GREATER BRITAIN.

A RECORD OF TRAVEL
IN
ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES
DURING 1866-7.
BY
CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE.
TWO VOLUMES IN ONE.
W I T H M A P S A N D I L L U S T R A T I O N S.

PHILADELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO.
1869.

TO
M Y F A T H E R
I D e d i c a t e
THIS BOOK.

C. W. D.

PREFACE.

In 1866 and 1867, I followed England round the world: everywhere I was in English-speaking, or in English-governed lands. If I remarked that climate, soil, manners of life, that mixture with other peoples had modified the blood, I saw, too, that in essentials the race was always one.

The idea which in all the length of my travels has been at once my fellow and my guide—a key wherewith to unlock the hidden things of strange new lands—is a conception, however imperfect, of the grandeur of our race, already girding the earth, which it is destined, perhaps, eventually to overspread.

In America, the peoples of the world are being fused together, but they are run into an English mould: Alfred‘s laws and Chaucer‘s tongue are theirs whether they would or no. There are men who say that Britain in her age will claim the glory of having planted greater Englands across the seas. They fail to perceive that she has done more than found plantations of her own—that she has imposed her institutions upon the offshoots of Germany, of Ireland, of Scandinavia, and of Spain. Through America, England is speaking to the world.

Sketches of Saxondom may be of interest even upon humbler grounds: the development of the England of Elizabeth is to be found, not in the Britain of Victoria, but in half the habitable globe. If two small islands are by courtesy styled “Great,” America, Australia, India, must form a Greater Britain.

C. W. D.

76 Sloane Street, S. W.
1st November, 1868.

CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME.

CONTENTS
OF
THE SECOND VOLUME.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PART I.
AMERICA.

G R E A T E R B R I T A I N.

CHAPTER I.
VIRGINIA.

FROM the bows of the steamer Saratoga, on the 20th June, 1866, I caught sight of the low works of Fort Monroe, as, threading her way between the sand-banks of Capes Charles and Henry, the ship pressed on, under sail and steam, to enter Chesapeake Bay.

Our sudden arrival amid shoals of sharks and kingfish, the keeping watch for flocks of canvas-back ducks, gave us enough and to spare of idle work till we fully sighted the Yorktown peninsula, overgrown with ancient memories—ancient for America. Three towns of lost grandeur, or their ruins, stand there still. Williamsburg, the former capital, graced even to our time by the palaces where once the royal governors held more than regal state; Yorktown, where Cornwallis surrendered to the continental troops; Jamestown, the earliest settlement, founded in 1607, thirteen years before old Governor Winthrop fixed the site of Plymouth, Massachusetts.

A bump against the pier of Fort Monroe soon roused us from our musings, and we found ourselves invaded by a swarm of stalwart negro troopers, clothed in the cavalry uniform of the United States, who boarded us for the mails. Not a white man save those we brought was to be seen upon the pier, and the blazing sun made me thankful that I had declined an offered letter to Jeff. Davis.

Pushing off again into the stream, we ran the gantlet of the Rip-Raps passage, and made for Norfolk, having on our left the many exits of the Dismal Swamp Canal. Crossing Hampton Roads—a grand bay with pleasant grassy shores, destined one day to become the best known, as by nature it is the noblest, of Atlantic ports—we nearly ran upon the wrecks of the Federal frigates Cumberland and Congress, sunk by the rebel ram Merrimac in the first great naval action of the war; but soon after, by a sort of poetic justice, we almost drifted into the black hull of the Merrimac herself. Great gangs of negroes were laboring laughingly at the removal, by blasting, of the sunken ships.

When we were securely moored at Norfolk pier, I set off upon an inspection of the second city of Virginia. Again not a white man was to be seen, but hundreds of negroes were working in the heat, building, repairing, road-making, and happily chattering the while. At last, turning a corner, I came on a hotel, and, as a consequence, on a bar and its crowd of swaggering whites—“Johnny Rebs” all, you might see by the breadth of their brims, for across the Atlantic a broad brim denotes less the man of peace than the ex-member of a Southern guerrilla band, Morgan‘s, Mosby‘s, or Stuart‘s. No Southerner will wear the Yankee “stove-pipe” hat; a Panama or Palmetto for him, he says, though he keeps to the long black coat that rules from Maine to the Rio Grande.

These Southerners were all alike—all were upright, tall, and heavily moustached; all had long black hair and glittering eyes, and I looked instinctively for the baldric and rapier. It needed no second glance to assure me that as far as the men of Norfolk were concerned, the saying of our Yankee skipper was not far from the truth: “The last idea that enters the mind of a Southerner is that of doing work.”

Strangers are scarce in Norfolk, and it was not long before I found an excuse for entering into conversation with the “citizens.” My first question was not received with much cordiality by my new acquaintances. “How do the negroes work? Wall, we spells nigger with two ‘g‘s,’ I reckon.” (Virginians, I must explain, are used to “reckon” as much as are New Englanders to “guess,” while Western men “calculate” as often as they cease to swear.) “How does the niggers work? Wall, niggers is darned fools, certain, but they ain‘t quite sich fools as to work while the Yanks will feed ’em. No, sir, not quite sich fools as that.” Hardly deeming it wise to point to the negroes working in the sun-blaze within a hundred yards, while we sat rocking ourselves in the veranda of the inn, I changed my tack, and asked whether things were settling down in Norfolk. This query soon led my friends upon the line I wanted them to take, and in five minutes we were well through politics, and plunging into the very war. “You‘re a Britisher. Now, all that they tell you‘s darned lies. We‘re just as secesh as we ever was, only so many‘s killed that we can‘t fight—that‘s all, I reckon.” “We ain‘t going to fight the North and West again,” said an ex-colonel of rebel infantry; “next time we fight, ’twill be us and the West against the Yanks. We‘ll keep the old flag then, and be darned to them.” “If it hadn‘t been for the politicians, we shouldn‘t have seceded at all, I reckon: we should just have kept the old flag and the constitution, and the Yanks would have seceded from us. Reckon we‘d have let ’em go.” “Wall, boys, s‘pose we liquor?” closed in the colonel, shooting out his old quid, and filling in with another. “We‘d have fought for a lifetime if the cussed Southerners hadn‘t deserted like they did.” I asked who these “Southerners” were to whom such disrespect was being shown. “You didn‘t think Virginia was a Southern State over in Britain, did you? ’cause Virginia is a border State, sir. We didn‘t go to secede at all; it was them blasted Southerners that brought it on us. First they wouldn‘t give a command to General Robert E. Lee, then they made us do all the fighting for ’em, and then, when the pinch came, they left us in the lurch. Why, sir, I saw three Mississippi regiments surrender without a blow—yes, sir: that‘s right down good whisky; jess you sample it.” Here the steam-whistle of the Saratoga sounded with its deep bray. “Reckon you‘ll have to hurry up to make connections,” said one of my new friends, and I hurried off, not without a fear lest some of the group should shoot after me, to avenge the affront of my quitting them before the mixing of the drinks. They were but a pack of “mean whites,” “North Carolina crackers,” but their views were those which I found dominant in all ranks at Richmond, and up the country in Virginia.

After all, the Southern planters are not “The South,” which for political purposes is composed of the “mean whites,” of the Irish of the towns, and of the Southwestern men—Missourians, Kentuckians, and Texans—fiercely anti-Northern, without being in sentiment what we should call Southern, certainly not representatives of the “Southern Chivalry.” The “mean whites,” or “poor trash,” are the whites who are not planters—members of the slaveholding race who never held a slave—white men looked down upon by the negroes. It is a necessary result of the despotic government of one race by another that the poor members of the dominant people are universally despised: the “destitute Europeans” of Bombay, the “white loafers” of the Punjaub, are familiar cases. Where slavery exists, the “poor trash” class must inevitably be both large and wretched: primogeniture is necessary to keep the plantations sufficiently great to allow for the payment of overseers and the supporting in luxury of the planter family, and younger sons and their descendants are not only left destitute, but debarred from earning their bread by honest industry, for in a slave country labor is degrading.

The Southern planters were gentlemen, possessed of many aristocratic virtues, along with every aristocratic vice; but to each planter there were nine “mean whites,” who, though grossly ignorant, full of insolence, given to the use of the knife and pistol upon the slightest provocation, were, until the election of Lincoln to the presidency, as completely the rulers of America as they were afterward the leaders of the rebellion.

At sunset we started up the James on our way to City Point and Richmond, sailing almost between the very masts of the famous rebel privateer the Florida, and seeing her as she lay under the still, gray waters. She was cut out from a Brizilian port, and when claimed by the imperial government, was to have been at once surrendered. While the dispatches were on their way to Norfolk, she was run into at her moorings by a Federal gunboat, and filled and sank directly. Friends of the Confederacy have hinted that the collision was strangely opportune; nevertheless, the fact remains that the commander of the gunboat was dismissed the navy for his carelessness.

The twilight was beyond description lovely. The change from the auks and ice-birds of the Atlantic to the blue-birds and robins of Virginia was not more sudden than that from winter to tropical warmth and sensuous indolence; but the scenery, too, of the river is beautiful in its very changelessness. Those who can see no beauty but in boldness might call the James as monotonous as the lower Loire.

After weeks of bitter cold, warm evenings favor meditation. The soft air, the antiquity of the forest, the languor of the sunset breeze, all dispose to dream and sleep. That oak has seen Powhatan; the founders of Jamestown may have pointed at that grand old sycamore. In this drowsy humor, we sighted the far-famed batteries of Newport News, and turning-in to berth or hammock, lay all night at City Point, near Petersburg.

A little before sunrise we weighed again, and sought a passage through the tremendous Confederate “obstructions.” Rows of iron skeletons, the frame-works of the wheels of sunken steamers, showed above the stream, casting gaunt shadows westward, and varied only by here and there a battered smoke-stack or a spar. The whole of the steamers that had plied upon the James and the canals before the war were lying here in rows, sunk lengthwise along the stream. Two in the middle of each row had been raised to let the government vessels pass, but in the heat-mist and faint light the navigation was most difficult. For five and twenty miles the rebel forts were as thick as the hills and points allowed; yet, in spite of booms and bars, of sunken ships, of batteries and torpedoes, the Federal monitors once forced their way to Fort Darling in the outer works of Richmond. I remembered these things a few weeks later, when General Grant‘s first words to me at Washington were: “Glad to meet you. What have you seen?” “The Capitol.” “Go at once and see the Monitors.” He afterward said to me, in words that photograph not only the Monitors, but Grant: “You can batter away at those things for a month, and do no good.”

At Dutch Gap we came suddenly upon a curious scene. The river flowed toward us down a long, straight reach, bounded by a lofty hill crowned with tremendous earthworks; but through a deep trench or cleft, hardly fifty yards in length, upon our right, we could see the stream running with violence in a direction parallel with our course. The hills about the gully were hollowed out into caves and bomb-proofs, evidently meant as shelters from vertical fire, but the rough graves of a vast cemetery showed that the protection was sought in vain. Forests of crosses of unpainted wood rose upon every acre of flat ground. On the peninsula, all but made an island by the cleft, was a grove of giant trees, leafless, barkless, dead, and blanched by a double change in the level of the stream. There is no sight so sad as that of a drowned forest, with a turkey-buzzard on each bough. On the bank upon our left was an iron scaffold, eight or ten stories high,—“Butler‘s Lookout,” as the cleft was “Butler‘s Dutch Gap Canal.” The canal, unfinished in war, is now to be completed at State expense for purposes of trade.

As we rounded the extremity of the peninsula an eagle was seen to light upon a tree. From every portion of the ship—main deck, hurricane deck, lower deck ports—revolvers, ready capped and loaded, were brought to bear upon the bird, which sheered off unharmed amid a storm of bullets. After this incident, I was careful in my political discussions with my shipmates; disarmament in the Confederacy had clearly not been extended to private weapons.

The outer and inner lines of fortifications passed, we came in view of a many-steepled town, with domes and spires recalling Oxford, hanging on a bank above a crimson-colored foaming stream. In ten minutes we were alongside the wharf at Richmond, and in half an hour safely housed in the “Exchange Hotel,” kept by the Messrs. Carrington, of whom the father was a private, the son a colonel, in the rebel volunteers.

The next day, while the works and obstructions on the James were still fresh in my mind, I took train to Petersburg, the city the capture of which by Grant was the last blow struck by the North at the melting forces of the Confederacy.

The line showed the war: here and there the track, torn up in Northern raids, had barely been repaired; the bridges were burnt and broken; the rails worn down to an iron thread. The joke “on board,” as they say here for “in the train,” was that the engine-drivers down the line are tolerably cute men, who, when the rails are altogether worn away, understand how to “go it on the bare wood,” and who at all times “know where to jump.”

From the window of the car we could see that in the country there were left no mules, no horses, no roads, no men. The solitude is not all owing to the war: in the whole five and twenty miles from Richmond to Petersburg there was before the war but a single station; in New England your passage-card often gives a station in every two miles. A careful look at the underwood on either side the line showed that this forest is not primeval, that all this country had once been plowed.

Virginia stands first among the States for natural advantages: in climate she is unequaled; her soil is fertile; her mineral wealth in coal, copper, gold, and iron enormous, and well placed; her rivers good, and her great harbor one of the best in the world. Virginia has been planted more than two hundred and fifty years, and is as large as England, yet has a free population of only a million. In every kind of production she is miserably inferior to Missouri or Ohio, in most, inferior also to the infant States of Michigan and Illinois. Only a quarter of her soil is under cultivation, to half that of poor, starved New England, and the mines are deserted which were worked by the very Indians who were driven from the land as savages a hundred years ago.

There is no surer test of the condition of a country than the state of its highways. In driving on the main roads round Richmond, in visiting the scene of McClellan‘s great defeat on the Chickahominy at Mechanicsville and Malvern Hill, I myself, and an American gentleman who was with me, had to get out and lay the planks upon the bridges, and then sit upon them, to keep them down while the black coachman drove across. The best roads in Virginia are but ill kept “corduroys;” but, bad as are these, “plank roads” over which artillery have passed, knocking out every other plank, are worse by far; yet such is the main road from Richmond toward the west.

There is not only a scarcity of roads, but of railroads. A comparison of the railway system of Illinois and Indiana with the two lines of Kentucky or the one of Western Virginia or Louisiana, is a comparison of the South with the North, of slavery with freedom. Virginia shows already the decay of age, but is blasted by slavery rather than by war.

Passing through Petersburg, the streets of which were gay with the feathery-brown blooms of the Venetian sumach, but almost deserted by human beings, who have not returned to the city since they were driven out by the shot and shell of which their houses show the scars, we were soon in the rebel works. There are sixty miles of these works in all, line within line, three deep: alternations of sand-pits and sand-heaps, with here and there a tree-trunk pierced for riflemen, and everywhere a double row of chevaux de frise. The forts nearest this point were named by their rebel occupants Fort Hell and Fort Damnation. Tremendous works, but it needed no long interview with Grant to understand their capture. I had not been ten minutes in his office at Washington before I saw that the secret of his unvarying success lay in his unflinching determination: there is pith in the American conceit which reads in his initials, “U. S. G.,” “unconditional-surrender Grant.”

The works defending Richmond, hardly so strong as those of Petersburg, were attacked in a novel manner in the third year of the war. A strong body of Federal cavalry on a raid, unsupported by infantry or guns, came suddenly by night upon the outer lines of Richmond on the west. Something had led them to believe that the rebels were not in force, and with the strange aimless daring that animated both parties during the rebellion, they rode straight in along the winding road, unchallenged, and came up to the inner lines. There they were met by a volley which emptied a few saddles, and they retired, without even stopping to spike the guns in the outer works. Had they known enough of the troops opposed to them to have continued to advance, they might have taken Richmond, and held it long enough to have captured the rebel president and senate, and burned the great iron-works and ships. The whole of the rebel army had gone north, and even the home guard was camped out on the Chickahominy. The troops who fired the volley were a company of the “iron-works battalion,” boys employed at the founderies, not one of whom had ever fired a rifle before this night. They confessed themselves that “one minute more, and they‘d have run;” but the volley just stopped the enemy in time.

The spot where we first struck the rebel lines was that known as the Crater—the funnel-shaped cavity formed when Grant sprang his famous mine: 1500 men are buried in the hollow itself, and the bones of those smothered by the falling earth are working through the soil: 5000 negro troops were killed in this attack, and are buried round the hollow where they died, fighting as gallantly as they fought everywhere throughout the war. It is a singular testimony to the continuousness of the fire, that the still remaining subterranean passages show that in countermining the rebels came once within three feet of the mine, yet failed to hear the working parties. Thousands of old army shoes were lying on the earth, and negro boys were digging up bullets for old lead.

Within eighty yards of the Crater are the Federal investing lines, on which the trumpet-flower of our gardens was growing wild in deep rich masses. The negroes told me not to gather it, because they believe it scalds the hand. They call it “poison plant,” or “blister weed.” The blue-birds and scarlet tannagers were playing about the horn-shaped flowers.

Just within Grant‘s earthworks are the ruins of an ancient church, built, it is said, with bricks that were brought by the first colonists from England in 1614. About Norfolk, about Petersburg, and in the Shenandoah Valley, you cannot ride twenty miles through the Virginian forest without bursting in upon some glade containing a quaint old church, or a creeper-covered roofless palace of the Culpeppers, the Randolphs, or the Scotts. The county names have in them all a history. Taking the letter “B” alone, we have Barbour, Bath, Bedford, Berkeley, Boone, Botetourt, Braxton, Brooke, Brunswick, Buchanan, Buckingham. A dozen counties in the State are named from kings or princes. The slaveowning cavaliers whose names the remainder bear are the men most truly guilty of the late attempt made by their descendants to create an empire founded on disloyalty and oppression; but within sight of this old church of theirs at Petersburg, thirty-three miles of Federal outworks stand as a monument of how the attempt was crushed by the children of their New England brother-colonists.

The names of streams and hamlets in Virginia have often a quaint English ring. On the Potomac, near Harper‘s Ferry, I once came upon “Sir John‘s Run.” Upon my asking a tall, gaunt fellow, who was fishing, whether this was the spot on which the Knight of Windsor “larded the lean earth,” I got for sole answer: “Wall, don‘t know ’bout that, but it‘s a mighty fine spot for yellow-fin trout.” The entry to Virginia is characteristic. You sail between capes named from the sons of James I., and have fronting you the estuaries of two rivers called after the King and the Duke of York.

The old “F. F. V.’s,” the first families of Virginia, whose founders gave these monarchic names to the rivers and counties of the State, are far off now in Texas and California—those, that is, which were not extinct before the war. The tenth Lord Fairfax keeps a tiny ranch near San Francisco; some of the chief Denmans are also to be found in California. In all such cases of which I heard, the emigration took place before the war; Northern conquest could not be made use of as a plea whereby to escape the reproaches due to the slaveowning system. There is a stroke of justice in the fact that the Virginian oligarchy have ruined themselves in ruining their State; but the gaming hells of Farobankopolis, as Richmond once was called, have much for which to answer.

When the “burnt district” comes to be rebuilt, Richmond will be the most beautiful of all the Atlantic cities; while the water-power of the rapids of the James, and a situation at the junction of canal and river, secure for it a prosperous future.

The superb position of the State-house (which formed the rebel capitol), on the brow of a long hill, whence it overhangs the city and the James, has in it something of satire. The Parliament-house of George Washington‘s own State, the State-house, contains the famed statue set up by the general assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia to the hero‘s memory. Without the building stands the still more noteworthy bronze statue of the first President, erected jointly by all the States in the then Union. That such monuments should overlook the battle-fields of the war provoked by the secession from the Union of Washington‘s loved Virginia, is a fact full of the grim irony of history.

Hollywood, the cemetery of Richmond, is a place full of touching sad suggestion, and very beautiful, with deep shades and rippling streams. During the war, there were hospitals in Richmond for 20,000 men, and “always full,” they say. The Richmond men who were killed in battle were buried where they fell; but 8000 who died in hospital are buried here, and over them is placed a wooden cross, with the inscription in black paint, “Dead, but not forgotten.” In another spot lie the Union dead, under the shadow of the flag for which they died.

From Monroe‘s tomb the evening view is singularly soft and calm; the quieter and calmer for the drone in which are mingled the trills of the mocking-bird, the hoarse croaking of the bull-frog, the hum of the myriad fire-flies, that glow like summer lightning among the trees, the distant roar of the river, of which the rich red water can still be seen, beaten by the rocks into a rosy foam.

With the moment‘s chillness of the sunset breeze, the golden glory of the heavens fades into gray, and there comes quickly over them the solemn blueness of the Southern night. Thoughts are springing up of the many thousand unnamed graves, where the rebel soldiers lie unknown, when the Federal drums in Richmond begin sharply beating the rappel.

CHAPTER II.
THE NEGRO.

IN the back country of Virginia, and on the borders of North Carolina, it becomes clear that our common English notions of the negro and of slavery are nearer the truth than common notions often are. The London Christy Minstrels are not more given to bursts of laughter of the form “Yah! yah!” than are the plantation hands. The negroes upon the Virginia farms are not maligned by those who represent them as delighting in the contrasts of crimson and yellow, or emerald and sky-blue. I have seen them on a Sunday afternoon, dressed in scarlet waistcoats and gold-laced cravats, returning hurriedly from “meetin’,” to dance break-downs, and grin from ear to ear for hours at a time. What better should we expect from men to whom until just now it was forbidden, under tremendous penalties, to teach their letters?

Nothing can force the planters to treat negro freedom save from the comic side. To them the thing is too new for thought, too strange for argument; the ridiculous lies on the surface, and to this they turn as a relief. When I asked a planter how the blacks prospered under freedom, his answer was, “Ours don‘t much like it. You see, it necessitates monogamy. If I talk about the ‘responsibilities of freedom,’ Sambo says, ‘Dunno ’bout that; please, mass’ George: me want two wife.’” Another planter tells me, that the only change he can see in the condition of the negroes since they have been free is that formerly the supervision of the overseer forced them occasionally to be clean, whereas now nothing on earth can make them wash. He says that, writing lately to his agent, he received an answer to which there was the following postscript: “You ain‘t sent no sope. You had better send sope: niggers is certainly needing sope.”

It is easy to treat the negro question in this way; easy, on the other hand, to assert that since history fails us as a guide to the future of the emancipated blacks, we should see what time will bring, and meanwhile set down negroes as a monster class of which nothing is yet known, and, like the compilers of the Catalan map, say of places of which we have no knowledge, “Here be giants, cannibals, and negroes.” As long as we possess Jamaica, and are masters upon the African west coast, the negro question is one of moment to ourselves. It is one, too, of mightier import, for it is bound up with the future of the English in America. It is by no means a question to be passed over as a joke. There are five millions of negroes in the United States; juries throughout ten States of the Union are mainly chosen from the black race. The matter is not only serious, but full of interest, political, ethnological, historic.

In the South you must take nothing upon trust; believe nothing you are told. Nowhere in the world do “facts” appear so differently to those who view them through spectacles of yellow or of rose. The old planters tell you that all is ruin,—that they have but half the hands they need, and from each hand but a half day‘s work: the new men, with Northern energy and Northern capital, tell you that they get on very well.

The old Southern planters find it hard to rid themselves of their traditions; they cannot understand free blacks, and slavery makes not only the slaves but the masters shiftless. They have no cash, and the Metayer system gives rise to the suspicion of some fraud, for the negroes are very distrustful of the honesty of their former masters.

The worst of the evils that must inevitably grow out of the sudden emancipation of millions of slaves have not shown themselves as yet, in consequence of the great amount of work that has to be done in the cities of the South, in repairing the ruin caused during the war by fire and want of care, and in building places of business for the Northern capitalists. The negroes of Virginia and North Carolina have flocked down to the towns and ports by the thousand, and find in Norfolk, Richmond, Wilmington, and Fort Monroe employment for the moment. Their absence from the plantations makes labor dear up country, and this in itself tempts the negroes who remain on land to work sturdily for wages. Seven dollars a month—at the rate equal to one pound—with board and lodging, were being paid to black field hands on the corn and tobacco farms near Richmond. It is when the city works are over that the pressure will come, and it will probably end in the blacks largely pushing northward, and driving the Irish out of hotel service at New York and Boston, as they have done in Philadelphia and St. Louis.

Already the negroes are beginning to ask for land, and they complain loudly that none of the confiscated lands have been assigned to them. “Ef yer dun gib us de land, reckon de ole massas ’ll starb de niggahs,” was a plain, straightforward summary of the negro view of the negro question, given me by a white-bearded old “uncle” in Richmond, and backed by every black man within hearing in a chorus of “Dat‘s true, for shore;” but I found up the country that the planters are afraid to let the negroes own or farm for themselves the smallest plot of land, for fear that they should sell ten times as much as they grew, stealing their “crop” from the granaries of their employers.

At a farm near Petersburg, owned by a Northern capitalist, 1000 acres, which before emancipation had been tilled by one hundred slaves, now needed, I was told, but forty freedmen for their cultivation; but when I reached the place, I found that the former number included old people and women, while the forty were all hale men. The men were paid upon the tally system. A card was given them for each day‘s work, which was accepted at the plantation store in payment for goods supplied, and at the end of the month money was paid for the remaining tickets. The planters say that the field hands will not support their old people; but this means only that, like white folk, they try to make as much money as they can, and know that if they plead the wants of their wives and children, the whites will keep their aged people.

That the negro slaves were lazy, thriftless, unchaste, and thieves, is true; but it is as slaves, and not as negroes, that they were all these things; and, after all, the effects of slavery upon the slave are less terrible than its effects upon the master. The moral condition to which the planter class had been brought by slavery, shows out plainly in the speeches of the rebel leaders. Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, declared in 1861 that “Slavery is the natural and moral condition of the negro.... I cannot permit myself to doubt,” he went on, “the ultimate success of a full recognition of this principle throughout the civilized and enlightened world ... negro slavery is in its infancy.”

There is reason to believe that the American negroes will justify the hopes of their friends; they have made the best of every chance that has been given them as yet; they were good soldiers, they are eager to learn their letters, they are steady at their work: in Barbadoes they are industrious and well conducted; in La Plata they are exemplary citizens. In America the colored laborer has had no motive to be industrious.

General Grant assured me of the great aptness at soldiering shown by the negro troops. In battle they displayed extraordinary courage, but if their officers were picked off they could not stand a charge; no more, he said, could their Southern masters. The power of standing firm after the loss of leaders is possessed only by regiments where every private is as good as his captain and colonel, such as the Northwestern and New England volunteers.

Before I left Richmond I had one morning found my way into a school for the younger blacks. There were as many present as the forms would hold—sixty, perhaps, in all—and three wounded New England soldiers, with pale, thin faces, were patiently teaching them to write. The boys seemed quick and apt enough, but they were very raw—only a week or two in the school. Since the time when Oberlin first proclaimed the potential equality of the race by admitting negroes as freely as white men and women to the college, the negroes have never been backward to learn.

It must not be supposed that the negro is wanting in abilities of a certain kind. Even in the imbecility of the Congo dance we note his unrivaled mimetic powers. The religious side of the negro character is full of weird suggestiveness; but superstition, everywhere the handmaid of ignorance, is rife among the black plantation hands. It is thought that the punishment with which the shameful rites of Obi-worship have been visited has proved, even in the City of New Orleans, insufficient to prevent them. Charges of witchcraft are as common in Virginia as in Orissa; in the Carolinas as in Central India the use of poison is often sought to work out the events foretold by some noted sorceress. In no direction can the matter be followed out to its conclusions without bringing us face to face with the sad fact that the faults of the plantation negro are every one of them traceable to the vices of the slavery system, and that the Americans of to-day are suffering beyond measure for evils for which our forefathers are responsible. We ourselves are not guiltless of wrong-doing in this matter: if it is still impossible openly to advocate slavery in England, it has, at least, become a habit persistently to write down freedom. We are no longer told that God made the blacks to be slaves, but we are bade remember that they cannot prosper under emancipation. All mention of Barbadoes is suppressed, but we have daily homilies on the condition of Jamaica. The negro question in America is briefly this: is there, on the one hand, reason to fear that, dollars applied to land decreasing while black mouths to be fed increase, the Southern States will become an American Jamaica? Is there, on the other hand, ground for the hope that the negroes may be found not incapable of the citizenship of the United States? The former of these two questions is the more difficult, and to some extent involves the latter: can cotton, can sugar, can rice, can coffee, can tobacco, be raised by white field hands? If not, can they be raised with profit by black free labor? Can co-operative planting, directed by negro over-lookers, possibly succeed, or must the farm be ruled by white capitalists, agents, and overseers?

It is asserted that the negro will not work without compulsion; but the same may be said of the European. There is compulsion of many kinds. The emancipated negro may still be forced to work—forced as the white man is forced in this and other lands, by the alternative, work or starve! This forcing, however, may not be confined to that which the laws of natural increase lead us to expect; it may be stimulated by bounties on immigration.

The negro is not, it would seem, to have a monopoly of Southern labor in this continent. This week we hear of three shiploads of Chinese coolies as just landed in Louisiana; and the air is thick with rumors of labor from Bombay, from Calcutta, from the Pacific Islands—of Eastern labor in its hundred shapes—not to speak of competition with the whites, now commencing with the German immigration into Tennessee.

The berries of this country are so large, so many, so full of juice, that alone they form a never-failing source of nourishment to an idle population. Three kinds of cranberries, American, pied, and English; two blackberries, huckleberries, high-bush and low-bush blueberries—the latter being the English bilberry—are among the best known of the native fruits. No one in this country, however idle he be, need starve. If he goes farther south, he has the banana, the true staff of life.

The terrible results of the plentiful possession of this tree are seen in Ceylon, at Panama, in the coastlands of Mexico, at Auckland in New Zealand. At Pitcairn‘s Island the plantain grove has beaten the missionary from the field; there is much lip-Christianity, but no practice to be got from a people who possess the fatal plant. The much-abused cocoa-nut cannot come near it as a devil‘s agent. The cocoa-palm is confined to a few islands and coast tracts—confined, too, to the tropics and sea-level; the plantain and banana extend over seventy-degrees of latitude, down to Botany Bay and King George‘s Sound, and up as far north as the Khyber Pass. The palm asks labor—not much, it is true; but still a few days’ hard work in the year in trenching, and climbing after the nuts. The plantain grows as a weed, and hangs down its bunches of ripe tempting fruit into your lap as you lie in its cool shade. The cocoanut-tree has a hundred uses, and urges men to work to make spirit from its juice, ropes, clothes, matting, bags, from its fiber, oil from the pulp; it creates an export trade which appeals to almost all men by their weakest side, in offering large and quick returns for a little work. John Ross‘s “Isle of Cocoas,” to the west of Java and south of Ceylon, yields him heavy gains; there are profits to be made upon the Liberian coast, and even in Southern India and Ceylon. The plantain will make nothing; you can eat it raw or fried, and that is all; you can eat it every day of your life without becoming tired of its taste; without suffering in your health, you can live on it exclusively. In the banana groves of Florida and Louisiana there lurks much trouble and danger to the American free States.

The negroes have hardly much chance in Virginia against the Northern capitalists, provided with white labor; but the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, and South Carolina promise to be wholly theirs. Already they are flocking to places in which they have a majority of the people, and can control the municipalities, and defend themselves, if necessary, by force; but if the Southerners of the coast desert their country, the negroes will not have it to themselves, unless nature declares that they shall. New Englanders will pour in with capital and energy, and cultivate the land by free black or by coolie labor, if either will pay. If they do pay, competition will force the remaining blacks to work or starve.

The friends of the negro are not without a fear that the laborers will be too many for their work, for, while the older cotton States appear to be worn out, the new, such as Texas and Tennessee, will be reserved by public opinion to the whites. For the present the negroes will be masters in seven of the rebel States; but in Texas, white men—English, Germans, Danes—are growing cotton with success; and in Georgia and North Carolina, which contain mountain districts, the negro power is not likely to be permanent.

We may, perhaps, lay it down as a general principle that, when the negro can fight his way through opposition, and stand alone as a farmer or laborer, without the aid of private or State charity, then he should be protected in the position he has shown himself worthy to hold, that of a free citizen of an enlightened and laboring community. Where it is found that when his circumstances have ceased to be exceptional, the negro cannot live unassisted, there the Federal government may fairly and wisely step in and say, “We will not keep you; but we will carry you to Liberia or to Hayti, if you will.”

It is clear that the Southern negroes must be given a decisive voice in the appointment of the legislatures by which they are to be ruled, or that the North must be prepared to back up by force of opinion, or if need be, by force of arms, the Federal Executive, when it insists on the Civil Rights Bill being set in action at the South. Government through the negroes is the only way to avoid government through an army, which would be dangerous to the freedom of the North. It is safer for America to trust her slaves than to trust her rebels—safer to enfranchise than to pardon.

A reading and writing basis for the suffrage in the Southern States is an absurdity. Coupled with pardons to the rebels, it would allow the “boys in gray”—the soldiers of the Confederacy—to control nine States of the Union; it would render the education of the freedmen hopeless. For the moment, it would entirely disfranchise the negroes in six States, whereas it is exactly for the moment that negro suffrage is in these States necessary; while, if the rebels were admitted to vote, and the negroes excluded from the poll, the Southern representatives, united with the Copperhead wing of the Democratic party, might prove to be strong enough to repudiate the Federal debt. This is one of a dozen dangers.

An education basis for the suffrage, though pretended to be impartial, would be manifestly aimed against the negroes, and would perpetuate the antipathy of color to which the war is supposed to have put an end. To education such a provision would be a death-blow. If the negroes were to vote as soon as they could read, it is certain that the planters would take good care that they never should read at all.

That men should be able to examine into the details of politics is not entirely necessary to the working of representative government. It is sufficient that they should be competent to select men to do it for them. In the highest form of representative government, where all the electors are both intelligent, educated, and alive to the politics of the time, then the member returned must tend more and more to be a delegate. That has always been the case with the Northern and Western members in America, but never with those returned by the Southern States; and so it will continue, whether the Southern elections be decided by negroes or by “mean whites.”

In Warren County, Mississippi, near Vicksburg, is a plantation which belongs to Joseph Davis, the brother of the rebel president. This he has leased to Mr. Montgomery—once his slave—in order that an association of blacks may be formed to cultivate the plantation on co-operative principles. It is to be managed by a council elected by the community at large, and a voluntary poor-rate and embankment-rate are to be levied on the people by themselves.

It is only a year since the termination of the war, and the negroes are already in possession of schools, village corporations, of the Metayer system, of co-operative farms; all this tells of rapid advance, and the conduct and circulation of the New Orleans Tribune, edited and published by negroes, and selling 10,000 copies daily, and another 10,000 of the weekly issue, speaks well for the progress of the blacks. If the Montgomery experiment succeeds, their future is secure.

CHAPTER III.
THE SOUTH.

THE political forecasts and opinions which were given me upon plantations were, in a great measure, those indicated in my talk with the Norfolk “loafers.” On the history of the commencement of the rebellion there was singular unanimity. “Virginia never meant to quit the Union; we were cheated by those rascals of the South. When we did go out, we were left to do all the fighting. Why, sir, I‘ve seen a Mississippian division run away from a single Yankee regiment.”

As I heard much the same story from the North Carolinians that I met, it would seem as though there was little union among the seceding States. The legend upon the first of all the secession flags that were hoisted was typical of this devotion to the fortunes of the State: “Death to abolitionists; South Carolina goes it alone;” and during the whole war it was not the rebel colors, but the palmetto emblem, or other State devices, that the ladies wore.

About the war itself but little is said, though here and there I met a man who would tell camp stories in the Northern style. One planter, who had been “out” himself, went so far as to say to me: “Our officers were good, but considering that our rank and file were just ‘white trash,’ and that they had to fight regiments of New England Yankee volunteers, with all their best blood in the ranks, and Western sharpshooters together, it‘s only wonderful how we weren‘t whipped sooner.”

As for the future, the planter‘s policy is a simple one: “Reckon we‘re whipped, so we go in now for the old flag; only those Yankee rogues must give us the control of our own people.” The one result of the war has been, as they believe, the abolition of slavery; otherwise the situation is unchanged. The war is over, the doctrine of secession is allowed to fall into the background, and the ex-rebels claim to step once more into their former place, if, indeed, they admit that they ever left it.

Every day that you are in the South you come more and more to see that the “mean whites” are the controlling power. The landowners are not only few in number, but their apathy during the present crisis is surprising. The men who demand their readmission to the government of eleven States are unkempt, fierce-eyed fellows, not one whit better than the brancos of Brazil; the very men, strangely enough, who themselves, in their “Leavenworth constitution,” first began disfranchisement, declaring that the qualification for electors in the new State of Kansas should be the taking oath to uphold the infamous Fugitive Slave Law.

These “mean whites” were the men who brought about secession. The planters are guiltless of everything but criminal indifference to the deeds that were committed in their name. Secession was the act of a pack of noisy demagogues; but a false idea of honor brought round a majority of the Southern people, and the infection of enthusiasm carried over the remainder.

When the war sprang up, the old Southern contempt for the Yankees broke out into a fierce burst of joy, that the day had come for paying off old scores. “We hate them, sir,” said an old planter to me. “I wish to God that the Mayflower had sunk with all hands in Plymouth Bay.”

Along with this violence of language, there is a singular kind of cringing to the conquerors. Time after time I heard the complaint, “The Yanks treat us shamefully, I reckon. We come back to the Union, and give in on every point; we renounce slavery; we consent to forget the past; and yet they won‘t restore us to our rights.” Whenever I came to ask what they meant by “rights,” I found the same haziness that everywhere surrounds that word. The Southerners seem to think that men may rebel and fight to the death against their country, and then, being beaten, lay down their arms and walk quietly to the polls along with law-abiding citizens, secure in the protection of the Constitution which for years they have fought to subvert.

At Richmond I had a conversation which may serve as a specimen of what one hears each moment from the planters. An old gentleman with whom I was talking politics opened at me suddenly: “The Radicals are going to give the ballot to our niggers to strengthen their party, but they know better than to give it to their Northern niggers.”

D.—“But surely there‘s a difference in the cases.”

The Planter.—“You‘re right—there is; but not your way. The difference is, that the Northern niggers can read and write, and even lie with consistency, and ours can‘t.”

D.—“But there‘s the wider difference, that negro suffrage down here is a necessity, unless you are to rule the country that‘s just beaten you.”

The Planter.—“Well, there of course we differ. We rebs say we fought to take our State out of the Union. The Yanks beat us; so our States must still be in the Union. If so, why shouldn‘t our representatives be unconditionally admitted?”

Nearer to a conclusion we of course did not come, he declaring that no man ought to vote who had not education enough to understand the Constitution, I, that this was good prima facie evidence against letting him vote, but that it might be rebutted by the proof of a higher necessity for his voting. As a planter said to me, “The Southerners prefer soldier rule to nigger rule;” but it is not a question of what they prefer, but of what course is necessary for the safety of the Union which they fought to destroy.

Nowhere in the Southern States did I find any expectation of a fresh rebellion. It is only Englishmen who ask whether “the South” will not fight “once more.” The South is dead and gone; there can never be a “South” again, but only so many Southern States. “The South” meant simply the slave country; and slavery being dead, it is dead. Slavery gave us but two classes besides the negroes—planters and “mean whites.” The great planters were but a few thousand in number; they are gone to Canada, England, Jamaica, California, Colorado, Texas. The “mean whites”—the true South—are impossible in the face of free labor: they must work or starve. If they work, they will no longer be “mean whites,” but essentially Northerners—that is, citizens of a democratic republic, and not oligarchists.

As the Southerners admit that there can be no further war, it would be better even for themselves that they should allow the sad record of their rising to fade away. Their speeches, their newspapers continue to make use of language which nothing could excuse, and which, in the face of the magnanimity of the conquerors, is disgraceful. In a Mobile paper I have seen a leader which describes with hideous minuteness Lincoln, Lane, John Brown, and Dostie playing whist in hell. A Texas cutting which I have is less blasphemous, but not less vile: “The English language no longer affords terms in which to curse a sniveling, weazen-faced piece of humanity generally denominated a Yankee. We see some about here sometimes, but they skulk around, like sheep-killing dogs, and associate mostly with niggers. They whine and prate, and talk about the judgment of God, as if God had anything to do with them.” The Southerners have not even the wit or grace to admit that the men who beat them were good soldiers; “blackguards and braggarts,” “cravens and thieves,” are common names for the men of the Union army. I have in my possession an Alabama paper in which General Sheridan, at that time the commander of the military division which included the State, is styled “a short-tailed slimy tadpole of the later spawn, the blathering disgrace of an honest father, an everlasting libel on his Irish blood, the synonym of infamy, and scorn of all brave men.” While I was in Virginia, one of the Richmond papers said: “This thing of ‘loyalty’ will not do for the Southern man.”

The very day that I landed in the South a dinner was given at Richmond by the “Grays,” a volunteer corps which had fought through the rebellion. After the roll of honor, or list of men killed in battle, had been read, there were given as toasts by rebel officers: “Jeff. Davis—the caged eagle; the bars confine his person, but his great spirit soars;” and “The conquered banner, may its resurrection at last be as bright and as glorious as theirs—the dead.”

It is in the face of such words as these that Mr. Johnson, the most unteachable of mortals, asks men who have sacrificed their sons to restore the Union to admit the ex-rebels to a considerable share in the government of the nation, even if they are not to monopolize it, as they did before the war. His conduct seems to need the Western editor‘s defense: “He must be kinder honest-like, he aire sich a tarnation foolish critter.”

It is clear, from the occurrence of such dinners, the publication of such paragraphs and leaders as those of which I have spoken, that there is no military tyranny existing in the South. The country is indeed administered by military commanders, but it is not ruled by troops. Before we can give ear to the stories that are afloat in Europe of the “government of major-generals,” we must believe that five millions of Englishmen, inhabiting a country as large as Europe, are crushed down by some ten thousand other men—about as many as are needed to keep order in the single town of Warsaw. The Southerners are allowed to rule themselves; the question now at issue is merely whether they shall also rule their former slaves, the negroes.

I hardly felt myself out of the reach of slavery and rebellion till, steaming up the Potomac from Aquia Creek by the gray dawn, I caught sight of a grand pile towering over a city from a magnificent situation on the brow of a long, rolling hill. Just at the moment, the sun, invisible as yet to us below, struck the marble dome and cupola, and threw the bright gilding into a golden blaze, till the Greek shape stood out upon the blue sky, glowing like a second sun. The city was Washington; the palace with the burnished cupola the Capitol; and within two hours I was present at the “hot-weather sitting” of the 39th Congress of the United States.

CHAPTER IV.
THE EMPIRE STATE.

AT the far southeast of New York City, where the Hudson and East River meet to form the inner bay, is an ill-kept park that might be made the loveliest garden in the world. Nowhere do the features that have caused New York to take rank as the first port of America stand forth more clearly. The soft evening breeze tells of a climate as good as the world can show; the setting sun floods with light a harbor secure and vast, formed by the confluence of noble streams, and girt with quays at which huge ships jostle; the rows of 500-pounder Rodmans at “The Narrows” are tokens of the nation‘s strength and wealth; and the yachts, as well handled as our own, racing into port from an ocean regatta, give evidence that there are Saxons in the land. At the back is the city, teeming with life, humming with trade, muttering with the thunder of passage. Opposite, in Jersey City, people say: “Every New Yorker has come a good half-hour late into the world, and is trying all his life to make it up.” The bustle is immense.

All is so un-English, so foreign, that hearing men speaking what Czar Nicholas was used to call “the American tongue,” I wheel round, crying—“Dear me! if here are not some English folk!” astonished as though I had heard French in Australia or Italian in Timbuctoo.

The Englishman who, coming to America, expects to find cities that smell of home, soon learns that Baker Street itself, or Portland Place, would not look English in the dry air of a continent four thousand miles across. New York, however, is still less English than is Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago—her people are as little Saxon as her streets. Once Southern, with the brand of slavery deeply printed in the foreheads of her foremost men, since the defeat of the rebellion New York has to the eye been cosmopolitan as any city of the Levant. All nationless towns are not alike: Alexandria has a Greek or an Italian tinge; San Francisco an English tone, with something of the heartiness of our Elizabethan times; New York has a deep Latin shade, and the democracy of the Empire State is of the French, not of the American or English type.

At the back, here, on the city side, are tall gaunt houses, painted red, like those of the quay at Dort or of the Boompjes at Rotterdam, the former dwellings of the “Knickerbockers” of New Amsterdam, the founders of New York, but now forgotten. There may be a few square yards of painting, red or blue, upon the houses in Broadway; there may be here and there a pagoda summer-house overhanging a canal; once in a year you may run across a worthy descendant of the old Netherlandish families; but in the main the Hollanders in America are as though they had never been; to find the memorials of lost Dutch empire, we must search Cape Colony or Ceylon. The New York un-English tone is not Batavian. Neither the sons of the men who once lived in these houses, nor the Germans whose names are now upon the doors, nor, for the matter of that, we English, who claim New York as the second of our towns, are the to-day‘s New Yorkers.

Here, on the water‘s edge, is a rickety hall, where Jenny Lind sang when first she landed—now the spot where strangers of another kind are welcomed to America. Every true republican has in his heart the notion that his country is pointed out by God for a refuge for the distressed of all the nations. He has sprung himself from men who came to seek a sanctuary—from the Quakers, or the Catholics, or the pilgrims of the Mayflower. Even though they come to take the bread from his mouth, or to destroy his peace, it is his duty, he believes, to aid the immigrants. Within the last twenty years there have landed at New York alone four million strangers. Of these two-thirds were Irish.

While the Celtic men are pouring into New York and Boston, the New Englanders and New Yorkers, too, are moving. They are not dying. Facts are opposed to this portentous theory. They are going West. The unrest of the Celt is mainly caused by discontent with his country‘s present, that of the Saxon by hope for his private future. The Irishman flies to New York because it lies away from Ireland; the Englishman takes it upon his road to California.

Where one race is dominant, immigrants of another blood soon lose their nationality. In New York and Boston the Irish continue to be Celts, for these are Irish cities. In Pittsburg, in Chicago, still more in the country districts, a few years make the veriest Paddy English. On the other hand, the Saxons are disappearing from the Atlantic cities, as the Spaniards have gone from Mexico. The Irish here are beating down the English, as the English have crushed out the Dutch. The Hollander‘s descendants in New York are English now; it bids fair that the Saxons should be Irish.

As it is, though the Celtic immigration has lasted only twenty years, the results are already clear: if you see a Saxon face upon the Broadway, you may be sure it belongs to a traveler, or to some raw English lad bound West, just landed from a Plymouth ship. We need not lay much stress upon the fact that all New Yorkers have black hair and beard: men may be swarthy and yet English. The ancestors of the Londoners of to-day, we are told, were yellow-headed roysterers; yet not one man in fifty that you meet in Fleet Street or on Tower Hill is as fair as the average Saxon peasant. Doubtless, our English eastern counties were peopled in the main by low-Dutch and Flemings: the Sussex eyes and hair are rarely seen in Suffolk. The Puritans of New England are sprung from those of the “associated counties,” but the victors of Marston Moor may have been cousins to those no less sturdy Protestants, the Hollanders who defended Leyden. It may be that they were our ancestors, those Dutchmen that we English crowded out of New Amsterdam—the very place where we are sharing the fate we dealt. The fiery temper of the new people of the American coast towns, their impatience of free government, are better proofs of Celtic blood than are the color of their eyes and beard.

Year by year the towns grow more and more intensely Irish. Already of every four births in Boston, one only is American. There are 120,000 foreign to 70,000 native voters in New York and Brooklyn. Montreal and Richmond are fast becoming Celtic; Philadelphia—shades of Penn!—can only be saved by the aid of its Bavarians. Saxon Protestantism is departing with the Saxons: the revenues of the Empire State are spent upon Catholic asylums; plots of city land are sold at nominal rates for the sites of Catholic cathedrals, by the “city step-fathers,” as they are called. Not even in the West does the Latin Church gain ground more rapidly than in New York City: there are 80,000 professing Catholics in Boston.

When is this drama, of which the first scene is played in Castle Garden, to have its close? The matter is grave enough already. Ten years ago, the third and fourth cities of the world, New York and Philadelphia, were as English as our London: the one is Irish now; the other all but German. Not that the Quaker City will remain Teutonic: the Germans, too, are going out upon the land; the Irish alone pour in unceasingly. All great American towns will soon be Celtic, while the country continues English: a fierce and easily-roused people will throng the cities, while the law-abiding Saxons who till the land will cease to rule it. Our relations with America are matters of small moment by the side of the one great question: Who are the Americans to be?

Our kinsmen are by no means blind to the dangers that hang over them. The “Know-Nothing” movement failed, but Protection speaks the same voice in its opposition to commercial centers. If you ask a Western man why he, whose interest is clearly in Free Trade, should advocate Protection, he fires out: “Free Trade is good for our American pockets, but it‘s death to us Americans. All your Bastiats and Mills won‘t touch the fact that to us Free Trade must mean salt-water despotism, and the ascendency of New York and Boston. Which is better for the country—one New York, or ten contented Pittsburgs and ten industrious Lowells?”

The danger to our race and to the world from Irish ascendency is perhaps less imminent than that to the republic. In January, 1862, the mayor, Fernando Wood, the elect of the “Mozart” Democracy, deliberately proposed the secession from the Union of New York City. Of all the Northern States, New York alone was a dead weight upon the loyal people during the war of the rebellion. The constituents of Wood were the very Fenians whom in our ignorance we call “American.” It is America that Fenianism invades from Ireland—not England from America.

It is no unfair attack upon the Irish to represent them as somewhat dangerous inhabitants for mighty cities. Of the sixty thousand persons arrested yearly in New York, three-fourths are alien born: two-thirds of these are Irish. Nowhere else in all America are the Celts at present masters of a city government—nowhere is there such corruption. The purity of the government of Melbourne—a city more democratic than New York—proves that the fault does not lie in democracy: it is the universal opinion of Americans that the Irish are alone responsible.

The State legislature is falling into the hands of the men who control the city council. They tell a story of a traveler on the Hudson River Railroad, who, as the train neared Albany—the capital of New York—said to a somewhat gloomy neighbor, “Going to the State legislatur’?” getting for answer, “No, sir! It‘s not come to that with me yet. Only to the State prison!”

Americans are never slow to ridicule the denationalization of New York. They tell you that during the war the colonel of one of the city regiments said: “I‘ve the best blood of eight nations in the ranks.” “How‘s that?” “I‘ve English, Irish, Welsh, Scotch, French, Italians, Germans.” “Guess that‘s only seven.” “Swedes,” suggested some one. “No, no Swedes,” said the colonel. “Ah! I have it: I‘ve some Americans.” Stories such as this the rich New Yorkers are nothing loth to tell; but they take no steps to check the denationalization they lament. Instead of entering upon a reform of their municipal institutions, they affect to despise free government; instead of giving, as the oldest New England families have done, their tone to the State schools, they keep entirely aloof from school and State alike. Sending their boys to Cambridge, Berlin, Heidelberg, anywhere rather than to the colleges of their native land, they leave it to learned pious Boston to supply the West with teachers, and to keep up Yale and Harvard. Indignant if they are pointed at as “no Americans,” they seem to separate themselves from everything that is American: they spend summers in England, winters in Algeria, springs in Rome, and Coloradans say with a sneer, “Good New Yorkers go to Paris when they die.”

Apart from nationality, there is danger to free government both in the growth of New York City, and in the gigantic fortunes of New Yorkers. The income, they tell me, of one of my merchant friends is larger than the combined salaries of the president, the governors, and the whole of the members of the legislatures of all the forty-five States and territories. As my informant said, “He could keep the governments of half a dozen States as easily as I can support my half dozen children.”

There is something, no doubt, of the exaggeration of political jealousy about the accounts of New York vice given in New England and down South, in the shape of terrible philippics. It is to be hoped that the overstatement is enormous, for sober men are to be found even in New York who will tell you that this city outdoes Paris in every form of profligacy as completely as the French capital outherods imperial Rome. There is here no concealment about the matter; each inhabitant at once admits the truth of accusations directed against his neighbor. If the new men, the “petroleum aristocracy,” are second to none in their denunciations of the Irish, these in their turn unite with the oldest families in thundering against “Shoddy.”

New York life shows but badly in the summer-time; it is seen at its worst when studied at Saratoga. With ourselves, men have hardly ceased to run from business and pleasures worse than toil to the comparative quiet of the country house. Among New Yorkers there is not even the affectation of a search for rest; the flight is from the drives and restaurants of New York to the gambling halls of Saratoga; from winning piles of greenbacks to losing heaps of gold; from cotton gambling to roulette or faro. Long Branch is still more vulgar in its vice; it is the Margate, Saratoga the Homburg of America.

“Shoddy” is blamed beyond what it deserves when the follies of New York society are laid in a body at its door. If it be true that the New York drawing-rooms are the best guarded in the world, it is also true that entrance is denied as rigidly to intellect and eminence as to wealth. If exclusiveness be needed, affectation can at least do nothing toward subduing “Shoddy.” Mere cliqueism, disgusting every where, is ridiculous in a democratic town; its rules of conduct are as out of place as kid gloves in the New Zealand bush, or gold scabbards on a battle-field.

Good meat, and drink, and air, give strength to the men and beauty to the women of a moneyed class; but in America these things are the inheritance of every boy and girl, and give their owners no advantage in the world. During the rebellion, the ablest generals and bravest soldiers of the North sprang, not from the merchant families, but from the farmer folk. Without special merit of some kind, there can be no such thing as aristocracy.

Many American men and women, who have too little nobility of soul to be patriots, and too little understanding to see that theirs is already, in many points, the master country of the globe, come to you, and bewail the fate which has caused them to be born citizens of a republic, and dwellers in a country where men call vices by their names. The least educated of their countrymen, the only grossly vulgar class that America brings forth, they fly to Europe “to escape democracy,” and pass their lives in Paris, Pau, or Nice, living libels on the country they are believed to represent.

Out of these discordant elements, Cubans, Knickerbockers, Germans, Irish, “first families,” “Petroleum,” and “Shoddy,” we are forced to construct our composite idea—New York. The Irish numerically predominate, but we have no experience as to what should be the moral features of an Irish city, for Dublin has always been in English hands; possibly that which in New York appears to be cosmopolitan is merely Celtic. However it may be, this much is clear, that the humblest township of New England reflects more truly the America of the past, the most chaotic village of Nebraska portrays more fully the hopes and tendencies of the America of the future, than do this huge State and city.

If the political figure of New York is not encouraging, its natural beauty is singularly great. Those who say that America has no scenery, forget the Hudson, while they can never have explored Lake George, Lake Champlain, and the Mohawk. That Poole‘s exquisite scene from the “Decameron,” “Philomela‘s Song,” could have been realized on earth, I never dreamt until I saw the singers at a New Yorker‘s villa on the Hudson grouped in the deep shades of a glen, from which there was an outlook upon the basaltic palisades and lake-like Tappan Zee. It was in some such spot that De Tocqueville wrote the brightest of his brilliant letters—that dated “Sing Sing”—for he speaks of himself as lying on a hill that overhung the Hudson, watching the white sails gleaming in the hot sun, and trying in vain to fancy what became of the river where it disappeared in the blue “Highlands.”

That New York City itself is full of beauty the view from Castle Garden would suffice to show; and by night it is not less lovely than by day. The harbor is illuminated by the colored lanterns of a thousand boats, and the steam-whistles tell of a life that never sleeps. The paddles of the steamers seem not only to beat the water, but to stir the languid air and so provoke a breeze, and the lime-lights at the Fulton and Wall Street ferries burn so brightly that in the warm glare the eye reaches through the still night to the feathery acacias in the streets of Brooklyn. The view is as southern as the people: we have not yet found America.

CHAPTER V.
CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT.

“OLD CAMBRIDGE! Long may she flourish!” proposed by a professor in the University of Cambridge, in America, and drunk standing, with three cheers, by the graduates and undergraduates of Harvard, is a toast that sets one thinking.

Cambridge in America is not by any means a university of to-day. Harvard College, which, being the only “house,” has engrossed the privileges, funds, and titles of the university, was founded at Cambridge, Mass., in 1636, only ninety years later than the greatest and wealthiest college of our Cambridge in old England. Puritan Harvard was the sister rather than the daughter of our own Puritan Emmanuel. Harvard himself, and Dunster, the first president of Harvard‘s College, were among the earliest of the scholars of Emmanuel.

A toast from the Cambridge of new to the Cambridge of old England is one from younger to elder sister; and Dr. Wendell Holmes, “The Autocrat,” said as much in proposing it at the Harvard alumni celebration of 1866.

Like other old institutions, Harvard needs a ten-days’ revolution: academic abuses flourish as luxuriantly upon American as on English soil, and university difficulties are much the same in either country. Here, as at home, the complaint is that the men come up to the university untaught. To all of them their college is forced for a time to play the high-school; to some she is never anything more than school. At Harvard this is worse than with ourselves: the average age of entry, though of late much risen, is still considerably under eighteen.

The college is now aiming at raising gradually the standard of entry: when once all are excluded save men, and thinking men, real students, such as those by whom some of the new Western universities are attended, then Harvard hopes to leave drill-teaching entirely to the schools, and to permit the widest freedom in the choice of studies to her students.

Harvard is not blameless in this matter. Like other universities, she is conservative of bad things as well as good; indeed, ten minutes within her walls would suffice to convince even an Englishman that Harvard clings to the times before the Revolution.

Her conservatism is shown in many trivial things—in the dress of her janitors and porters, in the cut of the grass-plots and college gates, in the conduct of the Commencement orations in the chapel. For the dainty little dames from Boston who came to hear their friends and brothers recite their disquisitions none but Latin programmes were provided, and the poor ladies were condemned to find such names as Bush, Maurice, Benjamin, Humphrey, and Underwood among the graduating youths, distorted into Bvsh, Mavritivs, Beniamin, Hvmphredvs, Vnderwood.

This conservatism of the New England universities had just received a sharp attack. In the Commencement oration, Dr. Hedges, one of the leaders of the Unitarian Church, had strongly pressed the necessity for a complete freedom of study after entry, a liberty to take up what line the student would, to be examined and to graduate in what he chose. He had instanced the success of Michigan University consequent upon the adoption of this plan; he had pointed to the fact that of all the universities in America, Michigan alone drew her students from every State. President Hill and ex-President Walker had indorsed his views.

There is a special fitness in the reformers coming forward at this time. This year is the commencement of a new era at Harvard, for at the request of the college staff, the connection of the university with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has just been dissolved, and the members of the board of overseers are in future to be elected by the university, instead of being nominated by the State. This being so, the question had been raised as to whether the governor would come in state to Commencement, but he yielded to the wishes of the graduates, and came with the traditional pomp, attended by a staff in uniform, and escorted by a troop of Volunteer Lancers, whose scarlet coats and polish recalled the times before the Revolution.

While the ceremony was still in progress, I had been introduced to several of the foremost rowing men among the younger graduates of Harvard, and at its conclusion I accompanied them to their river. They were in strict training for their university race with Yale, which was to come off in a week, and as Cambridge had been beaten twice running, and this year had a better crew, they were wishful for criticisms on their style. Such an opinion as a stranger could offer was soon given: they were dashing, fast, long in their stroke; strong, considering their light weights, but terribly overworked. They have taken for a rule the old English notions as to training which have long since disappeared at home, and, looked upon as fanatics by their friends and tutors, they have all the fanatic‘s excess of zeal.

Rowing and other athletics, with the exceptions of skating and base ball, are both neglected and despised in America. When the smallest sign of a reaction appears in the New England colleges, there comes at once a cry from Boston that brains are being postponed to brawn. If New Englanders would look about them, they would see that their climate has of itself developed brains at the expense of brawn, and that if national degeneracy is to be long prevented, brawn must in some way be fostered. The high shoulder, head-voice, and pallor of the Boston men are not incompatible with the possession of the most powerful brain, the keenest wit; but it is not probable that energy and talent will be continued in future generations sprung from the worn-out men and women of to-day.

The prospect at present is not bright; year by year Americans grow thinner, lighter, and shorter-lived. Ælian‘s Americans, we may remember, though they were greatly superior to the Greeks in stature, were inferior to them in length of life. The women show even greater signs of weakness than the men, and the high, undulating tones which are affectation in the French, are natural to the ladies of America; little can be expected of women whose only exercise is excessive dancing in overheated rooms.

The American summer, often tropical in its heat, has much to answer for, but it is the winter which makes the saddest havoc among the younger people, and the boys and girls at school. Cooped up all day in the close air of the heated school-house, the poor children are at night made to run straight back to the furnace-dried atmosphere of home. The thermometer is commonly raised indoors to eighty or ninety degrees Fahr. The child is not only baked into paleness and sweated bit by bit to its death, but fed meantime, out of mistaken kindness, upon the most indigestible of dainties—pastry, hot dough-nuts, and sweetmeats taking the place of bread, and milk, and meat—and is not allowed to take the slightest exercise, except its daily run to school-house. Who can wonder that spinal diseases should prevail?

One reason why Americans are pale and agueish is that, as a people, they are hewers of primeval forest and tillers of virgin soil. These are the unhealthiest employments in the world; the sun darts down upon the hitherto unreached mould, and sets free malarious gases, against which the new settlers have no antidotes.

The rowing men of Harvard tell me that their clubs are still looked on somewhat coldly by the majority of the professors, who obstinately refuse to see that improved physical type is not an end, but a means, toward improvement of the mental faculties, if not in the present, at least in the next generation. As for the moral training in the virtues of obedience and command, for which a boat‘s crew is the best of schools, that is not yet understood at Harvard, where rowing is confined to the half dozen men who are to represent the college in the annual race, and the three or four more who are being trained to succeed them in the crew. Rowing in America is what it was till ten years since at old Cambridge, and is still at Oxford—not an exercise for the majority of the students, but a pursuit for a small number. Physical culture is, however, said to be making some small progress in the older States, and I myself saw signs of the tendency in Philadelphia. The war has done some good in this respect, and so has the influx of Canadians to Chicago. Cricket is still almost an unknown thing, except in some few cities. When I was coming in to Baltimore by train, we passed a meadow in which a match was being played. A Southerner to whom I was talking at the time, looked at the players, and said with surprise: “Reckon they‘ve got a wounded man ther’, front o’ them sticks, sah.” I found that he meant the batsman, who was wearing pads.

One of the most brilliant of Harvard‘s thinkers has taken to carpentrying as a relief to his mental toil; her most famed professor is often to be found working in his garden or his farm; but such change of work for work is possible only to certain men. The generality of Americans need not only exercise, but relaxation; still, with less physical, they possess greater mental vitality then ourselves.

On the day that follows Commencement—the chief ceremony of the academic year—is held once in three summers the “Alumni Celebration,” or meeting of the past graduates of Harvard—a touching gathering at all times, but peculiarly so in these times that follow on the losses of the war.

The American college informal organizations rest upon the unit of the “class.” The “class” is what at Cambridge is called “men of the same year,”—men who enter together and graduate together at the end of the regular course. Each class of a large New England college, such as Harvard, will often possess an association of its own; its members will dine together once in five years, or ten—men returning from Europe and from the far West to be present at the gathering. Harvard is strong in the affections of the New England people—her faults are theirs; they love her for them, and keep her advantages to themselves, for in the whole list of graduates for this year I could find only two Irish names.

Here, at the Alumni Celebration, a procession was marshaled in the library in which the order was by classes; the oldest class of which there were living members being called the first. “Class of 1797!” and two old white-haired gentlemen tottered from the crowd, and started on their march down the central aisle, and out bareheaded into the blaze of one of the hottest days that America had ever known. “Class of 1800!” missing two years, in which all the graduates were dead; and out came one, the sole survivor. Then came “1803,” and so on, to the stalwart company of the present year. When the classes of 1859 and 1860, and of the war-years were called, those who marched out showed many an empty sleeve.

The present triennial celebration is noteworthy not only for the efforts of the university reformers, but also for the foundation of the Memorial Hall, dedicated as a monument to those sons of Harvard who fell while serving their country in the suppression of the late rebellion. The purity of their patriotism hardly needed illustration by the fire of young Everett, or the graceful speech of Dr. Holmes. Even the splendid oratory of Governor Bullock could do little more than force us to read for ourselves the Roll of Honor, and see how many of Harvard‘s most distinguished younger men died for their country as privates of Massachusetts Volunteers.

There was a time, as England knows, when the thinking men of Boston, and the Cambridge professors, Emerson, Russell Lowell, Asa Gray, and a dozen more of almost equal fame, morally seceded from their country‘s councils, and were followed in their secession by the younger men. “The best men in America stand aloof from politics,” it was said.

The country from which these men seceded was not the America of to-day: it was the Union which South Carolina ruled. From it the Cambridge professors “came out,” not because they feared to vex their nerves with the shock of public argument and action, but because the course of the slaveholders was not their course. Hating the wrongs they saw but could not remedy, they separated themselves from the wrong-doers; another matter, this, from the “hating hatred” of our culture class in England.

In 1863 and 1864 there came the reckoning. When America was first brought to see the things that had been done in her name, and at her cost, and, rising in her hitherto unknown strength, struck the noblest blow for freedom that the world has seen, the men who had been urging on the movement from without at once re-entered the national ranks, and marched to victory. Of the men who sat beneath Longfellow, and Agassiz, and Emerson, whole battalions went forth to war. From Oberlin almost every male student and professor marched, and the university teaching was left in the women‘s hands. Out of 8000 school-teachers in Pennsylvania, of whom 300 alone were drafted, 3000 volunteered for the war. Everywhere the teachers and their students were foremost among the Volunteers, and from that time forward America and her thinkers were at one.

The fierce passions of this day of wakening have not been suffered to disturb the quiet of the academic town. Our English universities have not about them the classic repose, the air of study, that belong to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Those who have seen the lanes of Leyden, and compared them with the noisy Oxford High Street, will understand what I mean when I say that our Cambridge comes nearest to her daughter-town; but even the English Cambridge has a bustling street or two, and a weekly market-day, while Cambridge in New England is one great academic grove, buried in a philosophic calm which our university towns can never rival so long as men resort to them for other purposes than work.

It is not only in the Harvard precincts that the oldness of New England is to be remarked. Although her people are everywhere in the vanguard of all progress, their country has a look of gable-ends and steeple-hats, while their laws seem fresh from the hands of Alfred. In all England there is no city which has suburbs so gray and venerable as are the elm-shaded towns round Boston: Dorchester, Chelsea, Nahant, and Salem, each seems more ancient than its fellow; the people speak the English of Elizabeth, and joke about us, ”—— speaks good English for an Englishman.”

In the country districts, the winsome villages that nestle in the dells seem to have been there for ten centuries at least; and it gives one a shock to light on such a spot as Bloody Brook, and to be told that only one hundred and ninety years ago Captain Lathrop was slain there by Red Indians, with eighty youths, “the flower of Essex County,” as the Puritan history says.

The warnings of Dr. Hedges, in reference to the strides of Michigan, have taken the New Englanders by surprise. Secure, as they believed, in their intellectual supremacy, they forgot that in a Federal Union the moral and physical primacy will generally both reside in the same State. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, at one time the foremost upholder of the doctrine of State rights, will soon be seen once more acting as its champion—this time on behalf of herself and her five sister States.

Were the six New England Commonwealths grouped together in a single State, it would still have only three-fourths of the population of New York, and about an equal number of inhabitants with Pennsylvania. The State of Rhode Island is one-fourth the size of many a single Californian county. Such facts as these will not be long lost sight of in the West, and when a divergence of interests springs up, Ohio will not suffer her voice in the Senate to continue to be neutralized by that of Connecticut or Rhode Island. Even if the Senate be allowed to remain untouched, it is certain that the redistribution of seats consequent upon the census of 1870 will completely transfer political power to the central States. That New England will by this change inevitably lose her hold upon the destinies of the whole Union is not so clear. The influence for good of New England upon the West has been chiefly seminal; but not for that the less enormous. Go into a State such as Michigan, where half the people are immigrants—where, of the remaining moiety, the greater part are born Westerners, and apparently in no way of New England—and you will find that the inhabitants are for the most part earnest, God-fearing men, with a New England tone of profound manliness and conviction running through everything they say and do. The colleges in which they have been reared are directed, you will find, by New England professors, men trained in the classic schools of Harvard, Yale, or Amherst; the ministers under whom they sit are, for the most part, Boston men; the books they read are of New England, or old English of the class from which the writers of the Puritan States themselves have drawn their inspiration. To New England is chiefly due, in short, the making of America a godly nation.

It is something in this age to come across a people who believe strongly in anything, and consistently act upon their beliefs: the New Englanders are such a race. Thoroughly God-fearing States are not so common that we can afford to despise them when found; and nowhere does religion enter more into daily life than in Vermont or Massachusetts.

The States of the Union owe so huge a debt of gratitude to New England, that on this score alone they may refrain from touching her with sacrilegious hands. Not to name her previous sacrifices, the single little State of Massachusetts—one-fourth the size of Scotland, and but half as populous as Paris—sent during the rebellion a hundred and fifty regiments to the field.

It was to Boston that Lincoln telegraphed when, in 1861, at a minute‘s notice, he needed men for the defense of Washington. So entirely were Southerners of the opinion that the New Englanders were the true supporters of the old flag, that “Yankee” became a general term for loyalists of any State. America can never forget the steady heroism of New England during the great struggle for national existence.

The unity that has been the chief cause of the strength of the New England influence is in some measure sprung from the fact that these six States are completely shut off from all America by the single State of New York, alien from them in political and moral life. Every Yankee feels his country bounded by the British, the Irish, and the sea.

In addition to the homogeneousness of isolation, the New Englanders, like the Northern Scotch, have the advantages of a bad climate and a miserable soil. These have been the true agents in the development of the energy, the skill, and fortitude of the Yankee people. In the war, for instance, it was plain that the children of the poor and rugged Northeastern States were not the men to be beaten by the lotus-eaters of Louisiana when they were doing battle for what they believed to be a righteous cause.

One effect of the poverty of soil with which New England is afflicted has been that her sons have wandered from end to end of the known world, engaging in every trade, and succeeding in all. Sometimes there is in their migrations a religious side. Mormonism, although it now draws its forces from Great Britain, was founded in New England. At Brindisi, on my way home, I met three Yankees returning from a Maine colony lately founded at Jaffa, in expectation of the fulfillment of prophecy, and destruction of the Mohammedan rule. For the moment they are intriguing for a firman from the very government upon the coming fall of which all their expectations have been based; and these fierce fanatics are making money by managing a hotel. One of them told me that the Jaffa colony is a “religio-commercial speculation.”

New England Yankees are not always so filled with the Puritan spirit as to reject unlawful means of money-making. Even the Massachusetts common schools and prim Connecticut meeting-houses turn out their black sheep into the world. At Center Harbor, in New Hampshire, I met with an example of the “Yankee spawn” in a Maine man—a shrewd, sailor-looking fellow. He was sitting next me at the ordinary, and asked me to take a glass of his champagne. I declined, but chatted, and let out that I was a Britisher.

“I was subject to your government once for sixteen months,” my neighbor said.

“Really! Where?”

“Sierra Leone. I was a prisoner there. And very lucky, too.”

“Why so?” I asked.

“Because, if the American government had caught me, they would have hanged me for a pirate. But I wasn‘t a pirate.”

With over-great energy I struck in, “Of course not.”

My Neighbor.—“No; I was a slaver.”

Idling among the hills of New Hampshire and the lakes of Maine, it is impossible for a stranger, starting free from prejudice, not to end by loving the pious people of New England, for he will see that there could be no severer blow to the cause of freedom throughout the world than the loss by them of an influence upon American life and thought, which has been one of unmixed good. Still, New England is not America.

CHAPTER VI.
CANADA.

THERE is not in the world a nobler outlook than that from off the terrace at Quebec. You stand upon a rock overhanging city and river, and look down upon the guardship‘s masts. Acre upon acre of timber comes floating down the stream above the city, the Canadian songs just reaching you upon the heights; and beneath you are fleets of great ships, English, German, French, and Dutch, embarking the timber from the floating-docks. The Stars and Stripes are nowhere to be seen. Such are the distances in North America, that here, farther from the sea than is any city in Europe west of Moscow, we have a seaport town, with gunboats and three-decker; morning and evening guns, and bars of “God save the Queen,” to mark the opening and closing of the port.

The St. Lawrence runs in a chasm in a flat table-land, through which some earlier Niagara seems to have cut for it a way. Some of the tributaries are in sight, all falling from a cliff into the deep still river. In the distance, seaward, a silver ribbon on the rock represents the grand falls of Montmorenci. Long villages of white tiny cots straggle along the roads that radiate from the city; the great black cross of the French parish church showing reverently from all.

On the north, the eye reaches to the rugged outlines of the Laurentian range, composed of the oldest mountains in the world, at the foot of which is Lake St. Charles, full of fiord-like northern beauty, where at a later time I learnt to paddle the Indian canoe of birch bark.

Leaving the citadel, we are at once in the European middle ages. Gates and posterns, cranky steps that lead up to lofty gabled houses, with sharp French roofs of burnished tin, like those of Liege; processions of the Host; altars decked with flowers; statues of the Virgin; sabots; blouses; and the scarlet of the British linesman,—all these are seen in narrow streets and markets, that are graced with many a Cotentin lace cap, and all within forty miles of the down-east Yankee State of Maine. It is not far from New England to old France.

Quebec Lower Town is very like St. Peter Port in Guernsey. Norman-French inhabitants, guarded by British troops, step-built streets, thronged fruit-market, and citadel upon a rock, frowning down upon the quays, are alike in each. A slight knowledge of the Upper Normandy patois is not without its use; it procured me an offer of a pinch of snuff from an old habitante on board one of the river boats. Her gesture was worthy of the ancien regime.

There has been no dying-out of the race among the French Canadians. They number twenty times the thousands that they did a hundred years ago. The American soil has left their physical type, religion, language, laws, and habits absolutely untouched. They herd together in their rambling villages, dance to the fiddle, after mass on Sundays, as gayly as once did their Norman sires, and keep up the fleur-de-lys and the memory of Montcalm. More French than the French are the Lower Canadian habitants.

Not only here, but everywhere, a French “dependency” is France transported; not a double of the France of to-day, but a mummy of the France of the time of the “colony‘s” foundation. In Säigon, you find Imperial France; here the France of Louis Quatorze. The Englishman founds everywhere a New England—new in thought as in soil; the Frenchman carries with him to California, to Japan, an undying recollection of the Palais Royal. In San Francisco there lives a great French capitalist, who, since 1849, has been the originator of every successful Californian speculation. He cannot speak a word of English, and his greatest pleasure, in a country of fruits and wine, is to bid his old French servant assure him, upon honor, that his whole dessert, from his claret to his olives, has been brought for him from France. There is much in the colonizing instinct of our race, but something, perhaps, in the consideration that the English are hardly happy enough at home to be always looking back to what they have left in the old country.

There is about this old France something of Dutch sleepiness and content. There is, indeed, some bustle in the market-place, where the grand old dames, in snowy caps, sit selling plums and pears; there is much singing made over the lading of the timber-ships; there are rafts in hundreds gliding down the river; old French carts in dozens, creaking and wheezing on their lumbering way to town, with much clacking of whips and clappering of wooden shoes. All these things there are, but then there are these and more in Dol, and Quimper, and Morlaix—in all those towns which in Europe come nearest to old France. There is quiet bustle, subdued trade, prosperity deep, not noisy; but the life is sleepy; the rafts float, and are not tugged nor rowed; the old Norman horses seem to draw the still older carts without an effort, and the very boys wear noisy shoes against their will, and make a clatter simply because they cannot help it.

In such a scene it is impossible to forget that British troops are here employed as guardians of the only true French colony in the world against the inroads of the English race. “Nos institutions, notre langue, nos lois,” is the motto of the habitants. Their newspapers are filled with church celebrations, village fêtes, speeches of “M. le Curé” at the harvest-home, announcements by the “scherif,” speech of M. Cartier at the consecration of Monseigneur Laroque, blessings of bells, of ships; but of life, nothing—of mention of what is passing in America, not a word. One corner is given to the world outside America: “Emprunt Pontifical, Emission Américaine, quatre millions de piastres,” heads a solid column of holy finance. The pulse-beat of the continent finds no echo here.

It is not only in political affairs that there is a want of energy in French or Lower Canada; in journeying from Portland to Quebec, the moment the frontier was passed, we seemed to have come from a land of life to one of death. No more bustling villages, no more keen-eyed farmers: a fog of unenterprise hung over the land; roads were wanting, houses rude, swamps undrained, fields unweeded, plains untilled.

If the Eastern Townships and country round Quebec are a wilderness, they are not a desert. The country on the Saguenay is both. At Quebec in summer it is hot—mosquitoes are not unknown: even at Tadousac, where the Saguenay flows into the St. Lawrence, there is sunlight as strong as that of Paris. Once in the northern river, all is cold, gloomy, arctic—no house, no boat, no sign of man‘s existence, no beasts, no birds, although the St. Lawrence swarms with duck and loons. The river is a straight, cold, black fiord, walled in by tremendous cliffs, which go sheer down into depths to which their height above water is as nothing; two walls of rock, and a path of ice-cold, inky water. Fish there are, seal and salmon—that is all. The “whales and porpoises,” which are advertised by the Tadousac folks as certain to “disport themselves daily in front of the hotel,” are never to be seen in this earth-crack of the Saguenay.

The cold, for summer, was intense; nowhere in the world does the limit of ever-frozen ground come so far south as in the longitude of the Saguenay. At night we had a wonderful display of northern lights. A white column, towering to the mid-skies, rose, died away, and was succeeded by broad white clouds, stretching from east to west, and sending streamers northward. Suddenly there shot up three fresh silvery columns in the north, northwest, and northeast, on which all the colors of the rainbow danced and played. After moonrise, the whole seemed gradually to fade away.

At Ha Ha Bay, the head of navigation, I found a fur-buying station of the Hudson‘s Bay Company; but that association has enough to answer for without being charged with the desolation of the Saguenay. The company has not here, as upon the Red River, sacrificed colonists to minks and silver-foxes. There is something more blighting than a monopoly that oppresses Lower Canada. As I returned to Quebec, the boat that I was aboard touched at St. Paschal, now called Rivière du Loup, the St. Lawrence terminus of the Grand Trunk line: we found there immense wharves, and plenty of bells and crosses, but not a single ship, great or small. Even in Virginia I had seen nothing more disheartening.

North of the St. Lawrence religion is made to play as active a part in politics as in the landscape. Lower Canada, as we have seen, is French and Catholic; Upper Canada is Scotch and Presbyterian, though the Episcopalians are strong in wealth and the Irish Catholics in numbers.

Had the Catholics been united, they might, since the fusion of the two Canadas, have governed the whole country: as it is, the Irish and French neither worship nor vote together, and of late the Scotch have had nearly their own way.

Finding themselves steadily losing ground, the French threw in their lot with the scheme for the confederation of the provinces, and their clergy took up the cause with a zeal which they justified to their flocks by pointing out that the alternative was annexation to America, and possible confiscation of the church lands.

Confederation of the provinces means separation of the Canadas, which regain each its Parliament; and the French Catholics begin to hope that the Irish of Upper Canada, now that they are less completely overshaded by the more numerous French, will again act with their co-religionists: the Catholic vote in the new confederation will be nearly half the whole. In Toronto, however, the Fenians are strong, and even in Montreal their presence is not unknown: it is a question whether the whole of the Canadian Irish are not disaffected. The Irish of the chief city have their Irish priests, their cathedral of St. Patrick, while the French have theirs upon the Place d‘Armes. The want of union may save the dominion from the establishment of Catholicism as a State Church.

The confederation of our provinces was necessary, if British North America was to have a chance for life; but it cannot be said to be accomplished while British Columbia and the Red River tract are not included. To give Canada an outlet on one side is something, but communication with the Atlantic is a small matter by the side of communication at once with Atlantic and Pacific through British territory. We shall soon have railways from Halifax to Lake Superior, and thence to the Pacific is but 1600 miles. It is true that the line is far north, and exposed to heavy snows and bitter cold; but, on the other hand, it is well supplied with wood, and if it possess no such fertile tracts as that of Kansas and Colorado, it at least escapes the frightful wilds of Bitter Creek and Mirage Plains.

We are now even left in doubt how long we shall continue to possess so much as a route across the continent on paper. Since the cession of Russian America to the United States, a map of North America has been published in which the name of the Great Republic sprawls across the continent from Behring‘s Straits to Mexico, with the “E” in “United” ominously near Vancouver‘s Island, and the “T” actually planted upon British territory. If we take up the British Columbian, we find the citizens of the mainland portion of the province proposing to sell the island for twenty million dollars to the States.

Settled chiefly by Americans from Oregon and California, and situated, for purposes of reinforcement, immigration, and supply, at a distance of not less than twenty thousand miles from home, the British Pacific colonies can hardly be considered strong in their allegiance to the crown: we have here the reductio ad absurdum of home government.

Our hindering trade, by tolerating the presence of two sets of custom-houses and two sets of coins between Halifax and Lake Superior, was less absurd than our altogether preventing its extension now. Under a so-called confederation of our American possessions, we have left a country the size of civilized Europe, and nearly as large as the United States—lying too, upon the track of commerce and highroad to China—to be despotically governed by a company of traders in skins and peltries, and to remain as long as it so pleases them in the dead stillness and desertion needed to insure the presence of fur-bearing beasts.

“Red River” should be a second Minnesota, Halifax a second Liverpool, Esquimault a second San Francisco; but double government has done its work, and the outposts of the line of trade are already in American, not British hands. The gold mines of Nova Scotia, the coal mines and forests of British Columbia, are owned in New England and New York, and the Californians are expecting the proclamation of an American territorial government in the capital of Vancouver‘s Island.

As Montana becomes peopled up, we shall hear of the “colonization” of Red River by citizens of the United States, such as preceded the hoisting of the “lone star” in Texas, and the “bear flag” in California, by Fremont; and resistance by the Hudson‘s Bay Company will neither be possible, nor, in the interests of civilization, desirable.

Even supposing a great popular awakening upon colonial questions, and the destruction of the Hudson‘s Bay monopoly, we never could make the Canadian dominion strong. With the addition of Columbia and Red River, British America would hardly be as powerful or populous as the two Northwestern States of Ohio and Illinois, or the single State of New York—one out of forty-five. “Help us for ten years, and then we‘ll help ourselves,” the Canadians say; “help us to become ten millions, and then we will stand alone;” but this becoming ten millions is not such an easy thing.

The ideas of most of us as to the size of the British territories are derived from maps of North America, made upon Mercator‘s projection, which are grossly out in high latitudes, though correct at the equator. The Canadas are made to appear at least twice their proper size, and such gigantic proportions are given to the northern parts of the Hudson territory that we are tempted to believe that in a country so vast there must be some little value. The true size is no more shown upon the map than is the nine-months’ winter.

To Upper Canada, which is no bad country, it is not for lack of asking that population fails to come. Admirably executed gazettes give the fullest information about the British possessions in the most glowing of terms; offices and agencies are established in Liverpool, London, Cork, Londonderry, and a dozen other cities; government immigration agents and information offices are to be found in every town in Canada; the government immigrant is looked after in health, comfort, and religion; directions of the fullest kind are given him in the matters of money, clothes, tools, luggage; Canada, he is told by the government papers, possesses perfect religious, political, and social freedom; British subjects step at once into the possession of political rights; the winter is but bracing, the climate the healthiest in the world. Millions of acres of surveyed crown lands are continually in the market. To one who knows what the northern forests are there is perhaps something of satire in the statement that “there is generally on crown lands an unlimited supply of the best fuel.” What of that, however? The intending immigrant knows nothing of the struggle with the woods, and fuel is fuel in Old England. The mining of the precious metals, the fisheries, petroleum, all are open to the settler—let him but come. Reading these documents, we can only rub our eyes, and wonder how it is that human selfishness allows the Canadian officials to disclose the wonders of their El Dorado to the outer world, and invite all men to share blessings which we should have expected them to keep as a close preserve for themselves and their nearest and dearest friends. Taxation in the States, the immigrants are told, is five and a half times what it is in Canada, two and a half times the English rate. Laborers by the thousand, merchants and farmers by the score, are said to be flocking into Canada to avoid the taxation of the Radicals. The average duration of life in Canada is 37 per cent. higher than in the States. Yet, in the face of all these facts, only twenty or two and twenty thousand immigrants come to Canada for three hundred thousand that flock annually to the States, and of the former many thousands do but pass through on their way to the Great West. Of the twenty thousand who land at Quebec in each year, but four and a half thousand remain a year in Canada; and there are a quarter of a million of persons born in British America now naturalized in the United States.

The passage of the immigrants to the Western States is not for want of warning. The Canadian government advertise every Coloradan duel, every lynching in Montana, every Opposition speech in Kansas, by way of teaching the immigrants to respect the country of which they are about to become free citizens.

It is an unfortunate fact, that these strange statements are not harmless—not harmless to Canada, I mean. The Provincial government by these publications seems to confess to the world that Canada can live only by running down the great republic. Canadian sympathy for the rebellion tends to make us think that these northern statesmen must not only share in our old-world confusion of the notions of right and wrong, but must be sadly short-sighted into the bargain. It is only by their position that they are blinded, for few countries have abler men than Sir James Macdonald, or sounder statesmen than Cartier or Galt; but, like men standing on the edge of a cliff, Canadian statesmen are always wanting to jump off. Had Great Britain left them to their own devices, we should have had war with America in the spring of 1866.

The position of Canada is in many ways anomalous: of the two chief sections of our race—that in Britain and that in America—the latter is again split in twain, and one division governed from across the Atlantic. For such government there is no pretext, except the wishes of the governed, who gain by the connection men for their defense, and the opportunity of gratifying their spite for their neighbors at our expense. Those who ask why a connection so one-sided, so opposed to the best interests of our race, should be suffered to continue, are answered, now that the argument of “prestige” is given up, that the Canadians are loyal, and that they hate the Americans, to whom, were it not for us, they must inevitably fall. That the Canadians hate the Americans can be no reason why we should spend blood and treasure in protecting them against the consequences of their hate. The world should have passed the time when local dislikes can be suffered to affect our policy toward the other sections of our race; but even were it otherwise, it is hard to see how twelve thousand British troops, or a royal standard hoisted at Ottawa, can protect a frontier of two thousand miles in length from a nation of five and thirty millions. Canada, perhaps, can defend herself, but we most certainly cannot defend her; we provoke much more than we assist.

As for Canadian “loyalty,” it appears to consist merely of hatred toward America, for while we were fighting China and conquering Japan, that we might spread free trade, our loyal colonists of Canada set upon our goods protective duties of 20 per cent, which they have now in some degree removed, only that they may get into their hands the smuggling trade carried on in breach of the laws of our ally, their neighbor. We might, at least, fairly insist that the connection should cease, unless Canada will entirely remove her duties.

At bottom, it would seem as though no one gained by the retention of our hold on Canada. Were she independent, her borders would never again be wasted by Fenian hordes, and she would escape the terrible danger of being the battle-field in which European quarrels are fought out. Canada once republican, the Monroe doctrine would be satisfied, and its most violent partisans would cease to advocate the adoption of other than moral means to merge her territories in the Union. An independent Canada would not long delay the railway across the continent to Puget Sound, which a British bureau calls impossible. England would be relieved from the fear of a certain defeat by America in the event of war—a fear always harmful, even when war seems most unlikely; relieved, too, from the cost of such panics as those of 1861 and 1866.

Did Canada stand alone, no offense that she could give America would be likely to unite all sections of that country in an attempt to conquer her; while, on the other hand, such an attempt would be resisted to the death by an armed and brave people, four millions strong. As it is, any offense toward America committed by our agents, at any place or time, or arising out of the continual changes of policy and of ministry in Great Britain, united to the standing offense of maintaining the monarchical principle in North America, will bring upon unhappy Canada the whole American nation, indignant in some cause, just, or seeming just, and to be met by a people deceived into putting their trust in a few regiments of British troops, sufficient at the most to hold Quebec, and to be backed by reinforcements which could never come in time, did public opinion in Great Britain so much as permit their sailing. In all history there is nothing stranger than the narrowness of mind that has led us to see in Canada a piece of England, and in America a hostile country. There are more sons of British subjects in America than in Canada, by far; and the American looks upon the old country with a pride that cannot be shared by a man who looks to her to pay his soldiers.

The independence of Canada would put an immediate end to much of the American jealousy of Great Britain—a consideration which of itself should outweigh any claim to protection which the Canadians can have on us. The position which we have to set before us in our external dealings is, that we are no more fellow-countrymen of the Canadians than of the Americans of the North or West.

The capital of the new dominion is to be Ottawa, known as “Hole in the Woods” among the friends of Toronto and Montreal, and once called Bytown. It consists of the huge Parliament-house, the government printing-office, some houseless wildernesses meant for streets, and the hotel where the members of the legislature “board.” Such was the senatorial throng at the moment of my visit, that we were thrust into a detached building made of half-inch planks, with wide openings between the boards; and as the French Canadian members were excited about the resignation of Mr. Galt, indescribable chattering and bawling filled the house.

The view from the Parliament-house is even more thoroughly Canadian than that from the terrace at Quebec—a view of a land of rapids, of pine forests, and of lumberers’ homes, full of character, but somewhat bleak and dreary; even on the hottest summer‘s day, it tells of winter storms past and to come. On the far left are the island-filled reaches of the Upper Ottawa; nearer, the roaring Chaudière Falls, a mile across—a mile of walls of water, of sudden shoots, of jets, of spray. From the “caldron” itself, into which we can hardly see, rises a column of rainbow-tinted mist, backed by distant ranges and black woods, now fast falling before the settler‘s axe. Below you is the river, swift, and covered with cream-like foam; on the right, a gorge—the mouth of the Rideau Canal.

When surveyed from the fittest points, the Chaudière is but little behind Niagara; but it may be doubted whether in any fall there is that which can be called sublimity. Natural causes are too evident; water, rushing to find its level, falls from a ledge of rock. How different from a storm upon the coast, or from a September sunset, where the natural causes are so remote that you can bring yourself almost to see the immediate hand of God! It is excusable in Americans, who have no sea-coast worthy of the name, to talk of Niagara as the perfection of the sublime; but it is strange that a people who have Birling Gap and Bantry Bay should allow themselves to be led by such a cry.

Niagara has one beauty in which it is unapproached by the great Chaudière: the awesome slowness with which the deep-green flood, in the center of the Horseshoe Fall, rolls rather than plunges into the gulf.

CHAPTER VII.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN.

FROM the gloom of Buffalo, the smoke of Cincinnati, and the dirt of Pittsburg, I should have been glad to escape as soon as might be, even had not the death from cholera of 240 persons in a single day of my visit to the “Queen City” warned me to fly north. From a stricken town, with its gutters full of chloride of lime, and fires burning in the public streets, to green Michigan, was a grateful change; but I was full of sorrow at leaving that richest and most lovely of all States—Ohio. There is a charm in the park-like beauty of the Monongahela valley, dotted with vines and orchards, that nothing in Eastern America can rival. The absence at once of stumps in the cornfields, and of untilled or unfenced land, gives the “Buckeye State” a look of age that none of the “old Eastern States” can show. In corn, in meadow, in timber-land, Ohio stands alone. Her indian-corn exceeds in richness that of any other State; she has ample stores of iron, and coal is worked upon the surface in every Alleghany valley. Wool, wine, hops, tobacco, all are raised; her Catawba has inspired poems. Every river-side is clothed with groves of oak, of hickory, of sugar-maple, of sycamore, of poplar, and of buckeye. Yet, as I said, the change to the Michigan prairie was full of a delightful relief; it was Holland after the Rhine, London after Paris.

Where men grow tall there will maize grow tall, is a good sound rule: limestone makes both bone and straw. The Northwestern States, inhabited by giant men, are the chosen home of the most useful and beautiful of plants, the maize—in America called “corn.” For hundreds of miles the railway track, protected not even by a fence or hedge, runs through the towering plants, which hide all prospects save that of their own green pyramids. Maize feeds the people, it feeds the cattle and the hogs that they export to feed the cities of the East; from it is made yearly, as an Ohio farmer told me, “whisky enough to float the ark.” Rice is not more the support of the Chinese than maize of the English in America.

In the great corn-field of the Northwestern States, dwells a people without a history, without tradition, busy at hewing out of the forest trunks codes and social usages of its own. The Kansas men have set themselves to emancipating women; the “Wolverines,” as the people of Michigan are called, have turned their heads to education, and are teaching the teachers upon this point.

The rapidity with which intellectual activity is awakened in the West is inexplicable to the people of New England. While you are admiring the laws of Minnesota and Wisconsin, Boston men tell you that the resemblance of the code of Kansas to that of Connecticut is consequent only on the fact, that the framers of the former possessed a copy of this one New England code, while they had never set eyes upon the code of any other country in the world. While Yale and Harvard are trying in vain to keep pace with the State universities of Michigan and Kansas, you will meet in Lowell and New Haven men who apply an old Russian story to the Western colleges, and tell you that their professors of languages, when asked where they have studied, reply that they guess they learned to read and write in Springfield.

One of the difficulties of the New England colleges has been to reconcile university traditions with democracy; but in the Western States there is neither reconciliation nor tradition, though universities are plenty. Probably the most democratic school in the whole world is the State University of Michigan, situate at Ann Arbor, near Detroit. It is cheap, large, practical; twelve hundred students, paying only the ten dollars entrance fee, and five dollars a year during residence, and living where they can in the little town, attend the university to be prepared to enter with knowledge and resolution upon the affairs of their future life. A few only are educated by having their minds unfolded that they may become many-sided men; but all work with spirit, and with that earnestness which is seen in the Scotch universities at home. The war with crime, the war with sin, the war with death—Law, Theology, Medicine—these are the three foremost of man‘s employments; to these, accordingly, the university affords her chiefest care, and to one of these the student, his entrance examination passed, often gives his entire time.

These things are democratic, but it is not in them that the essential democracy of the university is to be seen. There are at Michigan no honor-lists, no classes in our sense, no orders of merit, no competition. A man takes, or does not take a certain degree. The university is governed, not by its members, not by its professors, but by a parliament of “regents” appointed by the inhabitants of the State. Such are the two great principles of the democratic university of the West.

It might be supposed that these two strange departures from the systems of older universities were irregularities, introduced to meet the temporary embarrassments incidental to educational establishments in young States. So far is this from being the case that, as I saw at Cambridge, the clearest-sighted men of the older colleges of America are trying to assimilate their teaching system to that of Michigan—at least in the one point of the absence of competition. They assert that toil performed under the excitement of a fierce struggle between man and man is unhealthy work, different in nature and in results from the loving labor of men whose hearts are really in what they do: toil, in short, not very easily distinguishable from slave labor.

In the matter of the absence of competition, Michigan is probably but returning to the system of the European universities of the Middle Ages, but the government by other than the members of the university is a still stranger scheme. It is explained when we look to the sources whence the funds of the university are drawn—namely, from the pockets of the taxpayers of the State. The men who have set up this corporation in their midst, and who tax themselves for its support, cannot be called on, they say, to renounce its government to their nominees, professors from New England, unconnected with the State, men of one idea, often quarrelsome, sometimes “irreligious.” There is much truth in these statements of the case, but it is to be hoped that the men chosen to serve as “regents” are of a higher intellectual stamp than those appointed to educational offices in the Canadian backwoods. A report was put into my hands at Ottawa, in which a superintendent of instruction writes to the Minister of Education, that he had advised the ratepayers of Victoria County not in future to elect as school trustees men who cannot read or write. As Michigan grows older, she will, perhaps, seek to conform to the practice of other universities in this matter of her government, but in the point of absence of competition she is likely to continue firm.

Even here some difficulty is found in getting competent school directors; one of them reported 31½ children attending school. Of another district its superintendent reports: “Conduct of scholars about the same as that of ‘Young America’ in general.” Some of the superintendents aim at jocosity, and show no want of talent in themselves, while their efforts are to demonstrate its deficiency among the boys. The superintendent of Grattan says, in answer to some numbered questions: “Condition good, improvement fair; for ¼ of ¼ of the year in school, and fifteen-sixteenths of the time at play. Male teachers most successful with the birch; female with Cupid‘s darts. Schoolhouses in fair whittling order. Apparatus: Shovel, none; tongs, ditto; poker, one. Conduct of scholars like that of parents—good, bad, and indifferent. No minister in town—sorry; no lawyer—good!” The superintendents of Manlius Township report that Districts 1 and 2 have buildings “fit (in winter) only for the polar bear, walrus, reindeer, Russian sable, or Siberian bat;” and they go on to say: “Our children read everything, from Mr. Noodle‘s Essays on Matrimony to Artemus Ward‘s Lecture on First Principles of American Government.” Another report from a very new county runs: “Sunday-schools afford a little reading-matter to the children. Character of matter most read—battle, murder, and sudden death.” A third states that the teachers are meanly paid, and goes on: “If the teaching is no better than the pay, it must be like the soup that the rebels gave the prisoners.” A superintendent, reporting that the success of the teachers is greater than their qualifications warrant, says: “The reason is to be found in the Yankeeish adaptability of even Wolverines.”

After all, it is hard even to pass jokes at the expense of the Northwestern people. A population who would maintain schools and universities under difficulties apparently overwhelming was the source from which to draw Union volunteers such as those who, after the war, returned to their Northern homes, I have been told, shocked and astonished at the ignorance and debasement of the Southern whites.

The system of elective studies pursued at Michigan is one to which we are year by year tending in the English universities. As sciences multiply and deepen, it becomes more and more impossible that a “general course” scheme can produce men fit to take their places in the world. Cambridge has attempted to set up both systems, and, giving her students the choice, bids them pursue one branch of study with a view to honors, or take a less valued degree requiring some slight proficiency in many things. Michigan denies that the stimulus of honor examinations should be connected with the elective system. With her, men first graduate in science, or in an arts degree, which bears a close resemblance to the English “poll,” and then pursue their elected study in a course which leads to no university distinction, which is free from the struggle for place and honors. These objections to “honors” rest upon a more solid foundation than a mere democratic hatred of inequality of man and man. Repute as a writer, as a practitioner, is valued by the Ann Arbor man, and the Wolverines do not follow the Ephesians, and tell men who excel among them to go and excel elsewhere. The Michigan professors say, and Dr. Hedges bears them out, that a far higher average of real knowledge is obtained under this system of independent work than is dreamt of in colleges where competition rules. “A higher average” is all they say, and they acknowledge frankly that there is here and there a student to be found to whom competition would do good. As a rule, they tell us this is not the case. Unlimited battle between man and man for place is sufficiently the bane of the world not to be made the curse of schools: competition breeds every evil which it is the aim of education, the duty of a university to suppress: pale faces caused by excessive toil, feverish excitement that prevents true work, a hatred of the subject on which the toil is spent, jealousy of best friends, systematic depreciation of men‘s talents, rejection of all reading that will not “pay,” extreme and unhealthy cultivation of the memory, general degradation of labor—all these evils, and many more, are charged upon the competition system. Everything that our professors have to say of “cram” these American thinkers apply to competition. Strange doctrines these for young America!

Of the practical turn which we should naturally expect to discover in the university of a bran-new State I found evidence in the regulation which prescribes that the degree of Master of Arts shall not be conferred as a matter of course upon graduates of three years’ standing, but only upon such as have pursued professional or general scientific studies during that period. Even in these cases an examination before some one of the faculties is required for the Master‘s degree. I was told that for the medical degree “four years of reputable practice” is received, instead of certain courses.

In her special and selected studies, Michigan is as merely practical as Swift‘s University of Brobdingnag; but, standing far above the ordinary arts or science courses, there is a “University course” designed for those who have already taken the Bachelor‘s degree. It is harder to say what this course includes than what it does not. The twenty heads range over philology, philosophy, art, and science; there is a branch of “criticism,” one of “arts of design,” one of “fine arts.” Astronomy, ethics, and Oriental languages are all embraced in a scheme brought into working order within ten years of the time when Michigan was a wilderness, and the college-yard an Indian hunting-ground.

Michigan entered upon education work very early in her history as a State. In 1850, her legislature commissioned the Hon. Ira Mayhew to prepare a work on education for circulation throughout America. Her progress has been as rapid as her start was good; her natural history collection is already one of the most remarkable in America; her medical school is almost unequaled, and students flow to her even from New England and from California, while from New York she draws a hundred men a year. In only one point is Ann Arbor anywhere but in the van: she has hitherto followed the New England colleges in excluding women. The State University of Kansas has not shown the same exclusiveness that has characterized the conduct of the rulers of Michigan: women are admitted not only to the classes, but to the professorships at Lawrence.

This Northwestern institution at Ann Arbor was not behind even Harvard in the war: it supplied the Union army with 1000 men. The 17th Regiment of Michigan Volunteers, mainly composed of teachers and Ann Arbor students, has no cause to fear the rivalry of any other “record;” and such was the effect of the war, that in 1860 there were in Michigan 2600 male to 5350 female teachers, whereas now there are but 1300 men to 7500 women.

So proud are Michigan men of their roll of honor, that they publish it at full length in the calendar of the university. Every “class” from the foundation of the schools shows some graduates distinguished in their country‘s service during the suppression of the rebellion. The Hon. Oramel Hosford, Superintendent of Public Instruction in Michigan, reports that, owing to the presence of crowds of returned soldiers, the schools of the State are filled almost to the limit of their capacity, while some are compelled to close their doors against the thronging crowds. Captains, colonels, generals, are among the students now humbly learning in the Ann Arbor University Schools.

The State of Michigan is peculiar in the form that she has given to her higher teaching; but in no way peculiar in the attention she bestows on education. Teaching, high and low, is a passion in the West, and each of these young States has established a university of the highest order, and placed in every township not only schools, but public libraries, supported from the rates, and managed by the people.

Not only have the appropriations for educational purposes by each State been large, but those of the Federal government have been upon the most splendid scale. What has been done in the Eastern and the Central States no man can tell, but even west of the Mississippi twenty-two million acres have already been granted for such purposes, while fifty-six million more are set aside for similar gifts.

The Americans are not forgetful of their Puritan traditions.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE PACIFIC RAILROAD.

WHEN the companions of the explorer Cartier found that the rapids at Montreal were not the end of all navigation, as they had feared, but that above them there commenced a second and boundless reach of deep, still waters, they fancied they had found the long-looked-for route to China, and cried, “La Chine!” So the story goes, and the name has stuck to the place.

Up to 1861, the Canadians remained in the belief that they were at least the potential possessors of the only possible road for the China trade of the future, for in that year a Canadian government paper declared that the Rocky Mountains, south of British territory, were impassable for railroads. Maps showed that from St. Louis to San Francisco the distance was twice that from the head of navigation on Lake Superior to the British Pacific ports.

America has gone through a five years’ agony since that time; but now, in the first days of peace, we find that the American Pacific Railroad, growing at the average rate of two miles a day at one end, and one mile a day at the other, will stretch from sea to sea in 1869 or 1870, while the British line remains a dream.

Not only have the Rocky Mountains turned out to be passable, but the engineers have found themselves compelled to decide on the conflicting claims of passes without number. Wall-like and frowning as the Rocky Mountains are when seen from the plains, the rolling gaps are many, and they are easier crossed by railway lines than the less lofty chains of Europe. From the heat of the country, the snow-line lies high; the chosen pass is in the latitude of Constantinople or Oporto. The dryness of the air of the center of a vast continent prevents the fall of heavy snows or rains in winter. At eight or nine thousand feet above the sea, in the Black Hills, or Eastern Piedmont, the drivers on the Pacific line will have slighter snow-drifts to encounter than their brothers on the Grand Trunk or the Camden and Amboy at the sea-level. On the other hand, fuel and water are scarce, and there is an endless succession of smaller snowy chains which have to be crossed, upon the Grand Plateau or basin of the Great Salt Lake. Whatever the difficulties, in 1870 the line will be an accomplished fact.

In the act creating the Pacific Railroad Company, passed in 1862, the company were bound to complete their line at the rate of a hundred miles a year. They are completing it at more than three times that rate.

When the act is examined, it ceases to be strange that the road should be pushed with extraordinary energy and speed, so numerous are the baits offered to the companies to hasten its completion. Money is to be advanced them; land is to be given them for every mile they finish—on a generous scale while the line is on the plains, on three times the scale when it reaches the most rugged tracts. These grants alone are estimated at twenty millions of acres. Besides the alternate sections, a width of four hundred feet, with additional room for works and stations, is granted for the line. The California Company is tempted by similar offers to a race with the Union Pacific, and each company is struggling to lay the most miles and get the most land upon the great basin. It is the interest of the Eastern Company that the junction should be as far as possible to the west; of the Western, that it should be as far as possible to the east. The result is an average laying of three, and an occasional construction of four, miles a day. If we look to the progress at both ends, we find as much sometimes laid in a day as a bullock train could travel. So fast do the headquarters “cities” keep moving forward, that at the Californian end the superintendent wished me to believe that whenever his chickens heard a wagon pass, they threw themselves upon their backs, and held up their legs, that they might be tied and thrown into the cart for a fresh move. “They are true birds of passage,” he said.

When the iron trains are at the front, the laying will for a short time proceed at the rate of nine yards in every fifteen seconds; but three or four hundred tons of rails have to be brought up every day upon the single track, and it is in this that the time is lost.

The advance carriages of the construction train are well supplied with rifles hung from the roofs; but even when the Indians forget their amaze, and attack the “city upon wheels,” or tear up the track, they are incapable of destroying the line so fast as the machinery can lay it down. “Soon,” as a Denver paper said, during my stay in the Mountain City, “the iron horse will sniff the Alpine breeze upon the summit of the Black Hills 9000 feet above the sea;” and upon the plateau, where deer are scarce and buffalo unknown, the Indians have all but disappeared. The worst Indian country is already crossed, and the red men have sullenly followed the buffalo to the south, and occupy the country between Kansas State and Denver, contenting themselves with preventing the construction of the Santa Fé and Denver routes to California. Both for the end in view, and the energy with which it is pursued, the Pacific Railroad will stand first among the achievements of our times.

If the end to be kept in view in the construction of the first Pacific Railroad line were merely the traffic from China and Japan to Europe, or the shortest route from San Francisco to Hampton Roads, the Kansas route through St. Louis, Denver, and the Berthoud Pass would be, perhaps, the best and shortest of those within the United States; but the Saskatchewan line through British territory, with Halifax and Puget Sound for ports, would be still more advantageous. As it is, the true question seems to be, not the trade between the Pacific and Great Britain, but between Asia and America, for Pennsylvania and Ohio must be the manufacturing countries of the next fifty years.

Whatever our theory, the fact is plain enough: in 1870 we shall reach San Francisco from London in less time than by the severest traveling I can reach it from Denver in 1866.

Wherever, in the States, Forth and South have met in conflict, North has won. New York has beaten Norfolk; Chicago, in spite of its inferior situation, has beaten the older St. Louis. In the same way, Omaha, or cities still farther north, will carry off the trade from Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Kansas City. Ultimately Puget Sound may beat San Francisco in the race for the Pacific trade, and the Southern cities become still less able to keep their place than they have been hitherto. Time after time, Chicago has thrown out intercepting lines, and diverted from St. Louis trade which seemed of necessity to belong to her; and the success of the Union Pacific line, and failure of the Kansas road, is a fresh proof of the superior energy of the Northern to the Southern city. This time a fresh element enters into the calculation, and declares for Chicago. The great circle route, the true straight line, is in these great distances shorter by fifty or a hundred miles than the straight lines of the maps and charts, and the Platte route becomes not only the natural, but the shortest route from sea to sea.

Chicago has a great advantage over St. Louis in her comparative freedom from the cholera, which yearly attacks the Missourian city. During my stay in St. Louis, the deaths from cholera alone were known to have reached 200 a day, in a population diminished by flight to 180,000. A quarantine was established on the river; the sale of fruit and vegetables prohibited; prisoners released on condition that they should work at burying the dead; and funeral corteges were forbidden. Chicago herself, unreached by the plague, was scattering handbills on every Western railroad line, warning immigrants against St. Louis.

The Missourians have relied overmuch upon the Mississippi River, and have forgotten that railroads are superseding steamboats every day. Chicago, on the other hand, which ten years ago was the twentieth city in America, is probably by this time the third. As a center of thought, political and religious, she stands second only to Boston, and her Wabash and Michigan Avenues are among the most beautiful of streets.

One of the chief causes of the future wealth of America is to be found in the fact that all her “inland” towns are ports. The State of Michigan lies between 500 and 900 miles from the ocean, but the single State has upon the great lakes a coast of 1500 miles. From Fort Benton to the sea by water is nearly 4000 miles, but the post is a much-used steamboat port, though more distant, even in the air-line, from the nearest sea upon the same side the dividing range, than is the White Sea from the Persian Gulf. Put it in which way you would, Europe could not hold this river.

A great American city is almost invariably placed at a point where an important railroad finds an outport on a lake or river. This is no adaptation to railways of the Limerick saying about rivers—namely, that Providence has everywhere so placed them as to pass through the great towns; for in America railways precede population, and when mapped out and laid, they are but tramways in the desert. There is no great wonder in this, when we remember that 158,000,000 acres of land have been up to this time granted to railroads in America.

One tendency of a costly railroad system is that few lines will be made, and trade being thus driven into certain unchanging routes, a small number of cities will flourish greatly, and, by acting as housing stations or as ports, will rise to enormous wealth and population. Where a system of cheap railways is adopted, there will be year by year a tendency to multiply lines of traffic, and consequently to multiply also ports and seats of trade—a tendency, however, which may be more than neutralized by any special circumstances which may cause the lines of transit to converge rather than run parallel to one another. Of the system of costly grand trunk lines we have an instance in India, where we see the creation of Umritsur and the prosperity of Calcutta alike due to our single great Bengal line; of the converging system we have excellent instances in Chicago and Bombay; while we see the plan of parallel lines in action here in Kansas, and causing the comparative equality of progress manifested in Leavenworth, in Atchison, in Omaha. The coasts of India swarmed with ports till our trunk lines ruined Goa and Surat to advance Bombay, and a hundred village ports to push our factory at Calcutta, founded by Charnock as late as 1690, but now grown to be the third or fourth city of the empire.

Of the dozen chaotic cities which are struggling for the honor of becoming the future capital of the West, Leavenworth, with 20,000 people, three daily papers, an opera house, and 200 drinking saloons, was, at the time of my visit in 1866, somewhat ahead of Omaha, with its 12,000, two papers, and a single “one-horse” theater, though the northern city tied Leavenworth in the point of “saloons.”

Omaha, Leavenworth, Kansas City, Wyandotte, Atchison, Topeka, Lecompton, and Lawrence, each praises itself and runs down its neighbor. Leavenworth claims to be so healthy that when it lately became necessary to “inaugurate” the new grave-yard, “they had to shoot a man on purpose”—a change since the days when the Southern Border Ruffians were in the habit of parading its streets, bearing the scalps of abolitionists stuck on poles. On the other hand, a Nebraska man, when asked whether the Kansas people were fairly honest, said: “Don‘t know about honest; but they do say as how the folk around take in their stone fences every night.” Lawrence, the State capital, which is on the dried-up Kansas River, sneeringly says of all the new towns on the Missouri that the boats that ply between them are so dangerous that the fare is collected in installments every five minutes throughout the trip. Next after the jealousy between two Australian colonies, there is nothing equal to the hatreds between cities competing for the same trade. Omaha has now the best chance of becoming the capital of the far West, but Leavenworth will no doubt continue to be the chief town of Kansas.

The progress of the smaller cities is amazing. Pistol-shots by day and night are frequent, but trade and development are little interfered with by such incidents as these; and as the village cities are peopled up, the pioneers, shunning their fellows, keep pushing westward, seeking new “locations.” “You‘re the second man I‘ve seen this fall! Darn me, if ‘taint ’bout time to varmose out westerly—y,” is the standing joke of the “frontier-bars” against each other.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

At St. Louis I had met my friend Mr. Hepworth Dixon, just out from England, and with him I visited the Kansas towns, and then pushed through Waumego to Manhattan, the terminus (for the day) of the Kansas Pacific line. Here we were thrust into what space remained between forty leathern mail-bags and the canvas roof of the mule-drawn ambulance, which was to be at once our prison for six nights, and our fort upon wheels against the Indians.

CHAPTER IX.
OMPHALISM.

DASHING through a grove of cottonwood-trees draped in bignonia and ivy, we came out suddenly upon a charming scene: a range of huts and forts crowning a long, low hill seamed with many a timber-clothed ravine, while the clear stream of the Republican fork wreathed itself about the woods and bluffs. The block-house, over which floated the Stars and Stripes, was Fort Riley, the Hyde Park Corner from which continents are to measure all their miles; the “capital of the universe,” or “center of the world.” Not that it has always been so. Geographers will be glad to learn that not only does the earth gyrate, but that the center of its crust also moves: within the last ten years it has removed westward into Kansas from Missouri—from Independence to Fort Riley. The contest for centership is no new thing. Herodotus held that Greece was the very middle of the world, and that the unhappy Orientals were frozen, and the yet more unfortunate Atlantic Indians baked every afternoon of their poor lives in order that the sun might shine on Greece at noon; London plumes herself on being the “center of the terrestrial globe;” Boston is the “hub of the hull universe,” though the latter claim is less physical than moral, I believe. In Fort Riley the Western men seem to have found the physical center of the United States, but they claim for the Great Plains as well the intellectual as the political leadership of the whole continent. These hitherto untrodden tracts, they tell you, form the heart of the empire, from which the life-blood must be driven to the extremities. Geographical and political centers must ultimately coincide.

Connected with this belief is another Western theory—that the powers of the future must be “continental.” Germany, or else Russia, is to absorb all Asia and Europe, except Britain. North America is already cared for, as the gradual extinction of the Mexican and absorption of the Canadians they consider certain. As for South America, the Californians are planning an occupation of Western Brazil, on the ground that the continental power of South America must start from the head-waters of the great rivers, and spread seaward down the streams. Even in the Brazilian climate they believe that the Anglo-Saxon is destined to become the dominant race.

The success of this omphalism, this government from the center, will be brought about, in the Western belief, by the necessity under which the nations on the head-waters of all streams will find themselves of having the outlets in their hands. Even if it be true that railways are beating rivers, still the railways must also lead seaward to the ports, and the need for their control is still felt by the producers in the center countries of the continent. The Upper States must everywhere command the Lower, and salt-water despotism find its end.

The Americans of the Valley States, who fought all the more heartily in the Federal cause from the fact that they were battling for the freedom of the Mississippi against the men who held its mouth, look forward to the time when they will have to assert, peaceably but with firmness, their right to the freedom of their railways through the Northern Atlantic States. Whatever their respect for New England, it cannot be expected that they are forever to permit Illinois and Ohio to be neutralized in the Senate by Rhode Island and Vermont. If it goes hard with New England, it will go still harder with New York; and the Western men look forward to the day when Washington will be removed, Congress and all, to Columbus or Fort Riley.

The singular wideness of Western thought, always verging on extravagance, is traceable to the width of Western land. The immensity of the continent produces a kind of intoxication; there is moral dram-drinking in the contemplation of the map. No Fourth of July oration can come up to the plain facts contained in the Land Commissioners’ report. The public domain of the United States still consists of one thousand five hundred millions of acres; there are two hundred thousand square miles of coal lands in the country, ten times as much as in all the remaining world. In the Western territories not yet States, there is land sufficient to bear, at the English population rate, five hundred and fifty millions of human beings.

It is strange to see how the Western country dwarfs the Eastern States. Buffalo is called a “Western City;” yet from New York to Buffalo is only three hundred and fifty miles, and Buffalo is but seven hundred miles to the west of the most eastern point in all the United States. On the other hand, from Buffalo we can go two thousand five hundred miles westward without quitting the United States. “The West” is eight times as wide as the Atlantic States, and will soon be eight times as strong.

The conformation of North America is widely different to that of any other continent on the globe. In Europe, the glaciers of the Alps occupy the center point, and shed the waters toward each of the surrounding seas: confluence is almost unknown. So it is in Asia: there the Indus flowing into the Arabian Gulf, the Oxus into the Sea of Aral, the Ganges into the Bay of Bengal, the Yangtse Kiang into the Pacific, and the Yenesei into the Arctic Ocean, all take their rise in the central table-land. In South America, the mountains form a wall upon the west, whence the rivers flow eastward in parallel lines. In North America alone are there mountains on each coast, and a trough between, into which the rivers flow together, giving in a single valley 23,000 miles of navigable stream to be plowed by steamships. The map proclaims the essential unity of North America. Political geography might be a more interesting study than it has yet been made.

In reaching Leavenworth, I had crossed two of the five divisions of America: the other three lie before me on my way to San Francisco. The eastern slopes of the Alleghanies, or Atlantic coast; their western slopes; the Great Plains; the Grand Plateau, and the Pacific coast—these are the five divisions. Fort Riley, the center of the United States, is upon the border of the third division, the Great Plains. The Atlantic coast is poor and stony, but the slight altitude of the Alleghany chain has prevented its being a hinderance to the passage of population to the West: the second of the divisions is now the richest and most powerful of the five: but the wave of immigration is crossing the Mississippi and Missouri into the Great Plains, and here at Fort Riley we are upon the limit of civilization.

This spot is not only the center of the United States and of the continent, but, if Denver had contrived to carry the Pacific Railroad by the Berthoud Pass, would have been the center station upon what Governor Gilpin, of Colorado, calls the “Asiatic and European railway line.” As it is, Columbus in Nebraska has somewhat a better chance of becoming the Washington of the future than has this block-house.

Quitting Fort Riley, we found ourselves at once upon the plains. No more sycamore and white-oak and honey-locust; no more of the rich deep green of the cottonwood groves; but yellow earth, yellow flowers, yellow grass, and here and there groves of giant sunflowers with yellow blooms, but no more trees.

As the sun set, we came on a body of cavalry marching slowly from the plains toward the fort. Before them, at some little distance, walked a sad-faced man on foot, in sober riding-dress, with a repeating carbine slung across his back. It was Sherman returning from his expedition to Santa Fé.

CHAPTER X.
LETTER FROM DENVER.

Monday, 3d September.

My dear ——,

Here we are, scalps and all.

On Tuesday last, at sundown, we left Fort Riley, and supped at Junction City, the extreme point that “civilization” has reached upon the plains. Civilization means whisky: post-offices don‘t count.

It was here that it first dawned upon us that we were being charged 500 dollars to guard the United States Californian mail, with the compensation of the chance of being ourselves able to rob it with impunity. It is at all events the case that we, well armed as the mail officers at Leavenworth insisted on our being, sat inside with forty-two cwt. of mail, in open bags, and over a great portion of the route had only the driver with us, without whose knowledge we could have read all and stolen most of the letters, and with whose knowledge, but against whose will, we could have carried off the whole, leaving him gagged, bound, and at the mercy of the Indians. As it was, a mail-bag fell out one day, without the knowledge of either Dixon or the driver, who were outside, and I had to shout pretty freely before they would pull up.

On Wednesday we had our last “squar’ meal” in the shape of a breakfast, at Fort Ellsworth, and soon were out upon the almost unknown plains. In the morning we caught up and passed long wagon trains, each wagon drawn by eight oxen, and guarded by two drivers and one horseman, all armed with breech-loading rifles and revolvers, or with the new “repeaters,” before which breech-loaders and revolvers must alike go down. All day we kept a sharp look-out for a party of seven American officers, who, in defiance of the scout‘s advice, had gone out from the fort to hunt buffalo upon the track. About sundown we came into the little station of Lost Creek. The ranchmen told us that they had, during the day, been driven in from their work by a party of Cheyennes, and that they had some doubts as to the wisdom of the officers in going out to hunt.

Just as we were leaving the station, one of the officers’ horses dashed in riderless, and was caught; and about two miles from the station we passed another on its back, ripped up either by a knife or buffalo horn. The saddle was gone, but there were no other marks of a fight. We believe that these officers were routed by buffalo, not Cheyennes, but still we should be glad to hear of them.

The track is marked in many parts of the plains by stakes, such as those from which the Llano Estacado takes its name; but this evening we turned off into devious lines by way of precaution against ambuscades, coming round through the sandy beds of streams to the ranches for the change of mules. The ranchmen were always ready for us; for, while we were still a mile away, our driver would put his hand to his mouth, and give a “How! how! how! how—w!” the Cheyenne warhoop.

In the weird glare that follows sunset we came upon a pile of rocks, admirably fitted for an ambush. As we neared them, the driver said: “It‘s ’bout an even chance thet we‘s sculp ther’!” We could not avoid them, as there was a gully that could only be crossed at this one point. We dashed down into the “creek” and up again, past the rocks: there were no Indians, but the driver was most uneasy till we reached Big Creek.

Here they could give us nothing whatever to eat, the Indians having, on Tuesday, robbed them of everything they had, and ordered them to leave within fifteen days on pain of death.

For 250 miles westward from Big Creek we found that every station had been warned (and most plundered) by bands of Cheyennes, on behalf of the forces of the confederation encamped near the creek itself. The warning was in all cases that of fire and death at the end of fifteen days, of which nine days have expired. We found the horse-keepers of the company everywhere leaving their stations, and were, in consequence, very nearly starved, having been unsuccessful in our shots from the “coach,” except, indeed, at the snakes.

On Thursday we passed Big Timber, the only spot on the plains where there are trees; and there the Indians had counted the trunks and solemnly warned the men against cutting more: “Fifty-two tree. You no cut more tree—no more cut. Grass! You cut grass; grass make big fire. You good boy—you clear out. Fifteen day, we come: you no gone—ugh!” The “ugh” accompanied by an expressive pantomime.

On Thursday evening we got a meal of buffalo and prairie dog, the former too strong for my failing stomach, the latter wholesome nourishment, and fit for kings—as like our rabbit in flavor as he is in shape. This was at the horse-station of “The Monuments,” a natural temple of awesome grandeur, rising from the plains like a giant Stonehenge.

On Friday we “breakfasted” at Pond Creek station, two miles from Fort Wallis. Here the people had applied for a guard, and had been answered: “Come into the fort; we can‘t spare a man.” So much for the value of the present forts; and yet even these—Wallis and Ellsworth—are 200 miles apart.

We were joined at breakfast by Bill Comstock, interpreter to the fort,—a long-haired, wild-eyed half-breed,—who gave us, in an hour‘s talk, the full history of the Indian politics that have led to the present war.

The Indians, to the number of 20,000, have been in council with the Washington Commissioners all this summer at Fort Laramie; and, after being clothed, fed, and armed, lately concluded a treaty, allowing the running on the mail-roads. They now assert that this treaty was intended to apply to the Platte road (from Omaha and Atchison through Fort Kearney), and to the Arkansas road, but not to the Smoky Hill road, which lies between the others, and runs through the buffalo country; but their real opposition is to the railroad. The Cheyennes (pronounced Shíans) have got the Camanches, Appaches, and Arrapahoes from the south, and the Sioux and Kiowas from the north, to join them in a confederation, under the leadership of Spotted Dog, the chief of the Little Dog section of the Cheyennes, and son of White Antelope,—killed at Sand Creek battle by the Kansas and Colorado Volunteers,—who has sworn to avenge his father.

Soon after leaving Pond Creek, we sighted at a distance three mounted “braves,” leading some horses; and when we reached the next station, we found that they had been there openly proclaiming that their mounts had been stolen from a team.

All this day we sat with our revolvers laid upon the mail-bags in front of us, and our driver also had his armory conspicuously displayed, while we swept the plains with many an anxious glance. We were on lofty rolling downs, and to the south the eye often ranged over much of the 130 miles which lay between us and Texas. To the north the view was more bounded; still, our chief danger lay near the boulders, which here and there covered the plains.

All Thursday and Friday we never lost sight of the buffalo, in herds of about 300, and the “antelope”—the prong-horn, a kind of gazelle—in flocks of six or seven. Prairie dogs were abundant, and wolves and black-tail deer in view at every turn.

The most singular of all the sights of the plains is the constant presence every few yards of the skeletons of buffalo and of horse, of mule and of ox; the former left by the hunters, who take but the skin, and the latter the losses of the mails and the wagon-trains through sunstroke and thirst. We killed a horse on the second day of our journey.

When we came upon oxen that had not long been dead, we found that the intense dryness of the air had made mummies of them: there was no stench, no putrefaction.

During the day I made some practice at antelope with the driver‘s Ballard; but an antelope at 500 yards is not an easy target. The driver shot repeatedly at buffalo at twenty yards, but this only to keep them away from the horses; the revolver balls did not seem to go through their hair and skin, as they merely shambled on in their usual happy sort of way, after receiving a discharge or two.

The prairie dogs sat barking in thousands on the tops of their mounds, but we were too grateful to them for their gayety to dream of pistol-shots. They are no “dogs” at all, but rabbits that bark, with all the coney‘s tricks and turns, and the same odd way of rubbing their face with their paws while they con you from top to toe.

With wolves, buffalo, antelope, deer, skunks, dogs, plover, curlew, dottrel, herons, vultures, ravens, snakes, and locusts, we never seemed to be without a million companions in our loneliness.

From Cheyenne Wells, where we changed mules in the afternoon, we brought on the ranchman‘s wife, painfully making room for her at our own expense. Her husband had been warned by the Cheyennes that the place would be destroyed: he meant to stay, but was in fear for her. The Cheyennes had made her cook for them, and our supper had gone down Cheyenne throats.

Soon after leaving the station, we encountered one of the great “dirt-storms” of the plains. About 5 P.M. I saw a little white cloud growing into a column, which in half an hour turned black as night, and possessed itself of half the skies. We then saw what seemed to be a waterspout; and, though no rain reached us, I think it was one. When the storm burst on us we took it for rain, and halting, drew down our canvas and held it against the hurricane. We soon found that our eyes and mouths were full of dust; and when I put out my hand I felt that it was dirt, not rain, that was falling. In a few minutes it was pitch dark, and after the fall had continued for some time, there began a series of flashes of blinding lightning, in the very center and midst of which we seemed to be. Notwithstanding this, there was no sound of thunder. The “norther” lasted some three or four hours, and when it ceased, it left us total darkness, and a wind which froze our marrow as we again started on our way. When Fremont explored this route, he reported that the high ridge between the Platte and Arkansas was notorious among the Indians for its tremendous dirt-storms. Sheet lightning without thunder accompanies dust-storms in all great continents; it is as common in the Punjab as in Australia, in South as in North America.