Transcriber’s Notes

This e-text is based on ‘The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine,’ from December, 1912. The table of contents, based on the index from the November issue, has been added by the transcriber.

Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation have been retained, but punctuation and typographical errors have been corrected. Passages in English dialect and in languages other than English have not been altered. Footnotes have been moved to the end of the corresponding article.

Christmas Number

THE CENTURY
ILLUSTRATED
MONTHLY
MAGAZINE

THE CENTURY CO UNION SQUARE NEW YORK

FRANK H. SCOTT, PRESIDENT, WILLIAM W. ELLSWORTH, VICE-PRESIDENT AND SECRETARY, DONALD SCOTT, TREASURER, UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK.
(Title Registered U. S. Pat. Off.)
Copyright, 1912, by The Century Co.] [Entered at N.Y. Post Office as Second Class Mail Matter

Original Cover Image

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The pieces to furnish a bedroom, library or dining room would constitute a wonderful remembrance, but our dealers can show you many single pieces which, while reasonably priced, still make gifts which will always be cherished. In making a present of Berkey & Gay furniture you can say: “This is

For Your Children’s Heirlooms

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This inlaid mark of honor identifies to you each Berkey & Gay piece

With the displays on their floors in connection with our portfolio of direct photogravures, our dealers enable you to choose from our entire line. In addition to these, our special gift pieces in “novelty” furniture have an individual appeal.

OUR de luxe book, “Character in Furniture” gives an interesting and informative account of the origin of period furniture. It is illustrated in color from oil paintings by Rene Vincent. We will mail a copy to you direct for fifteen two-cent stamps. And, as a help to you in your making of gifts, we will gladly mail you our special new book entitled “Entertaining Your Guests,” which is descriptive of single pieces that are particularly appropriate.

Berkey & Gay Furniture Co.
174 Monroe Ave., Grand Rapids, Michigan

Original advertisement

Owned by Mr. A. A. Fowler

IDLENESS

FROM THE PAINTING BY MARY GREENE BLUMENSCHEIN

(THE CENTURY’S AMERICAN ARTIST SERIES)

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LARGER IMAGE

THE CENTURY MAGAZINE

VOL. LXXXV

DECEMBER, 1912

NO. 2

Copyright, 1912, by THE CENTURY CO. All rights reserved.

CONTENTS

THE CHRISTMAS TREE ON CLINCH

(DOINGS ON PERILOUS)

BY LUCY FURMAN

Author of “Mothering on Perilous,” etc.

WITH PICTURES BY BERNARD B. DE MONVEL

ONE Saturday morning in October the head-workers and some of the teachers of the Settlement School on Perilous were unpacking barrels and boxes on the front porch of the “big house,” a wagon having come in from the railroad the previous day. Christine Potter, the newest and youngest teacher, looked up from a box of books to see an odd procession approaching along the road. A yellow mare, bearing a small woman with an infant in arms, and a tiny child behind, was followed by a half-grown mule colt, on which rode three little girls, while a small yellow colt trotted sedately in the rear. At the school gate the party halted. The yellow colt flung his four legs in as many directions and began to frisk about his mother; the riders dismounted and came up the walk.

The woman came straight to the heads, her eager face beaming under the black sunbonnet, inevitable badge of the married woman.

“Don’t you know me?” she inquired—“little Anne Goodloe that was, from the head of Clinch? Don’t you mind the summer, ten year’ gone, you sot up a tent over there, and I holp you with the singing and gatherings?”

Yes, indeed, the heads remembered, and gave Anne a hearty welcome, asking a volley of questions about her family. But these she cut short.

“Women,” she said, “all that will keep. Let me first get off my mind what I come for. Before I lose another minute I crave to enter these young uns of mine on the highroad to l’arning in this here fine school. I have heared you write ’em down in a book, and take as they come; and many’s the time I have woke with a nightmare, dreaming my offsprings was writ down too late to get a show. I want you to put ’em down immediate’. Phœbe, Ellen, Minervy, Lukeanna, stand forth!”

The four small girls drew up in line before their mother, their blue sunbonnets forming an exact stairway.

“Six, four and a half, three, and going on two is their ages,” continued Anne, “and my man-child here, too—John Jeems, four month’,—don’t pass over him.”

One of the heads wrote down the names and ages; then she inquired:

“And the last name—your married name?”

Anne watched their faces expectantly as she replied:

“Talbert.”

“Talbert!” they exclaimed in one astonished voice.

“I allowed it would take your breath to hear that John Goodloe’s daughter had married Jeems Talbert’s son,” Anne said, smiling.

“When we were over on Clinch the Goodloes and Talberts were mortal enemies. There was constant trouble between them, and not a Talbert would ever come inside our tent simply because it was on Goodloe land.”

“Yes,” said Anne; “forty year’ they have been at war—ever since Paw and Jeems fell out over a gal, and shot each other all up.”

Christine had gathered the sunbonnets, and placed a chair for Anne, who now sat down, smoothed and recoiled her abundant yellow hair, and proceeded to give her man-child his dinner, the little girls ranging themselves silently on a bench, still in step formation, and gazing about them with big eyes and bobbing pigtails.

“There was some little shooting going on when we were there,” continued the heads, “and five years previous the two eldest sons had killed each other in an engagement.”

“Yes,” replied Anne; “that was a mighty sorry time when the boys on both sides got sizable enough to take up their paps’ war—a sorry time it was for both Goodloes and Talberts.” She sighed deeply.

“Doubtless they made peace later, or you would not have married a Talbert?”

Drawn by F. R. Gruger. Half-tone plate engraved by R. C. Collins

“‘’TWA’N’T LONG BEFORE I KNOWED HE WAS THE ONLIEST BOY I WOULD EVER MARRY’”

“No, they hain’t never made peace; but there never was no war betwixt me and Luke. We was the youngest on both sides, and I allus did think Luke was the prettiest boy that ever rid a nag. When we would be out hunting the cows, I never regretted when I met up with him, though of course we wouldn’t speak or let on to see. But one day when we had passed in the road unseeing that a-way, we both turned back to look. Luke he blushed, and I laughed. ‘Goodloes hain’t pizen,’ I says. ‘Neither is Talberts,’ he says; and from that time we would stop and pass a few words when there wa’n’t nobody in sight. ’T wa’n’t long before I knowed he was the onliest boy I would ever marry, and him the same of me. Of course I never told nobody but granny, and she holp us off; she allus did contend that Goodloes and Talberts never ought to be nothing but friends, paw and Jeems having been raised like own brothers.

“Well, maybe you think there wa’n’t a general commotion when me and Luke run off. Paw and Jeems b’iled and raged scandalous, for men lamed and maimed up like them, and it looked like the war would be fit all over ag’in. Luke had took his logging money and bought a piece of ground from his paw right j’ining ours, and raised a house on it, so we had a roof over our heads; but nary a foot did a Goodloe or a Talbert set in it, or so much as look our way in passing, for over a year. But me and Luke we never seed no slights, and allus spoke civil and cheerful to all we met, and in time they begun to drap in, first one side and then t’other. Then when my young uns come along, paw he would sa’nter down now and then to see ’em, and finally Jeems he stumped up on his crutch a time or two, which pleased me a sight, and I had hopes of their meeting peaceable and maybe patching up the war, like granny says she knows they pine to in their hearts, now they are both widows, and getting along in years, and lonesome. But when my man-child come, what did I do but spile everything by naming him John Jeems, atter both; sence which I hain’t had a glimp’ of neither.

“But though the feeling keeps up, there hain’t been to say no active warfare betwixt paw and Jeems sence Luke and me married, and no bad shootings amongst the sons and sons-in-law, like there used to be at Christmas and election-time. Four year’ gone, a five-month district school started up two mile’ down Clinch from us, and both Goodloe and Talbert young uns has been a-going, and has got acquainted and friendly, which has sort of swaged down their payrents; so you might say the war is ended with everybody now but Jeems and paw.

“I been a-going to that district school myself sence it took up. From the time you women was over on Clinch I got me a big hankering for l’arning. Jeems Talbert had sont Luke away to school two term’, and when we was married, to see him read and write and figure, and me not able to tell a from izzard, went ag’in the grain terrible. No Goodloe don’t like to be outdone by a Talbert. So when the school started, though I were a’ old married woman of nineteen, I gathered up my young uns and lit in for l’arning, riding back and forth to school on Cindy and her mule colt. Luke he made cradles for the babes to lay in at school, and the scholars holp me mind ’em, and they never give a’ hour’s trouble. Minervy here she started on the road to knowledge at five days old,—time was precious, and I couldn’t stay away,—and now at three she knows all her a b c’s. And I am able to read and write and figure as good as Luke, and can read every word of that Testament you give me, and hain’t neglected my cooking or spinning or weaving neither.”

Having made sure that Anne would remain to dinner, the heads resumed their work, leaving Christine to entertain the guest. The interesting fact was soon established that the two were almost of an age, both being twenty-three, with birthdays in August.

“Just as good as twins,” exclaimed Anne, delightedly. Then she sighed, and looked wistfully at Christine’s girlish face. “But you that fair and tender you don’t look sixteen,” she said, “and me a’ old woman!” Later she asked, “When a woman don’t marry at fourteen or fifteen or anyhow sixteen, how does she put in her time? What is there for her to do?”

“Many girls put in their time as I did,” replied Christine. “After finishing school, I spent four years in college, then I traveled in Europe for a year, then my father said I knew little more than an infant about actual life, and ought to do some real work for a while to find out; so I came here, where I hope I am learning.”

When the dinner bell rang, Christine found great pleasure in taking Anne to the table and in watching her eager scrutiny of room, children, manners, service.

Drawn by F. R. Gruger

Half-tone plate engraved by R. Varley

“‘JEEMS AND JOHN, THE MESSAGE COMES TO YOU THIS BRIGHT CHRISTMAS DAY STRAIGHT FROM THE TONGUE OF ANGELS.’” (SEE [PAGE 171])

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At two o’clock Anne announced that she must depart, as it would be necessary to reach the half-way stop-over place, nine miles distant, by night.

“My young uns sets a nag uncommon’ well, from such constant practice going to school,” she said; “but I consider nine mile’ is about enough for ’em to travel in a day. And now,” she continued, flashing a smile at Christine, “being as we’re twins, I do hope you will use your endeavors to make me a visit before long. Seems like I have a mighty near feeling for you.”

A sudden thought came to Christine.

“Would you like me to come over and have my Christmas tree at your house?” she asked. “Father has promised that I may have one.”

“I don’t rightly know what a Christmas tree is,” said Anne, “but I will be proud to have you any time or season.”

Christine explained that a Christmas tree is simply a small evergreen tree on which at Christmas time presents and candy are hung for the children.

“I should like to have the tree at your house, and invite all the children, and older people, too, in the neighborhood,” she said.

“I can answer for the young uns turning out if there’s pretties and rarities to see,” said Anne; “but the grown-ups is different. There hain’t nobody but Goodloes and Talberts on the head of Clinch, and I misdoubt if they’ll gather under one roof. But I’ll do my best, and give ’em all a’ invite.”

Letters passed between the two later, Anne sending the names and ages of the children of the neighborhood, Christine giving directions for making strings of popcorn and holly-berries for the adornment of the tree.

BEFORE day on Christmas morning, Christine, accompanied by Howard Cleves, a big boy from the school, set forth for the head of Clinch, the great “pokes” of Christmas things slung across the saddles standing out like panniers from the sides of the two nags. As they wound up the mountain-side above Perilous Creek, the whole east awoke and flushed with joy in memory of the day.

The eighteen miles were long and difficult and lonely; the mountains folded in and out, dazzling white where they caught the sunlight, deep blue in the shadows. Occasionally in a hollow or beside a frozen stream appeared a small log-house, tight-shut against the cold, the only sign of life or cheer the thin column of smoke rising straight from its chimney. Once or twice the travelers met parties of young men and boys riding with jugs and pistols, doing their utmost to celebrate the day, but always suddenly quiet at sight of Christine.

About half-past one they drew up before Luke Talbert’s house on Clinch, and Anne, Luke, and the four little girls gave Christine the warmest of welcomes. After being thawed and fed, she glanced about the two rooms of the house with some surprise and disappointment.

“I see you haven’t put up the tree yet,” she said.

Anne looked puzzled.

“Hain’t put the tree up?” she repeated. “Why, it’s already up—up and growing back here in the gyarden.” She led the way to the back porch. There, beyond the tall palings of riven oak, in the very center of the small, sloping garden, its delicate branches garlanded with snowy popcorn and scarlet berries, was a splendid young hemlock, apparently rejoicing in its vigor and beauty and in the sacred use to which it was being put.

Christine was dumb for an instant.

“Hain’t it right?” Anne inquired anxiously.

“Yes, beautiful, the loveliest I ever saw,” answered Christine. “Usually people cut down the Christmas tree and set it up in the house; but how much more appropriate to have it living and growing!”

“It was such a pretty little tree I wouldn’t let Luke cut it when we cleared the land,” said Anne; “I told him I would plant my gyarden round it. Granny she allus liked it, too. She come down yesterday and holp me cap corn and string berries. She’s powerful keen to see the doings to-day, and aims to fetch paw along if she can.”

Two fires were already burning, one to the right, one to the left of the tree, and large piles of wood stood beside them in the snow. “Luke allowed the folks would freeze to death if we never fixed to warm ’em abundant’,” Anne explained.

Then Christine and Anne and Luke and Howard set to work to fasten on Christmas bells, tinsel, bags of candy, dolls, and lighter gifts, climbing up on chairs when necessary. The oranges and heavier things were stacked below the tree. There was no need to take out the candles, with the glorious sunshine streaming all around.

“I warned the young uns not to show their faces before three,” said Anne, “but they are that wild I look for ’em any minute.” She had scarcely spoken the words before a dozen small excited faces peered through the palings. Picking up a stick of wood, Anne sallied forth. “Shoo, you feisty young uns, you!” she cried, “get along into that house there! Anybody that shows a face outside till called don’t get nary single pretty.”

Before she could return to the tree again, another crowd of children had collected at the palings, and the rout had to be repeated.

“And I see ’em a-coming as far as eye can reach,” she reported, “up Clinch and down Clinch, Talberts and Goodloes, both young and old. Of course I knowed the young would turn out, but the older ones wouldn’t make no promise, though I could see they was terrible curious to behold a Christmas tree. They’ll be mad as hops over being shut up that a-way; but they had no business to come so soon. And I hain’t aiming to take no chances on their raising a quarrel, neither: I’m locking Goodloes in one house and Talberts in t’ other, with the door fastened between.”

From this time Anne was busily occupied meeting visitors and diverting them to the two “houses” (rooms). Once a little old lady who had just dismounted from behind a gaunt, grizzled man dodged past Anne and ran into the garden. “I am just bound to see how it looks,” she said. “Oh, hain’t it a sight for cherubim!” She stood in an ecstasy of delight, hands clasped, withered little face shining within the quilted woolen sunbonnet, small body all alertness beneath the heavy homespun shawl.

“Now, Granny, you get right back in that house there with paw,” admonished Anne. “You have brung him thus far; but if he sees any Talberts, or gets wind of a whole passel being locked up in t’ other house, you know he’ll be off like a shot.”

Granny turned sorrowfully away.

“That’s p’int’ly true,” she admitted, hastening into the Goodloe room after her tall, stoop-shouldered son.

For a few minutes longer the sky seemed to rain Goodloes and Talberts. Both rooms must have been filled to bursting. Then, just as the tree was completed, and Anne was about to call out the guests, there was a last arrival. A heavy-set man, with a crutch under one arm, rode slowly into the yard, peering carefully about the house and over the palings as he came.

“My Lord! Luke, if there hain’t your paw!” cried Anne, breathlessly. “I made sure he wouldn’t come. Help him down and bring him right here, and don’t let on there’s any Goodloes in fifty mile’!” She placed a chair by the left-hand fire, and hither, on his crutch, Jeems Talbert was piloted, all the time gazing in fascination upon the tree.

The next instant garden gate and house doors were flung open, and the guests streamed out, young and old with eyes glued to the dazzling tree. Last of all came granny, her arm in that of her son, John Goodloe, whose one remaining eye was so intently fixed upon the tree that he had almost reached it before he saw his blood-enemy, Jeems Talbert, rise on his crutch not five feet distant, surprise and rage in his eyes. Both men stiffened and glared; the hand of each instinctively moved toward his hip-pocket; a gasp ran through the crowd. Granny’s cracked old voice rang out sharply:

“John, Jeems, hain’t you got no manners? Do you aim to spile the woman’s Christmas tree?”

The appeal to chivalry had its effect. Still glaring, the two enemies backed away, each to a fire.

The general uneasiness and apprehension abated somewhat when Christine stepped out in front of the tree, Anne’s Testament in her hand, and began to read, in her earnest, tender voice, the story of the first Christmas. As she proceeded, there was absolute silence. Not a person whispered, not a child stirred, not a baby winked. Faces became rapt, astonished, awed. The white, everlasting hills themselves appeared to hearken. “And Joseph also went up ... to Bethlehem ... to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife.... And she brought forth her firstborn son, ... and laid him in a manger.... There were in this same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, ... and the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.... And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

Christine and Howard lifted up their voices in “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” then, beginning with the youngest,—there was one infant even newer than John Jeems, a Goodloe baby of three weeks,—Anne and Luke read off the names and handed out the gifts. To children who had not seen a store doll or toy before, the simple things were marvels indeed. For every girl, little or big, there was a doll; for every boy, a toy of some kind; every person received an orange and a tarleton bag of candy; every family a large Christmas-bell. And at the last, at Anne’s suggestion, the smaller bells and ornaments and tinsel were stripped from the tree, in order that no one should go away without a “pretty.” For granny there was a handsome Bible, none the less joyfully received that she could not read a word of it. But even as she clasped it, her eyes wandered to the dolls.

“Who would ever believe there was such pretty poppets in all this world!” she exclaimed, hearing which, Christine laid the prettiest poppet of all in her arms. At this, three or four other old ladies crowded about granny in such voluble delight that Christine was glad she had enough dolls left over to present to them.

Nor, in the general largess, was the “stranger within the gates” forgotten. The tree held for Christine a fine pair of mittens from granny, a most beautiful woven coverlet from Anne, and a rosy apple each from Phœbe, Ellen, Minervy, Lukeanna, and John Jeems.

The scene was indeed a happy one. Absorbed in the joy of their offspring, and in their own gratified love of the beautiful, Goodloes and Talberts mingled freely, and melted into friendliness and cordiality. John Goodloe and Jeems Talbert alone stood apart, each by his fire, eying gloomily his orange and poke of candy.

Suddenly granny, laying her “pretty poppet” in Christine’s arms, stepped forward in front of the tree and raised a hand for silence.

“Friends, Talberts and Goodloes,” she began, in a wavering old voice which took on strength as she proceeded, “we find ourselves gathered to-day in onlooked-for and, I may say, onpossible fashion, refreshing our mortal eyes with the sight of this here wonderly tree, and our immortal sperrits with the good tidings the fotch-on woman has just read us out of the Book. I never heared just that particular scripture read before, or if so I never kotch its full meaning. Of course I knowed Christ had come to earth ’way back yander in old, ancient days some time or ’nother; but I never heared tell of his coming to all men. From what the preachers said, I got the idee he just come for to snatch a few elect favor-rites out of the hell to which all the rest of us was predestinated, whether or no; and consequent’, I never tuck no great interest in him, or felt particular’ grateful. Even if I had had the assurance of being one of the elect myself, which I never, I still would have worried a sight over them which was bound to be lost, not seeing no justice, let alone mercy, in it.

“But now comes the woman, and reads out of the scripture that the angels theirselves laid down and declared that unto all men was borned a Saviour, that the tidings of joy was for all. Which, though it takes me by surprise, is the very best and most welcomest news that ever fell upon my years. Yes, glory to God! all men,—not only the elect, not only the upright, but the very low-downest and dog-meanest, the vilest and needingest and most predestinated, is all took in. Now that’s the kind of a Saviour my heart has allus called for; that’s the kind I have laid awake of nights longing to hear tell of; and now at last the news has come, ’pears like my bosom will bu’st with the joy I hain’t able to utter.

“And that hain’t the only good tidings we have heared this notable day. That selfsame angel, and a multitude more, sang together in that Christmas sky, ‘Peace on earth, good-will toward men.’ O friends and chillens, words indeed fails me when I try to tell what powerful good news that is to me. For if ever a woman has craved peace and pursued it, if ever a woman has had her fill of bloodshed and warfare, and her heart tore and stobbed by violence and contention, I am that woman. Yes, for forty year’ I hain’t opened my eyes a single morning without fear of what the day might bring forth; my soul and body has been wore to a frazzle by anxiousness and tribulation. All you Talberts and Goodloes under the shadow of my voice know well what I mean, for all of you has staggered under the same burden. Yes, I’ll be bound there hain’t one here but has had his ’nough of war and strife, and is ready to welcome the good Christmas news to-day, and forgit whether he’s a Goodloe or a Talbert.

“Not a one, that is, but two. Surveying all around and about me, I don’t behold but two faces here that hain’t decked out, like the love-lie tree, with Christmas joy and peace. John Goodloe and Jeems Talbert is onliest humans in all this gathering that wears gloom and darkness on their countenance.

“John and Jeems, I am minded to speak out my full thought to you two boys here and now, if I die for it. I’m a-going to unbottle my mind and feelings, now I got you together, which God knows hain’t likely to happen ag’in. And I aim to speak to you, Jeems, just as free as to my son John, for the time was when you was every grain as dear to me as a son, and I never knowed no difference betwixt the two of you. Yes, when your pore young maw died at your birth, and you was left a leetle, pindling, motherless babe, not scarce able to cry, it was me, your nighest neighbor, that tuck you in and keered for you, that worked over you and prayed over you, tryin’ to keep life in your puny leetle body. Many’s the hour you and John have laid in my arms together, him a-sucking one breast and you t’other; and if the milk run short, he was the one that done without, being a week older and a sight stronger than you. And I would set, looking on you both, not able to tell which I loved the best. For him I had love, but for you both love and pity. Yes, I loved you pine-blank as good as John; I may say you was both my firstborns. And when your paw got him a new woman, it was with weeping and wailing and rebelling that I give you up; I reckon I’ll never git over the hurt of it. But even atter that, having fell into the hands of a step-maw, you was allus a-running back to me; my house was home to you; you knowed where to find understanding of your leetle troubles, sympathy for your hurts, and comfort for your stummick. I allow you hain’t forgot them batches of gingercake I used to keep cooked up for you and John?”

Jeems made no reply; but he swallowed perceptibly, and the hand on his crutch twitched nervously.

“You and John,” continued granny, “was allus together in your boy-time in all your pranks and antics; when I whupped one, I knowed it was safe to whup t’ other, and I done it glad’ and generous’, for your future profit. And as you begun, you kep’ on. In your teens, if one sneezed, t’ other kotch his breath. And finally when you got up to be tall, pretty boys, sprouting mustaches and dashing around on nags, you was just as onseparable, doing all your rambling and drinking and gallivanting together, even down to falling in love with the same gal. Yes, that ’ere pretty leetle jade, Nance Bolling, I can see her now,—these store-poppets reminds me pine-blank of her,—just as beautiful, just as empty-headed and hollow-hearted. Well, Nance she left nothing undone to agg you both on, and foment jealousy and hate in your hearts, and then, when she had you plumb beside yourselves, she sot you to fight it out. You fit it out, to that extent Jeems has gone through life on a crutch, and John with one eye and one lung; and while you was laid up with your wounds, Nance upped and run off with another boy, God help him! But did that restore you to your nateral senses and feelings? Did you rise up clothed in your right mind and ashamed of your conduct? Far from it! You riz up b’iling with rage, thirsting for blood, black in the face with that fierce hate which springs only from the root of love. You that had once lived closer than brothers, sot in to layway and ambush and kill, and to rid the earth of one another. You will both bear me out in saying it hain’t the fault of neither that t’ other draws the breath of life to-day.

“And even when you had both forgot Nance time out of mind, and tuck you two of as nice women as the wind ever blowed on, you still cherished deadly hatred in your hearts, and handed it down to your innocent offsprings as they come along, so that as they growed up they holp you in your devilment, and there was war betwixt every man and boy that bore the name of Goodloe and Talbert, shootings every Christmas and election, and battles and ambushings at odd times, till I allow there hain’t a man here that hain’t got a lot of scars to show. And the worst come fifteen years gone, when your two oldest, as likely and handsome a pair as ever drawed breath, and with young wives and babes depending on them, fit the terriblest battle of all, and fell both with six bullets in ’em, stone-dead. Yes, having nothing ag’in’ each other, they died, a living sacrifice to the hatred in your hearts. Jeems, John, it was a costly price to pay. I seed John, and heared of Jeems, aging twenty-year’ in a week. The fight was right smart took out of both of you, though the pride wa’n’t; you continued to go about with hate in your eyes and guns in your pockets.

“John and Jeems, you know it’s the truth I’m a-laying down when I say it is pride, and naught but pride, that stands betwixt you now at this present time. You know well you hain’t neither of you forgot, or can forget, them fair early days when you was nigher than brothers, and never had a thought you couldn’t share, and that it is them very ricollections that has give’ such a keen edge to your hate. You know well that, being sixty year’ old now, and considable past your youth, and widows at that, with many of your acquaintance’ drapped off and gone, you would both injoy fine having a boyhood friend and brother to set by the fire and talk old times with. I know myself how lonesome it is to git old and outlive everybody.

“Jeems and John, the message comes to you this bright Christmas day straight from the tongue of angels, ‘Peace and good-will’; no more hate, no more pride, no more projeckin’ and devilment, but ‘Peace on earth, good-will toward men.’ I charge you both, boys, hearken to the words, put by your stubbornness, tromple on your pride; for Christ’s sake and your old mother’s, be j’ined together ag’in in brotherly love!”

The two grizzled, scarred men were staring across the intervening space now into each other’s eyes, fixedly, painfully, awfully, as though they saw ghosts. Suddenly the hand of Jeems dropped to his hip-pocket, he drew forth his revolver, and flung it far up on the mountain-side. John’s pistol rose almost simultaneously in the opposite direction. Then, with working faces, the two advanced and silently clasped hands.

Weeping and shouting, little granny caught the big men to the shrunken bosom from which they had once drawn life. Goodloes fell on the necks of Talberts; men embraced and wrung hands solemnly, women wept hysterically on one another’s shoulders, children cried, not knowing why; Anne and Luke shed happy tears on the face of little John Jeems between them.

After a long while granny released the two men from her clasp, held them at arms’-length a moment, looking at them hungrily and joyously, and then laid a hand on the arm of each.

“Come along home now, boys,” she said; “it’s a-gitting on late, and I allow you’ll both injoy a good batch of gingercake for supper.”

HENRI BERGSON

PRONOUNCED “THE FOREMOST THINKER OF FRANCE”

HIS PERSONALITY, HIS PHILOSOPHY, AND HIS INFLUENCE[1]

BY ALVAN F. SANBORN

IF the generation now coming to the front in France is healthy and vigorous physically, mentally, and morally, and proud of its health and vigor, if it is confident, expectant, full of energy and will, impatient for action and fit to act, if it dares to be happy, if it will have none of the pessimism of Schopenhauer or of the nihilism of Renan; if it is, in a word, a generation of young young men, whereas the generation that preceded it was a generation of old young men, melancholy, morbid, dilettante, neurasthenic, and proud of its melancholia, morbidness, dilettantism, and neurasthenia,—and such is generally admitted to be the case,—certainly not the least of the numerous and varied influences that have combined to bring about this radical transformation is the inspiriting message of Henri Bergson.

In the early years of the twelfth century, at the base of the Tower of Clovis, on the summit of the Montagne Ste.-Geneviève in Paris, a scholar in the habit of a monk, Pierre Abélard, proclaimed under the open sky “the rights of the earth, the right of the reason to reason” in discourses which Michelet characterizes as “the veritable point of departure of the first Renaissance for France and for Europe.” The élite of the then civilized world—two popes, twenty cardinals, fifty bishops, “all the orders,” Romans, Germans, Englishmen, Italians, Spaniards, Flemings—flocked thither to listen to the great innovator. He was silenced by the dogmatists of the period, but he left behind him an idea which “became more and more the fixed idea of the Renaissance, namely, ‘wisdom is not wisdom if it confines itself to logic, if it does not add thereto erudition, all human knowledge.’”

Five hundred years later, on this same Montagne Ste.-Geneviève, René Descartes demolished scholasticism and founded modern psychology. Persecuted by the Sorbonne, as was nearly every other expounder of new doctrines at that time, he nevertheless created a veritable furor among the bluestockings of the magnificent court of Louis XIV. His “vortexes” and “fluted matter,” his “three elements” and his “innate metaphysical ideas,” were the small talk of the précieuses; snobbishness for the most part, of course, but it is one of the redeeming features of snobbishness that it sometimes bestows its plaudits and its patronage upon genuine merit.

At the present time the philosopher Henri Bergson is assailing, in his turn, another scholasticism—the scholasticism of science. At the Collège de France, the consummation and the coronation of the various schools of the Montagne Ste.-Geneviève, he is creating a flutter in the dove-cotes of bluestockingdom such as no pure philosopher has created there since the time of Descartes. Indeed, Bergson has become so fashionable that soon, as some one facetiously observed regarding Francis of Assisi after the appearance of Sabatier’s fascinating biography of that saint, “they will be wearing him upon bonnets,” another instance of snobbishness adoring actual achievement.

The biggest amphitheater the Collège de France can provide is quite too small for M. Bergson’s would-be auditors. Long before the lecture-hour, the seats and the steps of the aisles, which can be made to serve as seats, are preëmpted by patient waiters of both sexes, of varying ages, sorts, conditions, and all nationalities. The standing-room fills up rapidly also, while about the doors are enacted scenes vaguely reminiscent of those that occur daily at the City Hall terminal of the Brooklyn Bridge during the rush hours, in which the gentle, but not always mannerly, sex does rather more than its share of pushing, tugging, elbowing, and treading upon toes, in virtue, no doubt, of its superior zeal for knowledge.

When the lecture begins, the sitters, and such of the standers as are lucky enough to have their arms free, scribble furiously in their note-books, the hapless strugglers at the doors and in the vestibule crane their necks in a futile attempt to catch a glimpse of the platform through the rifts in the monstrous feminine headgear now in fashion, and all alike, those who neither see, hear, nor comprehend, as well as those who do, promptly take on the rapt, superior expression of initiates—the expression that used to characterize the audiences at “Pelléas and Mélisande” when Debussyism was in its infancy.

The lecturer is short of stature, spare, an almost perfect ascetic type, somewhat, gray and slightly bald. He has slender hands, tapering fingers, a weasel-shaped head, heavy eyebrows, a close-cropped mustache grayer than the hair, and “liquid and profound eyes that suggest mysterious molten metals in the stars.” He is correctly, even fastidiously, but not foppishly, dressed. He speaks slowly and distinctly, but easily, with engaging indifference to his notes and without any effort at oratory, his nearest approaches to gestures being abruptly arrested semispasmodic workings of the hands, periodical inclinations of the head, and an occasional deepening and darkening of the eyes. It is as though sheer intellect, abstract intellect, were endowed with the power of speech. There is not the slightest trace in M. Bergson’s manner of the overweening vanity that too often mars the public appearances of world celebrities, nor is there a scrap of the unlovely pedantry and arid officialism against the prevalence of which at the Sorbonne a considerable portion of cultivated France recently rose in revolt. On the contrary, he is constantly referred to in university circles as “the lark,” partly perhaps because he offers a certain physical resemblance to that ungarish creature; but mainly because there is a touch of lyricism in all his utterances, even his most trenchant analyses. He presents his views progressively and with a modest tentativeness which makes his auditors feel that they are assisting at the birth of a system rather than listening to the exposition of a perfected one. They seem to see the lecturer suffer and create, as the symbolical pelican of ecclesiastical tradition pierces her flank for the wherewithal to feed her young. Indeed, the regular attendants follow the stages of the creative process as eagerly and impatiently as though they were the instalments of an absorbing novel.

How far Henri Bergson’s extraordinary vogue is due to the substance and how far to the form of his thought is not easy to determine, since either alone amply suffices to account for it. His philosophy is a rehabilitation, to employ untechnical language, of God and the soul. It is a reconciliation “in a harmony felt by the heart of terms irreconcilable, perhaps, by the intellect,” of science and metaphysics with religion, of knowledge with life, of law with conduct, of liberty with authority, of the ideals of the Occident with the ideals of the Orient, of the present with the past and with the future. According to M. Bergson, the universe, which is incessant mobility, perpetual, continuous flux, is acquiring a constantly swelling volume of free creative activity, and the inner life of each and every person in the universe is absolutely original. “Life is really creation. It is not a fabrication determined by the idea of an end to be realized; it is an impetus, an initiative, an effort to make matter produce something which it would not produce of itself.” We know reality by living it. We may act freely, and in so acting we experience creation.

M. Bergson’s philosophy is a vindication of intuition, the faculty upon which the poets, the Shelleys and the Keatses, the Villons and the Verlaines, have always depended for their knowledge of themselves, of the universe, and of their relations to the universe. We who are not poets are the deluded victims, says M. Bergson in effect, of our reasoning faculty, which is constantly playing hob with us. We should submit to the authority of intuition, for to do a thing without reason, even against reason, may in certain cases be to act from the best of reasons. This does not mean that reason should be despised or discarded, as some of the philosopher’s overzealous followers are prone to proclaim,—even the great poet must resort to it in expressing the conceptions his intuition gives him,—but rather that reason is a highly useful subordinate of intuition, bearing much the same relation thereto that the housemaid bears to the housewife, the mason or carpenter to the architect, the private soldier to the strategist. In short, M. Bergson’s attitude toward reason is essentially that of the immortal seers. It recalls Pascal’s “The heart has its reasons which reason knoweth not,” Joubert’s “It is easy to know God if you do not attempt to define Him,” Emerson’s “With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do,” and Browning’s “Others may reason and welcome, ’t is we musicians know.”

Our William James pronounced every page of Henri Bergson to be “like the breath of morning and the song of birds.” M. Bergson’s style, though delightfully free from affectation, is not so simple and direct as these comparisons imply. They suggest admirably its freshness, melodiousness, graciousness, and grace, but they fail to suggest the exquisite subtlety which is its most distinctive trait. They may be given a fair approach to adequacy, however, by substituting for “the morning,” a morning of luminous haze such as Corot loved to paint, and for “the song of birds,” the cuckoo’s “wandering voice.” As soft, tenuous, filmy, fluid as mist or wreathing smoke, it is as precise, not to say geometrical, in design as the spider’s gossamer web, and is equally iridescent. The critic who characterized it as Arachnean, therefore, was most happily inspired, though his purpose in doing so was, if I remember right, to hold it up to derision. No living writer, not even Maurice Maeterlinck, surpasses Henri Bergson in evoking, in projecting, in visualizing, so to speak, those subconscious activities of the soul which are commonly esteemed unanalyzable and, great poetry, possibly, apart, unutterable. He “forces language to express things for which language was not intended.” With impalpable pigments and ghostly brushes he paints upon imaginary canvases veritable landscapes of the soul. We do not go to pure philosophers for esthetic sensations,—no one ever frequented Kant, for instance, for his style,—and in general we enjoy or do not enjoy them according as they do or do not succeed in convincing us. Henri Bergson is a striking exception to this rule. We read Bergson, as we read Plato, out of sheer infatuation with his verbal artistry, and we should continue to read him ecstatically if he should undertake to prove that the moon was made of green cheese.

Such as he is in the lecture-room, such as he is in his books, unassuming, unpedantic, gracious, well-poised, subtle, tactful, alert, resourceful, stimulating, such Henri Bergson is in his every-day existence. In his case, and to an unusual degree, the style is the man. An easy talker, ever ready to speak freely upon all subjects,—his personal affairs, work, and politics excepted,—he nevertheless goes little into society, not because he dislikes social functions, but because he cannot contrive to make the necessary leisure. He resides about midway between the Seine and the Bois de Boulogne, in an umbrageous and incredibly tranquil corner of the Auteuil quarter, where he is well nigh as secure from the hustle and bustle of Paris as he would be in a provincial village; and he spends his summers in Switzerland at St.-Cergue, almost ten miles from the nearest railway station, in a modest two-story villa, surrounded by meadows and evergreen woods, the front windows and veranda of which afford ravishing views of Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc. Winter and summer alike, six in the morning finds him installed at his desk, and from that moment until he retires for the night he allows himself virtually no respite save that which is afforded by an occasional varying of occupations.

Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson

HENRI BERGSON

FROM THE PORTRAIT BY JACQUES BLANCHE

Though so little of a Parisian in the sense in which the word is currently employed, M. Bergson is one of the relatively few famous Frenchmen who possess a clear title to that distinction. He was born in Paris on the eighteenth of October, 1859. From nine to eighteen he attended as a day student the Lycée Condorcet (then Lycée Bonaparte), in the Opéra quarter, an institution founded in 1803 under the consulship of the First Napoleon, which numbers among its illustrious alumni Dumas fils, De Banville, the Goncourts, Eugène Sue, and Hippolyte Taine. Less precocious than Pascal, who at sixteen wrote a treatise on conic sections that excited the admiration of Descartes, and who is said to have rediscovered at twelve the first propositions of Euclid, young Bergson was nevertheless sufficiently advanced at eighteen to produce in the concours général of the Paris lycées a mathematical solution which was accorded the unusual honor of being published in full in the “Annales Mathématiques,” and which, if I mistake not, exempted him from the obligation of military service. From the Lycée Condorcet he went to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, matriculating in the section of letters, which he had chosen over the section of sciences after not a little hesitation and misgiving, for he was at that time an ardent disciple of Herbert Spencer and dreamed of perfecting Spencerianism. While at the Ecole Normale he came under the joint influence of Félix Ravaisson, harmonizer of the Greek spirituality of the intelligence and the Christian spirituality of the will and of the heart, and Emile Boutroux, author of a memorable assault upon the then dominant determinism entitled “De la contingence des lois de la nature,” and now President of the Institut de France, who speedily freed him from his Spencerian obsession and turned him in the direction he has since followed. Obliged, after his graduation from the Ecole Normale to submit, like the majority of its graduates, to a period of banishment from Paris, he taught philosophy for two years at the Lycée of Angers, in the province of Anjou, and for five years at the Lycée of Clermont-Ferrand, in the province of Auvergne. During his stay at Clermont, he delivered a number of lectures in the university of that city, and wrote the work “L’essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience,” which revealed him as an original thinker and as a redoubtable antagonist of determinism. At Clermont he also mapped out his life-work (studies, researches, and publications), calculating carefully the time to be allotted to each subject, and thus far he has not only succeeded in executing his program to the letter, but he has been able to permit himself such interludes as a course of lectures on Plotinus, his essay on laughter, a lecturing sojourn at Oxford, and the projected visit to the United States.

His “stage” in the provinces over, he taught first in the Collège Rollin and then in the Lycée Henri IV, located upon the very spot where Abélard held his open-air classes. While connected with the latter institution, he published “Matière et mémoire,” and it is thanks, no doubt, to the sensation this work created in the university world that he was called in 1897 to an assistant professorship in the Ecole Normale, and, in 1900, to his present professorship at the Collège de France.

Teaching, for Henri Bergson, is not a makeshift, but a veritable sacrament. His former pupils are virtually unanimous in testifying to his conscientiousness and zeal, as well as to his magnetic qualities as a teacher. Not a few of them, become teachers in their turn, call upon him often for counsel and guidance, which he invariably bestows gladly, however preoccupied and harassed by his formidable undertakings he may be at the time. And this is not the least of the reasons why a goodly proportion of the younger professors of philosophy in the French lycées and collèges of France proclaim themselves Bergsonians. Furthermore, the young men who have attended his classes or his lectures or who have come under the less direct, but only a shade less potent, spell of his writings, seem to be possessed with a passion for “living things”—for “doing things,” we would say in America—as distinguished from analyzing things.

Bergson has been hailed as “the inaugurator of a new era in philosophy,” “the foremost thinker of France,” “the most original and significant figure in the philosophical field of Europe,” “the sole philosopher of the first rank France has had since Descartes and Europe since Kant,” “the restorer of psychology,” “the modern Heraclitus,” “the Darwin or the Newton of philosophy,” “the Wells of philosophy, adventurous inventor of a new machine for exploring the world.” And his system has been characterized as “a new principle for the integral renovation of philosophy,” “the matrix of all future systems,” “the ruin of Marxism,” “the annihilation of materialism.”

Whether all of these appraisals be just or none of them be just, whether Bergsonism be sound or unsound, enduring or ephemeral, time, the supreme winnower, will of course determine. In the meanwhile it is perfectly safe to affirm that Bergson is a peculiarly fine and rich personality, an admirable example of the consecrated scholar, a consummate literary artist, a genuine prose poet, a keen psychologist, an observer of life, and one of the most suggestive and stimulating of contemporaneous thinkers; and this, even though his philosophy may ultimately share the fate of the greatest of its predecessors, is enough to make the glory of one man.

[1] Professor Bergson is about to visit the United States, and will deliver a series of lectures at Columbia University in January.

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The Almond Branch

(Cache-Fiò)

I

“Come answer me this, petite, petite—

A riddle for you to guess, my sweet:

What is the tree that in winter’s gloom

Breaks in an hour into bloom, into bloom?

Here’s silver for her who tells”

(Hark to the nougat bells!)[2]

II

“Mon vieux, mon vieux, that’s no riddle for me

’Tis a branch of the little almond tree

The poor man brings from the orchard-plot;

A branch for a yule-log—is all he has got,

While his children sing noëls”

(Hark to the nougat bells!)

III

“But it snaps in the fire and the whole branch glows—

Breaks into blossoms of white and rose!

His wife and his children laugh to see

Those blossoms of fire from the almond tree—

And the smoke how sweet it smells!”

(Hark to the nougat bells!)

Edith M. Thomas

[2] The Christmas chimes, so called from the confection of that season.

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Saboly

Seventeenth
Century—

Saboly is dead,

Is dead in Avignon!

He made the organ sing

As it had been a choir

Of angels of the Lord

Cleaving and brightening

The roof of dark St. Pierre!

The sound was of great glory,

It trembled all around

And quivered through our hearts.

Saboly is dead,

The maker of noëls

That all the people loved,

Saboly is dead—

And Yule is here again;

The great log on the hearth,

The crèche with all its lights,

The children gathering there;

The Kings are on the road—

The twilight road that leads

From out the purple East

The road from St. Remys!...

How shall we sing his songs

Who sang so well of these!

Folk say, when death was near

He set his hand to write

For us a new noël.

(So many a one before

He wrote with pen of gold!)

When he to Heaven came

I wis was silence then.

While Mary Mother bent

And raised him to his place,

The sweetness on his lips

Of that last, best noël!

But we—how can we sing

The songs he made for us,

Though Yule is here again!

For Saboly is dead,

Is dead in Avignon.

Edith M. Thomas

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“Little Christmas Ghost.”

I

I am an old, old woman

And I do not see so well;

The things that are from the things that seem,

I may not at all times tell.

II

But this for a truth I know—

I know I had locked my door;

And had buried the fire on the hearth

As I’d always done before.

III

I am an old, old woman—

Not a chick nor child have I;

But that Christmas night, as I climbed the stair,

A Little One flitted by!

IV

It was nothing of flesh or blood,

But it passed with a lilting joy;

Its hair so bright flew out in Its haste,

And in either hand was a toy!

V

It heeded me not at all—

It was passing me by, when I said,

“Who art thou, thou little Christmas Ghost?”

And quickly it turned Its head!

VI

I am an old, old woman

You will not believe, but I know

That Christmas Elf was my own child-self

Of fourscore years ago!

Edith M. Thomas

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BY VIRGINIA YEAMAN REMNITZ]

Drawn by Joseph Clement Coll

LIZETTE AMBOISE sat beside the window making lace. The lovely line of her profile caught the light; the clear white of cap and kerchief enriched the olive of her skin. Seen thus from within the room, she was so beautiful that the old eyes of Pierre’s mother brightened as they looked at her.

Pierre himself was working in the woolen mills at Lisieux. Soon after he went his house had caught fire, and Lizette, rushing through the flames, had led his mother out to safety. Since then the old woman had remembered only in flashes.

So there she sat in Lizette’s cottage, her eyes brightening as they rested on the girl. But all at once they clouded; she had remembered.

“If it was as it used to be,” she broke out in a quavering voice, “you might be restored for Pierre’s coming home.”

At the words Lizette turned, and the old woman began to cry.

“For him to come back at Christmas,” she wailed, “to see that!”

The girl looked quickly away. The rich olive of her cheek had faded to a dead pallor; her hands lay idle in her lap. “For him to come back to see that!” She used to rejoice in Pierre’s love of beauty. He was different from the other young men of the village, who cared more for a woman’s strength than for her face, and who looked always at the earth they tilled and never at the sky. Pierre could be keen and shrewd as any other Norman peasant; but Lizette knew his dreams, his delight in beauty, the thoughts he hid from his neighbors.

Once Lizette had said to him:

“Perhaps I can serve you as well making my lace as though I were strong to work in the fields.”

And Pierre, his dark eyes glowing, had answered:

“It is not your service I want, my Lizette. I want only to have you near me, to be able to look into your face.”

The words had pleased her when he spoke them; now they stabbed her to the heart. And so did these lines of the letter Pierre had written after he heard from the curé about the burning of his house, and how Lizette had saved his mother: “My beautiful, brave Lizette! How shall I wait to see you! Your face is always before me.”

“Mère Bernay,”—Lizette had turned again to the old woman,—“listen to me, Mère Bernay. What did you mean when you said I could be restored for Pierre’s return if it was as it used to be?”

“By a miracle of Little Noël. You would make the nine-days’ prayer before Christmas mass. Many are the cures were made so at our church in the old days. But that was long ago; they are made no more.”

The miracles of Little Noël! Lizette had heard of them ever since she was a child, but they had seemed merely a tradition. Suppose—her eyes widened and she drew her breath in quickly.

If the miracles had ceased, it must be because the faith of the people had died. Had not the curé often bewailed the worldliness of the times, the love of pleasure that had replaced piety? If she had faith, if she prayed with her whole heart, it might be that a miracle of Little Noël would be wrought even now for her!

Drawn by W. T. Benda.

Half-tone plate engraved by C. W. Chadwick

“THE STARRY EYES, UPRAISED, OVERFLOWED WITH TEARS; THE LIPS QUIVERED IN THEIR SUPPLICATIONS: ‘GRANT TO ME FAITH, THAT A MIRACLE OF LITTLE NOËL MAY BE WROUGHT UPON ME’”

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It was only two weeks before Christmas. Soon she could begin the nine days of special fasting and prayer; and there was time before that for preparation. Lizette rose, took down her long cloak, bent over Pierre’s mother, kissed her withered cheeks, and then went out into the golden light of the sunset.

She pulled the hood of her cloak far over her face, and walked rapidly. She saw no one until Mère Fouchard came to her door, calling shrilly to the little Henri. Mère Fouchard stopped shrilling when she saw Lizette.

“How the girl keeps the hood over her face!” she said to herself. And then, “Does she think she can hide it thus from Pierre Bernay when he comes back!”

She called a greeting, hoping Lizette would turn; but she was disappointed. The girl answered without looking around.

The church was in the middle of the wood in which the village was built. In Normandy these little villages try to hide themselves among the trees; but the gleam of their white-walled cottages betrays them.

When Lizette reached the church, twilight was gathering, and the branches of the trees wove delicate traceries against a sky of pale amethyst and rose. The old stone church, with its square tower, made a picture amid that setting which Lizette was quick to note. Pierre had taught her to see such things.

But she noted also, and with a sorrow she had never felt before, the dilapidated condition of the church. In the days when the miracles of Little Noël made the village famous, it had been different. Then, as Lizette knew, not a crumbling bit of mortar had gone untended or a candlestick unpolished. And the women of the village had woven finest cloth for the altars, and bordered them with lace of their own making. Lizette resolved that she would begin such an altar-cloth on the morrow.

Now she pushed the door open and looked shrinkingly about. There was only stillness and peace within, and the Virgin with the Child in her arms. It seemed she was waiting for Lizette. With a little sob, swept by a wave of emotion that laid bare all her heart, the girl went forward and fell on her knees, throwing back the hood from her head.

Her face was now revealed, as though for the pitiful eyes of the Virgin to see. On one side it was the beautiful face Pierre Bernay hungered for day and night: on the other it was furrowed across by the crimson scars the fire had made.

The starry eyes, upraised, overflowed with tears; the lips quivered in their supplications: “Grant to me faith, that a miracle of Little Noël may be wrought upon me! Have pity upon me and restore me for Pierre’s return!”

How often she had pictured that return—the leap of her lover’s eyes to her face, their horrified turning away; for she had begged the curé to write no hint of her disfigurement. She would have no pretense, she who had throbbed and glowed under the long caress of Pierre’s gaze. If he could not bear to look upon her, she must know it. It would be better than finding out little by little. If it should be as she feared, she would go away. She had a cousin who worked on a farm in the rich country to the east. Perhaps she could find the place; it did not much matter.

Suddenly Lizette realized that these thoughts were intruding themselves upon her devotions; that fear and foreboding were driving out the faith she longed for. She began to pray again, and little by little her heart grew still within her. It was as though a light broke softly and grew; there was no room left for fear.

In the church, meantime, the dusk had been gathering. Lizette, when she rose to her feet, could just see the face of the Child. It was in honor of his birthday the cures had been made; for the sake of the little Jesus, who had come to heal the sicknesses and sorrows of all the world.

For some minutes Lizette stood there. Then she remembered the Mère Bernay, sitting all alone, with the fire dying on the hearth; and she hurried away. But the crushing weight was gone from her heart. She walked with light steps, and looked up at the stars, which were beginning to come out in the sky.

Every day now Lizette prayed in the church, but no one who saw her pass guessed at what was in her heart. It may be, however, that Pierre’s mother knew; she knew many things that no one ever told her. Sometimes when Lizette came in with that light on her face the old woman would look at her with eyes which seemed to understand.

When the time came for her to make the nine-days’ prayer, Lizette went to her devotions both morning and evening, and so absorbed was she that the fire often died on the hearth, and Pierre’s mother shivered as she sat beside it. But it was on the last day of her waiting that the girl knelt longest in the little church. When she came again it would be for the midnight mass; she hardly dared to think further than that. The old fear seemed to be hovering near, threatening to seize her. She sought shelter from it in her prayers: she even tried to forget a certain resolve she had made, lest it argue lack of faith. This resolve was that Pierre’s eyes should be the first to rest upon her after the midnight mass. She would neither look in her glass nor touch her face with her fingers. His eyes, and his alone, should tell her whether the miracle had been performed.

Pierre had written again, saying that he would come early on Christmas morning. In a few hours he would be on his way, walking from Lisieux to a little inn where he slept. But long before dawn he would start again, and be with her soon after the sun was up. She was glad that Mère Bernay lay in bed until late. She wished to watch for Pierre alone.

That evening she told the old woman that they would eat the réveillon before mass. “You would be too weary if you waited for my return,” she said; but the true reason lay in her resolve that Pierre should be the first to see her face after the midnight mass.

The réveillon may be spread either before or after that mass. Lizette brought out the roasted chestnuts soaked in wine and the little cakes. Her heart was suddenly light and gay. She made Mère Bernay put her shoes on the hearth, ready for gifts; then Lizette put one of her own beside them, and next to that she put the other of the pair for her lover.

The gifts were in readiness; the cottage wore a festive air. Branches of laurel and pine were fastened over the fireplace, and the vessels of copper and brass twinkled in the light of the yule log. Père Fouchard had brought the log in that morning. He was as kind as his wife was shrewish.

When the feast was eaten and Pierre’s mother was in bed, Lizette made herself ready to go to the church. With greater care than ever she hid her face in the hood of her cloak; then she lighted her lantern and stepped out into a white mist, which seemed to open to receive her. The frosty road crackled beneath her feet, and the branches of the trees waved ghostly arms on each side.

The mist was like a delicate veil, entwining everything. Lizette knew that the little procession of village folk had already passed on its way to the church. She had heard them singing a few minutes before as they went; but she had not wished to join them.

Now that she was on her way, she realized that her gaiety had deserted her, that she felt frightened. But she must not be frightened; she must have faith. It was faith that would make the miracle possible.

So Lizette came to the church after the others, and slipped into a dim corner. Nevertheless, several saw her and peered curiously. Among these was Mère Fouchard. Like all the rest, she had heard that Pierre Bernay returned on the morrow.

Lizette scarcely heard the hymns or the sermon. She sat like one tranced, waiting. Her rosary slipped through her fingers, and her pale lips moved. She tried to think of the words of the prayers, and she tried not to see Pierre’s eyes as they leaped to her face. Beyond her meeting with Pierre everything was a blank.

The mass was over, and Lizette was on her way home. The others had lingered to sing the Christmas carols and to exchange greetings; but Lizette had slipped out quickly, and went alone through the fog. She held her cloak tight about her with both hands. At first it had been all she could do not to touch her face, but that temptation had passed. She did not even think of it; she knew she would wait for Pierre’s coming.

But the reaction after the long strain had set in. She felt a great weariness; she would have liked to creep away into the wood and cry like a little child. But she stumbled on through the fog, came to the cottage, and lay down on her bed.

Then it was morning, and the mist was lifting and drifting away. It drifted away in trailing veils, clinging to everything it passed. But Lizette looked at the mist only a few moments; she had to make herself ready for Pierre’s coming.

She watched for him from the window where she sat when she made her lace, and the mist rose as though to let her see as far down the road as possible. She could not have said whether she believed herself healed. There was a sort of blankness in her head. Yet she knew she was suffering supreme suspense. Now and again the anguish of it pierced through the blankness; but it was only for a moment, or she could not have borne it.

Then a figure came into sight at the farthest point of the road she could see. She rose instantly; she knew it was Pierre. His tall figure, his eager gait—how often she had seen him coming thus to the cottage! But now her heart seemed to stop, and she felt she would never get to the door; never put on her cloak, and pull her hood over her head. She held the hood tight about her face as she went.

When Pierre saw her coming he stood perfectly still, his head lifted up. It was as though his very longing, the piercing delight of her nearness, had fixed him there. And Lizette, her knees trembling beneath her, went on toward him. Then stopping suddenly, she lifted her hands and threw back the hood from her face.

Ah, the leap of Pierre’s eyes! But before Lizette’s there came a swimming blackness; the earth seemed to rise up and the trees to rush past her. She tried to speak, she tried to see; then the deadly struggling ceased.

She found herself in Pierre’s arms. His eyes were on her face. Their love enveloped her and drew her close—closer than ever before. It was like something in which she lost herself. She lay still, looking up at him.

“Lizette,” he whispered brokenly. He put his face down against hers. “My brave, beautiful Lizette!”

Tears sprang to her eyes; an incredible happiness flooded her being.

“It is the miracle of Little Noël,” she whispered.

Pierre paid no heed. He seemed not to care about her meaning; he cared only for her. Raising her to her feet, he supported her with his arm. He gazed in her face as though his hunger for it could never be appeased; and at last he put one hand beneath her chin and turned her head gently to one side.

“This is the Lizette I left,” he said—“the Lizette whose beautiful face made me forget her soul. I loved her as a man loves a woman when both are young.”

He stopped, and then he turned Lizette’s face so that his eyes rested upon the side which had been burned.

“And this—” He broke off; when he could speak again, his voice had a hushed, exquisite note—“and this,” he said, “is the Lizette I never knew. It is the wonderful, beautiful soul of Lizette. When we are old and our bodies have changed, still I shall always see your brave, tender, beautiful soul.”

But Lizette, with a low cry, had pushed him from her. She put a hand to her face.

“The burns!” she gasped. “I feel the burns!”

Pierre seized her hands in his. He drew her to him, kissing the scars again and again.

“My Lizette,” he whispered, “I did not know before what love was—this love of soul and body!”

And Lizette, raising her head, clasped her hands together.

“It is the miracle of Little Noël,” she said.

THE IMPEACHMENT OF ANDREW JOHNSON

INTRODUCTION

No period of our history better repays perusal by thoughtful readers and good citizens than the political happenings of the three years following the Civil War, culminating in the attempt to “recall” President Johnson. But the subject is so vast that no magazine article can more than suggest its outlines, or sketch the personalities involved in the first efforts to reëstablish civil order in the South.

Probably no actor in that series of passionate events could write of them without some bias; nor would any picture be quite true without the perspective due to individual experience.

Considered in the large, the long fight between Congress and President Johnson must be regarded as a wrestling of political forces, a struggle for major influence in reconstruction, between the executive and legislative branches of the Government.

In the Civil War the Democratic party, which for many years had been dominated by the slave-holding interests of the South, had been dethroned by the new Republican party, which, however, could not have achieved its purpose to save the Union and abolish slavery without the aid of the large body of War Democrats who had been rallied to the support of Lincoln by his defeated rival, Senator Douglas.

At the end of the war, the Republican party was dominated by its Radical wing, whose extreme aims were almost as offensive to the War Democrats as to their old allies of the South; and the latter were not slow to grasp at the political advantage of a reunion which promised Democratic control of the National Government.

A fourth great factor in the war had been the Union men of the South, formerly Democrats, of whom Andrew Johnson had been the forceful leader. It was this prominence which dictated his nomination for Vice-President in 1864. When, at the close of the war, by the assassination of Lincoln he became President, his utterances gave the Republicans hope that as a convert his zeal would equal if not exceed that of the Radicals in their purpose to subject the South to a period of political probation. But it was soon manifest that he would steer the course of conciliation which Lincoln, before the end of battle, had already charted and begun. The tendency of Johnson’s policy was to draw to him men imbued with the old Democratic sentiment. In a little while, the Republican leaders perceived that as soon as the Democrats of the South should be allowed to vote they would unite with the Democrats of the North, and thus Republican ascendancy might come to a sudden end, and some of the results achieved by battle might be reversed at the ballot-box.

The black man had been freed, and, to protect him against the political power of his former masters, the Republicans decided to give him the ballot. This, it was expected, would also offset Democratic votes in the South, and help to perpetuate Republican rule. President Johnson had championed emancipation, but was opposed to immediate Negro suffrage. In the minds of the Radicals that attitude not only stamped him as a traitor to the party which elected him, but also incited an obstinate South. When the efforts to thwart the President by obstructive laws had failed, the Radicals sought to remove him by impeachment.

Each side had abundant legal and moral grounds for its actions, and each believed that the other was reaching for selfish political advantage. Outbreaks of lawlessness in the South, peculiar to the extraordinary conditions, and chargeable to both sides, convinced each that its worst fears were justified.

In the pages which follow, the main motives for impeachment are sketched by General Otis, who fought through the Civil War as a Union soldier, then entered the long political contest as a militant journalist, and finally resumed his place by the flag in the war with Spain. A more conservative view is taken by General Henderson, a War Democrat high in Lincoln’s confidence, and a slaveholder who yet proposed the final edict of freedom in the Senate. He is the only survivor of the seven Republican senators who thwarted impeachment, ex-Senator George F. Edmunds, of Vermont, being the only other surviving member of the court. Out of his personal recollection General Henderson describes his intercourse with Lincoln in securing emancipation, and his part in the impeachment fiasco.

Papers to follow, in the January CENTURY, will include an account of the impeachment trial, largely based on the President’s notes and letters, and an anecdotal sketch of Andrew Johnson, one of the most peculiar characters in American history.

In subsequent papers, after an interval, the later aspects of “Reconstruction” will be treated from the Southern point of view.—THE EDITOR.

THE CAUSES OF IMPEACHMENT

BY HARRISON GRAY OTIS

Editor of the “Los Angeles Times”; veteran of the war for the Union; Brevet Major-General in the war with Spain

THE SAVING OF THE UNION

THE War of the Rebellion was the offspring of a desire on the part of the South to secure exemption from laws that its people believed would be enacted by a great Northern party, following the election of Abraham Lincoln, and which would put an end to the extension of slavery, and menace its safety in the States where it existed. In vain Republican statesmen protested that slavery would not be interfered with south of the Potomac. Behind Lincoln and Seward the South beheld Garrison and Lovejoy and Phillips. It was the belief of Davis and Breckinridge and Benjamin and Toombs that to exclude slavery from Kansas and Nebraska would be to sound the prelude of its abolition in Virginia and the Carolinas, and that those who commended the raid of John Brown and indorsed Helper’s “Impending Crisis” would sooner or later dominate the Republican party and commit it to universal abolition of the system of servile labor, upon the perpetuation of which depended the industrial life of the South.

It was believed by Southern publicists that the Dred Scott decision would be reversed by a reorganized Supreme Court, and that a Republican Congress would enact laws denying the slaveholders the right to carry their slaves into the territories, and to be protected there by Federal power. As a matter of fact, slave labor could not have been employed profitably in the corn-fields of Kansas and Nebraska, and the cotton States had no slaves to spare. As was wittily said by Charles Francis Adams, “The South seceded because she couldn’t get protection for a thing she hadn’t got, in a place where she didn’t want it.”

In the months between the election and inauguration of Lincoln, during which the Southern Confederacy was organized, members of the Thirty-sixth Congress made futile efforts to avert the coming struggle. Senator Mason of Virginia sneeringly characterized the Crittenden compromise resolutions as “a bread pill.” Senator Douglas rejoined that “hypochondriacs were sometimes best cured of imaginary disorders by the use of bread pills.” Compromise was impossible. The South was determined on separation. Her press and her orators cherished the delusion that Northern men would not fight to preserve the Union. They fired the Southern heart and precipitated the cotton States into a revolution.

The uprising in the North that followed the assault on Sumter amazed the South and astonished the world; but it was not until nearly two years after Sumter that the nation became fully aroused to a sense of its power, its duty, and its destiny. The Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln struck swift and sure at the cause of the war, which was the Southern determination to perpetuate slavery. It enlisted the sympathies of Christian civilization. By the late summer of 1864 it became apparent that the sacrifices, the generalship, and the desperate valor of the Confederates could not much longer hold out against the superiority of the Union forces in numbers and arms, and the financial resources of the Federal government. The one hope of the Confederacy was that, at the ensuing election, the people of the loyal States might decree to end the contest. But the soul went out of the Confederacy on the sixth of November, 1864, when the ballots cast for Abraham Lincoln settled the issue of continuing the war for the Union. Victory succeeded victory, until the old banner, hallowed by the new motive, floated over every Southern stronghold.

AN ELECTION ON THE MARCH

MANY of the volunteer troops had been authorized by the laws of their respective States to vote in the field for President of the United States. In the case of my command, this voting was done in the Shenandoah Valley on November 6, about a fortnight after the famous battle of Cedar Creek, the scene of “Sheridan’s Ride.” My brigade was then on the march from Cedar Creek to Martinsburg as guard to a long supply-train. The usual practice on infantry marches was to march fifty minutes and rest ten minutes. Our troops availed themselves of the opportunity offered by these ten-minute rests to go to the polls and cast their ballots. Polling-places had been provided in every regimental line, proper election blanks supplied by the State, and the voting was done not “early and often,” but with honesty and a fair degree of regularity. In my own regiment the care of the rolls fell to me and my associate election judges, who had charge of the polling throughout the day. A bullet through the leg, received in the battle of Kernstown three months before, had deprived me of my full “hiking” powers, compelling me to resort to the “hurricane-deck” of a mule for transportation throughout the march; but I “arrived” all right, and on the following day, in the midst of a snow-storm, I was able to collect the rolls, certify to the results, and officially transmit the papers to the Ohio Secretary of State. The votes cast were almost entirely for Abraham Lincoln’s reëlection, General George B. McClellan, his Democratic, anti-war opponent, securing scarcely more than a “look in” at the hands of this steadfast Ohio brigade. McClellan fared little better at the hands of those Ohio volunteers than had Clement L. Vallandigham when he was a candidate for governor of the Buckeye State.

CIVIC AND MATERIAL DESOLATION

THE surrender of Lee and Johnston left the South in a deplorable condition. Its people were without money or credit, and their labor system was destroyed. Its legislators and judges were fleeing or hiding from Federal soldiers. The organic and statutory laws of the South that were in existence before the war had been changed by State conventions and legislatures during the war. Twelve millions of people, white and black, were not only without representation at Washington, but they were without local law, without civil government of any kind, without other protection than the bayonets of Federal troops. Somewhere there must exist the power to create, to adjust, to set the machinery of government again in motion. Clearly the creative power was in the people of each State capable of giving their consent to be governed, and not in a few, or in a class who should assume to govern the others. The adjusting power was in Congress under Section 8 of Article I of the Federal Constitution, which provides that Congress “shall have the power to provide for the general welfare of the United States.”

The national statesmen of those days were confronted with a perplexing problem. They desired to remove the blight from the fair face of the South, to open her seaports to the ships of the world, to restore her marts to commerce, her fields to plenty, her people to prosperity, to citizenship, to equality, and to a place in the councils of the Government. Nothing less than this was intended by those who undertook the task of reconstruction. There was no vengeful outbreak of passion, no proscription of the Southern people, no spirit of retaliation in the hearts of Union men.

The new nation which was to issue from the war began to take form before the surrender of Lee or the assassination of President Lincoln. The Thirteenth Amendment, validating the Emancipation Proclamation and abolishing slavery, had been ratified by eleven of the States which had joined the Confederacy, also by Maryland and Missouri of the border States, and by all the Northern States. Delaware and Kentucky alone had refused to ratify. But it was unfortunate for the Southern people that their leaders in the fighting did not participate in the public affairs of the South and advise the politicians that they could not expect to win from Union statesmen what their armies had failed to gain on the battle-field. Southern soldiers, as a whole, showed the spirit of men who had fought bravely and lost fairly, and recognized the duty, not less than the patriotism, of submitting to the inevitable. Almost without exception, Union soldiers of the line and their officers stood ready to reflect in their acts, attitude, and feelings the sentiments of their great commander General Grant, who had said to the vanquished at Appomattox: “Take your horses home with you; you will need them to put in your crops.” Had the Southern people, the non-combatants among them, taken the attitude of the mass of the Confederate soldiers, the difficulties of reconstruction would have been lessened. But in the first year after the close of the war the country, as already described, was convulsed by disturbing political events, in which the rebellious spirit shown by the Southern people caused deep anxiety and created marked revulsion in the North. There were strong exhibitions of aroused and indignant sentiment in Union conventions and other public assemblies, and there was a tremendous outpouring of protest and warning. At the same time the South was aflame with claims of Southern rights denied and of wrongs suffered.

INCIDENTS OF PROVOST-MARSHAL RULE

TWO incidents within my personal knowledge illustrate the inconvenience caused by the total absence of civil law in the South at that juncture. In June, 1865, I was serving as provost-marshal at the town of Harrisonburg, in the Valley of the Shenandoah, with instructions to preserve order, gather up various sorts of United States military property scattered through the country, arrest outlaws and marauders, and receive the surrender of, and give paroles to, bands of scattered Confederate soldiers who had not been “in” at the all-compelling surrender at Appomattox Court House two months before. The country was honeycombed with stragglers, and I was burdened with my unique tasks. Civil government being non-existent, there was not even authority for the issuance of marriage-licenses and for the performance of like civic duties. One day, in this emergency, I received a personal application from an ardent Virginia swain, who announced that he wished to get married, and appealed to me for instructions as to how to go about the tender though untimely task. Rising to the occasion, I told him that I would issue him a license, and accordingly did so in my capacity as a captain of United States Volunteers, and for the time being provost-marshal of that district. I wrote out the necessary authority, observing no forms, empowering any minister of the gospel, or any former justice of the peace under the Confederacy, to perform the ceremony. Then I sent the happy lover on his way rejoicing, and assumed that the knot was tied with due solemnity, that the couple would live happily ever after, and rear a family of Virginia children.

As provost-marshal I imposed a fine on a portly Negro saloon-keeper for violating a military order commanding the closing of all liquor shops in the town. The amount of the fine was fifty dollars in greenbacks, which was promptly, albeit ungraciously, paid by the aggrieved dispenser of firewater. Then, not knowing what to do legally with the money, I transmitted it to the regimental and post commander. He, also, not knowing how to dispose of this exceptional collection under any section of the army regulations, sent it to the Treasury of the United States at Washington, accompanied by an explanatory letter. The treasury officials, likewise “stumped” by the unusual problem, sent the fifty dollars back to the colonel commanding. He in turn threw the money back upon me, with a hint that in the unique dilemma the colored man’s unwilling contribution might not inappropriately be covered into the treasury of a certain regimental fund which was then being raised to promote a permanent, patriotic, and reverent object. Without delay I proceeded to act upon the hint, and to this day I hold among my private military archives the receipt of the regimental quartermaster for the money thus forcibly extorted from that Negro at Harrisonburg who had undertaken to sell Virginia apple-jack without a military license.

OPPOSITION TO THE EDICT OF FREEDOM

THE Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, which was pending when Lee surrendered, was not acceptable to the South. Almost the first acts of the Southern legislatures which assembled under President Johnson’s proclamation of amnesty, and the provisional organizations provided for by these agencies, breathed antagonism to the abolition of slavery. In November, 1865, Mississippi provided by legislative enactment that any Negro over eighteen years of age found in that State with no lawful employment or business should be deemed a vagrant. Conviction of vagrancy was punished by fine, and for non-payment of fine for five days it was made the duty of the sheriff to hire out the “vagrant” to any person who for the shortest period of service would pay the fine. In March, 1865, three months after the Thirteenth Amendment was declared in force, Georgia enacted a vagrant law authorizing the sale of the black man’s time for a year. The same law provided for the return and punishment by fine and imprisonment of runaway black employees, and authorized the employer to pay the fine and deduct it from the servant’s wages. Alabama, South Carolina, and Virginia had vagrant laws similar to those of Mississippi, and Louisiana had an additional provision requiring employers to pay only half-wages, and giving them the right to keep the remainder if the laborer quit before his time was out; and also the right to complain of a laborer who might quit work, and cause him to be put on the public works, without pay, until he returned to his employer.

Union men who had left their Southern homes during the war came back to find their property, real and personal, in the hands of Confederates, who refused to surrender it. Returning Unionists encountered such persecution as compelled them to leave again. There was, under “the black law,” a virtual reënslavement of Negroes. Confederate sentiment was nearly as dominant from the Potomac to the Gulf as when the Stars and Bars floated from every flagstaff. Georgia elected, or tried to elect, Alexander H. Stephens a United States Senator. Mobile made Raphael Semmes, the captain of the Alabama, a probate judge. Monroe was elected mayor of New Orleans, and Robert E. Lee was offered the nomination for Governor of Virginia. National airs were hissed in the theaters, and the national flag was insulted in the streets. The local press extolled the “Lost Cause” and flouted those who had overthrown it. Former Confederate officers were the chosen leaders of public sentiment. Taxation was levied to pay municipal indebtedness contracted to fit out Confederate regiments. The generally expressed Southern opinion was that, if reconstruction was necessary, it was the Confederates who should do the reconstructing.

Northern representatives in Congress, under the leadership of Thaddeus Stevens and Henry Winter Davis, were not hospitable to the Southern claims for immediate and unconditional representation in Congress. In substance they said: The alleged “right” of secession has been trampled under the feet of the Union armies; the Confederate claims of exemption from the consequences of their action is not allowed. The North does not demand punishment of Confederates, nor indemnity for the past, but it will have security for the future. Taxation is a consequence of war which the South must bear with the North. Representation—participation in public rule—is a privilege which, except under satisfactory conditions and guarantees, will not be extended to the people of the cotton States.

THE MILITARY STATE GOVERNMENTS

A LAW of Congress was enacted authorizing an officer not below the rank of brigadier-general of the United States army to make a list of all the voters in a State which might be under his command as a military district. In making this list, residence and manhood were the only qualifications.[3] The general was authorized and directed to issue a proclamation inviting the listed voters to assemble at the polls and elect delegates to a convention to draft a State constitution to be submitted to a vote of the people, and if ratified and approved by Congress, the State to be placed at once in practical political relations with the other States, and accorded her proper representation in Congress. The only persons excluded from participation in reconstruction were those who before the war had taken an official oath to support the Government and Constitution of the United States, and who had afterward violated that oath by voluntarily bearing arms against the Government of the United States. The class thus excluded from suffrage was perhaps 30,000 in number. The conventions were required to perpetuate the basis of suffrage set forth in the Reconstruction Act and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. That amendment provided that Federal indebtedness should be paid, and that Confederate indebtedness should not be paid; that those who were under disabilities should not be eligible to office until Congress should remove their disabilities; that representation in Congress and in the Electoral College should not be accorded to those to whom the right of suffrage had been or might be denied, and that all persons should be protected in their rights of liberty and property.

The Fourteenth Amendment was opposed both South and North by those who asserted that the Union armies had fought to establish the doctrine that no State could secede from the Union; that the Union victories had established such doctrine; that as no State could secede, therefore no State did secede, and, so being in the Union, every Southern State was entitled to representation without conditions.

To such reasoning it was answered that no statesman and no party had ever claimed that a State might not destroy herself, even as a city might disincorporate, or a county merge itself with another. No State could absolve its citizens from their allegiance to the United States or release them from their obligation to obey Federal laws and their liability for Federal taxes, or deprive them of their right to Federal protection. No State could withdraw her territory or her people from the dominant jurisdiction of the United States. But, nevertheless, a State might destroy her internal government, repeal her local laws, and discontinue her political relations with the other States. She might commit state suicide. If she sent no senators or representatives to the Federal Congress; if through her officers she emptied her treasury, abrogated her courts, disrobed herself of sovereignty, dissolved her legislature, smote her constitution to pieces with anarchic blows, and submitted to military rule or to the sway of a revolutionary central power, she did not take her territory or her people out of the Union, but she took herself out of existence as a State, leaving only her territorial boundaries to mark her place on the map. In such circumstances it became the duty of the Government of the United States to treat such disorganized Federal territory as it would treat unorganized Federal territory acquired by purchase or by conquest.

LINCOLN’S RECONSTRUCTION POLICY IN WAR AND JOHNSON’S IN PEACE

BETWEEN the assassination of President Lincoln and the meeting of Congress in December, 1865, an interval of over seven months, there was no authoritative Republican declaration of the party policy as to reconstruction. The murder of Lincoln, hastily and unjustly charged by some Union men against the entire South, was received with an outburst of rage that encouraged Thaddeus Stevens and other leading Radicals to propose that the South should be reconstructed by treating the eleven late Confederate States as conquered territory, wiping out State lines, and organizing the Territory of Grant, the Territory of Lincoln, the Territory of Sherman, the Territory of Sheridan, and other territories to be named after Union officers, which should be governed like the Territories of Idaho, Montana, and Colorado, and in due time admitted to the Union on a satisfactory showing in each case.

President Johnson opposed the program of Thad. Stevens. He called attention to the fact that before the surrender of Lee at Appomattox the white men of Tennessee elected two United States senators and a full complement of congressmen, made Brownlow governor, and gave a majority for Lincoln and Johnson. He reasoned that if Tennessee was in the Union sufficiently to provide a Vice-President who had become President, she was in the Union absolutely, and entitled to have her senators and representatives admitted to seats in Congress. Johnson’s policy was to ignore everything in the past; to readmit senators and representatives from the late Confederate States without guarantees and without delay; to withdraw our armies, and permit the Confederates to reëstablish their local governments to suit themselves. He proposed, in effect, that the Confederates, after four years of fighting, having surrendered to the Union, Union men in turn should, after four weeks of rejoicing, surrender to the Confederacy.

In assuming this position, Johnson claimed that he was carrying out Lincoln’s plan of reconstruction, for Lincoln had said long before the surrender of Lee that his purpose was to save the Union, whether such saving was accomplished by abolishing slavery or by preserving it. But Lincoln was a progressive and constructive statesman, and a policy which he might have favored to obtain peace conditioned on the disbandment of the Confederate armies, while they were still in the field as a mighty force, might not have been his policy after the enforced surrender of Lee and Johnston.

There was no time between the collapse of the Confederacy and the assassination of Lincoln for him to formulate any policy. It may be said, however, that he was not in favor of the plan of Thad. Stevens and Ben. Wade to blot out lines and names in eleven States, and deal with them as conquered territory. Lincoln’s plan was not to destroy the Southern States as existing entities, but to recognize the fact that, as far as government in those entities was concerned, “chaos had come again,” and it was the duty of Congress to provide for a reëstablishment of government there, and to prescribe the conditions on which the people of those States should be accorded national representation.

NEGRO SUFFRAGE

CONGRESS was determined that one of the conditions of reconstruction should be the admission of colored men to the right of suffrage. Most of those who advised this were influenced by politico-economic rather than moral or sentimental considerations. They said to the South, the action of your legislatures and the utterances of your public men and newspapers all evince your determination virtually to restore slavery by establishing peonage. We must either garrison every school district in the South with soldiers at enormous cost in order to protect the Negro, or else we must give him the ballot and enable him to protect himself. If he is made a voter, the struggle of candidates to obtain his vote may protect him.

Congress, as subsequently appeared, was determined to make Negro suffrage an essential part of any plan of reconstruction. Johnson was equally determined to refuse the franchise to the black man, and he had the power to do it.

KU-KLUX OUTRAGES

ONE of the most potent instrumentalities in discrediting Andrew Johnson was the Ku-Klux Klan. It would be impossible within the limits of this article to give even a brief synopsis of the outrages of this remarkable band of outlaws. The report of the “Congressional Committee on Affairs in the Insurrectionary States,” made to the Forty-second Congress, fills thirteen large volumes. The Ku-Klux organization extended over eleven States. It was estimated that its membership exceeded one hundred thousand, and included men who otherwise were reputable and respected citizens. Its avowed purpose was to exclude from participation in public affairs, either as voters or office-holders, all Negroes, all “carpet-baggers,” as incomers from the North were called, and all “scallywags,” as Southern Union men were designated.

The purpose of the Ku-Klux Klan was not primarily to depredate private property, but for a long period they were merciless in dealing with those who came under their ban. A white man obnoxious to them was ordered to leave the vicinage. If he failed to obey, the torch was applied to his home, and he was openly assaulted or secretly assassinated. If he offered armed resistance, he was murdered. The colored man who attempted to exercise the right of suffrage was called from his cabin at midnight, tied to a tree, and whipped, and his house was burned to the ground. Prosecutions of the members of the Ku-Klux instituted in the Federal courts in North Carolina, in South Carolina, and in other States almost invariably resulted in failure for want of proof, hard to get; and not until the second administration of General Grant were these outlaws finally disbanded and dispersed.

PUBLIC SENTIMENT AGAINST JOHNSON’S POLICIES

TWO great national conventions were held in the year 1866, one at Pittsburg and the other at Philadelphia. The latter, beginning on September 3, was made up in large measure of Southern loyalists and other civilians, among whom the tide of patriotism ran high. It made a tremendous impression upon the country and upon the recalcitrant and dissatisfied South. Among the delegates were Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John G. Whittier, eleven governors, and eight United States senators. Among the thousands of Unionists whom I met there was James A. Garfield, who had won his spurs as a major-general in the field, who subsequently served in the House of Representatives, became President, and died that tragic death which history has sadly recorded. In his joyousness and geniality he seemed to me like a great overgrown boy. While masses of shouting, cheering, and singing men were parading through Independence Square, within the sound of the Liberty Bell, that big man passed his arms affectionately about the shoulders of a young soldier, whom he did not know, and strode proudly along as though the latter had been his lifelong friend. It was enough for Garfield to know that the other was a comrade. I was the obscure young soldier.

The object of the convention was to devise means for the protection of the imperiled lives and property of loyal Southerners. The chairman, the Hon. Charles Gibbons, voiced the purpose of the convention when he said: “It is the honest sentiment of the North, held and uttered in the interests of union, of peace, and of Christianity, that when the South returns to her duty she must come in new robes, with new covenants for liberty, equality, and justice, led by her own loyal Unionists, who are free from the guilt of treason.”

The Union Soldiers’ and Sailors’ convention, at Pittsburg, followed the other in the same month. It was equally large, equally serious and determined in its character and utterances. It was attended by hosts of soldiers of all grades, from private to major-general. The speeches and resolutions breathed a sentiment of deep devotion to the restored Union, expressed a fearless determination to prevent the fruits of the nation’s sacrifices from being snatched away or diluted. Revolt against the tendencies in the White House and the South was general among the friends of the Union.

THE FAILURE TO DISLODGE THE PRESIDENT

IN 1867 an act of Congress was passed depriving the President of the power to issue an amnesty proclamation, which he overrode. His disposition and his plans to defy Congress and pursue his own method of reconstructing the South caused Congress to deprive him of the command of the army, a bold act, the constitutionality of which might well be disputed at any stage, but which illustrates the almost desperate frame of mind in which Congress then was. Johnson’s continued defiance was met by the enactment into law of the Tenure-of-Office bill, which prevented him from making a change in his cabinet, his own official household.

These strained relations between the President and Congress, which had existed for more than two years, reached an open rupture on February 21, 1868, when the President informed the Senate that he had removed Edwin M. Stanton as Secretary of War, contrary to the Tenure-of-Office act. The House at once adopted a resolution, by a vote of 122 to 47 (not voting 17) to “impeach Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, of high crimes and misdemeanors.” James G. Blaine, in his “Twenty Years of Congress,” says that, in adopting this resolution of impeachment, Congress acted hastily; but it is the opinion of many still living that he did not consider the precedent circumstances, which, as much as the removal of Stanton, led 122 congressmen to cast their votes for impeachment. Still, it was probably fortunate for the nation that Johnson was saved from impeachment by one senatorial vote. If Johnson had been impeached, Ben. Wade of Ohio, a fearless Republican statesman, would have become President. Wade was a Radical of the Radicals, who always had the courage of his convictions. He probably would have given the whole force of his administration to the plan of Thad. Stevens to organize the South into territories and govern it as such, yet granting the States readmission to the Union gradually and on stipulated terms. The people of the North were so enraged over the assassination of Lincoln and the continued efforts of the Southern States to nullify the Thirteenth Amendment that they might then have approved the Stevens plan of reconstruction. At this day, nearly half a century after Appomattox, it seems best that neither the Johnson plan nor the Stevens plan did prevail.

TWO CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS

THE failure to impeach Johnson accentuated the need of further constitutional amendment. As early as June 13, 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment, declaring that no State may abridge the rights of citizens of the United States, was proposed in Congress, but it was not finally ratified and declared to be in force until July 28, 1868. California never took final action on this amendment. It was rejected by Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky. New Jersey and Ohio rescinded their ratification of it. Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia at first rejected the amendment, but afterward ratified it.

Notwithstanding the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, feud, anarchy, and devastation continued in the Southern country, and the failure to impeach Johnson was an incentive to continued disorder. How to secure peace, justice, and prosperity was the pressing question of the hour. Congress had tried constitutional amendments, and the South ignored them. It had tried civil-rights bills, which were useless without military power to enforce them. Then Congress said in effect to the Southern people: “If you have not a loyal white majority which can be trusted with the administration of civil government, we will enfranchise the black man. We must either garrison every school district with Union troops in order to protect the Negro from a peonage that is practical reënslavement, or we must give him the ballot and let him protect himself.” It was believed that the contending ambitions of office-seekers to obtain the colored man’s vote would cause them to treat him justly.

It was such conditions that produced the Fifteenth Amendment, providing that no State might deprive a citizen of his vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The first draft contained the word “nativity,” which was obnoxious to the Pacific coast because of the apprehension of Chinese suffrage, so the word was eliminated. Nevada was the first State to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment. California, Oregon, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and New Jersey rejected it. Georgia and Ohio at first rejected it, but finally ratified it. New York rescinded her ratification. The amendment was proposed February 26, 1869, and declared in force March 30, 1870.

Half a century ago human slavery had been banished from every civilized nation in the world except the United States. Here it was intrenched behind apparently impregnable fortifications composed of cotton-bales, pulpits, and counting-rooms, of bank vaults and political conventions.

The reverberations of Sumter’s guns changed a majority of the people of the Northern States from conservative indifference to toleration of antislavery sentiments, and, as the war progressed, into active abolitionists; and thus the Emancipation Proclamation was acclaimed by millions who three years before would have scouted such a measure. It is more than forty-seven years since the last gun was fired in the Civil War; it is more than forty years since the last measure of reconstruction was enacted. The generals and statesmen of that historic era have journeyed on. The veterans in the soldiers’ homes grow rapidly fewer in number, and it will not be many years until the last of them will have joined the great majority. The acerbities and rancors of the war have been submerged in Lethean waters, and the Southern States, once desolated, have become prosperous and powerful supporters of the Old Flag.

Drawn by Joseph Pennell

THE CAPITOL, FROM PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

[3] See [page 195] for a reference to the Fifteenth Amendment, which introduced into the fundamental law the phrase, “without distinction of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

EMANCIPATION AND IMPEACHMENT

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE SENATOR WHO PROPOSED THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT, AND WAS ONE OF THE SEVEN REPUBLICANS WHO THWARTED THE ATTEMPT TO IMPEACH PRESIDENT JOHNSON

BY GENERAL JOHN B. HENDERSON

THE “RECALL” FOR PRESIDENTS

ARTICLE II, Sec. 4, of the Constitution provides that “The President, Vice-President, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Thus the principle of the “recall,” in very broad terms, has been written into our fundamental law. Human nature is such that the idea of resorting to this remedy originates first in the minds of political opponents. As applicable to Presidents, the recall was probably much desired by the enemies of John Adams, the second President, and of Andrew Jackson, the seventh. Fortunately it has actually been invoked only against the seventeenth President, Andrew Johnson, who owed his position to the recall by assassination of Abraham Lincoln. His impeachment, I believe, was due mainly to a counter-tide of passion, prejudice, and political revenge. His trial formed a crisis in the life of the nation, the dangerous import of which may not yet be fully understood. His rescue from conviction by the narrow margin of one vote was followed by demands for the recall of the seven Republican senators who voted with the Democrats. I happened to be the youngest of the seven, though not the least berated. By the refusal of a reëlection, all of the seven were retired to private life. Then out of several years of bitterness came the wisdom of reflection. Those who had reviled began to praise and finally to utter words of thankfulness. Even some of the leaders of impeachment, in the calm of reason, have put on record frank confessions of error. Thus it has been my happiness to live to see the keenest disappointment of my public life transformed into its chief honor.

BORDER-STATE INFLUENCE AND WARFARE

IN his great wisdom Lincoln early perceived that unless antislavery sentiment could be sustained in the border States, the Federal cause was likely to fail. With that belief he sought information and counsel from those men in Congress who, like myself, had been bred in the shadow of slavery and who yet desired the extinction of the institution. Though born in Danville, Virginia, most of my early life was spent at Louisiana, a town north of St. Louis, on the Missouri side of the Mississippi. There I began to practise law in 1848 and to hear of a lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, located at Springfield, seventy-five miles to the northeast. In that year he was serving his only term in Congress, while I was beginning public life as a member of the Missouri legislature, to which I returned in 1856. Though a member of the Electoral College in 1856 which made Buchanan President, I was strongly opposed to his Kansas policy. In 1860 I was an elector on the Stephen A. Douglas ticket. I had inherited slave property, but was convinced that slavery was an economic drawback in Missouri. On her borders, east and north, white settlers were founding prosperous communities, and avoiding us because white labor would not compete with slave labor. My only purchase of slaves was made on the appeal of a black man who had built the fires in my office. He and his wife and son were sold at auction to pay the debts of their master. I bought them in for about $1400. Thereafter they never served me; but as the law required that they should be in regular employ, I hired them out, they taking the wages.

Civil war was an actual fact in Missouri before the sword and the torch were at work in the other border States. Early in 1861 our legislature, which was secessionist in sentiment, provided for a state convention to join, as they hoped, the other seceding States; but, to their great surprise, a majority of Union delegates were chosen at the special election, I being among that majority. Ex-Governor Sterling Price, then classed with the opponents of secession, became president of the convention which assembled soon after Lincoln’s first inaugural made it plain that a conflict was inevitable. As Jackson, our governor at that time, was disloyal, the life of the convention was prolonged by adjournment, during which the secession element ranged itself under Jackson and Price, and the Union element, with the continuing authority of the convention, grew strong enough to organize and to elect Governor Gamble. Under the arrangements for home defense, I organized a brigade, and in General Schofield’s command operated against the raiders who burned bridges and disturbed northeastern Missouri during the first year of the war. The conditions were such that no man could safely remain neutral. Unless he was openly for one side or the other, he was suspected by both, and doubly liable to pillage and arrest.

THE TREND TOWARD EMANCIPATION

FROM the field I was sent to the United States Senate in January, 1862, to fill the unexpired term of Trusten Polk, who had joined the South. In March, President Lincoln sent to Congress his message asking for a joint resolution favoring the gradual abolishment of slavery with compensation. A few days later he asked the border States delegations to a conference at the White House in which he urged that policy without gaining much encouragement. On July 12 he made a second direct appeal to the same delegations, in conference, and urged that if the border States would adopt measures of compensated emancipation, the war must shortly end, since then, and not till then, would the South realize that slavery was doomed. Twenty of them signed a written qualified refusal to urge his recommendation; seven assented in a prepared address; and Horace Maynard and I wrote individual replies. I had been absent from the conference on business relating to my duties as senator, but I gave the President my view that, while I had supported the measure when first introduced, I did not share his belief that it alone would bring the war to an early termination. But I added that in such a period of national distress I knew of “no human institution too sacred for discussion, no material interest belonging to the citizen that he should not willingly place upon the altar of his country, if demanded by the public good. The man who cannot now sacrifice party and put aside selfish considerations is more than half disloyal. Pride of opinion, based upon sectional jealousies, should not be permitted to control the decision of any political question. These remarks are general, but apply with peculiar force to the people of the border States at present.”

THE FAILURE OF PLANS TO PURCHASE EMANCIPATION

THESE sentiments indicated that I was drifting toward Lincoln’s position that emancipation was indispensable to the saving of the Union. After the July conference at the White House, a general bill offering aid to the border States if they would adopt compensated emancipation was introduced in Congress, but not brought to final action. In the autumn, at Mr. Lincoln’s request, I went to Missouri to take part in the agitation of the question, and the reversal of sentiment shown at the November election seemed altogether favorable. So, on December 10, I introduced a bill in the Senate appropriating twenty millions of dollars to aid Missouri if her people would adopt compensated emancipation. At the same time Congressman Noell, in the House, gave notice of a similar bill, but reducing the aid to ten millions. His bill passed the House on January 6, 1863, and was sent to the Senate, where, on February 7, a compromise of fifteen millions was adopted; but the pro-slavery members from Missouri gathered enough strength to prevent action by the House. Meantime Lincoln’s proclamation of freedom to all slaves in rebellious territory had gone into effect on the first of January.

The idea of compensated emancipation for the border States made no further progress in Congress, and probably lost ground in the North, for a reason humorously stated by Senator Jacob Collamer of Vermont. During the recess he addressed a meeting of several hundred neighbors and stated that the measure would call for the payment of about $300 each for four million slaves. He asked them to go home and consider what they would advise their representatives to do. An old leader in the town waxed eloquent over the fact that the North shared the responsibility for slavery and ought to help settle the bill, and, though poor, he declared himself willing to pay his share. But in a day or two he was back again with a different opinion.

“Senator,” he exclaimed, “me and wife and the boys figure that our share would be just about all we’ve got; so I guess you might as well let that damned Negro question alone.”

THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT

A YEAR later the distress of the nation had enforced a more united sentiment, and on January 11, 1864, I offered in the Senate a joint resolution to abolish slavery in the United States. After a good deal of discussion over the wording of the resolution, Senator Sumner offering one form, and Senator Trumbull suggesting the terms of the ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery in all the Northwest, the latter was favored. Though the requisite two-thirds vote was obtained in the Senate, the House did not acquiesce until after a whole year of discussion. The bill became a law on January 31, 1865. A hundred guns announced the event, and the rejoicing was great and spontaneous.

LINCOLN AND THE LIQUOR HABIT

AT the second inauguration of Lincoln I was chairman of the committee which escorted the President to the Capitol, and sat by his side while Andrew Johnson, after taking the oath as Vice-President, harangued the crowded senate chamber. During the painful ordeal, Mr. Lincoln’s head drooped in the deepest humiliation. As I offered him my arm for the procession to the steps of the Capitol, where he delivered the Inaugural, he turned to the marshal and said, “Don’t let Johnson speak outside.”

Senator Doolittle, who had escorted the Vice-President elect to the Capitol, told me that when they went into Mr. Hamlin’s room Johnson said to the retiring Vice-President:

“Mr. Hamlin, I have been feeling very ill. Can you give me some good brandy?”

A bottle of French brandy was found, and to brace his nerves for the task before him, he poured out the full glass that wrought the mischief. His reputation was that of a temperate man; and this was his only show of inebriety; but the scene was so deeply humiliating that a caucus of senators a few days afterward seriously considered the propriety of asking him to resign as their presiding officer.

Mr. Lincoln’s aversion to liquor and tobacco was well known. He once told me with relish of a rebuke for his abstinence given by a friendly stage-driver. During the time that he was a circuit lawyer, he sometimes walked from one county court to another. While on such a tramp a stage overtook him and the driver invited him to take a seat on the box. After they had chatted for a while the driver produced a whisky-flask, saying:

“Stranger, won’t you take a drink?”

“No, thank you,” Lincoln replied; “I never drink.”

A little later the driver drew some tobacco from his pocket and said:

“Stranger, won’t you have a chew?”

Lincoln answered:

“No, thank you, I never chew.”

After a period of reflection the driver said:

“Stranger, do you smoke?”

Lincoln replied:

“No, I never smoke.”

Looking at him quizzically, the driver exclaimed:

“So you’re one of those men I’ve heard of who have no small vices.”

To which Lincoln answered:

“It is true that I don’t use liquor or tobacco.”

Then the driver turned on him with the conclusive remark:

“Stranger, I’ll tell you what I think: those men who have no small vices seldom have any large virtues.”

I once heard Mr. Lincoln tell of another liquor experience, this time at the expense of Senator David Davis, who was present and enjoyed it as much as the rest of the company. While attending a session of court presided over by Judge Davis, the latter overtook him one morning on the road, and asked him to get into the Davis carriage, which was drawn by a pair of spirited horses, driven by a trusted coachman. They traveled at a rate which made Lincoln uneasy, and soon entered on a piece of new road abounding in ruts and stumps. As the carriage bumped and swayed, Lincoln, in much alarm, turned to the judge and asked:

“Mr. Davis, isn’t your driver drunk?”

From a photograph by Prince, taken in 1908.   Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson

GENERAL JOHN B. HENDERSON

“No,” replied the judge, “Michael is a sober man and never takes anything.”

After a jar which nearly upset them, Lincoln asked that the carriage should be stopped, so that he could get out. The judge expostulated, but when they struck another stump, Lincoln exclaimed:

“Mr. Davis, your driver is drunk!”

Thereupon Davis loudly demanded of the coachman that he should stop, and, observing him closely, saw the whole truth in the wild gleam of his eyes. The judge indignantly exclaimed:

“Michael, you are drunk!”

And Michael, with an approving leer, answered:

“Judge Davis, that’s the correctest decision you’ve rendered in the last twelve months.”

LINCOLN’S CLEMENCY

MY last interview with Mr. Lincoln occurred after the adjournment of the extra session of the Senate about the middle of March, 1865. I went to the White House to ask the President to pardon a number of the men who had been languishing in Missouri prisons for various offenses, all political. Some of them had been my schoolmates, and their mothers, sisters, and sweethearts had persisted in appeals that I should use my influence for their release. Since it was evident to me that the Confederacy was in its last throes, I felt that the pardon of most of these prisoners would do more good than harm. I had separated them according to the gravity of the offense into three classes, and handing the first list to him, I said:

“Mr. President, the session is closed, and I am about to start for home. The war is virtually over. Grant is pretty certain to get Lee and his army, and Sherman is plainly able to take care of Johnston. In my opinion, the best way to prevent guerrilla warfare at the end of organized resistance will be to show clemency to these rebel sympathizers.”

Lincoln shook his head and said:

“Henderson, I am deeply indebted to you and I want to show it, but don’t ask me at this time to pardon rebels.”

Then I offered new arguments, but he replied in a grieved tone:

“I can’t do it! People are continually blaming me for being too lenient. Don’t encourage such fellows by inducing me to turn loose a lot of men who, perhaps, ought to be hanged.”

I answered:

“Mr. President, these prisoners and their friends tell me that for them the Rebellion is over, and it will surely have a good influence now to let them go.”

He answered:

“Henderson, my conscience tells me that I must not do it.”

But I persisted:

“Mr. President, you should do it. It is necessary for good feeling in Missouri that these people should be released.”

“If I sign this list as a whole, will you be responsible for the future good behavior of the men?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then I will take the risk and sign it.” He wrote the word “pardoned,” signed the general order of release, and returned the paper to me.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” I said, “but that is not all; I have another list here.”

“You are not going to make me let loose another lot!” he exclaimed.

“Yes,” I answered, “but I am not quite so sure of the merits of this list. However, I believe the men are not dangerous, and it will be good policy to let them go. My argument for this list is the same as for the other. The war is virtually over; the guilt of these men is at least doubtful; mercy must be the policy of peace.”

With the only word approaching profanity I ever heard him utter, he exclaimed:

“I’ll be durned if I don’t sign it!” and he signed the second list like the first. “Now, Henderson,” he said, as he handed the list back to me, “remember that you are responsible to me for these men; and if they don’t behave, I shall have to put you in prison for their sins.”

THE DISCONTENT WITH PRESIDENT JOHNSON

ON December 18, 1865, eight months after the death of Lincoln, the Thirteenth Amendment was proclaimed by Secretary Seward, it having received the indorsement of two thirds of all the States in the Union. Partly through my solicitation, President Johnson had used his great influence with the border States to gain their approval of emancipation. During the fight for the Thirteenth Amendment it was no secret that some of the leading Radicals in Congress were indifferent toward the abolishment of slavery at that time, as well as toward Mr. Lincoln’s scheme of reconstruction, out of the belief that those measures would make inevitable his renomination and election, which they did not favor. The Radicals had been sympathetic toward Andrew Johnson as senator and as military governor of Tennessee, on account of his vigorous antislavery views, but when he became President, and, as he believed, took up the work of reconstruction on the lines that Lincoln had begun, they at once realized that his success would frustrate their plans for the political domination of the South.

Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson

ANDREW JOHNSON

This portrait is from a photograph taken not long before his death.

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Senator Sumner’s theory of “State suicide” and Thad. Stevens’s idea of “conquered provinces,” became the basis of the Radical scheme of territorializing the South by keeping the States that had seceded under semi-military rule, and condemning them to a period of probation before they should be allowed to come back into the Union on terms of self-government.

Those of us in Congress who believed that Johnson’s policy was in the main in line with the right principles were nevertheless not in entire agreement with him. He felt that he was following precedent as far as Lincoln had established it, and that he was entitled to the confidence of the conservative Union element of the country; but he was hot-headed, and as the controversy with the Radicals in Congress grew, his attitude became more and more aggressive and irritating to the majority.

Early in 1866, Congress passed a bill enlarging the powers of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Johnson vetoed it, as well as a revised bill that followed, and the latter was enacted over his head. Congress soon after enacted a measure to fortify the rights of the Negroes, known as the Civil-Rights Bill, which he promptly vetoed, and which was as promptly passed over his head. Then, to prevent the President, who was now in open conflict with the Radical Republicans, from dispossessing the office-holders who were their friends, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act in a form which most of the Radicals interpreted to mean that the President might not supplant even a member of his own Cabinet. As another weapon against the administration, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act, which designated as illegal the State governments which had been set up by Johnson in the South, and provided that those States should be ruled by military governors appointed by the President, but really under control of the head of the army. Both these bills were vetoed by the President and Congress promptly enacted them over his head.

The President’s official advisers, who, it should not be forgotten, were those who had formed Lincoln’s Cabinet, themselves strongly objected to the Tenure of Office Act, the President’s veto being drawn up by Seward and Stanton. The latter was most emphatic in declaring that the act was unconstitutional; but it was part of the irony of the situation that Stanton was the first to feel its effects, and thereafter to become active in maintaining its validity. With Stanton’s suspension and the appointment, first of General Grant, and then of General Lorenzo Thomas, as Secretary of War ad interim, the first practical move for impeachment may be said to have begun.

PREPARING FOR IMPEACHMENT

THUS the impeachment of Andrew Johnson was the culmination of political differences which had become increasingly strained in the disturbed conditions which followed the death of Lincoln. The trial has been wrongly described as a great judicial event, but in the strict sense it was not a judicial event, since it was without sound basis in law. It was the culmination of a struggle for political advantage. Still the Radicals who brought it about were intensely in earnest. They felt that the tendency of Johnson’s reconstruction policy was toward the return of the Democratic party to power, which would have the effect of neutralizing the political results of the Civil War.

The very nature of the so-called Court of Impeachment was a monstrosity, as several of the lawyers in that body perceived, for the Senate was to act both as judge and as jury. I made several motions or orders to separate the jurisdiction of the jury from that of the judge, but in vain. I wanted a judge, preferably Chief-Justice Chase, to decide the judicial points, as the Senate was like a mob, deciding everything for themselves.

SENATOR PETER G. VAN WINKLE OF WEST VIRGINIA

SENATOR LYMAN TRUMBULL OF ILLINOIS

SENATOR JAMES W. GRIMES OF IOWA

SENATOR EDMUND G. ROSS OF KANSAS

SENATOR JOSEPH F. FOWLER OF TENNESSEE

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From a photograph by Brady

SENATOR WILLIAM PITT FESSENDEN OF MAINE

Impeachment was of course a matter in which personalities and personal ambitions played a large part. Without Benjamin F. Butler and Thad. Stevens, there never would have been an impeachment trial, for impeachment was chiefly a scheme to get place and power for themselves and their friends. Like many other politicians of selfish aims, they flourished under the peculiar conditions following the war—conditions in which the sole inquiry was, “Is he loyal?” and not, “Is he honest?”

Butler was able to push the impeachment scheme on the claim that Johnson was not loyal. It was even charged that Johnson was conspiring to form a new secession, despite the fact that he had been instrumental in securing the adhesion of a number of the Southern States to the Thirteenth Amendment. And this charge was fomented by Butler, the man whom I had heard vote fifty-seven times in the Charleston convention for Jeff Davis as President, and whom I heard address a group of Southern delegates in support of a declaration for the protection of slavery in all territories. On that occasion he declared that if the North undertook to raise troops to “coerce the South,” the bones of the Northern soldiers would rot upon the mountains before they reached the South. Yet this same man was the leader of one of the first regiments to march through Baltimore to “coerce the South.”

Feeling ran high in all parts of the country, and whenever a Republican senator showed a disinclination to join in impeachment he was bombarded by excited constituents. I was not slow to make my attitude known, for I would as soon have voted to condemn an innocent man to death as to vote to impeach Johnson on the articles that were presented. The Republicans in Missouri were, if possible, more aroused than in other parts of the country. Even the legislature passed a resolution requesting me to resign. I replied finally that I would hold my seat until impeachment was defeated. That position carried a great deal of significance, since the alinement of forces indicated clearly that the change of a single vote would result in the President’s condemnation.

From a photograph by Brady, taken in 1867

SENATOR JOHN B. HENDERSON OF MISSOURI

All of the articles of impeachment were based on some phase of the quarrel with Stanton. The eleventh article, which accused him of violating an act of Congress in suspending the Secretary of War was the strongest, though in my view of the law, as I declared in the Senate, he had legally suspended Stanton and had undoubted authority to fill the vacancy by an ad interim appointment. When the Tenure of Office Act was before the Committee of Conference, Senator John Sherman, chairman of the committee, was asked if the bill was intended to take away the power of the President to remove his own Cabinet, and he answered, “No, it is not to interfere with his power to remove or to retain his Cabinet.” During the impeachment trial, when it was reported that Senator Sherman was in favor of convicting Johnson on the eleventh article, I had a talk with him, and asked:

“Do you remember your attitude in the Committee of Conference on the question of the power of the President to remove his Cabinet?”

He said:

“I remember it very well.”

Then I asked bluntly:

“You are not going to stultify yourself by voting for the eleventh article?”

He replied:

“No.”

That conversation convinced me that the advocates of impeachment could not depend, as they hoped, on Sherman to vote guilty on the eleventh article, and in fact, when the crucial moment came, he voted against it.

GENERAL GRANT’S CHANGE OF VIEWS

DURING most of the period of agitation for impeachment General Grant had ranged himself with those who stood by the President. Everybody believed in the honesty of his purpose, and owing to his great fame, his influence was paramount. The Radical leaders understood the difficult task of carrying out their plans without Grant’s coöperation, and they shaped their course so that he would profit by the overturn of the administration. Grant’s quarrel with the President, over the question of his relations as head of the army to the Secretary of War, afforded them a line of approach, and the talk of making Grant a Presidential candidate in the coming election suggested the reward.

About the last of April, 1868, I received an invitation to a ten o’clock breakfast at General Grant’s house, which had recently been presented to him. Commodore Porter and other guests were present. Our host asked me to remain, and after the other guests had departed, he lighted a cigar—I did not smoke—and proposed a walk.

He shortly broached the question of impeachment, and asked for my opinion as to the result, saying that there were personal reasons why he should like to know definitely what might be expected.

I said:

“General Grant, you may rest assured that impeachment will fail.”

He answered:

“Senator, I have reason to believe, from good authority, that the managers of impeachment are confident of success.”

“They have no substantial grounds for such confidence,” I replied.

“I may tell you in confidence,” he then said, “that not only is it expected that Ben. Wade will become President, but the members of his Cabinet have already been selected.”

“Can you tell me, General, who they are to be?” I asked.

“Perhaps I ought not to say,” he replied, “but I will tell you, at least, that General Butler has been designated as Secretary of State.”

I reiterated my belief that the program never would be carried out, whereupon General Grant said:

“You know that people are talking of me for the Presidency at the coming election. I have not had political ambition, but I begin to think that possibly I might be of great service to the country in bringing peace to the disturbed sections of the Union. These men who are counting on the success of impeachment offer me their influence as the nominee to succeed Wade in case he becomes President by the removal of Johnson.”

“What are the conditions?” I asked.

“That I shall agree to take over Wade’s Cabinet.”

“Good God, General!” I exclaimed, in astonishment, “you didn’t consent to that, did you?”

“No,” he replied; “I did not give them any answer.”

He expressed distrust of Butler; yet I thought he seemed to lean toward the bargain. Then I said:

“General Grant, you may feel confident of the nomination whether these men support you or not; and you may rest assured that the succession will not occur as they promise.”

Drawn by Jay Hambidge, on the basis of a woodcut in “Leslie’s Weekly,” April 11, 1868

THE HIGH COURT OF IMPEACHMENT IN SESSION IN THE SENATE CHAMBER, MONDAY, MARCH 23, 1868

Benjamin R. Curtis of the counsel for the President is reading the answer to the articles of impeachment. At the table in the middleground are seated the Committee of Managers of the House of Representatives.

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About a week later, as I was coming from the Capitol in a street-car, General Grant got in. The car was well filled, and the General came over and sat beside me. He asked whether I had changed my opinion about the impeachment.

“No, General,” I answered, “I am of the same mind about it.”

“Do you think you can defeat it?” he asked.

“Well, I can’t warrant that,” I replied. “We have friends enough against it to defeat it, but I cannot give a pledge that we shall actually defeat it.”

“Well,” he said, “I hope you won’t.”

“Why, General,” I exclaimed, “you wouldn’t impeach Johnson?”

“Yes I would,” he answered bruskly.

“Then you have changed your mind,” I said, “and I am sorry to hear it.”

“Yes,” he repeated, “I would impeach him if for nothing else than because he is such an infernal liar.”

“I very much regret to hear you say it,” I answered, looking at him earnestly, for his language and manner aroused my indignation. “I regret it because on such terms it would be nearly impossible to find the right sort of man to serve as President.”

He seemed annoyed, but made no further remark, and in a few minutes left the car. We never had any further conversation on the subject. I inferred that the Radicals hoped to influence me through Grant, since they knew I was ready to support him for President. When I saw how and why he had changed about, I lost respect for his opinion.

From that time a coolness entered into our relations; but during his Presidency I was paid the compliment of being asked to take charge of the Whisky Ring prosecution in St. Louis.

THE SEVEN REPUBLICAN SENATORS

ALL of the Democratic senators were ranged on the side of President Johnson, and the division of the voting power was such that seven Republican senators voting with the Democrats could defeat impeachment. We senators who were opposed to the scheme held several informal conferences. At first we numbered at least eight, since Senator William Sprague of Rhode Island joined in the talks and was frankly on our side. He was the son-in-law of the Chief-Justice who would preside at the trial, and it was no secret that Chase looked upon the articles of impeachment as flimsy. But after the opposing senators began to be deluged with appeals and threats from their constituents, Sprague evidently decided that the good of the country required that he should return to the Senate, and he absented himself from further conference. It was rumored that Senator Edwin D. Morgan, formerly Governor of New York, would have voted with us in case of the defection of one of the seven. For political reasons he finally alined himself with the Radicals.

The tension in the senate chamber during the first vote, which was on the last, or eleventh, article, was tremendous, for at least two of the seven Republicans were claimed by both sides. William P. Fessenden of Maine was the first of the seven to rise on roll-call and be questioned by the Chief-Justice, saying:

“Mr. Senator Fessenden, how say you? Is the respondent, Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, guilty or not guilty of a high misdemeanor as charged in this article?”

Fessenden responded in a clear voice, “Not guilty.” In a written opinion filed later he disposed of the suggestion that “popular opinion” demanded the conviction of the President, by saying that the people had not heard the evidence as the Senate had heard it, and that the responsibility was not on the people, but on the senators who had taken an oath “to do impartial justice according to the Constitution and the laws.”

When the name of Senator James W. Grimes of Iowa was called, Fessenden asked for a moment’s delay, in order that the senator, who was ill, might be brought into the chamber. He was carried in and placed in his seat. Before the Chief-Justice summoned him to answer he suggested that Grimes might answer from his seat; but the ill senator rose with the aid of friends and, after the summons, in a feeble voice answered, “Not guilty.” Perhaps no one of the seven was afterward so roundly abused by newspapers and politicians who had formerly been his friends.

Senator Joseph F. Fowler of Tennessee had been claimed by both sides, since he had voted on some questions favorable to the Radicals and on others favorable to the President. Though not a man of conspicuous ability, he was regarded as level-headed. After his vote of “Not guilty” he received a despatch congratulating him on the position he had taken, to which he answered, “I acted for my country and posterity, in obedience to the voice of God.”

After my vote of “Not guilty,” which created no surprise, Senator Edmund G. Ross of Kansas was the next Republican to disappoint his party friends. He had begun political life as an Abolitionist and had been appointed to fill the unexpired term of the noted senator, “Jim” Lane. He had voted with the Radicals on some questions, and the reticence he had maintained with regard to his position on impeachment subjected him to enormous pressure. Still he maintained silence, and the audience held its breath until, in a clear voice he unhesitatingly answered, “Not guilty.” As Ross had been the main hope of the Radicals, his vote made a sensation. It was claimed that a sum of money had been subscribed to reward him for taking the stand he did contrary to the sentiment of the people of Kansas, who had threatened him with expulsion from the State if he voted for the President. He was made to suffer heavily for his adherence to principle, and his immediate hardships and poverty indicated that he was not bribed. After the trial was over, he stated in the Senate that he had entertained doubts on some of the articles until a few days before the vote, but had settled the matter in his own mind, as he said, “by giving his country the benefit of his doubts.”

Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, though he had voted for the resolution censuring Stanton, had been outspoken against impeachment; consequently his vote of “Not guilty” awakened no surprise. His position was based on the harm which would be done to the country by setting the example of impeaching a President, and he expressed the opinion that if Johnson were removed on such partizan grounds, “no future President will be safe who happens to differ with a majority of the House and two thirds of the Senate on any measure desired by them, particularly if of a political character.” In other words, his action was based on antagonism to the principle of the “recall” as it is being urged to-day.

Senator Peter G. Van Winkle of West Virginia was a substantial, fair-minded man, who on some questions had favored the President and on others had voted with the Radicals. Still, his vote of “Not guilty” occasioned no surprise.

During the clamor from Missouri to induce me to change my attitude, I was appealed to by the Missouri delegation in Congress, who, as a body, besought me to vote for impeachment. Under the stress of their urging I entertained momentarily the question of resigning, but as that would have brought victory to the side of the impeachers, I resolved to stay. On May 13 I received from St. Louis a despatch making a final appeal, which read:

There is intense excitement here. Meeting called for to-morrow night. Can your friends hope that you will vote for the eleventh article? If so, all will be well.

To this I immediately replied:

Say to my friends that I am sworn to do impartial justice according to law and conscience and I will try to do it like an honest man.

Every one of the seven Republican senators who voted against impeachment was relegated to private life at the expiration of his term. In addition to all kinds of printed and written abuse, I was burned in effigy at Macon, Missouri.

HOW TIME VINDICATED THE RIGHT

MY part in this crisis strained some of my friendships, particularly that with Sumner. At first he had been rather opposed to impeachment, especially to the eleventh article, remarking that no one but a Pennsylvania justice of the peace (alluding to Thad. Stevens) could have drawn that article; but he and Stevens were “thick as thieves” before the trial terminated. Meantime, as Sumner’s enthusiasm for impeachment grew, his regard for those of us who opposed it lessened. After the trial he directed a personal remark at me in the senate chamber that rankled. I was denouncing the course of the managers of impeachment for converting themselves into a committee to investigate and punish the seven senators. They sent telegrams and spies over the country. Butler was the most active in using the spy system, and it became an acute annoyance. Mr. Fessenden complained of it to me. He said, “I cannot go out at night without being pursued by spies who come behind me at every cross street.” Others told me the same. I had nothing to fear, for there was nothing they might not know about me. While I was denouncing the conduct of this committee as that of traitors, Sumner in a taunting voice exclaimed, “It is only the wounded bird that flutters.”

The coldness between us lasted for several years. In fact, it was not until the controversy over the treaty for annexing Santo Domingo arose that I had any further relations with him. At that time I had gone to Washington to argue a case before the Supreme Court, and Mr. Sumner asked me to dinner. I was a little surprised, but I went to his dinner, where I found a very good company. When I was ready to bid him good night, he insisted on my staying, as he wished to talk with me; but I was reluctant, as I wanted to do some work before I went to sleep. Still he insisted, and after Senator Thurman, who lingered enjoying his cigar, had gone, Sumner said that he had desired for several years to have a private talk with me over the impeachment of Johnson. He then said impressively:

“I want to say that in that matter you were right and I was wrong.”

“Mr. Senator,” I answered, “I am very glad to hear you say so for my own satisfaction, and also on your own account, because your course was a disappointment. I believed that you would take ground against impeachment.”

“That was my original impression,” he replied, “but Johnson talked so foolishly, and was so abusive, I came to believe it would be just as well to turn him out.” After a pause he repeated earnestly: “I didn’t want to die without making this confession, that in the matter of impeachment you were right and I was wrong. But,” he added, “if it is just as convenient to you, I would rather you would say nothing about it until I am dead—and I won’t live many years.”

In his “Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate, and Cabinet” John Sherman says:

I felt bound, with much regret, to vote “guilty” in response to my name, but I was entirely satisfied with the result of the vote, brought about by the action of several Republican senators.

James G. Blaine in “Twenty Years of Congress” is less apologetic and more candid. He says:

The sober reflection of later years has persuaded many who favored impeachment that it was not justifiable on the charges made, and that its success would have resulted in greater injury to free institutions than Andrew Johnson in his utmost endeavor was able to inflict.

It would be well if those who are urging the “recall” as a general panacea for mistakes and dissatisfaction in the working of elections, would study the personal motives and partizan manœuverings which were the soul and body of this enormity of injustice in American history.

INCLUDING A MASQUE IN THE MUIR WOODS

BY LOUISE HERRICK WALL

WITH PICTURES BY W. T. BENDA

EARLY in December the Angel of Peace on earth came to us, saying:

“How would you like a Christmas day deep in the woods, with no tissue-paper parcels or tinsel ribbon, with the people that you know best and like best and their children, with old English carols and games and wassail-songs and morris-dances, and stockings, and a huge bowl of innocent punch, and presents that cost fifteen cents, and no more, on pain of death? Now, how would you?”

Then we cried with one accord:

“Hath eye seen or ear heard? Can the cords of custom be loosened?”

“They can,” said the Angel, snapping her glove-clasp into its socket. She rose.

We turned questioningly to our Valiant One.

“I should like that,” she said. “I remember seventy Christmases, but none like that.”

“If I go,” said the Objector, “my Christmas-tree shall be a living tree. No cut-down, mutilated trees in a forest for me.”

The Angel frowned. Commentators spring up to amend the text almost before a miraculous visitant can catch a ferry-boat back to town. “We will see,” she said with the asperity common to women and angels.

MANY were called before our party of foresters was chosen. We were told that a little inn on a mountain-side, in a redwood grove, even in California, is a drafty place for aged parents and young children to be laid. And who would be separated from his own on Christmas day?

We found, too, that when Heaven had made the marriages between our friends, that no trouble had been taken to pair them for like qualities. Initiative and energy lay in streaks in families: the woman would, and the man would not, or the other way around, which, alas! was no way around at all, but just an impasse. Then there were aged parents-in-law who purposed to eat their turkey in the immemorial, family way or to perish forthwith of reproachful old age; others frankly confessed themselves caught in the Christmas mill: it was not that they enjoyed shopping for Christmas, or even the effects of Christmas-shopping, but to stop seemed perilous. Had it been tried?

At length forty freed spirits agreed. Muir Inn, part way up the shaggy flank of Mount Tamalpais, was to be the place; December 24 was to be the time; and sixteen young people were to do what they could toward supplying the action.

“THE GREAT FIRE WAS FED AGAIN, AND BY ITS LIGHT CHRISTMAS STORIES, IN SOBER PANTOMIME, WERE ENACTED”

On the day before Christmas seven of us, tucked in a touring-car, were climbing the foot-hills opposite the purple bulk of the mountain. A soft drizzle hung its drops on the fronds of the redwoods and made the leaves of the dwarf manzanita look ashen on their twisted, wine-red stems. As we beat up the grade, the world behind and below began to unroll, the inlets of the bay and the light-lying islands flattened to a map, while across and beyond we lifted San Francisco on her hills. The broken gray of the city houses laid washes of color, one above another, dove against rose-gray, against fawn, against pearl, and all cut by the sharper tones of the dark buildings.

At the crest of the foot-hills the car plunged down into the green-black shade of Muir Woods. Autumn and winter had touched the interior of the forest, and left sparse, lantern-like leaves of pale yellow on the bushes along the stream that gave to the wide, dim evergreen space an air of delicate and transient mortality. We ran beside the stream, the huge, shifting columns and the red, needle-silenced ground flowing past us, and on our eyelashes clung the caressing mist. Then our good cylinders labored hard to lift us by a winding, slippery grade up the abrupt side of the mountain to the inn. At a turn, without warning, we came out on a little plateau and up to the weather-stained building itself.

“AT THAT MOMENT FROM THE HOLLOW TRUNK OF A REDWOOD ANOTHER FIGURE STEPPED OUT”

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As we stopped, the inn doors flew open, and out on the porches came friends, and friends, children, young girls, and men called our names, tossing us greetings and laughing. Something tightened in the throat, and we knew, before we tore the rugs off our knees, that the Muir Woods Christmas was going to be—different.

The inn was chiefly one big room of seventy feet or so smelling of evergreens. The fireplace, built for a sleigh-and-six, held a red mound of fire that just now gnawed, half-sated, at the carcass of a tree. Evergreens hung from the rafters, and all the tangle of California winter woods—wild huckleberry, manzanita, sallol, Oregon grape, rose-haws, Woodwardia fern, as tall as the tallest child, and swordfern—branched forth from jars in the corners.

We were busy at once. There were costumes to arrange for the charades, and costumes to trim in secrecy for the Christmas masque in the woods; there were stockings—each family had brought characteristic ones for its group—to make ready to be strung on the wire in front of the fire; there were derisive jingles to be written and affixed to fifteen-cent presents for one’s dearest friend; ferns, evergreens, and candies had to be tied to things; there were packages with disguised contours to be hidden. Concealment, like a worm, preyed everywhere, and people talked muffledly because of twine and tacks between the teeth. Busy, efficient men nailed things, to the envy of wives who had brought ruminative, pocket-handed men of the smoking variety. The children romped and peeped at forbidden things, and the people who were not their mothers said they were wonderfully good, and what the mothers said was not recorded. About the whole place there was such a smell of evergreens and such a mood of noisy fellowship, climbing, nailing, upsetting, and standing about, that one suddenly realized that Dickens was not a caricaturist, just a merrymaker.

When the lights were lighted and things at their busiest, so that they could not possibly be moved from the tables, the waiters came to lay the cloth for Christmas-eve dinner. This sent us all to the fire. Laps were made, two-child deep; the very little people were fed hygienic pulp and simmered into drowsiness, so that they could be put to bed; and the women, and especially the girls, went and dressed in chilly little bedrooms smelling of matting.

We got back to the warm room again, to find that the tables had been laid in the form of a great cross, red berries at every place. All seemed sweet and familiar as we seated ourselves, for every face was the face of a friend. Food came and went, songs, stories, laughter; toasts were drunk and answered, and we wagged our heads and said the inevitable thing, “There used to be a time when people had families the size of this!” and were half sad and half glad for the decline of the good old times of abundance.

After dinner, chairs and tables were pushed aside, the great fire was fed again, and by its light Christmas stories, in sober pantomime, were enacted: Joseph and Mary, foot-sore and weary, knocked at the door of the inn at Bethlehem, and found not where to lay their heads; the shepherds fed their flocks by night, and a voice sang of peace on earth, good-will to men; then came the Magi, following the star, to the manger where the Child was laid and offered gifts of frankincense and myrrh, and all the simple, reverent scenes spelled adoration for those who watched. The absence of footlights and formal costumes made the little plays seem a part of some humble worship in memory of the hallowed and gracious time. The familiar faces, with a thousand every-day associations, perhaps, under veil or turban took on a new suggestion, a shade of mystery from a time and thought not wholly ours, yet wrought with ours by centuries of faith.

“Mirth is also of Heaven’s making,” and this soberness melted into laughter with the tramping of feet as the big circle formed to play the old English ring-games that have been sung and played where children have gathered, in merrymaking times, since our speech broke into rugged, rhythmic verse. As the older children and most of the grown people played,—for only trundle-bed trash had been put to bed,—the rope in front of the fire was putting forth a grotesque fruitage of harlequin stockings, stuffed with ten-cent surprises. One giant, pink sock, decorated with carnations, was for some one’s big, red-haired nephew, and the St. Patrick green one, bound with serpents, was marked “For Rattlesnake Pete, the Sierra Snake-Destroyer.” And so all down the line the stockings mocked their owners with intimate audacities. There were genuine baby stockings, too, to melt one’s heart, so little, woolly, and shrunken from the wash.

“GIVING AN ALMOST INTOLERABLE BEAUTY TO THE AGE-OLD TRUNKS”

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It grew late; the piano, which had been beating its life out all the evening over, “Oats, Pease, Beans, and Barley Grows” and “London Bridge is Falling Down, O My Lady!” began whispering a strange, old air, a marching tune with a pulse of marching feet, more and more loudly, until suddenly we all sang in lusty unison:

“Here we come a-wassailing

Among the leaves so green,

Here we come a-wandering

So fair to be seen.

Love and joy come to you—”

when in came the large and paunchy punch-bowl, borne by the stoutest of the waiters. All in line, singing and marching, old and young, we circled in a wide detour about the room, coming to a stand, our glasses high, about the wassail-bowl.

“Christmas! God bless us!” We drank the toast, and even the lip of the abstainer was touched with the foam of egg-nog.

When at last all was quiet for the night, the big room dark and empty, and the heavy line of forty stockings sagged and bulged in front of the fire, several sober rioters stole back for a few last words.

“The only thing that could spoil Christmas now,” said an anxious Martha, stooping to pick up a string from the floor, “would be that some of the younger children who have been sending letters to Santa Claus for automobiles and hill-coasters may be disappointed by ten-cent toys.”

“I know children,” said the Chief Emancipator. “They are not half as mercenary as we think. Play is what they love. They will never think of hill-coasters on the happy day when the grown people come to their senses and give themselves up to fun.”

Noël, Noël, Noël, Noël,

Born was the King of Israel!

Did you ever wake on a Christmas morning to the sound of fresh voices singing at your door and the soft swish of a redwood bough across your window-pane—eyes opening upon walls as bare as the walls of a stable, and the smell and feel of Christmas in the air of your naked little room?

The first Noël, the angels did say,

Was to certain poor shepherds, in fields as they lay,

In fields as they lay, keeping their sheep,

On a cold winter’s night that was so deep.

Noël, Noël, Noël, Noël,

Born was the King of Israel!

The carolers were down from the little cabins on the hillside where they had slept with a figment of roof between them and the stars, and the cries of Merry Christmas beat upon our doors until we all came together, in noisy collision; on the porches, and swept in to strip the line of stockings. The babies dropped on the floor with their pouches, dumping their toys frankly between their outspread legs, laughing, crooning, and picking, with tiny, pointed fingers, at the mystery of things. It was with them, as the wise woman had said, all bubbling contentment and delight. Little tin wagons bounded over the floor, any side up, two babies abreast, and every mouth blew upon squeakers and trumpets the blasts of which were mercifully tempered to the short wind of the little lambs. Our own gifts unmasked, with even-handed justice, our inner foibles, but the children’s came to the breakfast table with them in a spirit of peace. Live stock surrounded every plate, and cattle fed from porcelain mangers, and became entangled in patent breakfast foods.

As breakfast ended, a call came from the doorway, “Who wants to come with me to the woods and pick out a Christmas tree?” It was she of the Yerba Buena wreath and shoe-top skirt. We all wanted to come. This finding of the tree was to be a ceremony. Though a faint mist was still a-drift, no one cared, and a few wraps made the children snug.

A dozen tangled little paths lead down among the chaparral to the redwoods, and here the children gathered from everywhere, laughing and calling among the undergrowth, scattering, breaking, and running down the steep paths exactly as a brood of quail run and call and scatter through the mesquite under the convoy of their crested leader.

“The Woodsman! The Woodsman! First we must find a woodsman with an ax to cut the Christmas-tree,” called the leader. “He used to live over here. Who can find him?”

Her brood scurried here and there, unconsciously led where she would, beating up the brush, when suddenly, shouting with delight, they came full upon a man with an ax—a flannel-shirted man with a kind face and a great, broad, shining ax.

“Yes, I am the Woodsman,” he called. “May I cut a Christmas-tree for you this morning?” He came forward, and jumped straight into the story, without preliminaries. The whole flock surged down upon him and off to find the tree, accepting his being there with his ax as children do accept pleasant things. We all went down into the winding wood road, almost roofed over by redwood plumes, the little children stopping to consult gravely with the Woodsman about the suitability of trees two hundred feet high or saplings of a century’s growth, squinting up trunks, considering, rejecting, earnestly intent, each one, upon finding the perfect tree. The older conspirators, half lost in brake and fern, kept close behind.

“This one I think will do,” cried the Woodsman at last, and he lifted his ax.

At that moment from the hollow trunk of a redwood another figure stepped out, and all the children started, he was so strange.

“I am the Spirit of the Woods,” he said in a deep voice; “I come to plead with you for the life of this tree.”

He wore a mantle bordered with fern and moss. Instead of hair, his head was closely covered with the greenish lichen that grows on the north side of trees in winter, and his beard was of long, gray moss. He spoke very earnestly, and told the children how sweet it is to live, as a tree, in the forest. They were not exactly frightened; they even drew a step nearer: in that beautiful, solemn place strange things might happen. Then the Woodsman once more lifted his ax, when a very little boy, quite unprompted, and to every one’s surprise, suddenly broke from his father, and ran to the Woodsman, clasping his arms about him, crying out for the life of the tree.

“Don’t cut it down!” he sobbed. “It wants to be a tree; it doesn’t want to be logs.”

We were quite still for a moment, then the Spirit of the Woods said: “The tree has another friend. I thought I was the only one who really loved it.” Then turning to us all, he said with authority: “Do as the child bids. Come with me, for I have something to show you.” He moved with a long stride in his long mantle, the moss wagged from his sleeves like the beard of a goat, and the children crowded nearer to the Woodsman; but at a turn of the road they all cried out and ran forward. Growing beside the road, with its branches full of gold and silver ornaments, snow and cranberries and gifts, was a lovely living Christmas-tree, bearing its shining fruitage in the thick forest.

Then all took hands and danced about the tree, and sang to it, and praised it, and called it beautiful. From the thick branches, which were not so very high in that high place, grown people took packages marked with names. There were little Robin Hood costumes for several of the children, with feathered caps and feathered bows, and a Cupid’s dress of white gauze and filmy wings for the four-year-old cherub, and green mantles for every one, that slipped over the head, and wreaths of fresh green vines for the hair. The living tree gave up toys and tinsel and everything, as other trees, that have given up their lives, have never been known to do. The children starred themselves over with its ornaments, and everybody dressed at the same moment. The pretty girls wrapped tinsel and cranberry ropes in their hair, and looked prettier than ever. It was so deep in the forest that for mirrors each must inquire of the eyes that loved her for news of how she looked.

By the time that the tree was stripped quite bare, with only a spangle here or a fleece of snow there, the whole party was peacocking in its finery down the wood road, two by two, and two by two: the Woodsman with his boy on his shoulder; the green-mantled, vine-wreathed folk; the lonely Spirit of the Woods, a hesitating child peeping up at him; the little Robin Hoods, a-chase for sparrows; and, straggling behind the rest, the Cupid-baby, like a new-born butterfly, not quite able either to run or to fly. And so, winding with the winding red road, all our brightness subdued to the dim atmosphere in which we moved,—that impalpable violet that floats about the stems of the trees in these vast groves, giving an almost intolerable beauty to the age-old trunks,—we came to recognize that about us were the real Christmas-trees; for they were fast-rooted here when homeless Mary was with child in Bethlehem.

What broke the spell was the old Edenic curse. Some one spoke of food. I think it was a man. He said, in effect, that he wished to be comforted with apples; that he was sick of love; he described a cold Christmas dinner; then a dinner burned to a crisp and served to forty empty chairs. It was a moving tale, and had that effect upon our procession.

The dinner-hour had been set early that every child might come; and one or two little heads, with their first thistle-down thatch, beside the old white ones, made the Christmas dinner seem more than ever a gracious family feast. We did not come dressed as people dining on Christmas day, but all still in our mantles of forest green and wreaths of vine. Down the tables, formed like a cross, shone the red of toyon berries, in the folds of the girls’ coiled hair and in the chains about children’s necks.

If there, was a moment of disillusionment, it was the one in which it was discovered that the Spirit of the Woods did not subsist on wood-alcohol, as had been rumored, but contrived large pieces of turkey between the fringes of moss about his lips. But this, too, had a happy influence, because it loosened some rather silent tongues, and the children’s talk burst out fluent and simultaneous.

Housed intimately in by the evergreen-hung walls, the fire-light and soft lamps bringing us into one warm group, the sense of comradeship, up there on the big, misty mountain, and the gracious presence of little children and our own, dear people, brought us to our feet to sing again the wassail-song.

“Here we come a-wassailing

Among the leaves so green,

Here we come a-wandering

So fair to be seen.”

And as we stood, glasses lifted, we looked from the faces that had made our own first Christmases bright to the little ones, just above the cloth, and pledged the birth of this good, new way of being glad on Christmas day.

THE DREAMS DENIED

BY MARION COUTHOUY SMITH

OUR lives are molded by the things we miss.

Not by Love’s answering eyes, not by his kiss,

But by Love’s hunger do we learn Love’s bliss.

Our growth must answer to the swell and strain

Of thew and sinew toward the ultimate gain;

The warrior’s worth is measured by his pain.

Upward our hopes are flung, like tongues of fire.

The dreams denied unendingly aspire;

The soul must take the shape of its desire.

THE WOOING OF “HOLY CALM”

BY MARION HAMILTON CARTER

MISS ASHBELL’S first name was Matilda, but everybody at her boarding-house called her “Miss Mittie” by way of friendliness to a stranger; nor did they express much wonder as to what had brought her from Philadelphia to Laramie, because to a Wyomingite it is the most natural thing in the world that anybody should forsake every other place in the world for Wyoming, the only wonder being that millions more did not do it all the time. Possibly these dwellers on the altitudes would have thought her being in Laramie still more natural had they seen the house of her birth and rearing, one of those three-hundred-and-forty-seven-thousand-all-just-alike homes for which Philadelphia is famous, each with its bath-room, each bath-room with its cake of Cashmere bouquet soap, each parlor with its onyx-topped table between the two lace-curtained windows; and outside, white marble steps, and white, solid wood shutters to keep the Indians out at night. That is, they were to keep the Indians out, but as the Indians went faster than Philadelphia, the shutters are there yet. And Miss Mittie missed them dreadfully in Laramie; it didn’t seem like home if you couldn’t barricade at night, and scrub white marble steps in the morning.

But at Mrs. Ingersoll’s store, where Miss Mittie “had the ribbons,” they called her “Holy Calm,” pronouncing it “ca’m.” Coming from peaceful nights behind white, solid shutters, calm was to be expected, though perhaps not so much of it as Miss Mittie had. Her calm was of the peculiarly Quaker variety that exasperated you to the depths: instantly your desire was to ruffle it, to tear it open, and find out what was underneath, and if it were calm all through, and holy, or just put on for effect. And you felt somehow that the Lord made her on Sunday, after He had rested from His labors in the meetings attended by her father and mother; and by the same token, you felt that the Lord made Roddy McQueed on Monday, as a preliminary to getting the creative hand in on original chaos. It is beyond me to determine why these two should have been each other’s particular fate, yet such was the case.

My one experience with Miss Mittie showed me what she was. It was in the days when they were wearing yard-long hat-pins as articles of warfare. I went into the store to buy two short ones, and Holy Calm showed me a cushionful of rapiers, and told me “those were all they had now.”

There was just something in the way she said it that “got” me. I retorted that she didn’t know her stock—that I had bought proper hat-pins there three months before on my way up to the ranch, and there were a million of ’em still in a box.

“Oh, only two sold,” said she, taking it for truth, though never till that instant had she set eyes on me. “Then they must all be here except those two,” and with that, she drew out a box marked “ruching” in black letters six inches long. It contained ruching.

Miss Mittie only murmured apologetically to the box, “Not here, I see,” and drew forth another marked “stocks” containing stocks, and then one marked “gloves” containing gloves, and a fourth marked “ties” containing ties.

At this point my wickedness took me, and I showed her a box marked “corsets” containing corsets, a box marked “baby ribbon” containing baby ribbon, a box marked “embroidery cotton” containing embroidery cotton; after which I swept a commanding gesture over a table where silk hose were displayed and said artfully, “You’d better look under those stockings.”

She thanked me for the kind suggestion and conscientiously turned over every pair, soberly telling me, when she was through, she “didn’t see any hat-pins.” Neither did she see the glitter in my eye nor hear the derision in my voice; she positively never suspected that I was “doing her” in a way that would have reduced a New York “saleslady” either to rage or a red-faced pulp. I’d have kept it up for an hour until I forced her to show some sign of human feeling, but time was pressing, and I couldn’t sacrifice my sleeping-car berth east for the fine sport of baiting her Holy Calm. I stepped behind the counter and took a box, in full sight all the time, marked “hat-pins—short,” opened it, and put it in her hand.

No written words can convey the manner in which she said, “Oh, yes—two of those. Ten cents,” and wrote her slip.

I went off feeling defeated—the calm had never quivered; I had mentally made no more impression on her than if she’d been a waxwork.

But it had been borne in upon me that Miss Mittie’s soul needed saving to a world of human endeavor—that she was in bondage to some intangible inner force; and I was still thinking of her as a psychological phenomenon, wondering how a person so devoid of perception and imagination could contrive to earn her daily bread even in Wyoming, where the stress of commercial conditions is much easier than in the East, when the porter took my suitcase from Roddy’s hand and he cheered me off.

Roddy had driven me down from the ranch,—an all-day trip across the plains, with a sandwich lunch in the middle,—and he had made use of the opportunity to tell me the whole, true story of his life. He was emphatic on the truth of it, and said that I ought to write it up for the New York papers; and with this in view he went into details that would have made me faint away if they had been true. But knowing Roddy after three summers of him, I took his recitation quietly. My vague “Did you’s?” annoyed him but stimulated him to larger invention; and when at last we reached Laramie, he was in fine fettle for an adventure that would eclipse all the rest.

In this mood he strolled up the street after leaving me, and almost trampled Mrs. Ingersoll under foot as she dashed out of her store. She, too, had just received defeat at the hands of Holy Calm, and felt she had to save a soul alive.

Mrs. Ingersoll and Roddy were friends, after a sort. Everybody in the country was friends with him in the same fashion, as you’ve got to be with a next-to-nature man who has a reputation for originality in sin and has been in the papers no less than five times for it. So when Roddy and she collided and he said: “Why, hello, Mis’ Ingersoll! I didn’t go fer to smash ye,” and held out his big paw, she, with fine courtesy, gave him her hand and told him, smiling as though she liked to be smashed by careless cow-boys, “You’re just the one I want to see.”

Roddy was flattered. He knew, of course, that he was “just the one” any lady would want to see,—why not?—but somehow Mrs. Ingersoll was a little bit different from the rest. She did things, too, and her name was in the papers almost any time, attached to real news. Didn’t she organize the Laramie brass band that beat the Cheyenne band all to pieces?

So it really meant something to be wanted to be seen by her, and Roddy, hastily reviewing the situation, returned a handsome, “Well, you’re jest the one I wanta see. Now, ain’t that two of a kind?” and felt he had scored himself.

This paved the way for confidences. They were both smarting from too much Holy Calm. Mrs. Ingersoll blurted out her own experience, and asked Roddy how did he account for a girl like that?

Roddy pushed his hat back on his head to let out the thought that Miss Mittie seemed to lack a sense of humor and ought to be shown a thing or two; Mrs. Ingersoll, however, inclined to the belief that the trouble was “Holy Calm was too good for use,” or at least too good for any use in a millinery establishment. Roddy suggested that “something might be done fer her if ye went about it right,” but Mrs. Ingersoll averred despairingly that you’d never get an idea into Miss Mittie’s head short of cutting it open with an ax. However, after sifting the situation back and forth between them, the upshot was a soul-saving plot: Mrs. Ingersoll was to slip out just before closing time, leaving Miss Mittie to shut up shop alone; then Roddy, with a gang of cow-boys, was to “jump the store” and hold her up for a couple of hundred yards of ribbon, which they were to carry up to Mrs. Ingersoll’s house afterward.

All started off according to program. Holy Calm, softly humming to herself, was putting the store to bed as snug as anything, and thinking of her well-earned rest, when five young, seemingly desperate rascals, Roddy leading, fired their guns in the air and landed with a bounce inside, two of the boys blocking the door so she couldn’t get away.

Miss Mittie never quivered an eyelash.

“What can I do for you, gentlemen?” she asked, fixing her gaze and a smile on Roddy, whom she had met, and admired tremendously for the tales told of him.

Roddy was just a trifle dashed by her politeness, for he’d “allowed she’d screech, er something, like a woman always does,” and when anybody screeched his rule was, “Give ’em some more o’ the same medicine.” But under her serene, uncomprehending stare Roddy forgot what he’d come for.

Beany Johnson nudged him in the ribs as a reminder, and then, seeing a hesitancy, kicked him with his spur. Thus pushed to his duty, Roddy blurted out:

“I want some ribbon—pink ribbon—fer a church-fest’val decorations.” He slipped his gun into its holster, gave a hitch to his chaps and a jerk to the red handkerchief about his neck, picked up a roll from the counter, and told her in an offhand way: “This here will do. Gimme forty yards offen it,” and began carelessly unwinding it on the counter.

“There aren’t forty yards in that piece,” said she, taking the roll from his hand with her holiest calm and a smile at him, and at the same time noting the number on the roll. “There’s only eight and a quarter.”

“Well, gimme what they is—an’ then some more,” he commanded.

She measured off the eight and a quarter, then ten from another roll, said she was sorry she couldn’t match that pink exactly, but it was “special-sale goods,” and wouldn’t something else do, since it was for a church and not for a dress? The quality would be absolutely the same; the store didn’t carry any but the best.

Roddy, who had somewhat found himself by this time, amiably explained that “It didn’t matter about the match; it was only fer a church, anyways,” and handed her a roll of bright green.

She measured it demurely without looking at him. Still, it wouldn’t have helped her if she had; she wouldn’t have perceived the glitter of his eye.

With the green on the counter his self-confidence entirely returned. At the same time Beany Johnson and Hank Homans began to clamor, their arms overflowing with ribbons, that she measure some for them; and presently upon that counter lay a haystack of silk of all colors of the rainbow, and every roll that the boys could lay hands on had been unwound.

“Thirty-seven dollars and five cents,” said Miss Mittie. “But I’ll throw in the remnant and call it an even thirty-seven, since you took so much.” She had done the sum all in her head while she was measuring off!

“Charge it,” said Roddy, loftily. “This here gent—” He presented Hank, who bowed acknowledgment—“is Mr. Andy Carnegie. I guess you heard of him often enough, and know you can trust him all right; an’ this here one with the mustache is Mr. Pierpont Morgan. I am John D. Rockyfelly.” That being the preconcerted cue for them to go on with their parts, they began gathering the ribbons into their arms as fast as they could, meaning to cut and run with them.

“Excuse me, but this is a cash-down store,” informed Miss Mittie, laying her hand on the ribbons nearest her. “I can’t charge anything. I’m sorry not to oblige,—” She turned a little pale at the thought of it,—“but you see how it is; I’m not allowed, so I can’t. Thirty-seven dollars, please.”

“Well, I guess you won’t refuse us,” said Roddy, ingratiatingly, pulling surreptitiously at the ribbons while Hank added this sweet touch, “it’s fer a strawb’ry fest’val—real strawb’ries, real cream, you know.” (The season was late October.)

The words gave Roddy an idea. “Perhaps you’d like to go—with me.” The wretch beamed at her, thinking here was the best chance yet to “do her one” and send the shivers over her in a way she’d never forget.

A faint tinge of color suffused her cheeks. How kind of him, the great Roddy, to want her! She spoke, however, with her calm:

“I’d like to go with you ever so much. Yes, I’m sure I can go to-night; I haven’t anything else. I’ll go,” she accepted, making what she felt a momentous decision. Never yet had she been anywhere with a real live cow-boy, and it had been the dream of her life—the dream now at last come true! What a story to write home to Philadelphia! She smiled happily at Roddy, then, suddenly remembering her duty, said, “Thirty-seven dollars, please,” but very sweetly, and as though she hated to ask him for it after that invitation, and felt it not quite ladylike.

“Charge it, please,” he gave back, with a sweetness imitating her own, while a flush was beginning to be felt on his cheeks also. He hadn’t expected her to take him up so quickly. He was prepared to wheedle and urge, and it made him feel just a bit mean to see her so eager to go with him to a fictitious festival; and after his first stab of self-pride came the thought, was he “the first fella ever ast her to go somewheres in the evening? Didn’t she git no amusement at all? Why, the poor kid!”

He questioned, hesitating:

“You—ain’t been out much—in Laramie—sence you come?”

She shook her head.

“I haven’t been to one thing,” she replied, giving him a wistful look, and adding with a brighter one and a sigh, “until to-night.”

Meanwhile the two guards at the door had become so entranced with the scene at the ribbon counter that they’d cast aside their duty: they acknowledged the duty, however, by tiptoeing to the region of the ribbons, flattering themselves that, if they were not heard, they would not be seen.

Miss Mittie swept a glance at the five young men ranged before her and then at the clock. It was ten minutes past closing-time, and the street door stood wide open! Dreadful! In her shy delight at the prospect of a strawberry festival, she’d forgotten her sacred trust in putting the store to bed. What would Mrs. Ingersoll say when she found it out?

With a quick, “Excuse me,” she slipped along behind the counter, those five cow-boys standing like gawks and watching her do it, and locked the door and put the key in her pocket. She took the key, naturally, so she could get in the next morning, and she was intending to let the young men out by a certain back way in order that nobody should know how remiss she’d been. Returning hurriedly, she said, “Thirty-seven dollars, please,” and stuck her pencil in her hair.

The young men had been exchanging disconcerted glances. Roddy dropped his ribbon on the counter. Figuratively speaking, he threw up the sponge then; but it was Hank Homans who first found a usable tongue.

“I guess we don’t want it, after all,” said he, depositing his armful beside Roddy’s.

She smiled at him a smile that nothing but calm that is calm all through can produce on earth, and said, “Thirty-seven dollars, please.”

“No—I guess we don’t want it,” corroborated Roddy, trying to appear self-confident while he bunched his ribbons together with decisive gestures that eschewed ribbons from his life forever.

For the fraction of a second she appeared to believe it; then she repeated, “Thirty-seven dollars,” and thrust the slip across the pile at him.

He turned red.

“I say—we don’t want it,” he stammered.

She took this for a pleasantry, and held out her hand for the money. At the same moment he felt a spur dig into his boot; the situation was become exceedingly unpleasant to his fellow-missioners. What was the girl up to, anyway? And what in thunder did she mean by locking them in? Beany Johnson came to the rescue.

“I say, why, this here was—a—er—kinder joke,” he explained sheepishly, and feeling dreadfully uncomfortable.

She looked at him, puzzled.

“I don’t see it,” she remarked. Literally she didn’t. “What is the joke?”

“Why—er—all this here—” He waved his hand over the pile of ribbons—“this here pink ribbon hold-up—why, it was all a—er—kinder joke, without meanin’ any offense,” he trailed off, blushing.

“But I don’t see it,” she repeated, still with her puzzled look.

“Well, it is, anyway,” he assured her, desperately. “It’s what it is all right—a joke.”

For a moment after this brutal confession they thought comprehension dawned in her eyes; then she murmured, looking critically at the ribbon: “But I’m sure I measured it all right; I never make mistakes on ribbons. Mrs. Ingersoll will tell you that. I was very particular as I went along. And I know I counted it right—thirty-seven dollars, and the remnant, five cents; but I threw that off; I didn’t charge it on the slip.” She glanced at the slip to make sure on that point.

“Oh, you’re all right,” Hank chipped in courageously. “We ain’t kickin’ on yer measurin’. An’ the thirty-seven—it’s all right, too; but—why—er—”

“I gave you all-silk ribbon, no cotton-back,” she interrupted. “I looked at every piece before I undid it. There’s some cotton-back in the store for cheap trimmings and flower ties, but I was very particular to give you the same as you started out with—that pink Mr. McQueed took first.” She began rummaging the pile for the original sample.

“Oh, that’s all right; we ain’t kickin’ on the quality,” Hank rumbled on, despite the pucker on her brow feeling he was making progress—that by a process of elimination of false scents he was gradually getting her on the track of a true apprehension. He motioned with his hand to include the others. “We ain’t kickin’ on that part of it, fer it’s all right; but—”

“Then I don’t see what isn’t all right,” she sighed helplessly, glancing at the sale-slip to make sure the joke wasn’t there. “Yes, thirty-seven.” With that a light dawned on her face, and she handed the slip to him. “Oh, I see,” she cried, “I’ve been asking the wrong gentleman to pay!”

Beany only shook his head and pushed the bill aside. He was beginning to perspire, and the others, coming to his rescue in a chorus, protested:

“But it was all a joke—this here. Don’t you see?” hoping she’d see and make the best of it by opening the door and telling them to get out for a mean lot of—, well, anything you like and can imagine as coming from her chaste lips. Getting out was now all they were capable of thinking of in the present predicament; they wouldn’t have cared what she called them. Hank added firmly, and as a sort of inspiration, “You see, we don’t want it now.”

She looked from one to the other of them, repeating, “Don’t want it now, did you say?” Then with another of her comprehending smiles, “But you ain’t the kind of gentlemen that orders things you don’t want, and then don’t pay up for ’em, and you wouldn’t disappoint a church. Besides—” Here she presented them with a smile apiece—“I know you wouldn’t leave a lady to roll up ’most two hundred yards of ribbon just for a matter of thirty-seven dollars.”

“It wouldn’t be kinder jes right,” Hank admitted, seeing a chance here to slide out on excuses. “Sure it wouldn’t; but we didn’t none of us fellas think o’ that—”

She broke in on him with a quick, “I see it now!” and they waited breathless while she looked at the price-tags on several rolls. “You think I made a mistake in the different prices, carrying the different widths in my head, and you’re all too nice to tell me for fear you’ll get me in trouble with Mrs. Ingersoll. Well, maybe I did. Nobody’s perfect; no matter how careful you are, you’re liable to a slip-up once in a while. But I’ll measure it again and count it over just to satisfy you.”

She took a long ribbon in her hand. Inwardly they groaned, and Roddy felt spurs digging at his legs and elbows at his ribs that said, “You got us into this fix; now get us out, and be quick about it, too.”

But Roddy seemed to have been struck with paralysis. The truth is, Miss Mittie had those young missioners cowed. They didn’t dare tell her to her face how they’d planned and played a mean joke on her confiding innocence when she’d never done anything to harm or annoy them in the whole of her blameless life. To leave her to roll up that pile of ribbon was, as Roddy afterward confessed when he told me the story, “sich a dirty, ornery trick to play on a lady as only a coyote would think of.” And, then, they didn’t dare to give Mrs. Ingersoll away. Yet if they didn’t make a clean breast of it and show Miss Mittie just how low-down cussed they’d been, how were they to get the key? They couldn’t take it from her by force; at least things hadn’t reached the point where they felt they could “do anything that was reely ungentlemanly,” as Roddy said. And then this thought came to all of them: suppose they did make her understand, and “she struck it hoppin’ mad an’ kep’ ’em there all night to pay ’em fer it an’ git even!” By this time they felt her capable of anything through sheer lack of imagination.

Drawn by Fletcher C. Ransom

Half-tone plate engraved by H. C. Merritt

“‘THIRTY-SEVEN DOLLARS, PLEASE’”

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“One—two—three—four—five—” She measured swiftly, counting aloud as she went that they might be sure she was making no mistake. Under cover of her voice Hank hissed in Roddy’s ear:

“It’s yer turn to play. Say something, can’t yer? An’ git us outa this here hold-up.”

“Hold-up! I should say yes!” snorted Beany in Roddy’s other ear, suddenly appreciating the real essence of the joke; and then snorted again as he heard “Seventeen—eighteen—nineteen,” accompanied by the rapid swish of silk along the counter.

But all Roddy, now very red of face, could contribute toward a graceful retreat for himself and friends from the scene of disaster was, “We don’t want it,” while pushing the ribbons weakly in her direction.

Before he could think of anything else, she raised her unsuspicious eyes questioningly to his, acknowledging him the leader and his word her law. That was the glance that shot him through the heart—that, and the way she’d beaten them at their own game and never turned a hair. Roddy was enough the man and the sport to appreciate the laugh on himself.

“Fellas, the drinks are on us,” he informed them, grimly. “The little girl gits the jackpot. It’s up to us to shell out an’ be P. D. Q. about it, too.”

Miss Mittie stopped her measuring, since he was satisfied to take the ribbon as it was, and put the slip into his hand with a smile that said, “Now I’ll be ready to go with you to our entertainment.”

They made up the amount with difficulty,—it took every cent Roddy had and most of the spare cash in the party,—and when he had given it to her, he leaned over the counter, almost to kissing distance, and said:

“Little girl, y’ can buy me fer a nickel.”

She drew a shabby purse and took out of it a shabby nickel.

“It’s all I have,” she told him, soberly, offering it.

All she had, and she was giving it to him in earnest! In one swift flash it came to him why she hadn’t seen through the mean joke they were playing on her: she had trusted him too much; or, as he more picturesquely put it, “She knowed I was too much of a gentleman to do a girl dirt.” Her lack of comprehension of the true inwardness of the whole affair was precisely her measure of the high estimate she placed on his chivalry; she saw him as his own deepest ideals painted him, and he knew she saw him thus; and in the shine of the heavenly revelation he saw her as lovely calm womanhood confiding in his nobility. Something broke loose in him; his better nature, his affection, his generosity, his instinct for fair play, rose to its occasion, and in one instant he ceased to be a lawless young rapscallion—his heart truly and in the scriptural sense turned from its wickedness and the error of its ways.

“Little girl, if I take this here nickel offen ye, it’s a bargain between us,” he told her, dizzily. “You an’ me’ll belong to each other fer keeps. I mean it, honest.”

She hesitated, blushing from throat to forehead under the gaping stare of the other young fellows; then she said bravely, “I mean it honest, too,” and laid the nickel in his hand.

I fear I’ve told this so jocosely I’ve belittled their miracle, which was very real. I met her on the street in Laramie last summer, five years after the episode, and speaking of her marriage she confided to me that she and Roddy had been “made for each other.”

TIMOTHY COLE’S
WOOD ENGRAVINGS
OF
MASTERPIECES
IN
AMERICAN GALLERIES

LADY MILDMAY

BY

HOPPNER

Owned by Mr. P. A. Valentine

LADY MILDMAY. BY HOPPNER

(TIMOTHY COLE’S WOOD ENGRAVINGS OF MASTERPIECES IN AMERICAN GALLERIES)

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EXCLUSIVENESS AMONG COLLEGE WOMEN

WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?

BY EDITH RICKERT

MISS RICKERT’S article, “The Fraternity Idea among College Women,” in the November number, developed the argument that women’s fraternities like men’s are aristocratic, in that they are self-perpetuating and destructive to freedom of intercourse; that they stand for the privilege of one as against the common rights of all; that the benefits that they claim to bestow upon members are exaggerated, even in the case of individuals, and do not counterbalance the two evils which are inherent in the system and cannot be done away with by regulation from without or reform from within; and that these evils are, as regards members, that the fraternities educate to type, and, as regards outsiders, that they harden social differences into caste.—THE EDITOR.

CAN we do anything? Should we try? Some of the women’s colleges are taking action. Fraternities have recently been abolished at Rockford as contrary to the democratic spirit of that institution; also at Pembroke, on the ground that they had come to absorb too much of the interest that should go into general college activities. At Elmira, where they have been since 1856, they have recently disbanded of their own accord, and they are to be discontinued at Mount Holyoke after 1913.

Among coëducational institutions, however, the fraternal spirit is certainly growing. Although the entire number of fraternity women is less than one fifth that of fraternity men, the active members—that is, the undergraduates—are almost half as numerous as the men, and the rate of initiation is nearly the same. Unless some check is put upon them, the women will soon outnumber the men, as they are said to surpass them in efficiency of organization.

FACULTIES AND THE FRATERNITIES

PRESIDENTS and deans of colleges in which the Greek-letter societies exist show little inclination to abolish them, but rather a distinct recognition of the value of their coöperation in manipulating the student body. On the other hand, officers of institutions where only the local organizations are admitted, with no uncertain voice, declare that they mean to keep the control in their own hands, while the authorities of colleges where no fraternities have ever been admitted[4] are equally emphatic in stating that, as a force hostile to democracy, they shall never be allowed to enter.

There are the three faces of the problem. Which attitude is right?

The women’s fraternities, which first arose in small colleges that were scarcely more than boarding-schools, were purely in imitation of men’s organizations. But when women students were admitted to the state universities and other big endowed institutions, which were without provision for their students beyond lecture halls, laboratories, and libraries, the situation changed. In so far as the universities were concerned merely with intellectual training and made no attempt to reach the social side, the women’s fraternities took on a certain defensive quality—the banding together of the minority, whose presence was more or less resented by the men. Their practical value in providing safe and comfortable homes for students was quickly recognized both by parents and by deans, upon whom came the responsibility for student welfare. But now this question of housing is a very minor aspect of the case, as even in institutions where chapter houses exist, these provide for less than one third of the women, usually much less; and in the majority of institutions the fraternities have no chapter houses at all.

On the other hand, the immediate practical use of the fraternities to-day is that by their organization and their training in organizing power they can be trusted to put things through. One dean writes, “Unconsciously one often chooses a fraternity girl to do a necessary thing, knowing that she will see it through.” Several others, deans and presidents, say that the fraternities do valuable service in two ways: first, by making themselves responsible for the conduct of individual members of their societies who give trouble to the faculty; and, second, by taking the initiative, and standing solid in passing measures for the welfare of the whole student body.

“THE FRAT OF THE ULTRA-PLATONISTS”

These two virtues seem to me to be on very different levels. In regard to the first, I doubt whether any other agency could easily be found to deal as successfully with a recalcitrant student as a self-appointed committee of her intimate associates. It does not follow, however, that this committee need have the social characteristics of the fraternity. As for the second, it would seem that larger and more weighty organizations, such as the Young Women’s Christian Association and the Women’s League, not subject to the jealousies and rivalries of the fraternities, could be of much greater service.

SOME GOOD AGAINST MUCH EVIL

IT is difficult to balance the good and the bad points of the local and national organizations. The former are more democratic in that they are usually larger, being less strictly limited. They are without the element of permanent regulation that comes from the national union. They lack the exchange of ideas which comes from the association of a group of organizations, and their activities are entirely confined to the undergraduate years. In that they are always subject to faculty regulation, it is probable that loyalty to the society or club does not, as is too often the case among the fraternities, usurp the place of loyalty to alma mater.

As for the alleged democracy of the women’s colleges, it is, in many cases, largely theoretical. These colleges provide for their students both housing and social life. The latter is somewhat cloistral, to be sure, but it is open to all. By the very conditions of their life, they do not need the help of the fraternities for disciplinary or legislative measures. Does this mean that the colleges are without cliques, that every student is a sister to every other? Who that has lived in a woman’s college does not know that every class is run usually by one group of friends, with occasional more or less successful attempts by other rival groups to grasp the power? The “fraternity spirit” comes into play all over the world as soon as three people meet, because one combination of two will always be more congenial than the other, and one is always left out. The fraternity spirit is simply the aristocratic impulse, the social instinct that is ever working toward the formation of class. Then, as it cannot be torn out of human nature, is it to be recognized and allowed to develop freely as in the case of the national organizations, or is it to be checked and controlled from without as in the case of the local organizations, or is it to be ignored, hidden under a cloak of theoretical democracy, as in the women’s colleges?

REFORMING THE SYSTEM

THE furthest limit to which the national organizations will go in the way of outside regulation is to allow a representation of non-fraternity members of the faculty on their boards—a minority, I judge. On the other hand, they freely admit the more obvious faults of their system, and declare their earnest purpose of self-regulation. They even admit that these measures are defensive; they feel that their system is threatened. Let us look at the reforms they propose, and see how far they will go to change its fundamental nature.

They propose to do away, first, with the practice of “rushing” and the hysteria, expense, bitterness, and heartburn that accompany it, and to insure a thorough acquaintance on both sides by postponing pledge-day to the sophomore year. At the same time they mean to raise the scholarship standard for admission, and to regulate the social life of the chapter houses by insisting upon the observance of uniform and reasonable house rules.

The first trouble is that their chance of success in these reforms is very small. They may keep rushing, to all appearances, within bounds, but the feelings that it engenders must arise wherever a few persons are singled out by the arbitrary choice of several rival organizations.

A GIRL WHO IS PLEASANTLY WELCOMED INTO A FRATERNITY

When they postpone pledge-day, they cease to house the very students—the beginners—who in our big, promiscuous universities chiefly need care. Even if they provide for the freshmen by themselves building dormitories, they have to face the problems how the wide acquaintance of the first year is to pass into the segregation of the later years without breaking up friendships formed at that time, and whether, to avoid this thing, there will not be formed among the freshmen defensive cliques which will be taken in as wholes when the time comes. Under these conditions, which actually prevail in at least one university where sophomore pledging has been adopted, the system will remain unchanged.

The scholarship standard for admission, while it will improve the tone and efficiency of the fraternities by keeping out the thoroughly frivolous and incapable element, might conceivably, must inevitably render them still more exclusive by adding pride of intellect to pride of social standing. Even where a most beneficent result is confidently urged, that is, when the fraternity acts as a stimulus to drag the poor student up to the required grade, I am still in doubt. Is it worth while to force scholarship by means of social reward? Would it not be better to let these girls drop and find their place in another level in which they are moved by real interest in the thing they are doing, instead of by the goad of social ambition? This is at least a question to be considered.

“WHEN ALICE GOES TO COLLEGE AND IS RUSHED BY BETA AND GAMMA AND KAPPA”

As for the uniform house rules, where is the machinery that can enforce them in an aggregation of societies widely scattered and independent?

But suppose these reforms are carried out to the last degree, how will they affect the system? Will they break down the barriers between Greek and barbarian? Will they make the selection of the college aristocracy any less artificial? Will they not, by still further elimination of “mistakes,”—the incongruous element,—tend to make the fraternity woman still more conventional? Will they not ingrow more and more in their limitation of types? Will they not be still more the circle of girls looking inward and blowing up the little flame of their own ideals and aspirations, instead of individual women mingling with the great crowd of human beings, and turning their faces this way and that according to the needs of the time?

But if outside regulation is impracticable where the national organizations are already in control, and the proposed regulation from within only intensifies the abnormal conditions of the system, what can be done?

The fundamental problem for both the fraternities and the officers of colleges where they exist, is, whether or not the number of societies is to be restricted.

One dean says: “If I could, I would keep them out. As I cannot, I say let us have as many as possible.”

Another dean stands for, “The rendering of fraternities inconspicuous and unimportant as an element in college life.” She adds: “Often this end may be in a measure accomplished by strengthening the organizations to which all women students are eligible.”

A FOMENTER OF CASTE FEELING

THERE is the difference of theory. One view looks toward enough fraternities to take in all the students who have any inclination to be “clubable”; the other, toward preserving what is sometimes called “the balance” between fraternity and non-fraternity women. The first tendency is democratic by bringing the majority into the position held by the minority to-day; the second is democratic by limiting the powers of the present minority. The regulation from within, being urged by the National Pan-Hellenic, is aristocratic in that it aims to increase the efficiency and power of this minority.

Where the fraternities contain nearly the whole body of women students, as happens in some small institutions, the few who are left out suffer proportionately. Again, as the “barbs” need not be reckoned with, jealousies between chapters are almost sure to arise.

On the other hand, in regard to the balance, one of the fraternity journals says in effect: Why should there be this balance between the fraternity and the non-fraternity element? If the system is ideal for one girl, is it not for all? What ground can a college stand on in putting a premium on the fraternity girls? Why increase the difference which we would all gladly lose sight of? Our ideals are the same as those of every true college woman, and the banding together into a fraternity is a help toward these ideals. Why refuse any college woman this help?

It is not merely a question of ideals and of the help of friends, but of definite social values, such as, for example, more intimate association with members of the faculty, more opportunities for meeting distinguished guests, and so on. Why should the fraternities have the monopoly of these social pleasures and assets?

The usual answer of the fraternity woman would be, I think: “Shall we do away with colleges because fewer than two persons out of a thousand go to college? Opportunities must necessarily be limited to the few.”

“Limited to the few?” Yes, necessarily to a few at a time; but not always to the same few.

No, the fraternity woman does not wish to open up her fraternity to the general public. She may go outside her walls and speak with the barbs on terms of what she calls perfect equality and friendliness; but she wishes to keep to herself the fastness of her fraternity, with its idealistic ritual, its trivial secret, as a sanctuary secure from the miscellaneous hordes of the world.

There is no getting over or around or away from this attitude of mind. The insidiousness of it is that no amount of theory will save from it the average human being who gets the chance. One may have heard of the college professor who objected strongly when his sister was “bid” because he did not wish her to become a snob. Later, as fate would have it, he himself was called upon to organize a fraternity. Where was the snob then? On the other side of the wall, to be sure! And that is just where the difference comes in.

DO COLLEGE AUTHORITIES FACE THEIR DUTY?

ONE conclusion which would be generally admitted is, that the colleges and universities where the fraternities thrive have not done their whole duty by their students. Suppose, then, that they realize this, and wish to use the fraternal spirit to forward the welfare of the general body of students, what can they do? As a result of many suggestions, I seem to see that a somewhat definite line of action is possible.

In the first place, they are even now facing the problem of housing their students, and there arises the question of choice between the dormitory and the cottage. The large dormitory is more economical, and it was more manageable than a group of cottages in the old days before student government; but from every other point of view it fails. The small dormitory and the large cottage are rapidly approaching each other in size, and the approximation is due to a compromise between the desire of each college to put first the welfare of its students and the money available to carry out its plans.

But suppose—a somewhat visionary hypothesis, I am afraid—that an institution is free to build as many cottages as it needs, of the size that should bring the best possible results of group development, so that every girl student may be assured of a comfortable home with, for example, nineteen or twenty-nine others. She would then be on the proper basis for extending and receiving hospitality, and social training would follow as a matter of course.

THE GROUPING OF STUDENTS FOR DEVELOPMENT

THE fraternity girls put great stress on their power of developing one another, the “house mother,” or chaperon, even when she is not the cook, seeming to be usually more or less a figurehead. In this cottage system, what would happen if the group were left to itself in the same way? Naturally this would depend entirely upon the constitution of the group. If all birds of a feather flocked together, no sparrows would learn the song of the canary. If they were housed haphazard, in the order, for example, of registration, there would be at first anarchy, with the speedy assertion of the clique and government by the strongest spirits who were attracted to one another by congeniality, much as happens in the chapter houses now, while the weak and isolated spirits would have much the position of extension members of fraternities, taken in to help pay the coal bills. Clearly some sort of regulation from without would be not only desirable, but essential, unless the development of the individual girl is to be as much a matter of chance as with the fraternities. The line of remedy would seem to be by a proper distribution of upper-class girls and new students—poor dean!—and by the appointment of some responsible older woman as “house mother.”

“THE SOLITARY, SELF-SUFFICIENT GIRL SHOULD HAVE HER FRIENDS ABOUT HER”

A great deal would depend upon the type of woman in charge. As one of the fraternity members said, she ought to be an alumna. But however important it is that a woman of fine ability, tact, social distinction, and loving-kindness should be paid an excellent salary for developing this side of life in every cottage or dormitory on the campus, there is probably not an institution in the country that can afford to pay for such service exclusively. A middle way, perhaps not so impracticable, would be to choose from the graduating class of each year girls for whom college has been rather a general training for life than a specialized preparation for some one profession—girls who could afford to give a year’s time and who would gladly do so in return for board and lodging, special college privileges, such as graduate courses, and so on, and the not invaluable experience that they would gain by acting as these house mothers. They would be near enough in age to sympathize with the undergraduate point of view, far enough away to counsel, direct, and influence; and they, acting with house committees chosen by the household of each cottage, could guide each little group in such a way as to insure a flexible system which would permit both the individual and the social virtues to flourish. One might even foresee that a conference of these house mothers with the officers of the large students’ organizations and a committee of the faculty might form a board comparable to the local Pan-Hellenics of the fraternities for the general guidance of student affairs.[5]

This might allow for social training and group development; but, the objection may be urged, how would it react upon student friendships? What assurance is there that in any cottage home there might not be as many “mistakes” as occur in fraternity choosing? Deans are proverbially not infallible, and the burden put upon them by such a plan would be heavy.

The answer is that congenial friendships are no more a matter of accidental living together than of arbitrary imposition by upper classmen, but of a free choice that in undergraduate years should range over the campus and as far as possible out into the world. With these the cottage system has little to do, except that by its flexibility it saves a girl from being unhappy more than one year or perhaps even a semester. Whether her most intimate friends are all in her own house or scattered over the campus and through the town is a matter of special temperament. No two—poor dean again!—should be treated alike. The intense girl who tends to abnormality of the affections should have scattered friends. The solitary, self-sufficient girl should have her friends about her. With the eminently conventional, clubable girl it will make little difference with whom she lives; those about her will always be her friends, and by continued intimate association with them, she will develop a certain attitude of permanence in her ties which probably makes for character development.

A NARROWING INFLUENCE

IN this connection I cannot forbear pointing out another fallacy in the fraternity theory. As most fraternity girls are naturally of the clubable type, it is undoubtedly true that the four years of close association lead them to permanent ties of friendship as no other system could do; but, on the other hand, as these girls in their teens must grow at different rates of development, the fraternity becomes an actual clog on those who might otherwise develop more rapidly and more freely; it tends to keep them all back to the pace of those who remain most nearly what they were in college years.

It must be admitted, however, that the cottage system does not do much to foster the kind of growth that comes, not from the clash of different types of personality, but from congenial associations. But is there not in every college adequate machinery for such expression of tastes? With the students’ associations, the women’s leagues, the Young Women’s Christian Association, literary associations, tennis clubs, golf clubs, garden clubs, walking clubs, journal clubs,—the multifarious club activities of almost any college, to which ability, or at least interest, is the test for admission, there should be no lack of opportunity for any student to encourage to the utmost any taste whatsoever. Nor should there be any limitation as to the number of clubs to which any student belongs, apart from the question of her interests and the amount of energy that she diverts from her main business as a student.

Because of the diversity of their activities and the overlapping of their memberships, with such clubs as these there could be no question of rivalry. Rivalries and jealousies between the different cottages might spring up, but with a strong students’ association and with partizanship weakened by the inevitable scattering of friends, this could not grow into anything like the hostility between fraternities and non-fraternities, between Greeks and Greeks, that exists in many institutions to-day.

INTERCOURSE BETWEEN ALUMNA AND STUDENT

ONE thing not provided for in the scheme outlined is put forward by the fraternities as one of the great advantages of their organization, and that is the continued relationship between the alumna and her alma mater. Without admitting the wisdom of allowing too much alumnæ interference and control, one may see that some continuance of the tie is a good thing. The fraternities foster this connection, where they have chapter houses for the small proportion of students whom they reach, by means of a permanent college home and an abiding interest in the younger sisterhood. A similar result could be secured for the whole student body by means of a club-house built by the alumnæ to put up those who return for visits and to accommodate offices for the various organizations of students.[6]

All this is visionary and impracticable, at present; and yet it is only following out the various lines of suggestion, which are based upon institutions already in existence.

SOCIAL EXCLUSIVENESS

IN the colleges and universities should develop in this direction, what would become of the fraternities? The double system of cottages and clubs would remove the practical reasons for their existence. There is no work that they claim to do for the few that could not be done for the whole either in a cottage organization of students or by a club. They would be driven back upon the real ground of their growing prosperity in our land of the Newly Made—social exclusiveness. On that basis doubtless they will continue to exist. There will always be some people who will wish to wear a badge possessed by the few, who will wish to retire into an inner circle of common knowledge and common acquaintance where they are safe in feeling superior to those whom they keep outside as far as the choice lies with themselves. But these cliques, whatever each thinks of itself, will be forced to yield to the larger organizations of students both the control of affairs and the right to set the fashion in character and in social customs. They may become specialists in “cliquocracy”—the frat of the Vans and the frat of the Vons and the frat of the Log-Cabin Ancestors, the frat of the Ultra-Platonists, the frat of the Super-Bogies, and the frat of the Number-Two Shoes. That is, if the element of good which the fraternities give to their members is supplied to all college students in other ways, the fraternities themselves are bound to dwindle and shrivel until they become mere social excrescences, curiosities of aristocratic affinities.

THE FRATERNITY BADGE

Probably it is too late to make a stand. The fraternities are strong among the privileged classes, and tenacious of their privilege. They see, as who does not, that in an age and a country where opportunities are increasingly restricted to the few, this caste system of education is the best possible preparation to enable the few to use the opportunities that are theirs, in that it gives them all the social powers and affiliations by which chiefly the few rule the many; and the development of the individual is not the concern of a system that works to make corporate bodies closed against individual striving.

When one remembers the movement against the high-school fraternities, one is tempted for a moment to hope for a revision of popular opinion. How should what is generally condemned for the years between twelve and twenty be approved for the years between sixteen and twenty-four? Is there so wide a difference between the fraternity idea as it finds expression in the high-school girl of eighteen and the college girl of eighteen? The very women who most earnestly advocate the system in the colleges are bent upon driving it out of the high schools. Yet the fact that neither the joint effort of parents and teachers and state legislation has succeeded in this, argues ill for any successful movement against it in the colleges.

A NEW ALTRUISM NEEDED

WHAT can we do? We need a new religion to teach the subordination of personal good to communal welfare. We believe in it theoretically, we are anxious that our neighbors should practise it; but when it cuts home, we falter and fail. We see the evils of the fraternity system, and the fraternity people are among our most desirable acquaintances. We like them for friends and especially for our children’s friends. We argue against the system and preach its abolition; but when Alice goes to college and is rushed by Beta and Gamma and Kappa in eager rivalry, we step down from the pulpit and rejoice with her and suffer with her anxious little heart until she is safely housed within the chapter that has the best standing.

And yet we do not call ourselves snobs. There must be a top layer. Why should not we be in it? Democracy? Yes; but that we and our children are to be on the same level with venders and hagglers and foreigners and other impossible people—absurd! Let us hasten to put on the Alpha Omega pin, which assures public recognition of our social superiority.

In other words, we still care more for individual distinction than for the welfare of society. I have heard more than a few thoughtful fraternity women sum up their position thus: “I hate the system; I deplore it! But as it’s here, I’ve got to be in it because I can’t bear to be left outside!” Can we fight this spirit? Can we win? If we do, the victory will mean that we have grown wise and sane and strong enough for such a democracy as the world has never yet known.

[4] As Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Radcliffe; and, properly speaking, Smith.

[5] It has also been pointed out to me that the system could be used even in a large dormitory by dividing up the building into floors or sections, and that this is now being done in the newest dormitories. The idea is not, of course, to secure boarding-school supervision.

[6] Such club-houses are already in existence for men, and seem to fulfil their purpose admirably.

THE PITILESSNESS OF DESIRE

BY SHAEMAS O’SHEEL

Cease, cease, implacable desire,

Cease, cease!

The endless ways no longer, for I tire!

I who went forth mantled with morning fire

Pray now surcease

And peace—peace!

O Protean, pitiless, perilous, dread desire,

Cease, cease!

Blow not again

Your trumpet tyrannous, nor sound your lyre:

Once in their notes I heard a spirit choir;

Now only pain.

Whispers at my young soul, blood in the heart,

Limbs of the leaping goat—aye, these I had,

And spurned a myriad summits gained, to start

Down through new vales to newer hills apart;

And I was glad

To be insatiably mad

For more—more knowledge, wisdom, passion, art!

But now release

Your broken bondsman from his broken bond!

What is beyond

This, and the next horizon, and beyond

The last horizon, could not give me peace.

That I have learned at last, and therefore cease

The bloody goad and the illusory wand—

Cease, cease!

Cease, cease!

My life’s a burning arrow shot in the dark,

Fearfully arching heaven to find no mark.

Must it be always warfare, never peace?

Nay, then I ground my arms! I will not hark

The old command; so maybe you will cease.

This is the end of all; I quench the fire.

Calm of the hills, the rooted flowers and trees,

Have some right to my love, and now to these

I turn, because their service will not tire.

My staff, my scrip, my cloak into the pyre!

Yet—what high vision through the hot flame flees?

THE SET-BACK TO ENGLISH SOCIALISM

BY G. K. CHESTERTON

THE present condition of England is a very curious one, and the only obvious thing to say about it is that there is virtually nothing about it in the English papers. When I heard long ago that Mr. Balfour never read the papers, I thought it was because he was languid and frivolous; by which you will see that I did read the papers. Now I am older, I think it was more likely because he was practical and busy, and preferred to deal direct with the real facts. If, like the English, you run what is still at best an aristocracy with most of the forms of a democracy, it is found virtually necessary that the journalists should talk in public about anything or everything except what the politicians are really doing in private.

You may therefore utterly disregard all the things printed in very large letters in the “Daily Mail” or the “Daily Chronicle.” I have heard that American journalism is in a manner more truthful, if it is only by being more transparently untrue; but I will not presume to guess about that, or to imagine what the headlines in American papers mean. The headlines in English papers mean nothing. Mr. Bonar Law means nothing. Sir Edward Carson means nothing. Belfast means nothing. There is not one man of education and influence in England who cares a button about Belfast; at least in the governing classes, who have long seen that Home Rule is horse sense and nothing else; and least of all in the Conservative party, where a general High-Church flavor can be varied by Romanism, Atheism, Theosophy, Christian Science, or Devil-worship, but where such a thing as a No Popery puritan simply could not live for twenty minutes. Nor is there anything in Mr. Churchill’s supposed frenzy for war, or the other Radicals’ frenzy for peace. There is no more division among Englishmen about the need for national defense than there would be among you Americans or among Frenchmen or any other white men. And the mysterious ambitions and alterations of Mr. Churchill (of which you will see a great deal in the papers) mean nothing whatever but this: that the man is a cynic and an oligarch, but not a traitor; and that he is behaving exactly as any Englishman in his place would behave.

There was more in the comparatively slight stir about the tragedy of the Titanic. For that was connected, though largely unconsciously, with what is the deepest thing in modern England, a general suspicion that the men and methods now on top everywhere are not the best even from their own paternalist point of view; or, to use the foolish modern phraseology, that the survival of the unfittest rather than the fittest is the real result of our competitions or conspiracies. But here again the very phrase reminds us that in the modern world the real issue is carefully cloaked with a false issue.

There is much in the English papers just now, and I do not doubt in the American papers also, about degeneration and eugenics and the appalling sexual conduct and physical condition of the submerged. This also is a mere plutocratic fad, and corresponds to no general public feeling. Every sensible man in England knows that the poor must somehow or other be given more money for food and rest; but every sensible man also knows that in other respects they are as mixed and average as any other class, and marry and are given in marriage, as people always have done and always will do.

The suspicion really abroad in England is not a doubt about the people below, but about the people above. Looking at those who emerge into the first social rank, we are more inclined to be ashamed of our successes than of our failures. It is the breed of the top dog rather than the breed of the bottom dog that is becoming a mongrel breed. And there is certainly something amusing in the picture of the rich and powerful peering down into the abyss and dropping tears over the poor specimens that make up the populace, while by far the greater part of the populace is remarking more and more what uncommonly poor specimens are looking down at them.

This doubt of the powers that be is vague but universal, and had a sort of stifled explosion at the time of the Titanic affair; a general suspicion that governors cannot be trusted to govern or inspectors to inspect or arbiters to arbitrate, that captains are not to be trusted with ships, that lawyers are not to be trusted with laws. The kind of man who comes to the top everywhere conquers nothing but his superiors, gains nothing but his own gain. In modern England the successful man is not a success.

Now this state of public feeling has produced one rather odd, but very important, effect. While our attitude is growing more revolutionary, it is growing less Socialistic. For Socialism proposes to give to the state, and therefore to statesmen, fresh powers against social abuses. And England in its modern mood is rather more suspicious of the statesmen than of the bosses or middlemen whom they are supposed to control. The simple Socialistic formula that government should own the mines, for example—that simple formula begins to look a little too simple when people are suspecting that the mine-owners own the government. The mere proposal to set the politician to watch the capitalist has been disturbed by the rather disconcerting discovery that they are both the same man. We are past the point where being a capitalist is the only way of becoming a politician, and we are dangerously near the point where being a politician is much the quickest way of becoming a capitalist. But while the European haute politique is hypocritical and diseased (much more so, I should say, than the American), there is certainly less “graft” and corrupt give-and-take in the mass of minor functionaries or moderate fortunes; and this very comparative honesty in the less successful mass of Europe increases their uneasiness touching the national leadership. The English people, so far from being supine or decadent, are much more vigorous and wide-awake than they have been for a long time. But they have awakened in a cage. This cage produces a curious situation in which we silently but suddenly find ourselves.

When your nation separated from our nation, to my present delight and yours, it separated before most men had become commercial wage-earners. Our ruler was called Farmer George; but yours might have been called Farmer George also. Last week I went up the great Sussex road where stands the village of Washington; and I remembered that your sword was also beaten out of a plowshare. If we had separated later, he might have been called General Brighton, or Heaven knows what.

Now the big difference made by that fact is this: that in America industrialism may be quite as strong; but agriculture is not so weak. A hazy horizon of free farms surrounds your most insane cities: but with us all the eager and intelligent have become servants of the capitalists; it is only the idle or idiotic that remain servants of the landlords. It is undoubtedly tenable that the idle and idiotic were the wiser of the two.

On us, thus situated, has come an insurrection against industrialism itself. Our recent strikes have really been a revolt against the whole system of wage-earning. But while your workers would have some cloudy notion of an alternative in farming the larger country by freer men, with us the agricultural alternative has slipped out of sight. The workers know what they don’t want more than what they do; like Miss Arabella Allen in “Pickwick.” This state of mind is called by the learned syndicalism. It is really something much more serious; it is anger.

In the stress of these strikes two extraordinary things happened. The capitalist became a Socialist. The proletarian became an individualist. The employer wanted the community to intervene; and the employee didn’t want it to intervene. It was the rich man who used the Socialist argument; the comfort and convenience of the whole nation. It was the poor man who used the individualist argument; the freedom of contract and the private rights of man. It was the coal-owner who said, “Salus populi suprema lex.” It was the coal-miner who said, “Fiat justitia ruat cœlum.” He may not have expressed it precisely in those terms; though he is often no more illiterate than the coal-owner. This, then, is the extraordinary inversion that is the deepest dilemma of England to-day. Hamlet and Laertes have really changed swords in the scuffle: which is the poisoned sword I will not at this moment inquire.

The results of this extend and solidify every hour. For nearly a century now Socialists and social reformers in England, as in the rest of Europe and in America, have preached either greater philanthropy among the rich or greater rebellion among the poor. In both cases they have been suddenly taken at their word; but in such a manner as to sweep away the very foundations of their social science and their social scheme. The rich have become philanthropists; the rich have, in a sense, become Socialists; but only on condition that they may also be slave-owners. The poor have become rebels—but rebels against Socialism.

So far is this from being an exaggeration that every daily detail in the present development illustrates this and nothing else. The railway men, who led the revolt, were not, literally and legally, striking against an employer at all. They were striking against the decisions of State Arbitration Courts and Conciliation Boards such as State Socialists would set up; and semi-socialistic publicists had set up. The capitalists, wishing to strike back at the trade-unions, have not struck back by cutthroat competition or irresponsible locking out. They have struck back by a big act of Parliament, aimed at limiting the trade-unions by the law of the land; and tying men to their masters by a new and constructive social scheme. Here they have much the advantage of their proletarian opponents; who have to fight mainly with the remains of rather rhetorical Socialism and dreams, as yet somewhat dim, of the old liberty of the medieval guilds and charters. Thus it may too often seem that capitalists can combine and Socialists can only quarrel.

I do not myself think things can be cured except by a wider equalization of strictly private property, especially in land. This is not done or even demanded, not because it is impossible, but because its tradition has been lost. Meanwhile the Insurance Act, by which the rich contribute to the medical support of their servants, on condition of obtaining a tighter hold on their service, is the first of many legislative acts which will have for their object the ordering and cleansing, but also the strengthening, of the wage-system. They will attempt to forbid strikes. Thus we shall have the poor, with better conditions perhaps and under some general social stipulations; but bound irrevocably to particular and private masters.

The only thing I have to say about such a scheme concerns your country more than mine. This system of fixed service for certain masters has much to be said for it; and much was said by men dead and alive. In the wilderness by Chancellorsville or down all the roads to Richmond, there must be the dust of great gentlemen who came up out of the South to fight for such a system; and I think our Liberal social reformers owe them an apology. I think they ought to stand a moment and salute the dead, who had the courage to die for this thing, and the courage to call it by its name.

The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri

Studies in Red Chalk by Violet Oakley, for the medallions of a painted glass window made for the house of Mr. Robert J. Collier

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THE NEW YORK NEWSBOY

BY JACOB A. RIIS

Author of “How the Other Half Lives,” etc.

WITH SKETCHES BY J. R. SHAVER

THE newsboys of New York were having their Christmas dinner, and I was bidden to the feast. I stood at the door and saw them file in, seven hundred strong, to take their places at the long tables. Last of all came the little shavers, brimful of mischief waiting to break out. The superintendent pulled my sleeve when he set eyes upon them.

“Watch out now,” he said; “they’ll be up to something.”

I saw them eye the lay-out as they went down the line, where turkey and mincepie stood waiting, and make quick, stealthy passes with their hands, but nothing happened until they had taken their seats. Then up went eight grimy fists, and eight aggrieved voices piped out:

“Mister, I ain’t got no pie!”

The superintendent chuckled.

“How is that?” he said. “No pie? There was one; I put it there myself, at every plate. Why, what is that?” And he patted each of the little rascals in the region of the bread-basket, where something stuck out in a lump inside the shirt.

“Me pie,” was the unabashed reply. “I was afeard it ’u’d get stole on me.” There was just the ghost of a wink.

“Well,” laughed the superintendent, “we’ll forget it. It is Christmas. Go ahead, boys, with your dinner.” And they fell to.

It was great. Talk about the charge of the Six Hundred. These were seven hundred, and they used their knives, their forks, and their tongues all at once and for all they were worth. The noise was deafening. You could not have heard yourself think. One alone among them all did no shouting. He devoured his dinner like a famished little wolf, and all the while he never took his ferret eyes from my face. It was in the days when New York had a militant police commissioner, who set the town by the ears every other day with his unheard-of ways of enforcing dead-letter laws, and rattled its dry bones. All of a sudden the boy snatched his fist from his mouth and pointed it straight at me.

“I know you,” he piped in a shrill treble that cut through the Babel of tongues like a knife. “I seen yer picter in de papers. Ye ’r’—ye ’r’—Teddy Roosevelt!”

Instantly there was the silence of the tomb in the big hall. Where just before one would not have known that a dray went over the pavement outside, one could all at once have heard a pin drop. Looking down the table where the miscreants sat who had tried to get a double allowance of pie, I saw something stirring, and the stolen pies appeared and were swiftly and silently deposited on the table. The dreaded name had brought them back even on a false alarm.

That was seventeen years ago. Chance carried me past the Newsboys’ Lodging-House the other day at the dinner-hour, and I went in to have a look at things. There were no newsboys there. The little shavers with their gimlet wits were gone. The boys who sat about the tables did not hail from Newspaper Row. They were older, and evidently earning their bread in shop and factory.

“Gone,” said the superintendent to my question where the little fellows were. “Societies got them, and they don’t run in the street. The old times went out a dozen years ago. Before that we had them at six, even at five, and more and more of them up to fourteen. They overflowed from the city’s tenements in homeless hordes. They don’t any more. The boys we now have average seventeen or eighteen; they come mostly from out of town. The lure of the city, the Wanderlust, gets them. Now and then it is a stepfather. Here we sift them, get them work if we can. A few sell papers, but not many. There are not half a dozen newsboys in the house to-day, and its name might as well be changed. Less than one third belong in New York. Last year when Christmas was coming on we had a talk here, and the speaker touched the string of mother waiting at home for her wandering boy.”

HOW CAN HE HOLD SO MANY PAPERS, WITH ONLY ONE LEG AND TWO HANDS?

There was a tremendous demand for note-paper that week, and seventeen runaways were returned to their homes.

“The newsboy of to-day is another kind of chap, who has a home and folks. No, Santa Claus has not lost the way. We still have our Christmas dinner. Come and see for yourself.”

What he said was true. The newsboy of old, who foraged for himself, who crowded street and alley about the newspaper offices and mobbed the pressmen, who curled up by the steam-pipes or on the manhole-covers in the small hours of the morning for a “hot-pipe nap” till the clatter of the great presses began below, and was rounded up there by the “Cruelty man” in zero weather, is a rare bird nowadays.

In his place has come the commercial little chap who lives at home and sells papers after school-hours, sometimes on his own account, but oftener to eke out the family earnings with what may be the difference between comparative comfort and abject poverty.

Shorn of his lawless privilege of sleeping out and of imperiling his life a hundred times a day by jumping on moving cars in his hunt for trade, he is still a feature of metropolitan life, even holds the key to some of its striking phases; for, as the circulation manager will tell you, he is the one who makes the sales. The dealer at the stand merely registers the purchaser’s desire for a paper; the boy prompts it. He has surrendered some of his picturesqueness to become a cog in the industrial wheel, small but indispensable.

A YIDDISH “NEWSLADY” ON GRAND STREET, SHE SELLS NOTHING BUT HEBREW PAPERS

Like all business in our day, he is being concentrated, capitalized. From an atom he has become an asset, quite without his assistance.

UNDER THE SYSTEM OF “RETURNS” THE WEEPING NEWSBOY HAS DISAPPEARED

It was neither the change from the jovial Irish to the sunny Italian, nor from him to the sharp-witted Jew, that wrought the transformation. It was something more potent than either or both. It was the Spanish War, with the great boom of the sensational papers that set a new pace in the press-rooms. Where there had been one afternoon edition, half a dozen grew. It was clearly impossible for the boy to go down-town every half-hour for his papers; he would be traveling all day if he did. So he stayed where he was. The clamoring crowds about the newspaper offices disappeared. Pony expresses and automobiles carried the editions up-town, throwing them off at points where newsdealers and boys were waiting. Year by year the routes were extended, and they are growing yet. The old distribution centers under the equestrian statue in Union Square, in Greeley Square, Times Square, Columbus Circle, and at the Grand Central, have been multiplied many times. In this rush of development the little fellow has been caught up as in a whirlwind, and is being carried on with a speed that leaves him and, for that matter, the rest of us little chance to think or ask where he is going.

THE YOUNG NAPOLEON OF FINANCE

THE VETERAN NEWSBOY OF PARK ROW

Thus lassoed by the big business of the time, what sort of lad has the little pirate of the past become? And what is he, with the training of the street, in the way to become? It depends on the angle from which he is seen, and angles he has in plenty. Let it be said at once that the boy who weeps in the street at night, appealing to the tender-hearted with an armful of unsold papers, whatever he was once, is not now the typical newsboy. He can return his papers now, if “stuck,” or at any rate a fair share of them. Nine chances to one the tearful one is a preposterous little fraud. If he confronts you with a plea for a quarter, “to make the dollar and a half he needs to go to the camp,” the tenth chance is gone. He does not have to pay a dollar and a half to go to camp. The Newsboys’ Home Club gives him all its privileges, including the summer camp, through the whole year for a quarter. He is the crafty little rascal upon whom the “Cruelty man” keeps a wary eye, for he knows that he will encounter him in the Children’s Court some day, or, rather, that he will take him there. It is this lad who is responsible for the showing of the reformatories, that more than half of the prisoners “sold newspapers” in their day. Doubtless they did, and they made short change to begin with, and picked pockets a little later on. But they are no more representative of their class than the get-rich-quick swindlers, to whom the post-office authorities forbid the mails, represent the honest business of the land.

There is evil enough abroad in the streets. Its touch, with all that is cheap and tawdry and vulgar, from the perennial cigarette to the vile bar-room and worse that open upon it, sharpens the lad’s wits and too often tends to dull his morals. Seen from that angle, he gives the philanthropist concern with cause. Despite child-labor laws, he is on the street at too early an age and too late an hour. The law now forbids him to cry his extra after ten o’clock if he is under fourteen. This winter an effort will be made to shorten his hours by two and send him to bed at eight, while raising his age to sixteen. Even then there will be mischief enough and to spare in his path. School licenses and badges do not banish it. The lad does not always take them seriously.

“Where is your badge?” asked a man suddenly of a little fellow who pushed a paper at him. He was dirty and out at elbows. The rent in his trousers was mended with a bent nail.

“Left it home on the pianner,” he grinned, and dodged a vengeful grab.

THE FRIENDLY GRATING

Seen from the angle of his friend in the “club,” he is an honest little fellow whose earnings out of school help make both ends meet at home. The very independence that is arraigned as tending to defiance of authority, to irregularity and loose habits, in his view helps make a man of him early, “if it is in him.” He will point to the lad who just left his desk after arranging to take his week in camp in Sunday doses, and tell you the reason: he cannot get away from business. A Jew has set up a stand on his corner, and it is up to him to meet the competition, which he does by hiring another boy to waylay the customer in the middle of the block while he forages at the crossing. That other boy over there is going into a silk house on the first of the month, and his younger brother will take over his route. That boy began, as most of them do, by making six or ten cents a day. For a long while now he has brought home five dollars a week to his father, who presses clothes for a living, and weekly earns little more than that the year round.

CHRISTMAS DINNER IN A NEWSBOY’S BOWERY LODGING-HOUSE

COUNTING THE DAY’S RECEIPTS: HAS HE THE “PRICE” OF A LODGING?

From the point of view of the circulation manager, who, after all, perhaps knows him best, it being to his interest, the lad is just a boy who, if he goes crooked, goes fast and far, but who grows straight in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, and, whether the one or the other, can take care of himself. The one needs no one to weep over him; the other will “do” you while you are at it. It is the circulation manager who has housed him in his own club, once the dignified home of the Historical Society, at Eleventh Street and Second Avenue, sends him to camp in summer, has culled the chaff from the wheat generally, and given him a social footing because of the commercial one he has conquered.

Fresh from its humanizing influence, I corralled one of the species on the avenue and catechized him, investing at intervals in his stock to hold his attention. He was thirteen and had no badge. “My boss has one,” he said. The boss proved to be an older boy who “had the corner” and bought the papers at two for three; that is, for every two one-cent papers he paid for, he received one free. That was his profit. My boy was hired for the hours between half-past four and seven on all school-days at a wage of sixty cents a week. Here then was the capitalist at the beginning of things.

“Why don’t you get a corner yourself?” I asked.

“They’re all took.”

The boy was German, and it seemed safe to ask:

“He has no more right to the corner than you have; why don’t you fight him for it?”

“He’s my boss,” was the dogged reply.

“But suppose some stronger fellow drove him away?”

The answer was prompt:

“I’d get other boys and get it back for him.”

Does that help you to understand the following of Big Tim Sullivan and such leaders? Big Tim was a newsboy once, and he sticks up for them always. I tried once more.