a gale at sea would have upon them. I believe that no English railway carriage with only four, or at most six wheels, could keep on such rails; but American carriages, having never less than eight wheels, have a much firmer hold.

CHAPTER VIII.

FIRST SIGHT OF A COTTON FIELD—SPANISH MOSS—A NIGHT ON THE RAILS—MANY KINDS OF SAMENESS IN AMERICA—MAIZE—ORDER OF SUCCESSION IN THE FOREST—ITS EXTENT—EVERGREENS IN THE SOUTHERN FOREST—POOR LAND IN THE SOUTH MAY BE MORE PROFITABLE THAN RICH LAND IN THE WEST—DEADNESS OF CHARLESTON—ITS HOTELS—A CHARLESTON SAM-WELLER—THE NAPLES OF THE UNITED STATES—FEW ENGLISH TRAVELLERS—SUFFERINGS OF SOUTHERN FAMILIES—WANT OF SCHOOLS—HOW THE DEFICIENCY IS BEING SUPPLIED—BLACKS SHOULD BE PUT ON SAME FOOTING AS WHITES—DIALOGUE WITH BLACK MEMBER OF CONVENTION—ANOTHER CONVENTION—ABLE BLACK MEMBER—SOUTH CAROLINA ORPHAN ASYLUM.

First Sight of a Cotton Field.

One cannot behold for the first time what one has heard and read about all one’s life without some little emotion. I felt this when I saw for the first time a field of cotton. It was between Petersburg and Weldon. There is not much to attract attention in the sight itself as seen in winter, when there is nothing to look at but a large enclosure of dead bushes, each about the size of an ordinary gooseberry-bush, only with fewer branches, and every branch leafless, straight, and black, with every here and there a pod of cotton, that was missed at the time of harvesting, showing its white wool, with which the whole field is spotted, ‘This insignificant plant, then,’ I said to myself, ‘is cotton; and this is the way in which it is cultivated. The plant which has created so much wealth, and caused so much bloodshed; which was the main support of slavery, and so the main cause of the late war; which clothes so large a portion of mankind; which has built so many ships and factories; upon which so much of the prosperity of England is founded; and which has affected so largely the commerce of the world; and the influence of which is now felt in every quarter of the globe.

The traveller has pleasure in recalling moments of this kind. I shall not easily forget the delight I felt at the first sight of the Spanish moss. It was in the first gray of the morning, and I was looking out from the railway car, shading off with my hands the light of the lamps that were still burning, that I might be the better able to see through the window, when I beheld for the first time this curious parasite, of which one had seen such frequent mention, hanging in slender streamers of three or four feet in length from the boughs of the trees. I immediately left my seat, and went to the outside of the car. I found we were passing through a cedar swamp on a tressle-bridge of many miles in length. We passed through several such swamps in the course of that day, and wherever this was the case, the trees, of which the swamps were just as full as the dry land, were always covered with this moss. Old trees were entirely enveloped in it to the extremities of their branches. As you approach the Gulf, the trees on the dry land as well as those in swamps are shrouded in it. Its streamers are occasionally two yards long near the coast. It is of a pale ashy colour, and gives you the idea of the accumulated cobwebs of a thousand years.

A Night on the Rails.

American ladies having been well broken in to the publicity of their system of railway travelling, make the best of it, and seem quite unconcerned about what would appear to those unused to it its disagreeable incidents. Never but with one exception did I pass a night on an American railway without finding a sleeping-car attached to the train. It was in the South, and there happened to be about forty people in the car, of whom eight or ten were married ladies travelling with their husbands: like everybody one sees in America, they were young, and of course, as all American young ladies are, were better-looking than the generality of the fair sex. English ladies would probably, under circumstances of so much publicity, have unnecessarily and unwisely endeavoured to keep awake. But their American sisters passed the night as comfortably as might be, each laying her head on her husband’s shoulder for a pillow, and with their arms round each other, or with their hands locked together. In the morning, when the train stopped an hour for breakfast, they made their toilette in the carriage, there being generally abundance of water in a railway car, with a mug to drink from, and a basin to wash in. They appeared all to have with them brushes and combs, and towels and soap.

In travelling in the United States one is very much struck with the great amount of sameness that is met with in many things. In outward nature this is very observable. You go from New York to Charleston on what appears to be one level. Throughout these nine hundred miles you have no cuttings or embankments; at all events I do not recollect having had to go through or to go round a single hill. Again, you may go up the valley of the Mississippi on another longer level; and if you start from Chicago to cross the Prairie and Plains, you cross another thousand miles of level ground. Again, throughout all these long levels, adding to them the space between Charleston and New Orleans, there is in the soil a great sameness of colour. Except in the black soil of the Prairies, and occasionally in the river bottoms—of which latter you see little in railway travelling—yellow, of slightly varying tints, is almost universal, whether the soil be sandy or clayey. And then the forest which clothes this soil of the same colour and of the same level, is also everywhere itself the same. The predominant trees are fortunately the unfailing pine, and almost equally unfailing oak. Sameness, too, but not quite to the same extent, characterises the Great Lake region. There are glorious exceptions to this general sameness in the Alleghanies, the Rocky Mountains, and California; but these are not the situations in which the great masses of the population have formed their homes. De Tocqueville and others have observed a similar sameness in the ideas and customs of the Americans themselves; and this they attribute to the completeness with which the principles of democracy have been carried out both in their polity and social arrangements. I have already noticed the extraordinary sameness of their language, which, throughout the whole continent, admits of no dialectical difference and, in passing, how great are the changes this single fact implies have taken place in the conditions of human life, when we recollect that in that little plat of ground of ancient Greece every little town had a dialect of its own. The universality with which any form of expression, any social practice, or even any state of feeling, is abandoned or adopted throughout the vast Union, is to those who observe these matters a very interesting fact in American civilisation. The extent to which they are readers of newspapers is not the cause of this, though of course it somewhat contributes to it. The real cause is the urgent and uncontrollable desire in every American to talk, and think, and live, and dress, and feel, and to do everything just in the same way as other people; as we say here, to be in the fashion, only that they apply the idea of fashion to everything. Changes of this kind are wrought in America almost as if by magic. There is in this a great balance of good, although it is so great a check upon individuality, because it keeps the whole people advancing together as one man.

Maize.

In the agricultural reports of the United States maize is set down for so many million bushels as almost to transcend the power of belief on this side the water. How can so much be grown? how can so much be used? are questions which occur to us. But after one has seen something of America the feeling is changed into one of wonder at the inexhaustible merits of this grain, and of its incalculable utility to man; and one ceases to be surprised at finding it grown everywhere throughout the Union on so large a scale. It is quite impossible that America could have risen to her present greatness without it. While the hardy pioneer of civilisation was subduing the forest, which reached from the Atlantic to the valley of the Mississippi, there was nothing that could have met his wants as maize did. As soon as he had felled the trees for his log cabin, before the ground was cleared, or prepared sufficiently for any other crop, he would put in his seed for a crop of maize, which would be ready in a few months, perhaps before his log house was finished, and would supply with food his family, and pigs, and any other stock that he might have, till the next harvest. And when ripe, it did not, like wheat and other grain, require immediate harvesting; for nature had provided it with a thick strong stem to support it against the wind, and with a sheath which kept it effectually from the rain. And its yield, as it thus grew among the stumps of these forest clearings, was very great. And now that the land has been cleared, it still holds its ground as the chief crop almost everywhere, and apparently as almost the only grain crop in many districts. It is everywhere largely used as human food in a great variety of ways. It is the winter food of the cattle, horses, and mules, which latter do all the heavy work from Kentucky to New Orleans. The pork crop, too, of the United States, which is one of its largest items of produce, is only a certain portion of the maize crop in another form. The same may be said of the enormous quantity of poultry produced everywhere throughout the country. It is only transformed maize. Of all grains it is the easiest to grow, the easiest to harvest, the easiest to keep, the easiest to transport. It is good for man and for beast. It will grow on any soil, and will yield in the rich bottoms of Ohio and Illinois a hundred bushels an acre—and on some of these lands it has been grown for twenty years in succession—and on the poor sands of South Carolina will yield between twenty and thirty bushels, a quantity that is highly remunerative, where the land costs nothing, and an old negro and an old mule are all that are required for its culture. In America a head of maize should be the national emblem.

The Forest.

It did not strike me that the succession of trees in clearing forest land was quite so regular as is commonly stated. I saw, for instance, a different succession on the two sides of the same fence. The original forest on both sides had been exclusively pine. Where the forest had been entirely cleared off, the succession was again pine. But where the large trees only had been removed the succession was oak. This went some way towards showing that the amount of light and air decided which was to come up.

In the Carolinas the forest is, along the railway, everywhere more or less continuous: still it is all owned, as appears from the fencing. The better trees are everywhere being cut for building, or fencing, or firing; and the larger pines have all been tapped for turpentine. One is surprised, at first, to see so little land cultivated along the line of railway. The reason however is that, as a general rule, the good land is along the banks of the streams which run from the Alleghanies to the sea, that is, from west to east, while the railway runs from north to south, so that in travelling along it you only get occasional glimpses of the way in which culture is in these parts beginning, for it is hardly more, to encroach on the forest.

In these latitudes the forest becomes a little diversified by the appearance of several evergreens. One of the commonest is the evergreen or live-oak. I frequently saw from the cars a small tree having very much the appearance of our bay. There is an occasional magnolia. There are several evergreen shrubs, and some creepers. In swampy places there are long reaches of cane-brake. This is the Bambusa gracilis, which we sometimes see in this country in gardens, in spots where moisture and shelter can be combined. These cane- or bamboo-brakes are evergreen impervious jungles about twenty feet high. But the most interesting form to Northern eyes is that of the little palmetto palm. Its fan-like leaf, however, is all that can be seen of it, for its trunk scarcely rises above the ground. In some of the swamps around New Orleans it and a kind of iris are the most conspicuous plants.

The question of the colonisation or resettlement of the South by the North is simply one of £. s. d. Will it be more profitable for a Northern man to grow cotton in the South, or wheat, pork, beef, &c. in the West? People say Northern emigrants will never go to the poor lands of the South till all the good land of the West is taken up. This is quite a wrong way of putting the case between the two. A man would not go to the South to grow wheat, beef, and pork. That can be done cheaper in the fertile West. But it is not impossible that an equal amount of capital and labour embarked in the cotton culture of the South might produce a greater return. In that case the poor soils of the South might be preferred to the rich soils of the West.

One infers how much more completely the fabric of society rested on slavery in South Carolina than it did in Virginia, by the fact that three fourths of the devastation caused by the great fire at Richmond have been already repaired, while nothing had been done to repair the damages done by the great fire at Charleston, which destroyed the whole of the centre of the city. Literally not one single brick has yet been laid upon another for this purpose. There stand the blackened remains of churches, residences, and stores, just as if it were a city of the dead.

A Charleston Sam Weller.

Still, even here I was surprised at the number and magnitude of the hotels. I had taken up my quarters at the Mills House, where I suppose there were three hundred guests. I saw another, the Pavilion, quite as large; and I was told of a third, the Charleston Hotel, which was described to me as being much larger than either of the two just mentioned.

Before I reached Charleston there had been some wet weather, and the streets were muddy. I therefore used two pair of boots the first day I was in the place. The next morning the Sam Weller of the hotel refused to clean, or as he called it, to shine, more than one pair. I remonstrated with him, but it was to no purpose, as he was quite persuaded of the force of his own argument, ‘that if everyone in the house was to wear two pair of boots a-day his work would be doubled.’ Boots was a Paddy, and, since his naturalisation in the land of freedom, had become sure that he had as much right to form opinions for himself, express them, and act upon them, as the President himself. I carried my grievance to the manager. He promised redress, but the boots were not cleaned, that is to say, not in the hotel. I mention this as it was the only instance of insubordination I met with in this class in my tour through the United States.

Nature has done much for Charleston. Its fine harbour is formed by the junction of two large navigable rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper. It is free from yellow fever, the scourge of Mobile and New Orleans. The orange and oleander grow in the spaces between its streets and its houses. Hitherto it has been the chief winter resort of those in the Northern States who were unable to bear the severity of their own climate, and of those from the West Indies who were unable to bear the heat of theirs. Thus the victims both of heat and of cold met in Charleston, and each found in its delightfully tempered atmosphere exactly what he sought. And the society of these visitors, combined with that of the rich proprietors of the State who had their residences here, made it a very gay and pleasant place. Of course America, hard-worked and consumption-scourged above all other nations, ought to have its Naples; and it will be equally a matter of course that the Naples of America should temper gaiety with trade, and combine work with idleness, and should not be entirely a population of do-nothings, of Lazaroni, and of pleasure-seekers. Still, the feeling that came over one at Charleston was, How far off this place is from the world! It was not the distance that caused this feeling, for it is only nine hundred miles from New York, while Chicago, where one has no feelings of this kind, is three hundred miles further off. Perhaps fifty years hence, when probably a busy white population will be cultivating the land around it, there will be nothing in the place to suggest the thought that, when there, one is out of the world.

Few English Travellers.

I was surprised at finding how few Englishmen had, at all events of late, been travelling in the Southern States. At Charleston, in a dozen folio pages of names in the guest-book of the hotel, which I looked at for this purpose, I could only see one entry from England. At Richmond I only found two English names in forty folio pages, and the address appended to these two names was Manchester. In the North I heard that Lord Morley, and Lord Camperdown, and Mr. Cowper—I do not know whether the Right Hon. W. Cowper was meant—had lately been through that part of the country inspecting the common schools. But during my tour through the United States, I did not fall in with a single English traveller, nor did I fall in with one either on my outward or homeward voyage. All my fellow-passengers on both occasions were Americans. Of course in the summer—though it may be questioned whether that is, so decidedly as most people suppose, the best season for travelling in the United States—I might not have found my countrymen so conspicuous by their absence. And yet there is no part of the world which Englishmen ought to find so instructive and interesting. What is there in the world more worthy of investigation than the existing condition of things, and the events that are now taking place, upon this great continent, which contains within itself everything that is necessary for the well-being of man, which is indeed a world in itself, and which stands in the same relation towards the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that this little island does towards the Irish and North seas; and which, whatever else may befall, will at all events be thoroughly Anglo-Saxon?

Wherever one went in the South, one heard instances of the hardships, the deadliness, and the evils of the late war. Of the family of which I saw most at Richmond, the three sons had been sent to the army. Of these three one was killed, and another maimed for life. These were men who were no longer young, and many a day in their long marches, and when before the enemy, their commissariat having been utterly exhausted, they had had nothing to eat but a few handfuls of horse corn. There were regiments that did not bring home one fourth of the number with which they originally went out; the rest having died of disease, or fallen in battle. In the family of which I saw most at Charleston there were two sons, the eldest only eighteen years of age. They both enlisted in Hampton’s cavalry, for all above the age of sixteen had to go. And so again at New Orleans the gentleman to whom I was especially consigned, and who had held the commission of colonel in the Confederate army, and had been a rich merchant of the place, told me that he and his whole regiment were frequently without shoes, and that on one occasion he went barefooted for six weeks continuously.

Who are now Schoolmasters in the South.

One of the most lamentable results of the great cataclysm that ensued on the close of the war, has been that almost a complete end has been put to the education of Southern children. Formerly many were sent to the North, but now parents have neither the inclination nor the means to continue this practice. In the South itself schools did not abound; and of those which existed before the war the greater number have followed the fate of so many other Southern things. Some effort is being made to remedy this. In one of the Southern cities I had been advised to call on a gentleman who would be able to give me information on these matters. I found him at last, after some trouble, teaching a private school of his own. He was engaged in giving a French lesson. I remember him as a remarkably handsome and well-mannered man. On my saying something which implied astonishment at finding him so employed, he replied that his profession was that of a lawyer; but that since the war he had not been allowed to practise, because he was unable to take the oaths which the North had imposed on all who had held any office in the South during the war. But he added, ‘I am not in bad company, for many of the best men in the South, beginning with General Lee, are employed in teaching.’

While I was in the South the conventions were sitting. These were assemblies elected under the new system of universal suffrage, including the blacks, for the purpose of drawing up new constitutions for their several States. Of course where the negroes were numerically in the ascendant, the majority of the convention were either negroes or negro nominees. I felt a repugnance to witness this degradation of the whites; still it would have been foolish to have let pass the opportunity for seeing what indications the blacks gave of fitness for equal political power; and, as the governor of the State I was then in offered to take me to the convention and introduce me to some of the members, I accepted the offer. We had been talking on the irrepressible subject of the negro, and I had said I thought the blacks ought to be put on exactly the same footing as the whites. He had assented to this idea, as it sounded very much like what he was there to maintain. But I am not quite sure that he altogether approved of my explanation, when I went on to say that what I meant was, ‘that the negro should be left to work or starve, just as the white man was in New York, in England, and everywhere else; that I did not at all see why the negro should be petted, and patted on the back, and have soup given to him, while he was doing nothing, and have expectations raised in his mind that something would soon be done for him, which treatment could not in the end be of any advantage at all to him, while it was very costly to the whites.’ His reply to this was the offer I just mentioned to take me to the convention and introduce me to some of the members who were among the leading partisans of the negro race in the State.

I was present for two hours in this convention; during that time no speeches were made; I was therefore unable to judge in this manner of the intelligence and animus of the black members. I did not, however, leave the convention without a short conversation with one of them. He was a man of unmixed African blood, and, seeing me conversing with the white whom he regarded as the head of his party, he left his place in the house, and came up to me and held out his hand. I extended mine in return. On taking hold of it, he accosted me with the words,

‘Sir, you then believe that the franchise is a God-given right.’

I said ‘that was not my belief.’

‘Why?’ he asked, rather astonished.

‘Because,’ I said, ‘it was given to you by Mr. Lincoln and the North.’

‘No, sir,’ he replied, ‘it is a God-given right.’

The Southern Conventions.

‘If it is a God-given right,’ I rejoined, ‘how does it come to pass that so few of mankind have ever possessed it?’

He then inquired what limitation I would put to the ‘right.’ I told him that I did not think it wise or just that those who had no property should possess the power of imposing taxes on those who had property, and deciding how the proceeds of the taxes were to be disposed of; and that the argument would be strengthened, if these persons without property were also without the knowledge requisite for enabling them to read the constitution of their State. Instead of replying to this, he returned to his seat.

I give the above dialogue as a specimen of what are a negro’s ideas on the great subject of the day in that part of the world. I afterwards heard that the gentleman who had been speaking to me was the most prominent negro in the State.

In the convention I have just spoken of there was nothing remarkable in the appearance of the members of either race. In another convention, however, where I spent a morning, this was not the case; for I did not see a single white who had at all the air of a legislator, or even the appearance of a respectable member of society. Here I heard a man who was black, or as nearly black as one could be, make several speeches. He assumed a kind of leadership, or at all events of authority in the assembly, to which, as far as I could judge, he was most fully entitled. He certainly was the best speaker I heard in the United States, or, indeed, ever heard anywhere else, as far as his knowledge went. He spoke with perfect ease, and complete confidence in himself, and at the same time quite in good taste. He said nothing but what appeared to be most reasonable, proper, and fair to both races. He was for putting an end at once to all ideas and hopes of confiscation on the part of the blacks, and to the fears of the whites on the subject, by some authoritative declaration; for he believed that these hopes and fears were giving false expectations to his own race, and causing much uncertainty in the minds of the whites, which prevented their setting about the re-establishment of cultivation on their estates. He had a good musical voice, and he could vary its tones at his pleasure. His thoughts were clearly conceived and clearly put. I must not, however, omit to mention that, though the traces of white blood were so slight in the colour of his skin, he had most completely the head and features of the European—a high forehead, a thin straight nose, and a small chin and month. His hair was woolly in the extreme. I afterwards understood that the whites in this convention, who were so greatly his inferiors in debate, were almost all Northern adventurers and ‘mean whites’; the whole of the upper class having declined to take any part in forming the new constitution.

South Carolina Orphan Asylum.

I was taken over the South Carolina Orphan Asylum. It is a large fine building in the town of Charleston, with well-kept and extensive grounds around it for the children to play in. The number of children who are within the walls is two hundred. They are fed, clothed, educated, and placed out in life by the institution. The expenses were formerly divided between the State, a numerous body of subscribers, and the interest that accrued from some very considerable bequests. But during the war these investments went the way of all other investments in the South. They were placed in Confederate bonds, which are now worth nothing. Pretty nearly, therefore, the whole of the burden of maintaining the asylum has since been met by the State alone, in its present condition of extreme impoverishment. All the children from the different class rooms were summoned together for my inspection, into a large room somewhat resembling a theatre, in which they are taught music and some other subjects collectively. Small and great, they all appeared to be very well under control. They seemed also to be happy and healthy, but with more (which in those who lived all the year at Charleston could hardly have been otherwise) of the Southern lily than of the Northern rose in their complexions. As might have been expected, there was not the animation and zeal one sees in Northern schools, worked at the highest of high pressures. But it is a noble institution: in it Mr. Memminger, the first Secretary of the Confederate Treasury, was brought up.

CHAPTER IX.

COLD IN SOUTH CAROLINA AND GEORGIA—CURIOUS APPEARANCE OF ICE—TIME NOT VALUED IN THE SOUTH—WHY AMERICANS WILL NOT CULTIVATE THE OLIVE—TEA MIGHT GROW IN GEORGIA—ATLANTA BOUND TO BE GREAT—CATTLE BADLY OFF IN WINTER—A VIRGINIAN’S RECOLLECTION OF THE WAR—HIS POSITION AND PROSPECTS—APPROACH TO MOBILE BY THE ALABAMA RIVER—MOBILE—THE HARBOUR—WHY NO AMERICAN SHIPS THERE—A DAY ON THE GULF—PONCHATRAIN—NEW ORLEANS—FRENCH SUNDAY MARKET—FRENCH APPEARANCE OF TOWN—A NEW ORLEANS GENTLEMAN ON THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH—BISHOP ELECT OF GEORGIA—MISSISSIPPI—THE CEMETERIES—EXPENSIVENESS OF EVERYTHING—TRANSATLANTIC NEWS—FUSION OF NORTH AND SOUTH—FRENCH HALF-BREEDS—ROADS—THE BEST IN THE WORLD—APPROACH TO NEW ORLEANS BY LAND—SUGAR PLANTATIONS—A PRAYER FOR A BROTHER MINISTER.

I left Charleston at midday. It was a cold day, but there was no ice in the town. A few miles out of the town, on the Augusta railway, it was freezing sharply, the railway-side ditches were coated with ice, and the ground was white with hoarfrost wherever the sun had not touched it. I supposed that the warmer air from the bay had kept the frost out of the town. All through that day in travelling as far as Augusta, and for the next two days, I found the frost in the country between Augusta and Atlanta very severe. We should have considered them unusually cold days in England; and yet there was not a cloud to intercept a ray of the Southern sun. To my sensations it was colder than I found it on any other occasion during my tour in the United States. I mention this because it is satisfactory to collect indications of large districts of the South being adapted to white labour. No doubt the summer throughout this region is very warm, but here it was cold enough to brace up relaxed constitutions.

The Olive unfitted for America.

I here saw an effect of frost, which, I suppose from differences in radiation and evaporation, is never seen in England. Everywhere along the railway embankments and cuttings, the ice appeared to have shot out in rays or spikes, three or four inches in length, and then to have bent over. When the rays were shorter they remained straight. I asked a gentleman how the people of the country explained the phenomenon. ‘Our explanation of it is,’ he replied, ‘that in these parts the land spues up the ice.’

A Southern man does not set the same value on time a Northern one does. The day, he thinks, will be long enough for all he has to do. I often saw trains stopped, not at a station, for the purpose of taking up or putting down a single passenger. I even saw this done that a parcel or letter might be taken from a person standing by the railway side. On one occasion an acquaintance with whom I was travelling that day, and myself, both happened to have had no dinner. We mentioned this to the conductor, and asked him if he could manage in any way to let us have some supper. ‘Oh, yes,’ he readily replied, ‘I will at eleven o’clock stop the train at a house in the forest, where I sometimes have had supper myself. I will give you twenty minutes.’ I suppose the other passengers, none of whom left their seats, imagined that we had stopped to repair some small damage, or to take in wood or water, for on returning to the car we heard no observations made on the delay.

Whenever I suggested to Americans the probability that their long range of Southern coast was well suited for the culture of the olive, the suggestion was met with merriment. ‘There is no one in this country,’ they would say, ‘who looks fifteen or twenty years ahead’ (the time it takes for an olive tree to come into profitable bearing). ‘Everybody here supposes that long before so many years have expired he shall have sold his land very advantageously, or that his business will have taken him to some other part of the country, or that he shall have made his fortune and retired from business.’

The same objection does not lie against the culture of tea, for which the uplands of Georgia appeared well adapted.

Atlanta I thought the most flourishing place in the South. I saw several manufactories there, and much building was going on. It has 34,000 inhabitants. ‘Sir,’ said an Atlantan gentleman to me, ‘this place is bound to become great and prosperous, because it is the most central town of the Southern States.’ I suppose he had not yet been able to divest his mind of the idea that the Southern States formed a political unit, and must have a central capital.

A Virginian’s Recollections of the War.

The cattle of the South must, during the winter, be among the most miserable of their kind. I saw nothing at all resembling what we call pastures; and if such institutions (in America everything is an institution, even the lift in an hotel) are known in the South, they can be of little use at that time of year, for every blade of grass in America is then withered and dry. The cattle appeared to be kept generally in the woods, and in the maize fields, where of course they could get nothing but the leaves that were hanging on the dead stems. In the North, where the dead grass is buried in snow, and the cattle therefore must be housed and kept on artificial food and grain, they are sufficiently well off; while their brethren in the South become the victims of a more beneficent climate.

I sometimes repeat the remarks of persons I casually met, without noticing whether I accept or disagree with the statements they contain, or the spirit which appears to animate them, because what I thought about the matter is of no consequence, while by reporting occasionally what I heard I enable others to form some idea of what passes in the minds of the people I came in contact with. For this purpose I will report what a fellow-passenger said to me one night on our way through the interminable forest in Alabama. I had several times during the day had some talk with this gentleman, and had been much struck with him and interested in what he said. He was a handsome man—a very noble-looking specimen of humanity; and his manners and ideas corresponded to his appearance. At night we were seated together talking about the war, and the prospects of the country, when he gave me the following account of himself. He was a Virginian, and before the war had possessed a good property. Though disliking the Yankees (I am giving his own words) and their interference with the internal affairs of the Southern States, he had at first opposed the war. But when his State had decided for it, he took up his rifle, and joined it unreservedly. Everything he had possessed had been lost in the war; but he was determined neither to complain, nor to be beholden to any man. It was not a pleasant thing, for one who had lived as a gentleman, to work for others; but that was what he was now doing, for he had become travelling clerk for a large mercantile house. The period of his agreement had nearly expired, and if it was not renewed, and he could get nothing better, he would drive a dray. He spoke bitterly of the Yankees, for their greed of plunder, and for their want of a sense of honour. When the South surrendered, they did it in perfect good faith; acknowledging that fortune had entirely decided against them, and determining to submit honestly to the award. But the Yankees would not believe in their good faith, and had sent into every Southern State a military dictator with an army, to oppress and insult the whites, and to keep them in subjection to the blacks. He had loved his country, and been proud of it: but now he had no country, no home, no prospects. He said the blacks fought with more desperation than the Yankees. He had been through the whole war, and had had plenty of opportunities for comparing them. He would rather meet three Yankees than two blacks. The black was easily wrought up into a state of enthusiasm, and would fight like a fanatic. The Yankee was always calculating chances, and taking care of himself. The West it was that decided the war; and he thought it should have arbitrated at first, and prevented the fighting. I lost sight of this fallen but brave-hearted Virginian on the steps of the St. Charles Hotel at New Orleans, to which he was so obliging as to guide me on our arrival at that city. He was then on his way to Texas.

Mobile.

The railway does not run into Mobile, but ends at a wharf, about twenty miles from the city, on the Tensas (pronounced Tensaw), a kind of loop branch of the Alabama, which it rejoins at Mobile. It is a fine broad piece of water, and its banks are clothed with the undisturbed primæval forest, which is always to the European a sight of great interest. On unloading the train I saw that we had picked up during the night a dozen fine bucks, which we were to take on to Mobile. I had observed in the early morning two or three small herds of wild deer feeding in the forest. They seem to have become accustomed to the locomotive. Even here it was freezing very sharply, and the buckets of water on board the steamer were thickly coated with ice. This frost, I found at Mobile, had killed all the young wood of the orange trees. The crew of the steamer were negroes, and I was surprised to see them on so cold a morning washing their woolly heads in buckets of water drawn from the river, and then leaving their wet hair and faces to be dried by the cold morning air. At the junction of the Tensas and Alabama there was a great deal of swampy land, partly covered with reeds, and much shallow water, upon which were large flocks of wild fowl. The river was here full of snags and sawyers, and its navigation was still further impeded by a fortification of piles the Confederates had driven across it during the war, to keep the enemy from getting up to the city. This approach to Mobile had more of the air of novelty about it than anything I had yet seen in America. It made me feel that I was really in a new world.

As I intended to make no stay at Mobile, I did not use any of the letters of introduction I had with me, thinking I should in a short time see more of the men and manners of the place, if I accompanied a travelling acquaintance I had made, in his calls upon the firms with whom he had to transact business. I was four times during the morning invited, not to liquor, that expression I never once heard in America, but to take a drink. There is much heartiness of feeling here, and everybody carries out, to the full extent, the American practice of shaking hands with everybody, which is a rational way of expressing goodwill without saying anything. I walked about a mile out into the environs to see the houses of the merchants and well-to-do inhabitants. I passed three hospitals, one for yellow-fever cases that can pay, one for yellow-fever cases that cannot pay, and one for general cases. The streets of the town were full of pedestrians and of traffic. In this respect it bore a very favourable comparison with Charleston, where nothing was going on. The population amounts to about 34,000. The Spaniards who originally settled the place have been utterly obliterated. On inquiry I found that none had remained in the city, being quite unable in any department of business to support the competition of the Anglo-Saxon, but that among the mean whites, at some little distance from Mobile, a few Spanish names were to be found. These remnants of the original settlers the Alabamans call Dagos, a corruption of the common Spanish name of Diego.

A Day on the Gulf of Mexico.

The great cotton ships cannot come to up to Mobile. There is, however, a magnificent bay, in the form of a great lake with a narrow inlet from the sea, in which they ride at anchor, waiting for their cargoes, at a distance of between thirty and forty miles from the city. I counted thirty-seven of these ships. They were almost all English. Some said there was not a single American among them. A few years ago far the greater part of them would have been American; but since they have taxed heavily everything received into the country, or manufactured in it, they have ceased to be able to build or to sail ships as cheaply as we can.

I shall never forget the day I passed on the Gulf of Mexico in going from Mobile to New Orleans. The air was fresh and had just the slightest movement in it. The sky was unclouded, and the sun delightfully warm. We have pleasant enough days at home occasionally, but this belonged to quite another order of things. And as the darkness came on, the night was as fine and bright, after its kind, as the day had been. Many sat talking on the deck till long after the sun was down. Some, I suppose, felt that this would be their only day on the Gulf of Mexico.

The communication between Mobile and New Orleans is not carried on by the mouth of the Mississippi, but by the Lake of Ponchatrain. This is a large piece of very shallow water, seldom more than seven feet deep, which communicates with the sea. A railway is carried out into the lake on piles for a distance of five miles. At the terminus of this long pier the steamers deposit and receive their passengers.

On entering the city, at the other terminus of this railway, at half-past six o’clock in the morning, the first sight that attracted attention was the French Sunday Market. This is what everyone who visits New Orleans is expected to see. It is a general market, and the largest of the week. I do not remember ever to have seen a larger or a busier one. What attracted my attention most, on passing through it, was the great quantity and variety of wild fowl exhibited for sale. The Marché des Fleurs was very good. In short there was an abundant supply of everything. The shops in the neighbourhood were all open; and in the American part of the city also, I saw several open on the morning of this day.

New Orleans still retains very much of the air of a French city. Many of the streets are narrow, and paved (which I saw nowhere else in America) with large blocks of granite. This is brought from New England. Something however of the kind was necessary here, on account of the wet alluvial soil on which the city stands; it would be truer to say on which it floats. The houses are generally lofty, and their external character is rather French than English. The French language is spoken by a large part of the population. In the street cars, one is almost sure to hear it, coming often from the mouths of coloured people.

Episcopal Church at New Orleans.

While at New Orleans I heard Dr. Beckwith, the Bishop elect of Georgia. His church is about a mile and a half from the St. Charles’s Hotel, in one of the best suburbs of the city. In going I asked a gentleman, who was seated next to me in the street car, the way. He replied that he was one of the doctor’s congregation, and would be my guide. This led to some conversation; he said ‘that of late years, in New Orleans and elsewhere in the States, the Episcopal Church had begun to exert itself, and was now doing wonders in bringing people into its communion.’ I told him that only a few days before I had seen it stated in an editorial of a New York paper, ‘that the Episcopal Church was now quite the church of the best society in the United States; and that if one wished to get into good society, it was wise to join this communion.’ He replied ‘that statements of this kind read well in newspapers, and that of course there were some people who could be influenced by such considerations; but that in his opinion the most effective reasons for attracting people to the Episcopal Church was the character of the Church itself, and of those who did belong and had belonged to it. It was an historical church, with a grand theological literature of its own, and that, indeed, almost the whole literature of England appeared to belong to the Episcopal Church; and it had, which he thought the most potent reason of all, a definite creed and a dignified ritual.’

Dr. Beckwith’s congregation consisted of about a thousand very well-dressed people. As is usual everywhere in Episcopal churches in America, there was an offertory; and I saw, as its pecuniary result, four large velvet dishes piled full of greenbacks, placed in the hands of the three officiating clergymen. Nobody gives less than a quarter of a dollar note. The Bishop elect preached. He is a very good-looking, able, and eloquent man. He ridiculed the idea of a ‘psalm-singing’ eternity, and affirmed that the possession of knowledge would be an immeasurably nobler means of happiness. But if we concede this, there will still remain the question whether the exercise of the feelings of the heart would not confer on the majority of the human race far more happiness than the exercise of the powers of the intellect.

I looked into another large Episcopal church on my way to Dr. Beckwith’s, and found in it several young men teaching Sunday classes.

One gets so accustomed in the lakes, rivers and harbours of America, to vast expanses of water, that the first sight of the Mississippi at New Orleans becomes on that account more disappointing to most people than it otherwise would be. As you cross the Levee, you see before you a stream not three quarters of a mile wide. The houses on the opposite side do not appear to be at even that humble distance. The traveller remembers how many streams he has crossed, particularly on the eastern and southern coast, some of them even unnoticed on the map he is carrying with him, but which had wider channels. And so he becomes dissatisfied with his first view of the Father of Waters. Still, there he has before him, in that stream not three quarters of a mile wide, the outlet for the waters of a valley as large as half of Europe. What mighty rivers, commingled together, are passing before him—the Arkansas, the Red River, the Platte, the Missouri, the Ohio, the Wabash, the Cumberland, the Tennessee! How great then must be the depth of the channel through which this vast accumulation of water is being conveyed to the ocean! On this last point I questioned several persons in the city, getting from all the same answer, that several attempts had been made to fathom this part of the river, but that none had been attended with success.

The Cemeteries.

On my calling the attention of the stout, mediæval, coloured female who had charge of the baths of the St. Charles’s Hotel, to the water in the one she was preparing for me,—for it was of the colour, and not far from the consistency of pea-soup,—she convinced me in a moment of my ignorance, and of the irrational character of my remark. ‘Child,’ she said, ‘it is Mississippi river, which we all have to drink here all our lives.’

I visited the celebrated burial grounds of New Orleans, one in the suburbs, and three others contiguous to one another, in an older part of the city. None of them are more than two or three acres in size. In each case the enclosure was surrounded with a high wall, which was chambered on the inner side for the reception of coffins. The whole peculiarity of these burial grounds arises from the fact that, the soil being too swampy to admit of interment, the coffin must be placed in some receptacle above ground. Many of the trades of the city, and several other associations, appear to have buildings of their own in the cemeteries, for the common reception of the bodies of those who had in life belonged to the brotherhood. Most of the families, too, of the place appear to have their own above-ground tombs. They are almost universally of brick, plastered outside, and kept scrupulously clean with whitewash. It was on a Sunday evening that I visited the cemetery in the suburbs. It was very cold on that evening to my sensations, and so I suppose it must have felt much colder to people who were accustomed to the climate of New Orleans; still I saw many persons, sometimes alone, and sometimes in parties, sitting or standing by the tombs that contained the remains of those who had been dear to them, and the recollection of whom they still cherished. In some cases I saw one man, two men, or more than two, seated at a grave smoking. In some cases there would be a whole family. This I noticed particularly at what was far the best monument in the place. It was one that had been raised to the memory of a young man who had fallen in the late war. There was a small granite tomb, over which rose a pillar of granite bearing the inscription. A little space all round was paved with the same material, and this was edged with a massive rim, also of granite, about two feet high. Upon this were seated many of his sorrowing relatives, old and young. In the same cemetery I saw two other monuments to young men who had died soldiers’ deaths in the Confederate service. On each of the three, the inscription ran that the deceased had died in the discharge of his duty, or in defence of the rights of his country, or some expression was used to indicate the enthusiastic feeling of the South. One was stated to have been the last survivor of eight children, and the stone went on to say that his parents felt that they had given their last child to their country and to God. These were all English inscriptions; but I saw some that were in two languages, English being mixed in some cases with French, in others with German. I saw no inscriptions that had any direct reference in any way to what Christians believe.

Amalgamation of North and South.

At New Orleans, fifteen hundred miles from New York, you get, in your morning paper, whatever was known in London yesterday of English and European news. And this department of an American journal contains a great deal more than we, in this country, are in the habit of seeing in the Times and other English papers, as the messages brought to us by the Atlantic cable; because we want intelligence only from the United States, whereas they wish to get from us not only what is going on in England, but in every part of Europe, and in fact in every part of the Old World.

As one is thus day after day, whether you be in the centre, or thousands of miles away, at some almost unknown extremity, of this vast transatlantic region, kept well informed as to what is passing over almost all the earth, one feels that there are agencies at work amongst us which in some respects render ‘the wisdom of the ancients’ a little obsolete. Formerly it would have been thought impossible to harmonise such discordant elements as the North and the South. How could they ever dwell together as brethren, who were locally so remote from each other, that while one was basking in a sub-tropical sun, the other was shrinking from the nipping frosts of the severest winter; whose institutions, too, and interests, and antecedents had in many essential points been very dissimilar; and whose differences at last had broken out into a fierce and sanguinary war? Could they ever be fused into a single homogeneous people? Down to the times of our fathers, it would have been quite impossible. Each would then have kept only to his own region, and known no influences but those which were native to it. But now we have changed all that. A few threads of wire overhead, and a few bars of iron on the levelled ground, will do all that is wanted. For extreme remoteness they have substituted so close a contiguity that the North and South can now talk together. The dissimilar institutions, interests, and antecedents of the past, however strong they may be in themselves, become powerless when something stronger has arisen; and this new power is now vigorously at work undermining and counteracting their effects. And it is a power that will also exorcise envy, hatred, and malice. Men are what their ideas are, for it is ideas that make the man. And every morning these two people have the same ideas, and the same facts out of which ideas are made, put in the same words before them. The wire threads overhead do this. And if a Southern man, from what he reads this morning, thinks that his interests call him to the North, or a Northern man that his call him to the South, the railway, like the piece of carpet in the Eastern story, will transport them hither and thither in a moment. It ensures that there shall be a constant stream of human beings flowing in each direction. Everyone can foresee the result—that there must, sooner or later, be one homogeneous people. Formerly the difference of their occupations produced difference of feeling, and was a dissociating cause. Now it will lead to rapid, constant, and extensive interchange of productions, by the aid of the telegraph and railway. Each will always be occupied with the thought of supplying the wants of the other. And this will lead to social intercourse, and the union of families. So that what was impossible before is what must be now.

High Prices.

Everything in the United States, except railway fares and the per diem charges of hotels, is unreasonably dear; and the hotels themselves participate in the general irrationality on this subject as soon as you order anything that is not down in the list of what is allowed for the daily sum charged you. I never got a fire lighted in my bed-room for a few hours for less than a dollar, that is 3s. 6d.; or half a dozen pieces washed for less than a dollar and a half. But the one matter of all in which the charges are the most insane is that of hackney coaches and railway omnibuses. You get into an omnibus at the station to be carried two or three hundred yards to your hotel. As soon as the vehicle begins to move, the conductor begins to levy his black mail. He is only doing to you what his own government is doing to him. And in America it seems to be taken for granted that one will pay just what he is ordered to pay. ‘Sir,’ he addresses you, ‘you must pay now; three quarters of a dollar for yourself, and a quarter of a dollar for each piece,’ that is of luggage. You have perhaps four pieces, being an ignorant stranger; if you had been a well-informed native you would have had only one piece; and for these four pieces and yourself you pay about 7s. In an English railway omnibus you would have paid 6d. or 1s. The hackney coaches are very much worse. I found a driver in New York who would take me for a short distance for a dollar and a half, but I never found so reasonable a gentleman in the profession elsewhere. At New Orleans there appear to be a great many hackney coaches, all apparently quite new, with a great deal of silver-plated mounting about them, almost as if they had been intended for civic processions on the scale of our Lord Mayor’s show. Each of them is drawn by a very fair pair of horses. I once counted two-and-thirty of these coaches standing for hire, on a rainy day, at the door of the St. Charles’s Hotel; and I was told that it was their rule not to move off the stand for less than two dollars, or to take one out to dinner, and bring one back, for less than ten dollars.