'r-i^ P^ 'ii •J tsi PS n » C sq T\ A J GREATEE BRITAIN A RECORD OF TRAVEL IK ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES OURINU 1866 AND 1867- CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE. ■"-.5?-, IN TWO VOLUMES.— VOL. I. WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 31'oiTbon : MACMILLAN AND CO 1868. // V. / LONDON ; R. fil.AV, SONS, AND 'I'AVI.OR, PRINTERS, BREAD STREET HILL. TO MY EAT HE II THIS BOOK. 0. W. D. PUEFACE. In 1866 and 1867, I followed England round the world : everywhere I was in English-speaking, or in English-governed lands. If I remarked that climate, soil, manners of life, that mixture with other peoples had modified the blood, I saw, too, that in essentials the race was always one. The idea which in all the length of my travels liJis been at once my fellow and my guide — a key wherewith to unlock the hidden things of strange new lands — is a conception, however imperfect, of the grandeur of our race, already girdling the earth, which it is destined, perhaps, eventually to overspread. In America, the peoples of the world are being fused together, but they are run into an English mould : Alfred's laws and Chaucer's tongue are theirs whether they would or no. There are men who say that Britain in her age will claim the glory of having planted greater Englands across viii PREFACE. the seas. They fail to perceive that she has clone more than found plantations of her own — that she has imposed her institutions upon the offshoots of Germany, of Ireland, of Scandinavia, and of Spain. Through America, England is speaking to the world. Sketches of Saxondom may be of interest even upon humbler grounds : the development of the England of Elizabeth is to be found, not in the Britain of Victoria, but in half the habitable globe. If two small islands are by courtesy styled " Great," America, Australia, India, must form a Greater Britain. C. W. D. 76, Sloane Street, S.W. 1st November, 1868. CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. PART I. CHAP. I.-VlRGINIA ... * • 3 II-— The Negro . , 19 III.— The South . ... • ^ •••••.... . 32 IV.— The Empire State ■■•■•• 39 V. — Cambridge Commencement 51 VI. — Canada . . 66 VII,— Universitt of Michigan • • * • ' * . . . . 83 VIIL— The Pacific Railroad ' • • • • . . f . . 94 IX. — Omphalism . . • • • • • . . . . 103 X.— Letter from Denver 109 XI. —Red India . 122 XII. — Colorado . . 131 XIII.— Rocky Mountains 137 XIV.— Brigham Young 146 X CONTENTS. XV. — MORMONDOM 153 XVI.— Western Editors , • . . . , ^, . . . , . ; ir-y-j XVII.— Utah 173 XVIII. — Nameless Alps Ig3 XIX. — Virginia City 19q XX. — El Dorado 213 XXI. — Lynch Law 22G XXII. — Golden City 245 XXIII. — Little China 269 XXIV. — California ............... 269 XXV. — Mexico 276 XXVI. — Republican or Democrat 283 XXVII. — Brothers 296 XXVIII. — America 307 PART II. I. — PiTCAihN Island 32i II. — HOKITIKA 330 IIL— Polynesians , 347 IV.— Parewanui Pah 355 V. — The Maorir.s 379 VI. — The Two Flies 39q VII.— The Pacific 398 APPENDIX. A Maori Dinner 403 LIST OF ILLUSTKATIONS. VIEW FROM THE BULLER e» • • ''*<"= s< rontispiece. PROFILE OP "joe smith" PULL PACE OP "joe smith" ... '/ 180 PORTER ROCKWELL 184 FRIDAY'S STATION-VALLEY OF LAKE TA 310 ,^^^r.i ut IjAKB TAHOE ... "V V.BW ON ™. AM^CVK B.v.a-TH. r..« wnE« OOLB WAS FIRST FOUND 214 THE BRIDAL VEIL PALL, YO.EMITE VALLEY 2'>4 EL CAPITAN, Y08EMITE VALLEY 270 MAPS. ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC RAILROAD 94 LEAVENSWORTH TO SALT LAKE OITV 110 SALT LAKE CITY TO SAN FRANCISOO ... 188 NEW ZEALAND 330 ■ij> Amoxq some obvious clerical errors th. r. 7 • correct the following misprints :- ^' '''1"«^*«^1 '^ f Page 75, line 12,/,, -'the » 180 „ 22 » 180 „ 26 » 197 „ 30 " 253 „ 28 navigator's "rcaf^'Mercator's." ., " Taurida." " "Po^gynists." .< T. " " P-M." -B-Dgland" . you, and bewail the fate which has caused them to be born citizens of a republic, and dwellers in a country where men call vices by their names. The least educated of their countrymen, the only grossly vulgar class that America brings forth, they fly to Europe " to escape democracy," and pass their lives in Paris, Pau, or Nice, living libels on the country they are believed to represent. Out of these discordant elements, Cubans, Knicker- bockers, Germans, Irish, " first families," " Petroleum," and " Shoddy," we are forced to construct our compo- site idea — Nuw York. The Irish numerically predomi- nate, but we have no experience as to what should be the moral features of an Irish city, for Dublin has always been in English hands ; possibly that IV.] THE EMPIRE STATE. 49 which in Now York appears to be cosmopolitan is merely Celtic. However it may be, this much is clear, that the humblest township of New England reflects more truly the America of the past, the most chaotic village of Nebraska portrays more fully the hopes and tendencies of the America of the future, than do this huge State and city. • If the political figure of New York is not encou- raging, its natural beauty is singularly great. Those who say that America has no scenery, forget the Hudson, while they can never have explored Lake George, Lake Charaplain, and the Mohawk. That Poole's exquisite scene from the " Decameron," " Phi- lomela's Song," could have been realized on earth I never dreamt until I saw the singers at a New Yorker's villa on the Hudson grouped in the deep shades of a glen, from which there was an outlook upon the basaltic palisades and lake-like Tappan Zee. It was in some such spot that De Tocqueville wrote the brightest of his brilliant letters — that dated " Sing Sing" — for he speaks of himself ^.3 lying on a hill that overhung the Hudson, watching the white sails gleaming in the hot sun, and trying in vain to fancy what became of the river where it disappeared in the blue " Highlands." ■ That New York City itself is full of beauty the view from Castle Garden would suflS.ce to show ; and by night it is not less lovely than by day. The harbour is illuminated by the coloured lanterns of a thousand boats, and the steam-whistles tell of a life that never sleeps. The paddles of steamers seem not VOL. I. E 50 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. only to beat the water, but to stir the languid air and so provoke a breeze, and the lime-lights at the Fulton and Wall Street ferries burn so brightly that in the warm glare the eye reaches through the still night to the feathery acacias in the streets of Brooklyn. The view is as southern as the people : we have not yet found America. v.] CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 51 CHAPTER V. CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. " Old Cambridge ! Long may she flourish ! " pro- posed by a professor in the University of Cambridge, in America, and drunk standing, with three cheers,' by the graduates and undergraduates of Harvard, is a toast that sets one thinkino-. Cambridge in America is not by any means a University of to-day. Harvard College, which, being the only "house," has engrossed the privileges^ funds, and titles of the University, was founded at Cambridge, Mass., in 1636, only ninety years later than the greatest and wealthiest college of our Cambridge in old England. Puritan Harvard was the sister rather than the daughter of our own Puritan Emmanuel. Harvard himself, and Dunster, the first president of Harvard's College, were among the earliest of the scholars of Emmanuel. A toast from the Cambridge of new to the Cam- bridge of old England is one from younger to elder sister; and Dr. Wendell Holmes, "The Autocrat," said as much in proposing it at the Harvard alumni celebration of 1866. E 2 52 GREATER BRITAIN. [ch>p. Like other old institutions, Harvard needs a ten-days' revolution : academic abuses flourish as luxuriantly upon American as on English soil, and University difiiculties are much the same in either country. Here, as at home, the coror)laint is, that the men come up to the Ur^versity untaught. To all of them their college is forced for a time to play the high-school ; to some she is never anything more than school. At Harvard this is worse than with ourselves : the average age of entry, though of late much risen, is still considerably under eighteen. The college is now aiming at raising gradually the standard of entry : when once all are excluded save men, and thinking men, real students, such as those by whom some of the new Western Universities are attended, then Harvard hopes to leave drill-teaching entirely to the schools, and to permit the widest freedom in the choice of studies to her students. Harvard is not blameless in this matter. Like other Universities, she is conservative of bad things as well as good ; indeed, ten minutes within her walls would suffice to convince even an Englishman thai Harvard clings to the times before the Revolution. Her conservatism is shown in many trivial things — in the dress of her janitors and porters, in the cut of the grass-plots and college gates, in the conduct of the Commencement orations in the chapel. For the dainty little dames from Boston who came to hear their friends and brothers recite their disquisitions none but Latin programmes were provided, and the poor ladies were condemned to find such names as V.J CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 53 Bush, Maurice, 7>njamin, Humphrey, and Underwood among the graduating youths, distorted into Bvsh, Mavritivs, Beniamin, Hvmphredvs, Vnderwood. This conservatism of the New England Universities had just received a sharp attack. In the Commence- ment oration. Dr. Hedges, one of the leaders of the Unitarian Church, had strongly pressed the necessity for a complete freedom of study after entry, a liberty to take up what line the student would, to be examined and to graduate in what he chose. He had instanced the success of Michigan Uni'^^ersity consequent upon the adoption of this plan ; he had pointed to the fact that of all the universities in America, Michigan alone drew her students from every State. President Hill and ex-President Walker had endorsed his views. There is a special fitness in the reformers coming forward at this time. This year is the commencement of a new era at Harvard, for at the request of the college staff, the connexion of the University with the commonwealth of Massachusetts has just been dis- solved, and the members of the board of overseers are in future to be elected by the University, instead of nominated by the State. This being so, the question had been raised as to whether the Governor would come in state to Commencement, but he yielded to the wishes of the graduates, and came with the traditional pomp, attended by a alafF in uniform, and escorted by a troop of Volunteer Lancers, whose scarlet coats and polished hats recalled the times before the Revolution. While the ceremony was still in progress, I had 64 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. been introduced to several of the foremost rowing men among the younger graduates of Harvard, and at its conclusion I accompanied them to their river. They were in strict training for their University race with Yale, which was to come off in a week, and as Cambridge had been beaten twice running, and this year had a better crew, they were wishful for criticisms on their style. Such an opinion as a stranger could offer was soon given ; they were dashing, fast, long in their stroke ; strong, considering their light weights, but terribly overworked. They have taken for a rule the old English notions as to training which have long since disappeared at home, and, looked upon as fanatics by their friends and tutors, they have all the fanatic's excess of zeal. Rowing and other athletics, with the exceptions of skating and base-ball, are both neglected and despised in America. When the smallest sign of a rea:i:ion appears in the New England colleges, there comes at once a cry from Boston that brains are being postponed to brawn. If New Englanders would look about them, they would see that their climate has of itself developed brains at the expense of brawn, and that, if national degeneracy is to be long prevented, brawn must in some way be fostered. The high shoulder, head-voice, and pallor of the Boston men are not incompatible with the possession of the most powerful brain, the keenest wit ; but it is not probable that energy and talent vdll be continued in future generations sprung from the worn-out men and women of to-day. v.] CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 55 The prospect at present is not briglit ; year by year Americans grow thinner, lighter, and shorter-lived. iElian's Americans, we may remember, though they were greatly superior to the Greeks in stature, were inferior to them in length of life. The women show even greater signs of weakness than the men, and the high, undulating tones which are affectation in the French are natural to the ladies of America; little can be expected of women whose only exercise is excessive dancing in over-heated rooms. The American summer, often tropical in its heat, has much to answer for, but it is the winter which makes the saddest havoc among the younger people, and the boys and girls at school. Cooped up all day in the close air of the heated school-house, the poor children are at night made to run straight back to the furnace-dried atmosphere of home. The thermometer is commonly raised indoors to 80 or 90 degrees Fahr. The child is not only baked into paleness and sweated bit by bit to its death, but fed meantime, out of mistaken kindness, uj)on the most indigestible of dainties — pastry, hot dough-nuts, and sweetmeats taking the place of bread, and milk, and meat — and is not allowed to take the slightest exercise, except its daily run to school-house. Who can wonder that spinal diseases should prevail ? One reason why Americans are pale and agueish is that, as a people, they are hewers of primeval forest and tillers of virgin soil. These are the unhealthiest employments in the world ; the sun darts down upon the hitherto unreached mould, and sets free malarious 56 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. gases, against which the new settlers have no antidotes. The rowing men of Harvard tell me that their clubs are still looked on somewhat coldly by the majority of the professors, who obstinately refuse to see that improved physical type is not an end, but a means, towards improvement of the mental faculties, if not in the present, at least in the next generation. As for the moral training in the virtues of obedience and command, for which a boat's crew is the best of schools, that is not yet understood at Harvard, where rowing is confined to the half-dozen men who are to represent the college in the annual race, and the throe or four more who are being trained to succeed them in the crew. Eowing in America is what it was till ten years since at old Cambridge, and is still at Oxford — not an exercise for the majority of the students, but a pursuit for a small number. Physical culture is, however, said to be making some small progress in the older States, and I myself saw signs of the tendency in Philadelphia. The war has done some good in this respect, and so has the influx of (;)anadians to Chicago. Cricket is stQl almost an unknown thing, except in some few cities. When I was coming in to Baltimore by train, we passed a meadow in which a match was being played. A Southerner to whom 1 was talking at the time, looked at the players, and said with surprise : " Reckon they've got a wounded man ther', front o' them sticks, sah." I found that he meant the bai;sman, who was wearing pads. v.] CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 57 One of the most brilliant of Harvard's thinkers has taken to carpentering as a relief to his mental toil ; her most famed professor is often to be found working in his garden or his farm ; but such change of work for work is possible only to certain mer The gene- rality of Americans need not only exercise, but relaxation ; still, with less physical, they possess greater mental vitality than ourselves. On the day that follows Commencement — the chief ceremony of the academic year — is held once in three summers the " Alumni Celebration," or meeting of the past graduates of Harvard — a touching gathering at all times, but peculiarly so in these times that follow on the losses of the war. The American college informal organizations rest upon the unit of the " class." The " class" is what at Cambridge is called "men of the same year," — men who enter together and graduate together at the end of the regular course. Each class of a large New England college, such as Harvard, will often possess an association of its own ; its members will dine together once in five years, or ten — men re- turning from Europe and from the Far West to be present at the gathering. Harvard is strong in the affections of the New England people — her faults are theirs ; they love her for them, and keep her advantages to themselves, for in the whole list of graduates for this year I could find only two Irish names. Here, at the Alumni Celebration, a procession was marshalled in the library in which the order was by 58 OREATEB BRITAIN. [chap. classes ; the oldest class of which there were living members being the first. "Class of 1797!" and two old white-haired gentlemen tottered from the crowd, and started on their march down the central aisle, and out bareheaded into the blaze of one of the hottest days that America had ever known. "Class of 1800!" missing two years, in which all the graduates were di;ad ; and out came one, the sole survivor. Then came " 1803," and so on, to the stalwart company of the present year. When the classes of 1859 and 1860, and of the war-years Avere called, those who marched out showed many an empty sleeve. The present triennial celebration is noteworthy not only for the efforts of the University reformers, but also for the foundation of the Memorial Hall dedicated as a monument to those sons of Harvard who fell while serving their country in the sup- pression of the late rebellion. The purity of their patriotism hardly needed illustration by the fire of young Everett, the graceful speech of Dr. Holmes. Even the splendid oratory of Governor Bullock could do little more than force us to read for ourselves the Roll of Honour, and see how many of Harvard's most distinguished younger men died for their country as privates of Massachusetts Volunteers. There was a time, as England knows, when the thinking men of Boston, and the Cambridge pro- fessors, Emerson, Russell Lowell, Asa Gray, and a dozen more of almost equal fame, morally seceded from their country's councils, and were followed in their V.J CAMBRlDaE CJMMEXCEMEX1\ ji) secession by the yoiiiigvr men. " The best men in America stand aloof from politics," it was said. The country from which these men seceded was not the America of to-day : it was tlic union which South Carolina ruled. From it the Cambridge pro- fessors " cme out," not because they feared to vex their nerves with the shock of public argument and action, but because the course of the slaveholders was not their course. Hating the wrongs they saw but could not remedy, they separated themselves from the wrong-doers; — another matter, this, from the " hating hatred " of our culture class in England. In 1863 and 1864, there came the reckoning. When America was first brought to see the things that had been done in her name, and at her cost, and, rising in her hitherto unknown strength, struck the noblest blow for freedom that the world has seen, the men who had been urging on the movement from without at once re-entered the national ranks, and marched to victory. Of the men who sat beneath Longfellow, and Agassiz, and Emerson, whole batta- lions went forth to war. From Oberlin almost every male student and professor marched, and the university teaching was left in the women's hands. Out of 8,000 school teachers in Pennsylvania, of whom 300 alone were draughted, 3,000 volunteered for the war. Everywhere the teachers and their students were foremost among the Volunteers, and from that time forward America and her thinkers were at one. The fierce passions of this day of wakening have not been suflfered to disturb the quiet of the academic 60 GEE A TEE BEITATN. [chap. town. Our Engliah universities have not about tlicni the classic repose, the air of study, that Ix'long to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Those who have seen the hmes of Leyden, and compared them with the noisy Oxford High Street, will understand what I mean when I say that our Cambridge comes nearest to her daughter-town ; but even the English Cambridge has a bustling street or two, and a weekly market-day, while Cambridge in New England is one great academic grove, buried in the philosophic calm which our university towns can never rival so long as men resort to them for other purposes than work. It is not only in the Harvard precincts that the old- ness of New England is to be remarked. Although her people are everywhere in the vanguard of all progress, their country has a look of gable-ends and steeple-hats, while their laws seem fresh from the hands of Alfred. In all England there is no city which has suburbs so gray and venerable as are the elm-shaded towns round Boston : — Dorchester, Chelsea, Nahant, and Salem, each seems more ancient than its fellow ; the people speak the English of Elizabeth, and joke about us, " — — speaks good English for an Englishman." In the country districts, the winsome villages that nestle in the deUs seem to have been there for ten A centuries at least ; and it gives one a shock to light on such a spot as Bloody Brook, and to be told that only one hundred and ninety years ago Captain Lathrop was slain there by Red Indians, with eighty youths, " the flower of Essex county," as the Puritan history says. ▼.] CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 61 The warnings of Dr. Hedges, in reference to tiie strides of Michigan, have taken the New Englanders by surprise. Secure, as they believed, in their intel- lectual supremacy, they forgot that in a federal union the moral and physical primacy will generally both reside in the same State. The commonwealth of Mas- sachusetts, at one time the foremost upholder of the doctrine of State rights, will soon be seen once more acting as its champion — this time on behalf of herself and her five sister States. Were the six New England commonwealths grouped together into a single State, it would still have only three-fourths of the population of New York, and about an equal number of inhabitants with Pennsyl- vania. The State of Rhode Island is one-fourth the size of many a single Californian county. Such facts as these will not be long lost sight of in the West, and when a difference of interests springs up, Ohio will not suffer her voice in the senate to continue to be neutralised by that of Connecticut or Rhode Island. Even if the senate be allowed to remain untouched, it is certain that the redistribution of seats consequent upon the census of 1870 will completely transfer political power to the central States. That New Eng- land will by this change inevitably lose her hold upon the destinies of the whole If^nion is not so clear. The influence for good of New England upon the West has been chiefly seminal ; but not for that the less enor- mous. Go into a State such as Michigan, where half the people are immigrants — where, of ube remaining moiety, the greater part are born Westerners, and 62 BEATER BRITAIN. [chap. apparently in no way of New England — and you will find that tlie inhabitants are for the most part earnest, God-fearing men, with a New England tone of pro- found manliness and conviction running through everything they say and do. The colleges in which they have been reared are directed, you will find, l)y New England professors, men reared in the classic schools of Harvard, Yale, or Amherst ; the ministers under whom they sit are, for the most part, Boston men ; the books they read are of New England, or old English of the class from which the writers of the Puritan States themselves have drawn their inspira- tion. To New England is chiefly due, in short, the making of America a godly nation. It is something in this age to come across a people who believe strongly in anything, and consistently act upon their beliefs : the new Englanders are such a race. Thoroughly God-fearing States are not so common that we can afibrd to despise them when found ; and nowhere does religion enter more into daily life than in Vermont or Massachusetts. The States of the Union owe so huge a debt of gratitude to New England, that on this score alone they may refrain from touching her with sacrilegious hands. Not to name her previous sacrifices, the single little State of Massachusetts — one-fourth the size of Scotland, and but half as populous as Paris— sent during the rebellion a hundred and fifty regiments to the field. It was to Boston that Lincoln telegraphed when, in 1861, at a minute's notice, he needed men for V.J CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 63 the defence of Washington. So entirely were South- erners of the opinion that the New Englanders were the true supporters of the old flag, that " Yankee" became a general term for loyali^ , s of any State. America can never forget the steady heroism of New England during the great struggle for national existence. The unity that has been the chief cause of the strength of the New England influence is in some measure sprung from the fact that these six States are completely shut off" from all America by the single State of New York, alien from them in political and moral life. Every Yankee feels his country bounded by the British, the Irish, and the sea. In addition to the homogeneousness of isolation, the New Englanders, like the Northern Scotch, have the advantages of a bad climate and a miserable soil. These have been the true agents in the development of the energy, the skill, and fortitude of the Yankee people. In the war, for instance, it was plain that the children of the poor and ragged North-Eastern States were not the men to be beaten by the lotus- eaters of Louisiana when they were doing battle for what they believed to be a religious cause. One effect of the poverty of soil with which New England is afflicted has been that her sons have wandered from end to end of the known world, engaged in every trade, and succeeding in all. Some- times there is in their migrations a religious side. Mormonism, although it now draws its forces from 64 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. Great Britain, was founded in New England. At Brindisi, on my way home, I met three Yankees returning from a Maine colony lately founded at Jaffa, in expectation of the fulfilment of prophecy, and destruction of the Mohamedan rule. For the moment they are intriguing for a firman from the very Government upon the coming fall of which all their expectations have been based ; and these fierce fanatics are making money by managing an hotel. One of them told me that the Jafia colony is a " religio-commercial speculation." New England Yankees are not always so filled with the Puritan spirit as to reject unlawful means of money-making. Even the Massachusetts common schools and prim Connecticut meeting-houses turn out their black sheep into the world. At Centre Harbour, in New Hampshire, I met with an example of the "Yankee spawn" in a Maine man — a shrewd, sailor-looking fellow. He was sitting next me at the table-d'h6te, and asked me to take a glass of his champagne. I declined, but chatted, and let out that I was a Britisher. "I was subject to your Government once for sixteen months," my neighbour said. "Keally! Where?" "Sierra Leone. I was a prisoner there. And very lucky too." "Why so?" I asked. " Because, if the American Government had caught me, they would have hanged me for a pirate. But I wasn't a pirate." v.] CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 65 With over great energy I struck in, " Of course not." My Neighbour.— *' No ; I wets a slaver:' Idling among the hills of New Hampshire and the lakes of Maine, it is impossible for a stranger starting free from prejudice, not to end by loving the pious people of New England, for he will see that there could be no severer blow to the cause of freedom throughout the world than the loss by them of an influence upon American life and thought which has been one of unmixed good. Still, New England is not America. VOL. I. J, 66 G BEAT ER BRITAIN. [chap. CHAPTER VL • CANADA. There is not in the world a nobler outlook than that from off the terrace it Quebec. You stand upon a rock overhanging city and river, and look down upon the guardship's masts. Acre upon acre of timber comes floating down the stream above the city, the Canadian songs just reaching you upon the heights; and beneath you are fleets of great ships, English, German, French, and Dutch, embarking the timber from the floating-docks. The Stars and Stripes are nowhere to be seen. Such are the distances in North America, that here, farther from the sea than is any city in Europe west of Moscow, we have a seajjort town, with gunboat and three-decker ; morning and evening guns, and bars oi " God save the Queen," to mark the opening and closing of the port. The St. Lawrence runs in a chasm in a flat table- land, through which some earlier Niagara seems to have cut for it a way. Some of the tributaries are in sight, all falling from a clifl" into the deep still river. In the distance, seawards, a silver ribbon on the rock represents the grand falls of Montmorenci. Long villages of white tiny cots straggle along the VI.] CANADA. 67 roads that radiate from the city ; the great bhick cross of the French parish church showing reverently from all. On the north, the eye reaches to the rugged outlines of the Laurentian range, composed of the oldest moun- tains in the world, at the foot of which is Lake St. Charles, full of fiord-like northern beauty, where at a later time I learnt to paddle the Indian canoe of birch bark. Leaving the citadel, we are at once in the Euro- pean middle ages. Gates and posterns, cranky steps that lead up to lofty gabled houses, with sharp French roofs of burnished tin, like those of Liege ; processions of the Host ; altars decked with flowers ; statues of the Virgin ; sabots ; blouses ; and the scarlet of the British linesmen — all these are seen in narrow streets and markets, that are graced with many a Cotentin lace cap, and all within forty miles of the down-east Yrxikee State of Maine. It is not far from New England to old France. Quebec Lower Town is very like St. Peter Port in Guernsey. Norman-French inhabitants, guarded by British troops, step-built streets, thronged fruit- market, and citadel upon a rock, frowning down upon the quays, are alike in each. A slight knowledge of the Upper Normandy patois is not without its use ; it procured me an offer of a pinch of snuif from an old hahitante on board one of the river boats. Her gesture was worthy of the ancien regime. There has ])een no dying-out of the race among the French Canadians. They number twenty times F 2 68 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. the thousands that they did a hundred years ago. The American soil has left their physical type, religion, language, laws, and habits absolutely un- touched. They herd together in their rambling villages, dance to the fiddle after mass on Sundays, as gaily as once did their Norman sires, and keep up the fleur-de-lys and the memory of Montcalm. More French than the French are the Lower Canadian hdhitants. Not only here, but everywhere, a French " depen- dency " is France transported ; not a double of the France of to-day, but a mummy of the France of the time of the " colony's " foundation. In Saigon, you find Imperial France ; here the France of Louis Quatorze. The Englishman founds everywhere a New England — new in thought as in soil ; the Frenchman carries with him to California, to Japt.n, an undying- recollection of the Palais Royal. In San Francisco there lives a great French capitalist, who, since 184.9, has been the originator of every successful Californian speculation. He cannot speak a word of English, and his greatest pleasure, in a country of fruits and wine, is to bid his old French servant assure him, upon honour, that his whole dessert, from his claret to his olives, has been brought for him from France. There is much in the colonizing instinct of our race, but something, perhaps, in the consideration that the English are hardly happy enough at home to be always looking back to what they have left in the old country. There is about this old France something of Dutch VI.] CANADA. 69 sleepiness and content. There is, indeed, some bustle in the market-place, where the grand old dames in snowy caps sit selling plums and pears ; there is much singing made over the lading of the timl^er ships ; there are rafts in hundreds gliding down the river; old French carts in dozens, creaking and wheezing on their lumbering way to town, with much clacking of whips and clappering of wooden shoes. All these things there are, but then there are these and more in Dol, and Quimper, and Morlaix — in all those towns which in Europe come nearest to old France. There is quiet bustle, subdued trade, prosperity deep, not noisy ; but the life is sleepy ; tl^j rafts float, and are not tugged nor rowed ; the old Norman horses seem to draw the still older carts without an effort, and the very boys wear noisy shoes against their will, and make a clatter simply because they cannot help it. In such a scene it is impossible to forget that British troops are here employed as guardians of the only true French colony in the world against the in- roads of the English race. *' Nos institutions, notrc langue, nos lois," is the motto of the habitants. Their newspapers are filled with church celebrations, village fetes, speeches of " M. le Curd " at the harvest home, announcements by the " scherif," speech of M. dirtier at the consecration of MouLcigneur Laroque, blessings of bells, of ships ; but of life, nothing — of mention of what is passing in America, not a word. Ons corner is given to the world outside America : " Emprunt Pontifical, Emission Americaine, ciuatrc milliona de piastres," heads a solid column of holy 70 GREATER BHITAIN. [chap. fimmce. The pulse-beat of the Continent finds no echo here. It is not only in political affairs that there is a want of energy in French or Lower Canada : in journeying from Portland to Quebec, the moment the frontier was passed, we seemed to have come from a land of life to one of death. No more bustling villages, no more keen-eyed farmers : a fog of unenterprise hung over the land ; roads were wanting, houses rude, swamps undrained, fields unweeded, jjlains untilled. If the eastern townships and country round Quebec are a wilderness, they are not a desert. The country on the Saguenay is both. At Quebec in summer it is hot — mosquitoes are not unknown : even at Tadousac, where the Saguenay flows into ' e St. Lawrence, there is suidight as strong as that of Paris. Once in the northern river, all is cold, gloomy, arctic — no house, no boat, no sign of man's existence, no beasts, no birds, although the St. Lawrence swarms with duck and loons. The river is a straight, cold, black fiord, waUed-in by tremendous cliffs, which go sheer down into depths to which their height above water is a? nothing ; two walls of rock, and a path of ice-cold, inky water. Fish there are, seal and salmon — that is all. The ''whales and porpoises," which are advertised by the Tadousac folk as certain to "disport them- selves daily in front of the hotel," are never to be seen in this earth-crack of the Saguenay. The cold for summer was intense ; nowhere in the world does the limit of ever-frozen ground come so fc.r south as in the longitude of thi- Saguenay. AX> night VI.] CANADA. 71 we had a wonderful display of northern lights. A white column, towering to the mid-skies, rose, died away, and was succeeded by broad white clouds, stretching from east to west, and sending streamers northwards. Suddenly there shot up three fresh silvery columns in the north, north-west, and north- east, on which all the colours of the rainbow danced and played. After r^oonrise, the whole seemed gradually to fade away. At Ha Ha Bay, the head of navigation, I found a fur-buying station of the Hudson's Bay Company ; but that association has enough to answer for without being charged with the desolation of the Saguenay. The company has not here, as upon the Red River, sacrificed colonists to minks and silver-foxes. There is something more blighting than a monopoly that oppresses Lower Canada. As I returned to Quebec, the boat that I was aboard touched at St. Paschal, now called Riviere du Loup, the St. Lawrence terminus of the Grand Trunk line : we found there immense wharves, and plenty of bells and crosses, but not a single ship, great or small. Even in Virginia I had seen nothing more disheartening. North of the St. Lawrence, religion is made to play as active a part in politics as in the landscape. Lower Canada, as we have seen, is French and Catholic; Upper Canada is Scotch and Presbyterian, though the Episcopalians are strong in wealth and the Irish Catholics in numbers. Had the Catholics been united, they might, since the fusion of the two Canadas, have governed the 72 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. whole country : as it is, the Irish and French neither worship nor vote together, and of late the Scotch have had nearly their own way. Finding themselves steadily losing ground, the French threw in their lot with the scheme for the confederation of the provinces, and their clergy took up the cause with a zeal which they justified to their flocks by pointing out that the alternative was annex- ation to America, and possible confiscation of the Church lands. Confederation of the provinces means separation of the Canadas, which regain each its Parliament; and the Frencii Catholics begin to hope that the Irish of Upper Canada, now that they arc less completely overshaded by the more numerous French, will again act with their co-religionists : the Catholic vote in the new confederation will be nearly half the whole. In Toronto, however, the Fenians are strong, and even in Montreal their presence is not unknown : it is a question whether the whole of the Canadian Irish are not disaficcted. The Irish of the chief city have their Irish priests, their cathedral of St. Patrick, while the Frencli have theirs upon the Place d'Armes. The want of union may save the dominion from the establishment of Catholicism as a State Church. The confederation of our provinces was necessary, if British Nortl) America was to have a chance for life ; but it cannot be said to be accomplished while British Columbia and the Ecd River tract are not included. To give Canada an outlet on one side is something, but communication with the Atlantic is VI.] CANADA. 73 a small matter by tlic side of communication at once with Atlantic and Pacific through British territory. We shall soon have railways from Halifax to Lake Superior, and thence to the Pacific is hut 1,600 miles. It is true that the line is far north, and exposed to heavy snows and bitter cold ; but, on the other hand, it is well supplied with wood, and, if it possess no such fertile tracts as that of Kansas and Colorado, it at least escapes the frightful wilds of Bitter Creek and Mirage Plains. We are now even left in doubt how long we shall continue to possess so much as a route across the continent on paper. Since the cession of Russian America to the United States, a map of North America has been published in which the name of the Great Republic sprawls across the continent from Behring's Straits to Mexico, with the "E" in "United" ominously near Vancouver's Island, and the "T" actually planted upon British territory. If we take up the British Columbian, we find the citizens of the main-land portion of the province proposing to sell the island for twenty million dollars to the States. Settled chiefly by Americans from Oregon and California, and situated, for parposes of reinforce- ment, immigration, and supply, at a distance of not less than twenty thousand miles from home, the British Pacific colonies can hardly be considered strong in their allegiance to the Crown : we have here the reductio ad ahsurdum of home government. Our hindering trade by tolerating the presence of two sets of custom-houses and two sets of coins 74 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. between Halifax ; nd Lake Superior, was less absurd than our altogether preventing its existence now. Under a so-called Confederation of our American possessions, we have left a country the size of civilized Europe, and nearly as large as the United States — lying, too, upon the track of commerce and high road to China — to be despotically governed by a company of traders in skins and peltries, and to remain as long as it so pleases them in the dead stillness and desertion needed to ensure the presence of fur-bearing beasts. *'EedEiver" should be a second Minnesota, Halifax a second Liverpool, Esquimault a second San Fran- cisco ; but double government has done its work, and the outposts of the line of trade are already in American, not British hands. The gold mines of Nova Scotia, the coal mines and forests of British Columbia, are owned in New England and New York, and the Californians are expecting the pro- clamation of an American territorial government in the capital of Vancouver's Island. As Montana becomes peopled up, we shall hear of the "colonization" of Red River by citizens of the United States, such as preceded the hoisting of the *lone star" in Texas, and the "bear flag" in Cali- fornia, by Fremont ; and resistance by the Hudson's \ Bay Company will neither be possible, nor, in the interests of civilization, desirable. Even supposing a great popular awakening upon - Colonial questions, and the destruction of the Hudson's Bay monopoly, we never could make the Canadian vi.l CANADA. Tft dominion strong. With the addition of Columliia and Red River, British America would hardly be as powerful or populous as the two north-western States of Ohio and Illinois, or the single State of New York — one out of forty-five. •' Help us for ten years, and then we'll help ourselves," the Cana- dians say ; *' help us to become ten millions, and then we will stand alone ; " but this becoming ten millions is not such an easy thing. The ideas of most of us as to the size of the British territories are derived from maps of North America, made upon the navigator's projection, which are grossly out in high latitudes, though correct at the equator. The Canadas are made to appear at least twice their proper size, and such gigantic pro- portions are given to the northern parts of the Hudson territory that we are tempted to believe that in a co-*ntry so vast there must be some little value. The true size is no more shown upon the map than is the nine-months' winter. To Upper Canada, which is no bad country, it is not for lack of asking that population fails to come. Admirably-executed gazettes give the fullest information about the British possessions in the most glowing of terms ; offices and agencies are established in Liverpool, London, Cork, Londonderry, and a dozen other cities ; Government immigration agents and information-offices are to be found in every town in Canada; the Government emigrant is looked after in health, comfort, and religion ; directions of the fullest kind are given him in t|ie matters of money, 76 . ORE ATE R BRITAIN. [chap. clothes, tools, luggage ; Canada, he is told by the Government pnpers, possesses perfect religious, poli- tical, and social freedom ; British sul)jects step at once into the possession of political rights ; the winter is but bracing, the climate the healthiest in the world. Millions of acres of surveyed Crown lands are con- tinually in the market. To one who knows what the northern forests are there is perhaps something of satire in the statement that " there is generally on Crown lands an unlimited supply of the best fuel." What of that, however ? The intending emi- grant knows nothing of the struggle with the woods, and fuel is fuel in Old England. The mining of the precious metals, the fisheries, petroleum, all are open to the settler — let him but come. Reading these docu- ments, we can only rub our eyes, and wonder how it is that human selfishness allows the Canadian officials to disclose the wonders of their El Dorado to the outer world, and invite all men to share blessings which we should have expected them to keep as a close preserve for themselves and their nearest and dearest friends. Taxation in the States, the immigrants are told, is five and a half times what it is in Canada, two and a half times the English rate. Labourers by the thousand, merchants and farmers by the score, are said to be flocking into Canada to avoid the taxation of the Radicals. The average duration of life in Canada is 37 per cent, higher than in the States. Yet, in the face of all these facts, only twenty or two and twenty thousand immigrants come to Canada for three hundred thousand that flock annually to the VI.] CANADA. 77 States, and of the former many thousands do but pass through on their way to the Great We^t. Of the twenty thousand who land at Quebec in each year, but four and a half thousand remain a year in Canada; and there are a quarter of a million of persons bo^n in British America now naturalised in the United States. The passage of the immigrants to the Western States is not for want of warning. The Canadian Govern- ment advertise every Coloradan duel, every lynching in Montana, every Opposition speech in Kansas, by way of teaching the immigrants to respect the country of which they are about to become free citizens. It is an unfortunate fact, that these strange state- ments are not harmless — not harmless to Canada, I mean. The Provincial Government by these publi- cations seems to confess to the world that Canada can live only by running down the great republic. Canadian sympathy for the rebellion tends to make us think that the Northern statesmen must not only share in our old-world confusion of the notions of right and wrong, but must be sadly short-sighted into the bargain. It is only by their position that they arc blinded, for few countries have abler men than Sir James Macdonald, or sounder statesmen than Cartier or Gait ; but, like men standing on the edge of a cliff, Canadian statesmen are always wanting to jump off. Had Great Britain left them to their own devices, we should have had war with America in the spring of 1866. The position of Canada is in many ways anomalous: 78 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. of the two chief sections of our race — that in Britain an 1 that in America — the latter is again split in twain, and one division governed from across the Atlantic. For such government there is no pretext, except the wishes of the governed, who gain by the connexion men for their defence, and the opportunity of gratify- ing their spite for their neighbours at our expense. Those who ask why a connexion so one-sided, so opposed to the best interests of our race, should be suffered to continue, are answered, now that the argument of "prestige" is given up, that the Canadians are loyal, and that they hate the Americans, to whom, were it not for us, they must inevitably fall. That the Canadians hate the Americans can be no reason why we should spend blood and treasure in protecting them against the consequences of their hate. The world should have passed the time when local dislikes can be suffered to affect our policy towards the other sections of our race ; but even were it otherwise, it is hard to see how twelve thousand British troops, or a royal standard hoisted at Ottawa, can protect a frontier of two thousand miles in length from a nation of five and thirty millions. Canada, perhaps, can defend herself, but we most cei lainly cannot defend her : we provoke much more than we assist. As for Canadian " loyalty," it appears to consist merely of hatred towards America, for while we were fighting China and conquering the rulers of Japan, that we might spread free trade, our loyal colonists of Canada set upon our goods protective duties of 20 per cent, which they have now in some degree V»0 ' CANADA. 70 reiroved, only that they may get into their hands the smuggling trade carried on in breach of the laws of our ally, their neighbour. We might, at least, fairly insist that the connexion should cease, unless Canada will entirely remove her deities. At bottom, it would seem as though no one gained by the retention of our hold on Canada. Were she independent, her borders would never again be wasted by Fenian hordes, and she would escape the terrible danger of being the battle-field in which Eurooean quarrels are fought out. Canada once republican^ the Monroe doctrine would be satisfied, and its most violent partisans would cease to advocate the adop- tion of other than moral means to merge her territories m the Union. An independent Canada would not long delay the railway across the continent to Pucret Sound, which a British bureau calls impossible England would be relieved from the fear of a certain defeat by America in the event of war-a fear always harmful, even when war seems most unlikely ;— re- lieved, too, from the cost of such panics as 'those of 1861 and 1866*. Did Canada stand alone, no ofi"enee that she could give America would be likely to unite all sections of that country in an attempt to conquer her ; while on the other hand, such an attempt would be resisted to the death by an armed and brave people, four milhons strong. As it is, any off-ence towards America committed by our agents, at any place or tune, or arising out of the continual changes of policy and of ministry in Great Britain, united to the stand- 80 GREATER BRITAIN. [ciiAr. ing offence of maintaining the monarcliical principle in North Ameiica, will bring uj)on unhappy Canada the whole American nation, indignant in some cause, just, or seeming just, and to be met by a people deceived into putting their trust in a few regiments of British troops, sufficient at the most to hold Quebec, and to be backed by reinforcements which could never come in time, did public opinion in Great Britain so much as permit tbeir sailing. On the other hand, in all history there is nothing stranger than the narrowness of mind that has led us to see in Canada a piece of England, and in America a hostile country. There are more sons of British subjects in America than in Canada, by far ; and the American looks upon the old country with a pride that cannot be shared by a man who looks to her to pay his soldiers. The independence of Canada would put an imme- diate end to much of the American jealousy of Great Britain — a consideration which of itself should out- weigh any claim to protection which the Canadians can have on us. The position which we have to set before us in our external dealings is, that we are no more fellow-countrymen of the Canadians than of the Americans of the North or West. The capital of the new dominion is to be Ottawa, known as "Hole in the Woods" among the friends of Toronto and Montreal, and once called By town. It consists of the huge Parliament House, the Govern- ment printing-office, some liouseless Avildernesses meant for streets, and the hotel where the members VI.] CANADA. 81 of the Legislature " board/' Sucli Avas the senatorial throng at the moment of my visit, that we were thrust into a detached building made of half-inch planks, with wide openings between the boards ; and as the French Canadian members were excited about the resignation of Mr. Gait, indescribable chattering and bawling filled the house. The view from the Parliament House is even more thoroughly Canadian than that from the terrace at Quebec — a view of a land of rapids, of pine forests, and of lumberers' homes, full of character, but some- what bleak and dreary ; even on the hottest summer's day, it tells of winter storms past and to come. On the far left are the island-filled reaches of the Upper Ottawa ; nearer, the roaring Chaudiere Falls, a mile across — a mile of walls of water, of sudden shoots, of jets, of spray. From the " cauldron" itself, into which we can hardly see, rises a column of rainbow- tinted mist, backed by distant ranges and black woods, now fast falling before the settler's axe. Below you is the river, swift, and covered with cream-like foam ; on the right, a gorge — the mouth of the Rideau Canal. When surveyed from the fittest points, the Chaudiere is but little behind Niagara ; but it may be doubted whether in any fall there is that which can be called sublimity. Natural causes are too evident : water, rushing to find its level, falls from a ledge of rock. How different from a storm upon the coast, or from a September sunset, where the natural causes are so remote that you can bring yourself almost to VOL. I. Q 82 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. see the immediate hand of God. It is excusable in Americans, who have no sea-coast worthy of the name, to talk of Niagara as the perfection of the sublime ;• Init it is strange that a people who have Birling Gap and Bantry Bay should allow themselves to be led by such a cry. Niagara has one beauty in which it is unapproached by the great Chaudiere : the awesome slowness with which the deep-green flood, in the centre of the Horse- shoe Fall, rolls rather than plunges into the gulf. ■I ■ f • • I * •, I I ^i,-- K. -.v;- I l-.-r t Tit.] UmVEBSITY OF MICHIGAN. .> II f ^; CHAPTER VII. »''-■--.,'..'■ .■',■' ,' .' UNIVERSITY OP MICHIGAN. ■ 'f ,. ,. ■ , , - > From the gloom of Buffalo, tlie smoke of Cincinnati, and the dirt of Pittsburg, I should have been glad to escape as soon as might be, even had not the death from cholera of 240 persons in a single day of my visit at the " Queen City " warned me to fly north. From a stricken town, with its gutters full of cldoride of lime, and fires burning in the public streets, to green Michigan, was a grateful change ; but I wi.^ full of sorrow at leaving that richest and most lovely of all States — Ohio. There is a charm in the park-like beauty of the Monongahela valley, dotted with vines and orchards, that nothing in Eastern America can rival. The absence at once of stumps in the corn- fields, and of untilled or unfenced land, gives the '' buckeye State" a look of age that none of the " old Eastern States" can show. In corn, in meadow, in timber-land, Ohio stands alone. Her Indian corn exceeds in ricLncss that of any other State ; she has ample stores of iron, and coal is worked upon the surface in every Alleghany valley. Wool, wine, hops, tobacco, all are raised ; her Catawba has inspired poems. Every river side is clothed with groves of G 2 84 . : GREATER BRITAIN. -. [chap. oak, of hickory, of sugar-maple, of sycamore, of poplar, and of buckeye. But, as I said, the change to the Michigan prairie was full of a delightful relief ; ■ it was Holland after the Rhine, London after Paris. Where men grow tall theie will maize grow tall, is a good sound rule : limestone makes both bone and straw. The North-western States, inhabited by giant men, are the chosen home of the most useful and beautiful of plants, the maize — in America called "corn." For hundreds of miles the railway track, protected not even by a fence or hedge, runs through the towering plants, which hide all prospect save that of their own green pyramids. Maize feeds the people, it feeds the cattle and the hogs that they export to feed the cities of the East ; from it is made yearly, as an Ohio farmer told me, " whisky enough to float the ark." liice is not more the support of the Chinese than maize of the Americans. In the great corn-field of the North-western States, dwells a people without a history, without tradition, busy at hewing out of the forest trunks codes and social usages of its own. The Kansas men have set themselves to emancipating women ; the " Wol- verines," as the people of Michigan are called, have turned their heads to education, and are teaching the teacheis upon this point. The rapidity with which intellectual activity is awakened in the West is inexplicable to the people of New England. While you are admiring the laws of Minnesota and Wisconsin, Boston men tell you that the resemblance of the code of Kansas to that of VII.] UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. 86 Connecticut is consequent only on the fact, that the framers of the former possessed a copy of this one New England code, while they had never set eyes upon the code of any other country in the world. While Yale and Harvard are trying in vain to keep pace with the State universities of Michigan and Kansas, you will meet in Lowell and New Haven men who apply an old Russian story to the Western colleges, and tell you that their professors of lan- guages, when asked wuere they have studied, reply that they guess they learned to read and write in Springfield. One of the difficulties of the New England colleges has been to reconcile university traditions with demo- cracy ; but in the Western States there is neither reconciliation nor tradition, though universities are plenty. Probably the most democratic school in the whole world is the State university of Michigan, situate at Ann Arbor, near Detroit. It is cheap, large, practical; twelve hundred students, paying only the ten dollars' entrance fee, and five dollars a year during residence, and living where they can in the little to^vn, attend the university to be prepared to enter with knowledge and resolution upon the aftairs of their future life. A few only are educated by having their minds unfolded that they may become many-sided men ; but all work with spirit, and with that earnestness which is seen in the Scotch universities at home. The war with crime, the war with sin, the war with death — Law, Theology, Medicine— these are the three foremost of man's 86 G BEATER BRITAIN. [chap. employments; to these, accordingly, the University affords her chiefest care, and to one of these the student, his entrance examination passed, often gives his entire time. .^^ These things are democratic, but it is not in them that the essential democracy of the University is to be seen. There are at Michigan no honour-lists, no classes in our sense, no orders of merit, no com- petition. A man takes, or does not take, a certain degree. The University is governed, not by its members, not by its professors, but by a parliament of "regents" ai^pointed by the inhabitants of the State. Such arc the two great principles of the democratic University of the West. It might be supposed that these two strange de- partures from the systems of older universities were irregularities, introduced to meet the temporary em- barrassments incidental to educational establishments in young States. So far is this from being the case, that, as I saw at Cambridge, the clearest-sighted men of the older colleges of America are trying to assimi- late their teaching system to that of Michigan — at ,. least, in the one point of the absence of competition. They assert that toil performed under the excitement of a fierce struggle between man and man is un- healthy work, different in nature and in results from the loving labour of men whose hearts are really in what they do : toil, in short, not very easily distinguishable from slave-labour. In the matter of the absence of competition, Michi- gan is probably but returning to Cue system of the VII.] UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. 87 European universities of the Middle Ages, but the government by othei- than the members of the Uni- versity is a still stranger scheme. It is explained when we look to the sources whence the funds of the University are drawn — namely, from the tax- payers of the State. The men who have set up this corporation in their midst, and who tax themselves for its support, cannot be called on, as they say, to renounce its government to their nominees. Pro- fessors from New England, unconnected with the State, men of one idea, often quarrelsome, sometimes " irreligious " — for religious points have been contested bitterly in the senate of Ann Arbor. There is much truth in these statements of the case, but it is to be hoped that the men chosen to serve as " regents " are of a higher intellectual stamp thaii those appointed to educational offices in the Canadian backwoods. A report was put into my hands at Ottawa, in which a Superintendent of Instruction writes to the Minister of Education, that he had advised the ratepayers of Victoria county not in future to elect as school trustees men who cannot read or write. As Micnigan grows older, she will, perhaps, seek to conform to the practice of other universities in this matter of her government, but in the point of absence of competition she is likely to continue firm. Even here some difficulty is found in getting com- petent school directors; one of them reported 31^ children attending school. Of another district its superintendent reports : — " Conduct of scholars about the same as that of 'Young America' in general." 88 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. Some of the superintendents aim o,t jocosity, and show no want of talent in themselves, while their efforts are to demonstrate its deficiency among the boys. The superintendent of Grattan says, in answer to some numbered questions : — " Condition good, improvement fair ; for ^, of J of the year in school, and fifteen- sixteenths of the time at play. Male teachers most successful with the birch ; female, with Cupid's darts. School-houses in fair whittling order. A])paratus : — Shovel, none ; tongs, ditto ; poker, one. Conduct of scholars like that of parents — good, bad, and indif- ferent. No minister in town — sorry ; no lawyer — good !" The superintendents of Manlius township report that Districts 1 and 2 have buildings " fit (in winter) only for the polar bear, walrus, reindeer, Kussian sable, or Siberian bat f and they go on to say, " Our children read everything, from Mr. Noodle's Essays on Matrimony to Artemus Ward's Lecture on First Principles of American Government." Another report from a very new county runs : — " Sunday- schools afford a little reading-matter to the children. Character of matter most read — battle, murder, and sudden death." A third states that the teachers are meanly paid, and goes on : — " If the teaching is no better than the pay, it must be like the soup that the rebels gave the prisoners." A superintendent, reporting that the success of the teachcis is greater than their qualifications warrant, says : — " The reason is to be found in Lhe Yankeeish adaptability of even Wolverines." After all, it is hard even to pass jokes at the vu.] UNIVERSITY OF MICIIIOAN. 89 expense of the North-western people. A population who would maintain schools on such a footing under difficulties apparently overwhelming was the source from which to draw Union Volunteers sucli as those who, after the war, returned to their Northern homes, I have been told, shocked and astonished at the ignorance and debasement of the Southern whites. The system of elective studies pursued at Michigan is one to which we are year by year tending in the English universities. As sciences multiply and deepen, it becomes more and more impossible that a "general course" system can produce men fit to take their places in the world. Cambridge has attempted to set up both, and, giving her students the choice, bids them pursue one branch of study with a view to honours, or take a less-valued degree requiring some slight proficiency in many things. Michigan denies that the stimulus of honour exami- nations should be connected witL the elective system. With her, men first graduate in science, or in an arts degree, which bears a close resemblance to the English " poll," and then pursue their elected study in a course which leads to no university distinction, which is free from the struggle for place and honours. These objections to "honours" rest upon a more solid foundation than a mere democratic hatred of inequality of man and man. Repute as a writer, as a practitioner, is valued by the Ann Arbor man, and the Wolverines do not follow the Ephesians, and tell men who excel among them to go and excel elsewhere. The Michigan Professors say, and Dr. Hedges bears 90 GREATER BRITAIN. .•,:..: [chap. tliem out, that a far higher average of true work and real knowledge is obtained under this system of in- dependent work than is dreamt of in colleges where competition rules. " A higher average " is all they say, and they acknowledge frankly that there is here and there a student to be found to whom competition would do good. As a rule, they tell us, this is not the case. Unlimited battle between man and man for place is sufficiently the bane of the world not to be made the curse of schools : competition breeds every evil which it is the aim of education, the duty of a university, to suppress : pale faces caused by excessive toil, feverish excitement that prevents true work, a hatred of the subject on which the toil is spent, jealousy of best friends, systematic depreciation of men's talents, rejection of all reading that will not "pay," extreme unhealthy cultivation of memory, general degradation of labour — all these evils, and many more, are charged upon the competition system. Everything that our Professors have to say of " cram" these American thinkers ap2:)ly to compe- tition. Strange doctrines these for Young America ! Of the practical turn which we should naturally expect to find in the university of a bran-new State I found evidence v\ the regulation which prescribes that the degree oi Master of Arts shall not be con- ferred as a matter of course upon graduates of three years' standing, but only upon such as have pursued professional or general scientific studies during^ that period. Even in these cases an examination before some one of the faculties is required for the Master's vn.] UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. 91 degree. I was told that for the Medical degree four years of "reputable" practice is received instead of certain courses. In her special and selected studies, Michigan is as merely practical as Swift's University of Brobdingnag ; but, standing far above the ordinary arts or scionce courses, there is a " University course " designed for those who have already taken the Bachelor's degree. It is harder to say what thii. course includes than what it does not. The twenty heads range over philo- logy, philosophy, art, and science ; there is a branch of "criticism," one of "arts of design," one of "fine arts." Astronomy, ethics, and Oriental languages are all embraced in a scheme brought into working order within ten years of the time when Michigan was a wilderness, and the college-yard an Indian hunting- ground. Michigan entered upon education-work very early in her history as a State. In 1850, her legislature commissioned the Hon. Ira Mayhew to prepare a work on education for circulation throughout America. Her progress has been as rapid as her start was good ; her natural history collection is already one of the most remarkable in America ; her medical school is almost unequalled, and students flow to her even from New England and from Ccilifornia, while from Kew York she draws a hundred men a year. In only one point is Ann Arbor anywhere but in the van : she has hitherto followed the New England colleges in excluding women. The State university of Kansas has not shown the same exclusiveness that has charac- 92 GREATER BBTTAIN. [chap. terised the conduct of the rulers of Michigan : women are admitted not only to the classes, but to the Professorships at Lawrence. This North-western institution at Ann Arbor was not behind even Harvard in the war ; it supplied the Union army with 1,000 men. The l7th regiment of Michigan Volunteers, mainly composed of teachers and Ann Arbor students, has no cause to fear the rivalry of any other record ; and such was the eifect of the war, that in 1860 there were in Michigan 2,600 male to 5,350 female teachers, whereas now there are but 1,300 men to 7,500 women. So proud are Michigan men of their roll of honour, that they publish it at full length in the calendar of the University. Every "class" from the foundation of the schools shows some graduates distinguished in their country's service during the suppression of the rebellion. The Hon Oramel Hosford, Superintendent of Public Instruction in Michigan, reports that, owing to the presence of crowds of returned soldiers, the schools of the State are filled alm^ost to the limit of their capacity, while some are compelled to close their doors against the thronging crowds. Captains, colonels, generals are among the students now humbly learning in the Ann Arbor University Schools. The State of Michigan is peculiar in the form that she has given to her higher teaching ; but in no way peculiar in the attention she bestows on education. Teaching, high and low, is a passion in the West, and each of these young States has established a University of the highest order, and placed in every VII.] UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. §^ to wr ship not only schools, but public libraries, sup- ported from the rates, and managed by the people. Not only have the appropriations for educational purposes by each State been large, but those of the Federal Government have been upon the most splendid scale. What has been done in the Eastern and the Central States no man can tell, but even west of the Mississippi twenty-two million acres have already been granted for such purposes, while fifty-six million more are set aside for similar gifts. The Americans are not forgetful of their Puritan traditions. 94 GREATER BRITAIN. , [chap. -.-.|<^ ■. 4 CHAPTER VIII. ) .»f^t . )' . THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. ' '' When the companions of the explorer Cartier found that the rapids at Montreal were not the end of all navigation, as they had feared, but that above them there commenced a second and boundless reach of deep, still waters, they fancied they had found the long -looked -for route to China, and cried, "La Chine ! " So the story goes, and the name has stuck to the place. Up to 1861, the Canadians remained in the belief that they were at least the potential possessors of the only possible road for the China trade of the future, for in that year a Canadian government paper declared that the Rocky Mountains, south of British territory, were impassable for railroads. Maps showed that from St. Louis to San Francisco the distance was twice that from the head of navigation on Lake Superior to the British Pacific ports. America has gone through a fiv. years' agony since that time ; but now, in the first days of peace, we find that the American Pacific Railroad, growing at the average rate of two miles a day at one end, and one mile a day at the other, will stretch from sea to sea in viii.l THE PACIFIC BAILROAT). 95 1669 or 1370, wliile tlio British line remains a dream. Not only have the Rocky Mountains turned out to be passable, but the engineers have found themselves compelled to decide on the conflicting claims of passes without number. Wall-like and frowniig as the Rocky Mountains are when seen from the plains,, the rolling gaps are many, and they are easier crossed by railway lines than the less lofty chains of Europe. From the heat of the country, the snow-line lies high ; the chosen pass is in the latitude of Constantinople or Oporto. The dryness of the air of the centre of a vast continent prevents the fall of heavy snows or rains in winter. At eight or nine thousand feet above the sea, in the Black Hills, or Eastern Pied- mont, the drivers on the Pacific line will have slighter snow-drifts to encounter than their brothers on the Grand Trunk or the Camden and Amboy at the sea- level. On the other hand, fuel and water are scarce, and there is an endless succession of smaller snowy chains which have to be crossed upon the Grand Plateau, or basin of the Great Salt Lake. Wliatever the difficulties, in 1869 or 1870 the line will be an accomplished fact. In the Act creating the Pacific Railroad Company, passed in 1862, the company were bound to complete their line at the rate of a hundred miles a year. They are completinf^ it at more than three times that rate. When the Act is examined, it ceases to be strange that the road should be pushed with extraordinary 96 . a HEATER BRITAIN. [chap," energy and speed, so numerous are the baits offered to the companies to hasten it3 completion. Money- is to be advanced them ; land is to be given them for every mile they finish — on a generous scale while the line is on the plains, on three times the scale when it reaches the most rugged tracts. These grants alone are estimated at twenty millions of acres. Besides the alternate sections, a width of 400 feet, with additional room for works and stations, is granted for the line. The Californian Company is tempted by similar offers to a race with the Union Pacific, and each company is struggling to lay the most miles, an/i get the most land upon the great basin. It is the interest of the Eastern Company th^it the junc- tion should be as far as possible to the west ; of the Western, that it should be as far as possible to the east. The result is an average laying of three, and an occasional construction of four, miles a day. If we look to the progress at both ends, we find as much sometimes laid in a day as a bullock train could travel. So fast do the head-quarters " cities " keep moving forwards, that at the Californian end the superintendent wished me to believe, that whenever his chickens heard a wagon pass, they threw them- selves upon their backs, and held up their legs, that they might be tied, and thrown into the cart for a fresh move. " They are true birds of passage," he said. When the iron trains are at the front, the laying will for a short time proceed at the rate of nine yards in every fifteen seconds ; but three or four hundred tons of rails have to be brought up every day upon VIII.] THE FACIFin RAILROAD. 97 the single track, and it is in this that the time is lost. The advance carriages of the construction-train are well supplied with rifles hung from the roofs ; but even when the Indians forget their amaze, and attack the " city upon wheels," or tear up the track, they are incapable of destroying the line so fast as the machinery can lay it down. " Soon," as a Denver paper said, during my stay in the Mountain City, " the iron horse will sniff the Alpine breeze upon the summit of the Black Hills, 9,000 feet above the sea ; " and upon the plateau, where deer are scarce and buffalo unknown, the Indians have all but disap- peared. The worst Indian country is already crossed, and the red len have sullenly followed the buffalo to the South, and occupy the country between Kansas State and Denver, contenting themselves with pre- venting the construction of the Santa Fe and Denver routes to California. Both for the end in view, and the energy with which it is pursued, the Pacific railroad will stand first among the achieve- ments of our times. If the end to be kept in view in the construction of the first Pacific railroad line were merely the traffic from China and Japan to Europe, or the shortest route from San Francisco to Hampton Koads, the Kansas route through St. Ijouis, Denver, and the Berthoud Pass would be, perhaps, the best and shortest of those within the United States; but the Saskatchewan line through British territory, with Halifax and Puget Sound for ports, would be still VOL. I. H 98 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. more advantageous. As it is, the true question seems to be, not tlie trade between the Paeific and Great Britain, but between Asia and America., for Penn- sylvania and Ohio must be the manufacturing countries of the next fifty years. Whatever our theory, the fact is plain enough : in 1870 we shall reach San Francisco from London in less time than by the severest travelling I can reach it from Denver in 1866. AVherever, in the States, North and South have met in conflict. North has won. New York has beaten Norfolk ; Chicago, in spite of its inferior situation, has beaten the older St. Louis. In the same way, Omaha, or cities still farther north, will carry off the trade from Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Kansas City. Ultimately Puget Sound may beat San Fran- cisco in the race for the Pacific trade, and the Southern cities become still less able to keep their place than they have been hitherto. Time after time, Chicago has thrown out intercepting lines, and diverted from St. Louis trade which seemed of neces- sity to belong to her ; and the success of the Union Pacific line, and failure of the Kansas road, is a fresh proof of the superior energy of the Northern to the Southern city. This time a fresh element enters into the calculation, and declares for Chicago. The great circle route, the true straight line, is in these great distances shorter by fifty or a hundred miles than the straight lines of the maps and charts, and the Platte route becomes not only the natural, bi;t the shortest route from sea to sea. vni.] THE PACIFIC RAILROAD. 99 Chicago has a great aflvantagc over St. Louis in her comparative freedom from the cholera, whicli yearly attacks the Missoiirian city. During my stay in St. Louis, the deaths from cholera alone were lvno^vn to have reached 200 a day, in a population diminished by flight to 180,000. A quarantine was established on the river ; the sale of fruit and vege- tables prohibited ; prisoners released on condition that they should work at burying the dead ; and funeral corteges were forbidden. Chicago herself, unreached by the plague, was scattering handbills on every Western railroad line, warning immigrants af]fainst St. Louis. The Missourians have relied over much upon the Mississippi river, and have forgotten that railroads are superseding steamboats every day. Chicago, on the other hand, which ten yeais ago was the twentieth city in America, is probably by this time the third. As a centre of thought, political and religious, she stands second only to Boston, and her Wabash and Michigan avenues are among the most beautiful of streets. One of the chief causes of the future wealth of America is to be found in the fact that all her "inland" towns are ports. The State of Michigan lies between 500 and 900 miles from the ocean, but the single State has upon the great lakes a coast of 1,500 miles. From Fort Benton to the sea by water is nearly 4,000 miles, but the post is a much-used steamboat port, though more distant, even in the air-line, from the nearest sea upon the same side the dividing range, than is the H 2 100 GREATER BRITAIN. [cnAr. Wliitc Soa from tlic Persian Gulf. Put it in wliich way you would.. Europe could not hold this navigation. A great American city is almost invariahly placed at a point where an important railroad finds an out- port on a lake or river. This is no adaptation to rail- ways of the Limerick saying about rivers — namely, that Providence has everywhere so placed them as to pass through the great towns ; for in America j nil ways precede population, and when mapped out and laid, they are but tramways in the desert. There is no great wonder in this when we remember that 158,000,000 acres of land have been up to this time granted to railroads in America. One tendency of a costly railroad system is that few lines will be made, and trade being thus driven into certain unchanging routes, a small number of cities will flourish greatly, and, by acting as housing stations or as ports, will rise to enormous wealth and popula- tion. Wlierc a system of cheap railways is adopted, there will be year by year a tendency to multiply lines of traffic, and consequently to multiply also ports and seats of trade — a tendency, however, which may be more than neutralised by any special circumstances which may cause the lines of transit to converge ra,ther than run parallel to one another. Of the system of costly grand trunk lines we have an instance in India, where we see the creation of Umritsar and the pros- perity of Calcutta alike due to our single great Bengal line ; of the converging system we have excellent instances in Chicago and Bombay ; while we see the VIII.] TIIE PACIFIC BAILROAD. .101 plan of parallel lines in action licrc in Kansas, and causing the comi)arativc equality of progress mani- fested in Leavenworth, in Atchison, in Omaluu The coasts of India swarmed with ports till our trunk lines ruined Goa and Surat to advance Bombay, and a hundred village ports to push our factory at Calcutta, founded by Charnock as late as 1690, but now grown to be the third or fourth city of the empire. Of the dozen chaotic cities which are struggling for the honour of becoming the future capital of the West, Leavenworth, with 20,000 people, three daily papers, an opera house, and 200 drinking saloons, was, at the time of my visit in 18GG, somewhat ahead of Omaha, with its 12,000, two papers, and a single ** one-horse" theatre, though the Northern city tied Leavenworth in the point of " saloons." Omaha, Leavenworth, Kansas City, Wyandotte, Atchison, Topeka, Lecompton, and Lawrence, eacn praises itself, and runs down its neighbour. Leaven- worth claims to be so healthy that when it lately became necessary to " inaugurate " the new graveyard, "they had to shoot a man on purpose" — a change since the days when the Southern Border Ruffians were in the habit of parading its streets, bearing the scalps of Abolitionists stuck on poles. On the other hand, a Nebraska man, when asked whether the Kansas people were faiiiy honest, said : " Don't know about honest ; but they do say as how the folk around take in their stone fences every night." Lawrence, the State capital, which is on the dried-up Kansas river, sneeringly says of all the new towns on the Missouri that the boats 102 ' GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. that ply between them are so dangerous that the fare is collected m instalments every five minutes through- out the trip. Next after the jealousy between two Australian colonies, there is nothing equal to the hatreds between cities competing for the same trade. Omaha has now the best chance of becoming the capital of the Far West, but Leavenworth will no doubt continue to be the chief town of Kansas. The progress of the smaller cities is amazing. Pistol- shots by day and night are frequent, but trade and development are little interfered with by such inci- dents as these ; and as the village-cities are peopled up, the pioneers, shunning their fellows, keep pushing westwards, seeking new "locations." "You're the second man I've seen this fall ! Darn me, ef 'tain't 'bout time to varmose out westerly — y," is the standing joke of the " frontier-bdrs " against each other. ^H ^n ^^ ^p ^^ fl* At St. Louis I had met my friend Mr. Hepwortli Dixon, just out from England, and with him I visited the Kansas towns, and then pushed through Waumego to Manhattan, the terminus (for the day) of the Kansas Pacific line. Here we were thrust into what space remained between forty leathern mail-bags and the canvas roof of the mule-drawn ambulance, which was to be at once our prison for six nights, and our fort upon wheels against the Indians. IX. J OMPHALISM. 103 CHAPTEE IX. OMPHALISM. Dashing through a grove of cottonwood trees draped in bignonia and ivy, we came out suddenly upon a charming scene : a range of huts and forts crowning a long low hill seamed with many a timber-clothed ravine, while the clear stream, of the Eepublican fork wreathed itself about the woods and bluffs. The block-house, over which floated the stars and stripes, was Fort Riley, the Hyde Park Corner from which continents are to measure all their miles ; the " capital of the universe," or " centre of the world." Not that it has always been so. Geographers will be glad to learn that not only does the earth gyrate, but that the centre of its ci'ust also moves : within the last ten years it has removed westwards Unto Kansas from Missouri — from Independence to Fort Riley. The contest for centreship is no new thing. Herodotus held that Greece was the very middle of the world, and that the unhappy Orientals were frozen, and the yet more unfortunate Atlantic Indians baked every afternoon of their poor lives in order that the sun might shine on Greece at noon ; London plumes herself on being the " centre of the terrestrial globe ;" 104 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. Boston is the " hub of the hull universe," though the latter claim is less physical than moral, I believe. In Fort Riley, the "Western men seem to have found the physical centre of the United States, but they claim for the Great Plains as well the intellectual as the political leadership of the whole continent. These hitherto untrodden tracts, they tell you, form the heart of the empire, from which the life-blood must be driven to the extremities. Geographical and political centres must ultimately coincide. • Connected with this belief is another Western theory — that the powers of the future must be " Con- tinental." Germany, or else Eussia, is to absorb all Asia and Europe, except Britain. North America is already cared for, as the gradual extinction of the Mexicans and absorption of the Canadians they consider certain, j^s for South America, the Califor- nians are already planning an occupation of Western Brazil, on the ground that the Continental power of South America must start from the head waters of the great rivers, and spread seawards down the streams. Even in the Brazilian climate, they believe that the Anglo-Saxon is destined to become the dominant race. • . The success of this omphalism, this government from the centre, will be brought about, in the Western belief, by the necessity under which the natives on the head waters of all streams will find themselves of having the outlets in their hands. Even if it be true that railways are beating rivers, still the railways must also lead seawards to the ports, and the need .IX.] OMPHALISM. 105 for their control is still felt by tlie producers in the centre countries of the continent. The Upper States must everywhere command the Lower, and salt-water 'despotism find its end. , - . The Americans of the Valley States, who fought all the more heartily in the Federal cause from the fiict that they were battling for the freedom of the Mississippi against the men who held its mouth, look forward to the time when they will have to assert, peaceably but with firmness, their right to the free- dom of their railways througli the Northern Atlantic States. Whatever their respect for New England, it cannot be expected that they are for ever to permit Illinois and Ohio to be neutralised in the Senate by Ehode Island and Vermont. If it goes hard with New England, it will go still harder with New York ; and the West> ii men look forward to the day when Washington will be removed, Congress and all, to Columbus or Fort Riley. The singular wideness of Western thought, always verging on extravagance, is traceable to the width of Western land. The immensity of the continent produces a kind of intoxication ; there is moral dram- drinking in the contemplation of the map. No Fourth of July oration can come up to the plain facts con- tained in th3 Land Commissioners' report. The public domain of the United States still consists of one thousand five hundred millions of acres ; there are two hundred thousand square miles of coal-lands in the country, ten times as much as in all the remaining world. In the AVestern territories not yet States, 106 \QREATER BRITAIN. [chap. tliere is land sufficient to bear, at the English popula- tion rate, five hundred and fifty millions of human beings. It is strange to see how the Western country dwarfs the Eastern States. Buffalo is called a "Western city ;" yet from New York to Buffalo is only three hundred and fifty miles, and Buffalo is but seven hundred miles to the west of the most eastern point in all the United States. On the other hand, from Buffalo we can go two thousand five hundred miles westwards without quitting the United States. " The West" is eight times as wide as the Atlantic States, and will soon be eight times as strong. The conformation of North America is widely different to that of any other continent on the globe. In Europe, the glaciers of the Alps occupy the centre point, and shed the waters towards each of the surrounding seas : confluence is almost unknown. So it is in Asia : there the Indus flowing into the Arabian Gulf, the Oxus into the Sea of Aral, the Ganges into the Bay of Bengal, the Yangtse Kiang into the Pacific, and the Yenesei into the Arctic Ocean, all take their rise in the central table- land. In South America, the mountains form a wall upon the west, whence the rivers flow east- wards in parallel lines. In North America alone are there mountains on each coast, and a trough between, into which the rivers i.low together, giving in a single valley 23,000 miles of navigable stream to be ploughed by steamships. The map proclaims the essential unity of North America. Political IX] OMPHALISM. 107 geography miglit be a more interesting study tlian it lias yet been made. In reaching Leavenworth, I had crossed two of the five divisions of America : the other three lie before me on my way to San Francisco. The eastern slopes of the AUeghanies, or Atlantic coast ; their western slopes ; the Great Plains ; the Grand Plateau, and the Pacific coast — these are the five divisions. Fort Eiley, the centre of the United States, is upon the border of the third division, the Great Plains. The Atlantic coast is poor and stony, but the slight altitude of the Alleghany chains has prevented it being a hindrance to the passage of population to the West : the second of the divisions is now the richest and most powerful of the five ; but the wave of immigration is crossing the Mississippi and Missouri into the Great Plains, and here at Fort Eiley we are upon the limit of civilization. This spot is not only the centre of the United States and of the continent, but, if Denver had contrived to carry the Pacific railroad by the Berthoud Pass, would have been the centre station uj^on what Governor Gilpin of Colorado calls the "Asiatic and European railway line." As it is, Columbus in Nebraska has somewhat a better chance of becoming the Washington of the future than has this blockhouse. Quitting Fort Riley, we found ourselves at once upon the Plains. No more sycamore and white-oak and honey-locust ; no more of the rich deep green of the Cottonwood groves ; but yellow earth, yellow flowers. 108 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. yellow grass, and here and there groves of giant sun- flowers with yellow blooms, but no more trees As the sun set, we came on a body of cavalry marching slowly from the Plains towards the Fort. Before them, at some little distance, walked a sad- faced man on foot, in sober riding dress, with a repeating carbine slung across his back. It was Sherman returning from his expedition to Santa Fd. x] LETTER FROM DENVER. 109 My dear CHAPTER X. LETTER FROM DENVER. Monday, 3rd Sej^temher Here we are, scalps and all. On Tuesday last, at sundown, we left Fort Riley, and supped at Junction City, the extreme point that " civilization" has reached upon the Plains. Civiliza- tion means whisky : post-offices don't count. It was here that it first dawned upon us that we were being charged 500 dollars to guard the United States Californian mail, with the compensation of the chance of being ourselves able to rob it with impunity. It is at all events the case that we, well armed as the mail-officers at Leavenworth insisted on our being, sat inside with forty-two cwt. of mail, in open bags, and over a great portion of the route had only the driver with us, without whose know- ledge we could have read all and stolen most of the letters, and with whose knowledge, but against whose will, we could have carried off the whole, leavinjr hmi gagged, bound, and at the mercy of the Indians^ As it was, a mail-bag fell out one day, without the knowledge of either Dixon or the driver, who were 110 GBEATER BRITAIN. [chap. outside, and I had to shout pretty freely before they would pull up. On Wednesday we had our last " squar' meal " in the shape of a breakfast, at Fort Ellsworth, and soon were out upon the almost unknown Plains. In the morning Ave caught up and passed long wagon trains, each wagon drawn by eight oxen, and guarded by two drivers and one horseman, all armed with breech- loading rifles and revolvers, or with the new "re- peaters," before which breech-loaders and revolvers must alike go down. All day we kept a sharp look- out for a party of seven American officers, who, in defiance of the scout's advice, had gone out from the fort to hunt buffalo upon the track. About sundown we came into the little station of Lost Creek. The ranchmen told us that they had, during the day, been driven in from th^ir work by a party of Cheyennes, and that they had some doubts as to the wisdom of the officers in going out to hunt. They had passed here at mid-day. Just as we were leaving the station, one of the officers' horses dashed in riderless, and was caught; and about two miles from the station we passed another on its back, ripped up either by a knife or buffalo horn. The saddle was gone, but there were no other marks of a fight. We believe that these officers w< re routed by buffalo, not Cheyennes, but still we should be glad to hear of them. The track is marked in many parts of the plams by stakes, such as those from which the Llano Esta- cado takes its name ; but this evening we turned X.] LETTER FROM DENVER. HI off into devious lines by way of precaution against aml)uscaclcs, coming round througli the sandy beds of streams to the ranches for the cliange of mules. The ranchmen were always ready for us; for, wliilc we were still a mile away, our driver would put his hand to his mouth, and give a "Howl howl how ! how — w ! " the Cheyenne war-whoop. In the weird glare that follows sunset wc came upon a pile of rocks, admirably fitted for an am- bush. As we neared them, the driver said: "It's 'bout an even chance thet wes sculp therM" Wc could not avoid them, as there was a gully that could only be crossed at this one point. We dashed down into the " creek " and up again, past the rocks : there were no Indians, but the driver was most uneasy till we reached Big Creek. Here they could give us nothing whatever to eat, the Indians having, on Tuesday, robbed them of everything they had, and ordered them to leave within fifteen days on pain of death. For 250 miles westwards from Big Creek, we found that every station had been warned (and most plundered) by bands of Cheyennes, on behalf of the forces of the Confederation encamped near the creek itself The warning was in all cases that of fire and death at the end of fifteen days, of which nine days have expired. We found the horse-keepers of the Company everywhere leaving their stations, and were, in consequence, very nearly starved, having been unsuccessful in our shots from the "coaoL," except, indeed, at the snakes. 112 ORE I TER BRIT. I IN. [chap. On Thursday wo passed Big Timber, the only spot on the plains whore there are trees ; and there the Indians had counted the trees, and solemnly warned the men against cutting more : " Fifty-two tree. You no cut more tree — no more cut. Grass! You cut grass; grass make hig fire. You good hoy— you clear out. Fifteen day, wo come : you no gone — ugh ! " The " ugh " accompanied by an expressive pantomime. On Thursday evening we got a meal of buffalo and prairie dog, the former too strong for my failing stomach, the latter wholesome nourishment, and fit for kings — as like our rabbit in flavour as he is in shape. This was at the horse-station of " The Monu- ments," a natural temple of awesome grandeur, rising from the plains like a giant Stonchengo. On Friday we " breakfasted" at Pond Creek Station, two miles from Fort Wallis. Here the people had applied for a guard, and had been answered : " Come into the fort ; we can't spare a man." So much for the value of the present forts ; and yet even these — Wallis and Ellsworth — are 200 miles apart. We were joined at breakfast by Bill Comstock, in- terpreter to the fort — a long-haired, wild-eyed half- breed — who gave us, in an hour's talk, the full history of the Indian politics that have led to the present war. The Indians, to the number of 20,000, have been in council with the Washington Commissioners all this summer at Fort I^aramie ; and, after being clothed, fed, and armed, lately concluded a treaty. X.] LETTER FHOM DENVER. \V6 allowing" the riiiiiiiiig on the niiiil-roads. 'I'iiey now assert that this treaty was intended to a|)[tly to the Platte road (from Oninha and Atehisou through b\)rt Kearney), and to the Arkansas road, but not to the Smoky Hill road, which lies between the others, and runs through the buti'alo country ; but their real opposition is to the railroad. The Cheyennes (pro- nounced Shians) have got the Comanches, Appaches, and Arai)alioes from the south, and the Sioux and Kiowas from the north, to join them in a c(jnfede- ration under the leadership of Spotted Dog, the chief of the Little Dog section of the Cheyennes, and son of AVhite Antelope — killed at Sand Creek battle by the Kansas and Colorado Volunteers — who has sworn to avenge his father. Soon after leaving Pond Creek, we sighted at a distance hree mounted " braves," leading some horses ; and when we reached the next station, we found that they had been there, openly proclaiming that their " mounts " had been stolen from a team. All this day we sat with our revolvers laid upon the mail-bags in front of us, and our driver also had his armoury conspicuously displayed, while we swept the Plains with many an anxious glance. We were on lofty rolling downs, and to the south the eye often, ranged overmuch of the 130 miles which lay between us and Texas. To the north, the view was more bounded ; still, our chief danger lay near the boulders which here and there covered the Plains. All Thursday and Friday we never lost sight of the buffalo, in herds of about 300, and the " antc- VOL. I. I 114 OBEATER BRITAIN. [chap. lope" — the prong-horn, a kind of gazelle — in flocks of about six or seven. Prairie clogs were abundant, and wolves and black-tail deer in view every hour or two. The most singular of all the sights of the Plains is the presence every few yards of the skeletons of buffalo and of horse, of mule and of ox ; the former left by the hunters, who take but the skin, and the latter th^* losses of the mails and the waggon-trains through sunstroke and thirst. We killed a horse on the second day of our journey. When we came upon oxen that had not long been dead, we found that the intense dryness of the air had made mummies of them : there was no stench, no putrefaction. During the day, I made some practice at antelope with the driver's Ballard; but an antelope at 500 yards is not a good target. The drivers shot repeatedly at buffalo at twenty yards, but this only to keep them away from the horses ; the revolver balls did not seem to go through their hair and skin, as they merely shambled on in their usual happy sort of way, after receiving a discharge or two. The |)rairie dogs sat barking in thousands on the tops of their mounds, but we were too grateful to them for their gaiety to dream of pistol-shots. They are no " dogs " at all, but rabbits that bark, with all the coney's tricks and turns, and the same odd way of rubbing their face with their paws while they con you from top to toe. With wolves, buffalo, antelope, deer, skunks, dogs, X.] LETTER FROM DENVER. 115 plover, curlew, dottrel, herons, vultures, ravens, snakes, and locusts, we never seemed to be without a million companions in our loneliness. From Cheyenne Wells, where we changed mules in the afternoon, we brought on the ranchman's wife, painfully making room for her at our own expense. Her husband had been warned by the Cheyennes that the place would be destroyed : he meant to stay, but was in fear for her. The Cheyennes had made her work for them, and our supper had gone down Cheyenne throats. Soon after leaving the station, we encountered one of the great " dirt-storms " of the Plains. About 5 p.m. we saw a little white cloud growing into a column, which in half-an-hour turned black as night, and possessed itself of half the skies. We then saw what seemed to be a waterspout ; and, though no rain reached us, I think it was one. When the storm burst on us, we took it for rain ; and, halting, we drew down our canvas, and held it against the hurricane. We ■ soon found that our eyes and mouths were full of dust; and when I put out my hand, I felt that it was dirt, not rain, that was falling. In a few minutes it was pitch dark, and after the fall had continued for some time, there began a series of flashes of blinding lightning, in the very centre and midst of which we seemed to be. Notwithstanding this, there was no sound of thunder. The " norther " lasted some three or four hours, and when it ceased, it left us total darkness, and a wind which froze our marrow, as we again started on our way. Wlicn Fremont explored I 2 116 GREATER BRITAIN. (chap. tlii.s route, he reported that this high ridge between the Platte and Arkansas was notorious among the Indians for its tremendous dirt-storms. Sheet light- ning without thunder accompanies dust-storms in all great continents : it is as common in the Punjab as in Australia, in South as in North America. On Saturday morning, at Lake station, we got" beyond the Indians, and irxto a land of plenty, or at all events a land of something, for we got milk from the station cow, and preserved fruits that had come round through Denver from Ohio and Kentucky. Not even on Saturday, though, could we get dinner, and as I missed the only antelope that came within reach, our supper was not much heavier than our breakfast. Rolling through the Arapahoe country, where it is proposed to make a reserve for the Cheyennes, at eight o'clock in the morning we had caught sight of the glittering snows of Pike's Peak, a hundred and fifty miles away, and all the day we were galloping towards it, through a country swarming with rattle- snakes and vultures. T.ate in the evening, when we were drawing near to tiie first of the Coloradan farms, we came on a white wolf unconcernedly taking his evening prowl about the stock-yards. He sneaked along without taking . ;iy notice of us, and continued his thief-like walk with a bravery that seemed only to show that he luid never seen man before : this might well be the case, if he came from the south, near the upper forks of the Arkansas. All this, and the fretpiency of buffalo, I was unpre- pared for. I imagined that though the Plains were X.] LETTER FROM DENVER. 117 uninhabited, the game had all been killed. On the contrary, the " Smoky district " was never known so thronged with buffalo as it is this year. The herds resort to it because there they are close to the water of the Platte river, and yet out of the reach of the traffic of the Platte road. The tracks they make in travelling to and fro across the Plains are visible for years after they have ceased to use them. I have seen them as broad and as straight as the finest of Roman roads. On Sunday, at two in the morning, we dashed into Denver ; and as we reeled and staggered from our late prison, the aml)ulance, into the "cockroach corral" which does duty for the bar-room of the *' Planters' House," we managed to find strength and words to agree that we would fix no time for meeting the next day. We expected to sleep for thirty hours ; as it was, we met at breakfast at seven a.m., less than five hours from the time at which we parted. It is to-day that we feel exhausted ; the exhilaration of the mountain air, and the excitement of frequent visits, carried us through yesterday. Dixon is sufier- ing from strange blains and boils, caused by the unwholesome food. We have been called upon here by Governor Gilpin and Governor Cummings, the opposition governors. The former is the elected governor of the State of Colorado which is to be, and would have been but for the fact that the President put his big toe (Western for veto) upon the bill; the latter, the Washington- sent governor of the territory. Gilpin is a typical 118 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. pioneer man, and the descendant of a line of Riich. He comes of one of the original Quaker stocks of Maryland, and he and his ancestors have ever been engaged in founding States. He himself, after taking an active share in the foundation of Kansas, com- manded a regiment of cavalry in the Mexican war. After this, he was at the head of the pioneer army which explored the pares of the Cordilleras and the territory of Nevada. He it was who hit upon the glorious idea of placing Colorado half upon each side of the Sierra Madre. There never in the history of the world was a grander idea than this. Any ordinary pioneer or politician would have given Colo- rado the "natural" frontier, and have tried for the glory of the foundation of two States instead of one. The consequence would have been the lasting disunion between the Pacific and Atlantic States, and a possible future break-up of the country. As it is, this com- monwealth, little as it at present is, links sea to sea, and Liverpool to Hong Kong. The city swarms with Indians of the bands com- manded by the chiefs Nevara and Colloreyo. They are at war with the six confederate tribes, and with the Pawnees — with all the Plain Indians, in short. Now, as the Pawnees are also fighting with the six tribes, there is a pretty triangular war. They came in to buy arms, and fearful scoundrels they look. Short, flat-nosed, long-haired, painted in red and blue, -^ and dressed in a gaudy costume, half Spanish, half Indian, which makes their filthiness appear more fdtliy by contrast, and themselves carrying only their X.] LETTER FROM DENVER. 119 Ballard and Smith -and- Wesson, hut forcing the squaws to carry all their other goods, and papooses in addition, they present a spectacle of unmixed ruf- fianism which I never expect to see surpassed. Dixon and I, hoth of us, left London with " Lo ! the poor Indian," in all his dignity and hook-nosedness, elevated on a pedestal of nobility in our hearts. Our views were shaken in the East, but nothing revo- lutionised them so rapidly as our three days' risk of scalping in the Plains. John Howard and Mrs. Beecher Stowe themseb^es would go in for the Western " disarm at any price, and exterminate if necessary" policy if they lived long in Denver. One of the braves of Nevara's command brought in the scalp of a Cheyenne chief taken by him last month,, and to-day it hangs outside the door of a pawnbroker's- shop, for sale, fingered by every passer-by. Many of the band were engaged in putting on their paint, which was bright vermilion, with a little indigo round the eye. This, with the sort of pigtail which they wear, gives them the look of the dth peppery leaders, well-spiced telegrams, stinging " facts." Every week there must be something tluit can be used and quoted against Brigham. The Eastern remarks upon quota- tions in turn are quoted at Salt Lake. Under such circumstanceai, even telegrams can be made to take a flavour. In to-day's Vedette we have one from St. Joseph, describing how above one thousand " of these dirty, filthy dupes of Great Salt Lake iniquity" are novr squatting round the packet dep6t, awaiting l.'S GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. transport. Another from Chicago tells us that tho seven thousand European Mormons who have this year passed up the Missouri river " are of the lowest and most ignorant classes." The leader is directed against Mormons in general, and Stenhouse in par- ticular, as editor of one of the Mormon papers, and cx-postmaster of the territory. He has already had cause to fear the Vedette, as it was through the exertions of its editor that he lost his office. This 'matter is referred to in the leader of to-day : " When we found our letters scattered about the streets in fragments, we succeeded in getting an honest post- master appointed in place of the editor of the Tele- graph" — "an organ where even carrots, pumpkins, and potatoes arc current funds" — " directed by a clique of foreign writers, who can hardly speak our language, and who never drew a loyal breath since they came to Utah." The Mormon tax frauds, and the Mormon police, likewise come in for their share of abuse, and the writer concludes with a pathetic plea against arrest " for quietly indulging in a glass of wine in a private room with a friend." Attacks such as these make one understand the suspiciousness of the ]\Iormon leaders, and the slow- ness of Stenhouse and his friends to take a joke if it concerns the Church. Poor Artemus Ward once wrote to Stenhouse, " Ef you can't take a joke, you'll 1)0 darned, and you oughter ;" but the jest at which he can laugh has wrought no cure. Hebcr Kimball said to me one day : " They're all alike. There was came here to write a book, and we thought XVI.] WESTERN EDITORS. 159 better of him than of most. I showed him more kindness than I ever showed a man before or since, and then he called mc a ' hoary reprobate.' I would advise him not to pass this way next time." The suspicion often takes odd shapes. One Sunday morning, at the tabernacle, I remarked that the Prophet's daughter, Zina, had on the same dress as she had worn the evening before at the theatre, in playing " Mrs. Musket" in the farce of " My Husband's Ghost." It was a black silk gown, with a Vandyke flounce of white, impossible to mistake. I pointed it out in joke to a iMormon friend, when he denied my assertion in the most emphatic way, although he could not have known for certain that I was wrong, as ho sat next to me in the theatre during the whole play. The Mormons will talk freely of their own suspi- ciousness. They say that the coldness with which travellers are usually received at Salt Lake City is the consequence o''" years of total misrepresentation. They forget that they are arguing in a circle, and that this misrepresentation is itself sometimes the result of their reserve. The news and advertisements are even more amusing than the leaders in the Vedette. A para- graph tells us, for instance, that " ^Irs. Miirtha Stewart and Mrs. Robertson, of San Antoine, lately had an impromptu fight with revolvers ; Mrs. Stewart was badly winged." Nor is this the only reference in the paper to shooting by ladies, as another para- graph tells how a young girl, frightened by a sham ghost, drew on the would-be apparition, and with six mo GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. barrels sliot him twice through the head, and four times *' in the region of the heart." A quotation from the Owyhee Avalanche, speaking of gambling hells, tells us that " one hurdy shebang,'* in Silver City, shipped 8,000 dollars as the net proceeds of its July business. " These leeches corral more clear cash than most quartz mills," remonstrates the editor. " Corral," in this sense, is the Mexican cattle inclo- sure ; the yard where the team mules are ranched ; the kraal of Cape Colony, which, on the Plains and the Plateau, serves as a fort for men as well as a fold for oxen, and resembles the screw of the East. The word " to corral" means to turn into one of these pens ; and thence " to pouch," " to pocket," " to bag," to get well into hand. The advertisements are in keeping with the news. " Everything, from a salamander safe to a Limerick fish-hook," is offered by one firm. " Fifty-three and a half and three and three-quarter thimble-skein Schuttler wagons," is offered ])y another. Again, an advertiser bids us *' Spike the Guns of Humbug ! and Beware of Deleterious Dyes ! Refuse to have your Heads Baptized with Liquid Fire ! " Another says, " If you want a paper free from entanglements of cliques, and antagonistic to the corrupting evils of factionism, subscribe to the Montana Radiator." But nothing beats the following : " Butcher's dead- shot for bed-bugs ! Curls them up as fire does a leaf ! Try it, and sleep in peace ! Sold by all live druggists." If wc turn, however, to the other Salt Lake papers, XVI.] WESTERN EDITORS. 161 the Telegraph, an independent Mormon paper, and the Deseret News, the official journal of the Church, we find a contrast to the ti-ash of the Vedette. Brigham's paper, clearly printed and of a pleasant size, is filled with the best and latest news from the outlying portions of the territory, and from Europe. The motto on its head is a simple one — " Truth and Liberty ; " and twenty-eight columns of solid news are given us. Among the items is an account of a fight upon the Smoky Hill route, which occurred on the day we reached this city, and in w^liich two teamsters — George Hill and Luke West — were killed by the Kiowas and Cheyennes. A loyal Union article from the pen of Albert Carrington, the editor, is followed by one upon the natural advantages of Utah, in which the writer complains that the very men who ridiculed the Mormons for settling in a desert are now declaiming against their being allowed to squat upon one of the '* most fertile loca- tions in the United States." The same paper asserts that Mormon success is secured only by Mormon industry, and that as a merely commercial speculation, apart from the religious impulse, the cultivation of Utah would not pay : " Utah is no place for the loafer or the lazy man." An official report, like the Court Circular of England, is headed, " President Brigham Young's trip North," and is signed by G. D. Watt, " Reporter " to the Church. The Old Testa- ment is not spared. " From what we saw of tlie timbered mountains," writes one reporter, " we had no despondencv of Israel ever failing for material to VOL. I. M 1G2 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. build up, beautify, and adorn pleasant habitations in that part of Zion." A theatrical criticism is not wanting, and the Church actors come in for " praise all around." In another part of the paper are tele- graphic reports from the captains of the seven immi- grant trains not yet come in, giving their position, and details of the number of days' march for which they have provisions still in hand. One reports " thirty-eight head of cattle stolen ; " another, " a good deal of mountain fever ; " but, on the whole, the tele- grams look well. The editor, speaking of the two English visitors now in the city, says : " We greet them to our mountain habitation, and bid them welcome to our orchard ; and that's considerable for an editor, especially if he has plural responsibilities to look after." Bishop Harrington reports from American Fort that everybody is thriving there, and " doing as the Mormon creed directs — minding their own busi- ness." " That's good, Bishop," saj^s the editor. The " Passenger List of the 2nd Ox Train, Captain J. D. Holladay," is given at length ; about half the immi- grants come with wife and family, very many with five or six children. From Liverpool, the chief office for Europe, comes a gazette of " Keleases and Ap- pointments," signed " Brigham Young, Jun., President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles and Adjacent Countries/' accompanied by a despatch, in which the " President for England" gives details of his visits to the Saints in Norway, and of his conversation with the United States minister at St. Petersburg. . XVI. J WESTERN EDITORS. 163 Tlie Daihj Telecjraph, like its editor, is practical, and docs not deal in extract. All tlie sheet, with the exception of a few columns, is taken up with business advertisements ; but these are not the least amusing part of the paper. A gigantic figure of a man in high boots and felt hat, standing on a ladder and pasting up Messrs. Eldredge and Clawson's dry-goods adver- tisement, occupies nearly half the back page. Mr. Birch informs "parties hauling wheat from San Pete county" that his mill at Fort Birch is now running, and that it is situate at the mouth of Salt Creek Canyon, just above Neplii City, Juab County, on the direct road to Pahranagat. A view of the fort, with, posterns, parapets, embrasures, and a giant flag, heads the advertisement. But the guts are not always so cheer- ful : one Far- Western paper fills three-quarters of its front page with an engraving of a coflin. The editorial columns contain calls to the "])rethren with teams" to aid the immigrants, an account of a *"' rather mixed case" of '' double divorce" (Gentile), and of a prosecution of a man "for \ iolation of the seventh commandment." A Mormon poMcc report, is headed " One drunk at the Calaboose." Defending himself against charges of "du-ecting bisho])s" and '* steadying the ark," the editor calls on the bishops to shorten their sermons : "we may get a crack^for this, but we can't help it. We like variety, life, and short meet- ings." In a paragraph about his visitors, our friend the editor of the Telegraph said, a day or two after our arrival in the city : " If a stranger can escape the strychnine clique for three days after arrival, he is for M 2 ' /■•.._..■■..,;• ..;:..- 164 OREATUR BRITAIN. [chap. ever afterwards safe. Generally the first twenty-four liours are sufficient to prostrate even tlie very robust." In a few words of regret at a change in the Denver newspaper staff our editor says : " However, a couple of sentences indicate that George has no intention of abr.ndoning the tripod. That's right : keep at it, my boy ; misery likes company." The day after we reached Denver, the Gazette, com- menting on this same "George," said : "Captain West has left the Rocky Mountains News office. We are not surprised, as we could never see how any respect- able decent gentleman like George could get along with Governor Evans' paid hireling and whelp who edits that delectable sheet." Of the two papers which exist in every town in the Union, each is always at work fittempting to "use up" the other. I have seen the democratic print of Chicago call its republican opponent " a radical, disunion, disreputable, bankrupt, emasculated evening newspapti- concern of this city" — a string of terms by the s.de of which even Western utterances pale. A paragraph headed "The Millennium" tells us that the editors of the Telegraph and Deseret News were seen yesterday aflerncon walking together towards the Twentieth Ward. Another paragraph records the ill success of an expedition against Indians who had been "raiding" doTrn in "Dixie," or South Utah. A general order signed "Lieut.- General Daniel H. Wells," and dated "head-quarters, Nauvoo Legion," directs the assembly, for a three days' *' big drill," of the forces of the various military XVI.] WESTERN EDITOHS. 165 districts of the territ-^iy. The name of " Territorial Militia," under which alone the United States can permit the existence of the legion, is carefully omitted. This is not the only warlike advertisement in the paper : fourteen cases of Ballard rifles are offered in exchange for cattle ; and other firms offer tents and side-arms to their friends. Amusements are not forgotten : a cricket match between two Mormon settlements in Cache county is recorded, " Wellsville whipping Brigham city with six wickets to go down;'* and is followed hy an article in which the First Presi- dent may have had a hand, pointing out that the Salt Lake Theatre is going to be the greatest of theatres, and that the favour of its audience is a passport beyond Wallack's, and equal to Drury Lane or the Haymarket. In sharp contrast to these signs of pre- sent prosperity, the First Presidency announce the annual gathering of the surviving mer^-xbers of Zion's camp, the association of the first immigrant band. There is about the Mormon papers much that tells of long settlement and prosperity. When I showed Stenhouse the Denver Gazette of our second day in that town, he said : " Well, Telegraph' shcttcr than that ! " The Denver sheet is a literary curiosity of the first order. Printed on chocolate-coloured paper, in ink of a not much darker hue, it is in parts illegible — to the reader's regret, for what we were" able to make out was good enough to make us wish for more. The difference between the Mormon and Gentile papers is strongly marked in the advertisements. Thd Denver Gazette is filled with puffs of quacks and IGG GREATER BRITAIN. [chap •wliiskey-sliops. In the column licadccl " Business Cards," Dr. Ermcrins announces that he may be con- sulted by his patients in the "French, German, and English " tongues. Lower down we have the card of "Dr. Treat, Eclectic Physician and Surgeon," which is preceded by an advertisement of " sulkies made to order," and followed by a leaded heading "Know thy Destiny : Madame Thornton, the English Astro- logist and Psychomctrician, has located herself at Hudson, New York ; by the aid of an instrument of intense power, known as the Psycliomotrope, she guarantees to produce a lifelike picture of the future husband or wife of the applicant." There is a strange turning towards the supernatural among this people. Astrology is openly professed as a science throughout the United States ; the success of spiritualism is amazing. The most sensible men are not exempt from the weakness : the dupes of the astrologers are not the uneducated Irish ; they are the strong-minded, half-educated Western men, shrewd and keen in trade, brave in war, material and cold in faith, it would be supposed, but credulous to folly, as wc know, when personal revelation, the supernaturalism of the present day, is set before them in the crudest and least attrac- tive forms. A little lower, " Charley Eyser " and "Gus Fogus" advertise their bars. The latter announces "Lager beer at only 10 cents," in a "cool retreat," "fitted up with green-growing trees." A returned warrior heads his announcement, in huge capitals, " Back Home Again, An Old Hand at the Bellows, The Soldier Blacksmith : — S. M. Logan." In a country XVI.] WEiiTERN EDITORS. 1G7 where weights and measures are rather a matter of practice than of law, Mr. O'Conncll does well to add to "Lager beer 15 cents," "Glasses hold Two Bushels." John Morris, of the "Little Giant" or "Theatre Saloon," asks us to " call and see him ;" while his rivals of the " Progi'cssive Saloon" offer the "finest liquors that the East can command." Morris Sigi, whose " lager is pronounced A No. 1 by all who have used it," bids us " give him a fair trial, and satisfy ourselves as to the false reports in circulation." Daniel Marsh, dealer in " breech-loading guns and revolvers," adds, "and anything that may be wanted, from a cradle to a coffin, both inclusive, made to order. An Lidian Lodge on view, for sale." This is the man at whose shop the scalp hangs for sale ; but he fails to name it in his advertisement : the Utes brought it in too late for insertion, perhaps. Advertisements of freight-trains now starting to the East, of mail coaches to Buckskin Joe — advertisements slanting, topsy-turvy, and sideways turned — complete the outer sheet ; but some of them, through bad ink, printer's errors, strange English, and wilder Latin, are wholly unintelligible. It is hard to make much of this, for instance : " Mr. iEsculapius, no offense, I hope, as this is written extempore and ipso facto. But, perhaps, I ought not to disregard ex unci disce omnes." In an editorial on the English visitors then in- Denver, the chance of putting into their mouths a puff of the territory of Colorado was not lost. We were made to " appreciate the native energy and 168 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. wealth of industry necessary in building up such a Star of Empire as Colorado." The next paragraph is communicated from Conejos, in the south of the terri- tory, and says : " The election has now passed off, and I am confident that we can beat any ward in Denver, and give them two in the game, for rascality in voting." Another leader calls on the people of Denver to remember that there are two men in the calaboose for mule-steaHng, and that the last man locked up for the offence was allowed to escape : some cottonwood trees still exist, it believes. In former times, there was for the lynching here hinted at a reason which no longer exists : a man shut up in gaol built of adobe, or sun-dried brick, could scratch his way through the crumbling wall in two days, so the citizens generally hanged him in one. Now that the gaols are in brick and stone, the job might safely be left to the sheriff; but the people of Denver seem to trust themselves better even than they do their delegate, Bob Wilson. A year or two ago, the gaols were so crazy, that Coloradan criminals, when given their choice whether they would be hanged in a week, or " as soon after breakfast to-morrow as shall be convenient to the sheriff and agreeable, Mr. Prisoner, to you," as the Texan formula runs, used to elect for the quick delivery, on the ground that otherwise they would catch their deaths of cold — c,t least, so the Denver story runs. They have, however, a method of getting the gaols inspected here which might be found useful at home : it consists in the simple plan of giving the governor XVI.] WESTERN EDITORS. 109 of a gaol an opportunity of seeing tlie practical working of the system by locking him up inside for a while. These Far- Western papers are written or com- piled under difficulties almost overwhelming. Mr. Frederick J. Stanton, at Denver, told me th^t often he had been forced to " set up" and print as well as "edit" the paper which he owns. Type is not always to be found. In its early days, the California Alta once appeared with a paragraph which ran : " I have no W in my type, as there is none in the Spanish alphabet. I have sent to the Sandwich Islands for this letter ; in the meantime we must use two Vs." Till I had seen the editors' rooms in Denver, Austin, and Salt Liake City, I had no conception of the point to which discomfort could be carried. For all these hardships, payment is small and slow. It consists often of little but the satisfaction which it is to the editor's vanity to be "liquored" by the best man of the place, treated to an occasional chat with the governor of the territory, to a chair in the Overland Mail Office whenever he walks in, to the hand of the hotel proprietor whenever he comes near the bar, and to a pistol-shot once or twice in a month. It must npt be supposed that the Vedette does the Mormons no harm ; the perpetual reiteration in the Eastern and English papers of three sets of stories alone would suffice to break down a flourishing power. The three lines that are invariably taken as founda- tions for their stories are these — that the Mormon 170 OBEATER BRITAIN. [chap. women are wretched, and would fain get away, but are checked by the Danites ; that the Mormons are ready to fight with the Federal troops with the hope of success ; that robbery of the people by the apostles and elders is at the bottom of Mormonisra— or, as the Vedette puts it, " on tithing and loaning hang all the law and the profits." If the mere fact of the existence of the Vedette effectually refutes the stories of the acts of the Danites in these modern days, and therefore disposes of the first set of stories, the third is equally answered by a glance at its pages. Columns of paragraphs, sheets of advertisements, testify to the foundation by industry, in the most frightful desert on earth, of an agricultural community which California herseT cannot match. The Mormons may well call their country "Deseret" — "land of the bee." The process of fertilization goes on day b^ day. Six or seven years ago. Southern Utah was a desert bare as Salt Bush Plains. Irriga- tion from the fresh-water lake was carried out under episcopal direction, and the result is the growth of fifty kinds of grapes alone. Cotton mills and vine- yards are springing up on every side, and "Dixie" begins to look down on its parent, the Salt Lake Valley. Irrigation from the mountain rills has done this miracle, we say, though the Saints undoubtedly believe that God's hand is in it, helping miraculously "His peculiar people." In face of Mormon prosperity, it is worthy of notice that Utah was settled on the Wakefieldian system, though Brigham knows nothing of Wakefield. XVI,] WESTERN EDITORS. . 171 Town population and country population grew up side by side in every valley, and the plough was not allowed to gain on the machine-saw and the shuttle. It is not only in water and verdure that Utah is naturally pooi. On the mining-map of the States, the comitries that lie around Utah — Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Montana — arc one blaze of yellow, and blue, and red, coloured from end to end with the tints that are used to denote the existence of precious metals. Utah is blank at present — blank, the Mormons say, by nature ; Gentiles say, merely through the absence of survey ; and they do their best to circumvent mother nature. Every fall the "strychnine" party raise the cry of gold discoveries in Utah, in the hope of bringing a. rush of miners down to Salt Lake City, too late for them to get away again before the snows begui. The presence of some thousands of broad- brimmed rowdies in Salt Lake City, for a winter, would be the death of Mormonism, they believe. Within the last few days, T am told that prospecting parties have found " pay dirt" in City Canyon, which, however, they had first themselves carefully " salted" with gold-dust. There is coal at the settlement at which we breakfasted on our way from Welder Kiver to Salt Lake ; and Stenhouse tells us that the only difference between the Utah coal and that of "Wales is, that the latter will " burn," and the former voont ! Poor as Utah is by nature, clear though it be that whatever value the soil now possesses, represents only the loving labour bestowed upon it by the Saints, it is doubtful whether they are to continue to possess 172 QBEATEB BRITAIN. [chap. it, even though the remaining string of Vedette-hovn stories assert that Brigham "threatens hell" to the Gentiles that would expel liim. The constant, teasing, wasp-like pertinacity of the Vedette has done some harm to liberty of thought throughout the world. XVII.] UTAH. 173 CHAPTER XVII. UTAH. '* When you arc driven hence, where shall you go?" " We take no thought for the morrow ; the Lord will guide His people," was my rebuke from Elder Stenhouse, delivered in the half-solemn, half-laughing manner characteristic of the Saints. " You say mira- cles are passed and gone," he went on ; " but if God has ever interfered to protect a Church, he has inter- posed on our behalf. In 1857, when the whole army of the United States was let slip at us under Albert S. Johnson, we were given strength to turn them aside, and defeat them without a blow. The Lord permitted us to dictate our own terms of peace. Asain, when the locusts came in such swarms as to blacken the whole valley, and fill the air with a living fog, God sent millions of strange new gulls, and these devoured the locusts, and saved us from destruction. The Lord will guide His people." Often as I discussed the future of Utah and their Church with Mormons, I could never get from them any answer but this ; they would never even express a belief, as will many Western Gentiles, that no 174 GREATER BRITAIN [chap. tattcmpt will be made to expel them from the country they now hold. They cannot help seeing how immediate is the danger : from the American press there comes a cry, " Let us have this polygamy put down ; its existence is a disgrace to England from which it springs, a shame to America in which it dwells, to the Federal Government whose laws it outrages and defies. How long will you continue to tolerate this retrogression from Christianity, this insult to civilization ?" With the New Englanders, the question is political as well as theological, personal as well as political — ■ political, mainly because there is a great likeness between Mormon expressions of belief in the divine origin of polygamy and the Southern answers to the Abolitionists : " Abraham was a slave-owner, and father of the faithful ;" " David, the best-loved of God, was a polygamist " — " show us a biblical prohibition of slavery ;" " show us a denunciation of polygamy, and we'll believe you." It is this similarity of the de- fensive positions of Mormonism and slavery which has led to the present peril of the Salt Lake Church ; the New Englanders look on the Mormons, not only as heretics, but as friends to the slave-owners ; on the other hand, if you hear a man warmly praise the Mormons, you may set him down as a Southerner, or at the least a. Democrat. Another reason for the hostility of New England is, that while the discredit of Mormonism falls upon America, the American people have but little share in its existence : a few of the leaders are New Eng- xvn.] UTAH. 175 landers and New Yorkers, but of the rank and file, not one. In every ten immigrants, the missionaries count upon finding that four come from England, two from Wales, one from the Scotch Lowlands, one from Sweden, one from Switzerland, and one from Prussia : from Catholic countries, none ; from all America, none. It is through this purely local and temporary association of ideas that we see the strange sight of a party of tolerant, large-hearted Churchmen eager to march their armies against a Church. If we put aside for a moment the question of the moral right to crush Mormonism in the name of truth, we find that it is, at all events, easy enough to do it. There is no difiiculty in finding legal excuses for action — no danger in backing the Federal legislation with military force. The legal point is clear enough — clear upon a double issue. Congress can legislate for the territories in social matters — has, in fact, already done so. Polygamy is at this moment punish- able in Utah, but the law is, pending the completion of the railroad, not enforced. Without extraordinary action, its enforcement would be impossible, for Mor- mon juries will give no verdict antagonistic to their Church ; but it is not only in this matter that the Mormons have been offenders. They have sinned also against the land-laws of America. The Church, Brigham, Kimball, all are landholders on a scale not contemplated by the "Homestead" laws — unless to be forbidden ; doubly, therefore, are the Mormons at the mercy of the Federal Congress. There is a loop- hole open in the matter of polygamy — that adopted 17G GEEATEE BRITAIN. " [c;iap. by the New York Communists when they chose each ca woman to be his legal wife, and so put themselves without the reach of law. This method of escape, I have been assured by Mormon elders, is one that nothing could force them to adopt. Kather than indirectly destroy their Church by any such weak compliance, they would again renounce their homes, and make their painful way across the wilderness to some new Deseret. It is not likely that New England interference will hinge upon plurality. A " difficulty " can easily be made to arise upon the land question, and no breach of the principle of toleration will, on the surface at least, be visible. No surveys have been held in the territory since 1857, no lands within the territorial limits have been sold by the Federal land-office. Not only have the limitations of the "Homestead" and "Pre-emption" laws been disregarded, but Salt Lake City, with its palace, its theatre, and hotels, is built upon the public lands of the United States. On the other hand, Mexican titles are respected in Arizona and New Mexico ; and as Utah was Mexican soil when, before the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Mormons sett' .d on its wastes, it seems hard that their claims should not be equally respected. After all, the theory of Spanish authority was a ridiculous fiction. The Mormons were the first occupants of the country which now forms the terri- tories of Utah and Colorado and the State of Nevada, and the Mormons were thus annexed to the United States without being in the least degree consulted. It XVII.] . ' UTAH. 177 is true that they might be said to have occupied the country as American citizens, and so to have caiiiod American sovereignty witli them into the wilderness ; hut this, again, is a European, not an American theory. American citizens are such, not as men born upon a certain soil, but as being citizens of a State of the Union, or an organized Territory ; and though the Mormons may be said to have accepted their position as citizens of the Territory of Utah, still they did so on the understanding that it should continue a •Mormon country, where Gentiles should at the most be barely tolerated. We need not go further into the mazes of public law, or of ex post facto American enactments. The Mormons themselves admit that the letter of the law is against them ; but say that while it is claimed that Boston and Philadelphia may fitly legislate for the Mormons three thousand miles away, because Utah is a Territory, not a State, men forget that it is Boston and Philadelphia themselves who force Utah to remain a Territory, although they admitted the less populou.'^ Nebraska, Nevada, and Oregon to their rights as States. . . If, wholly excluding morals from the calculation, there can be no doubt upon the points of law, there can be as little upon the military question. Of the fifteen hundred miles of waterless tract or desert that we crossed, seven hundred have been annihilated : 1869 may see the railroad track in the streets of Salt Lake City. This not only settles the military question, but is meant to do so. When men lay VOL. I. N 178 QMEATEE BRITAIN. [cuap. four miles of a railroad in a day, and average two miles a day for a whole year, when a government bribes high enough to secure so startling a rate of progress, there is something more than commerce or settlement in the wind. The Pacific railroad is not merely meant to be the shortest line from New York to San Francisco ; but it is meant to put down Mormonism. If the Federal government decides to attack these peaceable citizens of a Territory that should long since have been a State, they certainly will not fight, and' they no less surely will not disperse. Polynesia or Mexico is their goal, and in the Marqutisas or m Sonora they may, perhaps, for a few years at lc?st, be let alone, again to prove the forerunner^ of English civilization — planters of Saxon institutions and the English to^igue ; once more to perform their mission, as they performed it in Missouri and in Utah. When we turn from the siipple legal question, and the still more simple military one, to the moral point involved in the forfible suppression of plural mar- riage in one State by tne force of all the others, we find the consideration of the matter confused by the apparent analogy between the so-called crusade against slavery and the proposed crusade against polygamy. There is no real resemblance between the cases. In the strictest sense, th3re was no more a crusade against slavery than there is a crusade against snakes on the part of a man who strikes one that bit iiim. The purest Republicans have never pretended that the abolition of slavery was the justification of the war. xviu] UTAH. 179 The South rose in rebellion, and in rising gav^c New England an opportunity for the destruction in America of an institution at variance with the rej^ublicau form of government, and aggressive in its tendencies. So fiir is polygamy from being opposed in spirit to democracy, that it is impossible here, in Salt Lake City, not to see that it is the most levelling of all social institutions — Aformonism the most democratic of religions. A rich man in Now York leaves his sons large j)roperty, and founds a family ; a rich Mormon leaves his twenty or thirty sons each a miserable fraction of his money, and each son must trudge out into the world, and toil for himself. Brigham's sons — those of them who are not gratuitously employed in hard service for the Church in foreign parts — are cattle-drivers, small farmers, ranchmen. One of them was the only poorly clad boy I saw in Salt Lake City. A system of polygamy, in which all the wives, and consequently all the children, are equal before the law, is a powerful engine of democracy. The general moral question of whether Mormonism is to be put down by the sword, because the Latter- day Saints differ in certain social customs from other Christians, is one for the preacher and the casuist, not for a travelling obsei'ver of English-speaking countries as they are. Mormonism comes under my observation as the religious and social system of the most successful of all pioneers of English civilization. From this point of view it would be an immediate advantage to the world that they should be driven out once more into the wilderness, again to found an N 2 180 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. England in Mexico, in Polynesia, or on Eed Eiver. It may be an immediate gain to civilization, but America herself was founded by schismatics upon a basis of tolerance to all ; and there are still to be found Americans who think it would be the severest blow that has been dealt to liberty since the St. Bar- tholomew, were she to lend her enormous power to systematic persecution at the cannon's mouth. • ''■ •■ The question of where to draw the line is one of interest. Great Britain draws it at black faces, and would hardly tolerate the existence among her white subjects in London of such a sect as that of the Maharajas of Bombay. "If you draw the line at black faces," say the Mormons, " why should you not let the Americans draw it at two thousand miles from Washington V - The moral question cannot be dissociated from that of Mormon history. The Saints marched from Missouri and Illinois, into no man's land, intending there to live out of the reach of those who differed from them, as do the Eussian dissenters transported in past ages to the provinces of Eiga and Kherson. It is by no fan It of theirs, they say, that they are citizens of the United States. 7. There is in the Far West a fast increasing party who would leave people to be polygamists, polyandrists. Free-lovers, Shakers, or monogamists, as they please ; who would place the social relations as they have placed religion — out of the reach of the law. I need hardly say that public opinion has such overwhelming force in America that it is probable that even under a O u o P - c : A. s' XVII.] VI AH. 181 system of perfect tolerat^o-i by law, two forms of the family relation Y;ould never be found existing side by side. Polygamists would continue to migrate to Mormon land, Free-lovers to New York, Shakers to New England. Some will find in this a reason for, and some a reason against, a change. In any case, a crusade against Mormonism will hardly draw sym- pathy from Nebraska, from Michigan, from Kansas. Many are found who say ; " Leave Mormonism to itself, and it will die." The Pacific railroad alone, they think, will kill it. Those Americans who know Utah best are not of this opinion. Mormonism is no superstition of the past. There is huge vitality in the polygamic Church. Emerson once spoke to me of Unitarianism, Buddhism, and Mormonism as three religions which, right or wrong, are full of force. " The Mormons only need to be persecuted," said Elder Frederick to me, "to become as powerful as the Mohamedans." It is, indeed, more than doubtful whether polygamy can endure side by side with American monogamy — it is certain that Mormon priestly power and Mormon mysteries cannot in the long run withstand the presence of a large Gentile population ; tbut, if Mormon titles to land are re- spected, and if great muieral wealth is not found to exist in Utah, Mormonism will not be exposed to any much larger Gentile intrusion than it has to cope with now. Settlers who can go to California or to Colorado "pares" will hardly fix themselves in the Utah desert. The Mexican table-lands will be annexed before Gentile immigrants seriously trouble Brigham. 182 QBEATEB BRITAIN. [cnAr. Gold and New England are the most dreaded foes of Mormondom. Nothing can save polygamy if lodes and pla(;ers such as those of all the surrounding States are found in Utah ; nothing can save it if the New Englanders df termine to put it down. Were Congress to enforce the Homestead laws in Utah, and provide for the presence of an over^i^helm- ing Gentile population, polygamy would not only die of itself, but drag Mormonism down in its fall. Brigham knows more completely than we can the necessity of isolation. He would not be likely to await the blow which increased Gentile immigration would deal to his power. If New England decides to act, the table-lands of Mexico will see played once more the sad comedy of Utah. Again the Mormons will march into Mexican territory, again to wake some day, and find it American. Theirs, howe\er, will once more be the pride of having proved the pioneers of that English civilization which is destined to overspread the temperate world. The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo annexed Utah to the United States, but Brigham Young annexed it to Anglo-Saxondom. xvtii.] NAMELESS ALPS. 183 CHAPTER XVIII. , NAMELESS ALPS. At the Post Office in Main Street, I gave Mr. Dixon a few last messages for home — he one to me for some Egyptian friends ; and, with a shake and a wave, we parted, to meet in London after between us completing the circuit of the globe. This time again I was not alone : an Irish miner from Montana, with a bottle of whiskey, a revolver and pick, shared the back seat with the mail-bags. Before we had forded the Jordan, he had sung "The A\ earing of the Green," and told me the day and the hour at which the Republic was to be proclaimed at his native village in Galway. Like a true Irishman of the South or West, he was happy only when he could be generous ; and so much joy did he show when I discovered that the cork had slipped from my flask, and left me dependent on him for my escape from the alkaline poison, that I half be- lieved he had drawn it himself when we stopped to change horses for mules. Certain it is that he pressed his whiskey so fast upon me and the various drivers, that the day we most needed its aid there was none, and the bottle itself had ended its career by serving as a target for a trial of breech-loading pistols. 184 GEE A TEE BEITAIN. [chap. At the sixth ranch from the city, which stands on the shores of the lake, and close to the foot of the mountains, we found Porter Rockwell, accredited chief of the Danites, the "Avenging Angels" of Utah, and leader, it is said, of the "White Indians" at the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Since 1840, there has been no name of greater terror in the West than Rockwell's; but in I860 his death was reported in England, and the career of the great Brother of Gideon was ended, as we thought. I was told in Salt Lake City that he was still alive and well, and his portrait was among those that I o-ot from Mr. Ottinger ; but I am not convinced that the man I saw, and whose picture I possess, was in fact the Porter Rockwell who murdered Stephenson in 1842. It may be convenient to have two or three men to pass by the one name ; and I suspect that this is so in the Rockwell case. Under the name of Porter Rockwell some man (or men) has been the terror of Mississippi Valley, of Plains, and Plateau, for thirty years. In 1841, Joe Smith prophesied the death of Governor Boggs, of Missouri, within six months : within that time he 'was shot— rumour said, by Rockwell. When the Danite was publicly charged with having done the deed for fifty dollars and a wagon team, he swore he'd shoot any man who said he'd shot Boggs for gain ; " but if I am charged with shooting him, they'U have to prove it"— words that looked like guilt. In 1842 Stephenson died by the same hand, it is believed.' Rockwell was known to be the working chief of the PORTER ROCKWKLL. P. 1S4 xviii.] NAMELESS ALPS. 185 band organized in 1838 to defend tlie Fii'st Presidency by any means whatever, fair or foul, known at various times as tlie "Big Fan" tJiat should winnow the chaff from the wheat ; the " Daughter of Zion," the " De- structives," the "Flying Angels," the "Brother of Gideon," the "Destroying Angels." "Arise and thresh, daughter of Zion, for I will make thy horn iron, and will make thy hoofs brass ; and thou shalt beat in pieces many people; and I will consecrate theii" gain unto the Lord, and their substance unto the lords of the whole earth" — this was the motto of the band. Little was heard of the Danites from the time that the Mormons were lI 'ren from Illinois and Missouri until 1852, when murder after murder, massacre after massacre, occurred in the Grand Plateau. Bands of immigrants, of settbrs on their road to California, parties of United States officers, escaping Mormons, were attacked by " Indians," and found scalped by the next whites who came upon their trail. It was rumoured in the Eastern States that the red men were Mormons in disguise, following the tactics of the Anti-Renters of New York. In the case of Almon Babbitt, the " Indians" were proved to have been white. The atrocities culminated in the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, when hundreds of men, women, and children were murdered by men armed and clothed as Indians, but sworn to by some '.vho escaped as being whites. Porter Rockwell has had the infamy of this tremendous slaughter piled on to the 186 GREATER BRITAIN. [chai<. huge mass of his earlier deeds of blood — whether . rightly or wrongly, who shall uay ? The man that I saw was the man that Captain Burton saw in 1860. His death was solemnly recorded in the autumn of that year, yet of the identity of the person I saw with the person described by Captain Burton there can be no question. The bald, frowning forehead, the sinister smile, the long grizzly curls falling upon the back, the red cheek, the coal beard, the grey eye, are not to be mistaken. EockwcU or not, he is a man capable of any deed. I had his photograph in my pocket, and wanted to get him to sign it ; but when, in awe of his glittering bowie and of his fame, I asked, by way of caution, the ranchman — a new-come Paddy — ^whether Kockwell could write, the fellow told me with many an oath that " the boss" was as innocent of letters as a babe. " As for writin'," he said, " cuss me if he's on it. You bet he's not — you bet." Not far beyond Eockwell's, we di'ove close to the bench-land ; and I was able to stop for a moment and examine the rocks. From the verandah of the Mormon poet Naisbitt's house in Salt Lake City, I had remarked a double line of terrace running on one even level round the whole of the great valley to the south, cut by nature along the base alike of the Oquirrh and the Wasatch. I had thought it possible that the terrace was the result of the varying hardness of the strata ; but, near Black Kock, on the overland track, I discovered that where the terrace " lines have crossed the mountain precipices, they are continued merely by deep stains xviii.] NAMELESS ALPS. 187 upon the rocks. The inference is that within ex- tremely recent, if not historic times, the water has stood at these levels from two to three hundred feet above the present Great Salt Lake City, itself 4,300 feet above the sea. Tlu-ee days' journey farther west, on the Eeese's River Eange, I detected similar stains. Was the whole basin of the Rocky Mountains — here more than a thousand miles across — once filled with a huge sea, of which the two Sierras were the shores, and the Wasatch, Goshoot, Waroja, Toi Abbe, Humboldt, Washoe, and a hundred other ranges, the rocks and isles? The Great Salt Lake is but the largest of many such. T saw one on Mirage Plains that is Salter than its greater fellow. Carson Sink is evidently the bed of a smaller bitter lake; and there are salt pools in dozens scattered through Ruby and Smoky valleys. The Great Salt Lake itself is sinking year by year, and the sage-brush is gaining ,y upon the alkali desert throughout the Grand Plateau. All these signs point to the rapid drying-up of a great sea, owing to an alteration of climatic conditions. In the Odd Fellows' Library at San Francisco I found a map of North Ameiica, signed " John Harvis, A.M.," and dated " 1605," which shows a great lake in the country now comprised in the territories of Utah and Dacotah, with a width of fifteen degrees, and is named "Thongo or Thoya." It is not likely that this inland sea is a mere exaggeration of the present Great Salt Lake, because the views of that sheet of water are everywhere limited by islands in such a way as to give to the eye the effect of exceed- 188 GBEATElt JJIilTAIN. [cuap. ing uan'owucss. It is jJoasiLlc that the Jesuit Fathers, and other Spanish travellers from California, may have looked from the Utah mountains on the dwindling remnant of a great inland sea. On we jogged and jolted, till we lost sight of the American dead sea and of its lovely valley, and got into a canyon floored with huge boulders and slabs of roughened rock, where I expected each minute to undergo the fate of that Indian traveller who received such a jolt that he bit off the tip of his own tongue, or of Horace Greeley, whose head was Ijumped, it is said, through the roof of his conveyance. Here, as upon the Eastern side the Wasatch, the track was marked by never-ending lines of skeletons of mules and oxen. On the first evening from Salt Lake, we escaped once more from man at Stockton, a Gentile mining settlement in Hush Valley, too small to be called a village, though possessed of a municipality, and claiming the title of "city." By night we crossed by Reynolds' Pass the Parolom or Cedar Eiinge, in a two-horse "jerky," to which we had been shifted for speed and safety. Upon the heights the frost was bitter ; and when we stopj)ed at 3 a.m. for "supper," in which breakfast was combined, we crawled into the stable like flies in autumn, half killed by the sudden chill. My miner spoke but once all night. " It's right cold," he said ; but fifty times at least he sang " The Wearing of the Green." It was his only tune. Soon after light, we passed the spot where Captain Gunnison, of the Federal Engineers, who had been in XVIII.] NAMELESS ALPS. 189 1853 the first explorer of the Smoky Hill route, was killed "by the Ute Indians." Gunnison was an old enemy of the Mormons, and the spot is ominously near to Rockwell's home. Here we came out once more into the alkali, and our troubles from dust began. For hours we were in a desert white as snow ; but for reward we gained a glorious view of the Goshoot Range, which we crossed by night, climbing silently on foot for hours in the moonlight. The walking saved us from the cold. The third day — a Sunday morning — we were at the foot of the AVaroja Mountains, with Egan Canyon for our pass, hewn by nature through the living rock. You dare swear you see the chisel-marks upon the stone. A gold mill had years ago been erected here, and failed. The heavy machinery was lost upon the road; but the four stone waL.:* contained between them the wreck of the lighter "plant." As we jolted and journeyed on across the suc- ceeding plain, we spied in the. far distance a group of black dots upon the alkali. Man seems very small in the infinite expanse of the Grand Plateau — the roof, as it were, of the world. At the end of an hour we were upon them — a company of *' overlanders " "tracking" across the continent with mules. First came two mounted men, well armed with Deringers in the belt, and Ballard breech-loaders on the thigh, prepared for ambush — ready for action against elk or red-skin. About fifty yards behind these scowling fellows came the main band of bearded, red-shirted diggers, in huge boots and felt hats, each 190 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. man riding one mule, and driving another laden with packs and buckets. As we came up, the main body- halted, and an interchange of compliments began. " Say, mister, thet's a slim horse of yourn." " Guess not — guess he's all sorts of a horse, he air. And how far might it be to the State of Yarmount ? " " Wall, guess the boys down to hum will be kinder joyed to see us, howsomever that may be." Just at this moment a rattlesnake was spied, and every revolver discharged with a shout, all hailing the successful shot with a " Bully for you ; thet hit him whar he lives." And on, without more ado, we went. Even the roughest of these overlanders has in him something more than roughness. As far as appear- ance goes, every woman of the Far "West is a duchess, each man a Coriolanus. The royal gait, the imperial glance and frown, belong to every ranch- man in Nevada. Every fellow that you meet upon the track near Stockton or Austin City^ walks as though he were defying lightning, yet this without silly strut or braggadocio. Nothing can be more com- plete than the ranchman's self-command, save in the one point of oaths ; the strongest, freshest, however, of their moral features is a grand enthusiasm, amount- ing sometimes to insanity. As for their oaths, they tell you it is nothing unless the air is "blue with cusses." At one of the ranches where there was a woman, she said quietly to me, in the middle of an awful burst of swearing, " Guess Bill swears steep ;" to which I replied, " Guess so " — the only allusion I ever heard or hazarded to Western swearing. XVI u.] NAMELESS ALPS. 191 Leaviflg to our north a snowy range — nameless here, but marked on European maps as the East Humboldt — we reached the foot of the Ruby Valley Mountains on the Sunday afternoon in glowing sun- shine, and crossed them in a snowstorm. In the night we journeyed up and down the Diamond or Quartz Range, and morning found us at the foot of the Pond Chain. At the ranch — where, in the absence of elk, we ate "bacon," and dreamt we breakfasted — I chatted with an agent of the Mail Company on the position of the ranchmen, divisible, as he told me, into " cooks and hostlers." The cooks, my experience had taught me, were the aptest scholars, the greatest politicians ; the hostlers, men of war and completest masters of the art of Western swearing. The cooks had a New-England cut ; the hostlers, like Southerners, wore their h; • all down their backs. I begged an explanation of the reason for the marked distinction. " They are picked/' he said, *' from different classes. When a boy comes to me and asks for something to do, I give him a look, and see Avhat kind of stuff he's made of. If he's a gay duck out for a six-weeks' spree, I send him down here, or to Bitter Wells ; but if he's a clerk or a poet, or any such sorter fool as that, why then I set him cooking ; and plaguy good cooks they make, as you must find." The drivers on this portion of the route are as odd fellows as are the ranchmen. Wearing huge jack-boots, flannel shirts tucked into their trousers, but no coat or vest, and hats with enormous brims, they have their hair long, and their beards untrimmed. Their oaths. 192 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. I need hardly s.iy, arc fearful. At night they wrap themselves in an enormous cloak, drink as much whiskey as their passengers can spare them, crack their whips, and yell strange yells. They are quarrel- some and overbearing, honest probably, but eccentric in their ways of showing it. They belong chiefly to the mixed Irish and German race, and have all been in Australia during the gold rush, and in Cali- fornia before deep sinking replaced the surface diggings. They will tell you how they often washed out and gambled away a thousand ounces in a month, living like Eoman emperors, then started in digging- life again upon the charity of their wealthier friends. They hate men dressed in " biled shirts " or in " store clothes," and show their aversions in strange ways. I had no objection myself to build fires and fetch wood ; but I drew the line at going into the sage- brush to catch the mules, that not being a business which I felt competent to undertake. The season was advanced, the snows had not yet reached the valleys, which were parched by the drought of all the summer, feed for the mules was scarce, and they wandered a long way. Time after time we would drive into a station, the driver saying, with strange oaths, " Guess them mules is clared out from this here ranch ; guess they is into this sage-brush ; " and it would be an hour before the mules would be dis- covered feeding in some forgotten valley. Meanwhile the miner and myself would have revolver practice at the skeletons and telegraph-posts when sage fowl failed us, and rattlesnakes grew scarce. XVIII.] NAMELESS ALPS. 193 After all, it is easy to speak of the eccentricities of dress and manner displayed by Western men, but Eastern men and Europeans upon the Plateau are not the prim creatures of Fifth Avenue or Pall Mall. From San Francisco I sent home an excellent photo- graph of myself in the clothes in which I had crossed the Plateau, tnose being the only ones I had to wear till my baggage came round from Panama. The result was, that my oldest friends failed to recognise the portrait. At the foot I had written " A Border Ruffian :" they believed not the likeness, but the legend. The difficulties of dress upon these mountain ranges are great indeed. To sit one night exposed to keen frost and biting wind, and the next day to toil for hours up a mountain-side, beneath a blazing sun, are very opposite conditions. I found my dress no bad one. At night I wore a Canadian fox-fur cap. Mormon 'coon-skin gloves, two coats, and the whole of my light silk shirts. By day I took off the coats, the gloves, and cap, and walked in my shirts, adding but a Panama hat to my "fit-out." As we began the ascent to the Pond River Range, we caught up a bullock-train, which there was not room to pass. The miner and myself turned out from the jerky, and lor hours climbed alongside the wagons. I was struck by the freemasonry of this mountain travel : Bryant, the miner, had come to the end of his " solace," as the most famed chewing tobacco in these parts is called. Going up to the nearest teamster, he asked for some, and was at once VOL. I. o 194 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. presented with p. huge cake — enough, I should have thought, to have hasted a Channel pilot for ten years. The climb was long enough to give me a dee}) insight into the inner mysteries of bullock-driving. Each of the great two-storeyed Californian wagons was drawn by twelve stout oxen ; still, the pace was not a mile an hour, accomplished, as it seemed to me, not so much by the aid as in spite of tremendous flogging. Each teamster carried a short-handled whip with a twelve-foot leathern lash, which was wielded with two hands, and, after many a whirl, brought down along the whole length of the back of each bullock of the team in turn, the stroke being accom- panied by a shout of the bullock's name, and followed, as it was preceded, by a string of the most explosive oaths. The favourite names for bullocks were those of noted public characters and of Mormon elders, and cries were frequent of " Ho, Brlgham !" " Ho, Jdseph!'' "Ho, Grant!" — the blow falling with the accented syllable. The London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would find at Pond Eiver Range an excellent opening for a mission. The appointed officer should be supplied with two Deringers and a well-filled whiskey-barrel. Through a gap in the mountain crest we sighted the West Humboldt Range, across an open country dotted here and there with stunted cedar, and, crossinp- Smoky Valley, we plunged into a deep pass in the Toi Abbe Range, and reached Austin — a mining town of importance, rising two years old — in the afternoon of the fourth day from Salt Lake City. xviii.] NAMELESS ALPS. 19; After dining at an Italian digger's restaurant with an amount of luxury that recalled our feasts at Salt Lake City, I started on a stroll, in which I was stopped at once by a shout from an open bar-room of " Say ! mister ! " Pulling up sharply, I was sur- rounded by an eager crowd, asking from all sides the one question : " flight you be Professor MuUer V Although flattered to find that I looked less dis- reputable and ruffianly than I felt, I nevertheless explained as best I could that I was no professor — only to be assured that if I was any 2:)rofessor at all, Muller or other, I should do just as well : a mule was ready for me to ride to the mine, and "Jest kinder fix us up about this new lode." If my new-found friends had not carried an over- whelming force of pistols, I might have gone to the mine as Professor Muller, and given my opinion for what it was worth ; as it was, I escaped only by " liquoring up " over the error. Cases of mistaken, identity are not always so pleasant in Austin. They told me that, a few weeks before, a man riding down the street heard a shot, saw his hat fall into the mud, and, picking it up, found a small round hole on each side. Looking up, he saw a tall miner, revolver smoking in hand, who smiled grimly, and said : " Guess that's my muel" Having politely explained when and where the mule was bought, the miner professed himself satisfied with a " Guess I was wrong — let's liquor." In the course of my walk through Austin, I came upon a row of neat huts, each with a board, oa 2 196 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. which Wtas painted, " Sang Sing, washing and iron- ing," or " Mangling by Ah Low." A few paces farther on was a shop painted red, but adorned with calmlistic scrawls in black ink ; and farther still was a tiny joss house. Yellow men in spotless clothes of dark-green and blue were busy at buying and selling, at cooking, at washing. Some, at a short trot, were carrying burthens at the ends of a long bamboo pole. All were quiet, quick, orderly, and clean. I had at last come thoroughly among the Chinese people, not to part with them again till I left Geelong, or even Suez. Returning to the room where I had dined, I parted with Pat Bryant, quitting him, in Western fashion, after a good "trade" or "swop." He had taken a fancy to the bigger of my two revolvers. - He wna going to breed cattle in Oregon, he told me, and thought it might be useful for shooting his wildest beasts by riding in the Indian manner, side by side with them, and shooting at the heart. I answered by guessing that I " was on the sell ;" and traded the weapon against one of his that matched my smaller tool. When I reached Virginia City, I in- quired prices, and was almost disappointed to find that I had not been cheated in the " trade." A few minut 'S after leaving the " hotel" at Austin, and calling at the post-office for the mails, I again found myself in the desert — indeed, Austin itself can hardly be styled oasis : it may have gold, but it has no green thing within its limits. It is in canyons and on plains like these, with the skeletons of oxen xviii.] NAMELEtiS ALPS. 197 every few yards along tho track, that one comes to comprelicnd the full significance of the terrible entry in the army route-bool^s — " No grass ; no 'vater." Descending a succession of tremendous " grades," as inclines upon roads and railroads arc called out West, we came on to. the lava- covered plain of Reese's River Valley, a wall of snowy mountain rising grandly in our front. Close to the stream were a ranch or two, and a double camp, of miners and of a company of Federal troops. The diggers were playing with their glistening knives as diggers only can ; the soldiers — their huge sombreros worn loosely on one side — were lounging idly in the sun. Within an hour, we were again in snow and ice upon the summit of another nameless range. This evening, after five sleepless nights, I felt most terribly the peculiar form of fatigue that we had ex- perienced after six days and nights upon the Plains. Again the brain seemed divided into two parts, think- ing independently, and one side putting questions while the other answered them ; but this time there was also a sort of half insanity, a not altogether dis- agreeable wandering of the mind, a replacing of the actual by an imagined ideal scene. On and on we journeyed, avoiding the Shoshone and West Humboldt mountains, but picking our way along the most fearful ledges that it has been my fate to cross, and traversing from end to end the dreadful Mirage Plains. At nightfall we sighted Mount Davidson and the Washoe Range; at 3 p.m. I was in bed once more — in Virginia City. 198 QREATElt BRITAIN. [chai-, CHAPTER XIX. VIllGINIA CITY. " Guess the Governor's conskVrable skeert." "You bet, he's mad." My sitting down to breakfast at the same small table seemed to end the talk ; but I had not been out West for nothing, so explaining that I was only four hours in Virginia City, I inquired what had occurred, to fill the Governor of Nevada with vexation and alarm. "D'you tell now! only four hours in this great young city. Wall, guess it's a bully business. You see, some time back the Governor pardoned a road agent after the citizens had voted him a rope. Yes, sir ! But that ain't all : yesterday, cuss me if he didn't refuse ter pardon one of the boys who had jess shot another in play like. Guess he thinks hisself some pumpkins." I duly expressed my horror, and my informant went on : " Wall, guess the citizens paid him off purty slick. They jess sent him a short thick bit of rope with a label ' For his Excellency.' You bet ef he ain't mad — you bet ! Pass us those molasses, mister." I was not disappointed : I had not come to Nevada for nothing. To see Virginia City and Carson, since xix.J VimiNlA CITY. 199 I first heard their fame in New York, liad been witli nic a passion, but the deed thus told me in the dining- room of the "Empire" Hotel was worthy a place in the annals of " Washoe." Under its former name, th(j chief town of Nevada was ranked not only the highest, but the "cussedest" town in the States, its citizens expecting a "dead man for breakfast" every day, and its streets ranging from seven to eight thousand feet above the sea. Its twofold fiime is leaving it : the Coloradan villages of North Empire and Black Hawk are nine or ten thousand feet above sea level, and Austin and Virginia City in Montana beat it in playful pistolling and vice. Nevertheless, in the point of "pure cussedness" old Washoe still stands well, as my first introduction to its ways will show. All the talk of Nevada reformation applies only to the surface signs : when a miner tells you that Washoe is turning pious, and that he intends shortly to "varmose," he means that, unlike Austin, which is still in its first state of mule-stealing and montd, Virginia City has passed through the second period — that of " vigilance committees " and " historic trees " — • and is entering the third, the stage of churches and *' city officers," or police. The population is still a shifting one. A by-law of the municipality tells us that the "permanent popu- lation " consists of those who reside more than a month within t;he city. At this moment the miners are pouring into Washoe from north and south and oast, from Montana, from Arizona, and from Utah, coming to the gaieties of the largest mining city to 200 QilEATER BlilTAIN. [chap. spend tliclr money during the fierce short winter. When I auw Virginia City, it was worse than Austin. Every other house is a restaurant, a drinking shop, a gaming hell, or worse. With no one to make beds, to mend clothes, to cook food — with no house, no home — men are almost certain to drink and gamble. The Washoe bar-rooms are the most brilliant in the States : as we drove in from Austin at 2 a.m., there was blaze enough for us to see from the frozen street the portraits of Lola Montez, Ada Menken, Heenan, and the other Californian celebrities with which the bar-rooms were adorned. Although "petticoats," even Chinese, are scarce, dancing was going on in every house ; but there is a rule in miners' balls that prevents all difficulties arising from an over supply of men : every one who has a patch on the rear portion of his breeches does duty for a lady in the dance, and as gentlemen are forced by the custom of the place to treat their partners at the bar, patches are popular. Up to eleven in the morning hardly a man was to be seen : a community that sits up all night, begins its work in the afternoon. For hours I had the blazing hills called streets to myself for meditating ground ; but it did not need hours to bring me to think that a Vermonter's description of the climate of the moun- tains was not a bad one when he said : " You rise at eight, and shiver in your cloak till nine, when you lay it aside, and wnlk freely in your woollens. At twelve you come in for your gauze coat and your Panama; at two jou are in a hammock cursing XIX, j VniGINIA CITY, 201 tlic licat, but at four you venture out again, and by- five are in your woollens. At six you begin to shake witli cold, and shiver on till bedtime, which you make darned early." Even at this great height, the thermometer in the afternoon touches 80° Fahr. in the shade, while from sunset to sunrise there is a bitter frost.- So it is throughout the Plateau. When morning after morning we reached a ranch, and rushed out of the freezing ambulance through the still colder outer air to the fragrant cedar fire, there to roll with pain at the thawing of our joints, it was hard to bear it in mind that by eight o'clock we should be shutting out the sun, and by noon melting even in the deepest shade. As I sat at dinner in a miner's restaurant, my opposite neighbour, finding that I was not long from England, informed ' "te he was "the independent editor of the Nevada Union Gazette" and went on to ask : " And how might you have left literatooral pursoots ? How air Tennyson and Thomas T. Carlyle ? " I assured him that to the best of my belief they were fairly well, to which his reply was : " Guess them ther men ken sling ink, they ken." When we parted, he gave me a copy of his paper, in which I found that he called a rival editor " a woiking whiskey-bottle'' and "a Fenian imp." The latter phrase reminded me that, of the two or three dozen American editors that I had met, this New Englander was the first who was "native born." Stenhouse, in Salt Lake City, is an Englishman, so is Stanton of Denver, and the whole of the remainder of the band were Irishmen. As for 202 GREATER BRITAIN. [chaf. the earlier assertion in the " editorial," it was not a wild one, seeing that Virginia City has five hundred whiskey-shops for a population of ten thousand. Artemus Ward said of Virginia City, in a farewell speech to the mhabitants that should have been published in his works : " I never, gentlemen, was in a city where I was treated so ivelly nor, I will add, so often." Through every open door the diggers can be seen tossing the whiskey down their throats with a scowl of resolve, as though they were committing suicide — which, indeed, except in the point of speed, is probably the case. The Union Gazette was not the only paper that I had given me to read that morning, Not a bridge over a " crick," not even a blacked pair of boots, made me so thoroughly aware that I had in a measure returned to civilization as did the gift of a California Alta containing a report of a debate in the English Parliament upon the Bank Charter Act. The speeches were appropriate to my feelings : I had just returned not only to civilization, but to the European incon- veniences of gold and silver money. In Utah, gold and greenbacks circulate indifferently, with a double set of prices always marked and asked ; in Nevada and California, greenbacks are as invisible as gold in New York or Kansas. Nothing can persuade the Californians that the adoption by the Eastern States of an inconvertible paper system is anything but the result of a conspiracy against the Pacific States — one in which they at least are determined to have no share. Strongly Unionist in feeling as were California, xix.] VIRGINIA CITY. 203 Oregon, and Nevada during the rebellion, to liavc forced greenbacks upon tliem would liave been almost more than their loyalty would have borne. In the severest taxation they were prepared to acquiesce ; but paper-money they believed to be downright robbery, and the invention of the devil. To me the reaching gold once more was far from pleasant, for the advantages of paper-money to the traveller are enormous : it is light, it wears no holes in your pockets, it reveals its presence by no untimely clinking ; when you jump from a coach, every thief within a mile is not at once aware that you have ten dollars in your right-hand pocket. The Nevadans say that forgeries are so common, that their neigh- bours in Colorado have been forced to agree that any decent imitation shall be taken as good, it being too difficult to examine into each case. For my part, though in rapid travel a good deal of paper passed through my hands in change, my only loss by forgery was one half-dollar noLe ; my loss by wear and tear, the same. In spite of the gold currency, prices are higher in Nevada than in Denver. A shave is half a dollar — gold ; in Washoe, in Atchison, but a paper quarter. A boot-blacking is fifty cents in gold, instead of ten cents paper, as in Chicago or St. Louis. During the war, when fluctuations in the value of the paper were great and sudden, prices changed from day to day. Hotel proprietors in the West received their guests at breakftist, it is said, with " Glorious news; we've whipped at . Gold's 180; board's 204 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. down half-a-clollar." While I was in tlic country, gold fluctuated between 140 and 163, but prices remained unaltered. Paper money is of some use to a young country in making the rate of wages appear enormous, and so attracting immigration. If a Cork bog-trotter is told that he can get two dollars a day for his work in America, but only one in Canada, no economic con- siderations interfere to prevent him, rushing to the nominally higher rate. Whether the working men of America have been gainers by the inflation of the currency, or the reverse, it is hard to say. It has been stated in the Senate that wages have risen sixty per cent, and prices ninety per cent. ; but " prices " is a term of great width. The men themselves believe that they have not been losers, and no argument can be so strong as that. My first afternoon upon Mount Davidson I spent underground in the Gould and Curry mine, the wealthiest and largest of those that have tapped the famous Comstock lode. In this single vein of silver lies the prosperity not only of the - :y, but of Nevada State ; its discovery will have hastened the completion of the overland railway itself by several years. It is owing to the enormous yield of this one lode that the United States now stands second only to Mexico as a silver-producing land. In one year Nevada has given the world as much silver a& there came from the mines of all Peru. The rise of Nevada has been sudden. I was shown in Virginia City a building block of land that XIX.] VIRGINIA CITY. 205 rents for ten times what it cost four years ago. Nothing short of solid silver by the yard would have brought twenty thousand men to live upon the summit of Mount Davidson. It is easy here to understand the mad rush and madder speculation that took place at the time of the discovery. Every valley in the Washoe Range was "prospected," and pronounced paved with silver ; every mountain was a solid mass, " Cities " were laid out, and town lots sold, wherever room was afforded by a flat piece of ground. The publication of the Californian newspapers was sus- pended, as writers, editors, proprietors, and devils, all had gone with the rush. San Francisco went clean mad, and London and Paris were not far behind. Of the hundred " cities" founded, but one was built ; of the thousand claims registered, but a hundred were taken up and worked ; of the companies formed, but half-a-dozen ever paid a dividend, except that obtained from the sale of their plant. The silver of which the whole base of Mount Davidson is composed has not been traced in the surrounding hills, though they are covered with a forest of posts, marking the limits of forgotten " claims :" " James Thompson, 130 feet N.E. by N." " Ezra WUliams, 130 feet due E. ;" and so for miles. The Gould and Curry Company, on the other hand, is said to have once paid a larger half-yearly dividend than the sum of tiiC original capital, and its shares have been quoted at 1,000 per cent. Such are the differences of a hundred yards. One of the oddities of mining life is, that the 206 GREATER BRITAIN [chap. gold-diggers profess a sublime contempt for silver- miners and tlieir trade. A Coloradan going West was asked in Nevada if in liis country they could beat tlie Comstock lode. " Dear, no ! " lie said. " The boys with us are plaguy discouraged jess at present." The Nevadans were down upon the word. " Discouraged, air they ? " " AVliy, yes ! They've jess found they've got ter dig through three feet Oi solid silver 'fore ever they come ter gold." Some of the companies have curious titles. " The Union Lumber Association" is not bad; but "The Segregated Belcher Mining Enterprise of Gold Hill District, Storey Country, Nevada State," is far before it as an advertising name. In a real " coach " at last — a coach with windows and a roof — drawn l)y six " mustangs," we dashed down Mount Davidson upon a real road, engineered with grades and bridges — my first since Junction City. Through the Devil's Gate we burst out upon a chaotic country. For a hundred miles the eye ranged over humps and bumps of every size, from stones to mountains, but no level ground, no field, no house, no tree, no green. Not even the Sahara so thoroughly deserves the name of " desert." In Egypt there is the oasis, in Arabia here and there a date and a sweet-water well ; here there is nothing, not even earth. The ground is soda, and the water and air are full of salt. This road is notorious for the depredations of the "road agents," as white 1 ighwaymen are politely called, red or yellow roltbers being ptill " darned XTX.1 VIRGINIA CITY. 207 tliieves." At Desert Wells, tlie coacli had been robbed, a week before I passed, by men who had first tied up the ranchmen, and taken their places to receive the driver and passengers when they arrived. The prime object with the robbers is the treasury box of " dust," but they generally '^ go through" the pas- sengers, by way of pastime, after their more regular work is done. As to firing, they have a rule — a simple one. If a passenger shoots, every man is killed. It need not be said that the armed driver and armed guard never shoot ; they know their business far too well. Close here we came on hot and cold springs in close conjunction, flowing almost from the same "sink-hole" — the original twofold springs, I hinted to our driver, that Poseidon planted in the Atlantic isle. He said that " some of that name " had a ranch near Carson, so I " concluded " to drop Poseidon, lest I should say something that might offend. From Desert Wells the alkali grew worse and worse, but began to be alleviated at the ranches by irrigation of the throat with delicious Californian wine. The plain was stre\vn with erratic boulders, and here and there I noticed sharp sand-cones, like those of the Elk Mountain country in Utah. At last we dashed into the *' city" named after the notorious Kit Carson, of which an old inhabitant has lately said, " This here city is growing plaguy mean : there was only one man shot all yesterday." There was what is here styled an "altercation" a day or two ago. The sheriff tried to arrest a man in broad day- 208 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. light in the single street which Carson boasts. The result was that each fired several shots at the other, and that both were badly hurt. The half-deserted mining village and wholly ruined Mormon settlement stacd grimly on the bare rock, surrounded by terrible weird-looking depressions of the earth, the far-famed " sinks," the very bottom of the Plateau, and goal of all the Plateau streams — in summer dry, and spread with sheets of salt ; in winter filled with brine. The Sierra Nevada rises like a wall from the salt pools, with a fringe of giant leafless trees hanging stiftly from its heights — the first forest since I left the Missouri bottoms. The trees made me feel that I was really across the Continent, within reach at least of the fogs of the Pacific — on " the other side ;" that there was still rough cold work to be done was clear from the great snow-fields that showed through the pines with that threatening blackness that the purest of snows wear in the evening when they face the east. As I gazed upon the tremendous battlements of the Sierra, I not only ceased to marvel that for three hundred years trafiic had gone round by Panama rather than through these frightful obstacles, but even wondered that they should be surmounted now. In this hideous valley it was that the Californian immigrants wintered in 1848, and killed their Indian guides for food. For three months more the strongest of them lived upon the bodies of those who died, incapable in their weakness of making good their foot- hold upon the slippery snows of the Sierra. After a XIX.] VIRGINIA CITY. 209 while, some were cannibals by choice ; but the story is not one that can be told. Galloping up the gentle grades of Johnson's Pass, we began the ascent of the last of fifteen great moun- tain ranges crossed or Hanked since we had left Salt Lake City. The thought recalled a passage of arms that had occurred at Denver between Dixon and Governor Gilpin. In his grand enthusiastic way, the Governor, pointing to the Cordilleras, said, " Five hundred snowy ranges lie between this and San Fran- cisco." " Peaks," said Dixon. " Kanges !" thundered Gilpin ; " I've seen them." Of the fifteen greater ranges to the westward of Salt Lake, eight at least are named from the rivers or valleys they contain, or are wholly nameless. Trade has preceded survey ; the country is not yet thoroughly explored. The six paper maps by which I travelled — the best and latest — differed in essential points. The position and length of the Great Salt Lake itself are not yet accurately known ; the height of Mount Hood has been made anything between nine and twenty thousand feet ; the southern boundary line of Nevada State passes through untrodden wilds. A rectification of the limits of California and Nevada was attempted no great time ago ; the head waters of some stream which formed a starting-point had been found to be erroneously laid down. At the flourishing young city of Aurora, in Esmeralda county, a court of California was sitting. A mounted messenger rode up at great pace, and, throwing his bridle round a stump, dashed in VOL. T. P 210 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. breathlessly, shouting, "What's this hero court ?" Being told that it was a Californian court, he said, " Wall, thct's all wrong : this here's Nevada. We've been an' rectified this boundary, an' California's a good ten mile off here." " Wall, Mr. Judge, I move this court adjourn," said the plaintiff's counsel. " How can a court adjourn thet's not a court?" replied the Judge. "Guess I'll go." And off he w^ent. So, if the court of Aurora luas a court, it must be sitting now. The coaching on this line is beyond comparison the best the world can show. Drawn by six half-bred mustangs, driven by whips of the fame of the Hank Monk " who drove Greeley," the mails and pas- sengers have been conveyed from Virginia City to the rail at Placerville, 154 miles, in 15 hours and 20 minutes, including a stoppage of half-an-hour for supper, and sixteen shorter stays to change horses. In this distance, the Sierra Nevada has to be tra- versed by a rapid rise of three thousand feet, a fall of a thousand feet, another rise of the same, and then a descent of five thousand feet on the Californian side. Before the road was made, the passage was one of extraordinary difficulty. A wagon once started, they say, from Folsom, bearing " Carson or bust" in large letters upon the tilt. After ten days, it returned lamely enough, wdth four of the twelve oxen gone^ and bearing the label " Busted." AVhen we were nearing Hank Monk's "piece," I became impatient to see the hero of the famous ride. KltlDAY'S STATION -VAIXEV OF LAKK TAHOE. TEAMING UP THE OaAUE AT SLITPEHY FORD, IN THE SIERRA. ., -.^ xix.j VIRGINIA crir. 211 What was 1113' disgust when the drivor of the ecJ-'-r portion of the road appeared again upon the box in charge of six magnificent iron-greys. The peremptory cry of "All aboard" brouglit me without remonstrance to the coach, but I took care to get upon the box, although, as we were starting before the orcak of day, the frost was terrible. To my relief, when I in- quired after Hank, the driver said that he was at a ball at a timber ranch in the forest ''six mile on.' At early light we reached the spot — the summit of the more eastern of the twin ranges of the Sierra. Out came Ha^k, amidst the cheers of the half-dozen men and women of the timber ranch who formed the " ball," wrapped up to the eyes in furs, and took the reins without a word. For miles he drove steadily and. moodily along. I knew these drivers too w^cll to venture upon speaking first when they were in the sulks ; at last, however, I lost all patience, and silently offered him a cigar. He took it without thanking me, but after a few minutes said : " Thet last driver, how did he drive ? " I made some shufHing answer, when he cut in : " Drove as ef he were skeert ; and so he was. Look at them mustangs. Yoo — on !" As he yelled, the horses started at what out here they style "the run;" and when, after ten minutes, he pulled up, we must have done three miles, round most violent and narrow turns, with only the bare precipice at the side, and a fall of often a hundred feet to the stream at the bottom of the ravine — the Simplon without its wail. Dropping into the talking mood, he asked me the usual questions as to my p 2 212 GREAT Uli BRITAIN. [chap. business, and wliitlier I was bound. When I told him I thought of visiting Australia, he said, " D'you tell now 1 Jess give my love — at Bendigo — to Gump- tion Dick." Not another word about Australia or Gumption Dick could I draw from him. 1 asked at Bendigo for Dick; but not even the officer in command of the police had ever heard of Hank Monk's friend. The sun rose as we dashed through the grand landscapes of Lake Tahoe. On we went, through gloomy snow-drifts and still sadder forests of gigantic pines nearly three hundred feet in height, and down the canyon of the American Eiver from the second range. Suddenly we left the snows, and burst through the pine woods into an open scene. From gloom there was a change to light ; from sombre green to glowing red and gold. The trees, no longer hung with icicles, were draped with Spanish moss. In ten yards we had come from winter into summer. Alkali was left behind for ever ; we were in £1 Dorado, on the Pacific shores— in sunny, dreamy California. XX.] EL DORADO. 213 CHAPTER XX. EL DORADO. The city of the high priest clothed in robes of gold figures largely in the story of Spanish discovery in America. The hardy soldiers who crossed the Atlantic in caravels and cockboats, and toiled in leathern doublets and plate armour through the jungle swamp of Panama, were lured on through years of plague and famine by the dream of a country whose rivers flowed with gold. Diego do Mendoza found the land in 1532, but it was not till January 1848 that James Marshall washed the Golden Sands of El Dorado. The Spaniards were not the first to place the earthly paradise in America. Not to speak of New Atlantis, the Canadian Indians have never ceased to hand down to their sons a legend of western abodes of bliss, to which their souls journey after death, through fright- ful glens and forests. In their mystic chants they describe minutely the obstacles over which the souls must toil to reach the regions of perpetual spring. These stories are no mere dreams, but records of the great Indian migration from the West : the liquid-eyed Hurons, not sprung from the Canadian snows, may be Californian if they are not Malay, the Pacific shores 214 G HEATER BRITAIN. [chap. tlieir liappy liuii ting-ground, the climate of Los Angeles their never-ending spring. Tlic names The Golden State and El Dorado are doubly applicable to C-alifornia : her light and land- scape, as well as her soil, are golden. Here, on the Pacific side. Nature wears a robe of deep rich yellow : even the distant hills, no longer purple, are wrapt in golden haze. No more cliffs and canyons — all is rounded, soft, and warm. The Sierra, which faces eastwards, with four thousand feet of wall-like rock, on the west descends gently in vine-clad slopes into the Californian vales, and trends away in spurs towards the sea. The scenery of the Nevada side was weird, but these western foot-hills are unlike anything in the world. Drake, who never left the Pacific shores, named the country New Albion, from the whiteness of a headland on the coast ; but the first viceroys were less ridiculously misled by patriotic vanity when they christened it New Spain. In the warm dry sunlight, we rolled down hills of rich red loam, and through forests of noble redwood ---the Scfjuoia sempervlrem, brother to the Sequoia gigantea, or Wellingtonia of our lawns. Dashing at full gallop through the American Eiver, just below its falls, where, in 1848, the Mormons first dug that Californian gold whi ^\ in the interests of their Church they had better have let alone, we came upon great gangs of Indians working by proxy upon the Conti- nental railroad. The Indian's plan for living happily is a simple one : lie sits and smokes in silence while his women work, and he thus lives upon the earnings jj^ajTsi^t- _ ^ - < viiow ON rm; AMr.iiKA.N liiviiu-rm, ii..\tt WJitui; fini.i> wak kiknt kiim>. P Jll XX.] EL DORADO. 215 of the squaws. Unlike a Mormon patriarch, he con- trives that polygamy shall pay, and says with the New Zealand Maori : " A man with one wife may starve, but a man with many wives grows fat." These fellows were Shoshonds from the other side of the Plateau ; for the Pacific Indians, who are black, not red, will not even force their wives to work, which, in the opinion of the Western men, is the ultimate form of degradation in a race. Higher up the hills. Chinamen alone are employed ; but their labour is too costly to be thrown a'\ay upon the easier work. In El Dorado Cit^ we stayed not long enough for the exploration of the once famous surface gold mines, now forming one long vineyard, but, rolling on, were soon among the tents of Placerville, which had been swept with fire a few months before. All these valley diggings have been deserted for deep-sinking — not that they are exhausted yet, but that the yield has •ceased to be sufficient to tempt the gambling digger. The men who lived in Placerville and made it infamous throughout the world some years ago are scattered now through Nevada, Arizona, Montana, iind the Frazer country, and Chinamen and digger Indians have the old workings to themselves, settling • their rights as against each other by daily battle and perpetual feud. The digger Indians are the most degraded of all the aborigines of North America — outcasts from the other tribes — men under a ban — *' tapu," as their Maori cousins say — weaponless, naked savages who live on roots, and pester the industrious C'hinese. 216 OREATEE BRITAIN. [chap. It is not with all their foes that the yellow men can cope so easily. In a tiny Chinese theatre in their camp near Placerville, I saw a farce which to the remainder of the audience was no doubt a very solemn drama, in ^hich the adventures of two Celestials on the diggings were given to the world. The only scene in which the pantomime was sufficiently clear for me to read it without the possibility of error was one in which a white man — "Melican man" — came to ask for taxes. The Chinamen had paid their taxes once before, but the fellow said that didn't matter. The yellow men consulted together, and at last agreed that the stranger was a humbug, so the play ended with a big fight, in which they drove him off their ground. A Chinaman played the over-'cute Ynnkee, and did it well. Perhaps the tax-collectors in the remoter districts of the States count on the Chinese to make up the deficiencies in their accounts caused by the non-pay- ment of their taxes by the whites ; for even in these days of comparative quiet and civilization, taxes are not gathered to their full amount in any of the terri- tories, and the justice of the collector is in Montana tempered by many a threat of instant lynching if he proceeds with his assessment. Even in Utah, the returns are far from satisfactory : the three great merchants of Salt Lake City should, if their incomes are correctly stated, contribute a heavier sum than that returned fo the whole of the population of the territory. The white diggers who preceded the Chinese have XX.] EL DOHA DO. 217 left their traces in the names of lodes and places. There is no town, indeed, in California with such a title as the Coloradan city of Buckskin Joe, but Yankee Jim comes near it. Placerville itself was formerly known as Hangtown, on account of its being the city in which lynch-law was inaugurated. Dead Shot Flat is not far from here, and within easy dis- tance are Hell's Delight, Jackass Gulch, and Loafer's Hill. The once famous Plug-ugly Gulch has now another name ; but of Chucklehead Diggings and Puppytown I could not find the whereabouts in my walks and rides. Graveyard Canyon, Gospel Gulch, and Paint-pot Hill are other Californian names. It is to be hoped that the English and Spanish names will live unmutilated in California and Nevada, to hand down in liquid syllables the history of ca half-for- gotten conquest, an already perished race. San Fran- cisco has become " Frisco " in speech if not on paper, and Sacramento will hardly bear the wear and tear of Californian life ; but the use of the Spanish tongue has spread among the Americans who have dealings with the Mexican country folk of California State, and, except in mining districts, the local names will stand. It is not places only that have strange designations in America. Out of the Puritan fashion of naming children from the Old Testament patriarchs has grown, by a sort of recoil, the custom of following the heroes of the classics, and when they fail, inventing strange titles for children. Mahonri Cahoon lives in Salt Lake City ; Attila Harding was secretary to 218 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. one of the governors of Utali ; Michigan University has for jjresident Erastus Haven ; for superintendent, Oramel Hosford ; for professors, Abram Sangoi, Silas Douglas, Moses Gunn, Zina Pitcher, Alonzo Pitman, De Volson Wood, Lucius Chapin, and Corydon Ford. Luman Stevens, Bolivar Barnum, Wyllys Ransom, Ozora Stearns, and Buel Derby were Michigan officers ■tluring the war, and Epaphroditus Ransom was formerly governor of the State. Theron Rockwell, •Oershon AVeston, and Bela Kellogg, are well-known politicians in Massachusetts, and Colonel Liberty Bil- lings is equally prominent in Florida. In New England school-lists it is hard to pick boys from giiis. AVho shall tell the sex of Lois Lombard, Asahel Mor- ton, Ginery French, Royal Miller, Thankful Poyne? A Chicago man, who was lynched in Central Illinois while I was in the neighbourhood, was named Alonza Tibbets. Eliphalet Arnould and Velenus Sherman are ranchmen on the overland road ; Sereno Burt is an editor in Montana ; Persis Boynton a merchant in Chicago. Zelotes Terry, Datus Damer, Zeryiah Rain- forth, Barzcllai Stanton, Sardis Clark, Ozias Williams, Xenas Phelps, Converse Hopkins, and Hirodshai Blake, are names with which I have met. Ziiplia, Huldah, Nabby, Basetha, Minnesota, and Semantha, are New England ladies ; while one gentleman of Springfield, lately married, caught a Tartia. One of the earliest enemies of the Mormons was Palatiah Allen ; one of their first converts Preserved Harris. Taking the pedigree of Joe Smith, the Mormon prophet, as that of a representative New England XX.] ELDORADO. 219 family, we sliall find that his aunts were Lovisa and Lovina Mack, Dolly Smith, Eunice and Miranda Pearce; his uncles, Eoyal, Ira, and Bushrod Smith. His grandfather's name was Asael ; of his great aunts one was Hephzibah, another Hypsebeth, and another Vasta. The prophet's eldest brother's name was Alvin; his youngest, Don Carlos; his sister, So- phronia ; and his sister-in-law, Jerusha Smith ; while a nephew was christened Chilon. One of the nieces was Levu-a, and another Rizpah. The first wife of George A. Smith, the prophet's cousin, is Bath- sheba, and his eldest daughter also bears this name. In the smaller towns near Placerville, there is still a wide field for the discovery of character as well as gold; but eccentricity among the diggers here seems chiefly to waste itself on food. The luxury of this Pacific country is amazing. The restaurants and cafe's of each petty digging-town put forth bills-of-fare which the " Trois Freres" could not equal for inge- nuity ; wine lists such as Delmonico's cannot beat. The facilities are great : except in the far interior or on the hills, one even spring reigns unchangeably — summer in all except the heat ; every fruit and vege- table of the world is perpetually in season. Fruit is not named in the hotel bills-of-fare, but all the day lono- there are piled in strange confusion on the tables. Mis- sion grapes, the Californian Bartlet pc^rs. Empire apples from Oregon, melons— English, Spanish, American, and Musk ; peaches, nectarines, and fresh almonds. All comers may help themselves, and wash down the fruit 220 GREATER BRITAIN. [cnxv. with excellent Californian-made Sauternc. If dancing, gambling, drinking, and still shorter cuts to the devil have their votaries among the diggers, there is no employment upon which they so freely spend their cash as on dishes cunningly prepared by cooks — Chinese, Italian, Bordelais — who follow every "rush," After the doctor and the coroner, no one makes money at the diggings like the cook. The dishes smell of the Californian soil ; baked rock-cod it la Buena Vista, broiled Californian quail with Russian River bacon, Sacramento snipes on toast, Oregon ham with cham- pagne sauce, and a dozen other toothsome things — these were the dishes on the Placerville bill-of-fare in an hotel which had escaped the fire, but whose only guests were diggers and their friends. A few Atlantic States dishes were down upon the list : hominy, cod chowder — hardly equal, I fear, to that of Salem — sassafras candy, and squash tart, but never a mention of pork and molasses, dear to the Massachusetts boy. All these good things the diggers, when "dirt is plenty," moisten with Clicquot, or Heidsick cabinet; when returns are small, with their excellent Sonoma wine. Even earthquakes fail to interrupt the triumphs of the cooks. The last "bad shake" was fourteen days ago, but it is forgotten in the joy called forth by the discovery of a thirteenth way to cook fresh oysters, which are brought here from the coast by train. There is still a something in Placerville that smacks of the time when tin- tacks were selling for their weight in gold. XX.] JSL DORADO. 221 Wandering through the single remaining street of Placerville before I left for the Southern country, I saw that grapes were marked *' three cents a pound ;" but as the lowest coin known on the Pacific shores is the ten-cent bit, the price exists but upon pa])er. Three pounds of grapes, however, for *' a bit" is a practicable pui'chase, in which I indulged when starting on my journey South : in the towns, you have always the hotel supply. If the value of the smallest coin be a test of the prosperity of a country, California must stand high. Not only is nothing less than the bit, or fivepence, known, but when fivepence is deducted from a " quarter," or shilling, fivepence is all you get or give for change — a gain or loss upon which Californian shopkeepers look with profound indifference. Hearing a greater jingling of glasses from one bar-room than from all the other hundred whiskey- shops of Placerville, I turned into it to seek the cause, and found a Vermonter lecturing on Lincoln and the war, to an audience of some fifty diggers. The lecturer and bar-keeper stood together within the sacred inclosure, the one mixing his drinks, while the other rounded off" his periods in the inflated Western style. The audience were critical and cold till near the close of the oration, when the *' corpse- revivers" they were drinking seemed to take effect, and to be at the bottom of the Stentorian shout " Thet's bully," with which the peroration was rewarded. The Vermonter told me that he had come round from Panama, and was on his way to Austin, 222 OEEATEli BRITAIN. [chap. as Placorvillc was "played out" since its "claims" had " fizzled." They have no lecture-room here at present, as it seems ; but that there are churches, however smalJ, appears from a paragraph in the Placerville news- sheet of to-day, which chronicles the removal of a Methodist meeting-house from Block A to Block 0, vice a Catholic chapel retired, " having obtained a superior location." A few days were all that I could spend in the valleys that lie between the Sierra and the Contra Costa Range, basking in a rich sunlight, and unsur- passed in the world for climate, scenery, and soil. This single State — one of forty-five — has twice the area of Great Britain, the most fertile of known soils, and the sun and sea-breeze of Greece. Western rhapsodies are the expression of the intoxication produced by such a spectacle ; but they are outdone by facts. For mere charm to the eye, it is hard to give the palm between the cracks and canyons of the Sierra and the softer vales of the Coast Eange, where the hot sun is tempered by the cool Pacific breeze, and thunder and liohtnino; are unknown. Coming from the wilds of the Carson desert and of Mirage Plains, the more sensuous beauty of the lower dells has for the eye the relief that travellers from the coast must seek in the loftier heights and precipices of the Yosemite. The oak-filled valleys of the Contra Costa Range have all the pensive repose of the sheltered vales that lie between the Apennines XX.] El DORADO. 003 and the Adriatic from Rimini to Ancona; but Cali- fornia has the advantage in her skies. Italy has the blue, but not the golden haze. Nothing can be more singular than the variety of beauty that lies hid in these Pacific slopes ; all that is best in Canada and the Eastern States finds more than its equal here. The terrible grandeur of Cape Trinitd on the Saguenay, and the panorama of love- liness from the terrace at Quebec, are alike outdone. Americans certainly need not go to Europe to find scenery ; but neither need they go to California, or even Colorado. Those who tell us that there is no such thing as natural beauty west of the Atlantic can scarcely know the Eastern, while they ignore the Western and Central States. The world can show few scenes more winning than Israel's iver Valley in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, or North Conway in the southern slopes of the same range. Nothing can be more full of grandeur than the passage of the James at Balcony Falls, where the river rushes through a crack in the Appalachian chain ; the wilder- ness of Northern New York is unequalled of its kind, and there are delicious landscapes in the Adirondacks. As for river scenery, the Hudson is grander than the Ehine ; the Susquehanna is lovelier than the Meuse; the Schuylkill prettier than the Seine ; the Mohawk more enchanting than the Dart.. Of the rivers of North Europe, the Neckar alone is not beaten in the States. Americans admit that their scenery is fine, but pretend that it is wholly wanting in the interest that 224 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap historic memoriua bestow. So-calltcl Republicans affect to find a charm in Bishop Hatto's Tower which is wanting in Irving's "Sunnyside;" the ten thousand virgins of Cologne live in their fimcy, while Constitution Island and Fort Washington are for- gotten names. Americans or Britishers, we Saxons are all alike — a wandering, discontented race ; we go 4,000 miles to find Sleepy Hollow, or Killian Van Rensselaer's Castle, or Hiawatha's great red pipe- stone quarry ; and tlie Americans, who live in the castle, picnic yearly in the Hollow, and flood the quarry for a skating rink, come here to England to visit Burns's house, or to sit in Pope's arm-chair. Down South I sa^v clearly the truth of a thought that struck me before T had been ten minutes west of the Sierra Pass. California is Saxon only in the looks and. language of the people of its towns. In Pennsylvania, you nay sometimes fancy yourself in Sussex ; while in New Ejigland, you seem only to be in some part of Europe that you have never hap- pened to light upon before ; in California, you are at last in a new world. The hills are weirdly peaked or flattened, the skies are new, the birds and plants are new ; the atmosphere, crisp though warm, is unlike any in the world but that of South Australia. It will be strange if the Pacific coast does not pro- duce a new school of Saxon poets — painters it has already given. Returning to Placerville, after an eventless explo- ration of the exquisite scenery to the south, I took the railway once again, the first time since I had left THK DUIDAL VKll. J.A1.L, VOSKMIIE VAI.I.KV I'. .21. XX.] EL DORALO, 225 Manhattan City — 1,800 miles away — and was soon in Sacramento, the State capital, now recovering slowly from the flood of 1862. Near the city I made out Oak Grove — famed for duels between well-known Calif ornians. Hers it was that General Denver, State senator, s\ot Mr. Gilbert, the representative in Con- gress, in a duel fought with rifles. Here, too, it was that Mr. Thomas, district attorney for Placer county, killed Dr. Dickson, of the Marine Hospital, in a duel with pistols in 1854. Records of duels form a serious part of the State history. At Lone Mountain Ceme- tery at San Francisco, there is a great marble monu- ment to the Hon. David Broderick, shot by Chief Justice Terry, of the Supreme Court, in 1859. A few hours' quiet steaming in the sunlight down the Sacramento river, past Rio Vista and Montezuma, tln"ough the gap in the Contra Costa Range, at which the grand volcanic peak of Monte Diablo stands sentinel watching over the Martinez Straits, and there opened to the south and west a vast mountain- surrounded bay. Volumes of cloud were rolling in unceasingly from the ocean, through the Golden Gate, past the fortified island of Alcatras, and spending themselves in the opposite shores of San Rafael, Be- nicia, and Vallejo. At last I was across the continent^ and face to face with the Pacific. VOL. I. 226 GUEATER BRITAIN. [chap. CHAPTER XXI. LYNCH LAW. " Californians are called the scum of the earth, yet their great city is the best policed in the world/' said a New York friend to me, when he heard that I thought of crossing the continent to San Francisco. " Them New Yorkers is a sight too fond of looking after other people's morals," replied an old " Forty- niner," to whom I repeated this phrase, having first toned it down, however. " Still," he went on, " our history's baddish, but it ain't for us to pl;iy showman to our own worst pints : — let every man skin hi* own skunk ! " The story of the early days of San Francisco, as to which my curiosity was thus excited, is so curious an instance of the development of an English com- munity under the most inauspicious circumstances, that the whole time which I spent in the ciLy itself I devoted to hearing the tale from those who knew the actors. Not only is the history of the two- Yigilance Committees in itself characteristic, but it works in with what I had gathered in Kansas, and Illinois, and Colorado as to the operation of the- claim-clubs ; and the stories, taken together, form a typical picture of the rise of a New English countr}\ XXI.] LYNCH LAW. 227 The discovery of gold in 1848 brought down on luckless California the idle, the reckless, the vaga- bonds first of Polynesia, then of all the woi-ld. Street fighting, public gaming, masked balls gi\'en by unknown women and paid for nobody knew how, but attended by governor, supervisors, and alcade— all these were minor matters by the side of the general undefined ruffianism of the place. Before the end of 1849, San Francisco presented on a gigantic scale much the same appearance that Helena in Montana wears in 1866. Desperadoes poured in from all sides, the l)est of the bad flocking off" to the mines, while the worst among the villains — those who lacked energy as well as moral sense — remained in the city, to raise by thieving or in the gambling-booth the "pile" that they were too indolent to earn by pick and pan. Hundi'eds of "emancipists" from Sydney, "old lags" from Norfolk Island, the pick of the criminals of England, still further trained and con- firmed in vice and crime by the experiences of Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur, rushed to San Francisco to continue Ji career which the vigilance of the convict police made hopeless in Tasmania and New South Wales. The floating vice of the Pacific ports of South America soon gathered to a spot where there were not only men to fleece, bu' men who, being fleeced, could pay. The police were necessarily few, for, appoint a man to-day, and to-morrow he was gone to the Placers with some new friend ; those who could be prevailed upon to Q 2 228 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. remain a fortnight in the force were accessible to bribes from the men they were set to watch. They themselves admitted their inaction, but ascribed it to the continual change of place among the criminals, which prevented the slightest knowledge of their characters and haunts. The Australian gaol-birds formed a quarter known as " Sydney Town," which soon became what the Bay of Islands had been ten years before — the Alsatia of the Pacific. In spite of daily murders, not a single criminal was hanged. The ruffians did not all agree : there were jea- lousies among the various bands ; feuds between the Australians and Chilians ; between the Mexicans anc'i the New Yorkers. Under the various names, of " Hounds," " Regulators," " Sydney ducks," and " Sydney coves," the English convict party organized themselves in opposition to the Chilenos as well as to the police and law-abiding citizens. Gangs of villains, whose sole bond of union was robbery or murder, marched, armed with bludgeons and revolvers; every Sunday afternoon to the sound of music un- hindered through the streets, professing that they were ''guardians of the community" against the Spaniards, Mexicans, and South Americans. At last a movement took place among the mer- chants and reputable inhabitants which resulted in the break-up of the Australian gangs. By an uprising of the American citizens of San Francisco, in response to a proclamation by T. M. Leavenworth, the alcade, twenty of the most notorious among the XXI.] LYNCH LAW. 229 "Hounds" were seized and shipped to China: it is believed that some were taken south in irons, and landed near Cape Horn. "Anywhere so that they could not come back," as my informant said. For a week or two things went well, but a fresh inpour of rogues and villains soon swamped the volunteer police by sheer force of numbers ; and in February 1851 occurred an instance of united action among the citizens, which is noticeable as the fore- runner of the Vigilance Committees. A Mr. Jansen had been stunned by a blow from a slung shot, and his person and premises rifled by Australian thieves. During the exan} '.nation of two prisoners arrested on suspicion, five tnousand citizens gathered round the City Hall, and handbills were circulated, in which it was proposed that the prisoners should be lynched. In the afternoon, an attempt to seize the men was made, but repulsed by another section of the citizens — the Washington guard. A meeting was held on the Plaza, and a committee appointed to watch the authorities, and prevent a release. A well-known citizen, Mr. Brannan, made a speech, in which he said : " We, the people, are the mayor, the recorder, and the laws." The alcade addressed the crowd, and suggested, by way of compromise, that they should elect a jury which should sit in the regular court, and try the prisoners. This was refused, and the people elected not only a jury, but , three judges, a sheriff, a clerk, a public prosecutor, and two counsel for the defence. This court then tried the prisoners in their absence, and the jury 230 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. failed to agree — nine were for conviction, and three were doubtful. " Hang 'em, anyhow ; majority rules," was the shout, but the popular judges stood firm, and discharged their jury, while the people acquiesced. The next day, the prisoners were tried and convicted by the regular court, although they were ultimately found to be innocent men. Matters now went from bad to worse : five times San Francisco was swept from end to end by fires known to have been helped on, if not originally kindled, by incendiaries in the hope of plunder; and when, by the fires of May and June, 1851, hardly a house was left untouched, the pious Bos- tonians held up their hands, and cried " Gomorrah !" Immediately after the discovery that the June fire was not accidental, the Vigilance Committee was formed, being self-appointed, and consisting of the foremost merchants in the place. This was on the 7th of June, according to my friend ; on the 9th, according to the Californian histories. It was rumoured that the Committee consisted of two hundred citizens ; it was known that they were supported by the whole of the city press. They pu])lished a declaration, in which they stated that there is "no security for life or property under the . . . law as now administered." This they ascribed to the " quibbles of the law," the " corruption of the police/' the "insecurity of prisons," the "laxity of those who pretend to administer justice." The secret instructions of the Committee contain a direc- tion that the members if mine 1 " " Twelve by thirteen." " That will do." In Kansas, a log-house of the regulation size was fitted up on wheels, and let at ten dollars a day, in order that it might be wheeled on to different lots, to be sworn to as a house upon the land. Men have been known to make a window- sash and frame, and keep them inside of their window- less huts, to swear that they had a window in their house — another of the requirements of the Act. It is a singular mark of deference to the traditions of a Puritan ancestry that such accomplished liars as the Western land-sharks should feel it necessary to have any foundation whntever for their lies ; but not only in this respect are they a curious race. One of their peculiarities is that, however wealthy they may be, they will never place their money out at interest, never sink it in a speculation, however tempting, when there is no prospect of almost immediate realiza- tion. To turn their money over often, at whatever VOL. I. R 242 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap risk, is with these men an axiom. The advance-guard of civilization, they push out into an unknown wilder- ness, and seize upon the available lots, the streams, the springs, the river bottoms, the falls or "water- privileges," and then, using their interest in the terri- torial legislature — using, perhaps, direct corruption in some cases — they procure the location of the State capital upon their lands, or the passage of the railroads through their valleys. The capital of Nebraska has been fixed in this manner at a place two hundred and fifty iTjles from the nearest settlement. A newspaper appeared suddenly, dated from " Lincoln City, centre of Nebraska territory," but published in reality in Omaha. To cope with such fellows, Western sheriffs need be no ordinary men. Thanks to the Vigilance Committees, California stands new before the other Far- Western States. Rowdyism is being put down as the God-fearing Northerners gain ground. It may still be dangerous to stroke your beard in a bar-room at Placerville or El Dorado ; *' a gentleman in the loafing and chancing line " may still be met with in Sacramento ; here and there a Missourian " PiLe," as yet unhung, may boast that he can whip his weight in wild-cats, but San Francisco has at least reached the age of outward decorum, has shut up public gaming-houses, and supports four Church papers. In Colorado, Lynch-law is not as yet forgotten : the day we entered Denver, the editor of the Gazette expressed, " on historical grounds," his deep regret at the cutting-down of two fine cotton wood -trees that stood on Cherry Creek. When we came to talk to XXI.] LYNCH LAW. 243 him, we found that the " history" alluded to was that of the " escape up" these trees of many an early inha- bitant of Denver City. " There's the tree we used to put the jury under, and that's the one we hanged 'em on. Put a cart under the tree, and the boy standing on it, with the rope around him ; give him time for a pray, then smack the whip, and tlier' you air." Tn Denver we were reserved upon the subject of Vigilance Committees for it is dangerous sometimes to make close inquiries as to their constitution. While I was in Leavenworth, a man was hanged by the molj at Council Bluffs for asking the names of the Vigilants who had hanged a friend of his the year before. We learnt enousch, however, at Denver to show that the Committer jn that city still exists ; and in Virginia .'ind Carson I know that the organizations are con- tinued ; but offenders are often er shot quietly than publicly hanged, in order to prevent an outcry, and avoid tli(^. vengeance of the relatives. The verdict of the jury never fails to be respected, but acquittal is almost as unknown as mercy to those convicted. Innocent men are seldom tried before such juries, for the case must be clear before the sheriff' will run the risk of being shot in making the arrest. When the man's fate is settled, the sheriff" drives out quietly in his buggy, and next day men say when they meet, "Poor 's escaped;" or else it is, "The sheriff's shot. Who'll run for office?" .„^- v. It will be seen from the history of the Vigilance Committees, as I heard their stories from Kansas to California, that they are to be divided into two R 2 244 aiiEATER BRITAIN. [chai'. classes, with sluirply-marked charaeteristics — those where committees, hangings, transportations, warnings, are alike open to the light of day, such as the Ccm- mittees of San Francisco in 1856, and the Sandwich Islands in 18G6, and those — unhappily the vast majo- rity — where all is secret and irresponsible. Here, in San Francisco, the Committee was the government ; elsewhere, the organizations were less wide, and the members, though always shrewdly guessed at, never known. Neither class should be necessary, unless when a gold rush brings down upon a State the desperadoes of the world ; but there is this encourage- ment even in the history of Lynch-law : that, although English settlements often start wild, they never have been known to go wild. The men who formed the second Vigilance Com- mittee of San Francisco are now the governor, senators, and Congress- men of California, the mayors and sheriffs of her towns. Nowadays the citizens are remarkable, even among Americans, for their love of law and order. Their city, though still subject to a yearly deluge from the outpourings of all the over- crowded slums of Europe, is, as the New Yorker said, the best policed in all America. In politics, too, it is remarked that party organizations have no power in this State from the moment that they attempt to nominate corrupt or time-serving men. The people break loose from their caucuses and conventions, and vote in a body for their honest enemies rather than for corrupt friends. They ha\e the advantage of singular ability, for there is not an average man in California. xxirj GOLDEN CITY, 245 CHAPTER XXir. GOLDEN CITY. The first letter which I dehvered in San Francisco was from a Mormon gentleman to a merchant, who, as he read it, exclaimed : " Ah ! so you want to see' the lions ? I'll pick you up at three, and take you there." I wondered, but went, as travellers do. At the end of a pleasant drive along the best road in all America, I found myself upon a cliff over- hanging the Pacific, with a glorious outlook, seawards towards the Farallones, and northwards to Cape Benita and the Golden Gate. Beneath, a few hundred yards from shore, was a conical rock, covered with shapeless monsters, plashing the water and ro-iring ceaselessly, while others swam around. These were " the lions," my acquaintance said— the sea-lions. I did not enter upon an explanation of our slang phrase, " the lions/' which the Mormon, himself an Englishman, no doubt had used, but took the first opportunity of seeing the remainder of " the lions" of the Golden City. The most remarkable spot in all America is Mission Dolores, in the outskirts of San Francisco City— once a settlement of the Society of Jesus, and now partly 246 GREATER BRITAIN. . [chap. blanket factory and partly church. Nowhere has the conflict between the Saxon and Latin races been so sharp and so decisive. For eighty or ninety years California was first old Spanish, then Mexican, then a half independent Spanish- American republic. The progress of those ninety years was shown in the foundation of half-a-dozen Jesuit " missions," who held each of them a thousand or two tame Indians as slaves, while a few military settlers and their friends divided the interior with the savage tribes. Gold, which had been discovered here by Drake, was never sought: the fathers, like the Mormon chiefs, discou^^aged mining ; it interfered with their " tame " Indians. Here and there, in four cases, perhaps, in all, a presidio, or castle, had been built for the protec- tion of the mission, and a puebla, or tiny free town, had been suffered to grow up, not without remon- strance from the fathers. Los Angele-. had thus sprung from the mission of that name, the fishing vil- lage of Yerba Buena, from Mission Dolores on the bay of San Francisco, and San Jose, from Santa Clara. In 1846, Fremont the Pathfinder conquered the country with forty-two men, nnd now it has a settled population of nearly half a million ; and San Francisco is as large as Newcastle or Hull, as flou- rishing as Liverpool, and the Saxon blanket factory has replaced the Spanish mission. The story might have served as a warning to the French Emperor, when he sent ships and men to found a " Latin empire in America." Between the presidio and the Mission Dolores lies XXII J GOLDEN CITY. 247 Lone Mountain Cemetery, in that solitary calm and majesty of beauty which befits a home for the dead, the most lovely of all the cemeteries of America. Queen Emma, of the Sandwich Islands, who is here at present, said of it yesterday to a Californian mer- chant : " How comes it that you Americans, who live so fast, find time to buiy your dead so beautifully ? " Lone Mountain is not the only delicious spot that is given up to the American dead. Laurel Hill, Mount Auburn, Greenwood, Cypress Grove, Hollywood, Oak Hill, arc names not more full of poetry than are the places to which they belong ; but Lone Mountain has over all an advantage in its giant fuchsias and scarlet geraniums, of the size and shape of trees ; in the dis- • tant glimpses, too, of the still Pacific. San Francisco is ill placed, so far as mere building facilities are concerned. When the first houses were built in 1845 and 1846, they stood on a strip of beach surrounding the sheltered cove of Yerba Buena, and at the foot of the steep and lofty sand-hills. Dunes and cove have disappeared together ; the hills have been shot bodily into the bay, and the former harbour is now the business quarter of the city. Not a street can be built without cutting down a hill, or filling up a glen. Never was a great town built under heavier difiiculties ; but trade requires it to be exactly where it is, and there it will remain and grow. Its former rivals, Vallejo and Benicia, are grass-grown villages, in spite of their having had the advantage of " a perfect situation." While the spot on which the Golden City stands was still occupied by the strug- 248 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. gling village of Yerba Bucnn, Francisc.a was a rising city, where corner lots were worth their ten or twenty thousand dollars. When the gold rush came, the village, shooting to the front, voted itself the name of its great bay, and Francisca had to change its title to Benicia, in order not to be thought a mere suburb of San Francisco. The mouth of the Columbia was once looked to as the future haven of Western America, and point of convergence of the railroad lines ; but the " centre of the universe " has not more completely removed from Independence to Fort Riley than Astoria has yielded to San Francisco the claim to be the port of the Pacific. The one great danger of this coast all its cities share in common. Three times within the present century, the spot on which San Francisco now stands has been violently disturbed by subterranean forces. The earth- quake of last 3^ear has left its mark upon Montgomery Street and the Plaza, for it frightened the San Fran- ciscans into putting up light wooden cornices to hotels and banks, instead of the massive stone pro- jections that are common in the States ; otherwise, though lesser shocks are daily matters, the San Fran- ciscans have forgotten the "great scare." A year is a lonff time in California. There is but little of the £:.rliest San Francisco left, though the city is only eighteen years old. Fires have done good work as well as harm, and it is worth a walk up to the Plaza to see how prim and starched are the houses which now occupy a square three sides of which were, in 1850, given up to public gaming-hells. xxii.] aoLDEN CITY. 249 One of the few remaining bits of old Golden City life is to be found in the neighl)ourhood of the " What Cheer House," the resting-place of diggers on their way from the interior to take ship for New York or Eu- rope. Here there is no lack of coin, no want of oaths, no scarcity of drinks. " Mint juleps" are as plentiful as in Baltimore itself; Yerba Buena, the old name for San Francisco, means " mint." If the old character of the city is gone, there are still odd scenes to be met with in its streets. To- day I saw a master builder of great wealth with his coat and waistcoat off, and his hat stowed away on one side, carefully teacliing a raw Irish lad how to lay a brick. He told me that the acquisition of the art would brino; the man an immediate rise in his wages of from five to ten shillings a day. Unskilled labour, Mexican and Chinese, is plentiful enough, but white artisans are scarce. The want of servants is such, that even the wealthiest inhabitants live with their wives and families in hotels, to avoid the cost and trouble of an establishment. Those who have houses pay rough unkempt Irish girls from £6 to £8 a month, with board, " outings " when they please, and "followers'' unlimited. The hotel boarding has much to do with the some- what unwomanly manner of a few among the ladies of the newest States, but the effect upon the children is more marked than it is upon their mothers. To a woman of wealth, it matters, perhaps, but little whether she rules a household of her own, or boards in the first floor of some gigantic hostelry ; but it docs 250 (iREATEIl BRITAIN. [chap. matter a great deal to her, children, who, in the one case, have a home to play and work in, and who, in the other, play on the stairs or in the corridors, to the annoyance of every sojourner in the hotel, and never dream of work out of school-hours, or of solid reading that is not compulsory. The only one of the common charges brought against America in English society and in English books and papers that is thoroughly true, is the statement that American children, as a rule, are " forward," ill-mannered, and immoral. An American can scarcely be found who does not admit and deplore the facts. With the self- exposing honesty that is a characteristic of their nation, American gentlemen will talk by the hour of the terrible profligacy of the young New Yorkers. Boys, they tell you, who in England would be safe in lower school at Eton or in well-managed houses, in New York or New Orleans are deep gamesters and God-defying rowdies. In New England, things are better ; in the West, there is yet time to prevent the ill arising ; but even ?n the most old-fashioned of American States, the children are far too full of self- assurance. Their faults are chiefly faults of manner, but such in children have a tendency to become so many vices. On my way home from Egypt, I crossed the Simplon with a Southerner and a Penn- sylvanian boy of fourteen or fifteen. An English boy would have expressed his opinion, and been silent : this lad's attacks upon the poor Southerner were unceasing axid unfeeling ; yet I could see that he was good at bottom. I watched my chance to give him XX"] ' GOLDEN VITY. .>,)| my view of liis conduct, and when we jiarted, he came up and shook hands, saying : " You're not a bad fellow for a Britisher, after all." In my walks through the city, I found its climate agreeable rather for work than idleness. Saunterincr or lounging is as little possible as it is in London. Thl summer is not yet ended ; and in the summer at San Francisco, it is cold after eleven in the day-strangely cold for the latitude of Athens. The fierce sun scorches up the valleys of the San Joaquin and the Sacramento in the early morning ; and the heated air, rismg from off the ground, leaves its place to be filled by the cold breeze from the Pacific. The Contra Costa Eange is unbroken but by the single gap of the Golden Gate, and through this opening the cold winds rush in a never-ceasing gale, spreading fan-like as soon as they have passed the narrows. Hence it is that the Golden Gate is called " The Keyhole," and the wind "The Keyhole Breeze." Up country, they make it raise the water for irrigation. In winter, there is a calm, and then the city is as sunny as tlie rest of California. So puiely local is the bitter gale, that at Benicia, ten miles from San Francisco, the mean temperature is ten degrees higher for the year, and nearly twenty for the summer. I have stood on the shore at Benicia when the thermometer was at a hundred in the shade, and seen the clouds pouring in from the Pacific, and hiding San Francisco in a murky paU, while' the temperature there was under 70 degrees. This fog retarded by a hundred years the discovery of San 252 QREATKR BRITAIN. [chap. Fraucisco Bay. The entrance to the Golden City is narrow, and the mists hang there all day. Cabrillo, Drake, Viscaino, sailed past it ^\'itlioiit seeing that there was a bay, and the great land-locked sea was first beheld by white men when the missionaries came upon its arms and creeks, far away inland. The peculiarity of climate carries with it great advantages. It is never too hot, never too cold, to work — a fact which of itself secures a grand future for San Francisco. The effect upon national type is marked. At a San Franciscan ball, you see English faces, not American. Even the lean Western men and hungry Yankees become plump and rosy in this temple of the winds. The high metallic ring of the New England voice is not found in San Francisco. As for old men, California must have been that fabled province of Cathay the virtues of which were such' that, whatever a man's age when he entered it, he never grew older by a day. To dogs and strangers there are drav/backs in the absence of winter : dogs are muzzled all the year round, and musquitoes are perennial upon the coast. The city is gay with flags ; every house supports a Liberty pole upon its roof, for wdien the Union sentiment sprang up in San Francisco, at the beginning of the war, public opinion forced every citizen to make a conspicuous exhibition of the stars and stripes by way of showing that it was from no want of loyalty that they refused to permit the circulation of Federal greenbacks. In this matter of flags, the sea-gale is of service, for xxn.] GOLDEN CITY. 253 were it not for its friendly assistance, a short house between two tall ones could not sport a huge flag with much efl'ect. As it is, the wind always blowing "^across the chief streets, and never up or down, the narrowest and lowest house can flaunt a large ensign without fear of its ever flapping against the walls of its proud neighbours. It is not only in rosy cheeks that the Califor- nian English have the old-world type. With less ingenuity than the New England Yankees, they have far more depth and solidity in their enterprise ; they do not rack their brain at inventing machines to peel apples and >idlk cows, but they intend to tunuel through the mountains to Lake Tahoe, tap it, and with its waters irrigate the Californian plains. They share our British love for cash payments aiid good roads ; they one and all set their faces against repudia- tion in any shape, and are strongly for what they call "rolling-up" the debt. Throughout the war, they quoted paper as depreciated, not gold as risen! Indeed, there is here the same unreasoning prejudice against paper-money that I met with in Nevada After all, what can be expected of a State which still produces three-eights of all the gold raised yearly in the world. ^ San Francisco is inhabited, as all American cities bid fair to be, by a mixed throng of men of all lands beneath the sun. New England and Enghshmen predominate in energy, Chinese in numbers. The French and Italians are stronger here than in any other city in the States; and the red-skinned Mexi- 254 a RE AT Eli BRIT J IN. [chap. cans, who own the land, supply the market people and a small proportion of the townsfolk. Austra- lians, Polynesians, and Chilians are numerous ; the Germans and Scandinavians alone are few ; they prefer to go wliere they have already friends — to Philadelphia or Milwaukee. In this city — already a microcosm of the world — the English, British, and American, are in possession — have distanced the Irish, beaten down the Chinese by force, and are destined to physically preponderate in the cross-breed, and give the tone, political and moral, to the Pacific shore. New York is Irish, Philadelphia German ; Milwaukee Norwegian ; Chicago Canadian ; Sault de St. Marie French ; but in San Francisco — wliere all the foreign races are strong — none is dominant ; whence the singular result that California, the most mixed in population, is also the most English of the States. In this strange community, starting more free from the Puritan influence of New England than has hitherto done any State ithin the Union, it is doubtful what religion will predominate. Catholi- cism is "not fashionable" in America — it is the creed of the Irish, and that is enough for most Americans ; so Anglicanism, its critics say, is popular as being " very proper." Whatever the cause, the Episcopalian Church is flourishing in California, and it seems probable that the Church which gains the day in California will eventually be that of the wdiole Pacific. In Montgomery Street are some of the finest XXII.] GULDEN CITY. 255 buildings in all America ; tlie *' Occidental Hotel," the " Masonic Hall," tlic " Union Club," and others. The club has only just been rebuilt after its destruction by a nitro-glycerine explosion which occurred in the express office next door. A case, of which no one knew the contents, was being lifted by two clerks, Y/hen it exploded, blowing down a portion of the club, and breaking half the windows in the city. On examination it was found to be nitro-glycerine on its way to the mines. Another accident occurred here yesterday with this same compound. A sharp report was heard on board a ship lying in the docks, and the cook was found dead below ; pieces of a flask had been driven into his heart and lungs. The deposit on the broken glass was examined, and found to be common oil ; but this morning, I find in the Alta a report from a chemist that traces of nitro-glycerine have been discovered b}' him upon the glass, and a statement from one of the hands says that the ship on her way up had called at Manzanilla, where the cook had taken the flask from a merchant's office, emptied it of its contents, the character of which was unknown to him, and filled it with common vegetable oil. Since the great explosion at A spin wall, nitro- glycerine has been the nightmare of Californians. For earthquakes they care little, but the frejiks of the devilish oil, which is brought here secretly, for use in the Nevada mines, have made them ready to swear that it is itself a demon. They tell you that it freezes every night, and then the slightest friction 256 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. will explode it — that, on the other hand, it goes off if heated. If you leave it standing in ordinary- temperatures, the odds are that it undergoes decom- position, and then, if you touch it, it explodes ; and no lapse of time has on its power the smallest deteriorating effect, but, on the contrary, the oil will crystallize, and then its strength for harm is multiplied by ten. If San Francisco is ever destroyed by earthquake, old Californians will certainly be found to ascribe the shock to nitro-glycerine. A day or two after my return from Benicia, I escaped from the city, and again went South, halting at San Jose, "The Garden City," and chief town of the fertile Guadalupe district, on my way to the quicksilver mines of New Almaden, now the greatest in the world since they have beaten the Spanish mines and Idria. From San Jose, I drove myself to Almaden along a sun-dried valley Avith a fertile tawny soil, reaching the delicious mountain stream and the groves it feeds in time to join my friends at lunch in the shady hacienda. The director took me through the refining works, in which the quicksilver may be seen running in streams down outters from the furnaces, but he was unable to go with me up the mountain to the mines from which the cinnabar comes shooting down by its weight. The superintendent engineer — a meerschaum-equipped Ba- varian — and myself mounted, at the Hacienda Gate, upon our savage-looking beasts, and I found myself for the first time lost in the depths of a Mexican saddle, and my feet plunged into the boot-stirrups tliat I had XXI l] golden city. 257 seen used by the Utes in Denver. Tlie riding feats of the JMexicans and the Californian boys are ex- plained when you find that their saddle puts it out of the question that they should be thrown ; but the fatigue that its size and shape cause to man and horse, when the man is a stranger to New Spain, and the horse knows that he is so, outweighs any possible advantages that it may possess. With their huge gilt spurs, attached to the stirrup, not to the boot, the double peak, and the embroidered trappings, the Mexican saddles are the perfection at once of the cumbersome and the picturesque. Silently we half scrambkul, half rode, up a break- neck path which forms a short cut to the mine, till all at once a charge of our horses at an almost perpendicular wall of rock was followed by their simultaneously commencing to kick and back towards the cliff. Springing off, we found that the girths had been slackened by the Mexican groom, and that the steep bit of mountain had caused the saddles to slip. This broke the ice, and we speedily found ourselves discussing miners and mining in French, my German not being much worse than my Bavarian's English. After viewing the mines, the walls of which, com- posed of crimson cinnabar, show bravely in the torch- glare, we worked our way through the tunnels to the topmost lode and open air. Bidding good-bye to what I could see of my Ger- man in the fog from his meerschaum, I turned to ride down by the road instead of the path. I had not gone a furlong, when, turning a corner, there l^urst upon VOL. r. s 258 GREATER BRITAIN. , [chap. me a view of the whole valley of tawny California, now richly golden in the colours of the fall. Looking from this spur of the Santa Cruz Mountains, with the Contra Costa Kange before me, and Mount Hamilton towering from the plain, apart, I could discern below me the gleam of the Coyote Creek, and of the windows in the church of Santa Clara — in the distance, the mountains and waters of San Francisco Bay, from San Mateo to Alameda and San Pablo, basking in unhindered sun. The wild-oats dried by the sun made of the plain a field of gold, dotted here and there with groups of black oak and bay, and darkened at the mountain foot with "chapparal." The volcanic hills were rounded into softness in the delicious haze, and all nature overspread with a poetic calm. As I lost the view, the mighty fog was beginning to pour in through the Golden Gate to refresh America with dews from the Pacific, xxiii.] LITTLE CHINA. 259 .y CHAPTER XXIII. LITTLE CHINA. "The Indians begin to be troublesome again in Trinity County. One man and a Chinaman have been killed, and a lady crippled for life." That the antipathy everywhere exhibited by the English to coloured races was not less strong in California than in the Carolinaj I had suspected, but I was hardly prepared for the deliberate distinction between men and yellow men drawn in this paragraph from the California Alta of the day of my return to San Francisco. A determination to explore Little China, as the celestial quarter of the city is termed, already arrived at, was only strengthened by the unconscious humour of the Alta, and I at once set off in search of two of the detectives, Edes and Saulsbury, to whom I had some sort of introduction, and put myself under their charge for the night. We had not been half-an-hour in the Chinese theatre or opera-house before my detectives must have repented of their offer to " show me round," for, incomprehensible as it must have seemed to them with their New England gravity and American con- s 2 260 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. tem[ t for the Chinese, I was amused beyond measure with the performance, and fairly lost myself in the longest laugh that I had enjoyed since I had left the plantations of Vkginia, When we entered the house, which is the size of the Strand Theatre of London, it may have been ten or eleven o'clock. The performance had begun at seven, and was likely to last till two a.m. By the "performance " was meant this particular act or scene, for the piece had been going on every evening for a month, and would be still in progress during the best part of another, it being the principle of the Chinese drama to take up the hero at an early age, and conduct him to the grave — which he reaches full of years and of honour. The house was crammed with a grinning crowd of " yellow-boys," while the " China ladies" had a long gallery to themselves. No sound of applause is to be heard in a (Jhinese place of amusement, but the crowd grin delight at the actors, who, for their part, grin back at the crowd. The feature of the periormance which struck me at once was the hearty interest the actors took in the play, and the chalf that went on between them and the pit. It is not only from their numbers and the nature of their trades that the Chinese may be called the Irish of the Pacific : there was soul in every gesture. On the stage, behind the actors, was a band, which played unceasingly, and so loud, that the performers, who clearly had not the smallest intention to sub- ^^'"•1 •■ LTTTLE CHINA. 261 ordinate their parts to the music, had to talk in shrinks in order to be heard. Tlie audience, too, all talked in their loudest natural tones. As for the play, a lady made love to an old gentle- man (probably the hero, as this was the second month or third act of the play), and, bawling at him fiercely, was indignantly rejected by him in a piercing shriek. Relatives, male and female, coming with many howls to the assistance of the lady, were ignominiously put to flight, in a high falsetto key. by the old ft^llow'b footmen, who were in turn routed by a force of yelling spearmen, apparently the couiity posse. The soldiers wore paint in rings of various colours, put on so deftly, that of nose, of eyes, of mouth, no trace could be discovered ; the fjont face resembled a target for archery. All this time, a steady, unceasing uproar was continued by four gongs and a harp, with various cymbals, pavilions, triangle^'s, and guitars. Scenery there was none, but boards were put up in the Elizabethan way, with hieroglyphics denoting the supposed locality ; and another archaic point is, that all the female parts are played by boys. For this I have the word of the detectives ; my eyes, had I not long since ceased to believe them, would have given me proof to the contrary. . . The acting, as far as I could judge by the grimace, was excellent. Nowhere could be found greater spirit, or equal power of facial expression. The stage fight was full of pantomimic force; the leading soldier would make his fortune as a London pantaloon"! 2G2 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. When the detectives could no longer contain their distaste for the performance, we changed our quarters for a restaurant — the " Hang Heong," the wood of which was brought from China. The street along which we had to pass was deco- rated rather than lit by paper lanterns hung over every door ; but the " Hang Heong " was brilliantly illuminated, with a view, no doubt, to attracting the crowd as they poured out from the theatre at a later hour. The ground-floor was occupied by shop and kitchen, the dining-rooms being upstairs. The counter, which is on the plan of that in the houses of the Palais Tloyal, was presided over, not by a smiling Avoman, but by grave and pig-tailed gentle- men in black, who received our order from the detective with the decorous solemnity of the head waiter in an English country inn. The rooms upstairs were nearly full ; and as the Chinese by no means follow the Americans in silent eating, the babel was tremendous. A saucer and a pair of chopsticks w^ere given each of us, but at our request a spoon was furnished as a special favour to the " Melicans." Tiny cups of a sw^eet spirit were handed us before supper wai brought up. The liquor was a kind of shrub, but white, made, I was told, from sugar-canes. For first course, we had roast duck cut in pieces, and served in an oil-filled bowl, and some sort of fish ; tea was then brought in, and followed by shark's fin, for which I had given a special order; the result might have been gum-arabic for any flavour I could XXIII.] LITTLE CHINA. 203 find. Dog was not to be obtained, and Lirds'-nest soup was beyond the purse of a traveller seven thou- sand miles from home, and twelve thousand from his next supplies. A dish of some strange black fungus stewed in rice, followed by preserves and cakes, concluded our supper, and were washed down by our tliird cups of tea. After paying our respects and our money to the gentleman in black, who n-unted a lugubrious some- thing that answered to " good-night," we paid a visit to the Chinese "bad quarter," which difters only in degree of badness from the " quartier Mexicain," the bad pre-eminence being ascribed, even by the pre- judiced detectives, to the Spaniards and Chilians. Hurrying on, we reached the Chinese gaming- houses, just before they closed. Some difficulty was made about admitting us by the " yellow loafers" who hung round the gate, as the houses are prohibited by law ; but as soon as the detectives, who were known, explained that they came not on business but on pleasure, we were suffered to pass in among the silent melancholy gamblers. Not a word was heard, beyond every now and then a grunt from the croupier. Each man knew what he was about, and won or lost his money in the stillness of a dead-house. The game appeared to be a sort of loto ; but a few minutes of it was enough, and the detectives pretended to no deep acquaintance with its principles. The San Francisco Chinese are not all me^e theatre- goers, loafers, gamblers ; as a body, they are frugal, industrious, contented men. I soon grew to think it 264 OBEATEli BRITAIN. [chap. a pleasure to meet a Chinese- American, so clean and happy is his look ; not a speck is to be seen upon the blue cloth of his long coat or baggy trousers. His hair is combed with care ; the bamboo on which he and his mate together carry their enormous load seems as though cleansed a dozen times a day. It is said to be a peculiarity of the Chinese that they are all alike : no European car>, without he has dealings with them, distinguish one celestial from another. The same, however, may be said of the Sikhs, the Australian natives, of most coloured races, in short. The points of difference which distinguish the yellow men, the red men, the black men with straight hair, the negroes, from any other race what- ever, are so much more prominent than the minor distinctions between Ah Sing and Chi Long, or between Uncle Ned and Uncle Tom, that the indi- vidual are sunk and lost in the national distinctions. To the Chinese in turn all Europeans are alike ; but beneath these obvious facts, there lies a grain of solid truth that is worth the hunting out, and which is connected with the change-of-type question in Ame- rica and Australasia. Men of similar habits of mind and body are alike among ourselves in Europe ; noted instances are the close resemblan^^^. of Pk^e Enfantin, the St. Simonian chief, to the busts of Epicurus ; of Bismarck to Cardinal Ximenes. Irish labourers — men who for the most part work hard, feed little, and leave their minds entirely unploughed — are all alike ; Chinamen, who all work hard, and work alike, who live alike, and who go further, aiid all think alike, xxiii.] LITTLE CHINA. 265 are, Vy a mere law of nature, indistinguishable one from the other. In the course of my wanderings in the Golden City, I lighted on the house of the Canton Company, one of the Chinese benevolent societies, the others being those of Hong Kong, Macao, and Anioy. They are like the New York Immigration Commission, and the London " Societe Fran^aise de Bienfaisance," combined ; added to a theatre and joss-house, or temple, and governed on the principles of such clubs as those of the " whites" or " greens" at Heidelberg, they are, in short, Chinese trades unions, sheltering the sick, succouring the distressed, finding work for the unemployed, receiving the immigrants from China when they land, and shipping their bones back to China, ticketed with name and address, when they die. " Hong Kong, with dead Chinamen," is said to be a common answer from outward-bounders to a hail from the guard-ship at the Golden Gate. Some of the Chinese are wealthy : Tung Yu & Co., Chi Sing Tong & Co., Wing Wo Lang & Co., Cliy Lung & Co., stand high among the merchants of the Golden City. Honest and wealthy as these men are allowed to be, they are despised by every white Calif ornian, from the Governor of the State to the Mexican boy who cleans his shoes. In America, as in Australia, there is a violent prejudice against John Chinaman. He pilfers, we are told ; he lies, he is dirty, he smokes opium, is full of bestial vices — a pagan, and — what is far more important — yellow ! All his sins are to be pardoned 2GG GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. but the last. Californians, when in good humour, will ndmit that John is sober, patient, peaceable, and hard-working, that his clothes -at least are scrupulously clean ; but he is yellow ! Even the Mexicans, themselves despised, look down upon the Chinamen, just as the New York Irish affect to have no dealings with " the naygurs." The Chinese them- selves pander to the feeling. Their famous appeal to the Californian Democrats may or may not be true : " What for Democlat allee timee talkee dam Chinaman ? Chinaman allee samee Democlat ; no likee nigger, no likee injun." *' Infernals," " Celes- tials," and " Greasera " — or black men, yellow men, and Mexicans — it is hard to say which are most despised by the American whites in California. The Chinaman is hated by the rough fellows for his cowardic>\ Had the Chinese stood to their rights against the Americans, they would long since have been driven from California. As it is, here and in Victoria they invariably give way, and never work at diggings which are occupied by whites. Yet in both countries they take out mining licenses from the State, which is bound to protect them in the possession of the rights thus gained, but which is powerless against the rioters of Ballarat, or the "Anti-Chinese mob" of El Dorado. The Chinese in California are practically confined by public opinion, violence, or threats, to inferior kinds of work, which the " meanest " of the whites of the Pacific States refuse lO perform. Politically, this is slavery. All the evils to which slavery has xxiii.] LITTLE CHINA. on given rise in the cotton KStates are produced here by violence, in a less degree only because the Chine£.e are fewer than wer*^ the negroes. In sj^ite of a prejudice which recalls the time when the British Government forbade the American colonist to employ negroes in the manufacture of hats, on the ground that white labourers could not stand' the competition, the yellow men continue to flock to " Gold Hills," as they call San Francisco. Already they are the washermen, sv^eepers, and porters of three States, two territories, and British Columbia. They are denied civil rights ; their word is not taken in cases where white men are concerned; a heavy tax is set upon them on their entry to the State ; a second tax when they commence to mine— still their number steadily increase. In 1852, Governor Bigler, in his message, recommended the prohibition of the immigration of the Chinese, but they now number one-tenth of the poiDulation. The Irish of Asia, the Chinese have commenced to flow over on to the outer world. Who shall say where the flood will stop ? Ireland, with now five millions of people, has in twenty years poured an equal number out into the world. What is to pre- vent the next fifty years seeing an emigration of a couple of hundreds of millions from the rebellion-torn provinces of Cathay? Three Chinamen in a temperate climate will do as much arm-work as two Englishmen, and will eat or cost less. It looks as though the cheaper would starve out the dear race, as rabbits drive out stronger 268 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. but hungrier bares. Tbis tendency is already plainly vibible in our mercantile marine : tbe shipc are manned witb motley crews of Bombay lascars, Maories, Negroes, Arabs, Chinamen, Kroomen, and Malays. There are no British or American seamen now, except boys who are to be quartermasters some day, and experienced hands who are quartermasters already. But there is nothing to regret in this : Anglo-Saxons are too valuable to be used as ordinary seamen where lascars will do nearly, and Maories quite as well. Nature seems to intend the English for a race of officers, to direct and guide the cheap labour of the Eastern peopleS: The serious side of the Chinese problem — ^just touched on here — will force itself rudely upon our notice in Australia. ^^iv-J CALIFORNIA, 269 CHAPTER XXIV. CALIFORNIA. " In front of San Francisco are 745 millions of hungry Asiatics, wlio have spices to exchange for meat Tnd grain." The words are Governor Gilpin's, made use of by him m discussing the future of overland trade, and worthy of notice as showing why it is that, in making fore- casts of the future of California, we have to look more to her facilities for trade than to her natural produc- tions. San Francisco aims at being, not so much the port of California as one of the chief stations on the Anglo-Saxon highway round the globe. Although the chief claim of California to consider- ation is her position on the Pacific, her fertility and size alone entitle her to notice. This single State is 750 miles in length-would stretch from Chamouni to the soutliernmost point of Malta. There are two capes in California— one nearly in the latitude of Jerusalexn, the other nearly in the latitude of Rome. The State has twice the area of Great Britain ; the single valley of the Joaquin and Sacramento, from Tulare Lake l.o the great snow-peak of Shasta, is as large as the three kingdoms. Every useful mineral, every kind of fertile soil, every variety of helpful 270 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. climate, are to be foiiiul within the State. There are in th.. Union 45 such states or territories, with an ? verage area equal to that of Britain. Between the Pacific and the snows of the Sierra are three great tracts, each with its soil and character. On the slopes of the Sierra are the forests of giant timber, the sheltered valleys, and the gold-fields in which I spent my first week in California. Next comes the great hot plain of Sacramento, where, with irrigation, all the best fruits of the tropics grow luxuri- antly, where water for irrigation is plentiful, and the Pacific breeze will raise it. Round the valley are vast tracts for sheep and wheat, and on the Contra Costas are millions of acres of wild oats growing on the best of lands for cattle, while the slopes are covered with young vines. Between the Contra Costa Eange and the sea is a winterless strip possessing for table vegetables and flowers the finest soil and climate in the world. The story goes that Californian boys, when asked if they believe in a future state, reply : " Guess so ; California." Whether San Francisco Vv'ill grow to be a second Liverpool or New York is an aJl- absorbing question to those who live on the Pacific scores, and one not with- out an interest and a moral for ourselves. New York has waxed rich and huge mainly because she is so placed as to command one of the best harbours on the coast of a country which exports enormously of bread- stufis. Liverpool has thrived as one of the shipping ports for the manufiicturers of the northern coal counties of England. San Francisco Bay, as the best EL CAi'iTAN, vomk.mhk vallkv. p. "^70. XXIV.] CALIFORNIA. 271 harbour bouth of Puget Sound, is, and will remain, tiie centre of the export trade of the Pacific States in wool and cereals. If coal is found in plenty in the Golden State, populaHon will inc'rease, manufactures spring up, and the export of wrought articles take the place of that of raw prod ace. If coal is found in the Contra Costa Range, San Francisco will continue, in s})ite of earthcpiakes, to be the foremost port on the Pacific side ; if, as is more prol)able, the find of coal is confined to the Monte Diablo district, and is of trifling value, still the future of San Francisco as the meetiiig point of the railways, and centre of the import of manufactured goods, and of the export of the pro- duce of an agricultural and pastoral interior, is as certain as it must inevitably be brilliant. Whether the chief town of the Pacific States will in time develop into one of the commercial capitals of the world is a wider and a harder question. That it will be the converging point of the Pacific railroads both of Chicago and St. Louis there can be no doubt. That all the new overland trade from China and Japan will pass through it seems as clear ; it is the extent of this trade that is in question. For the moment, land transit cannot compete on equal terms with water carriage ; but assuming that, in the long run, this will cease to be the case, it will be the overland route across Russia, and not that through the United States, that will convey the silks and teas of China to Central and Western Europe. The very arguments of which the Californian merchants make use to show that the delicate goods of China need land transport go to prove 272 aUEATEH liRITAIN. (ciiap. that sliii)ping and uiiHliipjiing in the Pacific, and a repetition in the Athintic of each process, cannot be good for them. The political importance to America of the Pacific railroads docs not admit of over-state- ment ; but the Russian or English Pacific routes must, commercially speaking, win the day. For rare and costly Eastern goods, the English railway through Southern China, Upper ludia, the Persian coast, and the Euphrates is no longer now a dream. If Russian bureaucracy takes too long to move, trade will be diverted by the Gulf route ; coarser goods and food will long continue to come by sea, but in no case can the city of San Francisco become a western outpost of Europe. The lustre of the future of San Francisco is not dimmed by considerations su(di as these ; as the port of entry for the trade of America, with all the East, its wealth must become enormous ; and if, as is pro- bable, Japan, New Zealand, and New South Wales become great manufiic^-uring communities, San Fran- cisco must needs in time take rank as a second, if . not a greater, London. This, however, is the more distant future. With cheaper labour than the Pacific States and the BritibJ* colonies possess, with a more settled government than Japan — Pennsylvania and Ohio, from the time that the Pacific railroad is com- • pleted, will take, and for years will keep, the China trade. As for the colonies, the voyage from San Francisco to Australia is almost as long and difficult as that from England, and there is every probability that Lancashire and Belgium will continue to "upply XXIV.] CALIFOHNIA. 273 the colonists with clothes and tools, until they them- selves, possessed as they arc of coal, become competent to make them. The merchants of San Francisco will be limited in the main to the trade with China and Japan. In this direction the future has no bounds : through California and the Sandwich Islands, through Japan, fast becoming American, and China, the coast of which is already British, our race seems marchir.g westward to universal rule. The Russian empire itself, with all its passive strength, cannot stand against the English horde, over pushing with burning energy towj.rds the setting sun. Russia and England are said to be nearing each other upon the Indus ; but long before they can meet there, they wiU be face to face upon the Amoor. For a time, the flood may be diverted south or north : Mexico will doubtless, and British Columbia will probably, carry off a portion of the thousands who are pouring west from the bleak rocks of New England. The Calif ornian expedition of 1853 against Sonora and Lower California will be repeated with success, but the tide will be but momentarily stayed. So entirely are English countries now the mother- lands of energy and adventure throughout the world, that no one who has watched what has happened in California, in British Columbia, and on the west coast of New Zealand, can doubt that the discovery of placer gold-fields on any coast or in any sea-giit country in the world, must now be followed by the speedy rise there of an English government : were gold, for instance, found in ^urfticq diggings in Jnpq-n, VOL. 1. T 274 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. Japan would be English in five years. We know encngli of Chili, of the new Russian country on the Amoor, of Japan, to l^ aware that such discoveries are more than likely to occur. In the face of facts like these, men are to be found who ask whether a break-up of the Union is not still probable — whether the Pacific States are not likely to secede from the Atlantic ; some even contend for the general principle that "America must go to pieces — she is too big." It is small powers, not great ones, that have become impossible : the unification of Germany is in this respect but the dawn of a new era. The great countries of to-day are smaller than were the smallest of a hundred years ago. Lewes was further from London in 1700 than Edinburgh is now. New York and San Francisco will in ;'.870 be nearer to each other than Canton and Pekin. From the point of view of mere size, there is more likelihood of England entering the Union than of California seceding from it. The material interests of the Pacific States will always lie in union. The West, sympathising in the main with the Southerners upon the slavery question, threw herself into the war, and crushed them, because she saw the necessity of keeping her outlets under her own control. The same policy would hold good for the Pacific States in the case of the continental railroad. America, of all countries, alone shares the future of both Atlantic and Pacific, and she knows her interests too well to allow such an advantage to be thrown away. Uncalculating rebellion of the Pacific XXIV.] CALIFORNIA. 275 States upon some sudden heat, is the only danger to be apprehended, and such a rising could be put down with ease, owing to the manner in which these States are commanded from the sea. Throughout the late rebellion, the Federal navy, though officered almost entirely by Southerners, was loyal to the flag, and it would be so again. In these days, loyalty may be said to be peculiarly the sailor's passion : perhaps he loves his country because he sees so little of it. The single danger that looms in the more distant future is the eventual control of Congress by the Irish, while the English retain their hold on the Pacific shores. « « « « « California is too British to be typically American : it would seem that nowhere ix the United States have we found the true America or the real American. Except as abstractions, they do not exist ; it is only by looking carefully at each eccentric and irregular America — at Irish New York, at Puritan New Eng- land, at the rowdy South, at the rough and swag- gering Far West, at the cosmopolitan Pacific States — that we come to reject the anomalous features, and to find America in the points they possess in common. It is when the country is left that there rises in the mind an image that soars above all local prejudice — that of the America of the law-abiding^ mighty people who are imposing English institutions on the world. T 2 276 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. CHAPTER XXV. MEXICO. In company with a throng of men of all races, all tongues, and all trades, such as a Californian steamer can alone collect, I came coasting southwards under the cliffs of Lower California. Of the thousand pas- sengers who sought refuge from the stifling heat upon the upper and hurricane decks, more than half were diggers returning with a "pile" to their homes in the Atlantic States. While wo hung over the bulwarks watching the bonitos and the whales, the diggers threw "bobs" at the boobies that flew out to us from the blazing rocks, and brought them down screaming upon the decks. Threading our way- through the reefs off the lovely island of Margarita, where the " Independence " was lost with three hun- dred human beings, we lay-to at Cape St. Lucas, and landed his Excellency Don Antonio Pedrin, Mexican Governor of Lower California, and a Juarez man, in the very bay where Cavendish lay in wait for months for the *' great Manilla ship" — the Aca- pulco galleon. When Girolamo Benzoni visited the Mexican Pacific coast, he confused the turtle with the " croco- xxv.J MEXICO. 277 dile," describing the former under the latter's name ; but at Manzanilla, the two may be seen lying almost side by side upon the sands. Separated from the blue waters of the harbour by a narrow strand there is a festering lagoon, the banks of which swarm with the smaller alligators; but a few yards off, upon the other slope, the townsfolk and the turtles they had brought down for sale to our ship's purser were lying, when I saw them, in a confused heap under an awning of sail-cloth nailed up to the palm-trees. Alligator, turtle, Mexican, it was hard to say which was the superior being. A French corvette was in possession of the port — one of the last of the hold- ing-places through which the remnants of the army of occupation were dribbling back to France. In the land-locked bay of Acapulco, one of the dozen " i ittest places in the world," we found two French frigates, whose officers boarded us at once. They told us that they landed their marines every morning after breakfast, and re-embarked them be- fore sunset ; they could get nothing from the shore but water ; the Mexicans, under Alvarez, occupied the town at night, and carried off even the fruit. When I asked about supplies, the answer was sweep- ing : '* Ah, mon Dieu, monsieur, cette ssacrrreeee canaille de Alvarez nous vole tout. Nous n'avons que de I'eau fralche, et Alvarez va nous emporter la fontaine aussi quelque nuit. Ce sont des voleurs, voyez-vous, ces Mechicanos." When they granted us leave to land, it v/as with the proviso that we should not blame them if we were shot at by the 278 QBEATEB BRITAIN. [chap. Mexicans as we went ashore, and by themselves as we came off again. Firing often takes place at night between Alvarez and the French, but with a total loss in many months of only two men killed. The day of my visit to Acapulco was the anni- versary of the issue, one year before, of Marshal Bazaine's famous order of the day, directing the instant execution, as red-handed rebels, of Mexican prisoners taken by the French. It is a strange com- mentary upon the Marshal's circular that in a year from its issue the " Latin empire in America " should have had a term set to it by the President of the United States. In Canada, in India, in Egypt, in New Zealand, the English have met the French abroad, and in this Mexican affair history does but repeat itself. There is nothing more singular to the Londoner than the contempt of the Americans for France. All Europe seems small when seen from the United States ; but the opinion of Great Britain and the strength of Russia are still looked on with some respect : France alone completely vanishes, and instead of every one asking, as with us, "What does the Emperor sayl" no one cares in the least what Napoleon does or thinks. In a Chicago paper, I have seen a column of Washington news headed, " Seward orders Lewis Napoleon to leave Mexico right away ! Nap. lies badly to get out of the fix ! " While the Americans are still, in a high degree, susceptible of affront from England, and would never, if they conceived themselves purposel} insulted, stop to weigh the cost of war, towards France they XXV.] MEXICO. 27i) only feel, as a Californian said to me, " Is it worth our while to set to work to whip her 1 " The efifect of Gettysburg and Sadowa will be that, except Great Britain, Italy, and Spain, no nations will care much for the threats or praises of Imperial France. The true character of the struggle in Mexico has not been pointed out. It was not a mere conflict between the majority of the people and a minority supported by foreign aid, but an uprising of the Indians of the country against the whites of the chief town. The Spaniards of the capital were Maximilian's supporters, and upon them the Indians and Mestizos have visited their revenge for the deeds of Cortez and Pizarro. On the west coast there is to be seen no trace of Spanish blood : in dress, in language, in religion, the people are Iberian; in features, in idleness, and in ferocity, undoubtedly Ecd- Indian. In the reports of the Argentine Confederation, it is stated that the Circassian blood comes to the front in the mixed race ; a few hundred Spanish families in La Plata are said to have absorbed several hundred thousand Indians, without sufiering in their whiteness or other natural characteristics. There is something of the frog that swallowed the ox in this ; and the theories of the Argentine officials, themselves of the mixed race, cannot outweigh the evidence of our own eyes in the seaport towns c»f Mexico. There at least it is the Spaniards, not the Indians, wlio have disappeared ; and the only mixture of blood that can be traced is that of Ked Indian 280 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. and negro, in the fisher-boys about the ports. They are lithe lads, with eyes full of art and fire. The Spaniards of Mexico have become Eed Indians, as the Turks of Europe have become Albanians or Circassians. Where the conquering marries into the conquered race, it ends by being absorbed, and the mixed breed gradually becomes pure again in the type of the more numerous race. It would seem that the North American continent will soon be divided between the Saxon and the Aztec republics. In California I once met with a caricature in which Uncle Sam or Brother Jonathan is • lying on his back upon Canada and the United States, with his head in Kussian America, and his feet against a tumble-down fence, behind which is Mexico. His knees are bent, and his position cramped. He says, " Guess I shall soon have to stretch my legs, some ! " There is not in the United States any strong feeling in favour of the annexation of the remainder of the continent, but there is a solemn determination that no foreign country shall in any way gain fresh footing or influence upon American soil, and that monarchy shall not be established in Mexico or Canada. Further than this, there is a belief that, as the south central portions of the States become fully peopled-up, population will pour over into the Mexican provinces of Chihuahua and Sonora, and that the annexation of these and some other por- tions of Mexico to the United States cannot long be prevented. For such acquisitions of territory America would pay as she paid in the case of XXV.] MEXICO. 281 Texas, which she first conquered, and then bought at a fair price. In annexing the whole of Mexico, Protestant Americans would feel that they were losing more than they could gain. In California and New Mexico, they have already to deal with a population of Mexi- can Catholics, and difficulties have arisen in the matter of the Church lands. The Catholic vote is powerful not only in California and New York, but in Maryland, in Louisiana, in Kansas, and even in Massachusetts. The sons of the Pilgrim Fathers would scarcely look with pleasure on the admission to the Union of ten millions of Mexican Catholics, and, on the other hand, the day-dreams of Leonard Calvert would not be realized in the triumph of such a Catholicism as theirs any more than in the success of that of the Philadelphia Academy, or New York Tammany Hall. With the exception of the Irish, the great ma- jority of Catholic emigrants avoid the United States, but the migration of European Catholics to South America is increasing year by year. Just as the Germans, the Norwegians, and the Irish flow towards the States, the French, the Spanish, and the Italians flock into La Plata, Chili, and Brazil. The European population of La Plata has already reached three hundred thousand, and is growing fast. The French " mission " in Mexico was the making of that great country a further field for the Latin immigration ; and when the Californians marched to Juarez' help, it was to save Mexico to North America. 282 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. In all history, nothing can be found more dignified than the action of America upon the Monroe doctrine. Since the principle was first laid down in words, in 1823, the national action has been courteous, con- sistent, firm ; and the language used now that America is all-powerful, is the same that her statesmen used during the rebeUion in the hour of her most instant peril. It will be hard for political philosophers of the future to assert that a democratic republic can have no foreign policy. The Pacific coast of Mexico is wonderfully full of beauties of a peculiar kind ; the sea is always calm, and of a deep dull blue, with turtles lying basking on the surface, and flying-fish skimming lightly over its expanse, while the shores supply a fringe of bright yellow sand at once to the ocean blue and to the rich green of the cactus groves. On every spit or sand-bar there grows the feathery palm. A low range of jungle- covered hills is cut by gullies, through which we get glimpses of lagoons bluer than the sea itself, and behind them the sharp volcanic peaks rise through and into cloud. Once in a while, Colima, or other giant hill, towering above the rest in blue-black gloom, serves to show that the shores belong to some mightier continent than Calypso's isle. XXVI.] REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT. 288 CHAPTER XXVI. REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT. Among our Californian passengers, we had many- strong party men, and political conversation never flagged throughout the voyage. In every discussion it became more and more clear that the Democratic is the Constitutional, the Republican the Utilitarian party— rightly called "Radical," from its habit of going to the root of things, to see whether they are good or bad. Such, however, is the misfortune of America in the possession of a written Constitution, such the reverence paid to that document on account of the character of the men who penned it, that even the extremest Radicals dare not admit in public that they aim at essential change, and the party loses, in consequence, a portion of the strength that attaches to out-spoken honesty. The President's party at their convention— known as the " Wigwam"— which met while I was in Phila- delphia, maintained that the war had but restored the " Union as it was," with State rights unimpaired. The Republicans say that they gave their blood, as they are ready again to shed it— for the " Union as it was not;" for one nation, and not for thirty-six, 284 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. or forty-five. The Wigwam declarct' that the Wash- ington Government had no constitutional right to deny representation in Congress to any State. The Republicans ask how, if this constitutional provision is to be observed, the Government of the country is to be carried on. The Wigwam laid it down as a principle, that Congress had no power to interfere with the right possessed by each State to prescribe qualifications for the elective franchise. The Radicals say that State sovereignty should have vanished when slavery went down, and ask how the South is to be governed consistently with republicanism unless by negro suffrage, and how this is to be maintained except by Federal control over the various States — by abolition, in short, of the old Union, and creation of a new. The more honest among the Republicans admit that for the position which they have taken up they can find no warrant in the Con- stitution ; that, according to the doctrine which the '' continental statesmen " and the authors of " The Federalist " would lay down, were they living, thirty- five of the States, even if they were unanimous, could have no right to tamper with the constitution of the thirty-sixth. The answer to all this can only be that, were the Constitution to be closely followed, the result would be the ruin of the land. The Republican party have been blamed, because their theory and practice alike tend towards a con- solidation of power, and a strengthening of the bands of the Government at Washington. It is in this that lies their chief claim to support. Local government XXVI.] REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT, 285 is an excellent thing; it is the greatest of the in- ventions of our inventive race, the chief security for continued freedom possessed by a people already free. This local government is consistent with a powerful executive ; between the village municipality and Congress, between the Cabinet and the district council of select men, there can be no conflict : it is State sovereignty, and the pernicious heresy of primary allegiance to the State, that have already j^roved as costly to the Republic as they are dangerous to her future. It has been said that America, under the Federal system, unites the freedom of the small State with the power of the great; but though this is true, it is brought about, not through the federation of the States, but through that of the townships and districts. The latter are the true units to which the consistent Republican owes his secondary allegiance. It is, perhaps, only in the tiny New England States that Northern men care much about their common- wealth ; a citizen of Pennsylvania or New York never talks of his State, unless to criticise its legislature. After all, where intelligence and education are all but universal, where a spirit of freedom has struck its roots into the national heart of a great race, there can be no danger in centialization, for the power that you strengthen is that of the whole people, and a nation can have nothing to fear from itself. In watching the measures of the Radicals, we must remember that they have still to guard their countiy against great dangers. The war did not 2bG (iUEATEli mUTAlN. [chap. last long enough to destroy anti-republican ism along with slavery. The social system of the Carol inas waa upset; but the political fabric built upon a slavery foundation in such "free" States as New York and Maryland is scarcely shaken. If we look to the record of the Kepublican party with a view to making a forecast of its future conduct, we find that at the end of the war the party had before it the choice between military rule and negro rule for the South — between a government caiTied on through generals and provost-marshals, unknown to the Constitution and to the courts, and destined to prolong for ages the disruption of the Union and disquiet of the nation, and, on the other hand, a rule founded upon the principles of equity and self-government, dear to our race, and supported by local majorities, not by foreign bayonets. Although possessed of the whole military power of the nation, the Eepublicans refused to endanger their country, and established a system intended to lead by gradual steps to equal suffrage in the South. The immediate interest of the party, as distinguished from that of the country at large, was the other way. The Eepublican majority of the presidential elections of 1860 and 1864, had been increased by the success of the Federal arms, borne mainly by the Eepub- licans of New England and the West, in a war conducted to a triumphant issue under the leadership of Eepublican Congress-men and generals. The apparent magnanimity of the admission of a portion of the rebels, warm-handed, to the poll, would still further XXVI.] REPUBLICAN Oil DEMOCRAT. 287 have strengthened the Republicans in the Westeni and Border States ; and while the extreme wing would not have dared to desert the party, the moderate men would have been conciliated by the refusal of the franchise to the blacks. A foresight of the future of the nation happily prevailed over a more taking policy, and, to the honour of the liepublican leaders, equal franchise was the result. The one great issue between the Radicals and the Democrats since the conclusion of the war is this : the " Democracy " deny that the re-admission to Congress of the representatives of the Southern States is a matter of expediency at all ; to them they declare that it is a matter of right. There was a rebellion in certain States which temporarily prevented their sending representatives ; it is over, and their men must come. Either the Union is or is not dissolved ; tix3 Radicals admit that it is not, that all their en- deavours were to prevent the Union being destroyed by rebels, and that they succeeded in so doing. The States, as States, were never in rebellion ; there was only a powerful rebellion localized in certain States. " If you admit, then," say the Democrats, " that the Union is not dissolved, how can you govern a number of States by major-generals ? " Meanwhile the Radicals go on, not wasting their time in words, but passing through the House and over the Presi- dent's veto the legislation necessary for the recon- struction of free government — with their illogical, but thoroughly English, good sense, avoiding all talk about constitutions thnt are ol)solete, and laws that 288 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. it is impossible to enforce, and pressing on steadily to the end that they have in view : equal rights for all men, free government as soon as may be. The one thing to regret is, that the Kepublicans have not the courage to appeal to the national exigencies merely, but that their leaders are forced by public opinion to keep up the sham of constitutionalism. No one in America seems to dream that there can be anything to alter in the " matchless Constitution," which was framed by a body of slave-owners filled with the narrowest aristocratic prejudices, for a country which has since abolished slavery, and be- come as democratic as any nation in the world. The system of presidential election and the con- stitution of the Senate are matters to which the Republicans will turn their attention as soon as the country is rested from the war. It is not impossible that a lifetime may see the abolition of the Presidency proposed, and carried by the vote of the whole nation. If this be not done, the election Mdll come to be made directly by the people, without the intervention of the electoral college. The Senate, as now constituted, rests upon the States, and that State-rights are doomed no one can doubt who remembers that of the population of New York State less than half are native-born New Yorkers. What concern can the cosmopolitan moiety of her people have with the State-rights of New York ? "When a system becomes purely artificial, it is on the road to death ; when State-rights represented the various sovereign powers which the old States had allowed to sleep while they entered a federal union, XXVI.] REPUBLICAN OB DEMOCRAT. f>89 State-rights were historical ; but now that Congress by a single vote cuts and carves territories as large as all the old States put together, and founds new commonwealths in the wilderness, the doctrine is worn out. It is not likely that the Republicans will carry all before them without a check ; but though one Conser- vative reaction may follow another, although time after time the Democrats may return victorious from the Fall elections, in the end Radicalism must inevi- tably win the day. A party which takes for its watchword, " The national good," will always beat the Constitutionajists. Except during some great crisis, the questions which come most home at election times in a democratic country are minor points, in which the party not in power has always the advantage over the office- holders: it is on these petty matters that a cry of jobbery and corruption can be got up, and nothing in American politics is more taking than such a cry. "We are a liberal people, sir," said a Californian to me, "but among ourselves we don't care to see some men get more than their share of Uncle Sam's money. It doesn't go down at election time to say that the Democrats are spoiling the country ; but it's a mighty strong plank that you've got if you prove that Hank Andrews has made a million of dollars by the last Congressional job. We say, ' Smart boy, Hank Andrews;' but we generally vote for the other man." It is these small questions, or "side issues," as they are termed, which cause the position of parties VOL. I. U 290 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. to fluctuate frequently in certain States. The first reaction against the now triumphant Radicals will probably be based upon the indignation excited by the extension of Maine liquor laws throughout the whole of the States in which the New Englanders have the mastery. Prohibitive laws are not supported in America by the arguments with which all of us in Britain are familiar. The New England Radicals concede that so far as the effects of the use of alcohol are strictly personal, there is no ground for the interference of society. They go even further, and say that no ground for general and indiscriminate interference with the sale of liquor is to be found in the fact that drink maddens certain men, and causes them to commit crime. They are willing to admit that, were the evils confined to individuals, it would be their own affair ; but they attempt to show that the use of alcohol affects the condition, moral and physical, of the drinker's offspring, and that this is a matter so bound up with the general weal, that public interference may be necessary. It is the belief of a majority * , the thinkers of New England that the taint of alcoholic poison is hereditary ; that the children of drunkards will furnish more than the ordinary proportion of great criminals ; that the descendants of habitual tipplers will be found to lack vital force, and will fall into the ranks of pauperism and dependence : not only are the results of morbid appetite, they say, transmitted to the children, but the appetites themselves descend to the offspring XXVI.] REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT. 291 with the hloocl. If this be true, the New Enghtnd Kadicals urge, the use of alcohol becomes a moral wrong, a crime even, of which the law might well take cognizance. We are often told that party organization has become so dictatorial, so despotic, in America, that no one not chosen by the p^'eliminary convention, no one, in short, whose name is not upon the party ticket, has any chance of election to an office. To those who reflect upon the matter, it would seem as though this is but a consequence of the existence of Party, and of the system of Local Kepresentation : in England itself the like abuse is not unknown. Where neither party possesses overwhelming strength, division is failure; and some knot or other of pushing men must be permitted to make the selection of a candidate, to which, when made, the party must adhere, or suffer a defeat. As to the composition of the nominating conventions, the grossest mis-state- ments have been made to us in England, for we have been gravely assured that a nation which is admitted to present the greatest mass of education and intelligence with the smallest intermixture of ignorance and vice of which the world has knowledge, allows itself to be dictated to in the matter of the choice of its rulers by caucuses and conventions com- posed of the idlest and most worthless of its popula- tion. Bribery, we have boen told, reigns supreme in these assemblies ; the nation's interest is but a phrase ; individual selfishness the true dictator of each choice ; the name of party is but a cloak for private ends, and u 2 292 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. the wire-pullers are equalled in rascality only by their nominees. It need hardly be shown that, were these stories true, a people so full of patriotic sentiment as that which lately furnished a million and a half of volun- teers for a national war, would without doubt be led to see its safety in the destruction of conventions and their wire-pullers — of party government itself, if necessary. It cannot be conceived that the American people would allow its institutions to be stultified and law itself insulted to secure the temporary triumph of this party or of that, on any mere question of the day. * The secret of the power of caucus and convention is, general want of time on the part of the community. Your honest and shrewd Western farmer, not having himself the leisure to select his candidate, is fain to let caucus or convention choose for him. In practice, however, the evil is far from great : the party caucus, for its own interest, will, on the whole, select the fittest candidate available, and, 1 ^ any case, dares not, except perhaps in New York city, fix its choice upon a man of known bad character. Even where Party is most despotic, a serious mistake committed by one of the nominating conventions will seldom fail to lose its side so many votes as to secure a triumph for the- opponents. King Caucus is a great monarch, however ; it would be a mistake to despise him, and conventions are dear to the American people — at least, it would seem so, to judge from their number. Since I have been in XXVI.] REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT. 293 America, there have been sitting, besides doubtless a hundred others, the names of which I have not noticed, the Philadelphia " Copper Johnson Wigwam," or assembly of the Presidential party (of which the Radicals say that it is but " the Copperhead organi- zation with a fresh snout"), a dentists' convention, a phrenological convention, a pomological congress, a school-teachers' conveittion, a Fenian convention, an eight-hour convention, an insurance companies' con- vention, and a loyal soldiers' convention. One is tempted to think of the assemblies of '48 in Paris, and of the caricatures representing the young bloods of the Paris Jockey Club being addressed by their President as " Citoyens Vicomtes," whereas, when the cafe waiters met in their congress, it was " Messieurs les Gar§ons-limonadiers." The pomological convention was an extremely jovial one, all the horticulturists being whiskey- growers themselves, and having a proper wish to compare their own with their neighbours " Bourbon " or " old Rye." Caucuses (or cauci : which is it ?) of this kind suggest a derivation of this name for what many consider a low American proceeding, from an equally low Latin word of similar sound and spelling. In spite of the phrase " a dry caucus " being not unknown in the temperance State of Maine, many might be inclined to think that caucuses, if not exactly Vessels of grace, were decidedly " drinking vessels;" but Americans tell you that the word is derived from the phrase a " caulker's meeting,'* caulkers being peculiarly given to noise. 294 GMEATER BRITAIN. [chap. The cry against conventions is only a branch of that against " politicians," which is continually being raised by the adherents of the side which happens at the moment to be Ihc weaker, and which evidently helps to create the evils against which its authors are protesting. It is now the New York Democrats who tell such stories as that of the Columbia District census- taker going to the Washington house of a wealthy Boston man to find out his religious tenets. The door was opened by a black boy, to whom the white man began: "What's your name?" "Sambo, sah, am my Christian name/' "Wall, Sambo, is your master a Christian?" To which Sambo's indignant answer was : " No, sah ! Mass member ob Congress, sah ! " When the Democrats were in power, it was the Eepublicans of Boston and the Cambridge pro- fessors who threw out sly hints, and violent invectives too, against the whole tribe of "politicians." Such unreasoning outcries are to be met only by bare facts; but were a jury of readers of the debates in Parliament and in Congress to be empanelled to decide whether political immorality were not more rife in England than in America, I should, for my part, look forward with anxiety to the result. The organization of the Republican party is hugely powerful ; it has its branches in every township and district in the Union ; but it is strong, not in the wiles of crafty plotters, not in the devices of unknown politicians, but in the hearts of the loyal people of the country. If there were nothing else to be said to Englishmen on the state of parties in America, it XXVI.] REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT. 296 should be sufficient to point out that, while the "Democracy" claim the Mozart faction of New York and the shoddy aristocracy, the pious New Englanders and their sons in the North- West are, by a vast majority, Republicans ; and no " side issues" should be allowed to disguise the fact that the Demo- cratic is the party of New York, the Republican the party of America. 2 9 G GEEA TER BRIT A IN. [chap. CHAPTER XXVII. BROTHERS. I HAD landed in America at the moment of what is known in Canada as "the great scare"— that is, the Fenian invasion at Fort Erie. Before going South, I had attended at New York a Fenian meeting held to protest against the conduct of the President and Mr. Seward, who, it was asserted, after deluding the Irish with promises of aid, had abandoned them, and even seized their supplies and arms. The chief speaker of the evening was Mr. Gibbons, of Philadelphia, "Vice-President of the Irish Republic," a grave and venerable man ; no rogue or schemer, but an enthusiast as evidently convinced of the justice as of the certainty of the ultimate triumph of the cause. At Chicago, I went to the monster meeting at which Speaker Colfax addressed the Brotherhood ; at Buffalo, I was present at the "armed picnic" which gave the Canadian Government so much trouble. On Lake Michigan, I went on board a Fenian ship ; in New York, I had a conversation with an ex-rebel officer, a long-haired Georgian, who was wearing the Fenian uniform of green-and-gold in the public XXVII.] BROTHERS. 297 streets. The conclusion to which I came was, that the Brotherhood has the support of ninety-nine hundredths of the Irish in the Statee As we are dealing not with British, but with English politics and life, this is rather a fact to be borne in mind than a text upon which to found a homily ; still, the nature of the Irish antipathy to Britain is worth a moment's consideration ; and the probable effects of it upon the future of the race is a matter of the gravest import. The Fenians, according to a Chicago member of the Eoberts' wing, seek to return to the ancient state of Ireland, of which we find the history in the Brehon laws — a communistic tenure of land (resembling, no doubt, that of the Don Cossacks), and a republic or elective kingship. Such are their objects; nothing else will in the least conciliate the Irish in America. No abolition of the Establishment, no reform of land- laws, no Parliament on College Green, nothing that England can grant while preserving the shadow of union, can dissolve the Fenian league. All this is true, and yet there is another great Irish nation to which, if you turn, you find that conciliation may still avail us. The Irish in Ireland are not Fenians in the American sense : they hate us, perhaps, but they may be mollified ; they are discontented, but they may be satisfied ; customs and principles of law, the natural growth of the Irish mind and the Irish soil, can be recognised, and made the basis of legisla- tion, without bringing about the disruption of the empire. 298 OREATER BRITAIN. [chap. The first Irish question that we shall have to set ourselves to understand is that of land. Permanent tenure is as natural to the Irish, as freeholding to the English people. All tluit is needed of our statesmen is, that they recognise in legislation that which they cannot but admit \i. private talk — namely, that there may be essential difterences between race and rax3e. The results of legislation which proceeds upon this basis may follow very slowly upon the change of system, for there is at present no nucleus whatever for the feeling of amity which we would create. Even the alliance of the Irish politicians with the English Radicals is merely temporary ; the Irish antipathy to the English does not distinguish between Conservative and Radical. Years of good govern- ment will be needed to create an alliance against which centuries of oppression and wrong-doing pro- test. We may forget, but the Irish will hardly find themselves able to forget at present, that, while we make New-Zealand savages British citizens as well as subjects, protect them in the possession of their lands, and encourage them to vote at our polling- booths and take their pkce as constables and officers of the law, our fathers " planted " Ireland, and declared it no felony to kill an Irishman on his mother-soil. In spite of their possession of much political power, and of the entire city-government of several great towns, the Irish in America are neither physi- cally nor morally well-off. Whatever may be the case at some future day, they still find themselves politically in English hands. The very language xxvii.] BROTHERS. 299 that tlicy arc compelled to 'neak is hateful, even to men who know no other. With an impotent spite which would be amusing were it not very sad, a resolution was carried by acclamation through both houses of the Fenian (congress, at Philadelphia, this year, " that the word * English ' be unanimously dropped, and that the words 'American language' be used in the future." From the Cabinet, from Congress, from every office, high or low, not controlled by the Fenian vote, the Irish are systematically excluded; but it cannot be American public opinion which has prevented the Catholic Irish from rising as merchants and traders, even in New York. Yet, while there are Belfast names high up on the Atlantic side and in San Francisco, there are none from Cork, none from the southern counties. It would seem as though the true Irishman wants the persev^erance to become a successful merchant, and thrives best at pure brain- work, or upon land. Three-fourths of the Irish in America remain in towns, losing the attachment to the soil which is the strongest characteristic of the Irish in Ireland, and finding no new home : disgusted at their exclusion in America from political life and power, it is these men who turn to Fenian ism as a relief Through drink, through gambling, and the other vices of homeless, thriftless men, they are soon reduced to beggary ; and, moral as they are by nature, the Irish are nevertheless supplying America wit\ that which she never before possessed — a criminal and pauper class. Of ten thousand people 300 OBEATEIi BRITAIN. [chap. sent to gaol euch year in Massachusetts, six thousand are Irish born ; in Chicago, out of the 3,598 con- victs of last year, only eighty-four were native-born Americans. To the Americans, Fenianism has many aspects. The greater number hate the Irish, but sympathise profoundly with Ireland. Many are so desirous of seeing republicanism prevail throughout the world that they support the Irish republic in any way, except, indeed, by taking its paper-money, and look upon its establishment as a first step towards the erection of a free government that shall include England and Scotland as well. Some think the Fenians will burn the Capitol and rob the banks; some regard them with satisfaction, or the reverse, from the religious point of view. One of the latter kind of lookers-on said to me : '• I was glad to see the Fenian movement, not that I wish success to the Brotherhood as against you English, but because I rejoice to &co among Irishmen a powerful centre of resistance to the Catholic Church. We, in this country, were being delivered over, bound hand and' foot, to the Eoman Church, and these Fenians, by their power and their violence against the priests, have divided the Irish camp, and rescued us." The unfortunate Canadians, for their part, ask why they should be shot and robbed because Britain mal- treats the Irish; but we must not forget that the Fi^nian raid on Canada was an exact repetition, almost on the same ground, of the St. Alban's raid into the American territory, during the rebellion. xxvii.] BROTHERS. 301 The Fenians would be as ahsolutcly without strength in America as they are without credit were it not for the anti-British traditions of the Democratic party, and the rankling of the Ala])ama question, or rather of the remembrance of our general conduct during the rebellion, in the hearts of the Republicans. It is impossible to spend much time in New England without becoming aware that the people of the six North- Eastern States love us from the heart. Nothing but this can explain the character of their feeling towards us on these Alabama claims. That we should refuse an arbitration upon the whole question is to them inexplicable, and they grieve with wondering sorrow at our -^erversity. It is not here that the legal question need be raised ; for observers of the present position of the English race it is enoiigh that there exists between Britain and America a bar to perfect friendship — a ground for future quarrel — upon which we refuse to allow an all-embracing arbitration. We allege that we are the best judges of a certain portion of the case, that our dignity would be compromised by arbi- tration upon these points; but such dignity must always be compromised by arbitration, for common friends are called in only when each party to the dispute has a case, in the justice of which his dignity is bound up. Arbitration is resorted to as a means of avoiding wars; and, dignity or no dignity, everything that can cause war is proper matter for arbitration. What even if some little dignity be lost by the affair, in addition to that 302 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. ■which has been lost abeady? No such loss can be set against the frightful hurtfulness to the race and to the cause of freedom, of war between Britain and America. The question comes plainly enough to this point : we say we are right ; America says we are wrong ; they offer arbitration, which we refuse upon a point of etiquette — for on that ground we decline to refer to arbitration a point which to America appears essential. It looks to the world as though we offer to submit to the umpire chosen those points only on which we are already prepared to admit that we are in the wrong. America asks us to submit, as we should do in private life, the whole correspondence on which the quarrel stands. Even if we, better in- structed in the precedents of international law than were the Americans, could not but be in the right, still, as we know that intelligent and able men in the' United States think otherwise, and would fancy their cause the just one in a war which might arise upon the difficulty, surely there is ground for arbitration. It would be to the eternal disgrace of civilization that we should set to work to cut our brothers' throats upon a point of etiquette ; and, by declining on the ground of honour to discuss these claims, we are compromising that honour in the eyes of all t . world. In democra(3ies such as America or France, every citizen feels an insult to his country as an insult to himself. The Alabama question is in the mouth or in the heart — which is worse — of every American XXVII.] BROTHERS. 303 who talks with an Englishman in England or America. All nations- commit, at times, the error of acting as though they think that every people on earth, ex- cept themselves, are unanimous in their policy. Ne- glecting the race distinctions and the class distinc- tions which in England are added to the universal essential differences of minds, the Americans are convinced that, during the late war, we thought as one man, and that, in this present matter of the Alabama claims, we stand out and act as a united people. A New Yorker with whom I stayed at Quebec — a sbrewd but kindly fellow — was an odd instance of the American incapacity to under- stand the British nation, which almost equals our own inability to comprehend America. Kind and hospitable to me, as is any American to every Englishman in all times and places, he detested British policy, and obstinately refused to see that there is an England larger than Downing Street, a nation outside Pall Mall. " England was with the rebels throughout the war." " Excuse me ; our ruling classes were so, perhaps, but our rulers don't represent us any more than your 39th Congress represents George Washington." In America, where Congress does fairly represent the nation, and where there has never been less than a quarter of the body favour- able to any policy which half the nation supported, men cannot understand that there should exist a country which thinks one way, but, through her 304 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. rulers, speaks another. We may disown tlie national policy, but we suffer for it. The hospitality to any Englishman of the American England-hater is extraordinary. An old Southerner in Eichmond said to me, in a breath : " I'd go and live in England if I didn't hate it as I do. England, sir, betrayed us in the most scoundrelly way — talked of sympathy with the South, and stood by to see us swallowed up. I hate England, sir! Oome and stay a week with me at my place in county. Going South to-day? Well, then, you return this way next week. Come then! Come on Saturday week." When we ask, " Wliy do you press the Alabama claims against us, and not the Florida, the Georgia, and the Eappahannock claims against the French?" the answer is : "Because we don't care about the French, and what they do and think ; besides, we owe them some courtesy after bundlmg them out of Mexico in the way we did." But in truth there is amongst Americans an exaggerated estimate of the offensive powers of Great Britain ; and such is the jealousy of young nations, that this exaggeration becomes, of itself, a cause of danger. Were the Americans as fully convinced, as we ourselves are, of our total incapacity to carry on a land- war with the United States on the western side of the Atlantic, the bolder spirits among them would cease to feel themselves under an assumed necessity to show us our own weakness and their own strength. The chief reason why America finds much to offend XXVII.] BROTHERS. 305 her in our conduct is, that she cares for the opinion of no other people than the English. America, be- fore the terrible blow to her confidence and love that our conduct during the rebellion gave, used morally to lean on England. Happily for herself, she is now emancipated from the mental thraldom ; but she still yearns towards our kindly friendship. A Napoleonic senator harangues, a French paper declaims, against America and Americans ; who cares ? But a Times' leader, or a speech in Parliament from a minister of the Crown, cuts to the heart, wounding terribly. A nation, like an individual, never quarrels with a stranger ; there must be love at bottom for even querulousness to arise. While I was in Boston, one of the foremost writers of America said to me in conversation : " I have no son, but I had a nephew of my own name ; a grand fellow; young, handsome, winning in his ways, full of family affections, an ardent student. He felt it his duty to go to the front as a private in one of our regiment3 of Massachusetts volunteers, and was promoted for bravery to a captaincy. All of us here looked on him as a New England Philip Sidney, the type of all that was manly, chivalrous and noble. The very day that I received news of his being killed in leading his company against a regiment, I was forced by my duties here to read a leader in one of your chief papers upon the officering of our army, in which it was more than hinted that our troops consisted of German cut-throats and pot-house Irish, led by sharpers and broker politicians. Can you wonder at my being bitter ? " VOL. I. X 3)G ' GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. That tlierc must be in America a profound feeling of (iffection for our country is shown by the avoidance of wa;; when we recognised the rebels as belligerents ; and, again, at the time of the " Trent " aftair, when tlie surface cry was overwhelmingly for battle, and the Cabinet only able to tide it over by pro- mising the West war with England as soon as tiie rebellion was put down. "One war at a time, gentlemen," said Lincoln. The man who, of all in America, had most to lose by war with England, said to me of the "Trent" affair: "I was written to by ^ to do all I could for peace. I wrote him back tliat if our Attorney-General decided that our seizure of the men was lawful, I would spend my last dollar in the cause." The Americans, everywhere affectionate towards the individual Englishman, make no secret of their feeling that the first advances towards a renewal of the national friendship ought to come from us. They might remind us that our Maori subjects have a pro- verb, " Let friends settle their disputes as friends." '^-^^'"'•J AMEEICA. 3Q- CHAPTER XXVJIL AMEIllCA. Me arc coasting again, gliding tln-oiigli calm blue waters, watching the dolphins as they play, and the boobies as they fly stroke and stroke with the paddles of the ship. On the right, mountains rise through the warm misty. air, and form a long towering line upon the upper skies. Hanging high above us are the Volcano of Fire and that of Water— twin menacers of Guatemala City. In the sixteenth century, the water-mountain drowned it ; in the eighteenth, it was burnt by the fire-hill. Since then, the city has been shaken to pieces by earthquakes, and of sixty thousand men and women, hardly one escaped. Down the valley, between the peaks, we have through the mahogany groves an exquisite distant view towards the city. Once more passing on, we get peeps, now of West Honduras, and now of the island coffee plantations of Costa Rica. The heat is terrible. It was just here, if we arc to believe Drake, that h^^ fell in with a shower so hot and scalding, that each drop burnt its hole through his men's clothes as they hung up to dry. " Steep stories," it is clear, were known before the planta- tion of America. X 2 308 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. Now that the time has come for a leave-taking of the continent, we can begin to reflect upon facts gleaned during visits to twenty-nine of the forty- five territories and states — twenty-nine empires the size of Spain. A man may see American countries, frora the pine- wastes of Maine to the slopes of the Sierra ; may talk with American men and women, from the sober citi- zens of Boston to digger Indians in Califc>rnia ; may eat of American dishes, from jerked buffalo in Colo- rado to clambakes on the shores near Salem ; and yet, from the time he first "smells the molasses^' at Nantucket light-ship to the moment when the pilot quits him at the Golden Gate, may have no idea of an America. You may have seen the East, the South, the West, the Pacific States, and yet have failed to find America. It is not till you have left her shores that her image grows up in the mind. The first thing that strikes the Englishman just landed in New York is the apparent Latinization of the English in America ; but before he leaves the country, he comes to see that this is at most a local fact, and that the true moral of America is the vigour of the English race — the defeat of the cheaper by the dearer peoples, the victory of the man whose food costs four shillings a day over the man whose food costs four pence. Excluding the Atlantic cities, the English in America are absorbing the Germans and the Celts, destroying the Eed Indians, and checking the advance of 'he Chinese. The Saxon is the only extirpating race on earth. xxvin.] AMERICA. 309 Up to the commencement of the now inevitable destruction of the Red Indians of Central North America, of the Maories, and of the Australians by the English colonists, no numerous race had ever been blotted out by an invader. The Danes and Saxons amalgamated with the Britons, the Goths and Bur- gundians with the Gauls: the Spaniards not only never annihilated a people, but have themselves been all but completely expelled by the Indians, in Mexico and South America. The Portuguese in Ceylon, the Dutch in Java, the French in Canada and Algeria, have conquered but not killed off the native peoples. Hitherto it has been nature's rule, that the race that peopled a country in the earliest historic days should people it to the end of time. The American problem is this : Does the law, in a modified shape, hold good, in spite of the destruction of the native population ? Is it true that the negroes, now that they are free, are commencing slowly to die out? that the New Englanders are dying fast, and their places being supplied by immigrants? Can the English in America, in the long run, survive the common fate of all migrating races? Is it true that, if the American settlers continue to exist, it will be at the price of being no longer English, but Red Indian? It is certain that the English families long in the land have the features of the extirpated race ; on the other hand, in the negroes there is at present no trace of any change, save in their becoming dark brown instead of black. The. Maories — an immigrant race — were dying off 310 GREATER BRITAIN. [chap. in New Zealand when we landed there. The Rod Indians of Mexico — another immigrant people— had themselves undergone decline, numerical and moral, when we first became acquainted with them. Are we English in turn to degenerate abroad, under pressure of a great natural law forbidding change ? It is easy to say that the English in Old England are not a native but an immigrant race; that they show no symptoms of decline. There, however, the change was slight, the distance short, the difference of climate small. The rapidity of the disappearance of iihysical typo is equalled at least, if not exceeded, by that of the total alteration of the moral characteristics of the immigrant races— the entire destruction of eccen- tricity, in short. The change that comes over those among the Irish who do not remain in the great towns is not greater than that which overtakes tho English handworkerr^ of whom some thousands reach America each year. Gradually settling down on land, and finding themselves lost in a sea of intel- ligence, and freed from the inspiiing obstacles of antiquated institutions and class prejudice, the English handicraftsman, ceasing to be roused to aggressive Radicalism by the opposition of sinister interests, merges into the contented homestead settler, or adventurous backwoodsman. Greater even than this revolution of character is that which falls upon the Celt. Not only is it a fact known alike to phj-- siologists and statisticians, that the children of Irish parents born in America are, physically, not . Irish, xxviii.] AMEBIC J. 311 but Americans, but the like is true of the moral type: the change in this is at least as sweephig. The son of Fenian Pat and bright-eyed Biddy is the normal gannt American, quick of thought, but slow of speech, whom we have begun to recognise as the latest product of the Saxon race, when housed upon the AVestern prairies, or in the pine-woods of New England. For the moral change in the British workman ifc is not difficult to account : the man who will leave country, home, and friends, to seek new fortunes in America, is essentially not an ordinary man. As a rule, he is above the average in intelligence, or, if defective in this point, he makes up for lack of wit by the possession of concentrativeness and energy. Such a man will have pushed himself to the front in his club, his union, or his shop, before he emi- grates. In England, he is somebody; in America, he finds all hands contented, or, if not this, at all . events too busy to complain of such ills as they profess to labour under. Among contented men, his equals both in intelligence and ambition, in a country of perfect freedom of speech, of manners, of laws, and of society, the occupation of his mind is gone, and he comes to think himself what others seem to think him — a nobody; a man who no longer is a living force. He settles upon land ; and when the world knows him no more, his children are happy corn-growers in his stead. The shape of North America makes the existence of distinct peoples within her limits almost impossible. 312 GEE A TEE BEIT A IN. [chap. All upturned bowl, with