I J a Master Minds at the Commonwealth's Heart By Percy H. Epler Joint Author of Yale Addresses on "The Personality of Christ, Author of "The Beatitude of Progress," Magazine Articles, etc. F. S. Blanchard & Co., Publishen Worcester, Massachusetts 1909 KAft Copyright, 1909, by F. S. Blanchard & Co. IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER, AND TO MY MOTHER WHOM HE HAS LEFT, THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED BY ONE WHOSE EYES ARE MORE AND MORE OPENED, AS DISTANCE INCREASES THE PERSPECTIVE, TO THE SACRED DEPTHS OF THEIR PARENTAL LOVE AND SACRIFICE. CONTENTS Fsge Foreword 5 Artemas Ward — First Commander-in-chief of the American Revolution, Victor of the Evacuation of Boston, and Hero of Shays' Rebelhon 9 Eli Whitney — Inventor of the Cotton-gin .... 57 Thomas Blanchard and other inventors ... 78 Elias Howe — Inventor of the Sewing-machine ... 78 William Morton — The Conqueror of Pain .... 89 Dorothy Lynde Dix — Redemptress of the World's Insane . 119 Clara Barton — Founder of the Red Cross in America . 149 George Bancroft — Historian of the United States . . . 189 John Bartholomew Gough— Greatest Apostle of Temperance 217 George Frisbie Hoar— An American Ideal Statesman . 247 Luther Burbank— Discoverer of a New Plant World . . 285 ILLUSTRATIONS Opp. Page Ancient Kitchen of the Ward Homestead with Door and Knocker 15 Watching the Battle of Bunker Hill 23 Portrait of General Artemas Ward 45 Revolutionary Homestead of General Artemas Ward . . 54 Birthplace of Eli Whitney 58 Portrait of Eli Whitney 70 Portrait of Thomas Blanchard 74 Birthplace of Elias Howe 78 Portrait of Elias Howe 86 The Discovery of Ether as an Anaesthetic 91 Portrait of Dr. William Morton 105 Portrait of Dorothy Lynde Dix 119 Clara Barton's Birthplace and Present Summer Home at Oxford 150 Portrait of Clara Barton 157 Portrait of George Bancroft 189 Bancroft's Birthplace 192 Portraits of John Bartholomew Gough . . . . 217 Reproduction of Painting of John B. Gough .... 245 Portrait of George Frisbie Hoar 247 A Presidential Party at Senator George Frisbie Hoar's Residence 273 Portrait of Luther Burbank 285 Birthplace of Luther Burbank and his Cottage at Santa Rosa, California 296 Cactus— Before and After 307 FOREWORD hi writing a collective biography of ten great lives in the zone of inventive genius presented in such a book as ''Master Minds at the Commonwealth's Heart," the danger of origi- nality is as great as the danger of merely reproducing recounted facts from others. Defects from each of these qualities of the biographer no doubt abound, yet not inten- tionally. So far a^ I have sought originality, it has been by a diligent study of each life and time to get a first-hand consciousness of the animating purpose of the life and re- immerse the life story anew in that. So far as I have clung to lines presented by other biographers, it has been to true the account to facts, in doing which escape from hitherto admirable biographies, long and short, is well nigh impossible. Not relinquishing the hope of some original presentation through the seizing of each life's purpose amid the detail and making it stand out in its essentials, I yet naturally have found it impossible to get clear away from the splen- did work of scores of magazine writers and monographers before and after the Civil War, and from the following authoritative and standard biographies : "The Life of Dor- othea Dix," Tiffany; "Trials of a Public Benefactor," N. P. Bice; "The Story of the Bed Cross," "The Story of My Childhood," etc., Clara Barton; John Bartholomew Gaugh's "Autobiography," "Platform Echoes," "Sun- light and Shadow," etc.; "Life and Letters of George Ban- FOBEWORD croft," 2 vols., M. A. DeWolf Howe; George Frisbie Hoar's " Autohiograpliy of Seventy Years," 2 vols.; "New Crea- tions in Plant Life," W. S. Harwood. Especially does the author acknowledge the courteous and unfailing help of these descendants of master minds or originals themselves, in granting him access to unprinted sources, photographs, daguerreotypes, etc.: the late Miss Harriet Ward and Miss Clara Denny Ward of Shrews- bury, and other members of the Ward family; Hon. Eli Whitney, grandson of the inventor; Miss Clara Barton and her secretary. Dr. J. B. Hubbell; Mrs. Charles Beed, niece of John B. Gough; the descendants and friends of Elias Howe at Spencer; Dr. William Morton of New York, the son of the discoverer ; Miss Mary Hoar, daughter of Senator Hoar; Luther Burbank and his sister, Mrs. Bee- son. These once, and frequently more than once, revised and corrected the copy, occasionally inserting a luminous touch. Finally well-informed men, themselves authors of note, like Professor Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard University or Charles Allen Dinsmore, or eye-ivitnesses and friends of the great men of the Commonwealth, like Hon. A. S. Roe and ex-Librarian S. S. Green of Worcester, have read all or part of the monographs and grafted their kindly criti- cism. I present these ten lives in a group with a purpose. For zones of genius have always held their peculiar place in the history of huma/)iity. Master minds, isolated as they may be in their originality, do not exist alone. Others living near catch the breath of their inspiration, and though proceeding perhaps along altogether different paths, are animated to achieve equally great master-pieces. The contagiousness of genius might be proved, had we time, by a biographical map of the world's great genius groups. FOREWORD We have Jiere to view hut one} While individually its figures have been too frequently forgotten or obscured, it has never been in any case viewed as a group originating from one centre. But it is a mighty group nevertheless. It is more than a school of genius. We speak of the Concord School, and properly. They were writers, authors, dreamers. But these in the Worcester zone of genius are not only writers and dreamers, but founders, creators, in- ventors, discoverers, "doers of the word and not 'writers' only," and in this sense they are a greater zone of genius than that at Concord. General Artemas Ward, First Commander-in-chief of the American Revolution; Eli Whitney, Inventor of the Cotton-gin; Elias Howe, Inventor of the Sewing-machine ; Dr. William Morton, "Conqueror of Pain;" Dorothy Lynde Dix, Redemptress of the World's Insane; Clara Barton, Founder of the Red Cross in America; George Bancroft, Historian of the United States; John Bartholomew Gough, Greatest Apostle of Temperance; George Frishie Hoar, an American Ideal Statesman ; Luther Burbank, Discoverer of a New Plant World! — Geniuses are these, small, perhaps, if you bound them by their starting-point, the hill-crowned region of Worcester. But they are mighty when you see them radiate the globe. PERCY H EPLER Worcester, September 10th, 1909. iHad the author projected a history of Worcester, there have been other residents of Worcester and of the county of Worcester, of na- tional reputation whose sketches might well have been given, such as Isaiah Thomas, and the first Levi Lincoln, and Governor Davis, and others in the past; Andrew H. Green in the present; and still others equally great who did not start here, but who for a time were resi- dents of Worcester, such as Edward Everett Hale. But such is not the object of the book as it is to deal with ten international figures who have been distinctly creators, founders, discoverers or inventors. ARTEMAS WARD FIRST COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, VICTOR OF THE EVACUATION OF BOSTON, AND HERO OF SHAYS' REBELLION^ THE earliest chapter of the American Revolution we may realize afresh by reading the letters in an an- cient trunk over which, in the old colonial home- stead at Shrewsbury, General Artemas Ward's tall clock is still telling the moons and tick-tocking the generations away. For here are writings whose broken seals disclose the first secrets of the conflict in the handwriting of the fathers of the Revolution, in the handwriting of Washing- ton and his generals, in the handwriting of the creators of the Constitution, and sometimes, as in the following, in the handwriting of an intercepted message of the enemy. Just here breaks upon the scene the secret forming of the first minute-men. There vibrates throughout the qui vive that pulsated about the storm-centre at Concord. Con- sternation whispers its breath and betrays its shock at the rupture between royalist and American, brother and brother, comrade and comrade, neighbor and neighbor, friend and friend. Here is exposed the ominous separa- lApril 20th, 1908, as the Patriots' Day address in Boston at the celebration of Patriots' Day by the Sons of the Colonial Wars of Massachusetts, the author first presented this monograph on General Ward by invitation of Prof. Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard University and the Governor of the Sons of the Colonial Wars. 10 MASTER MINDS tion of powder-stores from the King's powder-houses to the powder-houses of the patriots. Here is thrust in the royalist counter-stroke of Governor Gage's proclamation and the threat that every rebel taken in arms would hang. In the captured missive from Cambridge, August 29th, 17741— Mr. Brattle presents his duty to His Excellency Governor Gage; he apprehends it is his duty to acquaint His Excellency from time to time with everything he hears and knows to be true and of importance in these troublous times. Captain Minot of Concord, a very worthy man, this minute informed Mr. Brattle that there had been repeatedly made pressing applications to him to warn his company to meet at one minute 's warning, equipped with arms and ammunition according to laws he had constantly denied them; adding, if he did not gratify them, he should be constrained to quit his farm and town. Mr. Brattle told him he had better do that than lose his life and be hanged for a rebel. This morning the Selectmen of Medford came and received their town stock of powder which was in the arsenal on Quarry Hill. So there is now there in the King's powder-house only which shall remain there as a sacred deposition till ordered out by the Captain General. The facts in this letter exposed not only the patriots' withdrawal of powder, but actuated the first attempt of General Gage to disarm the people by securing the powder- stores and cannon of the colony, WARD WITHSTANDS THE KING'S GOVERNOR Amongst the first patriots to voice their rights against British encroachment of liberties and against arbitrary power was Artemas Ward. Original copies of the royal Governor's official summons to council still lie in a packet in the ancient trunk, and iFrom a manuscript at the Ward homestead. ARTEMASWARD 11 repeatedly bear to Ward this commandatory but reluctant message : Sir: His Excellency tho Governor directs a general council to be held at the Council Chamber in Boston on Wednesday, the 11th instant, at ten o'clock in the forenoon, and expects your attendance accordingly. This summons was not issued with grace by the royal Governor, but at the dictation of a popular demand he dared not resist. To represent their stand against a high-handed infringe- ment of their rights and liberties, nine years before Mr. Brattle's letter and for nearly ten years previous to the Revolution, the Massachusetts men insisted upon the pres- ence of Artemas Ward in the royal council. The Governor objected and negatived their choice — an evidence of the greatness of Ward's weight as a patriot. In this full decade before the events of '76, among the pre-revolutionary collisions constantly occurring, one col- lision took place in June, 1766, at Shrewsbury Green, with King George's Governor, Francis Bernard. This June day Artemas Ward was engaged after the manner of his time in doing his part towards the rebuilding of the Shrewsbury Meeting-house. Like the rest of his line, who did the same from the time Deacon Ward landed in the sixteen hundreds, Ward took the lead in the Pilgrim Church and in all that it meant to America, particularly in fostering in the Colonies the idea of freedom and individual liberty which had been always tabernacled in its ark. Suddenly Ward's superintendence of the white church's reconstruction was interrupted by a dash of a mounted red-coat, who swirled out of the dust of tJie Boston turn- pike. It was the agent of His Majesty's Governor at Bos- ton, and he did not rein the wheeling nag till he brought it 12 MASTER MINDS up full before Artemas Ward himself, to thrust before him the order whose seal he at once broke thus to read aloud: Boston, June 30, 1766. To Artemas Ward, Esquire. Sir: I am ordered by the Governor to signify to you that it has been thought fit to supersede your commission of Colonel in the regiment of militia lying in part in the County of Worcester and partly in the County of Middlesex, and your said commission is superseded accordingly. I am, sir. Your most obt and humble servant, Jno. Cotton, Deputy Secretary. "Give my compliments to the Governor and say to him that I consider myself twice honored, but more in being superseded than in being commissioned, and (holding up the letter) that I thank him for this, since the motive that dictated it is evidence that I am what he is not, a friend to my country!" ^'Colonel Ward forever!" shouted the fast-grown crowd as the cloyed and chesty royalist dug his spurs into his horse 's flanks and shot out of view back to Boston. The Governor could revoke the commission, but he could not stifle the breath of liberty nor shut Ward out of the Governor's own royal council, to which, against the Gov- ernor's negative, the patriot Colonists, as we have seen, elected him in 1768, notwithstanding even then tlu'eats of subjection by the King's soldiers. WARD IN THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WARS There was another thing Ward carried with him besides the breath of liberty which the Governor could not revoke. It was, as with Washington, a knowledge of war, which he had learned under the King's generals in the French and Indian fights in the wilderness. In ARTEMAS WARD 13 1755-1758 such was his innate martial mettle that, like over one third of the able-bodied youth of Massa- chusetts, with Colonel Williams' rcf^ment of foot, he left the feathered nest of a country seat and the j^olden spoon of a proud family^ to risk life and limb in the battles in the wilds of the north. Like Washincrton under Braddoek, under General Abercrombie, Lord Howe and Williams, he was here first to follow the ^leam and show the mettle of the man in a school of war the teachincrs of which he was so soon to turn back against his English tutors in the fierce reflex of Revolution. The very diary in which on page after page he wrote down each day his campaigns still lies at the estate^ of his great-grandson, the late Samuel D. Ward of Shrewsbury. Taking it up and reading it to-day, it is easy for us to see in Ward from the first the brand of unsullied courage. The crux of the expedition in which he advanced from Major to Lieutenant-colonel lay in the retreat from the farthest point in tliis particular campaign against Tieonde- roga. The command that came to leave the breastwork, where at imminent danger to his life he stood amid his falling comrades for one whole day of bloody attack, Ward stigmatizes in his diary under that date as given at a point whence they so soon "shamefully retreated!" Had the faintest flaw of the fear of a coward lurked in the iron of Artemas Ward's blood, it would have manifested itself in these fierce and virgin battles where were hand-to-hand fights in trackless wilds against the cunning of superior foes. Nowhere is there a hint of anything but dare and iHis wife was a great grand-daughter of Increase Mather. 2 Adjacent to the General Ward homestead. On the ancient farm Artemas Ward was bom, Nov. 7, 1727. 14 MASTER MINDS risk. The peril ahead was in a black, untrodden wilderness which masked redskins, who were backed in turn by the army of the French. Privation and death lay there, before which indeed two thousand of his comrades were to fall, including* his particular leader, Lord Howe. But with all the spirit of his being. Ward was for action and against retreat. In broken battle-lines in deadly engagements beyond Lake Champlain, hand to hand with Indians and French, it was no longer a baptism of water of which he first ■^ATote, ''My horse flung me into the river," but a baptism of blood. From eight in the morning till nine at night under steady fire at the farthest breastwork, with the born soldier's freedom from adjectives or emotion, he simply records, "Many slain," though from the forests on the way he passes details of bleeding men emerging '^ scalped alive" to tell of ambush and of butchery ! WARD THE FIRST AMERICAN GENERAL IN COMMAND OF THE REVOLUTION Such a knowledge of war began by the patriots to be first systematically turned against the British October 27th, 1774, when the Provincial Congress appointed Artemas Ward general officer, together with Jedediah Preble and Seth Pomeroy. The first of the latter two not serving, General Ward was left first in rank, senior officer of the Revolution and the first American appointed General in actual command. March 9th, 1775, the Committee of Safety was organized "to alarm, accoutre and assemble militia," and to establish at Concord and at Worcester stores for powder-magazines, cannon and guns. Ancient Kitchen of the Ward Homestead— With Doo:; and Knocker ARTEMA8 WARD 15 April 18th, 1775, it was this accumulation of stores that called out Oafjo's orders "to reconnoitre and destroy." Tho troops that obeyed the order brought on the clash at Lexington and Concord. Just before this oiitburst of the Revolution, General Artemas Ward, when all realized that they must "hang together or hang separately," left the Provincial Congress at its adjournment April 15th, expecting May 10th to con- vene with it for a day of prayer and fasting. In this spirit of deep and breathless solemnity, he retired to the stillness of his home, the other patriots doing the same. Samuel Adams and John Hancock (marked to be sent to the King for trial) awaited events in the prayerful quiet of the house of Rev. Jonas Clark at Lexington. Hard upon the outbreak of April 19th, when the relay of horsemen alarmed every highway and turnpike with the simple and oft-repeated alarm, "To arms! to arms! the war's begun!" there came at Shrewsbury as everywhere else the breaking of a passion whose pressure had for years been clamped down nowhere deeper than in the Ward household. In the glow of the great fireplace of the ancient kitchen we can stand in now, when the ponderous blinds had been tightly drawn and the burnished guns still overhead hung waiting to speak their message, the letters of the Commit- tee of Correspondence had here been read time and time again. Here faces gleamed with light other than the back- log's and drank inspiration other than that from the crane. For years only brains were fired. The guns hung ready but mute. But at last these flintlocks,^ as a last resort, en- forced the dictates of men's minds. iThese guns were used in secret drilling, and the old kitchen is yet marked with dents from the clumsy barrels. 16 MASTER MINDS April 20th President Warren^ of the Committee of Safety accompanied the general alarm by this call to towns : "Our all is at stake. Death and desolation are the consequence of delay. every moment is infinite- LY PRECIOUS. One hour's delay may deluge your coun- try IN BLOOD AND ENTAIL PERPETUAL SLAVERY UPON THE FEW OF OUR PATRIOTS THAT MAY SURVIVE THE CARNAGE.'' It was the drive of this compelling passion of April 19th that enlisted before the town of Boston, by Saturday night, over sixteen thousand patriots and. in their lead, accom- panied by his sons, Ithamar and Nahum. Artemas "Ward as General at the head of the army.^ Immediately General Ward took command of the troops inpouring from every side, not only from the Province of Massachusetts, but from New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont and Connecticut. It was no frolic or foray, for beyond these colonies on to New York went " f/ie shot heard round the world," and following right upon the dispatch of the news at Lexington and Concord, the patriots in New York arose as one man, as is shown by this "intelligence,"' at once posted to General Ward and still found in his effects : iWarren, as if anticipating his fate at Bunker Hill, transported his wife and children to a house on Main Street, Worcester, still standing where it has been moved, 1 Fountain Street. 2First to bring the patriots kiUed (forty-nine killed, fifty-seven wounded) at the bridge and at Lexington, General Ward ordered out one lieutenant, two sergeants and fifty rank and file. For bread and other provisions for the assembling thousands, Colonel Gardner he dispatched to Eoxbury; for cannon and ordnance, Col- onel Bond to Cambridge. 3From a manuscript at homestead. ABTEMASWARD 17 Newport, April 26, 1775. Sir: It is with pleasure that I communicate to you by express the following important intelligence: By a vessell just arrived here from New York, we are informed that the news of the engagement between the regulars and the provincials got to New York on Sunday last between forenoon and afternoon service; that the people of the city immediately rose, disarmed the soldiers, possessed themselves of the fort and mag- azines, in which they found about 1500 arms; that they unloaded two transports bound to Boston, Captain Montague not dareing to give them any assistance; that a third transport has sailed while they were seizing the two others, and the people had fitted out a vessell in order to take and bring them back; that they had forbid all the pilots from bringing up any King's ships; that Captain Mon- tague was not able to procure a pilot in the whole city, and that the inhabitants were preparing and putting themselves into the best position of defense. The gentleman who brings this intelligence left Elizabethtown yesterday morning, and tells us that on Monday the committee of that town and county met and agreed to raise one thousand men immediately to assist in the defense of New York against any attacks that may be made against them. I have the honor to assure you that the intelligence may be depended on, and that I am Sir, Yr hum Ser John Collins, Chairman of the Committee of Inspection. The Commanding officer at Eoxbury. Thus, to SO great an extent conceived and born in New England, the Revolution, in whose creation Artemas Ward was an initial master mind, spread from New England over a continent. The generals commanding the troops from the other col- onies yielded deference to General Ward as head, defer- ence being thus yielded by General Spencer of Connecticut, General Greene of Rhode Island and General Folsom of 18 MASTER MINDS New Hampshire, "Ward's orders to be in the form of requests. The titamc task of the organization of an unformed and unarticulated patriot army fell to General Ward. His it was first to face the stupendous hurden of setting in order nearly twenty thousand troops, arising, as it were, in a night, to stand before him in the morning, a tatterdemalion multitude of high-strung and independent spirits. Already senior officer in command of this first army of the American Revolution, Artemas Ward, May 19, 1775, by the following commission was elevated by the Provincial Congress to the post of Commander-in-chief : The Congress of the Colony of Mass. To the Hon. Artemas Ward, Esq. Greeting: We, reposing especial trust and confidence in your courage and good conduct,i do by these presents constitute and appoint you, the said Artemas Ward, to be General and Commander- in-chief of all the forces raised by this Congress aforesaid for the defense of this and other American Colonies. You are therefore confidently and intelligently to discharge the duty of a general in leading, ordering and exercising the forces in arms, both inferior officers and soldiers, and to keep them in good order and discipline; and they are hereby ordered to obey you as their General; and you are yourself to observe and follow such orders and instructions as you shall from time to time receive from this or any future Congress or House of Representatives of this colony or the Com- mittee of Safety, so far as said committee is empowered by this commission to order and instruct you for the defense of this and the other colonies; and to demean yourself according to military i"The army reposed great confidence in its officers. They were the free choice of the men. Many had that influence over their fellow men that accompanies character. Ward was a true patriot, had many private virtues and was prudent and highly esteemed." — Frothingham, "Siege of Boston," p. 103. ARTEM AS WARD 19 rules and discipline established by said Congress in pursuance of the trust reposed in you. By order of the Congress, 19 May, A. D. 1775. T TtT Pres. Pro Tern. Jos. Warren. General Ward's ori^nal placing,'' of this vast unformed force of citizen minute-men about the besiegino^ line of some twenty miles was so stratefj^ic that Washincrton upon his arrival found, in the large, its position from a military point of view unchangeable. Lord Howe's estimate of his enemy's lines and their position bespoke an even higher appraisal of General Ward's strong line of impregnable blockade into which he divided this multitudinous array of men. "The Objective at Bunker Tlill" is a late booklet introducing us to the English letters as found in England by the author. Colonel Fisher. Through these letters of Lord Ho^ve, General Clinton and others, new light is thrown on the American Revolution, and nowhere more than on the underestimated work of General Ward, whose original laying of the siege-lines of Boston, as well as his final work on Dorchester Heights, the English deemed im- pregnable, and spoke of with well-weighed esteem. A week after occurred a "frolick" at Noddle's and Hog Islands — a frolic which, while the engagement was a minor one and, compared to Bunker Hill, but a foot-hill to a mountain, betrayed a deep-laid and permanent plan of General Ward's army, which was not only to hem in the five thousand King's regulars within the besieged town of Boston, hid to starve them out by corralling all near-by stock and pro-visions. From headquarters, Cambridge, May 27th and 28th, 1775, original letters of General Ward picturesquely paint the 20 MASTER MINDS local colors of the raid which any moment may swing into the decisive engagement. He wrote as to Hog Island that was attacked by the regulars : Our party, consisting of about six hundred men and two field- pieces, have just been forwarded to them. They have sent for reinforcements. But it is prudent not to weaken our company more. Our men have all been ordered to be in the greatest readiness this night. I doubt not your camp will be in the same readiness. There have been great movements in Boston this day. They have viewed arms, etc., etc. We have intelligence by General Putnam, who has just come from Chelsea, that Hog Island and Noddle's Island are swept clean; all the live-stock, as much as the total amount thereafter seized by the English, is taken off by our party. An armed schooner upon Winnisimmet ways was burned, although there was a heavy fire kept up continually. She had about sixteen pieces of cannon. I have the pleasure to inform you that we have not lost one man. I am obliged to you for offering me a reinforcement, but at present we apprehend we have no special need of them. We only request you to hold your men in readiness if we should. BUNKER HILL Such minor fights serve but as an index to the forces about to break upon one another on the two great penin- sular hills commanding the city — the keys to the situation, Bunker Hill and Dorchester Heights. Between these two heights of Boston on the north and south, with the blue strip of the Charles between them, lie the American Army on the Cambridge side and the King's regulars cooped up in Boston. The American belt-line of troops General Ward stretched in a semi-circle over twelve miles from Winter Hill on the left wing to Roxbury church on the right ABTEMA8 WARD 21 wing. It comprised by this time over sixteen thousand colonists. The English army, which consisted of at first some five thousand troops, was now to become, soon after Lexington and Concord, ten thousand, through reinforce- ments from England by Generals Howe, Clinton and Bur- goyne. The situation is in the prepossession of the two hills. With a judgment confirmed by the result, General Ward was opposed, for strategic reasons, to their occupying with a fortification Breed's Hill and Bunker Hill. So was General Warren. They called it at once "rash and imprudent." But others in the council of war alleging that the army was growing restless and the countiy dissat- isfied, voted to proceed. Upon the decision of the Committee of Safety to fortify it, Bunker and Breed's Hills at once became the storm- centre. On a bright moonlight night, June 16th, 1775, Colonel William Prescott with over one thousand men set out to throw up and occupy a redoubt and breastw^ork. In the rear two hundred yards back behind a low stone waU, Cap- tain Gridley, the engineer of the works, held the left flank. Reed and Stark the next morning increased the number to between twelve and fifteen hundred men. Against this force was flung the entire attack of the British army and navy. Over three thousand of the ten thousand King's troops had begun to cross by one o 'clock on the 17th. Since day- break the frigate Lively had been firing at the exposed works, which soon, together with burning Charlestown, became the target for not only the Lively, but the frigates Somerset, Symmetry, Cerberus, Falcon, Glasgow and four floating batteries. 22 MASTER MINDS 'June 20th, 1775, seven men of the Provincial Congress, acting for the Committee of Safety, three days after the battle forwarded this record of the engagement to the Con- tinental Congress: "We think it an indisputable duty to inform you that reinforcements from Ireland, both of horse and foot, being arrived (the number unknown), and having intelligence that General Gage was about to take possession of the advantageous posts in Charlestown and in Dorchester Point, the Committee of Safety advised that our troops should prepossess them if possible. "Accordingly on Friday evening, the 16th instant, this was effected by about twelve hundred men. About day- light on Saturday morning their line of circumvallation on a small hill south of Bunker's Hill in Charlestown was closed. ' ' At this time the ' Lively ' man-of-war began to fire upon them. A number of our enemy's ships, tenders, scows and floating batteries soon came up, from all of which the fire was general by twelve o'clock. About two the enemy began to land at a point which leads out towards Noddle 's Island, and immediately marched up to our intrenchments, from which they were twice repulsed, but in the third attack forced them. Our forces which were in the lines, as well as those sent out for their support, were greatly annoyed by balls and bombs from Cops Hill, the ships, scows, etc. At this time the buildings in Charlestown appeared in flames in almost every quarter, kindled by hot balls, and are laid since in ashes. Though the scene was most horri- ble and altogether new to most of the men, yet many stood and received wounds by swords and bayonets before they quitted their lines. At five o'clock the enemy were in full possession of all the posts within the isthmus. In the even- WaTcHIM. IHK liATILK llF IUNK KK IIlIJ. ARTEMASWARD 23 ing and night following, General Ward extended his intrenchments before made at the stone house over Winter Hill. About six o'clock of the same day the enemy began to cannonade Roxbury from Boston Neck and elsewhere, which they continued twenty-four hours with little spirit and less effect," "If any error has been made on our side, it was in taking a post so much exposed. ' ' When the bombs were bursting over Charlestown and the buildings "kindled by hot balls" were in flames, two shadows crossed the path of the Commander-in-chief, Artemas Ward. They were cast by the General 's third son, Tommy, who had been left at home, but who, rebelling at staying there, took hold tightly by the hand a lad with whom he had beaten his way from Shrewsbury forty miles away and appeared breathlessly headed for the battle. "How's this, Tommy?" vociferated the thunderstruck Commander to the young patriot, who insisted on joining his brothers on the fire-zone. "You must go right back!" The impression has too often been left that General Ward remained inactive, contenting himself with simply scrib- bling in his diary, "The battle is going on at Charles- town." But it is not so. General orders from head- quarters^ showed incessant activity. It was 9 o 'clock before Colonel Prescott applied to Ward for reinforcements, as Prescott himself did not believe the British would attack. At eleven o'clock General Ward ordered to Bunker Hill, to reinforce Prescott, the whole of Colonel Stark's and Reed's regiments of New Hampshire. This was three iGeneral Ward's headquarters were in the building later occupied by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and now known as his house. 24 MASTER MINDS hours before the three thousand English began to land. The remainder of the Massachusetts forces at about one o'clock he ordered to go. The battle began at three. Late in the day, notwithstanding the large possibility of the English yet striking at the centre at Cambridge, General Ward sent his own regiment and Patterson's and Gardner's to reinforce the patriots in the battle. Companies even of these last sent arrived in time to take posts as directed by Putnam. Certain other companies, though sent with these and long before these, failed to report for action over the fire-zone of the cannonaded Neck. In reality they never got there, but stampeded. June 17th, 1775, a general order from headquarters was sent to the effect that "the several companies in regiments parade precisely at five o'clock this afternoon at our alarm-post with two days' provisions, well dressed, their arms and ammunition in good order, ready to march to regiment orders." June 30th, in a record written by John Martin to Presi- dent Stiles, it is also stated that application to Ward for aid brought Colonel Putnam a large reinforcement about noon. Though Ward's aide hastened under cross-fire more than once through the enfiladed Neck in carrying his chief's commands, to maintain a central direc- torate or an intelligent line of communication, or to have exact and speedy intelligence of the enemy's surprising frontal attack, was indeed beyond human power. When Ward knew of the attack, which at first not even Colonel Prescott^ believed would come (as appears from the above 1' ' The troops, who had worked all night and half of a hot June day in throwing up intrenchments on Breed's Hill, were not relieved ARTEMASWARD 25 ordere long before the battle ended), he acted. But it took him, considering the shortness of the battle, a long time to know. Captain Aaron Smith's (the Shrewsbury soldier) statement that General Ward dispatched messen- gers across who were interfered with and sent back by Tory sympathizers witliin the American lines was no doubt but an undershot of the full truth. Other reasons for delay also abounded — reasons beyond General Ward's control. For instance, when the Conmiittee of Safety asked for the four best horses for General Ward's messengers, the Com- mittee of Supply refused, saying there were none except those unfit or wanted. The heat of the battle (over at five) occupied but ninety minutes. Waterloo lasted one day with thirty-four per cent, of the number engaged killed ; Gettysburg lasted three days with twenty-five per cent, of the Union Army lost; Bunker Hill lasted only ninety minutes with over thirty per cent, of the number engaged Idlled. Therefore, the bloody issue of Bunker Hill was decided with dreadful impetus. It was not only, proportionately speaking, one of the bloodiest battles in history, but the carnage was con- densed into an abnormally short period. Considering this, the suddenness of the onslaught and the slowness of the intelligence, it is seen that it was absolutely impossible, after the first intelligence of the enemy's frontal charge, for General Ward to have wisely acted sooner than he did. Yet before and during this ninety minutes' conflict, by others Colonel Preseott at first did not believe the British would attack his redoubt, and when he saw the movement he felt assured he could easily repulse any assailants, and it was nine o'clock before he applied to General Ward for reinforcements." — Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History, Vol I, p. 445. 26 MASTER MINDS General Ward constantly ordered troops to march and con- tinually gave his orders to reinforce. Lord Howe's and General Clinton's approval of the battle 's value to the Americans reveals in their letters a far higher appraisal of Ward's generalship than we have hitherto awarded to General Ward. The military probabilities were all against the English doing what they did. Their first master-stroke of strategy would have been to strike at the centre of the Army at Cambridge. Sixty-three half barrels of powder, only one-half pound for each soldier, in case of a general engag-ement, were all "the necessary article" the patriots possessed! General Ward knew this. But even to explain his course he dared not then expose the fact that this, together with his fear of an attack on the centre, was the reason of his caution. Had the English acted up to the best military strategy and struck at the centre at the American Army with its one-half pound of powder to a man, divided by a river and thinly stretching twenty miles all the way from Winter Hill to Eoxbury, they could have had a chance to destroy it piecemeal. Ward did not know that they would not live up to their opportunity. He had knowledge in fact, as it afterwards proved, that it was General Clinton's plan ! General Clinton 's plan was to cut off the patriots at the Neck and also then to strike at Cambridge. Gage and Howe shrank at the last moment from it, for which they were later roundly criticised in England.^ Till h^ found out for certainty their plan of frontal attack upon Bunker Hill, Ward had to guard against this master-stroke of strategy by the British, which was iSee Fisher, "The Objective at Bunker Hill." Also letters of Howe and Clinton. ARTEMA8 WARD 27 to bottle up the patriot troops by simply landing at the neck of the peninsula and thas corking the isthmian flask, with the Americans inside unable to get out. Indeed this, we see, was the strategy of the over- ruled English General, who was not overruled till the last minute. With the gunboats Lively, Glasgow, Somerset, Symmetry, Falcon, Cerberus and four floating batteries pouring in hot shot from the water-ways all about, had they done this, and had Ward ordered all of his army into the trap, they could indeed have annihilated the cut-off American columns at Bunker Hill. After the battle. Ward was cleared and confirmed by the report to the Provincial Congress June 20th, but three days later. This stated that in the opinion of the seven men constituting the committee, than whom no men on earth were fitter to judge, that "if any error has been made on our side, it was in taking a post so much exposed" — the very last thing Ward had said before the battle. But, after all. Ward's troops won a moral victory. One thing was left of Bunker Hill to the patriots, and that the greatest — a demonstration both to themselves and the enemy of the deatlilessness of their inspired cause. It gleamed out of the American gaze from the time when they met the whites of the enemy's eyes and made a martial tar- get of their waistbands. It sank in tliroughout the rake-off of the embattled farmer's fatal aim till the Americans' last dram of powder was wasted away, and cannon from land and floating batteries swept them from their feet at the third charge. It survived the triple fire and repeated itself at tlie engagement farther back. Then it appeared that England in Ward 's army was not to face a rabble of rebels, but a belligerent and equal foe. Then it broke once for all the flippant morale of English arms in America. 28 MASTER MINDS "I would sell them another hill at the same price," said General Greene. Washington upon hearing of the battle declared that "the liberties of America are now secure." To General Ward at headquarters Colonel Prescott reported the result of Bunker Hill. General Ward thanked him, but wisely refused to let him go back to recapture the hill. A short time later General Ward thanked the troops under him as a whole, saying to them on June 24th: ' ' The General orders his thanks to be given these officers and soldiers who behaved so gallantly at the late action in Charlestown. Such bravery gives the General sensible pleasure, as he is thereby fully satisfied that we shall fully come off victorious, and triumph over the enemies of free- dom and America." The day before this order, June 20th, three days after the battle, realizing how the confusion, slowness and insubordi- nation of officers had hindered General Ward in reinforc- ing Bunker Hill, Connecticut voted to place the whole of its troops under General Ward, and advised the other Colo- nies plainly to do the same thing openly, as it had so far been but a matter of deference. That evening as General Artemas Ward extended his lines and entrenchments over Winter Hill, it was not to abandon himself to despair. Even then inspired by this test of the American Army 's courage, there no doubt arose before him the other key-point to the sifuation — the un-lost hill on the southern peninsula, Dorchester Heights. Whether or not Ward then thought of Dorchester Heights, the fact is, the time soon came when he did, and it re- mained to be his vindication and by his victory there to prove to the world his courage and his generalship. ARTEMAS WARD 29 THE ARRIVAL OF WASHINGTON Two days before the Battle of Bunker Hill and not at all because of it, at Philndolphia the Continental Concrress appointed Washington Commander-in-chief of the Conti- nental Army. The difference between Ward and Washinprton is the difference between two great epochs — the Continental and the Provincial or Colonial. Washington incarnated the Continental, Ward the Provincial. Artemas Ward by the Congress of Massachusetts, at that time heading as he did New England and the Provincial cause, had been appointed Commander-in-chief of the Provincial Army by the Pro\'incial Congress. But the Eevolution had groMTi out of the Provincial period into the Continental. It was, therefore, time to pass its leadership over to a Continental cause instead of a Provincial cause ; a Continental Congress instead of a Pro- vincial Congress; a Continental capitol instead of a Pro- vincial capitol; a Continental army instead of a Provincial army; a Continental commander-in-chief instead of a Pro- vincial commander-in-chief. The two positions Washington and Ward held were not identical. They were not the same. The Provincial lead- ership was not destroyed, but fulfilled and passed out of the Provincial into the Continental, the new embodiment of which was Washington. There were great New Englanders who were later sign- ers of the Declaration of Independence like Paine, who favored Ward.^ But for one great reason he was not to be i"Mr. Paine expressed a great opinion of General Ward." — Let- ter of John Adams in Colonel Joseph Ward's Revolutionary cor- respondence. 30 31 ASTER MINDS the man. He had filled his place as Provincial leader and was to carry to success the driving of the British from New England. He had not only filled his place, but fulfilled his place. But he could not fill Washinsrton's place. For Washington, chovsen as head of the Continental cause, brought all the dismembered colonies together into one new body — the United Provinces of North America — by knotting the muscles of their various powers into one arm — the Continental Army. Washington arrived July 2d, 1775. From Nathan Stowe's old order-book in manuscript at Concord, Washington's general orders for July 4, 1775, read to this effect : "All troops of the several colonies which have been raised or are hereafter to he raised for the support and defense of the liberties of America are received into the pay and service of the Continental Congress, and are now the troops of the United Provinces of North America, and it is hoped that all distinctions of Colonies will he laid aside." If Washington was astounded at the task of reorganiza- tion, it reveals what a herculean burden had been Ward's of organization. For Washington found nearly twenty thousand men whom Ward had initially organized and held together deployed in so well-planned a siege-line that he himself would not change it and the English could not. If "it was a naked army, and the quartermaster had not a single dollar in hand;" if "the troops were in a state not far from mutiny," it only shows all the more the hardness of Ward's initial task in leading, organizing and holding such a mass of raw material. ARTEMASWARD 31 BETWEEN THE LINES Washino-ton's arrival July 2d, 1775, had found the remarkable army Ward had collected and held together. July 9th, at a council of war, it was decided to maintain posts as Ward had placed them and to increase the army to twenty- two thousand. The British ai-my across the Charles in Boston was then estimated at eleven thousand five hundred. To General Ward July 22d, 1775, came the commission of Major-general and the rani? next to Washinrrton, of second in command of the Continental Army, with his station the right wing at Dorchester Heights. The left wing at Winter and Prospect Hlills, to whose command General Lee^ was to succeed, consisted of two brigades under Generals Sullivan and Greene. At the centre, where were Washington's headquarters at Cambridge, were two brigades under Putnam. During the next eight months the siege of Boston is to go on till March 17, 1776, the day of the British evacuation. iWard's rival and detractor, as we shall see, and a general not only discounted at the time, but rated even lower in the later his- tory of the Eevolution. "Gates and Lee were placed in service next to Washington, and of both these Englishmen the record was as bad as it could be." — Edward Everett Hale in "Reminiscences of a Hundred Years." General Lee's pompous and un-American opinions shone through- out his meteoric career. Washington deciphered and sent to a friend a sample of this questionable General's language as a "specimen of his abilities in that way." Lee's role, in which he later in his own language describes himself as "a dog in a dancing school," was one in which he jealously came to denounce Washington himself as "damnably deficient." The detraction of General Ward which he and other rivals dared, however, lasted long enough to shatter Washington's friendship for Ward. 32 MASTER MINDS For nearly a year the two armies lie, the one over against the other. We open certain unprinted letters to feel again the ferment of this long wait ; the excitement of the chafing camps; the friction without collision; the nervous tension of the tightening lines; the momentary convulsions of the one at the slightest alarm in the other. Saturday night, July 29, it is a trembling woman in the camp. In the peak of a baby's cap or tucked into its slip is a letter from "Washington to Ward. We hold it again as "Elizabeth Royal" held it, and we re-read it even as at first it was read as a sentry's lantern trembled across its page: KOXBURY. To the Honorable General Ward.i The bearer, Elizabeth Eoyal, wife to a soldier in the Sixty-third Regiment, has obtained leave from the General to go into Boston, leaving her child here. If she applies you will give the necessary orders to the guards. This morning a detachment of riflemen surprised the enemy's guard q 'rt 'd. in Charlestown Neck and brought off two prisoners, but they gave no particular information but what we had before. It is supposed that two of their men were killed ; not one on our side was either killed or wounded. I am sir with much esteem, Your most ob'd't and very H'ble servant, Jos. Eeed (Washington's secretary). Headquarters, Sunday, 9 o 'clock. The British army, alarmed by the riflemen's surprise, fear the main engagement may be precipitated any moment. Washington fears the same, and therefore watches every move and detects the slightest action, as is shown by this iFrom original manuscript at homestead. Many of Washington's dictated letters and dispatches, while still his dictations, were signed by his aides or secretary. ARTEMASWARD 33 request Washington dictated in this hitherto unprinted letter : Headquarters, Cambridge, 30 July, 1775. His Excellency here desires me to inform you that it is his opinion the movemonts of the regulars on your side may have been occasioned by the alarm we gave them last night. He requests you to be prepared for them in case they attempt anything against your posts, and if any new movements are made to give him immediate notice of them. "We have had before ns General Ward's unpublished or- derly book^ in which he wrote each day's events and orders at Dorchester. It details the Ions: stand of the ri^ht wing up to March. In its pages we follow the patriots as they are bracing themselves for the impending struggle, and strengthen outposts on even to Squantum. As the winter drew on, as some soldier on the Neck or on the other side from over the Charles kicked the blazing log of a fire in the American camp, the British army confined there heard him sing camp-songs like this: "And what have you got by all your designing But a town without dinner to sit down and dine in?" Ward's plan of starving and freezing out the garrison was working. For to provide fuel for the shivering troops of the British, numbers of whom were up to December still in tents, through his glasses from Dorchester, General Ward watched meeting-houses being torn down in Boston. lln the Antiquarian Society, Worcester, where the writing stands out as boldly as on the day he wrote it in his year as Commander of the right wing. 34 MASTER MINDS Washington, too, was on the watch. English ships com- ing to succor the royalists he had smartly seized, and their coasting vessels prevented from bringing in provisions and provender. Chief among the prizes taken by the patriots was the brigantine Nancy, loaded with beef and with two thousand stands of arms and seven thousand of round shot for cannon, two thousand muskets, one hundred five thou- sand flints, sixty reams of cartridge paper, three thousand round shot for twlve -pounders and four thousand shot for six-pounders. Grave matters of internal administration still arose, how- ever, to engage the new Commander-in-chief. From the contents of many letters, nowhere do we see "Washington demonstrate more wise and delicate capacity to command than in thus holding the restless army together by conciliat- ing New England generals to the reorganization. Manu- script letters far back in 1775 expose how often he yielded minor differences wherever he could to secure the major harmony. So close even since September have grown the sentries of the opposing armies, and so short the space between, that deserters walk undetected from one to the other. Counter- signs are betrayed and the enemy is given the password by which they may enter the American lines. At such times from wing to wing the besieging army quivers with excite- ment as post-riders dash in to Washington with dispatches like this one to Washington from Greene, which we have reopened in the original manuscript from General Ward's house: o ART EM AS WARD 35 Prospect Hill, Sept. 10, 1775.1 8 o'clock. Til is TiKunout reported me from the White-house Guard ^ that a deserter had made his escape into Bunker Hill. Two ^ sentries fired at him but he made his escape I believe unhurt. H ... If this deserter has carried in the countersign, they may easily carry it over to Roxbury. It would be a pretty ^ y, advantage for a partisan frolic. 9 ^ The Rifflers seem very sulky and . . threaten to rescue H w their mates tonight, but little is feared from them, as the o g regiment are already at a moment's notice to turn out — and 1^ ^ the guards very strong. On again Avith the dispatch, under cover of darkness, spurred the post-rider whom Washington, by his staff officer, after the reception of the eight o'clock message, hastened over to Ward at Roxbury with General Greene's dispatch and the new parole and countersign, adding: Headquarters 9 at night,i 10 September, 1775. The parole and countersign has been changed on this side as you see them inscribed in General Greene's letter. You will no doubt order it to be complied with. Your most obedient humble servant, Horatio Gates (Adj. Gen.). How long the British can stand the pressure of the siege becomes to both sides an a.nxious question. It is evident that it cannot be long, and this means — action ! Beset everywhere by petty sjnuptoms of disorganiza- tion and disorder, Washington not only finds no chance to strike the enemy, but grows desperate in his determination to prevent his own army's leaking away between his fingers while apparently yet in his hand. iFrom the original manuscript at homestead. 36 MASTER MINDS By November 28th, of the required twenty-two thousand men but three thousand five hundred had re-enlisted for the new establishment. Even on into December, not only was the recruiting of men for the new year delayed, but officers were unfixed, with less than thirty days before the expira- tion of all. The whole future of the Revolution was indeed at stake. GENERAL WARD, VICTOR OF THE EVACUATION OF BOSTON During the past months, lest the enemy make the first move, Washington had been all along for weeks most alert, and constant warnings fiy between him and Ward. A warning to Ward December 4th, 1775, by his Adjutant- general, Washington punctuates ■with these words: This moment a report is come from the commanding oflScer at Chelsea that the enemy have passed from Boston to Charlestown this afternoon, near one hundred boats full of men; perhaps this may be only intended as a feint on this side, when the serious attacks may be on yours; it behooves to be alert in all quarters. I therefore by His Excellency's command acquaint yen of this manoeuvre of your enemy, not doubting but you will take your measures accordingly. By the hard-pressed enemy in Boston, where conditions were growing intolerable, is there to be a movement against the stores? Washington will send troops here and there to guard them, as we see by his dictated word, and straightway in view of the climax, which sooner or later circum- stances will force upon them, he looks towards meet- ing the crisis. To meet this crisis General Washington altogether planned three separate attacks upon Boston, all of which failed to eventuate. They were the one shown ARTEMAS WARD 37 in the following letter on Castle William, the one across the Charles on ice, and the counter attack to Lord Percy's in March. As to the first he most interestingly proceeds to unfold to Ward the following design : Cambridge, Nov. 17th, 1775.1 As the season is fast upproachiug when the Bay between us and Boston will, in all probability, be close shut up, thereby rendering any movement upon the Ice as easy as if no water was there, and as it is more than possible that General Howe, when he gets the expected reinforcement will endeavor to relieve himself from the disgraceful confinement in which the Ministerial troops have been all this Summer, common prudence dictates the necessity of guard- ing our camps wherever they are most available for this purpose, I wish you, Sergt. Thomas, Genl. Spencer & Col. Putnam to meet me at your Quarters tomorrow at Ten o'clock, that we may ex- amine your work at the neck and Sewells point, and direct such batteries as shall appear necessary for the security of your camp, on that side to be thrown up without loss of time. I have long had it upon my mind that a successful attempt might be made, by way of surprise, upon Castle William — from every acct. there are no more than 300 men in the place. The whale boats therefore which you have, such as could be sent to you would easily transport 800 or 1000 which with a very mod- erate share of conduct and spirit might I should think bring off the Garrison, if not some part of the Stores. — I wish you to discuss this matter (under the Kose) with officers of whose judgment and conduct you can rely — something of this sort may show how far the men are to be depended upon — I am with respect Yr most obed H Ser G Washington This stands out as the first one of the three ways Wash- ington planned to take Boston, all of which failed to suc- ceed. lOriginal manuscript at Antiquarian Society, Worcester. 38 MASTER MINDS About two weeks later the Continental Congress voted Washington "could attack Boston in any manner he may think expedient." Dropping the Castle William plan, he elected another one — to attack by crossing the frozen waters of the Charles. But the ice did not freeze until the middle of February. Calling a council, Washington, to his great disheartenment, found himself out-voted on the grounds of the too great risk involved. February the 13th the enemy themselves anticipated him and carried out his strategy by crossing over the ice to Dor- chester Neck (now South Boston). Here they leveled all cover in the shape of buildings, also capturing six patriot guards. The British objective was Dorchester Heights. But they were not the only ones having designs on this objective. It was also tlie objective for General Artemas Ward's right wing. While Washington was three times to be compelled to give up his plans of attack upon Boston, the chance from Ward's side is all the time opening. The plan went before the council of war. It was voted by the council, Washington then concurring. From the very first Ward's move towards a victorious prepossession of Dorchester Heights, towards the Dorchester Heights victory and towards the British evacuation, moves swiftly to a climax. Everything favored the Dorchester Heights plan. The brigantine Nancy's contribution of ammunition came just in time to supply Knox's heavy cannon so brilliantly trans- ported from Ticonderoga over the Green Mountains by forty-two ox-team sleds. General Ward had also under him most able subordinates. General Thomas, Colonel Put- nam and Engineer Gridley, who had thrown up the Bun- ker Hill redoubts. ART EM AS WARD 39 But details are over, and at len^h the crisis is at hand. It may come at any moment. The American fjenerals are all alert. Any juncture may precipitate the conflict. Though himself outvoted as to his plan of attack and now giving the new undertaking over into the direct command of his first Major-general, General Ward, Washington right nobly decided that as to prepossessing Dorchester Heights : "It is better to prevent than to remedy an evil," and backs Ward with every force at his command. In an interest- ing letter he keeps Ward in touch with the enemy's designs, and Ward in turn warns General Brewer that in view of an immediate attempt upon the American lines, the troops "lye upon their arms" and the picket be "so dis- posed as to give them a warm reception." Washington betrays great caution. It is evident that it is hard for him to share Ward's convictions that the affair is to go through without a hitch and be a clean sweep for the American forces. It is yet but February 27th, and March 17th, the day of the British evacuation of Boston, is three weeks distant. Washington fears an attack while Ward is unprepared. But his fear again and again turns out unfounded, as, for instance, he here himself declares to General Ward from Cambridge, February 27th, 1776^: We were falsely alarmed a while ago with an account of the regulars coming over from the Castle William to Dorchester. Mr. Bayler whom I immediately sent is just returned with a contra- diction of it. But as a rascally Eifleman went it last night & will no doubt give all the intelligence he can, wd it not be prudent to keep Six or Eight trusty men by way of Lookouts or Patrols iThis letter, originally found at the residence, is also in Miss Ward's "Old Times in Shrewsbury," p. 168. 40 MASTER MINDS tonight on the point next to the Castle as well as in Nuke Hill; at the same time ordering particular Eegiments to be ready to march at a moment's notice to the Heights of Dorchester. For should the enemy get Possession of those hills before us, they would render it a difficult task to dispossess them. Better it is therefore to prevent than to remedy an evil. To draw attention from the right wing's operations of Major-general Ward, Saturday night, March 2d, the left wing north of Boston began cannonading, and continued cannonading the nights of Sunday and Monday, March 3d and 4th. So great was the din and so skillful were the manoeuvres that Knox's forty-two ox teams hauled the Ticonderoga cannon on "screwed" straw over the frozen earth of Dorchester Neck within a mile of the English sen- tries without discovery. March 3d, preceding the day (March 4th) on which General Thomas' ox-teams were to cany up the cannon, came this letter from Washington to Ward;! To Major General Ward, Commanding at Eoxbury, Cambridge 3 March 1776 Sir: My letter of last Night would inform you that the Gen'l officers at this place thought it dangerous to delay taking post on Dorchester Hills, least they should be possessed before us by the Enemy, and therefore Involve us in difficulties which we should not know how to extricate ourselves from — This opinion they were inclined to adopt from a belief, indeed almost a certain knowledge, of the Enemy's being apprised of our designs that way. You should make choice of some good Eegiments to go on the morning after the Post is taken, under the command of General Thomas — the number of men you shall judge necessary for this Eelief may be ordered. I should think from two to three thousand, as circumstances may require, would be enough. I shall send you lit is the most highly graphic of several Dorchester Heights letters, and is now in the Ward homestead. ARTEMA8 WARD 41 from thenco two Regiments to be at Roxbury early on Tuesday morning to strengthen your lines and I shall send you from hence tomorrow evening two Companies of Riflemen, which with the three now there may bo part of the Relief to go on with Gen'l Thomas — these Five companies may be placed under the care of Captain Hugh Stephenson subject to the Conunaud of the officer Commanding at the Post (Dorchester), — They will I think be able to gald the Enemy sorely in the march from the boats in landing. A Blind along the Causey should be thrown up, if possible while the other work is about; especially on the Dorchester side, as that is nearest the Enemy's Guns and most exposed. We calculate 1 think that 800 men would do the whole Causey with great ease in a night if the marsh is not got bad to work again and the tide gives no great Interruption. — 250 able men I should think would soon fell the Trees for the Abettes but what number it may take to get them, the Fascines, Chandeliers etc. in place I know not — 750 men (the working party carrying their arms) will I should think be sufficient for a Cov- ering party, these to be posted on Nuke Hill — or the little hill in front of the 2nd hill looking into Boston Bay — and near the point opposite the Castle — sentries to be kept between the Parties and some on the back side looking towards Squantum. As I have a very high opinion of the defense which may be made with barrels from either of the hills, I could wish you to have a number over. Perhaps single barrels would be better than linking of them together, being less liable to accidents. The Hoops should be well nailed on else they will soon fly and the casks fall to pieces. You must take care that the necessary notice is given to the Militia agreeable to the plan settled with General Thomas. I shall desire Col'n Gridley and Col'n Knox to be over tomorrow to lay out the work. I recollect nothing more at present to mention to you — you will settle matters with the officers with you, as what I have here said is intended rather to convey my ideas generally than wishing them to be adhered to strictly. I am with esteem etc. Sir Yr most Obed. Servt Go Washington. Monday, March 4th, soon after General Thomas had started from General Ward's camp with twelve hundred 42 MASTER MINDS men, he took position on the higher elevations of Dorches- ter Heights, where he was reinforced. Under General Ward, the immediate head in command of the undertaldng entrusted to him, all worked in perfect harmony. Gridley, who entrenched the Heights and laid out the works, was assisted by Colonel Putnam. Inspired by their townsmen's generalship, it was said that none of the sappers and miners worked with more unflagging toil to entrench the Heights than General Ward's own Shrewsbury neighbors. One of these, Nathan Howe, died of the chill he conti'acted this night. So remarkable was the extent of their night's work that General Howe of the enemy's force wrote to his cabinet minister in England that it must have been the work of twelve thousand men. It was the first sight of the works frowning down upon the shipping that evoked from the British officer in com- mand the exclamation: "The rebels have done more in a night than my whole army could have done in a month ! ' ' To destroy these suddenly thrown-up works which could themselves destroy the harbor ships, their only means of escape, Lord Percy with three thousand British proceeded to Castle William, the little island just off the main land (now Castle Island, South Boston). Here he planned attack on the east and south, but a driving storm prevented this action. While Lord Percy was thus for attacking Ward's army at Dorchester Heights on the east and south, Washington planned his third unsuccessful stroke upon Tuesday, the 5th of March. It was by a counter-attack to strike Boston by the west on the river side.^ iWhere now lies the Massacliusetts General Hospital Parkway. ARTE MAS WARD 43 But Percy's failure to make the English attack on the other side blocked Washington's move, for which he had in readiness the troops of Putnam, Greene and Sullivan. Thus the field was left clear to Artemas Ward, and we cannot but admire tho magnificent way in which Washing- ton, liis other plans miscarrying, now leaves the master- piece of the Dorchester Heights undertaking to Major- general Ward, and yet backs him with every resource of his matchless generalship. He is in constant solicitude for the undertaking, of whose success he is not wholly con- vinced. He therefore writes from headquarters to General Ward: By the deserter from the 63 Eegiment who came last night from the Enemy the General is informed that they have it in con- templation to erect a battery of Cannon somewhere between Brown's House and the George Tavern, having cut down Liberty Tree for the purpose of making fascines, etc. Though the tales of deserters are not always true, yet some attention may not be thrown away upon the present occasion. The General thinks a strong Picquet at all hours of the night should be in readiness to defeat the design of the Enemy. A proper patrol may also, during the night, keep con- stantly watching the motions of the enemy and instantly alarming the picquet upon any advance upon that side who will thereupon march and drive the enemy from the intended works. The deserter says, he informed the gentlemen who examined him this morning at Roxbury of the intentions of the Enemy .1 March 8th Howe sent within the American lines by flag an offer of truce, stating the English desire to evacuate Boston with the army. The Selectmen of Boston sent by the same flag a petition begging that ' ' so dreadful a calam- ity as the destruction of Boston ' ' might not be brought on from without. iFrom a manuscript at Ward homestead. 44 MASTER MINDS Accompanied by an expression of the Commander-in- chief's prevailing fear of a trap and the overturning of Ward's plan, came as a result Washington's peremptory orders to General Ward March 10, which we reopen from the original as they came from Cambridge March 10th, 1776 : By his Excellency's command I am to inform you that it is his desire that you give peremptory orders to the Artillery officer commanding at Lams Dam that he must not fire on the town of Bos- ton tonight unless they first begin a cannonade, and that you inform the officer at Dorchester Heights that he is not to fire from thence on the town. If they begin and we have any cannon on Nuke Hill his Excellency would have the fire to be returned from thence among the shipping and every damage done them that possibly can — Notwithstanding the accounts received of the enemy's being about to evacuate Boston with all seeming hurry and expedition, his Ex- cellency is apprehensive that Gen. Howe has some design of hav- ing a brush before his departure and is only waiting in hopes of finding us off our guard. He therefore desires that you will be very vigilant and have every necessary precaution taken to prevent a sur- prise and to give them a proper reception in case they attempt any- thing. It, however, was farthest from Howe's purpose to do anj^hing but get aivay, and General Ward's victory was completely beyond even Washington's expectations. At General Ward's headquarters on March 13 a council of war was summoned, at which were Washington, Put- nam, Sullivan, Heath, Greene and Gates. Nook's Hill as a nearer point from which to harass the ships and towns was here determined upon as a point to be fortified. Saturday, the 16th of March, Howe blew up his own army effects which the over-crowded transport bound for Hali- fax compelled him to leave behind. Sunday morning, the 17th, he then embarked in seventy-eight transports the besieged army of eight thousand nine hundred and six officers and men and eleven hundred tory residents. General Aiitemas Ward First Commander-in-chief of the American Revolution (From a portrait of 1777) ARTEMA8 WARD 45 The 17th of March is therefore the feast-day in the rubrics of the Eevolution in New England. It marks the driving of the British from New England. On this red- letter day the same deathless purpose that unnerved King George's troops at Bvnher TJill expdled the iron heel of the King from Neiv England soil once and forever. It is to the glory of New England, and it is the everlast- ing retriever of Bunker Hill, that the Dorchester Heights victory that cleared New England of the aggressor fell not only to Washington, grand as he was, hut more immediate- ly to the New England General, the first Commander-in- chief of the Eevolution as it came to a head in Massachu- setts — General Artemas Ward. From the time of its first conception to the time of its final victory, the British evacuation was Ward's master- piece. As the commanding officer at the head of the specific undertaking, it was Ward, not Washington, who literally sent the enemy to Halifax. General Ward, as soon as the enemy evacuated on March 17th, had the gates unlocked and entered with five hundred troops, with Ensign Rich- ards hearing the standard.^ lOn the 20th the main body of the army entered. The siege ended Monday. Ward marched in notwithstanding the fact that the Boston Selectmen had warned him of the pest of small-pox, to which scourge he was to sacrifice his eon Nahum. Washington as the Commander-in-chief came over after- wards from Cambridge and entered with ceremony. A medal was struck for Washington, without whose reorgan- ization of the army in one sense the victory could not have been achieved. But in another sense neither his immediate plan nor faith nor action was directly, in the main, responsible for the brilliant vic- tory. For Thomas the heights of Dorchester were named, but for Ward the appreciation of America is yet to be shown. 46 MASTER MINDS GENERAL WARD AT BOSTON Partly from a belief in Ward's incapacitation through an intestinal malady, partly from a personal misunder- standing of him as his Major-general, and partly from the feeling that Ward could best of all serve the cause in New England's capital, Boston, Washington left General Ward over the evacuated town, and took with him as his staff all the other generals to the New York campaign. There is no doubt that amongst these reasons, belief in Ward's incurable sickness was in some ways a major one and cannot be charged to Washington or laid at any other door. In April (1776) General Ward himself represented to Congress his enfeebled state of health and unwillingness to continue in office while prevented by ill health from ren- dering "an equivalent in service." He therefore requested Congress to accept his resignation as First Major-general of the Continental Army. But there is not much doubt, however, that General Ward, who served the State in twenty more intensely active years, would have risked his state of health, whose disorder he had all along, were it not for the lamentable misunderstanding which undeniably existed between him and Washington. Washington 's estimate of Ward was no doubt discolored by mischief-maJiers, chief among whom was General Lee^ lA confidential letter of Washington to Lee shows Lee's per- nicious influence, which existed in the early part of the Eevolution until Washington found Lee out. In this letter, existing among Colonel Joseph Ward's literary remains, Washington is sharing Lee's misconception of Ward as "a chimney-side hero." "It is well known that Washington spoke of the resignation of General Ward, after the evacuation of Boston, in a manner approach- ing contempt. His observations, then confidentially made, about ABTFjMA.S WART) 47 of the left win£7, ever a malcontent and troiihle-hreeder, and a man so un- Americanly ambitious, that to throw down whatsoever character stood between him and his own superiority was a common failinnf. They discolored the glasses through which Washinprton looked at Ward. It was no doubt with a keen sense of this misunderstand- ing and its results that "Ward later wrote, June 14th, 1790 : "This world is full of disappointments, and sometimes I am ready to say that no one hath more of them than I." Yet no matter what the single or combined reasons, no matter how he felt, no matter how great the misunder- standing, it was Ward's fate to be shelved and pocketed to police a pest-ridden and deserted city, while the other gen- erals superseded him and carried on the Revolution. The fortifying of the harbor against the possible return of the enemy he had driven out was the only reward, the only soldierly task left him. ARTEMAS WARD, THE HERO OP SHAYS ' REBELLION Yet Ward did not sulk in his tent or retire as invalided. The period of reconstruction following the Revolution's loss of blood and wealth, the modem mind ill conceives. some of the other generals, were not calculated to flatter their amour propre or that of their descendants. It is said that General Ward, learning long afterwards the remark that had been applied to him, accompanied by a friend, waited on his old chief at New York, and asked him if it was true that he had used such language. The Presi- dent replied that he did not know, but that he kept copies of all his letters, and would take an early opportunity of examining them. Ac- cordingly, at the next session of Congress (of which General Ward was a member) he again called with his friend, and was informed by the President that he had really written as alleged. Ward then said, 'Sir, you are no gentleman,' and turning on his heel quitted the room." — Dralce: "Historic Fields and Mansions of Middlesex, page 48 MASTER MINDS In the swept-clean nation, devils of fratricidal conflict worse than the first seemed about to tear young America to pieces. Were the arms that had but lately given the Republic birth now to turn upon it and rend it ? This was a crisis immediate and fearful. The trouble was crucial, severe and threatening. Bankrupt even to the melting of their pewter which was gone ; destitute to the clothes off their backs which they had given; in debt and everything mortgaged; lands foraged and overrun ; farms neglected ; church habits broken ; hus- bands and sons killed or incapacitated; standards and morals frequently demoralized, — ^in fine, parts of the coun- try upon which the Revolutionary centres drew ready to lose themselves in a reaction of debt, disorder and discour- agement, strong hands were needed to save the State. Letters and messages lie in "Ward's trunk rehearsing "crimes which reached the very existence of social order which were perpetrated wdthout content." Washington's messages are filled with the situation. In Pennsylvania he has to recall the army. In August, 1786, Washington most seriously took notice of this state of rebel- lion and declared: ''A letter received from General Knox — just returned from Massachusetts — is replete with mel- ancholy accounts of the important designs of a consider- able part of that people. Among other things he says: 'Their creed is that the property of the United States had been protected by the exertion of all, and therefore ought to he the common property of all; and he that attempts oppo- sition to this creed is an enemy to equity and justice and ought to be swept from off the face of the earth. ' ' ' Again "they are determined to annihilate all debts, and have agrarian laws by means of unbonded paper money. The ARTEMA8 WARD 49 number of these people in Massachusetts amounts to one- fifth part of several populous counties, and to them may be collected people of similar sentiments from the states of Rhode Island, Connecticut and New PTampshire, so as to constitute a body of about twelve or fifteen thousand des- perate and unprincipled men. They are chiefly of the young and active part of the community. "How melancholy is the reflection," concludes Washing- ton, "that in so short space we should have made such long strides towards fulfilling the prediction of our trans- atlantic foes : ' Leave them to themselves and their govern- ment will soon dissolve. ' Will not the wise and good strive hard to avert this evil ? ' ' Febmarv' 3d, 1787, Washington added: "If three years since, any person had told me that there would have been a formidable rebellion as exists to-day against the laws and constitution of our making, I should have thought him a bedlamite or a fit subject for a mad-house." In Massachusetts, which had breasted the Revolutionary conflicts and had become a field of battle, the dead were many and the sick legion. "The pitiable condition of the injured and unfortunate inhabitants of Massachusetts," was a phrase used in letters to Ward to describe the people's suffering. To cap the climax, it was a population who had given their all in blood and money to supply the sinews of war which had not been wrenched from them but offered gladly upon their country's altar, that was to meet the debtor's fate and the mortgagee's hammer. Executions for debt were being everywhere served.^ Inability to meet the demands of creditors cruelly stung the New England iln 1784 more than 2000 actions were entered in the county of Worcester. 50 MASTER MINDS ' pride. All this was intensified by prophets of evil, agitators and alarmists. Repudiation of debt and stay of execution — this became the natural and popular outcry in Massachusetts as well as at other centres of disturbance. The people started to take the law into their own hands and initiate a reign of lawlessness. In New England it took the form of Shays' Rebellion. The centre of Shays' Rebellion was Worcester, the Heart of the Conmionwealth, and. strange to say by the very home of Ward — the first hero of its defeat. The best of Ward's old captains in the Revolution headed the militia, whose ranks were hot-beds of the trouble. Captain Aaron Smith, for instance, lived opposite Ward's house,^ not a stone's- throw away. Captain Wheeler, another townsman, rebelled, to say nothing of the rank and file who enlisted everywhere under Ward's old comrades. Captain Daniel Shays, the ring- leader himself, was also one of Ward's captains. To let the rebellion swell from such a start till it over- flowed and became one with the other ferment in other col- onies would be civil war and the nation's death. Now came a beautiful proof of Ward's unflinching love of country after his being superseded in Washington's staff by such as Lee and Gates. He might, through sympathy with his own New England, his soldiers and their homes and through jealousy of Washington, have let the evil go on. But no! To do-v^Ti Shays' hand and break the rebellion became the work of his mind and tongue. Artemas Ward was at this time Chief-justice of the Court of Common Pleas. The first Tuesday in September, i"The house built by Ward's father, whence Ward's family moved across the street to the present old homestead." ARTE MAS WART) 51 1786, as Chief-justice with his associates, he was ordered by the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth to convene the court at Worcester. Should it meet and its execution and judcrments be decreed law, execution against debtors could be enforced. Hence it was the psychological moment for Shays to strike. Successful, it would appeal to other centres of people, and set the country aflame and complete the prediction that the gfovernment would soon dissolve, towards which dissolution Washington confessed the country was g'oing by lonjs^ strides. Under Captain Wheeler, Ward saw one of Shays' wheels of rebellion pass out of Shrewsbury. There were many others under as many captains. They came into Worcester County IMonday afternoon, September 4th, the day previous to the court's session, and barracked in the Court House halls. Aaron Smith, Ward's next-door neigfhbor and friend, marched his Shrewsbury company up Monday morning and posted them on Court Hill and around the Court House. Had there been tlie least show of disloyalty or had pri- vate jealousy swallowed his patriot's devotion, it would now be easy for Ward to sit back and see the troubles pile up against the Government and Washington and say nothing. But he was not that type of man. He preferred to bring against himself unpopularity at home by standing against the people. The populace, in sympathy with the disaffection, crowded the open and slopes. A challenge rang out, and a clank of a bayoneted musket. It was a sentinel halting Judge Ward's cortege of jurists at the foot of the hill. 52 MASTER MINDS But hardly had the challenge resounded when the old Commander's tones rang out stern and clear upon the Sep- tember air: "Present arms!" Almost on the exact spot, not far from the place where now is the motto, ' ' Obedience to Law is Liberty, ' ' the sol- dier obeyed, and the judge's party proceeded up the Court House Hill, eyed by the hostile populace and troops. On the broad steps at the southern entrance, with side- arms drawn. Ward's old friends, neighbors and officers, Captain Wheeler and Captain Smith, blocked the way, backed by five soldiers, whose fixed bayonets were leveled gleaming in the sun. At this point the crier of the Court House opened the doors, exposing a body of soldiery within ready to fire. Ignoring the blockade, and attempting to pass the five soldiers, the jurists were met with bayonet points which even pierced their coat-fronts. Saying he would answer their complaints, Chief Justice Ward was told to reduce his remarks to writing. Deter- minantly refusing, General Ward heard the drum beat and the guard commanded to charge. The crisis was faced by their old Commander as with gleaming eye and righteous wrath he looked his soldiers full in the face and spoke to this effect : "I do not value your bayonets; you might plunge them into my heart; but while that heart beats I will do my duty; when opposed to it, my life is of little consequence; if you will take away your bayonets and give me some posi- tion where I can be heard by my fellow-citizens and not by the leaders alone, who have deceived and deluded you, I will speak, but not otherwise."^ iSee pp. 118-120, History of Worcester, Mass., by William Lincoln. ART EM AS WAR J) 53 The five soldiei's in the hill-top, like the sentries at its foot, themselves nuistered by the master mind of their old Commander, dropp(>d their iiuiskets. The way up the steps, now nn])locked, the jndf^e ascended in the dignity of triumphant hiw and for two hours ad- dressed the people, where most appropriately enshrining the spirit of that day is now earven in stone the above- mentioned motto given by Senator Iloar:^ ''Obedience to Law is Liberty." Repeated demands were as loyally met by Ward and other patriots, who remained unmoved by threats or show of force, and declared firmly for the Con- stitution. The rebels were stubborn, however, and con- tinued assembling till the moral opposition, in which Ward led, began to turn the tide of public opinion, until at last, January 21st, 1787, the State sent an army of forty-four hundred men against them under General Lincoln, That Ward acted with etfect can be judged by the going to pieces of the rebellion and later the resumption of court. Resentfully, the cowed leaders, scattered throughout the towns of central Massachusetts, were pursued by the troops under General Lincoln in a pursuit which is traced in a iSenator Hoar himself, the Ward family advocate, was a cham- pion of General Ward, and had often expressed to the family the conviction that General Ward's statue should occupy the space in front of the Court House. The ignorant assumption as to Ward of popular history writers, he frequently took pains to scorn. Compare Howe in * ' Life and Letters of George Bancroft, ' ' where Howe points out even Bancroft's fault as one that obscured all lights but Washington 's. ' ' In more than one instance Bancroft 's with- holding of credit where credit was due sprang rather transparently from a desire to fix upon Washington 's brow every laurel it could accommodate." This is preeminently true of Bancroft's passing over of Ward in order to emblazon Washington. 54 MASTER MINDS diary written by General Ward's son. Some of the rebels even gathered around Aaron Smith's homestead just across the King's highway from Ward's own home. Their camp-fires spat their sparks and snapped their harmless revenge in front of Ward's very door-stoop till, stamped out by the Commonwealth's troops, that put to flight the last of Shays' rebels, who flew to the four winds, they had nothing left but to imitate the dis- graceful flight of Shays himself. "Convinced of the errors and evil consequence of being in rebellion and opposition to the good laws and authority of the Commonwealth, I do feel truly and heartily sorry for my misconduct. Therefore, permit me, kind sir, to beg humbly your pardon and forgiveness in this as well as in other matters. ' ' One by one, in the spirit of this represent- ative confession, returned Ward's old comrades from the rebellion, some going so far as to have their epistles of con- trition read before the Shrewsbury Church, in the presence of the old Commander whose master hand had dealt the rebellion its first death-blow. Thus Ward never laid down public service to his coun- try. And in other ways he covered at every step his mili- tary retreat with honor. In 1777 he was elected to the Ex- ecutive Council of the Commonwealth, of which he became President, and for sixteen years he was active in the Legis- lature, and he was Speaker of the Assembly in 1785. In 1777 he had been the choice of the people for the Con- tinental Congress at Philadelphia. In 1791 he was elected to the national House of Representatives, to remain until 1795. The reconstruction period and the diplomacy of the American Revolution could be interestingly sketched, had we time, from letters in Ward's effects, disclosing the hand ^1 K ABTEMA8 WARD 55 of Franklin, Adams, Hancock, and of forei^ lungs and courts. As a gentleman and a scholar, his personal standing was so great at Harvard University, where he graduated in 1748, that he acted as overseer, and, being again and again called to the college, served at President Langdon's right hand. No matter what his disappointments and military eclipse, in every quarter to the end, Ward, the patriot leader, never once failed to lay down his service to the new nation. For while New England was always dear to him, she was chiefly dear to him as the mother of the nation ; and she was to him, above all others, even above Washing- ton, the mother of the nation because the mother of the Revolution of which he was a first-bom son. In 1799 he was smitten with a paralytic stroke, to be repeated in March, 1800. ' ' I hope to see you in that world where the weary are at rest and where envy and malice cannot approach," were previously spoken words which conveyed the spirit of his going, which occurred a little before seven in the evening of the 28th of October, 1800, as the family circle watched the end when they parted, but when Ward and Washington met where "to know all is to forgive all." " It is one of the most pathetic bits of satire in American history," declared William Cullen Bryant,^ "that the name of the first commander in the Continental Army should be remembered by nine people in ten only as that of an imagined humorist — half philosopher and half showman.^ iWith Ms coadjutors in "Scribner's History of the United States." 2Eef erring to ' ' Artemus Ward, ' ' the nom de plume of the humorist of that name, Charles F. Browne. 56 MASTER MINDS In few other cases has the camera ohscura of history more sadly concealed by its negative a heroic national figure. But it is a figure that, more and more, exposure to new light will clearly bring out and prove that, as author and finisher of the American Revolution in New England, Artemas Ward took second place to none. The curtain may well be raised on the stage of "Master Minds at the Commonwealth 's Heart, ' ' not by a dry history lecture, but by this Revolutionary hero's intensely thrilling life in whom the Revolution first came to a head and whose figure best focalizes the light of its opening chapter in New England. It is also a life, very blood of very blood, of the hill-folk of central Massachusetts, from whom later sprang the other master minds, and therefore fittingly introduces the group of geniuses here produced. In living action it shows how came to be that liberty without which would have been impossible such a marvelous outburst of discov- ery and inventive genius as they represent, and it well points out the birth of the freedom which was the mother of their ingenuity and which magnetized their souls with its currents. ELI WHITNEY INVENTOR OP THE COTTON-GIN WITH the name of Eli Whitney, Westboro adds a great link to the chain of central Massachusetts towns which are coupled with the careers of master minds. On the hard-scrabble of a comparatively thrifty New England farm, December 8, 1765, a baby boy came to add to a New England mother 's burdens, which were in general, and in this case so severe that it sometimes took two or three mothers,^ as one passed away after another, to rear one man's family. Yet had she but lived to rear this mite she called Eli, she would have seen her life triumphantly vin- dicated, and she would have seen of the travail of her soul and have been satisfied. In the independence of that day, when necessity was the mother of invention, Eli Whitney's father did his own repairing. To do this generated an atmosphere about the place in which ingenuity was taxed to the limit. THE LAD IN THE LITTLE LEAN-TO WORKSHOP "Our father," his sister has recalled, ''had a workshop, and sometimes made wheels of different kinds, and chairs. iSee President G. Stanley Hall's illuminating address, "More Manly Men and Womanly Women." 58 MASTER MINDS He had a variety of tools, and a lathe for turning chair- posts. This gave my brother an opportunity of learning the use of tools when very young. He lost no time, but as soon as he could handle tools he was always making some- thing in the shop, and seemed not to like working on the farm. One time after the death of our mother, when our father had been absent from home two or three days, on his return he inquired of the housekeeper what the boys had Birthplace of Eli Whitney. In the Tool-shed at the Left Began his Boyhood Labors at Invention. been doing. She told him what B. and J. had been about. 'But what has Eli been doing?' asked he. She replied he had been making a fiddle. 'Ah,' he added, despondingly, 'I fear Eli will have to take his portion with fiddles.' " Nevertheless, so well made was the instrument that the boy understood now the structure of all violins, and was sought throughout the countryside by every one who had one to repair. ELI WHITNEY 59 On another occasion, during: church-time, a watch of his father's Eli secretly took to pieces, and put together again before his father's return. Thus it was that no one discovered young Whitney's genius for him. As generally happens, in the unexpected and quite accidental in such instances as these, he found it out for himself. If around the house, for instance, a table-lmife was broken, he made one in its place. Shortly after he was ten years old, the Revolutionary War broke out. Among other conunodities denied the Americans through the English blockade, nails, he noted, were everywhere lacking. Young as he was, he contrived the idea of making them himself. By this time his father had been won over to believe in the boy's mechanical abil- ity, and went out of his way not only to allow him free use of his tools, but to get for him new ones. Whitney was only sixteen years old when the war ended in 1781, but up to this time, for three years, since thirteen, the lad had made first the machinery for manufacturing nails, then the nails tliemselves. The demand was large, and the nails were used everywhere. TOO OLD FOR A COLLEGE EDUCATION? As early as the age of twelve, the boy, enamored of an active life, had point-blank refused his father's proposition that he go to preparatory school and make ready for college. But in the play of his ingenuity, ever seeking knowledge and advancement out of the rut in which he found himself, six years after the thirteen-year-old boy had invented a way to make nails, he made a way, not finding one, to go to Yale. 60 MASTER MINDS Thus six years after he refused his father's offer of a college education, he changed his mind. He was eighteen, and the hard knocks of the world proved to him the helpfulness of a higher education to enable him to rise above the common level. "Too old," declared his father. Added to this was his stepmother's violent opposition to spending money on Eli at this age. If he went at all he must begin all over again, start with elementary preparatory studies, and at the same time earn enough to pay his ' ' keep ' ' and defray his future college course with the amount he could save. Yet he decided to do it alone. At seven dollars a month and his board he found a place to teach in three towns that belt Worcester on three sides: Westboro, Northboro and Paxton. Studying alongside all the while, in the summer he attended the neighboring academies. To teaching school he added such humble work as making and selling bonnet-pins and walking-sticks. By these means he succeeded at last in his dream of a liberal educa- tion, and arrived at New Haven, twenty-three years old, in 1789. Mathematics naturally being the choice of a mind as scientific as his, with his native originality he turned from the dead languages to pursue his peculiar bent, and was graduated in a class of thirty-four in 1792. His address to his classmates recalls that he took life earnestly in college, and showed an educated conscience. "We have nearly completed our collegiate life," he con- cluded, ' ' our whole life to look back ; how short it has been ! We soon must quit these favorite walks of science and retirement and go forth each to perform his destined task on the busy stage of life. Let us ever be actuated by prin- ciples of integrity, and always maintain a consciousness of ELI WHITNEY 61 doing right. This will beam happiness upon our minds, make the journey of life agreeable, avert the deadly shaft of calumny, and be a firm support in death. In a few days more we shall be dispersed in various parts of the world." In this Whitney proved a class prophet, with tho object of the prophecy — himself. That Whitney's whole life was to be spent in stemming iho dull, resistant tide of human meanness, and the shafts of f'alumny, he then little knew, but seemed for it even then prepared. Prepared was he also, not only in grace of soul, but in a trained mathematical mind. In college he betrayed his scientific genius — a stroke quite out of the ordinary in that day of the classics' sole tyranny over an education. ^ Men even then noted how his talent was confined, not to the course, but overflowed as usual into invention. In an astronomical experiment, for instance, when the apparatus broke down, Whitney dared ask to repair it in place of its being sent abroad. In addition to this mechanical practicability, however, his stopping to get an education in the higher branches was itself a mark of his inventive originality. For all along the advice of unlettered machinists had been against it, and one had said: "There was one good mechanic spoiled when you went to college. ' ' First having avoided the extreme of the academic, now avoiding this extreme advice of the mechanic, it seemed as if he were now to fall back at last into the academic, miss his talent — and study law. lA tyranny over liberal education which has swung the other way to technical science. 62 MASTER MINDS THE TURNING POINT IN HIS LIFE With this in view, like most young men of early days, in order to lay by the means he set out to teach school. Offered a position as tutor to a South Carolina gentleman, at eighty guineas a year, he arranged to travel south. Smallpox delayed the New York voyage, but the delay threw him into the friendship of another party waiting to sail, chief among whom was the widow of Gen. Nathaniel Greene. In this delay he learned that the father of his prospec- tive pupils had grown tired of waiting his arrival, in the long journey of those days, and had engaged another tutor. "While on the vessel to Savannah he met a Yale graduate, Phineas Miller, who was with the widow of General Greene. To meet these two friends proved the turning-point in his life. As he confided his ambitions to this lady, she mani- fested a motherly interest, and invited him, at the news of his lost position, to Mulberry Grove, her own plantation near Savannah. THE INVENTION OF THE GIN At that time it took a negro a day to clean a single pound of raw cotton and separate it from the seed. Cotton was to the eyes of an inquisitive New England young man itself a curiosity. Whitney had never seen a cotton boll, or seed, or plant. The West Indies had grown all that had been used in any quantity in America. In 1770 its cultivation was tried, and it was found to grow prolifically in Georgia, surpassing even rice, tobacco and indigo. IUjI WHITNEY 63 But there was no way to separate the fibre from the entangled seeds save by the slow hand-labor, a pound a day a hand. By 1792, but one hundred thirty-eight thousand three hundred and twenty-four pounds, on this account, were raised for export in an entire year. Jay considered it of so little importance that he considered its being placed on the prohibited list of exports as an item of no loss. But this year happened the crisis that made cotton king. This crisis was the invention of the cotton-gin. It was this way. A group of Southern gentlemen were being entertained at the great house at Mulberry Grove by Mrs. Nathaniel Greene, amid the emerald live oaks and magnolias, under the white-pillared portico. Languidly as they lighted their cigars and smoked, they bemoaned the slow manner of extracting cotton-seed from the cotton-boll. ' ' Why don 't you go to work and get something that will do it, gentlemen ? ' ' exclaimed Madam Greene. **Your good husband, the General, though he cleaned the redcoats out of Georgia, couldn't clean the seeds from cot- ton." was shot back as the cavalierish answer. "Apply to my young friend here; he can make any- thing," replied Mrs. Greene. ''My tambour frame was all out of kilter ; I couldn 't embroider at all with it because it pulled and tore the threads so badly. Mr. Whitney noticed this, took it out on the porch, tinkered with it a little, and there see what he has done — just made the frame as good as new ! ' ' ''As for cleaning cotton-seed," exclaimed Mr. Whitney, blushing, " why, gentlemen, I shouldn't know it if I saw it. I don't think I ever saw cotton or cotton-seed in my life." 64 MASTER MINDS But next day he caught his first sight of raw cotton, took it back to the Greene plantation, and made cotton his study in place of law. Green-seed or short-stapled cotton, in contrast to black- seed, which grew only by the sea-shore, could be grown evers^where in Georgia and the Southern uplands, where no other crops could grow, if only there was some way to sepa- rate the seeds, which were hopelessly entangled. That he might invent a machine to do this, in secret con- fidence Mrs. Greene gave Eli Whitney a private room in which to experiment. Here first he had to draw his own wire and make his own tools. By May 27th, 1793, Phineas Miller became interested, and entered into partnership. It has been said there were no records of his first labor. But there is a record, and that his own. The 21st of November, 1793, he wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson, Sec- retary of State. In this he said : "Within about ten days after my first conception of the plan, I made a small though imperfect model. Experi- ments with this encouraged me to make one on a larger scale ; but the extreme difficulty of procuring workmen and proper materials in Georgia prevented my completing the large one until some time in April last." To get their pound or so a day, Whitney had observed old negro mammies claw off the seed with their finger-nails. Could not a cylinder wheel, covered with the teeth of a wire comb, do the same thing? Whitney's idea was to place the enteethed rollers so near the cotton sticking out of an upper hopper of iron wire mesh that it would catch hold of the mass and claw away the torn fibre from the seed- boll. The openings in the gratings of the hopper that held the mass of raw cotton, though permitting the torn fibre ELT WHITNEY 65 caught in the saw-like teeth to drop, were too narrow for the seeds to fall thi-oiigh — hence the separation. The brushes were arranged on the second roller, or cylinder, traveling the opposite way, but touching the cot- ton in the claw-teeth of the first cylinder and removing it. Thus designed was the machine that was to enable one negro to clean five thousand pounds of cotton a day ! It so revolutionized cotton-planting that by 1800, to say nothing of home consumption in America, one hundred and fifty times the cotton was exported (eighteen million pounds instead of one hundred and thirty-eight thousand three hundred and twenty-four pounds in 1792). By 1860 over two billion and fifty million pounds a year were exported (four million eight hundred and twenty-four thousand bales at four hundred and twenty-five pounds a bale) . Such an invention was hailed with tremendous enthu- siasm. Whitney's battle witpi the Px\tent thieves Crowds in flocks came from every quarter to see the wondrous design. Unable to see it until patented, they broke open the house and carried it away. The thieves then reproduced the model. Hence arose the swarm of competitors who were to con- test Mr. Whitney's design Avith the stolen one, which was really not their ovm, but his. "My invention," wrote Whitney to his fellow inventor, Fulton, "was new and distinct from every other. It stood alone. It was not interwoven with anything known before ; and it can seldom happen that an invention or an improve- ment is so strongly marked and can be so clearly and specially identified." "The use of the machine being immensely profitable to almost every planter in the cotton districts, all were inter- 5 66 MASTER MINDS ested in trespassing on the patent right, and each kept each other in countenance. Demagogues made themselves pop- ular by misrepresentation and unfounded clamors, both against the right and against the law made for its protec- tion. Hence there arose associations to oppose both. At one time but few men in Georgia dared to come into the court and testify to the most simple facts within their Imowledge relative to the use of the machine. In one instance I had great difficulty in proving that the machine had been used in Georgia, although there Avere three sepa- rate sets of this machinery in motion within fifty yards of the building in which the court sat, and all so near that the rattling of the wheels was distinctly heard!" Backed as he was by Phineas Miller, Eli Whitney imme- diately went north to New Haven, completed a new model and commenced the manufacture of cotton-gins. The planters planted a greatly increased acreage, and an arrangement was made with them to give one-third of the profits to the gin-o^^Tiers, cotton selling at that time at twenty-five cents a pound. October 26. 1794, Miller wrote to Whitney : "Do not let anything hinder the speedy construction of the gins. The people are almost running mad for them!" Gins in New Haven could not be made in sufficient num- ber to meet the demand of the enlarged crop. This gave the venders of the stolen model their chance to produce and sell imitations. THE FIGHT AGAINST THE CURRENTS OF DEBT, FIRE, THEFT AND DEATH The money from one-third of the crop was much of it to be lost, and Whitney and his partner soon found them- selves financially embarrassed. ELI WniTNEY 67 In March, 1795, aftor beinp: taken with an illno55s, Eli Whitney returned, still half sick, from New York to New Haven, to find fire had bnrned his entire factory ! To opposition and lack of funds was added now this con- flap:ration in New ITaven ! The fire bnrned, besides all the factory, the new machines, with all desip^ns, books and papers, and the firm was left banlo'npt! Yet came another blow. Enjifland, which was so soon to become the world's factoiy centre for the mannfactnre of America's cotton, now raised a formidable outcry, being falsely led to a belief by Whitney's enemies that his machine ruined the cotton fibre, making it too brittle. In Georgia alone twenty-eight gins lay idle. "This misfortune is much heavier than the fire," wrote Miller. "Every one is afraid of the cotton. Not a pur- chaser in Savannah will pay a full price for it." "I con- fess myself to have been entirely deceived in supposing that an egregious error, and a general deception with regard to the quality of our cotton, could not long continue to influence the whole of the mannfactory, the mercantile and the planting interests against us. But the reverse is the fact, and I have long apprehended that our ruin would be the inevitable consequence. ' ' In 1796, humiliated by being compelled to seek loans, Whitney had already written a friend : "I applied to one of those vultures called brokers, who are preying on the purse-strings of the industrious." He paid twenty per cent., which was increased right along by this shark to five, six and seven per cent, a month! But from the first the calibre of the yonng men was fixed, as is shown in 1795 in an early letter of Miller to Whitney. "I think indeed it will be very extraordinary if two young men in the prime of life, with some share of 08 MASTER 31 IND8 ingenuity, witli n littlo knowledge of the world, a prr^at deal of industry, and a eonsidorable command of property, should not be able to siistain such a stroke of misfortune as this, heavy as it is." Yet Ynle p-rit was on hand for the uphill pfame, for in March, 1797, Miller wrote: "Am determined that all the dark clouds of adversity shall not abate my ardor in laborinji: to burst through them, in order to reach the dawn of prosperity." Already a.s an earnest of tbis prrit, Miller had p^iven up all bis means and bis hopes of a home, even refusinfj: to marry. Yet M'ilb il. all. by Oct. 17, 1797, he was forced to say: "The extreme embarrassments which have been for a long time accumulating' upon me are now become so great that it will be impossible for me to struggle against them many days longer. 11 lia.s rc(|uired my utmost exertions to exist." "The current of disappointment carrying down the cat- aract" his "shattered oar" and "a struggle in vain,"— to all these ho pointed in the words of an oarsman who has been beaten. In 1799 he followed up the situation with this letter: "The prospect of making anything by ginning in this State is at an end. Surreptitious gins are erected in every part of the country, and the jurymen at Augusta have come to an understanding among themselves that they will never give a verdict in our favor, let the merits of the case be a.s they may. ' ' In 1803, unable to bear the erusb of human meanness and oppression, Miller broke dowTi and died. Rut the race Avas not lost. It was to be won by Whitney alone. Yet without Miller's great soul and sacrifice, Whitney could never have succeeded. ELI WHITNEY 69 Having gotten so far, refusing to lie down, he fought it out. "In all my experience in the profefssion of law," wrote his consultin<r counsel, "I have never seen such a case of perseverance under such persecutions, nor do I believe that I ever knew any other man who would have met them Math equal coolness and firmness." Had it not been for Eli "Whitney's liberal education he would never have had the trained mathematical mind; he would never have been thrown \Wth people of influence such as the Greenes of Georgia, and he would never have met the chance to make his discovery. Furthermore, now to sustain his discovery comes in again and again the use of this same higher education, especially in law. Public opinion, blinded in America and in England, had to be undeceived. At the same time came the necessity of appearing before courts, State and National, in never- ending arguments. We have said had not Eli Whitney gone to Yale, he would not have invented the cotton-gin in the first place. Now we see indeed that had he not gone to Yale, he would never have had the education and knowledge to have been able to defend his invention in the second place. Public opinion as to gin-cleaned cotton he first won back, and wheels again whirred everywhere in the South in the process of separating the staple from the seed. In the gaining of his patent-right, however, lay the only assurance of financial return to meet his debts incurred in the long, long battle for his rights. The first law, in 1797, against violators of his patent was lost through the prejudice of a Southern jurj', though the law itself was on Whitney's side. The whole South now broke the patent, Whitney 's rights being almost altogether unrespected. To recoup his crush- 70 MA8TEB MINDS ing debt of many thousands incurred in the invention and manufacture of gins, now seemed impossible. Was it after all a losing battle ? Perhaps not, for a partial victory resulted in Whitney's proposition to the Legislature of South Carolina to pur- chase his patent in that State for one hundred thousand dollars. The Legislature voted to pay fifty thousand dol- lars. North Carolina and Tennessee followed by fixing a tax of two shillings and six pence on every saw for ginning cotton for five years, the annual collection to be paid Whit- ney. Tennessee did the same, placing the tax even higher, at thirty-seven and one-half cents a year for four years. South Carolina, however, was later moved to rescind its law, even enacting a hostile bill in its place, for the recov- ery of all money paid the inventor. Other states subse- quently weakened in their defense of Whitney's patent- rights. South Carolina, to her fair name be it recorded, three years after rescinded the second law, restoring the first. Still it was a fight all along the line, and was to be up to the last. In 1812 Whitney petitioned the United States Congress for a renewal of his patent, but without success, owing to the predominating prejudice of Southern senti- ment in Congress. "Eepublics are ungrateful," might well be the epitaph with which to end Whitney's struggle were it not for the next thing to come. WHITNEY FOUNDS THE FIRST UNITED STATES ARSENAL As early as 1798, despairing of ever restoring his shat- tered fortunes, he decided to turn his inventive genius to the manufacture of muskets and fire-arms. The Govern- l£ L I W 11 1 T N IC Y 71 ment of the ITnitod States encouraj;ed him with an order for ten thousand muskets, advancing- live tliousand dollars, and adding an extra fifteen thousand dollars later. This, with a loan of ten thousand dollars from friends, enabled the inventor to erect on the beautiful shores of Lake Whit- ney, near New Haven, his model arsenal for the manufac- ture of fire-arms. England had prohibited a factory for fire-arms in Amer- ica, all arms used in the Revolution being smuggled from France or seized as prizes taken from England. Hence, no lathes, engines, planing, milling or slotting machines for gun manufacture existed. Yet Whitney produced them all, and for power proceeded to make use of the great amount of running power about Lake Whitney's water- basin. The unifonnity system was here bom in his brain and is now in use all over the world. It is the system of assigning to each particular mechanic one particular part, to the making of which, as a specialty, he should devote himself. Ridiculed and laughed down, Whitney carried many parts of each kind that go to make up a musket, to Wash- ington, and from a number of piles proceeded rapidly to pick out the parts and construct, in quick succession, mus- ket after musket, making ten before the astonished gaze of the members of Congress ! With all this, it was not until 1817 that Whitney emerged from financial and legal struggles, and achieved the dis- tant yearnings to enable him to settle down and found a home. This he did by marrying a direct descendant of Jonathan Edwards, the youngest daughter of Judge Edwards of the District Court of Connecticut. He had hardly become settled and founded a family, whose descendants carry that honored name to-day, when. 72 MASTER MINDS at the age of fifty-nine years, after his settlement by the beautiful waters of the lake, he died of an enlargement of the glands, a malady science could not then cure. WHITNEY A POUNDER OF AMERICA He did not die, however, before his work was done. As Macaulay concluded: ''What Peter the Great did to make Russia dominant, Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton-gin, has more than equaled in its relation to the power and progress of the United States." Through King Cotton, Whitney not only made the South — he fed the cotton-spindles of all the North, and he not only planted the North with factories, but by the cotton to be manufactured he has given millions work across the sea in England, the withdrawal of which product, even for a little while during the Civil War, was such a disaster as to paralyze in England the wheels of industry and make bread-riots everywhere. The revolution of Whitney's invention did even more. Like every truth that is ever discovered, its effect was not only industrial. However undesignedly so, it was political and moral. It upset the course of govern- ment itself. It turned the wheel of a Southern slave empire from its hinges. Through its marvelous increase of cotton, it unconsciously increased to its anti-climax the slave power, till it over-topped itself, and having to get worse before it could get better, burst into the Rebel- lion to end in the Emancipation Proclamation. Before the youth of to-day, Massachusetts and Yale Uni- versity cannot honor his name enough, nor the name of his school partner, Phineas Miller. ELIWniTNEY 73 A distingnished visitor to Yale, and a great son of Har- vard/ lately remarked: "At the great bi-centennial celebration of New Haven, nobody in four days of experience and song had one word to say about this graduate of the University, though he had by one invention revolutionized the commerce of the world." But Whitney is a founder of America; a founder of economic and political foundations. Speaking of Jefferson, and the other leaders of the post- Revolutionary period, this same great son of Harvard gave as his ripe perspective: "The four men who can be named as leaders w^ere the four foimders: Bonaparte, Livingstone, Whitney and Robert Fulton. Such men as the Political Presidents and leaders did not make the America of 1812. Whitney played a much more important part in the development of the country than Jefferson did himself." Such a master mind well introduces circles of mechanical inventors of every kind that have since made the Heart of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts peerless for inventive genius. THOMAS BLANCHARD AND THE MECHANICS OF WORCESTER Whitney is but one of many. For instance, a contempo- rary of Whitney, bom at Sutton, Massachusetts, in 1788 — Thomas Blanchard — showed a like remarkable ingenuity for invention which everywhere throbbed throughout the region. Blanchard was a noted whittler from the first, whittling wind-mills and water-wheels to the admiration of the coun- lEdward Everett Hale. 74 MASTERMINDS tryside. He made many inventions, such as a machine for making five hundred tacks a minute, improved steamboats and locomotives, envelope machinery and, strange to say, a locomobile or steam wagon — before the automobile was dreamt of, save in Mother Shipton's prophecy. Yet most memorable of the remarkable creations of his genius was the lathe for turning all kinds of irregular forms. Beginning with a gun-barrel, whose forms were at one time laboriously outw^orked by hand, he produced a machine for turning and finishing gTin-barrels at a single operation. Then when men refused to believe it, he performed the feat before them. Told he certainly could not turn the stock, he at once turned his wonderful macliine to curving out the formerly hand-worked stock. Once invented and patented in 1820, the machine has since been one of the world's great tools for turning out, at a single operation, irregular forms of ahnost any pat- tern. It is a mechanical wonder to-day to see the Blanchard lathe at work, as curves grow out of once rough blocks into the designed pattern, bent and convoluted as it may be. Blanchard was, however, like Whitney, but a path- breaker in the zone of invention that was to possess the ter- ritory in which he lived. "The mechanics of Worcester," once declared Senator George Frisbie Hoar, "were unsurpassed for their inge- nuity anywhere on the face of the earth. Worcester was the centre and home of invention. Within a circle of twelve miles' radius was the home of Blanchard, the inventor of the machine for turning irregular forms; of EUas Howe, the inventor of the sewing-machine; of Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton-gin, which doubled the Thomas Blanch a rd Invt'iitor of a New Principle in Mechanics ELT WHITNEY 75 value of every acre of cotton-prodncing bind in the coun- try; of Erastus B. Bij?elow, the inventor of the carpet- machine; of Ilawes, the inventor of the envelope-machine; of Crompton and Knowles, the creators and pcrfecters of the modern loom; of Rno-o-les, Nourse and Mason, in whose establislmient the modern plane was brought to perfection, and a great variety of other agricultural implements invented and improved. * ' There were many other men whose inventive genius and public usefulness were entitled to rank with these. ' '^ iGeorge Frisbie Hoar, "Autobiography of Seventy Years," Vol. II, p. 159. An elaborated account of great inventors within twelve miles of Worcester occurs in the New England Magazine of Novem- ber and December, 1904, where Senator Hoar writes most inter- estingly in conjunction with Hon. A. S. Eoe on "Worcester County Inventors. ' ' ELIAS HOWE INVENTOR OF THE SEWING-MACHINE UP to a day in 1837, P]]ias Howe, the hill-town boy of Spencer, Worcester County, Massachusetts, to iiinny may have seemed the same as the idlers who carved their names on the dry-goods boxes in front of the village store. To those who knew him best it was not so. "To the contrar\% my father's early life and character were full of purpose," declares his daughter.^ On this day, to this curly-headed joker, something happened. That something discovered the soul of the one some thought only a happy-go-lucky fellow standing there ^^ath his hands in his pockets. It was just a keyword dropped by another, but this unlocked his life-plan, namely, the invention of the sewing-machine, the machine that has broken the yoke of human labor and rendered a hundred- fold as bearable the work of women. THE FLASH OF THE SUGGESTION INTO HOWE'S MIND Elias Howe suddenly at this time of his soul 's awakening felt caught by the dream suggested by a tinker, who hap- pened in and who had in view a knitting-machine. "Why don't you make a sewing-machine?" came a ques- tion from Ari Davis, head of the store, as he punctured the drift of the conversation. iMrs. Jane E. Caldwell, of New York, in a letter of Sept. 28, 1909. 78 MASTER MINDS Unawares, he had also punctured the drift of bo^'ishness in Elias Howe, who suddenly felt his mind hitched to a star. From that star he never broke away till he evolved the creation his awakened genius leaped to embrace. In reply to Ari Davis' question, the rest of the talk ran on as follows: "It can't be done," said the tinker. "Yes, it can." "Do it," said the dreamer to Davis, "and I'll ensure you an independent fortune. ' ' The tinkeriner Yankee inventor himself gave it up. He could not grasp the thought or give it conception. But the awkward green hand standing by could, and from that moment of the birth of his genius the twenty-year-old country boy took his hands out of his pockets and buried them in a creative purpose. HOWE — THE CRIPPLED SPENCER BOY The under layers of invention thus tapped bear high tribute to the race that came flowing down from the racial reserv'oir in the New England hill-town of Spencer. However poor in goods and chattels the Howe family happened to be, the Howe birthrights were rich in blood. N. P. Banks was a cousin, and Elias Howe's uncle was designer of the first truss bridge erected in America, that over the Connecticut at Springfield. Tyler Howe, another uncle, was the inventor of the spring bed. The year 1819, on the 9th of July, saw Elias Howe born here in Spencer into a farmer's and miller's family, one of eight children, and at first partially crippled. ELI AS HO W E 79 Worcester County inventive infjeniiity was there in full force, as eonid luivc boon witnossod by a siirbt of the eight boys and gfirls, all busy with strips of leather, into which their busy fingrers stuck wire teeth for carding cotton. The buzz of his father's mill-wheels filled the air at all times, and found in happy-hearted Elias a delighted observer and an unconscious student. Yet to break the strain upon the family purse-strings, at the age of eleven he left his father's house, and relieved the home struggle by going to live out with a neighbor for a year. After this the boy returned home. At sixteen, in 1835, he fell into the tide of country lads who drifted into the Lowell factories for the making of cotton-machines. Afloat again in two years, and unemployed, he found himself before the door of a Cambridge machine-shop. In turn, leaving this shop, where he carded hemp wdth his cousin. N. P. Banks, by whose side he worked, Elias Howe sauntered into the big city of Boston to the place of Ari Davis, the maker of mathematical instruments, whose shop was the place Ari Davis put his question to the tinker. Edison's youth was considered, in so far as it was con- sidered at all by others, a failure. Sent home as a lunk- head, given up by his teachers, his mother alone believing in him, his genius lay hidden in an apparent husk of mental denseness. But chaos, without form and void, once had in it the raw material of a world, and often has of a man, can there but be some great soul behind it to give it the right suggestion and the shaping force. This came to Edison and it came to Howe. Through the dream suggested by the strolling tinker in Ari Damns' shop, this shaping force was given to Elias Howe, and the aimless Spencer boy rose to the stature of a creator, to create something yet non-existent! 80 MASTER MINDS DESPERATION DRI\'ES HIM TO INSPIRATION But it took a long period for the clouds to roll from the void in which Howe wandered. A year later, at twenty-one, he found himself married, and with children beginning to arrive, while he began to decline into a semi-invalid, exhausted after a long day's toil lasting from morning candle-light till candle-light at night. Watching his wife's sore fingers stitch, stitch, stitch, he came home night after night to his attic, to the tragedy of poverty. He could but fling himself upon the bed and lie there, supperles.s, with appetite lost through overwork, and no longing left but ' ' to lie in bed forever. ' ' But such desperation at a time when he was forced to see his wife take in sewing, proved the inspiration that drove him on in his purpose to create a sewing-machine. "While his tired wife grew thinner and thinner as she plied the madding little needle, in 1843 there haunt.ed his mind more and more another kind of needle, a kind possible to insert in a machine. Should it be a needle pointed at both ends, or a needle with an eye in the centre to go up and down with thread through the cloth? Upon this he worked one whole year, only to find it a failure. For twelve months to find a new Idnd of frame he whittled on the design of a new device. But he whittled not as the drv'-goods-box loafer. He whittled to a purpose. He whittled to a plan according to a purposefulness always in him, but which now began to come out. In the progress of the year his creative imagination broke loose. It broke loose from trying to imitate any- thing in existence. It dared something altogether new! ELI AS now E 81 Why not two threads — with a shuttle to lock the stitch by a second thread beneath, and above a curved needle, with an eye near the point for the first thread! With this the invention was bom ! The idea thus created in 1844 he materialized at once into a model.^ By October, 1844, he completed the shape of the rough model of wood and wire. It sewed ! It — made — the — finished — stitch — in — the — cloth! It — could — sew — three — hundred — sti tches — a — minute ! But Howe must have means and he had none! For a steel and iron frame three hundred dollars was needed at once and unfortunately the brain that can coin an inven- tion cannot coin money. Elias Howe's brother had in conjunction with his father in Cambridgre a machine which cut palm-leaves into strips. Joining his father there, Elias worked on a lathe in the attic. But his father found the venture of the palm-leaf shop a failure, owing to its destruction by fire, and poverty again stared young Howe in the face. At this act in the drama of the-dream-come-true — enter, a friend! iThe old story that Howe had thought so much of this invention that it invaded his dreams is probably untrue. "We think this is very improbable," write his family to-day, as to the story that circulated the statement that the new idea of a single needle and shuttle-locked stitch beneath came concretely in an actual dream by night. The dream was said to have been of a king who ordered Howe to perfect his machine or lose his head. He failed, and saw savage warriors advancing to decapitate him, when he noted holes in the spear heads, this suggesting the new needle with a hole at its point. 82 MASTER MINDS The friends of inventors ! To them should belonof a hall of fame. Without them many inventions would have never been. "Without Phineas Miller the world would not have known Eli Whitney's cotton-^n; without Edison's mother the world would not have known Edison. Georere Fisher of Cambridge, an old schoolmate of Howe, at this trying and desperate time, in 1844, proved the friend in need. He not only quartered the Howes in his own house, but he con- tributed five hundred dollars, thus forming a partnership in which he was to receive half of the profits. "I believe," wrote Fisher, "I was the only one of his neighbors and friends in Cambridge that had any confidence in the success of the invention. He was generally looked upon as very visionary in undertaking anything of the kind, and I was thought very foolish in assisting him." But HoAve at once demonstrated the machine by making upon it two suits of clothes for himself and his partner. Packed in a little box only 1x1^ cubic feet, Howe exhib- ited his model, making it sew at exhibits in fairs and pub- lie gatherings and private demonstrations. Unlike Whitney's, his patent, secured in 1845, judicially wavS again and again affirmed. Practically, however, the result was the opposite. Tailors combined in the great cities against him, declaring that were the machine intro- duced, in ten years it would make all tailors beggars ! The cup of the pathos of progress Howe now tasted to the full. In the opposition of mankind to labor-saving machinery, all inventors have more or less drained the same chalice of bitter opposition. Howe M^as no exception. Fear of jour- neymen's boycotts kept insulated the enthusiasm of the tailors, yet he still kept his courage. Placing a machine ELIASnOWE 83 in Qiiincy Hall, he by actual timirifr sowed seven times as swift as the swiftest picked hand. Then, to sit and sew at a demonstration for two weeks, Howe challenged five of the swiftest seamstresses on ten seams of five yards — and won! To make the patent model which he sent to "Washington, Mr. Howe had to work three months in a garret. To keep food in his children's months in the meantime, in the spring of 1846, he had to piece out by engineering on a railroad. Just then his partner, Fisher, who had surrendered two thousand dollars with no return, felt forced to give up. At last once patented, the machine when exhibited sewed, it is true, for the amusement of the populace, but this was not a money return, neither did it allow Howe even material support or the machine an industrial intro- duction. "I had lost confidence in the machine ever paying any- thing, ' ' he later confessed. Health now completely failed. Broken-hearted as to an American response, in October, 1846, Elias Howe entrusted his precious little box, enclosing the model machine, to the steerage of an English vessel on which he embarked his brother for England. By this brother, Amasa, he was to try entering the machine there. But Amasa sold his rights to William Thomas, a shrewd English corset and carpet-bag manufacturer. Patented in England, on each machine Thomas arranged that Amasa Howe should be paid for Elias three pounds. IMaking a verbal contract only with the unsophisticated young New Englander, Thomas broke his side, notwithstanding that he received himself ten pounds on each machine, and made for himself over one million dollars ! 84 MASTER MINDS Elated at his prospects, Thomas forwarded the money to bring over Elias Howe himself and his family, that Howe might spend eight months in labor to adapt his machines to corsets. Elias Howe fell to the plot, and arriving in Eng- land adapted the invention — only to find himself dis- charged ! A coat-maker gave him enough means to rent a room in which to construct four machines. Before he could do so, life's necessities were exhausted and Howe, with his pitiable little family, had to leave the machines uncom- pleted, going from three rooms to one, and even then he was forced to borrow money from the coat-malver for the pur- chase of bread for his wife and children. Finally he was reduced to the alternative of either embarking them for America or starving them. So in the fog of a soaking night, IMrs. Howe and her family Howe tearfully took to the place of embarkation. Unable even to transport the party by carriage or express wagon, he carried the luggage in a wheelbarrow. As his wife was in delicate health and hectic from consumption, needing all the care wealth could supply, he was deeply humiliated and harassed by these extremities. Returning, he remained alone to cook for himself in a little room, and to finish the four machines. Finished, they were worth fifty pounds. But he received only five ! Anxious only to get home, one machine he pawned, also his precious patent papers. With the money he procured another hand-cart, in which he carried the little pack of possessions yet left to the ship bound for America, secur- ing passage by cooking meals for the emigrants. In April, 1849, four years since his first machine, he reached New York with one half a crown, to find news that, broken down, his wife was dying of consumption ! ELIASnOWE 85 With ten dollars borrowed from his father, he reached his wife's side, but he was in time only to take her hand and hear her last breath. Close upon this unspeakable loss came the staggering news that the ship he had embarked his models and posses- sions upon from New York was lost off Cape Cod. HOWE VICTORIOUS Recovering from these blows, ''cast down but not destroyed, " as a journeyman machinist he sought to renew his shattered fortunes. Yet in going about he opened his eyes to see his machines now celebrated in the United States, but himself as the inventor and patentee forgotten! Imitations, too, were ever^^vhere in use. Instituting patent-suits, he secured deliverance in 1847, and triumphed in all cases over infringements. A new partner, by name George Bliss, was found to buy the half interest of George Fisher. Starting again in 1850 in New York on Gold Street with a five-dollar desk and two fifty-cent chairs, the indomitable heart of Howe beat as strongly as ever, notwithstanding he stood amidst the wrecks of everything but his faith in the machines which he exhibited far and near. In 1854 the patent-suit against S. M. Singer being decided in his favor, all contests were settled, all royalties became his, and complete victory came all at once. "No successful sewing-machine has ever been made which does not contain some of the essential devices of this first attempt, ' ' was the brief of the judicial decisions,^ iWhile Howe did not get his working idea elsewhere, it should be stated that as early as 1755, in Europe, men sought to invent a machine that would sew, Thimonier coming nearest to a solu- tion. Hunt, in America, attempted its construction in 1834, but came short of the finish. 86 MASTER MINDS ** Every adult person is indebted $200 for the amount saved Mm by this machine," declared a high authority on patent-rights. In 1863 Howe's royalties accrued to four thousand dol- lars a day and totaled two million dollars. HOWE — THE MAN The picture of Howe exposes a face kept happy by his heart, which ever through all the crushing blows burnt God's chemical of good-will. The curly-headed Spencer boy lived still unembittered in the big-souled man of forty- four, and retained in him amid all outer bitterness a sweet and sunny temper. He met his blows with a quiet, modest reserve, only chastened by them from his early merriment into an outer placitude w^hich now overflowed, at the time of fortune's rapid turn, with charity for all mankind. This charity he showed till his death from Bright 's disease Oct. 3, 1867. So great was his love of the race, and so deep his New England conscience, that instead of nursing a tendency to lameness,^ sitting down and retiring at last to enjoy in affluence the flower of his long-spent life, he offered his means and his life to his country, not as an officer but as one of the common soldiers in the ranks of the Civil "War. ' ' He was a man of peace, ' ' declares his daughter to-day, "but his patriotism was great, and he was willing to serve his country to the extent of his ability. ' ' 1" Regarding my father's lameness, though it might have troubled him at times, I never heard him complain of it, and doubt that except in the event of a long march, he was disqualified as a soldier. ' ' — From a letter from his daughter, Sept. S8th, 1909. Elias Howe Inventor of the Sewing-Machine ELIA^ nOWE 87 Accepting the lot of a plain boy in blue, he was ragged as they were ragged, he suffered as they suffered, he was hungry as they were hungry, he went penniless as they went penniless. When the regiment should have had a pay-day, as a private he appeared before the paymaster and stood in line and, when it came to salute and state his case, he asked about the pay of the Seventeenth Connecticut. "When the Government^ is ready, and not before," was the curt rejoinder of the Captain's officer. ' ' But how much is due them ? ' ' demanded Howe. * ' Thirty-one thousand dollars, ' ' came the reply. Penning a draft for this sum, Howe secured a proper endorsement and paid the whole thirty-one thousand dol- lars, later going up to receive, on the level with his fellows, but twenty-eight dollars and sixty cents! Already twice a millionaire, with hundreds of dollars a day and hundreds of thousands a year, he left all to face death and obey the ruling passion of the true patriot. It was such a passion as we have already seen in Artemas Ward and such as we are to see in Dorothy Dix and Clara Barton and Dr. Morton and all of the others, and which, as in the case of the Red Cross founder, thus answers the self-propounded question — a question whose answer is in itself, — "What is money if I have no country?" iln the meantime the Government of France in 1867, by the hand of Emperor Louis III, decorated him with the Cross of the Legion of Honor. WILLIAM MORTON THE CONQUEROR OF PAIN THE sixteenth of October, in the year 1846, was the immortal day when first was proved to the world insensibility to pain through ether. Up to that hour till 10.15 o'clock on that day, the con- quest of pain remained an unsolved mystery. The world knew it not. Even a quarter of an hour before that moment, the most open-minded place in the world to har- bor the hope, the surgical amphitheatre of the Massachu- setts General Hospital, filled as it was with a half-believing company of professional surgeons and students, broke down at the audacity of the claim and collapsed in a burst of laughter. The patient ready to test it lay stretched on the amputating-table. The atmosphere had been one of half- hearted incredulity, hoping against hope. Should the dis- coverer appear as he had promised and produce insensi- bility. Dr. John C. Warren, the most distinguished sur- geon, would apply the knife. If the claimant did not appear, he would apply it in the old way, of conscious tor- ture. It was 10 o 'clock — the appointed time ! It was 10.05 ! It was 10.10! It was 10.15 — a quarter of an hour past the time for the discoverer to walk in and make good his claim ! The distrust of the curious and doubting became conta- gious and mastered the assemblage. Even the courage of 90 MASTER MINDS Dr. Warren, head surgeon, who had hoped most, began to wane as the clock struck the quarter! Upon the wincing and conscious victim he prepared in the old way to insert the knife-blade in human vivisection, saying as he turned around before he raised the scalpel: ' ' As Dr. ]\Iorton has not arrived, I presume he is otherwise engaged. ' ' It was at this remark that laughter relieved the tension — the knowing laughter that intonates, "I told you so." Thereupon the claim of the discoverer became a joke and his name a mark of sarcasm. That here in the most scientific spot in the new world the very idea became a matter for ridicule, proved how utterly anaesthesia had not only been unpracticed but un- discovered, unrecognized and unknown. The conquest of pain through ether was as yet unbeliev- able. "Was the experiment to be now ignored and the claimant's name laughed out of the court of surgery? Just then, of a sudden, a side-door opened. There strode in a young man of twenty-seven, no older than many of the scoffing students in the gallery. His name was William T. G. Morton. His occupation, men w^hispered one to another, was simply that of a young dentist on Tremont Row. There were smiles of pity and contempt in the overlying array of faces that were not assuring. The young man looked down for a moment, confused, at the apparatus he held in his hand. As he stood still he heard Dr. Warren say — it seemed a little distantly : "Well, sir, your patient is ready." Not that amphitheatre only, not only the most distin- guished surgeons of the new world, but all time to come and its share of human pain, hung upon the success or fail- ure of the next few moments. In the figure on the stretcher, f^ g WILLIAM MORTON 91 whose neck was to be laid open and a tumor removed, lay represented "the whole creation" that "groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now," till a fulfillment of a part of the prophecy at least — "neither shall there be any more pain. ' ' In the immediate test there was at stake also the ques- tion of safety or fatality to the patient's life; for it was the imiversal belief up to this moment that enough ether to stupefy for a surgical operation would kill the patient if inbreathed. "Are you afraid?" Dr. Morton inquired of the sufferer. "No," replied the man, who had turned his head to look at a Mr. Frost, a patient who had gone through a private test in a dental operation, and whom Dr. Morton had pointed out for his encouragement. " No ; I feel confident, and will do precisely as you tell me. ' ' In the breathless silence of all, Dr. Morton then appUed the tube connected with the ether in a glass globe. In four and one-half minutes the man slept like a child.^ The demonstration was a complete victory. Surprise mastered the human terrace of witnesses in the gallery, who mutely hung over the backs of the seats and pressed far over the rails, the foremost kneeling, that the rest could see. Repeating the head surgeon's challenge to him of five minutes before. Dr. Morton turned and said modestly but victoriously : "Dr. Warren, your patient is ready, sir." The critical operation for the removal of a tumor in the sufferer's neek was then performed by the head surgeon. iThis scene, depicted in Eobert Hinckley's painting, hangs in the Medical Library on the Fenway, Boston. 92 MASTER MINDS At the end, as the patient still lay immovable like a log, Dr. Warren turned to the circle of surgeons and the erst- while mocking gallery, on whose faces the late verdict of "humbug" lingered still, saying to them solemnly: ' ' Gentlemen, this is no humbug ! ' ' To-day, looking around this room, which is the birth- place of pain's demonstrated conquest, we find it still the same, and we may visit it this hour, in the Massachusetts General Hospital, as one of the great birthplaces of history. Meanwhile, the patient, whose neck in the operation had been opened, declared when he awoke : "I have experienced no pain, only a scratching like the scraping of the part with a blunt instrument. ' ' The conviction swept over all, which Dr. Warren later articulated in these words : "A new era has opened on the operating surgeon. His visitations on the most delicate parts are performed not only without the agonizing screams he has been accustomed to hear, but sometimes in a state of perfect insensibility and occasionally even with an expression of pleasure on the part of the patient. Who would have imagined that draw- ing a knife over the delicate skin of the face might produce a sensation of unmixed delight? That the turning and twisting of instruments in the most sensitive bladder might be accompanied by a delightful dream? That the con- torting of anchylosed joints should coexist with a celestial vision? And with what fresh vigor does the living sur- geon, who is ready to resign the scalpel, gi'asp it and wish again to go through his career under the new auspices ? ' ' At one year's end the trustees, corporation and staff of the Massachusetts General added these words : * ' The past year has tested the unspeakable importance of the recent discovery of the properties of sulphuric acid, WILLIAM MORTON 93 no less than one hundred and thirty-two operations, many of them of much severity, having- been already performed with entire success on patients — insensible through its benipm influence. By overcoming all muscular and ner- vous resistance, it has extended the domain of surgery, making? operations possible which could not have been per- formed, and which could not have been attempted without its aid; and by the removal of the fear of pain it has greatly increased the actual number of operations." With these first words may well go this last word of science, being- that of the gifted speaker^ in 1908 at the anniversary of ''Ether Day" at the Massachusetts General. "Ushered in by the discovery of vaccination against smallpox at the close of the eighteenth century, the greatest practical achievements in our art during the nineteenth cen- tury were anesthesia, antiseptic surgery, and the power to control infectious diseases resulting from the discovery of their living contagia — achievements surpassing the heritage of all the centuries which had gone before in the saving of human life and the alleviation of suffering. Of those gifts to medicine the sweetest and the happiest is the death to pain, ' ' ' ' We Have Conquered Pain ! ' ' — so read the head-lines of the press all over America and far into Europe, Asia and the islands of the sea. Thence till to-day the balanced verdict of science has been that the key that unlocked the chamber of painless surgery was found by Dr. Morton. ''Time and history at last place the honor," declares Dr. Mumford's authorita- tive narrative of medicine in America, ' ' where it belongs — with Dr. Morton." iWilliam H. Welch, M.D., LL.D., of Johns Hopkins. 94 MASTER MINDS The brilliant \actorj^ over suffering here recorded is as shining a turning-point, next to the Cross itself, as ever gleamed out into human history. But this victory, too, is bounded by sacrifice on two sides — one before, one after. On the one side before it stands a lonely era of solitary experiment in the desert of waiting; and on the other side of the discovery, it is bounded by two decades of desertion, destitution and death. The pages of the pathos of progress in Morton's life are bordered with great rubrics of suffering, and add a signal chapter to the human persecution of discoverers, ''the yoke in his youth " To enable the discoverer as long as he did to meet these two eras of loneliness and persecution, it was a good thing, — a providential thing — that the Worcester County hill- town of Charlton ingrained into him constitution, charac- ter and courage — for he was born of Charlton ancestry Aug-ust 19th, 1819. Here he learned to bear "the yoke in his youth. ' ' In the American Revolution, William Morton's great- grandfather served under the martyr of Bunker Hill, President Joseph Warren, whose nephew, Dr. Warren, it was who performed the operation for this very man's great-grandson. Dr. William Morton, the discoverer of ether. Thomas Morton, son of this patriot, was killed by falling on a scythe in 1759, and left the horror of his death ever preying on the mind of James, his son, from whom, with enmity to human pain thus inbred, came in 1819 the victor over pain — William Thomas G. Morton. By the time William was bom, his father had left a farm in Rhode Island and returned to the WILLIAM MORTON 95 ancestral ground of his family tree at Charlton, to a farm of one himdred acres, clustering? around a lar^e old-fashioned farm-house built about the old-style chimney as the centre-piece. Climbinir-plants crept from the background of woods and brooks so that they almost hid the outline of the homestead. Indoors in winter about the huge fireplace, over which hung dried apples, squashes and pumpkins, were the cvistomary com- forts of a gentleman farmer in early New England. Out- doors in the summer were the season's interests of sheep- shearing, haying and husking, until winter came around again with milling, carding and skating — ^to be followed in turn by the spring tree-tapping and sugaring-off. To Wil- liam as to every wholesome boy came with gusto these variant diversions and tasks of the Yankee lad. But beyond materinl interests, dearly as they clustered about the homestead, lay those of mind and soul, of head and heart. To these all else should be sacrificed. Hence, the father moved from this homelike spot to be near an acad- emy for his children's instruction. At thirteen William went to Oxford Academy, where he was under the same type of thorough and sterling worthies as had been Clara Barton and other master minds at the Commonwealth's heart. After a short course at Northfield Academy, he sought the famous Leicester Academy, Here he became acquainted with a Dr. Pierce, who discouraged the boy's ambition, which had come to be a passion, to become a physician. Too deep to be resisted, however, this determi- nation which the Creator himself had implanted refused to be thus torn up by the roots.^ iHis master passion was bom with him. Nicknamed "Doctor" by Ms playmates, William, while in kilts, administered elder-tree vials 96 MASTER MINDS A false accusation at school, for a fault lie never did, led him to break with the Academy and leave with broken health. Yet his spirit was unbroken and his self-education as steady as ever, notwithstanding human backing seemed against him. This was shown, for instance, by his explora- tion of the fields over which he roamed, searching for objects of mineral science. When William was seventeen years old, his father, James Morton, failed, and the son left for Boston to mend his fortunes. Though in a Boston publishing house with the editor of the Christian Witness, he was disappointed at the failure to get time for self-education, and he returned home. ''Minding" the counter of his father's store, which had started up again at Charlton, he found time to carry on between hours his cherished study and self-culture. In 1840, when twenty-one years old, he heard of the new science of dentistry. It was rising out of the old day of ignorant blundering over broken crowns and tampering with teeth whose roots were left embedded in the jaw. To counteract this, the American Association of Dental Surgery, founded by a remnant of true dental surgeons, was established at Baltimore. Its shorter course offered Morton the chance that medi- cine's curriculum denied him, and eighteen months he studied the elements of dentistry. In 1842 he commenced practicing in Boston. Not con- tent to abide by the present stage of his profession, he paid several hundreds of dollars to experiment in the scientific laboratory of a Dr. Keep. One investigation led to another, and bread pills, almost putting an end to his baby sister by a de- coction he poured down her throat. WILLIAM MORTON 97 and in the steps of each smaller discovery he caught sight of a larger. THE STEPS TO THE DISCOVERY Seeking a solder that would not leave a black line on false teeth, he discovered that to use it old fangs must be removed. The pain of this was intense. Great numbers of patients came, only to go away. But pain must be removed or his new solder would prove useless. So by fidelity to this little step of soldering false teeth, he was led face to face with the quest of his life — the con- quest of pain. Brandy and champagne as intoxicants, opium to the pro- portion of ten to twelve grains, laudanum to the proportion of four hundred drops — all these he tried, even extracting by the last expedient the fangs of both jaws in a woman patient. Yet by none of these methods did he realize suc- cess. Magnetism likewise failed, as did the others. Unfound as yet, further to pursue his search, he entered the Medical College in Boston to study during his spare hours as a physician. In March, 1844, his practice having reached many thou- sands a year, he married Elizabeth Whitman of Farming- ton, Conn. In July of this year, while filling a tooth of a Miss Par- rot of Gloucester, to appease her great pain he rubbed sul- phuric ether on the outside of the jaw. One day, in the series of treatments as a result of this one of several sit- tings, he noted the parts had become benumbed through the action of the ether on the outside. What if the M^hole system could thus be benumbed ! What an insensibility to pain might result ! 7 98 MASTER MINDS Inhaling' a little ether as an amusement, or as a curios- ity, for its intoxicating effects, had been kno\^^l ; also it had been used for its medicinal effects in easing inflammation in the bronchial passages. But could it be inhaled in quan- tities enough to produce complete insensibility to the severest pain and not be itself dangerous and suicidal ? The answer to this was unknown. No one had tried it. No one had dared try. That summer, to experiment, he went to his father-in-law's house in Farmington. His ex- periments with goldfish and insects and animals did not satisfactorily answer this question, but left it open, and his gay young friends made him, on account of trying the experiments, a butt of humor. Even his wife shared the fun, but he rebuked her, saying : "The time will come, my dear, when I will banish pain. I shall succeed. There must be some way of deadening pain. I have a work to do in the world, Lizzie. The time will come when I will do away with pain. ' ' ''Dr. Morton," added his wife, who recounts these moments, ' ' was one of those tremendously earnest men who believe they have a high destiny to fulfill. ' ' On his return to Medical School he faced a new incentive to make the discovery. It lay in the operating-room, the chamber of horrors which surgery then presented, of con- scious victims writhing in awful struggles under the knife. This circular chamber was in the dome of the Massachusetts General Hospital, placed distant from the wards full of patients, that they might not hear the shrieks. Here he saw three or four strong men always in readiness to fall upon a sufferer and hold him down to the torture. Per- haps it was to wrench a hip-joint out of a false position in order to replace a dislocation. If so, he saw the strong men tie a rope to the limb of the patient, then all fall on the WILLI AM MORTON 99 line and heave till the bones left the socket. Upon the screaming subject he watched the cords tighten, the sinews crack, the beefy men hold on, and the sufferer faint before the snap back into the socket. At other times he watched the knife's edge plunge under a conscious gentlewoman's skin and go on prodding to open the flesh while she remained conscious, till her staggering shrieks and acute convulsions again demanded the body of strong men, who fell upon her quivering form and held her down till she swooned away. Such sights, repeated upon the vision of one inheriting an instinctive dread of suffering, could but fan to a flame the passion in his mind to discover a deadener of pain, and to apply to the whole system its gracious allevia- tion of agony. In the meantime his profession of dentistry in his ex- tended business at Tremont Row prospered to such an extent that he had to employ a number of assistant dentists, and his income by 1844 became twenty thousand dollars a year. No rest was the result. But his creative energies compelled him to proceed. Minor discoveries were continually made. The use of atmospheric pressure to mould the shape of the teeth and overcome harelip added to his fame, as did a plant for the manufacture of false teeth by his own process by pulverization of stone, colored with oxalic acid, and then loieaded, moulded, hardened, agglutinated, enameled, polished, and annealed. In the term of 1844-45, while studying medicine. Dr. Morton observed the exhibition of nitrous oxide gas by a brother dentist. Dr. Horace Wells of Hartford. It was to be demonstrated before the staff of the Massachusetts Gen- eral Hospital and the Medical College as an anodyne for extracting teeth without pain to a patient. But it failed 100 MASTERMINDS utterly, as the patient shrieked with pain and the students roared with laughter — even hissing their disapproval. It is only justice to Dr. Wells to say that, for extracting teeth without pain, nitrous oxide became successful, and by 1862 was generally used. Yet it did not at that time prove efficacious, even in pain in a tooth, and since that time it has been impossible to pro- duce with it insensibility to pain in surgery proper. The failure only spurred on Dr. Morton to try out his specific — sulphuric ether by inhalation. To devote himself wholly to this experiment, Jime 30th, 1846, he turned over his business of twenty thousand dol- lars a year to Dr. Hayden, his assistant. Utterly self- forgetful ; regardless of man's jealousy of discoverers ; caught up only by the vision of relieving a world's suffering, he hesitated not a moment, but took the step and went on. It was, as we have seen, the general belief in Morton's day that ether in use sufficient to stupefy the system would kill the patient, and no man dared take the risk. Pereira, in his medical works, then in general use, stated that to relieve whooping-cough, dyspepsia, and inflamma- tion in the bronchial tubes, ether could be inhaled if mixed with atmospheric air — a fact discovered in England in 1812. Dr. Morton was therefore confronted by the question — could ether be inhaled in quantities to render a patient in- sensible to pain, in acute operations, without killing him? This he knew had never been discovered. The verdict of the books and times concurred in saying it would be fatal. Velpean, the noted French surgeon, thus declared the scientific world's latest opinion in 1839 : ''To escape pain in surgical operations is a chimera which we are not permitted WILLIAM MO ETON 101 to look for in our day. Knife and pain in surg^ery are two words which never present themselves, the one without the other, in the minds of patients, and it is necessary for us surgeons to admit their association." This noted scientist who called it a chimera in 1839 was the same one who, after the discovery, proclaimed Dr. Mor- ton's victory "a glorious triumph for humanity." Yet the investigator in no way gave up. To Dr. Gould, an assistant, he declared: "I will have some way yet by which I shall perform my operations without pain." In June, 1846, he confided to his other assistant, Dr. Hay- den, and his la^v;y'^er, Richard H. Dana, that soon he "should have his patients come in at one door, have all their teeth extracted without pain and without knowing it, and then, going into the next room, have a full set put in. ' ' To get some one to take ether in sufficient quantity to make the test w^as the task. No one would do it, it being thought suicidal. No one on the wharves, among the human wharf -rats, even by a liberal display of five-dollar bills, could be bought up to throw away, as every one believed, his life. Putting a combination of ether, morphine and other nar- cotics in a retort surrounded with a hot towel, Dr. Morton himself proceeded to inhale it. But he was only to be rewarded vsdth a furious headache, accompanied by a slight numbness. "Nig," a black spaniel, he had before succeeded in ren- dering insensible. But how about a man ? Dr. Hay den, one of Dr. Morton's office colleagues, believ- ing it fatal, refused. Spear, another associate, consented, but after the first drowsiness became furious and violent, making a failure. 102 MASTER MINDS Analysis revealed that the ether administered was chemi- cally impure, THE FIRST SUCCESSFUL EXPERIMENTS With pure ether he now decided (though not without great alarm to his wife) upon an experiment upon himself. Together with an experienced chemist, Dr. "Wightman, he devised a glass funnel or globe, and an india-rubber bag with a hole cut near the neck. A sponge inserted in the glass globe, which had two openings, completed the inhal- ing instrument. September 30, 1846, with this and chemically pure ether, he shut himself in a room and inbreathed the fumes. "Taking the tube and flask," he recorded, "I shut my- self in my room, seated myself in the operating-chair and commenced inhaling. I found the ether so strong that it partially suffocated me, but produced no decided effect. I then saturated my handkerchief and inhaled it from that. I looked at my watch and soon lost consciousness. As I recovered I felt a numbness in my limbs with a sensation like night-mare, and would have given the world for some one to come and arouse me. I thought for a moment I should die in that state, and the world would only pity or ridicule me. At length I felt a tingle of the blood in the end of my third finger, and made an effort to touch it with my thumb, but without success. At a second effort I touched it, but there seemed to be no sensation. I grad- ually raised my arm and pinched my thigh, but I could see that sensation was imperfect. I attempted to rise from my chair, but fell back. Gradually I regained power over my limbs and full consciousness. I immediately looked at my watch and found I had been insensible between seven and eight minutes. WILLIAM MORTON 103 "Delighted with the success of this experiment, I imme- diately axinounced tlie result to the persons employed in my establishment, and waited impatiently for some one upon whom I could make a fuller trial. Toward evening a man named Eben H. Frost, residinf? in Boston, came in, suffer- ing great pain, and wished to have a tooth extracted. He was afraid of the operation and asked if he could be mes- merized. I told him I had something better, and saturat- ing my handkerchief gave it to him to inhale. He became unconscious almost immediately. It was dark and Dr. Hayden held the lamp while I extracted a firmly rooted bi-cuspid tooth. He recovered in a minute and knew noth- ing of what had happened to him. This I consider to be the first demonstration of this new fact in science. I have heard of no one else who can prove an earlier demonstra- tion. If any one can do so, I yield to him the point of priority in time."^ Numerous other experiments followed in the days to come and public notice was drawn to the wonderful new ano- dyne. Scientists like Dr. Heniy J. Bigelow of the Massachusetts General Hospital came in to observe, and at once Dr. Morton decided upon a public demonstration of his discovery. The first week in October, to obtain a chance to lAfter the operation Dr. Morton tried the man asking, "Are you ready?" "I am ready," said the man, unconscious it had been done. "Well, it is out now." "No?" cried the man. "Glory, Hallelujah! " The quoted account is from Dr. Morton's own memorial recovmt- ing the experiment to the French Academy of Arts and Sciences, which awarded him the Montyon prize. — Of other European states, Norway and Sweden awarded him. the Cross of the Order of Wasa and Kussia the Cross of the Order of St. Vladimir. 104 MASTERMINDS demonstrate, lie called upon Dr. John Warren, senior sur- geon of the Massachusetts General Hospital, The call was a success, and Dr. Warren set the date Friday, ten o 'clock, October 16, 1846. On the anxious seat, Morton knew the possibilities of that hour and its desperate chances. He knew the fatal effects of ether without an exact arrangement to in-mix air before it was breathed and with- out the device to carry off the carbonic acid gas exhaled. On any one of these points, to say nothing of the possible intractability of the patient, hung the fateful risks of the test. The evening before till two in the morning he was assisted by his wife, who, though trying to dissuade him lest, if unsuccessful, he be convicted of manslaughter, or be the prey of ridicule, nevertheless helped him design valves in the inhaler to carry off the vitiated air. Eight hours after came the hour set for the test. But the instrument- maker had delayed his part on this apparatus^ for inhaling till not only the last minute, but beyond. This was the cause of Dr. Morton's hurried and late appearance after Dr. Warren had decided to give him up. It was then at 10.15 that the door opened upon this great act in the tragedy of pain, and the great actor, the young dentist of twenty-seven, William T. G. Morton, took the centre of the stage. When he came, the knife was lifted to go on in the old way. When he left, after a most successful operation, the patient, \nth the tumor on the jaw gone, was the first of millions of sufferers to say : iThis may be seen to-day in this old operating-room of the Massa- chusetts General. Di!. William Moktox CoiKiueror of Pain WILLIAM MORTON 105 "I have felt no pain!" At four in the afternoon the weight of lifting a world's burden of pain seemed to have left its mark upon Morton's face as he said with strange sadness to his Avife when he returned home, "Well, dear, I succeeded." That is the one side of this great discoverer's life, the side of the lonely discoverer. It was — Dr. Morton against the world. Now we are to look at — the world against Dr. Morton. THE WORLD AGAINST THE DISCOVERER This period extends from October 16, 1846, the date of the demonstrated discovery, to July 15, 1868, the date of his death. It is, indeed, an era of desertion, destitution and death. Its sphere of persecution is professional, governmental, financial. It started with the professional rivalry and jealousy of the dentists. Hardly had the great news of the discovery cheered the world before that opposition, which is always the pathos of progress, began. There was no question of the success of the brilliant dis- covery. October 17th, the day after, a tumor in the arm of a young woman was removed with complete success without pain. For three weeks went on the first of the one hundred and thirty-two operations, all equally successful as they fol- lowed one after another in the next year, for the first three months of which Dr. Morton freely taught the world, in the Massachusetts General Hospital, to administer ether. Suddenly, as an index of gathering opposition, a halt was demanded ! 106 MASTER MINDS It demanded he suspend the operations simply because the compound of the ether was not analytically disclosed. Dr. Morton had secreted the nature of the drug by coloring it bright red, but he now at once disclosed it, offering the free use of his discovery to hospitals, reserving compensa- tion only from private practitioner's use. Operations went on and the ether was demanded as before. A crowning test was the case of a man cauterized for a disease of the bones of the spine. Once under the ether, hot irons at white heat blackened the flesh till it shriveled back, unrolling from the bared spinal column. No groan escaped the patient ! Not a prick of pain was felt ! Con- trasting the impossibility of such an operation without death to the patient under the old treatment but a few weeks before, the whole circle of surgeons and amphitheatre burst into a tumult of applause. American scholars hailed the day of the discovery. They did their part by baptizing it with the name, Anaesthesia. The first name, proposed and preferred by the discoverer, was Letheon. But the name Anesthesia, proposed by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who baptized it with this name November 2, 1846, was the one accepted. Dr. Holmes^ baptized the discovery with these words: lApril 2d, 1893, Dr. Holmes wrote E. I. Snell for his luminous article in the Century of August, 1894, the following confirmation: ' ' My dear Sir : Few persons have or had better reasons than myself to assert the claim of Dr. Morton to the introduction of artificial anaesthesia into surgical practice. ... I have never for a mo- ment hesitated in awarding the essential credit of the great achieve- ment to Dr. Morton. . . . The man to whom the world owes it is Dr. William Thomas Green Morton. Yours very truly, O. W. Holmes." WILLI AM 310 RT ON 107 "The knife is searching for disease, the pulleys are drag- ging back dislocated limbs, Nature herself is working out the primal curse which doomed the tenderest of her crea- tures to the sharpest of her trials, but the fierce extremity of suffering has been steeped in the waters of forgetfulness and the deepest furrow in the knitted brow of agony has been smoothed forever." At the growing news of the success of the discovery arose a host of claimants, chief among whom was a professional competitor in dentistry, a Dr. Jackson of Boston. He claimed to have given Dr. Morton the general idea of ether as a safe means of insensibility to pain September 28, 1846. After exhaustive investigations, the summoning of wit- nesses on both sides to give testimony as in a law court, and hearing the principals themselves, the trustees of the Mas- sachusetts General Hospital, a board of twelve gentlemen of highest standing in Boston, reached a verdict — a verdict which unqualifiedly gave the discovery to Dr. Morton, and laid aside as utterly unproven the claims of Dr. Jackson. The unanimous report in which this verdict confirmed Dr. Morton's discovery was issued January 6, 1848. The famous Dr. Bowditch for the entire staff of the hos- pital followed the report with a "Vindication" of the ver- dict of the trustees. Thus the combined weight of all pro- fessional evidence was thrown on tlie side of Dr. Morton. The reports of trustees and the staff ended with this con- clusion: "Dr. Morton, previous to Ids interview with Dr. Jackson, had bought sulphuric acid, and was concerned about its qualities, especially its effects when inhaled, for the prevention of pain in dental operation, etc.; in other words, that Dr. Morton was seeking for this discovery by 108 MASTERMINDS means of this agent and did not get the first idea of using it from Dr. Jackson.'' As time went on, the hospital staffs of New York, Phila- delphia and elsewhere confirmed Dr. Morton's claim as the verdict of organized science.^ Their judgment is sustained by the sifted evidence of science to-day. Every year leading scientists and surgeons in the United States gather and celebrate the birthday of the discovery of ether. In 1908, October 16th, the latest verdict of science,^ to which we have already referred, was ably voiced by Dr. William H. Welch, M. D., LL.D., chair of pathology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, who concluded : ' ' I deem it, however, fitting and only historical justice to say that, after careful study of the evidence, the greater share of the honor belongs to Morton." Dr. Welch credited to the fullest possible degree the claims of Dr. Crawford W. Long of Jeffer- son, Georgia, who asserted he had removed a tumor in 1842 from a man he had anresthetized by ether. He also credited to the full the claims of Dr. Jack- son, even admitting the possibility of Jackson's pre- vious conversations as to "pure ether," and his personal experiments four years before. Yet what he decided of Dr. Jackson he in these words decided of Dr. Long: "We cannot assign to him any share in the introduction to the i"The great thought is that of introducing insensibility, and for that the world is, I think, indebted to you." — From a letter of Nov. 17, 1847, from Sir J. ¥. Simpson, Edinburgh, who this year (1847 ) discovered chloroform as an anaesthetic. 2The candid and able address before referred to as voicing modem science is published in full in the Boston Medical and Surgical Jour- nal, November 5, 1908, WILLIAM MORTON 109 world at large of the blessings of this matchless discovery." ''There is good evidence that Morton, while reaching out for all the evidence and assistance he could obtain from dif- ferent sources, acted independently and conducted experi- ments and tests with ether upon his own initiation and in accordance with his own ideas. The supposition appears to me irreconcilable with the facts that he was merely a hand to execute the thoughts of Jackson," . . . "The glory belongs to Morton's deed in demonstrating publicly and convincingly the applicability of antesthetic inhalation to surgical purposes." But Dr. Jackson refused to abide by the Massachusetts General tribunal or further submit his case. Henceforward he became chief of a number of con- spirators against Dr. Morton in a train of attacks which do not close till Dr. Morton drops dead of heart disease in New York, some twenty years later. Not merely individuals, but organizations of dentists, opposed him and adopted systematized opposition to the use of ether and bitterly attacked Dr. Morton, planning to prosecute whomsoever used it. The loss professionally to Dr. Morton's practice, which had amounted to so many thousands a year, was complete. Coupled with his ha\ang left it to his assistant, to whom he turned it over in order to prosecute and perfect his dis- covery, this professional persecution did much in time to decrease the number of patients. Between 1847-1858, counting the amount he expended for the laboratory and apparatus needed for the discovery, and the loss of income, he sacrificed one hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars. In 1848, while yet in his twenties, being twenty-nine, as he was brooking the professional opposition which broke upon him, he sustained an even heavier loss — that of his 110 MASTER MINDS health. This now collapsed under attacks of neuralgia, whose needle-like prickings left him trembling and despondent. The breathing of ether fumes, necessary in the process of the discovery, had undermined his powers of resistance to this attack and found him ill prepared to fight it. The other claimants to the discovery arose and claimed they had used it even as far south as Georgia. But none had used it with effect in cases as severe as surgical opera- tions, and indeed had they used it at all, could summon no satisfactory evidence, could record no satisfactory demon- stration, could point to no public reception and practice in any section of the country. Among these claims was that for Dr. Horace Wells of Hartford, whose demonstration of nitrous oxide gas for killing pain in the extraction of a tooth had resulted in a total failure. The claim was that, notwithstanding he used a different drug, and that even for a tooth its demonstra- tion was a failure, yet Dr. IMorton got his idea from him. Slight and immaterial as they were, the real evil result of these false claimants now becomes apparent. They became obstructionists. They blocked the Government's compensation of Dr. Morton's discovery, and for fourteen years they pulled the wires of politics in their own sections to prevent his claim being passed by Congress. Dr. Morton's patent to exclusive right was applied for October 27, 1846, and was issued November 12, 1846, and signed by the Secretary of State. Its terms gave him sixty-five per cent, of the net profits for a term of fourteen years.^ lAt first, told by the Patent Office that any person joining even slightly in the discovery must join in the application, and frankly WILLI AM MORTON 111 Either help must be had from the Government as com- pensation for his one hundred and eierhty-seven thousand dollai-s expended and lost as a sacrifice to his ether discov- eiy, or Dr. Morton would find himself in beggary and no roof over his family's head. It wa.s for this, not for mer- cenaiy reasons or greed, that he decided to ask the Govern- ment to compensate him. The patent the Government in the Mexican Wai- itself broke, and allowed to be broken everywhere. Hence there was to be no recompense from royalties. Yet Dr. Morton refused to bring suit. He had originally issued the patent, chiefly to keep unauthorized people from misusing his dis- covery and so throw it into disuse and public disfavor. As the patent was now, however, everywhere broken, he no longer cared to prosecute its infringement. All that remained was to secure sufficient compensation for his debt to keep his home from the auctioneer's hammer, his prac- tice from being trusteed and himself from bankruptcy and writs of execution. But this compensation was never to come ! For fourteen years, hounded by creditors, and pursued by counter-claimants, he sought at the doors of Congress by bills and memorials to cover the debt he had contracted in the discovery. He sought justice. But "republics are ungrateful." For no less than six Congressional committees admitted his claim, or admitting his conversation with Dr. Jackson, Dr. Morton was advised by Commissioner of Patents Eddy to include Jackson's name in the application. Later, looking over the evidence, the Commissioner rescinded his decision on the ground that he had overrated Jackson's grounds for joining in the discovery. He thereupon granted the exclusive right to Dr. Morton. . 112 MASTER 31 INDS refused to admit the claim of any other to the discovery of ether. Yet for selfish reasons, and on account of sectional political pressure from the re^ons of other claimants, each Congress held back the vote of the appropriation he asked. Kept on the balance-rock of expectancy and disappoint- ment for fourteen years, Morton was encouraged to go to Congress each time right up to the brink of a passed bill. Then at the last moment, after even the Congressional com- mittee in almost every case had voted for it by majority report, he had to see it referred or laid over ! Thus acted the Twenty-eighth Congress on the vote of a select committee in the second session; the Thirty- second Congress on the majority report of the Naval Com- mittee of the House of Representatives; the Thirty-second Congress on the majority report of the Military Committee of the Senate ; the Thirty-second Congress on the majority report of the Naval Committee of the Senate (second ses- sion) ; the Thirty-second Congress on the majority report of the Select Committee of the House of Representatives (first session), and the Thirty-seventh Congress on the majority report of the Militaiy Committee of the Senate (third session). Bandied about, referred back and forth, the bill or memorial, though always voted by majority reports of committees, became the football of Congress, but one never to reach the goal. No man of like deserts was ever grilled on a Govern- mental gridiron for so long a time or grueled to such pro- longed and excruciating mental torture. He was again and again held off, but kept on dragging his worn form to Congress, enthused to try again and again by the highest scientific backing of all the United States as led by Boston and New York hospital staffs. WILLIAM MORTON 113 In 1854 Daniel "Webster wrote him as follows : WAsniNGTON, December 20, 1851. Db. W. T. G. Morton. Dear Sir: In reply to your letter of the 17th instant, I would say, having been called on a previous occasion to examine the question of the discovery of the application of ether in surgical operations, I then forwarded the opinion, which I have since seen no reason to change, that the merit of that great discovery belonged to you, and I had supposed that the reports of the trustees of the hospital and of the committee of the House of Eepresentatives of the United States were conclusive on this point. The gentlemen connected with the hospital were well known to me as of the highest character, and they possessed at the time of the investigation every faculty for ascertaining all the facts in the case. The committee of the House were, I believe, unanimous in accord- ing to you the merit of having made the first practical application of ether, and a majority of their report accorded to you the entire credit of the discovery. ' Very respectfully your obedient servant, Daniel Webster. Rufiis Choate, Charles Sumner and Edward Everett decided upon the same conclusion with like arguments — ^but in vain. After the second application and its issue was lost, Mor- ton, dispirited and crushed, left for home to become prey to a severe illness, and for thirty days hovered between life and death. But this was just the beginning. Year after year, as his fight for his rights went on, he was to receive a like crushing blow by four more congresses. The defense of his discovery from false claimants was practically settled, the committees of Congress, in agree- ment with the best scientific verdict of the country, always voting by a good majority the discovery as his. The halt- ing-point of Congress was the request for a compensation for the money he had drawn from his business to put in his 8 114 MASTERMINDS discovery. For this, however, he had to fight on because, behind his back, threatening him and getting yearly more and more pressing, were debt and the assault of the ever- increasing army of creditors. Arriving at his office one day, he found that his enemies and his creditors had spread the report of his great outlay and his consequent slowness to pay. This instigated a ' ' run. ' ' While he was away, they stole his books, took the names of all his patients, and sent them dunning bills, also trusteeing their salaries in case of non-payment. These notes were sent to not only patients who had not paid, but to those who had. On his return, offended numbers of his former patients met him with cold stares, and, thinking he had sent the bills, refused to speak to him, and cut off their patronage. His health, already broken, grew worse. More and more harassed in his practice, in 1853 he retired from it altogether. But the inquisition was not ^'et over. It was now to make its home-thrust nearest the heart. At Wellesley, Massachusetts (then West Needham), twenty miles from Boston, Dr. Morton had established his home. By arboriculture and landscape gardening, transforming abandoned farms, he made the wooded knoll on which his house stood the centre of an estate of pastoral charm and quietude. Cultivating the trees and shrubs about it. he left a perspective looking from the knolls far away across to the village church in the distance. Close by was the little cottage near which he had chosen for the last living resting-place of his white-haired parents. But even here invaded his persecutors, and, returning one day, he found his wife and children had retreated to the nursery and locked the doors, owing to a strange man who had forced his way in and seated himself in the parlor. He WILLIAM MORTON 115 was a man Avho had come to act as "keeper" and to attach the house and everythint? in it! But all, all, had to go. Even this Morton had to admit to his wife. To Washington and home again, and back again to Wash- ington, he began now his desperate journey as his last resort. The stock left on the farm he sold and leased the estate itself for five hundred dollars. His previous cabinet of instruments and scientific appa- ratus he put in pledge for two thousand dollars. He then fell ill again \Wth an alarming attack. At this juncture he was kept fourteen months waiting for the Government's decision. It ended as before, with- out result, and he now gave up all hope. Nearly beside himself, he decided to return for the last time from Washington and face his creditors. Attachments were raced upon him. Execution writs and sales rapidly succeeded one another. Matters grew worse and worse. At length his family and little ones were hooted on the streets. Worst of all, his aged parents he had to tell to get out of their cottage. "The discovery, indeed," as Dr. Morton's son. Dr. Wil- liam James Morton, has said, "while a boon to the world, was a tragedy to its author and his family. ' ' To keep off actual starvation. Dr. Morton looked around for what was left, and saw a load of wood on his wood- pile. It is, indeed, easier to freeze than to starve. He therefore piled the wood on a cart, carried it to a baker and exchanged it for one-half a barrel of biscuit. In 1857 Boston friends, headed by Amos Lawrence, issued an "Appeal to the Patrons of Science and the Friends of Humanity." The Massachusetts General Hos- 116 MASTEB MINDS pital had already in 1848 presented Morton as a memorial a silver casket in which was one thousand dollars, and on which was written, "He has become poor in a cause which has made the world its debtor." It was sijsrned by the noble and g-reat of the day, and con- firmed by the sio^atures of the staffs of the great hospitals in Boston, New York, Brooklyn and other cities. Thus buoyed up by the best in the land, he lived till ten years later, when he was stricken with an apoplectic shock July 15, 1868, while driving with his wife in New York, aged only forty-eight.^ At St. Luke's Hospital, whither at midnight he was carried, the chief surgeon gave one look, turned to some students, and declared: "Young gentlemen, you see lying before you a man who has done more for humanity and for the relief of suffering than any other man who has ever lived. ' ' Besides the monument in Boston Public Garden in com- memoration of the discovery is the monument over Dr. Morton's grave in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, erected by the people of Boston and thus inscribed : William T. G. Morton Inventor and revealer of Anaesthetic inhalation Before whom, in all time, surgery was agony By whom pain in surgery was averted and annulled Since whom science has control op pain. lA keen touch of pathos is added to this event by the fact that Dr. Morton had left his Massachusetts home to go to New York to reply to an attack on his discovery by Dr. Jackson — this stroke, therefore, being the last in the train of all the others literally to kill him. WILLIAM MORTON 117 Up to his death, instead of beinp^ embittered, he main- tained his interest in humanity and his love of country and of the race, as was shown by his visits to the fierce fields of the Battles of the Wilderness in the Civil War, whose hun- dreds of thousands of wounded in this and other campaigns of that war lapsed from desperate pain into gracious insen- sibility through the discovery he had made. Here, broken in health as he was, to prepare wounded patients for the knife, before the operators followed and the dressers bound up the stumps, he produced perfect ancesthesia in a few seconds and became a volunteer surgeon. It came about in this way : The time was the early summer of 1864, — the place the Wilderness of Virginia. An aide approached headquarters and announced that a civilian doctor wished to obtain an ambulance for visiting field-hospitals. * ' The ambulances are only for the sick and wounded, and under no circumstances can be taken for private use, ' ' was the curt reply of General Grant. Dr. Brinton, who was on Grant's staff of surgeons, sought the applicant and found him a broken, travel-stained man in a sadly worn suit of brown clothes. Discovering his identity. Dr. Bnnton returned to General Grant and repeated the aide's request, but elicited only the same curt answer. "But, General, if you knew who that man was I think you would give him what he asks for. ' ' "I will not divert an ambulance to-day for any one. They are all required elsewhere." "General, I am sure you will give him the wagon ; he has done so much for mankind, so much for the soldier, more than any soldier or civilian has ever done before, and you will say so when you know his name. ' ' 118 MASTERMINDS General Grant took his cigar from his mouth, poised it between his fingers, looked curiously at the applicant and asked, "Who is he?" " He is Dr. Morton, the discoverer of ether. ' ' Pausing a moment. Grant weighed his words and declared : "You are right, Doctor. He has done more for the sol- dier than any one else, soldier or civilian, for he has taught you all to banish pain. Let him have the ambulance and anything else he wants ! ' ' DOPCITHY LYNDE DIX Ki'dciiiiitrcss of the WorM's Insane DOROTHY DIX REDEMPTRESS OF THE WORLD'S INSANE OVER the central portal of Memorial Hall at Harvard University is set a stand of the United States National colors. What patriot do they commemorate? What heroic act? What dear-won victory? What blood-bought cause? Not that of a hero, but a heroine; not that of a soldier, but a saint; not that of a fighting man in uniform, but of an American unveiled Sister of Mercy — Dorothy Lynde Dix. As a testimonial of that which she had done as it cul- minated in her acts of mercy in the Civil War, what sliould it be? Should it be by Congressional vote a for- tune of many thousands of dollars ? Or, as tendered by the War Cabinet at Washington, should it be the ovation of a national mass meeting? Which, asked the Cabinet, did she prefer ? "Neither!" "What, then?" "The flags of my country" were all she asked, and of such are the flags at Harvard. Signal as is the distinction of this memorial to Dorothy Dix, under which daily troop thousands of the country's best young blood and which, though that of a woman, heads the sacred mementoes in that hall of fame dedicated 120 MASTERMINDS to the quick and the dead, it stands second to far greater memorials — memorials unspeakably grander than even this. Built by her work, thirty and two memorials (now grown to over three hundred) she saw rear their roof- trees throughout the length and breadth of the Union. Twice did they break over the line into Canada. Carried by her. they crossed the Atlantic to more than one great pile in England and Scotland. The Pacific they were to cross in time, even to far-away Japan. Under the shadow of the Vatican, through her plea, they became entrenched in the "Eternal City" of Rome. Just what are these memorials? They are none other than the colossal hospitals for the world's insane. These hospitals when as yet they were not, this little woman, an invalid, broken in body, alone and unattended, founded and promoted. To use her own title to her task, her life's masterpiece lay in her career as "Champion and Challenger of the Insane. ' ' Doubly well do those colors dedicated to Dorothy Dix stand over the vestibule of a temple largely dedicated to fighters ; for the entire life of this frail lady in grey was a fight from first to finish. And of the truly great, whether men or women, is there any life worth remember- ing where it has not been so? Differepces bridged are the pontoons to success. And across this bridge have walked all the immortals. Weak characters evade these differences. Merely strong characters quarrel with them. But great characters use them as the way to triumphs they could never have achieved had it not been for such differ- ences thus bridged. "The tonic I need," once said Dorothy Dix when laid low by sickness, "is the tonic of opposition. It always sets me on my feet." DOROTHY DIX 121 HER DIFFERENCE WITH HER HOME AND HER IMPULSE FOR AN EDUCATION Of this tonic there was plenty. Her first difference was with her home. "I never knew childhood," was her ver- dict upon the usual care-free age of from one to twelve. She was born in Hampden, Maine, in the year 1802.^ Concerning her father's household, her heart never, it is true, registered anything but an aching void. In it was desperation. Yet desperation proves a form of inspira- tion if instead of to things wicked and small it drives to things worthy and great. In the city of Worcester, where her father moved soon after her birth, such was her keen mind that before twelve she perceived her home but a sinking ship to which she was tied down, together with her father, iMueh question has existed as to the place and time of Miss Dix's birth, an event about which she was always reticent. But whatever certainty has existed is dispelled by the birth records given in the following letter to the author: Hampden, Maine, Sept. 21st, 1909. Dear Sir: Your letter of the 20th at hand, and have in my pos- session the tovra records of Hampden, marked on edge of outside cover dated 1792, and in tracing the book along to record of births came across the following word for word and a true copy: ' ' Joseph Dix and his ""« Mary their children Born. Dorothy Lynde their daughter Borne April the 4th, 1802." Have shown your letter to the following persons, who have seen the records, and swear to its being correct: J. L. Miller, Mrs. Ella E. Rowe, E. H. Eowell, Town Clerk. Arthur W. Braithwaite, Postmaster. 122 MASTER MINDS Joseph Dix, already up to the arm-pits in debt, her mother a hopeless invalid, and her brothers, doomed with her to a life of dependence, poverty and ignorance. So absorbed was the head of the family with his habit of peddling tracts which he kept Dorothy home to sew, that the education of his family, the bills of his creditors, the health of his wife, — all had to be sacrificed. Ignorance and the poor-house, towards which they were tending, stung Dorothy's little soul and goaded her spirit to shake itself free, escape, run away, be educated, then return to the sinking ship and save all that she could! Such w^as the moving impulse under which she acted. That conditions were such she had to do so was always an open wound. As to others disgruntled with home life and anxious to imitate the form and not the spirit of her action, Dorothy Dix punctuates their folly with a full stop, begging them to love a home and make one. **No! Let them fall in love, marry and preside over a home. It will be a thousand times better for them." In the home she left to return later to save, Joseph Dix, Dorothy's father, had, by the time the girl was twelve, already since her birth been through more than "the three moves" which Benjamin Franklin has said are as bad as fire. He had by 1814 little but his pack of tracts over which the child was constantly bending to stitch and paste. At the mysterious age of change between twelve and thirteen, when the Head of Humanity himself felt the driving instinct which made him run away from home ties and be about "his Father's business," she, too, felt that first stirring of a divine impulse and also fled away. Her landing-place was likewise a temple of Truth, a place for hearing teachers and asking them questions. DOROTHY DIX 123 The Boston home of her grandfather, Dr. Elijah Dix, • was still held by her grandmother, a veritable Puritan, whose home, mentally speaking, was an arsenal of Crom- wellian misvsiles. Hither Dorothy turned her steps. Dame Dix received her to the mental and moral rigors of her training. The sword was not too sharp for the scab- bard. For it Dorothy's hungry', starved mind was ready. Iron hit iron. Skipping one generation the metal of Elijah Dix's moral and mental constitution was repeated in the grandchild. There was no doubt about its existing in her grand- father. Years before, while Elijah Dix lived in Worces- ter in a house^ near the present Court House at Lincoln Square, a decoy call came at night summoning him to the bedside of an imaginary patient, on his way to which the plan was to waylay him in ambush. Thus trapped, the trick of the conspirators was to drive him from Worces- ter. The antagonism of his iron will and the unyielding purpose with which he relentlessly pursued certain enter- prises had raised up enemies. Among the enterprises which they derided was the planting of Worcester shade- trees, an idea of which he was the father, and which made him a butt of ridicule. The turnpike from Boston to Worcester was also among the things of which he was promoter. In his civic work this uncompromising stand for conviction had made him a target, and the shaft this night fell at his door. Divining danger, he did not quail, but threw up the window and called out to his stable-boy in loud tones: iNow moved to No. 1 Fountain Street. It is the house to which the patriot Warren's wife and children came for shelter during the Revolution. 124 MASTERMINDS "Bring round my horse, and see that the pistols in my holsters are double-shotted ; then give the bull-dog a piece of raw meat and turn him loose ! ' ' It is enough to say he was unmolested. The iron of such courage in her grandfather was by a kind of spiritual carbon to be carbonized in Dorothy into finer steel. The high-strung nerve which allowed her to eye calmly the muzzle of a desperado 's pistol, look out of countenance the slur of low politicians, and again and again tame a maniac's wild stare, was to be hers by divine right. In her it was the trinity of that triple courage which is physical, moral and spiritual. Dame Dix therefore could not break it, though she was strenuousness personified and a speaking image of Puri- tanism at its strictest. Her Puritan forebears had left Charlestown when it was set in flames by British fireballs, only to return from Worcester to Boston concentrated in her — a composite picture of them all. The little slip of the old tree found her book and bell good discipline, however, and the virgin stock was not bent but toughened into "a dread of a secret desire to escape from labor which, unless hourly controlled, will overcome and destroy the best faculties of our mind and paralyze our most useful powers." This conviction in 1812-1814, Dorothy later affirmed, became enfibred in her very being. She was thus endowed with a constitution that could endure seventy years of high-keyed labor eighteen hours each day! HER DIFFERENCE WITH THE OLD PURITANISM OF LAW AND HER QUEST OF THE NEW LOVE-LIGHT OF CHARITY Yet there was an extreme in all this — an extreme which drove her to a desperation which led, like all her despera- DOROTHY DIX 125 tions, to an inspiration. In this step she advanced to a quality which Puritanic Elijah Dix and Dame Dix never knew. No good-night kisses, no stories to warm the imagina- tion, no affection to melt the heart or warm the nature in the stately Dix mansion ! A special indulgence granted as a prize was the making under Dame Dix's eye of an entire shirt, not one stitch of which could vary from the other ''by the width of a micrometer." Under this and the pressing intellectualism of Boston's school life, Doro- thy's heart was starved to feed the mind and will. "An enemy to all enthusiasm," is a line of eulogy at Copp's Hill on an old Bostonian's tombstone of an early day. But the girl refused to be such an enemy and to stifle heart and imagination. In 1816, coming back to Worces- ter after two years of such training, at the age of four- teen, it seemed as though the vise of iron about her frail frame and mind had pressed out these higher and finer traits. Her little "Worcester pupils later recalled, along with her excellent teaching, the cold dignity with which like a pillar of chilled steel she stood erect over their desks irresponsive to the more playful and tenderer heart- strings of a child. Such may have been a true impres- sion, but she was not to remain chilled steel. If she had ever been frozen music, the music was now to melt in the great Boston revolt from a cold lovelessness. By 1816 this reaction, led by Channing, was at its height. From a holy selfishness she chose now without casting away the Puritan ideal of holiness, the lovelight of selflessness. This melting of the old Puritanism of law into the new Pilgrim spirit of love made of the two a mag- 126 MASTERMINDS nificent combination. There was a flux of both. As the new fires of humanitarianism reflected their glow against the stifi' Dix mansion and into her room, in place of a society that drew its skirts from the other half as outlawed, she welcomed the new leaning toward mercy and the searching out of earth's friendless and afflicted. An aristocratic day and boarding school she was set over by Dame Dix. It contained the daughters of Bos- ton's most select and exclusive. Dorothy's ability and drawing powers upon this quarter enabled her to gratify her desire to relieve financially her father's load. This she did by taking her two brothers to Boston to educate and start in business, one to become commander of an American vessel, the other a successful Boston mer- chant. To Dr. Daniel Tuke, the English alienist, she confided later in life that up to this time she had been determined "to live to herself, to enjoy literature and art" — in other words, to be a useless vestal of culture instead of an un- veiled sister of mercy. Happy the change ! Happy the time when to return to her own beautiful confession she "discovered the fatal mistake and deter- mined to live for the good of men. The suffering to be comforted, the wandering led home, the sinner reclaimed ! How can any fold their hands, rest and say to the spirit, 'Take thine ease, for all is well'?" Into the cold intellectual anremia of the Boston patri- cian flushed the warm Christ-blood of the new passion. But it abode as no mere lovely emotion. There was the old Dix barn. Why should she not begin here? Fit this up? Gather and educate free the children of the poor who were shut out of private schools? DOROTHY DIX 127 Dame Dix's hauteur at the thought of down-trodden, miserable waifs and gamin coming under the stiff lines of the Dix mansion, the girl disarmed by this plea. "Let me rescue some of our America's miserable chil- dren from vice and gnilt. Do, my dear grandmother, yield to my request and witness next summer the reward of your benevolence and Christian complaisance." So searching was the plea explaining all the motives and dwelling on all the good, good to the poor, the miserable, the idle, the ignorant, that Dame Dix at last conde- scended. With this consent we mark Dorothy Dix bridging her second difference — a difference with the over-sternness of the grand old Puritanism. Keeping its holiness she walked with all its iron-sharded power over into the lists of earth's afflicted whose cause she was at once to chal- lenge and to champion. The bridging of such a difference was a pontoon to a new success. It was her life's career. Not so much when amid Boston's Four Hundred in the Dix mansion, but as she touched the hearts of the wretched in the barn, her pen- tecostal gift and tongue of fire were revealed ! HER DIFFERENCE WITH HER HEALTH AND THE SECRET OF HER TRIUMPHANT CONSTITUTION But just here on the eve of this discovery came a third difference to meet — a difference with her health, a difference to bridge which she had to combat all her life. At fourteen, when she taught school for two years in Worcester, it was evident that the tall slip of a girl who had just lengthened her skirts and put up her hair was to run the gauntlet with death. Such sharp pains stabbed her in the side that even then 128 MASTERMINDS she had to hold to a bench for support as she clasped her waist. By 1826 the eonsumptic symptoms attacked her voice so that it became noticeably husky. Pumped into the brain out of the body, there to be exhausted, it seemed as if her blood was prey to the white plague to a degree no mortal could withstand. Her vicarious talks with the girls in the day school fol- lowed, with heart-searching interviews, a Saturday-night question-box which she turned into a confessional. To all this many a girl owed her making. But to the teacher apparently it was her un-making. Every day it was her habit to get up at daybreak — at four in summer, at five in winter, and remain at work till midnight. Suction on nerve and system from the night work of the Charity School was an additional tax, enough to collapse the physique and eclipse the career of a giantess, to say nothing of her frail frame. That the inroad of the disease did not snap the iron in her soul and break it completely was indeed a miracle — a miracle, however, whose secret lay in her wonderful connection with the Source of power. Though she arose at four in summer and five in winter, one whole hour she spent alone in the morning watch with her Bible. There- fore could she write : ' ' The hour of bodily suffering is to me invariably the hour of spiritual joy. " ' * It is happiness to feel progression and to feel that the power that thus aids is not of earth." To such a soul even sleepless nights unlocked new pleas- ures, and the star-studded constellations, otherwise unseen, sang to her, as she lay wakeful, the music of the spheres. In 1827 she began a series of joumeyings with the family of Dr. William Ellery Channing, who was also in DOROTHT DIX 129 search of health and had chosen Miss Dix as governess of his children. For six months of spring and summer she suffered the sea-change of Rhode Island's shore, where Dr. Channing had a country seat, and where her soul also enjoyed the marvelous sea-walk to which the illus- trious Channing owed such inspiration. IMarine life and the rich flora of the Rhode Island and Providence planta- tions exposed also to her keen eye an apocalypse of nature's secrets. The "v^^nters Miss Dix spent for several successive sea- sons in Philadelphia, and Alexandria, Virginia. Here she was kept alive by not only the milder clime, but by healthful spirits engendered, as they always are, by new- born purposes. In 1824 she wrote a crystallization of her inner musings, entitled "The Science of Common Things." It reached afterwards sixty editions, and was followed by seven boofe on the higher life. In 1830 she visited the West Indies, landing at St. Croix with Dr. Channing's family and meeting her first shock from the slavery system. Overcoming the inertia of the tropics, which she confessed laid her rebellious self flat on a sofa, by sheer triumph of will she shook it off and arose from a languor in which "one," as she said, "does nothing, is nothing, thinks nothing," to study the system of slavery, whose "creatures cannot be Christians, cannot act as moral beings and for whom none can pay the awful price but those who have hidden from them the bread of life." Returning to Boston by 1836, her day school financially and academically a success, she gave her real heart's blood to her Charity School. Hemorrhages, a hectic flush and chest-pains marked her as one of those who die of having lived too much. The currents, mental and 9 130 MASTERMINDS soulful, that for five years had so overdriven the mill- wheels of her physical life-stream, now compelled her to leave both schools and spend eighteen months with cultured sympathizers in England. Thence she returned to find her poor mother dead in New Hampshire, and her proud grand-dame dead in Boston. HER DIFFERENCE WITH THE WORLD 's NEGLECT OP THE DEMENTED AND HER CONQUEST AS '' CHAMPION AND CHAI^LENGER OF THE INSANE" A new difference now was to arise, the greatest dif- ference of her life, the difference that led to her great discovery and bridged her way to her career. It was a difference, the friction of which was to catch and generate into power a spiritual electricity that unlocked new layers of energy. This difference was with the world's barbaric neglect of the insane. "Woe, woe, if thou dost not champion these outcast and miserable ones!" This call of the prophetess, greater than which there has never been any, planted Dorothy Dix's feet on the world- wide bridge of sighs to the shunned sphere of the demented. In Christ's day their sphere was in the Perea — the be- yond. So was it still in Dorothy Dix's day. The insane existed and died apart, in a land beyond human sjonpathy and human care and human love. It came to her in this way. Knowing her reputation as an authority and expert in charity work, which began in her barn school, a Cambridge divinity student, who had failed to reach the women of the Cambridge jail, came to see Miss Dix, who was now much sought in Bos- ton. DOROTHY DIX 131 **I shall take them myself," she replied. To the youngf elerfiyman's expostulation she simply added: "I shall be there next Sunday!" Among the prisoners was a group of insane, and par- ticularly noticeable were two women with no fire to warm them, planked in, and caged by a stone wall all winter from November to March. The elder was a hag shrieking curses at the younger, who w^as but a slightly irrational girl. To Dorothy Dix it became but a focal point from which to see ten tho^^sand times ten thousand similar cases all over the world. But were all insane so beyond the pale of human mercy? Relying on no impulsive judgment which might be due to a woman's hypersensitiveness, she investigated. Two silent yeare of intensest activity followed. At every keeper's door, at every poor-house and jail in Mas- sachusetts, there her frail hand knocked. From Cambridge jail to the Berkshires, from Province- town to Fitchburg, the trim little woman in white linen and grey traveled alone. Into a note-book she jotted down specifically and exactly what she saw. None dared deny her entrance. The fire of a spirit willing to be martyred if necessary gleamed in her eye and convicted by its determined gaze. TAventy-four months were thus consumed when, like the apparition of an ancient seer, she appeared at the Legislature of Massachusetts — not with the hysteria of a sentimentalist, but armed with facts — facts scientific, proved, articulate; facts compelling and uncontestable. She spoke not a word in public from the rostrum, but with that delicate feminine instinct that at once disarmed opposition she worked in private, chose the mouth-pieces of her facts, then charged upon Senate 132 MASTERMINDS and House with the irresistible calibre of her loaded memorial. Drawn up in it were the points she had taken over seven hundred laborious days to collate and which she thus prefaced : *'I tell what I have seen, painful and shocking as the details are, to prevent the possibility of repetition or con- tinuance of such outrages upon humanity. I proceed, gentlemen, to call your attention to the present state of insane persons within this Commonwealth — in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens ; chained, naked, beaten with rods and lashed into obedience." Beasts without souls, disenspirited bodies — so were the insane as a whole regarded in America. Save at one or two semi-privat€ places of detention, the ancient con- ception of the demented still prevailed, a conception which believed them possessed with devils and no longer human. In 1792 Philippe Pinel, the father of alienists, confronted by the municipal pit into which the metropolis of Paris, France, threw its bedlam of insane, cried to the heads of the Commune : "Off with these chains — away with these iron cages and brutal keepers. They make a hundred mad men where there was one. An insane man is not an inflex- ible monster. Underneath his wildest paroxysms there is a germ at least of rationality. To believe in this, to seek for it, stimulate it, build it up — here lies the only way of delivering him." In answer iron doors whose hinges had corroded for generations upon creatures with- in were knocked off, manacled chains had their battered serewheads wrenched away, and haggard, grey-headed wild men walked out to see the blue sky and to become as little children. DOROTHY DIX 133 In 1796 William Tuke in England, the path-breaker among English alienists, did the same thing, changing the London Amphitheatre of maniacs from a museum of curios every one went to visit as a human zoo to what was in the real sense of the word, "<j retreat.'' Coming upon such an inspiration quite independently as we have seen, Dorothy Dix became the apostle in America of this revolution, universalizing here and throughout the world what the other reformers had started in their own municipality. Charles Sumner headed the memorialists who presented Dorothy Dix's monograph of facts. Behind him were such other memorialists as Samuel Howe, Horace Mann, Drs. Palfrey and Channing, and Superintendents Bell of the McLean and Woodward of Worcester, Calling the roll of county after county, her recital presented its cham- bers of horrors: — "Dan vers!" — Exposed were 60 inmates; witness one — *'She had passed from one degree of violence and deg- radation to another in swift progress; there she stood clinging to or beating upon the bars of her caged apart- ment, the contracted size of which afforded space only for increasing accumulations of filth. There she stood with naked arms and disheveled hair, the unwashed frame invested Avith fragments of undergarments, the air so extremely offensive that it was not possible to remain beyond a few moments without retreating for recovery to the outward air. Irritation of body excited her to the horrid process of tearing off her skin by inches. All, all, coarse, brutal men, wandering, neglected children, old and young, each and all, witnessed this lowest, frailest state of miserable humanity. And who protects that 134 MASTERMINDS worse tlian Pariah outcast from other wrongs and blacker outrages?" "Sandisfield!"— "A pauper young woman, a raging maniac — a cage of chains and a whip were the agents for controlling her, united with hard tones and profane language. Annually with others she was put up at auction ! ' ' By chance a kindly man had taken this poor soul and knocked off the rust-encrusted chains. The result showed what could be done — the making of a frenzied maniac a being docile and at peace, calling her benefactors "father and mother. ' ' "Groton!"— "A wooden building upon the roadside of heavy boards and planks! No window save a hole closed by boards! A young man, with a heavy iron chain, in an iron collar, wintered from November to April with the hole closed with boards in darkness and alone!" "Shelburn!"— "A lunatic pauper. A stye of rough boards. The inmate stirred with a stick! The food pushed through a loose board! A bed a mass of filth! No fire!" "He's cleaned out now and then, but what's the use?" "Newton!"— "Woman furiously mad — she rushed out the length of the chain almost nude, belching out filthy words to by- standers." "Worcester!"— "A lunatic pauper of decent and respectable family, outraged in the almshouse, later with an infant in arms." DOROTHY DIX 135 These present but an average of her dreary catalogue of Massachusetts insane penned in poor-houses or auctioned off and farmed out. The memorial concluded: ' ' Men of Massachusetts, I beg, I implore, I demand, pity and protection for these of my suffering, outraged sex. Fathers, husbands, brothers, I would supplicate you for this boon. Here you will put away the cold, calculating spirit of selfishness and self-seeking, lay off the armor of local strife and political opposition; here and now, for once forgetful of the earthly and perishable, come up to these halls and consecrate them with one heart and mind to a work of righteousness and just judgment. Gentle- men, I commit you to this sacred course. Your action upon this subject will affect the present and future condi- tion of hundreds of thousands. ' ' Seated for consultation in an out-of-the-way alcove, the modest author of the memorial never appeared upon the floor. Nevertheless, here as in state after state, she became the storm-centre round whom raged the wrath of keepers, selectmen and politicians. Her memorial was referred to a committee. Sumner, Howe, Mann, Bell and Woodward confirmed her point of view as even an under- statement of facts. The committee's report came back citing additional cases of maltreatment and an appeal for legislative action. Brought to vote under pressure of public opinion, previously as always preinformed and educated by Miss Dix's editorials and contributions, the bill was carried by a majority, and the first step taken was to build quarters for two hundred more insane at Worcester. Facts collected at the southern boundaries of Massachu- setts apprised Miss Dix of similar conditions in Connecti- 136 MASTERMINDS cut and Rhode Island. Doing the duty at hand always commands the larger beyond and over the line into other states Dorothy Dix is to go on till her experience is to be repeated in thirty-two states of the Union, then and since then to be reproduced and yet again reproduced the world over. The first case over the border-line was in Rhode Island in Little Compton. A man was imprisoned in a square six by eight, clapped behind a double wall and two iron doors. Here he was — buried alive without fresh air and light, half an inch of frost coating the inner stone walls, his comfortable of straw frozen stiff with drippings, thawed only by his panting breath, a sheet of ice his covering! "He's here," said the mistress to Miss Dix, warning the lady in grey to stand back lest he spring out and kill her as she went down into the underground hole. "I took his hands," said Miss Dix, who had ignored the warning, "and endeavored to warm them by gentle fric- tion. I spoke to him of release, of care and kindness. A tear stole over his hollow cheek." Hereupon Miss Dix stumbled over a chain in the dark, linked as it was to an iron ring on the creature's leg. "My husband in winter," called the keeper's wife from her safe position without, "rakes out sometimes of a morning a half bushel of frost and yet he never freezes!" Publishing the case to melt the public mind. Miss Dix planned the Rhode Island attack, pre-arranging friends of the measure, the getting of whom she always made the crux of the campaign. Chief of these men was a Mr. Cyrus Butler. But upon her appearance he dodged the issue. "Mr. Butler, I wish you to hear what I have to say. I want to bring before you certain facts involving terrible DOROTHY DIX 137 suffering to your fellow creatures around you — suffering you can relieve. My duty will end when I have done this and with you will rest all further responsibility!" Then followed the recital, beginning with the man in the frost-coated pen. "Miss Dix," said Mr. Butler at length, "what do you want me to do?" "I want you to give $40,000 towards the enlargement of the insane in this city." "Madam, I'll do it." The psychological moment in Rhode Island was thus won beforehand and the back of private opposition broken. Given confidence by this success in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Dorothy Dix saw the horizon lift, and felt inspired to a campaign whose field was the United States and the world! So far she had worked with the feeble beginnings of one or two semi-private plants, such as existed in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. She was to conquer now a world — a world almost destitute of any insane retreat — a world foreign even to the idea. In such a world New Jersey afforded this first point of action. Instead of a foolish bombardment upon reacting sympa- thies, Miss Dix as usual spent months in a patient collec- tion of facts in every jail and poor-house. Winning a leader in Hon. Joseph S. Dodd, she advanced the attack by laying less accent than before upon the cruelty of keepers and more upon the positive ' ' way out, ' ' pointing to something better in the place of that which she could only elsewise condemn. This positive treat- ment grew upon her and worked "with increasing effect. She quoted in her recountal such types as that of a female whose marred limbs were rutted by year-old iron, and 138 MASTERMINDS who said: "I could curse those who chain me like a brute beast, and I do, too; but sometimes the soft voice says: 'Pray for thine enemy.' " Another voice was that of a manacled old judge who, though for years a noted jurist among them, was now quickly forgotten. "I am all broken up, all broken up," he wailed, clasp- ing his chains. In answer to the question, "Do you feel much weaker, judge ? " he moaned, ' ' The mind, the mind, is almost gone ! ' ' Armed as it was with many such heart-piercing resur- rections of their own acquaintances, this was the result of the Dix memorial to the Legislature : "We can only report what is better said by Miss Dix, which presents the whole subject in so broad a manner as to supersede further remarks." One by one wavering legislators were brought before the quiet woman in drab, only to go out — won ! Daylight was spent in such resultful work, yet by night Miss Dix sat in the hotel parlor as hostess of circles of legislators, to whom she outlined her plans. One, a country member, had declared, "The wails of the insane are all humbug. ' ' But after an hour and a half audience he concluded : "Ma'am, I bid you good-night. I do not want, for my part, to hear anjrthing more. The others can stay if they want to — I am convinced. You've conquered me out and out. I shall vote for the hospital. If you can come to the House and talk as you have done here, no man that isn't a brute can withstand you!" March 25th, 1845, came the unanimous passage of the bill for the establishment of the New Jersey Insane Hos- pital — the first full-fledged triumph — a hospital built on DOROTHY DIX 139 no other's foundation. But it was a triiimph we are to see her reproduce again and again. Under the roof- tree of this New Jersey Hospital she was to choose her place to die. But that day was forty-two years off, and this triumph of a hospital built on no other's founda- tion was in this time to be reproduced in over twenty American commonwealths before it leaped the border into Canada and crossed the seas into the old world. In Pennsylvania it was duplicated at Ilarrisburg. But between sessions in one state Miss Dix was always busy in another. For instance : Prom Lexington, Kentucky, as early as 1843, two years before the New Jersey vote, Miss Dix recorded this statement: "I have been labo- riously traveling through the country collecting facts and information." Let us imagine the cultured sensitive gentlewoman day after day standing in her physical frailty before wild- eyed maniacs as the bolts were drawn and the keepers retired — a mental and moral queen. And previous to this experience day after day recall her, besides fronting the coarse stares of hostile keepers, before the meanest and lowest, "the party demagogues, shocking to say, the basest characters." Yet doors unlocked before the avenger, and in her tell-tale note-book the dooks were opened. Every time she entered. Judgment Day had come for the insane. * * I shall go to the Southern prisons after the Legislature arises in this State," was her untiring look ahead. Down the Mississippi to New Orleans and Baton Rouge, into the State of Mississippi to Jackson; back into Mis- souri to Jefferson City; over into Illinois to Alton — thus she penetrated the Interior and the South. No railroads — and highways all but impassable — she was compelled to carry a kit of tools to mend with her 140 MASTERMINDS own skill broken-down wagons as they jousted over cor- duroy roads, or sank in black mud to the hub, or forded streams with water up to the floor, where once and again the horses sank their haunches into sandbars, and axle- trees broke as back wheels rolled off in the rapid current. On river-boats with burning malarial fever — once on a boat blown up by a boiler explosion, — she traveled the waterways as the highways, never thinking of self. Upon crossing the gang plank her first question was always not as to her berth, but — ''are any sick aboard?" In Llichigan she boldly forced her paths across trackless wilds of forests. "I had hired a carriage and a driver to convey me some distance through an uninhabited portion of the country," she recorded of this State. "In starting I dis- covered that the driver, a young lad, had a pair of pis- tols with him. Inquiring what he was doing with arms, lie said that he carried them to protect us, as he had heard that robberies had been committed along our road. I said to him: 'Give me the pistols, I will take care of them.' He did so reluctantly. "In pursuing our way through a dismal-looking forest, a man rushed into the road, caught the horse by the bridle, and demanded ray purse. I said to him with as much self-possession as I could command: 'Are you not ashamed to rob a woman? I have but little money and that I want to defray my expenses in visiting prisons and poor-houses, and occasionally giving to objects of char- ity. If you have been unfortunate, are in distress and in want of money, I will give you some.' "While thus speaking, I discovered his countenance changing and he became deathly pale. DOROTHY DIX 141 "'My God!' he exclaimed. 'That voice!' — and imme- diately told me he had been in the Philadelphia Peniten- tiary and had heard me lecturing to some of the prison- ers in an adjoining cell and that now he recognized my voice. He then desired me to pass on, and expressed deep sorrow at the outrage he had committed. But I drew out my purse, and said to him: 'I will give you something to supportyou untilyou can get into honest employment,' " Dorothy Dix's record in three years before 1845. even in this bedraggled and dangerous type of travel, was over ten thousand miles. Besides her great quest she visited in this time state penitentiaries, three hundred county jails, five hundred almshouses, besides hospitals and houses of refuge. In these thirty-six months alone, she succeeded in planting and promoting six hospitals for the insane besides a number of county poor-houses and improved jails. After 1845 the great achievement of founding colossal hospitals for the insane where none existed was completed in Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Mis- sissippi, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, North Car- olina and Maryland. "Nothing can be done here," had been the people's rejoinder at North Carolina. "I reply," said she, "I know no such word in the vocabulary I adopt." * ' Kill the bill, stillborn, ' ' was the opposition 's cry. Exposes of conditions recast public opinion, and with a previously prepared hold on Hon. James C. Dobbin as leader, December, 1848, she found the vote to build, 101 to 10! Constantly an invalid, a,ble to rest only by stealing snatches of repose between the long travel stretches, she 142 MASTERMINDS was compelled to stay up till one o'clock at night in order to strike when the iron was hot. When not confronting groups of men whose will power she had to handle and control, she was writing newspaper broadsides. Seldom free from enervation, it was in the South that she wrote: "I shall be well when I get to Alabama" (a storm-centre of protest). "The tonic I need is the tonic of opposition. It always sets me on my feet." "Just one chance that my bill would pass," was her comment concerning this Alabama crisis. In 1849, as a last blow, the Alabama State Capitol burned. Yet backed by her picked leader. Dr. Lopez, and the Alabama State Medical Association, one hundred thousand dollars was voted, and later one hundred and fifty thousand dollars more! The magnanimous act was closely seconded by Mississippi with twenty- four majority in the Senate and eighty-one in the House — marking a conquest over a pre- determination ' ' not to give a dime ! " In true Southern style the legislators' thanks were followed by that drawn up by the commissioners, and not finding this enough the Southern great-hearts bestowed upon the institutions Miss Dix's name, an honor she has always proceeded to refuse. That summer — into Canada — but not for rest. Canada was seemingly hopeless. "I must go by thy faith, for mine is gone," wrote Hon. Hugh Bell, the crushed leader of the cause. This was in 1850. In but a short time Miss Dix's little figure stepped in the breach and the Canadian Parliament closed with sixty thousand dollars appropriation, fol- lowed by twenty thousand dollars more subscribed. Punctuated was this period by cheering news from other centres of agitation. Baltimore, Maryland, wrote DOROTHY BIX 143 that her bill had passed. Kentucky followed, declaring for a hospital at Lexington as well as at ITopkinsvillo, Indiana for the hospital at Indianapolis, Illinois for the hospital at Jacksonville, ]\Tissouri for the hospital at Ful- ton, Tennessee for the hospital at Nashville, North Caro- lina for the hospital at Raleigh, Alabama for a hospital at Tuscaloosa, and the District of Columbia for a hospital at Washington. Yet this was not enough. **0n to Washington!" became her cry. Twenty odd State legislatures and Canada already won — Congress must be won ! In the meantime the few friends of the Army and Navy Hospital for the insane were about to give up the fight, saying: "There is nothing more to be done." *'We must try what can be done," was her reply. Two days after came an answer to Dorothy Dix's plea, from the owner of the coveted but refused site, who now offered her the laud, "regarding you," as he wrote her, "the instrument in the hands of God to secure this very spot for the unfortunate whose best earthly friend you are, and believing that the Almighty's blessing will not rest on or abide with those who may place obstacles in your way." The Army and the Navy Hospital thus secured, before the Federal Congress Dorothy Dix now launched her twenty-five-million-aere bill for a land-grant "to promote, plant and sustain insane hospitals in the newer states and territories." For school purposes one hundred and forty- three million, seven hundred four thousand, nine hundred and eighty-two acres had already been given, and vast tracts to railroads, and deaf and dumb, and blind institutions ; why should not grants be made the insane ? One sixth of 144 MASTERMINDS the insane of the country were in hospitals, but five sixths were outside, in horrors she only too well had discovered and thus described : "I have myself seen more than nine thousand idiots, epileptics and insane in the United States destitute of appropriate care and protection. And of this vast and miserable company sought out in jails or poor-houses and in private dwellings, there have been hundreds, nay rather thousands, bound with galling chains, bruised beneath fetters and heavy iron balls attached to drag-chains, lacerated with ropes, scourged with rods, and terrified beneath storms of profane execrations, and blows; now subject to gibes and scorn and torturing tricks, now aban- doned to the vilest and most outrageous violations." Congressional action, however, was deferred owing to the new Democratic move against land-grabbing, which foolishly included such righteous causes as this. At this opposition in 1850 Dorothy Dix did not give in, but instead characteristically increased the number of acres in the bill by twelve million, two hundred and fifty thou- sand. In 1851 the Senate passed the act by a large major- ity. In March, 1852, it again passed the Senate and in August the House ; likewise also her bill for one hundred thousand dollars for the Army and Navy Hospital. At this time, like a thunder-bolt from a clear sky, fell upon the Congressional bill for a land grant the remark- able and partisan veto of President Franklin Pierce! At the crushing news of the veto, INIiss Dix sought Great Britain as her change of sphere and earth's miserables as her counter-consolation, with this motto : — "Best is not quitting the mortal career, Rest is the fitting of self to its sphere." DOROTHY DIX 145 In Scotland, sonth of Edinhnrpjh, six stone cells were the only pnhlic places of confinement for the insane! The bills of 1848 for the relief and plantinj? of hospitals had been lost when America's unveiled Sister of Mercy arrived on the scene. To every place of detention of the demented came the knock of the avenger. The Lord Provost of Edinburgh himself headed the opposition. He would indeed even fore- stall her appeal to the Home Secretary at London. But driving to the first train out of Scotland for London that night, she secured her audience hours before the Plonorable Lord Provost alighted in due dignity from his coach. Her interview resulted in the modification of the lunacy laws of Scotland, the abrogation of all private money- making establishments and the founding of the great new general hospitals by Parliament's final vote. This vote was consummated AugiTst 25th, 1857, Debility of heart and physician's cautions could not deter Dorothy Dix from the cry from the Channel Islands, where many of England's insane were farmed out for blood money. As a result of her visit and eon- fronting the authorities with the conditions, came the vote to build instead a great English Hospital for tbe Insane ! In Switzerland, the Chamonix, Berne, Oberland, the Glaciers and the Cascades could not drown or freeze Miss Dix's heart to an ultra-montane cry — a cry from Kome itself. Under the shadow of the Vatican she found one of the most cruelly neglected of all places for the detention of insane. To the noble heart of Rome's Supreme Pontiff she went straightway as America's unveiled Sister of Mercy. The Pope was transfixed at the exposure. Visiting the place secretly in person, his Eminence found it worse than 10 146 MASTER MINDS described. By his gracious initiative a new asylum on the most approved plan soon reared its head. In 1856, upon Miss Dix's return to America, she was not yet to escape the call of the demented, and she confessed: ''If I am cold, they are cold. If I am iveary, they are dis- tressed. If I am alone, they are abandoned." After four years came the Civil War. whose bloodshed reddened the sunset of her afternoon. Her field of action at once was at the front at Baltimore. Here she revealed the Southern strategy which contemplated an attack upon Washington and the capture of Lincoln. I'hrough the mob she pressed to Washington to be appointed Superintendent of women nurses. In the awful years of beautiful service, in directing nurses to military camps, in supervising their service throughout the army, in caring for the thousands upon thousands of tons of supplies, what wonder human ingenuity sometimes became confused and human power to compass the situation fell short ! It was said that in those four years she never once sat down! Grand as her effort, "it is not the work I am to be coupled with," was her conclusion. Yet her work there was illustrious. It was so notable a climax to her career that the United States Secretary of War, by vote of Congress and the War Cabinet, offered, as we have said, to bestow the recognition of either a fortune or a national ovation. Refusing both, as we have seen, she chose instead — ' ' the flags of my coun- try." From now on up to her death in 1887,^ under the roof- tree of her first-born hospital in New Jersey, her queenly, iFrom the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum, Trenton, N. J., April 20, 1888, from a letter of the superintendent, John W. Ward, DOROTHY DIX 147 nnconqnerable spirit reined like a wounded general's. Here she spent her remaining]: strenp:th in supervisinor the insane hospitals of the country and the world. And in "the hour of bodily suffering:" which for her was "the hour of spiritual joy," her life's quest ended in the fulfillment of her own prophecy of long ago when she predicted : * * This is no romance. I shall see their cha/ins off. I shall taTce them into the green fields and show them the lovely little flowers and the blue sky, and they shall play witk the lambs and listen to the songs of the birds, and a little child shall lead them!" to Hon. A. S. Eoe of Worcester, it is stated: "She died about 6 o'clock on the evening of July 18, 1887. Her remains were buried in the Mt. Auburn Cemetery at or near Boston, Mass. She was under my professional care for nearly five years. Her mind was clear and vigorous to within a few hours prior to her decease." CLARA BARTON FOUNDER OP THE RED CROSS IN AMERICA IT is a gracious paradox of Providence that Dorothy Dix, Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton, the three women of the world who have nursed more dying men and have healed more of earth's scourged and diseased and sick and wounded than any other, should all have outlived their generation and attained to the age of nearly ninety. Florence Nightingale lives to-day in her eighty-eighth year, and has just been accorded the freedom of the city of London, though, demanding that it go to the needy, she has refused the heroic token of that royal ovation — the golden casket. "If I could give you information of my life," she remarked, ' ' it would be to show how a woman of very ordi- nary ability has been led by God in strange and unaccus- tomed paths to do in His service what He has done in mine, and if I could tell you all, you would see how God has done all and I nothing. I have worked hard, very hard, that is all; and I have never refused God anything." Strangely parallel, as we have seen, was the working idea of Dorothy Dix. But quite as identical is that of Clara Barton, who is to-day^ eighty-eight years of age. "You have never known me without work ; while able you never will," she declares in one of her home messages to her friends. ' * It has always been a part of the best religion I had. I never had a mission, but always had more work Un 1909. 150 MASTER MINDS than I could do lying before me waiting to be done. ' ' So to Clara Barton's career as to the others the point of departure is just this — the path of duty. She came by it naturally. It was so with her father. In the engagements with Indians and British, Barton left his chimney-side in 1793 for the side of "Mad" Anthony Wayne in the wilds of the Northwestern Territory in Indiana and about Detroit. The tales of this hero father fell upon the tablets, melted and plastic, of Clara's tender mind while she was yet under six years of age.^ They fell not coldly, but like red-hot iron upon wax. Unconsciously but deeply even in those days she instinctively became a little sister to the soldier. COURAGE THROUGH FEAR OVERCOME The truest courage lies in the overcome fear. Such cour- age was Clara Barton's. She did not make one of the world's greatest trinity of nurses because she was mascu- line, because she was devoid of a woman's sensitiveness, but because of a great sensitiveness, not calloused, but chan- iThe date of her birth was 1821 — Christmas day. Strange to say, most of the biographical notices of Clara Barton, even such standard ones as Appleton's and Harper's, place her birth in 1830, nine years afterwards. In a letter of Sept. 30th, Miss Barton interestingly remarks : ' ' That error in the date of my birth has been travelling about for the last fifteen years or more, from one biographical sketch to another. I made strenuous efforts to correct and set it right when my attention was first called to it, but it was too late; it, like other falsehoods, had gone the world over. The publishers could not call it off, and met me with polite, good-natured pleasantness, as 'the mistake was all in my favor; if other persona did not object, I scarcely needed to;' until I grew discouraged and gave it up, excepting to state the truth whenever opportunity pre- sented. "December 25, 1821, according to the calendar, is correct." S o g o z 2 CLAKA BARTON 151 neled. Indeed, that sensitiveness in her earlier years was her controlling: passion. Of those days she now recalls, "I remember nothing but fear." In a soul that was later to face unflinchingly fields of blood and have shells tear the men she held in her arms into fragments, so intense was this delicacy of feeling that the accidental sight of the butchering of an ox dropped tlie little girl to the barn-floor in a dead faint, and ever since, owing to that day, she has refused the taste of meat. In overcoming fear lay her pathway from first to last. The fear of horses, for instance, at the age of five, she controlled. Out in the Oxford pastures, when her brother David bridled half-broken colts, he threw her on one, jumped on the other, and while she held fast to the mane, led off in a wild gallop. "It served me well. To this day," she writes as she looks back, ' ' my seat on a saddle or on the back of a horse is as secure and tireless as in a rocking-chair, and far more pleasurable. Sometimes in later years, when I found myself suddenly on a strange horse in a trooper's saddle, flying for Life or liberty in front of pursuit, I blessed the baby-lessons of the wild gallop among the beautiful colts. ' ' As to the explosion of the mine before Petersburg, ]\Iiss Barton related at Worcester, Sept. 21st, 1909, to the Twenty-first Regiment, which had made Miss Barton a "comrade" on the field, the following: "One night following the battle of the mine, there was a party of horsemen rode up to my place. They drew apart and talked among themselves for five minutes. Now and then they looked in my direction, I noticed, but I did not look at them. One of them finally stepped out of the party and, approaching me, said: " 'Miss Barton, I have some bad news.' " 'What is itr I said. 152 MASTER MINDS ' ' ' The mine has been blown up, ' said he. ' We have lost a great many men, and Gardner (a friend of Miss Barton) was among them.' '' 'Is he killed?' I asked. " 'Yes,' said he. "I was asked if I wanted to go to the mine, and said yes, and the troop of horsemen offered to accompany me there, some twenty miles, but I said that one would be enough. It was a fearful night, and late. It was terribly dark. We had no way of keeping one another in sight, except for our horses. "One horse, which was mine, was black, and the other was white. It was a long twenty-mile ride. The thunder was terrific and the lightning fearful. When the lightning came we were able to distin- guish one another and see where we were going. The rain com- menced almost immediately. ' ' The horses became frightened. True they did not run, but they stopped stock still. They woidd not budge an inch. They stayed in one spot there for three or four hours shivering from the effects of the elements. When the rain subsided and the daylight came, we resumed our way. ' ' At the mine we found everything in confusion. There were a great many killed there. We knew they were there at the mine, but we were not permitted to enter where they were then. ' ' Her conscience naturally shared this general sensitivity of her nature. Concerning an early accident due to dis- obedience and stealing away to skate on Sunday, she con- fessed: "My mental suffering far exceeded my physical. I despised myself, and failed to sleep or eat. ' ' "Her sensitive nature will always remain," was the criterion of Fowler, the phrenologist who once visited her home. "She will never assert herself for herself, but for others she will be perfectly fearless." In fulfillment of this prophecy is her own admission when she says : " To this day I would rather stand behind the lines of artillery at Antietam or cross the pontoon bridge under fire at Fred- ericksburg than to be expected to preside at a public meet- ing." CLARA BARTON 153 Over against the delicacy of such a temperament, all the greater, as we proceed, grows upon us the bravery which, while, on the one hand, it demanded in the midst of earth's worst terrors that she control this sensitivity, yet, on the other hand, by it was kept sweet and feminine. With this delicacy very naturally went a mental keen- ness. So searching was her agile mind that while yet a primary pupil, early winter mornings she awoke her sis- ters to trace places on the map. So small was she at this time that she had to be lifted up and carried to school through the snow-drifts upon her brother 's shoulders. When eight years old, she entered Colonel Stone's Oxford Plains High School. Back home again but a little bundle of nerves, she was wisely left for a while to the development that comes from life out of doors on her father's three hundred acre farm. Feeding ducks, milking cows, riding saw-logs, racing through primeval pines, grinding paint, mixing putty, hanging paper, in this industrial training and in the atmosphere of play and animal pets, lay chapters of her education fully as important as any other. HER POINT OF DEPARTUEE, THE PATH OF DUTY By the time she was eleven, her brothers had caught the mill-fever and engaged in building mills on the French River — first saw-mills, later mills for the manufacture of satinet. It happened that one of these brothers, David, fell at a barn-raising from the top to the bottom. Leeches and bleeding did little for the resulting fever, and for two years Clara gave up all to stay by her brother's side, char- acteristically rendering not only '^ first aid," but last aid 154 MASTER 31 INDS and aid all the time "to the injured." The only intervals of relaxation lay in the reading from the poems of Scott and the Great Poets of England. But who can say that this which seemed from an educational standpoint a wasted epoch, was not the pivotal epoch on which turned her career, the epoch in which she discovered herself and her genius ? How much this path of duty proved a point of depart- ure to her destiny as one of the world 's three Unveiled Sis- ters of Mercy, God only knows. "It was an accidental turn," she to-day declares, but ' * an accidental turn that changed my entire course. ' ' The follo^ving few years of schooling led her mind up to the mysteries of chemistry, Latin, philosophy, and the usual eye-opening books of an advanced high school. Yet her teachers' personalities were the chief educational asset, for they M^ere sterling worthies as rich in character as in instruction. Like Lucy Larcom, though not like her because she had to, Clara Barton democratically and voluntarily joined the group of American girls among her brothers' mill-hands. Here as a satinet- weaver she mastered "tlie evenly-drawn wai'p and the swiftly-flying shuttles." In contrast to mill-life the Barton home was the centre of culture for the community, a roof-tree for visiting lec- turers, literati and clergymen. ' ' She has all the qualities of a ' teacher. Give her a school to teach," was the advice of one of these. So at fifteen she began to teach at District No. 9, forty pupils, some of whom were as tall as their teacher. Like Dorothy Dix, to look older she lengthened her skirts and put up her hair. Yet whether it be in the interpretation of the Beatitudes before school, or in drilling a lesson or CLARA BARTON 155 leading in play at recess, she awakened a chivalry in the noisiest boys that won the day. Even by them her depart- ure, at the age of fifteen, after the all too quickly ending year, was greeted with sobs. In similar manner the teach- ing of other schools followed in her native town. After a course of study at Clinton Liberal Institute, New York, Miss Barton followed up her successful school ven- ture by a harder test at Bordentown, New Jersey. Great prejudice existed against a free school. "A pack of row- dies," was up to this time the verdict of the people. Men teachers had failed; how could she succeed? Failure beforehand was predicted. Nevertheless she volunteered to give her services for three months, just to show that she could do it. Herein was her stock principle of success. Appearing in the midst of others ' failure, she converted doubters by show- ing not ivords, but a way. Six pupils in a crazy shack of a school-room she in- creased in a year's time to six hundred pupils in a large edifice erected for her. Bordentown 's streets became filled not with idle and vicious children as before, but with hundreds of attendants upon a model school. In 1854 recommended to the Commissioner of the United States Patent Office, the next epoch of her life takes her to Washington, D. C. The several years she remained here she was indispensable not only for her business ability, but because of her honor, a quality greatly needed at that time, owing to the stealing of inventions by employees. The male clerks, to whose eyes she was an interloper, ranged themselves in rows each day, leaning against the walls, whistling softly as eyes on the ground and, uneon- quered, she passed by. Day after day she ran the gauntlet till the bolder clerks, venturing lying slanders, were dis- 156 MASTERMINDS missed, "for the good of the service," as ring-leaders of disorder. "what is money IP I HAVE NO COUNTRY?" In 1861 came the war. The Government was financially embarrassed. Could she help ? Yes ; she could give up her salary for her country and do, unpaid, the additional work of two disloyal clerks as an act of patriotic free grace. To the querulousness of friends who demurred at her generosity, she answered, several years later: "What is money if I have no country ? ' ' In the spirit of this rejoinder she was now to act. She met at the train the wounded from the first clash at Balti- more, supplied the men mth food, and from the Pres- ident's desk in the Senate Chamber, where they were quar- tered, acquainted them with the bulletins of the fight from which they had come. The letters home of the soldiers soon overflowed her rooms with supplies, which she transferred to warehouses. Filled with heartaches at the news and scenes from the front, she left Washington and hastened to her father's Massachusetts home in Worcester County, where she con- fided her resolve to go personally to their aid, and elicited this reply from the old veteran : "Go, if it is your duty to go. I know what soldiers are, and that every true soldier will respect you and your errand. ' ' But the wounded men on Potomac boats stirred her to go beyond the lines. "No place for a woman!" This curt prohibition con- fronted her. Red-tape blocked her way. Point-blank the officers refused to let her cross the lines. Claiia Bauton (From tlie portrait takeii of lier in her regulation field costume at the height of her service in the Civil War, and authorized by her) CLARA BARTON 157 Going straight to the Assistant Quartermaster General of the army, she described the swamps of Chickahominy, where soldiers were weltering in their own blood, which dried npon unattended wounds already quite matted with mud and filth. In tears, he gave his consent and supplied transportation. Leaving organized circles of women at the Capitol, at the front Clara Barton entered the lines — alone. ''the angel of the battlefield " Through the eyes of her contemporary, Lucy Larcom, "we may look back and catch a glimpse of her in the dark- ness of the rainy midnight bending over a dying boy, who took her supporting arm and soothing voice for his sister's; or falling into a brief sleep on the wet ground in her tent, almost under the feet of flying cavalry ; or riding in on her train of army-wagons toward another field, subduing by the way a band of mutinous teamsters into her firm friends and allies; or at the terrible Battle of Antietam (where the regular army supplies did not arrive till three days after- ward), furnishing from her wagons cordials and bandages for the wounded, making gruel for the fainting men from the meal in which her medicines had been packed, extract- ing with her own hand a bullet from the cheek of a wounded soldier, tending the fallen all day, with her throat parched and her face blackened by sulphurous smoke ; and at night when the surgeons were dismayed at finding them- selves left with only one half-burnt candle amid thousands of bleeding, dying men, illuminating the field with candles and lanterns her forethought had supplied. No wonder they called her ' The Angel of the Battlefield. ' ""We may see her at Fredericksburg attending to the wounded who were brought to her, whether they were the 15S MASTERMINDS blue or the ^ay. One rebel officer, whose death agonies she soothed, besought her with his last breath not to cross the river, betraying to her that the movements of the rebels were only a ruse to draw the Union troops on to destruc- tion. It is needless to say that she followed the soldiers across the Rappahannock, undaunted by the dying man's warning. And we may watch her after the defeat, when the half-starved, half-frozen soldiers were brought to her, having great fires built to lay them around, administering cordials and causing an old chimney to be pulled down for bricks to heat and warm them with, while she herself had but the shelter of a tattered tent between her and the piercing winds." Such were the times when her gown was dyed with the blood of fallen soldiers whom she again and again raised to administer cordial to their lips. At Fort Wagner's siege, ill in a tent, she was begged to retire to Port Royal. Fifteen hundred men had fallen in an hour. There was no good water. It was fiercely hot. The air was heavy with malaria. IMorris Island, a grave- yard, was occupied successively by Southern and Union troops, and raked by all the forts, including Sumter and Wagner. "Do you think I will leave here during a bombardment?" she replied. There she stood her ground, bandaging and saving from death all she could, whether bleeding generals dragging the stump of shot-off legs, or slaves with arms torn to shreds. General Voris of Ohio thus recalls his final deliverance at her hands : ' ' I was shot with an enfield cartridge within one hundred and fifty yards of the fort, and so disabled that I could not go forward. I was in an awful predicament, perfectly CLARA BARTON 159 exposed to canister from Waprncr and shell from Oreprs and Sumter in front ajid the enfilade from James Island. I tried to dig a trench in the sand with my sabre, into which I migrht crawl, bnt the dry sand would fall back in my face about as fast as I could scrape it out with my narrow imple- ment. Failing: in this, on all fours I crawled toward the lee of the beach. A charf^re of canister all around me aroused my reverie to thoujjhts of aetion. I worked my way back on hands and loiees like a turtle for two hundred yards. ' ' Found and carried to shelter he awoke, he recalls, as from a rapturous dream of his wife soothing his pain, to see Clara Barton bathing his temples and fanning his fevered face. With his leg shot away, but for her he would have died. It is the observation of another general that Miss Barton, rather than abandon a desperately wounded boy, once came very near falling into the hands of the enemy. The inci- dent occurred at the retreat of Pope during the several days' fighting at the second Battle of Bull Run. "Miss Barton was about stepping on the last car convey- ing the wounded from the field, with the enemy 's cavalry in sight and shot and shell from their guns falling into our dis- ordered ranks, when a soldier told her there was left behind in the pine bushes, where he had fallen, a wounded young soldier that could not live, and that he was calling for his mother. "She followed her guide to where the boy lay. It was growing dark and rainy. She raised him up and quietly soothed him. "When he heard her voice, he said in his delirium : * Oh, my mother has come. Don 't leave me to die in these dark woods alone. Do stay with me. Don't leave me. ' 160 MASTER MINDS ''At that moment an officer cried out to her: 'Come immediately or yon will fall into the hands of the rebels. They are on us.' "'Well, take this boy!' 'No,' said the officer; 'there is no transportation for dying: men ; we have hardly room for the living. Come quick ! ' * ' ' Then I will stay with this poor boy ; we both go or both stay!' ' ' Both were therefore taken on the car and the wounded boy carried to one of the "Washington hospitals, where his New England mother found him, nursed him and closed his eyes in death." Years later, at the time of the Charleston^ earth- quake, she reviewed the old-time battle-scenes off Morris Island by the side of the very Southern officer who had raked the Northern army with shot and shell. Just afterwards with the same hand that under the impulse of the moment she had shortly before joined with the officer's, she wrote this mis- sive, to go to the reunion of the Yates Phalanx of Illinois: "Tell them as I stood in the dismantled dome of Charles- ton Orphan House and looked over the bay upon the glit- tering sands of Morris Island, I found us all there again; and that in memor^^ I saw the bayonets glisten ; the 'swamp angel' threw her bursting bombs, the fleet thun- dered its cannonade, and the little dark line of blue trailed its way in the dark to the belching walls of Wagner. Tell them from me what you will not of yourself, that I saw them on, up and over the parapets into the jaws of death, and heard the clang of the death-dealing sabres as they grappled with the foe. I saw the ambulances laden with iSouth Carolina. CLABA BARTON 161 a^ony and the wounded slowly crawling to me down the tide-washed beach, Voris and Cumminger gaspinj? in their blood; heard the deafeninof clatter of the hoofs of 'Old Sam' as Elwell madly p-alloped np under the walls of the fort for orders. I heard the tender, wailing: fife, the muffled drum and the last shots as the pitiful little graves grew thick in the shifting sands ! " But to follow Clara Barton through the scenes and crises through which she passed in the Civil "War would be to reproduce many of the campaigns themselves.^ Suffice it to say that her post always lay at the front and that she remained always the same, "The Angel of the Battlefield." In 1864 General Butler placed her as head of the nurses of the hospitals in the Army of the James. After the war, bushels of letters asking for missing men led her to assuage grief at many thousands of homes by organizing her kindly service into the system of the "Bureau of Records for Missing Men." At Andersonville alone, all but four hundred of thir- teen thousand graves were identified. It was in the midst of this errand of mercy that, scolded by friends at her expenditure of her own. she quietly said : "What is money, if I have no country?" Four years Miss Barton devoted to this Bureau. In 1869 rest in the Alps proved not a "quitting the mor- iThe battlefields in the American Civil War where Miss Barton was most active included: Cedar Mountain, Antietam, Fredericksburg, the siege of Charleston (where she served eight months), Morris Island, Fort Wagner, Petersburg, about Eichmond, and in the battles of the Wilderness. In addition to these are the European wars, the Spanish War, and the great national disasters. 11 162 MASTERMINDS tal career," for at this time there burst upon Europe the horrors of the Franco-Prussian War (1870). Against its bloodshed a great vision opened to Clara Barton. It was the Red Cross. Five years before, the Red Cross Society had been founded at Geneva, its object the lessening of war's hor- rors by rendering neutral, surgeons, chaplains, the wounded and their bearers, also hospitals and supplies. The United States was not among the signatory powers. This fact stabbed her heart with pain she could not for- get. But at the battlefields of the Franco-Prussian War Miss Barton's strong executive hand and organizing brain found plenty to do. The twenty thousand homeless at capit- ulated Strasburg she cared for and furnished forty thou- sand garments. Hundreds of demoralized women groveling in cellars she brought out again to the light. With the Grand Duchess Louise of Baden, who had turned her castles into hospitals, she became a co-worker. The decorations of the Golden Cross of Baden were pinned on her breast by the Grand Duchess, and the Iron Cross of Germany by the Emperor, her father, a decoration given only to the brave in battle. These with the Servian Red Cross presented by Queen Natalie of Servia, together with jeweled decorations from the Crown of Spain, the Sul- tan of Turkey, the Czar of Russia, the government of Bel- gium, and many others, are among the many outward tokens by which Clara Barton recalls these battlefields of the world. She was at the storming of Metz and with the wounded at Sedan. She also distributed food at the Commune in Paris (1871-2) when in a riot, though the mob overcame the po- lice, they greeted her with the acclamation : "God! It is an angel. " CLARA BARTON 163 TIER VISION OF THE RED CROSS But throiio'h it all, in the ligrht of the revolution it had effected as to the wounded in war, nothinj:^ could erase from Clara Barton's consciousness the Red Cross. It came up before her as especially vivid as she saw its absence in America. In the whole world, indeed, previous to the treaty of Geneva, the wounded had no rights; neither had the sick. This was a factor of even more crv'ing significance, for even up to the late Japanese War, ten deaths from disease to one of violence is the ratio of fatalities. Now, by this treat}', the sick as well as the wounded and their attendants, under the Red Cross flag, were equally neutral, and subject to the same care the captors gave their own. At the time of this vision of the Red Cross which thus arose, "I thought," said Miss Barton, "of the Peninsular Campaign, of Pittsburg Landing, Cedar Mountain, and Sec- ond Bull Run, Antietam, old Fredericksburg with its acres of snow-covered and gun-covered glacis and its fourth-day flag of truce, of its dead, and starving, wounded, frozen to the ground, and our commissions, and their supplies in Washington with no effective organization or power to go beyond ; of the Petersburg mine with its four thousand dead and wounded and no flag of truce, the wounded broiling in a July sun, the dead bodies putrefying where they fell. As I saw the work of these Red Cross societies in the field, accomplishing in four months under their systematic organization what we failed to accomplish in four years without it — no mistakes, no needless suffering, no waste, no confusion, but order, plenty, cleanliness, and comfort wher- ever that little flag made its way, a whole continent mar- shaled under the banner of the Red Cross, — as I saw all 164 MASTER MINDS this and joined and worked in it, you will not wonder that I said to myself: " 'If I live to return to my country, I will try to make my people understand the Red Cross and that treaty.' But I did more than resolve ; I promised other nations I would do it, and other reasons pressed me to remember it." Several years of suffering came as an inevitable reaction from the American and European campaigns. Nearly one year Miss Barton lay bedridden in the fogs and smoke of London. Back to America in 1873 to lie two years more a helpless invalid, she forgot the use of her limbs in walking. She may have forgotten how to walk, yet the purpose and the promise to establish the Red Cross in America she never forgot. At her recovery, anxiously backed from abroad by the members of the International Committee of Geneva as the last hope, she was able in 1876, with letters from its Presi- dent, to lay the matter before the United States Govern- ment, but without success. Then ensued five years of hard, incessant labor on her part before it ended in persuading the government to join the thirty-one great states of the world that had signed the Red Cross treaty of Geneva. Upon the refusal of the Cab- inet at Washington to adhere to the Geneva Convention, on the 21st of May, 1881, Miss Barton called a meeting at the Capitol. On the 9th of June she summoned a second meet- ing, solemnly setting forth the critical question of the Red Cross for America. The same day President Garfield made Miss Barton President of the Society for the United States. In March, 1882, President Arthur signed the treaty of Geneva. Clara Barton thus became the founder of the Red Cross in America. At once adopted by the Senate and CLARA BARTON 165 ratified by the International Congress at Berne, it entrenched forever the Red CroSvS in this country. Referring to the linking of tlie United States to the chain of international societies of the Red Cross, the President of that assembly, at Geneva, September 2, 1882, thus charac- terized the event: ''Its vi^hole history is associated with a name already known to you — that of Miss Clara Barton. Without the energy and perseverance of this remarkable woman, we should not for a long time have had the pleasure of seeing the Red Cross received in the United States. ' ' In the United Stales but four lines in an obs<3ure comer of the Washington Press proclaimed the event. But in Europe the streets of the cities of France, Germany, Swtz- erland and Spain blazed with celebrant bonfires. There afresh they had learned in suffering what they ' ' taught in song. ' ' The United States was yet, as to the Red Cross, to learn its lesson. Here the Red Cross, so obscure at first, was not to grow upon the people until it rushed to the relief of National disasters and later to its work in the Spanish- American War, Disasters soon came. But before them, for a year, by request of the Governor, Miss Barton's hand and head were needed for double duty at the Reformatory for Women at Sherborn, ]\Iassachusetts. There convicted outcasts fell under the spell of her per- sonality, a good example of which occurred when, for instance, an inmate pushed her way out of the bushes in the garden where she had been put to work, startling Miss Bar- ton to demand : ' ' What is it ? " "I heard you coming," was the only reply, "and I just wanted to look at you ! ' ' Taking the place of superintendent of a State institution with hundreds of convicts, doing the work of the man secre- 166 MASTERMINDS tSLiy and treasurer in addition, as in all the confusing accounts that came in war and disaster, Miss Barton's bud- get was found to tally to a detail. THE RED CROSS IN NATIONAL DISASTERS Soon began the train of national disasters which brought the Red Cross into greatness in America. In the year of 1881 occurred the Michigan forest-fires, when a large section of the State was afire. As President of the Red Cross, Miss Barton acted at once, readiness being the watchword of her organization. Starting as usual with the contents of her own purse, she occupied the field through her agent. Dr. Hubbell, who later became a field veteran in every catastrophe, and remains a veteran yet by her side to-day. Miss Barton first awoke the Senators to the situation and then she filled the press with broadsides. Society at large she thus got well under way to forward field relief and supplies to the stricken State. On the ashes of this disaster the Red Cross arose afiame with recognition and fame. In 1883, while still at Sherborn, came the floods of the Mississippi and Ohio, met also through Red Cross agencies. In 1884 came still greater floods in the Ohio and Missis- sippi valleys. To these Miss Barton went in person, with a force of efficient help, chartering steamers, of which she took command herself. She plied the swollen waters with supplies of relief to people from Cincinnati to New Orleans, feeding the hungiy, clothing the nailed, and rescuing the stock left to starve on the banks and levees. Later, as the water subsided, she sheltered the thousands of homeless. CLARA BARTON 167 Ready money for instant relief, no paid officers, no solicited funds, no red tape, instantaneous action, — with these fundamental principles, quick steps could be at once taken. This system it was that allowed Miss Barton in her chartered steamer, piled to the hurricane-deck with sup- plies, to rim down the swollen Ohio, feed victims at second- story windows, and clothe and give fuel to thousands "wringing their hands on a frozen fireless shore." From side to side, from village to village, steamed the relief-boat for eight thousand miles, distributing one hundred seventy- five thousand dollars' worth of supplies, leaving the drowned-out inhabitants agape with wonder and tear- stained with gratitude. For months Miss Barton kept her boats plying to and fro, ministering to the malarial, the homeless and the sick, and scattering among them ten thou- sand dollars' worth of seeds and implements with which they might start again. Following the example of St. Louis and Chicago, relief circles everywhere formed, even groups of children, all sharing the contagious passion to join the work of relief. ' ' All the country knows what you have done, and is more than satisfied, ' ' wrote the United States Secretary of State. Tbus awakened at last to the scope and greatness of the Red Cross, in 1884 the nation appointed four delegates to the International Red Cross Conference at Geneva. In 1885 midwinter startled the country by drawing back the curtain upon many thousands of American people on the verge of starvation in Texas. Lured to settle by a rail- road which had muzzled the press, these settlers were left to die in cold, famine and wretchedness. In person Miss Bar- ton visited the stricken district, then appeared before the editors of the Dallas papers, who confessed they had been blinded, and stood aghast at her expos^. They at once 168 MASTERMINDS struck off a new edition of the evening papers embodying her exposure, and as a result one hundred thousand dollars rolled in for the relief of the sufferers. In 1887 the International Red Cross at Geneva again called the attention of the United States to the Fourth International Conference to be held at Carlsruhe by invita- tion of the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess of Baden. Delegates were sent, always of course as a necessity, includ- ing Miss Barton as the indispensable "esprit de corps." In 1888 cyclones at Mt. Vernon, Illinois, found Miss Bar- ton on the field even while the inhabitants stood yet dazed and stupefied. ' ' The pitiless snow is falling on the heads of three thou- sand people who are without homes, without food or cloth- ing and without money ! ' ' This message vibrating on the wires from Illinois from Clara Barton was enough to accumulate almost instantly ninety thousand dollars' worth of supplies. Now came a new call. Yellow fever broke out in Florida and led Miss Barton at once to organize immime nurses and physicians to see the dying through, and speed in a special train from place to place till the epidemic had died out. Thousands were saved. To get to the plague-spots Miss Barton's determined band went on and through, even if it demanded riding in dirt-cars over dangerous trestles. Sunday morning, the 30th of May, 1889, the country was shocked by the breaking in Pennsylvania of the dam above Johnstown, leaving four thousand dead and thirty thousand unfed and homeless in the gutted bed of the reservoir's spent torrent. For five months, with an expenditure of one half a mil- lion in supplies and money. Miss Barton remained at the stricken centre of industry, always working in harmony CLARA BARTON 169 with the main State relief appointed by the Governor, which distributed six and a half millions in money. She had made her way there over washed-out gullies, broken engines and mud-banked highways only to find the Gen- eral in charge wondering "what a poor lone woman could do." She answered, as always, not in words, but in actions. Six huge and hastily erected buildings became Red Cross "hotels." Twenty-five thousand persons were received. Another even more mammoth "hotel" was raised. Two hundred and eleven thousand dollars was in all distributed in supplies, and thirty-nine thousand dollars in money, leaving no single case of unrelieved suffering.^ RUSSIA Now the Red Cross was drawn from home disasters to extend "hands across the sea." By failure of crops in Russia in 1891 a million square miles were without harvest owing to crop failures. Thirty-nine million people were famine-stricken ! Even at this news the House of Repre- sentatives defeated a bill for an appropriation. But the Red Cross took up the fallen cause. Societies everywhere responded. The Elks initiated the largesses. Then a spirit of relief swept the country. Pennsylvania sent a ship from Philadelphia. The Christian Herald sent a ship's cargo in its own vessel. Iowa shipped one hundred seven- teen thousand bushels of com and one hundred thousand pounds of flour in a British steamer to Riga, and to Riga lA broach and pendant of diamonds the people of Johnstown presented Miss Barton as an outward token of her memorable ser- vice. These lie among the collection of other rich jewels and in- signia. 170 MASTERMINDS to distribute these argosies of grain proceeded the Red Cross field officer, Dr. Hubbell. August 28th, 1893, a hurricane and tidal wave submerged the Port Royal Islands, sixteen feet below the surface, off South Carolina. Five thousand negroes were drowned and thirty thousand left without homes, which, as they moaned, were "done gone" or "ractified. " The Governor of South Carolina called the Red Cross, and for ten months, endeared to the stricken natives as "Miss Clare," Miss Barton presided over operations in the field. From fifteen to twenty thousand refugees who had flocked to one place she re-distributed. Immediate wants of food and clothes once relieved, to reconstruct society fell to her also, a thing which she did, backed by one million feet of pine lumber, quantities of seed for replanting, and thirty thousand dollars in money. Altogether Miss Barton rehoused and rehabilitated in society thirty thousand sur- vivors ! ' ' Miss Clare ? ' ' pleaded one darkey. — The rest he enacted with action eloquent in pathos as he pulled up a ragged sleeve disclosing an ugly scar. "Wagner?" exclaimed Miss Barton. * * Yes, you drissed that for me that night I crawled down the beach. I was with Colonel Shaw; you drissed our wounz ! ' ' ARMENIA In 1895 and 1896 came the Armenian massacres in Asiatic Turkey. A large fund was forthcoming and ready to be distrib- uted from England and America. But how and by whom? All eyes turned to the Red Cross. CLARA BARTON 171 The butchered could not be brought back to life. But in the regions burnt and i-aided by Kurds thousands of human beings were starving and tens of thousands orphaned and helpless. They could go to these. The International Red Cross alone could reach a zone so jealous of interference of other nations. iV^o^t-political, wow- sectarian — it could enter where an army could not. So it was thought by all. Yet suspicious of political intrigue and interference, word came from the authorities in Turkey that "not even so reputable an organization as the Red Cross ' ' would be allowed to enter Turkey. But trusting in the strength of the treat^^, which she understood so well, and her confidence in the power and the humanity of national governments, the risk was taken and she went for- ward. "We honor your position and your wishes shall be respected. Such aid and protection as w^e are able we shall render. ' ' So said Tewfik Pasha, and the pledge was never broken. Five great expeditions the Red Cross sent through Arme- nian Turkey, from sea to sea, distributing, repairing, heal- ing, settling in homes and enhousing villagers. Yet they were not through. A plague of small-pox was destroying thousands at Marash and Zeitoon. One hun- dred a day were dying. In response to the plea of the British Embassy in Constantinople, the Red Cross started a long train of caravans for the infected district. May 24th, under such hero physicians as Dr. Harris of Tripoli, the disease was overcome — one of the preeminent medical vic- tories of all time. When the fugitives were once reinstated in their houses and villages, and food and clothes, seeds, sickles, knives. 172 MASTER 31 INDS looms and wheels were provided, even the cattle driven off by the Kurds into the mountain-passes were bought or reclaimed, and to these two thousand plow-oxen were added. October 8th, 1896, at "Washington, Clara Barton's wel- come home was celebrated by a banquet of the citizens. ''wait a moment, miss barton " In 1898 Cuba added its rubrics to American history. It also impressed its red letters into the annals of the Red Cross. At the news of the reconcentrados suffering under Weyler, the Red Cross in three days organized the Cuban Relief Committee to meet the intolerable conditions among the families driven by Weyler into towns — penniless, home- less, unfed and sick. Prevented from going at once to the front, Miss Barton proceeded to the Secretary of State. "He is with the President, ' ' was the reply with which she was checked. In the lobby she was turned away, but she heard McKin- ley's kind voice cry, "Wait a moment. Miss Barton." Ushered into the President's room she found President McKinley himself as well as the Secretary of State. The President's benign face, to grow so soon ashen white as the war clouds gathered, expanded with a gentle and assuring welcome. He was in a quandary over the very question she had come to ask about— the alleviation of the recon- centrados. The result of the conference was that February 6th she left Washington for Cuba, reaching Havana February 9th to bring relief to the thousands of men, women and chil- dren. The men were like walking skeletons, the mothers mere racks of bones, the babies they carried but little shells of living clay. CLARA BARTON 173 For this work Spain itself had sent her the royal grant and blessing. MISS BARTON IN THE SPANISH WAR But on the night of February 15th, while at her desk arranging for the distribution of supplies, suddenly the table tottered, the house shook, a blast burst open the reranda door, revealing amid a deafening roar a lurid blaze seaward. Amid the ringing of bells and the blowing of whistles came the cry: ''The Maine has blown up!'* Over tsvo hundred were lost and some forty wounded were picked up, and Miss Barton and her nurses being ready, these fell at once into their care. "I am with the wounded," came her cable from Havana. "Suspend judgment," had cabled the Maine's captain. But gradually and irrepressibly the verdict veered to war, and hostilities began. The Red Cross proceeded to secure the steamship State of Texas, a fourteen-hundred-ton boat with a black hull. On it, April 29th, Clara Barton, who had returned at the outbreak, set sail from New York for the open Caribbean. June 20th came orders to report at Santiago to Admiral Sampson, who, as fighting had begun, had advised Miss Barton to proceed to Guantanamo. ''It's the Rough Riders we go to, and the relief may be rough, but it will be ready, ' ' she said. Siboney was reached at 9 p.m. ' ' Ha ! — a woman nurse ? ' ' Again Miss Barton, a veteran to this question, faced an army. As usual her answer came not in words, but acts. Gar- cia 's abandoned house she fitted up as a hospital. In three days her ability so impressed those in command that there 174 MASTER 31 INDS came to her the plea from headquarters ' * to find it possible to care for patients in view of a coming; engagement!" So the Red Cross flag flew to the breeze, and the 1st and 2d of July the engagement came. The historic file of sol- diers had made its way up San Juan. After it soldiers by the score, sick or wounded, were lying everywhere. The blood had dried and caked with mud on their garments over their wounds, as their bodies were necessarily stripped by the surgeons, who had no clothing to replace them with. Many of them, therefore, lay naked, exposed to the sun's fierce tropic heat and to insectivora, daily rains, and shiv- ering cold at night. For an awful stretch of thirty hours surgeons loaded the operating-tables. Saturday came hurried orders from General Shafter: "Send food, medicines — anything. Seize wagotis from the front for transportation!" The army supplies in ships lay off at sea, with no dock and no means of landing them. But from the decks of the steamer State of Texa.s and back on a surf no small boat could weather, Miss Barton nevertheless sent supplies ! By ha^ang natives leap overboard in the breakers and seizing the flat boat pontoons in which she had lightered these sup- plies, she succeeded in landing the precious necessaries. Improvising transport wagons out of hay-carts, on one of which she herself rode, she made her way to the front, to the First Division Hospital, Fifth Army Corps, of General Shafter, The field she found a morass. The tents were but dog tents staked in the coarse grass. She saw men wounded, freshly operated upon, still l>dng unprotected in the sun and rain by day, and the chill by night. Seventeen died that night. In the battle besides the killed, five hundred were wounded. Altogether eight hundred lay in tents or CLARA BARTON 175 sprawled npon the fyrass. No fires were lit except such as came from wet wood smouldering- from six bricks overlaid with two pieces of wagon-tire. Above them were small camp-kettles, in which the detailed soldiers were trying to make coffee for their wonnded comrades. But soon Miss Barton had erected high fire-places. Over these she placed great agate camp-kettles holding six and seven gallons apiece. In the cheerful blaze they watched her unwind mammoth white bolts of unbleached cotton for covering for the men. Gruel, the first in three days, was soon simmering in all the great agate kettles, sending out its savor to the half-famished and the wounded. "Who sent it?" was everywhere the tearful query. Five Red Cross nurees met each arrival. These were Sis- ter Bettina, wife of the Red Cross surgeon; Dr. Lesser, the noted head of the Red Cross Hospital in New York city; Sister Minnie, Sister Isabel, Sister Anna and Sister Blanche. They served, as they thus met each fresh arrival of a wounded body, for a forty hours' stretch of sleepless ser- vice. All night and day and night again, one by one, wounded and sick and shelterless were being taken under cover and care. Early in the dawn of the first day after the engagement a rough figure in broAvn khaki appeared at the little Red Cross hospital. His clothes showed hard service, and a red bandanna handkerchief hung from his hat to protect the back of his neck from the already broiling sun-rays. "I have some sick men with the regiment who refuse to leave it. They need such delicacies as yon have here which I am ready to pay for out of my own pocket. Can I buy them?" "Not for a million dollars!" 176 MASTER 31 INDS "But my men need these things," he said, his face and tone expressing anxiety. ' ' I think a great deal of my men. I am proud of them. ' ' "And we know we are proud of you, Colonel; but we can't sell hospital supplies." ' ' Then how can I get them ? ' ' ' ' Just ask for them. Colonel. ' ' "Oh," he said, his face suddenly lighting up with a bright smile. "Lend me a sack and I'll take them right along. ' ' Slinging the ponderous sack over his shoulder, the last they saw was the rough figure in khaki, overtopped by the red bandanna, swinging off out of sight through the jungle. It was Theodore Eoosevelt ! At last the Spaniards' wall of ships was broken and Cer- vera's fleet forced out of the bottled-up harbor. But in the besieged islands thousands of reconcentrados were famishing and without shelter. A demand for thirty thousand rations came at one call. There to meet it was Clara Barton and the black-hulled supply-ship Texas. But red-tape orders due to fear of fever contagion stood between the Red Cross and the landing of supplies. At her appeal, however, July 16, 1898, the President of the Red Cross was ordered to proceed at once to the flag- ship of Admiral Sampson herself. She had only to refer to the twelve hundred tons of food, of which only two hun- dred had been landed, and the thousands in crying need at Santiago, while still beyond that were the thirty thousand dying and suffering at El Caney. It was enough to win Admiral Sampson's consent. Then came the Sunday's crisis when the Spanish fleet came out to its doom. Just afterwards Admiral Sampson dispatched a pilot to board the Red Cross ship the State of Texas. CLARA BARTON 177 Orders were ^iven Miss Barton to proceed. "With the Red Cross streamer aloft, Clara Barton ran the Texas past the gxms of Morro, past the smoking wrecks of the Spanish men-of-war, past the sunken Merriraac. The sun was setting on an empurpled sea. No mine was struck. No other craft ploughed the grave-like waters. On they went — "a cargo of food under the direction of a woman! '^ Hers was the first ship to enter the captured port. As her ship neared the spires of Santiago, Miss Barton asked : ' ' Is there any one who can sing the Doxology ? ' ' "Praise God!" rang from the deck, followed by "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." This was the ship's order of entrance: the Red Cross ship, by far away the first; after her the flagships of Admirals Sampson and Schley. "Directions?" flagged Miss Barton. " Yow need no directions from me, hut if any one troubles you let me know," signaled Admiral Sampson. While Shafter negotiated with Santiago, the Spanish wounded were tenderly sent back on American stretchers, General Shafter demonstrating to the letter the Genevan Treaty of equal care to the enemy's woiuided. During this, General Toral's troops stood at present-arms, suffering a mental revolution at the sight, for they had been filled with the medieval fear of butchery. Clara Barton and the Red Cross in Cuba were thus memorialized when, on December 6th, President McKinley sent in his message to Congress : "Zi^ is a pleasure to me to mention in terms of cordial appreciation the timely and useful work of the Red Cross, both in relief measures preparatory to the campaigns, in sanitary assistance to several of the camps of assemblage, 12 178 MASTERMINDS a7id l-ater under the able and experienced leadership of Miss Clara Barton on the fields of battle and in the hospi- tals at the front in Cuba. The Bed Cross has fully main- tained its already high reputation for intense earnestness and ability to exercise the noble purposes of its inter- national organization.'' AT THE GALVESTON FLOOD A tidal wave and tornado of terrific and titanic force on September 8, 1900, swept over the seas and submerged Gal- veston, the metropolis of Texas. Containing some forty thousand human souls, with the island on which it stood and the adjoining mainland, the buried city was engulfed in the ripping fury of the waves. Lives to the awful num- ber of from eight thousand to ten thousand were suddenly lost in the cataclysm of flood and cyclone, which crushed like eggshells four thousand homes of the people, only to dro\\Ti these people like rats in the hurtling debris. The thousands of survivors "through a terrible day of storm and a night of horror floated and swam and struggled, amid the storm-beaten waves, with the broken slate roofs of all these houses hurled like cannon-shot against them, cutting, breaking, crushing ; meeting in the waves obstacles of every sort from a crazed cow fighting for its life to a mad mocca- sin-snake — perhaps to come out at last on some beach miles away, among people as strange and bewildered as them- selves. Some of them struggled back to find possibly a few members of the family left, the rest among the several thou- sand of whom nothing is known." When the waters subsided, eight thousand and more wan- dered, dazed and destitute, in the sand which coated the land, but in which tent-stakes could not be successfully fixed to afford even the shelter of wind-tossed canvas. CLARA BARTON 179 Confronting: these refugees and victims as they opened their eye.s, sliook off their stupor and beeame conscious of the catastrophe, was only (to use Miss Barton's eyes) "the d^^'bris of broken houses, crushed to splinters and piled twenty feet hicrh, alono- miles of sea-coast, where even six blocks wide of the city itself was gone, and the sea rolled and tossed over what was lately its finest and most thickly populated avenues; heaps of splintered wood were filled with the furniture of once beautiful habitations — beds, pianos, chairs, tables, — all that made up happy homes. "Worse than that, the bodies of the owuers were rotting therein, twenty or thirty of them being taken out every day, as workmen removed the rubbish and laid it on great piles of ever-burning fire, covering the corpses with mat- tresses, doors, boards — anything that was found near them, and then left to burn out or go away in impregnated smoke, while the weary workmen 'toiled' on for the next." Almost every family in the city had all or part of its members among the dead, while the li\dng, for the most part without a roof, remained to suffer in the blasts of the retreating hurricane and coming nor 'casters. To succor and shelter the thirty thousand people left, one-third of whom at least were huddling in the wreckage like cattle in a pen, came the Red Cross, headed by Clara Barton in person. September 13th Texas City, just opposite Galveston, was reached, after the first news of the disaster at Washington, by Clara Barton and her committee. While awaiting the boat across the bay, Miss Barton's party were met by the local caretakers of the many injured who were being cared for in crowded quarters in Texas City itself, although it mostly lay stricken level to the ground. Across the bay the doomed city of Galveston appeared lighted not by elec- 180 MASTER MINDS trie arcs, but by vast funeral pyres on the coast of the island and the adjoining mainland. Twenty-three funeral piles ]\Iiss Barton could count at one time. Everywhere the air reeked as it was to reek for months with the acrid smoke of burnt human flesh, frequently thirty bodies and more being in one of the awful pyres. These only could destroy them, as the tide had carried bodies away but to return them to be cast upon the shore. At hand, Miss Bar- ton and her committee were confronted by hosts of refugees, whom the little harbor-boat kept landing on the beach at Texas City. All were sufferers, whether maimed or dazed. Lunatics and unnumbered cases of nervous prostration caused by the late terror arrived \\dth the rest. Thus warned of the catastrophe's extent, next morning Miss Barton's committee took the boat to the stricken city. At a first interview a representative of the party was told that the city "needed no nurses!" At the quick reply of Miss Barton's spokesman that she "was glad, as they had none to give," the look of surprise which followed upon the face of the high-keyed local head of medical relief was countered by the Red Cross representative 's rebuttal : "What are you most in need of?" "Surgical dressings and medical supplies." Telegraphing the huge order it was filled and receipted by the Red Cross in twenty- four hours ! Thus learned the Galveston local committee of relief that the Bed Cross had come with the country behind its back. Thus they learned that a Nation was subject to the Red Cross' beck and call. ''What do you most needf" was asked of the chief of police. * ' Homes, ' ' was the reply. CLARA BARTON 181 Estimating the material needed for homes, Miss Barton at once sent over the whole United States a plea to all lum- ber, hardware and furniture dealers. Pacing the actual needs, the Red Cross thus went to work, each gi'oup with a separate department of investiga- tion empowered to meet the discovered need, whether it be for stoves, heaters, food, clothing, bedding, blankets, or other necessities of life. As the answer to these needs, from the constantly arriv- ing carloads and shiploads centralized at the Red Cross warehouses, came huge boxes, branded with the flaming Red Cross, ready to be landed at every place where clus- tered a group of survivors. The task was tremendous and but begun. Miss Barton, who herself remained two months, thus sketched the condi- tion: ' ' Dead citizens lay by thousands amid the wreck of their homes, and raving maniacs searched the debris for their loved ones, with the organized gangs of workers. Corpses, dumped by barge-loads into the Gulf, came floating back to menace the living ; and the nights were lurid with incin- erations of putrefying bodies, piled like cord-wood, black and white together, irrespective of age, sex or previous condition. At least four thousand dwellings had been swept away, with all their contents, and fully half of the population of the city was without shelter, food, clothes, or any of the necessaries of life. Of these, some were living in tents, others crowded in with friends hardly less fortunate; many half-crazed, wandering aimlessly about the streets, and the story of their sufferings, mental and physical, past the telling. Every house that remained was a house of mourning. Fires yet burned continuously, fed 182 MASTER MINDS not only by human bodies, but by thousands of carcasses of domestic animals. "By that time, in the hot, moist atmosphere of the lati- tude, decomposition had so far advanced that the corpses — which at first were decently carried in carts or on stretch- ers, then shoveled upon boards or blankets — had finally to be scooped up with pitchforks in the hands of negroes, kept at their awful task by the soldiers' bayonets. And still the 'finds' continued, at the average rate of seventy a day. The once-beautiful driving-beach was strewn with mounds and trenches, holding unrecognized and uncoffined victims of the flood ; and between this improvised cemetery and a ridge of debris, three miles long and in places higher than the houses had been, a line of cremation fires poisoned the air. ' ' Even during the sixth week in Galveston, happening to pass one of these primitive crematories, Miss Barton stopped to interview the man in charge. Boards, water- soaked mattresses, rags of blankets and curtains, part of a piano and the framework of sewing-machines piled on top, gave it the appearance of a festive bonfire, and only the familiar odor betrayed its purpose. ' ' Have you burned any bodies here ? ' ' she inquired. The custodian regarded her with a stare that plainly said, "Do you think I am doing this for amusement ? ' ' and shifted his quid from cheek to cheek before replying: "Ma'am," said he, "this 'ere fire's been goin' on more 'n a month. To my knowledge, upwards of sixty bodies have been burned in it." One department of the Red Cross took care of all sur- viving children, orphaned by the loss of parents, — a group especially appealing to the country and for which in New York alone was raised fifty thousand dollars. CLARA BARTON 183 In all it took four vast warehouses and twelve ward- stations to act as a base from which to systematize the vast work of Red Cros.s relief. Besides Galveston proper the experienced eye of Miss Barton at once saw six smitten counties on the mainland with homes destroyed, houses leveled to kindling heaps and their casualties a replica of Galveston's horrible tale of death and woe on the night of horrors of September 8. In addition in these farming districts on the main coast, all crops and farming animals were destroyed. Not only to offer charity but to help people help themselves and give them work, was the great question. Miss Barton, through her committee, at once saw the point of permanent need. One million and a half of stravv berry-plants and cases of other seeds for southern crops, through her committee she provided and added to the carloads and shiploads of immediate necessities. But there were in need one thousand square miles and sixty different towns and villages in the stricken districts on the mainland. To all these the Eed Cross, though centred at Galveston, turned its hand not only with tools and seeds for the future, but to meet the crying needs of the moment with one thousand five hundred and fifty-two huge cases, two hundred and fifty-eight barrels, five hundred and forty- two packages, thirteen casks, containing mixed clothing, shoes, crockery, hardware, groceries, disinfectants and medicine, in addition to carloads of lumber. Of the great national disasters in America in times of peace, this calamity September 8, 1900, at Galveston, has been the vastest and most destructive. Next and almost as calamitous were the Johnstown flood and the cyclone and the engulfment on the Port Royal Islands. 184 MASTER MINDS The loss of life in each of the three cataclysms was nearly in each case ten thousand human lives, while at Galveston the sums of money for relief were almost the same as at Johnstown, namely, nearly one million five hundred thou- sand dollars ! And in all these national disasters ready in times of peace as it had come to be so gloriously in times of war, extending out from the great body of our people, the hand of relief was the Red Cross, the soul of which was a little woman not standing over five feet four inches — Clara Bar- ton. Grandly institutionalized as a governmental institution as it is to-day, with first the Secretary of War and now the national President^ proud to be at the head — this Red Cross, whose hand reaches out so gloriously from the body of our people, would never have been born in America had it not been through the travail of this little woman's soul, who, to let it be born, had to fight off the very government which now so proudly and ardently has taken it out of her hands and claimed it for its own. FIRST AID TO THE INJURED But her work was not yet through. Miss Barton's genius of observation in foreign countries, especially Switz- erland and England, had shown her the great utility of first-aid work known as the St. John Ambulance, which iDec. 8th, 1908, President-elect Wm. H. Taft was re-elected Pres- ident of the American Eed Cross, asserting it would give him great pleasure to continue as its head. President Taft refused to be elected an honorary member, as he coveted the privilege of active leadership. CLABA BARTON 185 work she had been very desirous of establishing in Amer- ica; and at length, in the spring of 1903, she succeeded in establisliing under the direction of Edward Howe of Eng- land, assisted by Roscoe G. Wells and others, a headquarters of First Aid in Boston, with the purpose of making it a part of the American Red Cross work, and it was so voted and entered in the by-laws of the Red Cross of 1903. In 1904 Miss Barton resigned from the Red Cross, it having virtually become a Government institution. But in its reorganization the First Aid not being included either in its charter or bj^-laws, and as Miss Barton was still anxious for its establishment in America, she con- tinued its work at the headquarters in Boston. Of its dire and grim necessity a few statistical facts give abundant evidence. In the industries of the United States five hun- dred thousand casualties occur each year. Every minute one toiler drops either killed or injured ! In 1889 among railroad men casualties happened to one in thirty-five men. In 1905 it increased to one in nineteen — thus doubling the peril. One man dropping a minute! — It has been truly said: * * The Russo-Japanese War could not equal that ! ' ' In this industrial strife, maiming and killing in times of peace five hundred thousand a year, can not the Red Cross serve? Such a challenge has not escaped Clara Barton, in whom, when human pain is in view, her eye for its relief is not dimmed nor her natural force abated. The motive of this new and needed organization she has said is ''essentially the giving of first aid. You cannot do this by giving pink teas or by keeping accounts in an office. Such work is done by going about with your sleeves rolled up and with the immediate situation always in hand. ' ' 186 MASTER MINDS June 17, 1906, in Boston, therefore, the association born of this motive grew into an organization. It was for the purpose of instructing people in the knowledge of "First Aid to the Injured" — "what to do and how to do it in time of accident." This gathering without Miss Barton, fine as it was, would have been but an organization. With her it was an orgaiiism. "It is an organized movement," she arose to say, "that shall yet permeate more homes, penetrate more hearts, broaden more needs, carry useful knowledge to more men and women who could get it no other way, assuage more suffering that nothing else could reach, awaken an interest in the welfare of his brother man in more rough toil-worn hearts unknown to it before, than lies in our power to esti- mate or our hopes to conceive. ' ' "Twenty-five years ago, when it was my privilege to bring the germ of the Red Cross to this country, and after years of untold labor gained for it a foothold, a treaty, a charter and a working organization, I thought I had done my country and its people the most humane service it would ever be in my power to offer. "But as organized, it reached only a certain class. All the accidents incidental to family life, mechanics, chemi- cals, manufactories and railroads with their hundred thou- sand victims a year, were not within its province. "Hence the necessity and opportunity for this broader work where," she went on to say, "the sickening stab of sharpened steel, the rending of saws, the tearing of drills, the gnaw of couplers, the pinch of belts become a biting agony." "A wise Providence has permitted me to leave the one that I might stand with the other in its beginning. 'Peace CLARA BARTON 187 hath her battlefields no less than war.' The sweat of blood, the dust, dirt and grime-glued frame, the aching stress on full-strained muscle and sinew, thwart the pur- pose, blind the eye, deaden tlie will and divert the crafts- man's skill." Thus Clara Barton became President of ' ' The First Aid to the Injured," and thence the association has radiated its power till it has reached all the States of the Union, and has become a National organization, inspirited with the soul of its President. It was incorporated as a National body April 18, 1905. "Its First Aid Handbook"^ carries directions for treat- ing accidents of every kind. Illustrated with diagrams it is of great effect. Its lessons are taught in all branches of society and industry — in classes of railroad men, Y. M. C. A., police departments, gymnasiums, fire departments, boys' schools, the Salvation Army and innumerable facto- ries and centres of industries, as well as in a universal and unclassed host of individuals and homes throughout the land. Thus never ceasing to toil for her feUows in distress, the afternoon of her career Miss Barton spends in winter at her home, Glen Echo, Maryland, and in summers at her old home town of Oxford, Massachusetts, Eighty-eight years young, Clara Barton can still declare to-day, as she declared to a gathering of neigh- bors and friends not long ago : i"The Barton First Aid Text-book," 134 pp. Issued at 6 Beacon Street, Boston, by H. H. Hartung, M.D. Under Clara Barton's pen has been also issued ' ' The History of the Eed Cross, " " The History of the Eed Cross in Peace and War," and "The Story of My Childhood." 188 MASTER MINDS *'My working hours are fourteen out of twenty- four,^ It is my duty to work for the good of my kind. While the strength is given me, I have no right to lay it down. ' ' lA day with Miss Barton, Sunday, September 26th, 1909, revealed her wonderful retention of human faculties. "It is too bad it is raining," the author remarked as he escorted her from an auto- mobile into his church where she was to speak. "Is it?" she said carelessly, ' ' I hadn 't noticed it ! " Addressing from five to six hundred people a little later, she rose and spoke unsupported for fifteen minutes, and with the voice and animation and intellect of a woman of forty. Hardly a gray hair was to be seen, and she fol- lowed her speech by standing to receive hundreds of people. Per- haps this continued thought of others and self-forgetfulness is the secret of her keeping her youth at eigthy-eight. Though dining as heartily as a girl, she said she avoided every stimulant, saying when we offered her coffee: "I never drink coffee — or whiskey." fiEOHCK 1}AMI!(I|'-T ilisloriaii of the United Slates GEORGE BANCROFT HISTORIAN OF THE UNITED STATES MANY famous sons of clerjrymen have refuted the wicked old blackmail about '* ministers' sons" by being the product of an American manse. To this circle George Bancroft, greatest historian of the United States, adds a name surpassingly notable. He bears witness to the power of a simple parsonage to radiate integrity and influence far outside of things ecclesiastical into a world-wide domain where all truth is God's. Bancroft Tower, off Salisbury Street in Worcester, marks a comer of the farm where stood the rustic manse in which George, the eighth of thirteen children, was born October 3d, 1800. AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE THE CRUCIBLE OP HIS FATHER *S CHARACTER The answer to the question why it happened to be a farm when his father was pastor two miles away of a church on Back Street (now Summer Street), leads to an interesting situation as the curtain rises on the stage whereon George Bancroft began life. Five hundred dollars, largely in back bills to be collected at a discount, was all the salary his father, Aaron Bancroft, drew. Hence to eke out his scanty living, he had to take to farming on the rocky hillsides where stands the monu- m.ental tower. 190 MASTERMINDS A few j^ears before, while a sophomore at Harvard, the Revolution sounded its call. Then Aaron left college, shouldered a gun at Lexington and fought at Bunker Hill. Sturdy independence was thus inborn and fired into the human clay of his youth at the age of change. It was an independence that showed itself at every turn long after the Treaty of Peace. The deteraiination to hold up liis head, preach to the best in Worcester and go on preaching at the pittance of a sal- ary, was a continuation of the same fighting-blood of the independent. This independent spirit pervaded every side of his life. For example, he insisted on marrying the daughter of a distinguished Tory royalist, John Chandler, whose goods and lands were confiscated, and who became an exile rather than take the oath of allegiance, Lucretia Chandler was the daughter of this exile, who had lived up to his convic- tions for King George as stubbornly as his son-in-law, on the other side, fought against him. The exile's wife, left to take care of seventeen children, died. Lucretia was left as an older daughter out of the sad break-up of such a home and its plunge into "the poverty-stricken state." Then because he was man enough in a case of true love to "cut prejudice against the grain" and ask her, Lucretia married Aaron, George Bancroft's father. Aaron Bancroft also showed this independence of judg- ment in the years 1783-84, when he preached in the pulpit of Old South, the First Parish, where a majority of the people were conservative, and held tenaciously to the ortho- dox side of Calvinism. A score of old families of intellect and culture thought the other way, and tended toward Arminianism. In the old meeting-house, Aaron Bancroft preached on without fear or favor, and as a result was sure GEORGE BANCROFT 191 to incur upon his head the indiprnation of some one. It proved to be the ortliodox majority who thoiiifht his views heretical. Then the church split — a fact he always de- plored, — and in 1785 the more advanced thinkers asked him to become their minister in another place, though they still were compelled to pay tax to the old First, the estab- lished church of the "Worcester colony.^ In 1786 so few and far between were those of his per- suasion that it was hard to find clergymen to ordain him, one from Lancaster and one from Lunenburg alone con- senting. Fifty-three and one-half years in this pulpit, Aaron Ban- croft stood his ground, acting up to the courage of his con- victions and preaching truth as he saw it in this new church which soon grew into a Unitarian communion. A soldier of fortune in his struggle for thirteen boys and girls, and backed by but a remnant of people, he yet founded a home instinctive with manly independence and dearly bought honor. Persecution, loneliness and struggle had the effect of the wind on the fiow^er, toughening the tissues in the stock, which in this case were mental, moral, spirit- ual as w^ell as physical. Development under such pressure made his home dynamic and vibratory mth originality, resourcefulness, progress and creative thought. In three-cornered hat and knickerbockers, the last man in Worcester to wear them, small and wiry, but dignified, Aaron Bancroft was every inch the freshly-moulded Amer- ican. For him her old-world moulds aside she threw — New birth of our new soil. He marked out his own path, where every epoch was a new battlefield, and a fresh victorj^ for a soul in iln 1787 legal separation was effected and the tax stopped. 192 MASTER MINDS whom energized to the end the quintessence of American independence. Ploughing all the day as he had to plough, he yet kept an elastic, growing mind, uncalloused by drudgery. His application of religion to life instead of metaphysics and dogma, his devotion to ripe scholarship and his gift of expression were the fine flowers that grew out of his posi- tion, grounded as it was into this touch with the soil. All this made its home-thrust into George, and was inbuilt into his physical and his spiritual structure. Senator George Frisbie Hoar, three quarters of a cen- tury later, when amazed at George Bancroft's vigor of thought and beauty of diction, heard him from his own lips ascribe his deep inclinations towards these and towards his- tory to his father, Aaron Bancroft, who had "a very judi- cial mind and would have been an eminent historian. ' ' THE '^BURBANKING'^ OF THE BOY IN WORCESTER'S HILLS AND POOLS *^Burbanking" a boy finds no better confirmation for the training of the human plant than in the making of this master-mind of Bancroft. "I was a wild boy," he wrote to a literary friend, "and your aunt did not like me. She was always fearful that I would get her son into bad ways, and still more alarmed lest I should some day be the cause of his being brought home dead. There was a river or piece of water near Worcester where I used to beguile young Salisbury, and having constructed a rude sort of raft, he and I would pass a good deal of our play-time in aquatic amusements, not by any means unattended by danger. Madam 's remon- strances were all in vain, and she was more and more con- GEORGE BANCROFT 193 firmed in the opinion that I was a wild, bad boy — a wild, bad boy I continued to be up to manhood." This strain of the wildin^? in his nature ever kept Ban- croft from being out of touch with common clay and from being carried off his feet by things academic, pedantic and booldsh. He owed this strain not only to such an out of doors in which he revelled in Worcester's green hills and silver pools — not only to mother earth, but to his mother in the flesh. Far removed from the academician and stoic scholar in her husband, Aaron Bancroft, her nature wa.s elastic with animal spirits and homespun out of simple affection, com- mon sense, charity and unlettered good humor. ' ' How happy I was, ' ' the good dame wrote, ' ' when I had half a douzen children standing around me for their break- fast and supper, consisting of rye bread tosted, the frag- ments of cold coffee boyled and put on milk. I always did it with my own hands, tliey as cheerful and satisfied as if it was a dainty. For why? Because mother gave it to them. At dinner my children always dined with us. Cheap soup or pudding would be generally seen — I learned many cheap dishes. I was grateful for the bright prospect before the children as they advanced, for their readiness to learn and the very great love they show to their mother. ' ' Such was the untutored love-light in Bancroft's mother. There was none of the danger of over-education of mind and under-education of body as exists too often in the hot- house plant of to-day 's schools. The session itself was only a three-hour-and-a-half one in the old town school-house, and the rustic walk back and forth for two miles each way fortunately gave play to pent-up animal spirits. Eyes and ears were always open along the road. What he 13 194 MASTERMINDS saw diverted the boy and lent color to his imagination, in which it was long* afterwards retained over the grilf of three generations, to appear in his later life and visualize the earlier epoch. ' ' I saw a man in the pillory there once, ' ' he exclaimed, at nearly ninety, while on a visit to Worcester, in the course of which he passed by Court House Hill. "He had uttered some blasphemous words and was punished in that way, ' ' To his dying day he related with gusto such jokes as his bo^^sh fancy caught as he trotted to and fro from school, or rode behind his father's old horse from the country-side to Lincoln Square. One of these bits of humor he regaled his friends with was about old Levi Lincoln. The old gentleman was nearly blind. A flock of geese were being driven up Lin- coln Street. Leaning far out of his carriage, the fine old aristocrat, thinking they were children, threw out a hand- ful of pennies, graciously exclaiming: ' ' God bless you, my children ! ' ' After these journeys afoot to and from school in the morning, for the rest of the day the farm offered abundant opportunity to work off all surplus energy befo«re it could go too far. Here also he gained a control over his nervous, bilious, melancholic nature, leaving it for life like his father's, wiry and enduring. "If a man does not take time to keep well, he will have to take time to be sick, ' ' was a motto he learned here. BANCROFT 's ORIGINALITY Within the farm-manse the atmosphere was as conducive to the natural growth of the higher being as the out-of-door GEORGE BANC BOFT 195 life was to the bodily. Orisjinal jndprment, not a mumblinf; over of forrmilaries, was the mlo of the honse. To culti- vate it, his father in debate with celebrated men of the day, such as the chief justices and other leaders, was accustomed to turn to him and ask of him, a boy of six, 7ms opinion. It is a mark of such orifTfinality here cultivated that in several ways George Bancroft, though in spirit a filial embodiment, did not at all copy his father in the forms of his life. The forms also of his religious vieivs were different. His father was pastor of the first Unitarian Church in Worces- ter. George Bancroft thought for himself, and declared himself more in sympathy with the Trinitarians.^ All through life Bancroft exercised original insight in religion. He saw the good in each sect, discriminating it from its limitations. He rejected the dogma, but wel- comed the spirit of the Unitarian. He attended service with Episcopalians, but said, "I am not an Episcopalian." He deplored the formalism of the Roman Catholic system, but immersed his soul in worship at St. Peter 's. And how- ever much he turned from the Congregational to worship elsewhere, he yet always turned back again to conclude, "I am a Congregationalist. "^ One thing that contributed to his ability to think for himself was his departure, at the early age of eleven, for Phillips Exeter Academy. Aaron and Lucretia Bancroft were able to get him there, but so poor were they, in their high thinking and plain living, that they were unable to iSee life and letters of George Bancroft. — If. A. DeWolfe Howe, Vol. II, p. 120. 2" I am with increasing years more and more pleased vdth the simplicity and freedom of the New England Congregational system. ' ' —lUd. 196 MASTER MINDS get him back, and, once there, he had to stay for two long years for lack of the few extra coin to carry him on the stage back to Worcester. Trained to face situations originally, not to be a crammed and prodded little spender always dependent upon another, George acted with such attack upon his studies, extracting essentials out of their mixture with unessentials, that men like Hildreth, the annalist, and Benjamin Abbott, even then ascribed to him ''the stamina of a distinguished man. ' ' In the year 1813, when only thirteen, he entered Har- vard, at the time a college small in quantity, but in qual- ity great in men like Sparks, Palfrey, Samuel Eliot and Edward Everett. Stimulus to original writing lay in the air of this expanding centre of American scholars, out of which at seventeen, in 1817, Bancroft was graduated with the second English oration. June 27th, 1818, sent by the college he had markedly impressed, and granted a scholar- ship of seven hundred dollars a year, Bancroft departed for Germany. BANCROFT THE EUROPEAN STUDENT Gottingen in a night had become a small circle of schol- ars through the sudden exit of twenty-five hundred stu- dents, owing to a town and gown row. These scholars and instructors were inspired ^vith the genius of scholarship, whose inclination from close contact was contagious. As to his course Bancroft wrote: "Of German theological works I have read, till I find there is in them everything which learning and acuteness can give, and that there is in them nothing which religious feeling and reverence for Chris- tianity can give. ' ' QEOBOE BANCROFT 197 Hence his course turned his mind to other channels than the theological, while from Biblical studies he veered to Oriental languages and history. Starting upon the ideal set by Eichom, to study from ten to fifteen hours a day, he rose at five and ground over books and lectures till eleven at night. In 1820 he became a doctor of philosophy, a degi'ee heading that long series of degrees which later followed him from Oxford back into America from one university after another. Unlike certain Americans of lesser status, Bancroft's originality of mind and peerlessness of judgment never shone clearer than in his estimates of continental life. While appreciating German virtues to a degree that the Germans came to say, "He is one of us," he refused to be expatriated, and retained a New England conscience in all its essential insight. Rare technical culture and the expert scholarship of specialists he discovered and lauded as the Germanic contribution to truth. But the separation of this scholarship from character he at once detected. Such men as Wolf, whose brilliant abilities as scholars amazed him, awoke by their private home-life and treatment of women, only detestation. Biblical scholars so devoid of charity that they took the silver shoe-buckles for fees from poor students who had nothing else to give, alike pained him. Continental standards of society he refused to hide under "fine art." Goethe's Bohemianism he declaimed against as "indecency and immorality, in which he preferred to represent vice as lovely and exciting," "and would rather take for his heroine a prostitute or profligate than to give birth to that purity of thought and loftiness of soul." At a supper given by the pro-rector of the university, he flushed as he heard a professor rise and ejaculate with a 198 MASTERMINDS flourish, "He who does not love wine, women and song remains a fool all the days of his life. ' ' In such an atmosphere he wrote, "I do not myself be- lieve that my reverence for a religion which is connected with all my hopes of happiness and usefulness and distinc- tion can be diminished by ridicule." While this discrimination existed, it did not shut his eyes to the rare culture and educative genius of such specialists, and he learned from it what he could, aiming to become a scholar as well as a clergyman, on his return to America. History and languages along with church development and Biblical exegesis formed the core of his tasks from five in the morning till eleven at night. The ideal he had adopted, to study and attend lectures from ten to fifteen hours a day, he studiously followed. In vacation, following the example of American students like Ticknor and Everett in tramping through Germany, he met Goethe and other German geniuses at their homes and gardens. His admiration of the technique of scholarship continued to grow adversely to his estimate of continental character, Bancroft maintaining that he was "too Ameri- can, ' ' and could ' ' not endure the coarseness of their amuse- ments, and still less of their vices. ' ' In 1820 he became a doctor of philosophy. For his third year, feeling "that erudition" for which his school stood, when taken alone, a dead weight on society, he left Gottin- gen and chose Berlin, where "the grand aim is to make men think." The eye-flashing and electric reverence of Schleier- macher, at once a combination of spiritual seer and Teu- tonic sage, captured Bancroft mind and soul. "Virtue, the life of study and cheerfulness," together with "literary activity and domestic quiet," "with the GEORGE BANCROFT 199 calm and pure delight of friendship, ' ' he now laid down as his programme for the future. In the vacation intervaJs he was to spend a few weeks in Heidelberg, then in Paris, where was a meeting with Schle- gel, Baron Von Humboldt, Cuvier, Lafayette and his great-souled countryman, Washington Irving. In contrast to seeking the panderers to American swinishness with which Europe, and Paris especially, even then began to swarm, he held up as his quest "the grand, true models of uneorrupted virtue." The sublime heights of the Alps and the depth of sorrow of his brother's death in 1821 aroused his desire to be a prophet of the soul. Little did he think then that it was his country 's soul of which he would be the prophet. "It seemed," he wrote, "that I never should be so happy; as if God would one day teach me to pray earnestly and preach eloquently." "There are many things in my character yet to be changed or improved. I long to become more deeply devout." "At home, in retirement, there will be many an opportunity of becoming well acquainted with the works of the pious who have written so feelingly on religion. From them I would strive to learn the direct way to win hearts. ' ' "I began to feel (January 1, 1822) a strong desire of engaging in the ministry, of serving at the altar of God ; I would so willingly rest my hope of distinction in the hope of being eloquent and useful in preaching the grand doc- trines of Christianity, in speaking of God as the Author of the universe and the Source of all science, of Christ who has made us acquainted with His nature, of the nature and 200 MASTERMINDS possibility of virtue, of the duty of becoming like God ; of life, death and immortality. ' ' Even his physical being seemed at this time to partake of the ideal and of the sublime and the ethereal. The Alpine air breathed such lightness into his nature that, beside himself, he at times fell to shouting, and bounded into the air, clicking his heels and sending forth peal after peal of joy in sheer exultancy at living. Perfectly at home amid the literati and princely figures of Paris in their salons of culture and aristocracy, he yet much more enjoyed tramping in frayed trousers and mth a long black beard on his face, as he scaled the Alpine bridle-paths of Switzerland. ' ' When I entered Switzerland, I came with a heavy and desponding heart. One event after another had happened to crush everything like cheerfulness in my bosom, and though I had not yet gained my one and twentieth year, my mind seemed to be sear, and I almost thought I had the heart of an old man. But I reposed on the bosom of nature, and have there grown young again. From her breasts gush the streams of life, and they who drink them regain cheerfulness and \agor; I traveled alone; I was on foot; solitude was delightful; I could give way to the delightful flow of feelings and reflections as I sat on the Alpine rocks and gazed on the Alpine solitudes. I said to the winds, 'Blow on, I care not for ye;' to the sun, 'Hide thy beams, I carry a sun in my bosom;' to the rains, 'Beat on, for my thoughts gush upon me faster than your drops.' " Eome had been reached November 26, 1821. At St. Peter's he confessed: "I threw myself on my knees before the grand altar, and returned thanks to God for guarding me against all the dangers of traveling. My parents and GEORGE BANCROFT 201 every member of my family were remembered, too, in those moments of my life, which were too sweet and too solemn ever to be forgotten. ' ' In European cities again by August, 1822, his meeting with Byron and other great creative personalities marked a red-letter event. Returning to America in the year 1822-23, he became tutor at Harvard, though he still looked toward the minis- try. HIS FOUR FAILURES September 14 he began to preach, speaking from the Sec- ond Parish pulpit in Worcester with ' ' an aim to be earnest and impressive rather than oratorical, and to write serious, evangelical sermons rather than fashionable ones." Lack of response grew evident, and though he preached thirty-six times this year, he found no encouragement; his manner, it was thought, being artificial, his gestures forced, and his presentation of truth unacceptable even to his father. From his first sermon in Worcester, an essay on "Love," to liis final attempts in county towns, he gained no hearing that would encourage him to go on. "A high falsetto and strident voice," unconventional imagery, together with other out^vard forms that were disliked, were outward and visible signs that to the people's eye of that time ruined the vision he presented of the inner and spir- itual life. The verdict of almost all was against him. Nevertheless, minds with insight saw the kernel back of the ruder shell, amongst whom was Emerson, who declared him- self ' ' delighted with his eloquence. So were all. We think him an infant Hercules. ' ' No pulpit, however, opened, and failure "number one" stared Bancroft in the face. 202 MASTERMINDS Failure "number two" was now ready with its blow. College, where he was already a Harvard tutor, became ' ' a sickening and a wearisome place ; not one spring of com- fort to draw from." "Trouble, trouble, trouble," was his conclusion as to his trials as a teacher. "As tutor he is the laughing-butt of all the college," wrote liis acquaintance, Cogswell, himself a dissatisfied tutor and returned German student. In December, 1822, Bancroft determined to quit the tor- ture and ' ' train a few minds to virtue and honor by start- ing a boys' school, the end to be the moral and intellectual maturity of each boy, " as " our country needs good instruc- tors more than good preachers." In this school failure "number three" is here to be recorded. Founding in connection with Cogswell the Round Hill School at Northampton, he became the leading teacher, while his friend was superintendent of the other teachers and classes. Sons of wealthy families failed to appreciate Bancroft's genius, and he perhaps failed to appreciate their leanings. They called him "the crittur," and eluding his gaze when they misbehaved in the school- room, dropped on all fours. Seeking to win them with gifts of peaches in his orchard, they pelted him with the pits. "Restraining the petulance, and assisting the weakness of children when conscious of sufficient courage to sustain collision with men," made the Head-master restless. He was too creative, original and progressive to tie himself down to such detail. So, in September, 1831, he withdrew. Failure "number four" must be added to his inability to "make good" as a secondary school master. It was as a poet. In 1823 he had published a book of poems which fell flat as an enterprise, both professionally and pecuniarily. GEORGE BANCROFT 203 Amid these four failures Bancroft wrote text-books for schools, and translated "The Politics of Ancient Greece," this being one of tho first acts showing his bent toward his- tory. In 1829 he followed this with a translation of Hee- ren's history of "The Political System in Europe." Between 1825-1834 he cultivated his growing power by writing seventeen articles for the North American Review, ' ' chiefly on European scholarship, also an article on "The Bank of the United States. ' ' SUCCESS By this blazed way of history-writing and politics, in the midst of failure, Bancroft is at last finding himself. He expressed it thus : "I have gained self-confidence, and am determined, as the Scripture has it, to work out my own salvation." In 1827 professionally beginning to settle, he anchored in other ways as well, and founded a home by marrying the daughter of Jonathan Dwight of Springfield, Sarah H, Dwight, who presided over his home ten years, till 1837, when she died, leaving him four children. A stay of several months at the Capitol of the United States introduced him in 1831-32 to men and measures of State, all of which excited liis dormant tastes for the twin talents of statesmanship and the writing of history. Bancroft's judgment in the science of government, from which he never moved, was thus expressed in 1826 in a political speech : "The government is a democracy, a determined, uncom- promising democracy, administered immediately by the people or by the people's responsible agents. The popular voice is all powerful with us. This is our oracle. ' ' 204 MASTERMINDS In George Bancroft lay the genius of democracy as it exists as the very sap of the liberty-tree of this republic. From it he never swerved. In it he found his delight and with its essence his soul was one. With it he grew, as a part of it, and it as a part of him, and out of it came, as flower and fruit from the root, his colossal and inspired History of the United States.^ In him as an embodiment of independence, Aaron's rod budded. For it went back to the rootage of liberty, to his father, Aaron Bancroft, at Lexington and Bunker Hill, only to come out in the nineteenth century in his remark- able history. "I have formed the design of writing the history of the United States from the discovery of the American Conti- nent to the present." Such one day at this time he expressed as his inspired purpose. It was the vision of his destiny, the call of his prophecy. The first volume of this history of the United States appeared in 1834. So great was the magnum opus that in 1874 after forty years of research he brought the history only to the repub- lic's start, his tenth volume ending with the conclusion of the treaty of peace in 1782. Yet it stands nevertheless preeminent as the Histor>^ of the United States; for it embodies the spirit of our coun- 1' ' Mr. Bancroft was a hearty Democrat. The fact that he really believed in the wisdom of the people, as opposed to classes, was one of his leading qualifications for writing sympathetically the history of the popular movement which led to the foundation of the United States, and which is now at the bottom of the admin- istration of its affairs." — Samuel S. Green, librarian emeritus Free Public Library, Worcester, in Proceedings of the American Anti- quarian Society, April 29, 1S91. GEORGE BANCROFT 205 try, its conception, its genius, its birth, its birthnp^hts as event after event first took place on the staple of the forests and fields of the new world. In 1834 Bancroft was defeated for Representative of the General Court from Northampton — "failure number ^i^e/" But such defeats meant nothiuf^:. Failure as a preacher, tutor, head master, poet, are now with this defeat to be swallowed up in the might}', sweepingsuccess of his life-work. Justice Story and Edward Everett led a chorus of great men by pronouncing upon the first volumes with great favor, the latter calling it: "A work which will last while the memory of America lasts, and which will instantly take its place among the classics of our language. It is full of learning, information, common sense and philosophy, full of taste and eloquence, full of life and power. You give us not wretched pasteboard men, but you give us real, indi- vidual, living men and women, with their passions, inter- ests and peculiarities." International verdicts came from across the sea. Hee- ren from Gottingen wrote, declaring he had the true inspiration of the historian, and adding that never had he been so agreeably surprised. Bancroft himself is carried away with his master theme. In 1835, still at Northampton, he whites as to his second volume of United States History: "The topics are various, grand in their character and capable of being arranged in an interesting narrative. ' ' His home, vie-wing as it did the beautiful Connecticut valley, silver-threaded by the river, began to be a centre for literati and minds of great calibre from this country and abroad, all of whom, by his enkindled imagination and unlocked expression, he bestirred with tales of the Indians, and his exposition of the system of American society. 206 MASTERMINDS In 1835 Mr. Bancroft chang-ed his home to Sprin^eld, where came the death of his first wife, two years later, leaving three children, aged four, two and one. AugTist 16, 1838, Bancroft married a second time, uniting in marriage with Mrs. Elizabeth Davis Bliss, a widow with two boys, and a home in Boston. As a representative Dem- ocrat, the young historian was at this time appointed collec- tor of the port in Boston by President Van Buren. While in this position he gave a place to Nathaniel Hawthorne. June 13, 1838, the second volume of his history Thomas Carlyle hailed as conveying ' ' its glimpses of the old prime- val forest in its hot, dark strength and tangled savagery and putrescence, Virginia planters, with their tobacco pouches, galloping amid the 'buckskin kye' in the glades of the wildwood, Puritans stern of visage, warm and sound of heart!" In 1840 was finished the third volume of the history. BANCROFT THE STATESMAN In 1844 Bancroft was a defeated candidate for Demo- cratic Governor of Massachusetts, but still remained in- tensely interested in the Presidential contest between Whig and Democrat. Polk being elected, Bancroft found himself a])pointed Secretary of the Navy of the United States. It was a crucial and telling incumbency, for by his order in the contest of ' ' fifty-four forty or fight, ' ' the Oregon boun- dary was settled in the Northwest, and in the event of the IMexican War it was by his orders that the United States commander proceeded to take California and General Tay- lor to take Texas. He founded the National Observatory at Washington and the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1846. GEORGE BANCROFT 207 But, important as his post, in the midst of the Mexican War, Bancroft terminated his portfolio to become ambas- sador to Ens^land. England's stare of wonder at the expansion of the United States into its great new territories in the North- west, South and West ; English joy at the Mississippi val- ley's inexhaustible new staple, Indian com; diplomatic confidences as to France and Mexico, with which France had futilely intermeddled, and conferences also with Queen Victoria, — all betray a mind gauged to the world's broad platform, but intensely American. To W. H. Prescott, the historian, he wrote between the lines of such affairs of for- eign states, sighing for ' ' Republican air ! ' ' Yet a host of men of letters of the Victorian era made the embassy delightful, among them Thackeray. Carlyle, Milman, Maeaulay, Dickens and Hallam. To his delight he found his own books of history equally advertised on London stalls as Christmas gifts of a high order, as well known and read in London as in Boston. "I met him everj^where, " said Robert C. Winthrop, "and witnessed the high estimation in which he was held by literary men like Rogers, Hallam and Allison and Mil- man, and by statesmen like Peel, Palmerston and Russell." In Paris in 1847, while he met Guizot, Thierry, Lamar- tine and the French King and Queen, he insisted upon spending much of his daylight hours searching the archives of the French alcoves. In Great Britain politically he increased England's enlarged estimate of America and secured great international improvements in postal laws. Chiefly, however, he found the embassy helpful because of his chance for research for facts as to America's found- ing, in letters and documentary^ folios long laid away in England's splendid archives. 208 MASTERMINDS The making- of modem history he also watched from the process of other nations, notably the spread of Republi- canism in Europe and its popularity in France in contrast to monarchy's brief appearance on the shifting stage. At this period he took breath to exclaim, "I must write the history of the Eevolution before life ebbs." In 1848 the Whig victory in America, electing Gen- eral Taylor, unseated him from his post as ambassador and enabled him to return to write in his history the opening of the Revolution, and ''tell how Prescott defended Bun- ker Hill, how Franklin swayed France, how the invincible Washington not only was the bravest in war, but the wise, loving, generous creating father of our blessed form of gov- ernment. ' ' Upon his return in 1849, he chose to live in New York city for eighteen years, until 1867. There the history pro- ceeded with rapid strides. Three volumes of the history having been completed in the previous eighteen years, seven were before him yet to be written. His plan was to write history by the almanac, and he recorded each day as he passed it in review, adding every detail of value. Many thousands of his o\\ti money he paid copyists and tran- scribers. Many journeys on research for unprinted letters he himself undertook, whether it be to the Falls of St. Anthony, at the head of the Misvsissippi, or to great houses on plantations in Tennessee. The manuscript once ferreted out, it is said, he handled "A^dth the furtive quickness of a raccoon." "I know not which more to admire," wrote Theodore Parker in 1854, "the mighty diligence which collects all the facts and words, even the minutest articles of charac- teristic manner, or the subtle art which frames them into so nice a picture of the progress of the people and the race GEORGE BAN CROFT 209 — the most noble and splendid piece of historical com- position, not only in Enp:lish, but in any ton^ie." "What surprised and charmed me," wrote Emerson, "the history starts tears and almost makes them overflow on many and many a pa^e. " Yet with all these encomiums and encouragements, Ban- croft knew that coping with such a mighty theme, a human hand must have limitations, and these he sought to know more jealously than laudations. In 1858, while on "The Battle of Bunker Hill," he wrote Dr. Frothingham, the eminent author of "The Siege of Boston," and said: "Take your copy of Volume VII, fill it full of cavils, criticisms and questionings, especially on the Battle of Bunker Hill, and send it to me. Be as severe and hyper- critical as I was. ' ' His library became a historical arsenal of books and documents, growing from twelve thousand to fifteen thou- sand to finally thirty thousand volumes, all of which are now stored in the Lenox Library, New York. In this library, by working solidly mornings and exercis- ing afternoons, he produced three hundred words each new day in his careful, painstaking creation of the history. In 1857 he supported Buchanan, who was against the "propensities of the black Republicans." Then he fell into sympathy with Douglas. Bancroft had a wonderful power to visualize history and dissect statesmanship. Yet it is hard to understand that a mind which so mystified "Washington with glory, should at first utterly fail to see it in Lincoln. "We who have preferred another public servant, ' ' was the phrase in which he declared himself as to Lincoln, whom he characterized as "a President without brains." Further caricaturing 14 210 MASTERMINDS him as dominated and henpecked by his wife, he ended thus: ' ' Things do not look very promising. " " We suffer from want of any organizing mind at the head of the govern- ment. " "Our poor country, under incompetent hands, is going to ruin." Yet for all this he soon atoned, and from all this he was soon aroused. He had always stood uncompromisingly with the North against slavery. Now he broke entirely with the Southern and Northern Democracy, standing against the ' ' Nullification of the Constitution ' ' and against the "Dred Scot Decision." The compromising party of the Democracy he came to call "the bastard race that con- trols the organization — this unproductive hybrid begot by Northern arrogance upon Southern subserviency," "Northern Democracy" was "dreadfully routed," he exclaimed, "and handed over to the most corrupt set of political opponents." By the impending conflict he stood unfalteringly, stating to English critics that "our Rebellion is a proof of the vitality of Republican principles. Slavery was an anomaly in a Democratic country. The doctrine of liberty is proved true by the fact that it will not be reconciled with slavery. ' ' The mighty recoil of the north when Fort Sumter, with the Stars and Stripes, was fired upon, he described as "the sublimest spectacle I ever knew, the uprising of the irresis- tible spirit of a free people in behalf of law, order and liberty." These views led Bancroft along the track to Lincoln's personality, which he finally, however late, saw through, accepted, loved, and led the country in crowning with tribute. GEORGE BANCROFT 211 In 1862, everywhere reco^ized as the foremost scholar in public life, he was nominated by the Republicans for Congress, but declined. In tlie midst of the war he was chosen to voice the cause in the great Cooper Institute oration in New York, where in America's chief city he stood the dominant oracle of the principle at issue. At Lincoln's funeral it was he again, above all others, to whom the country turned as America's highest exponent when it invited him to deliver the funeral oration of the martyred President. In 1867 appointed minister to Berlin by Johnson's ad- ministration, he remained seven years on into Grant's pres- idency, watching the German states moulded by Bis- marck into nationalism, and at times himself consorting with the King, then in process of becoming an Emperor. Bancroft returned at the end of Grant's administration to reside in Washington. Even more highly confirmed as the foremost American scholar in the public eye, he was granted as no other citizen equality with its Senators and Congressmen, even on the floors of the Senate and House of Representatives. Furthermore, he was granted equality with President, Cabinet and Supreme Court judges, who exchanged calls upon him as upon one whose station was on a level. Choosing Washington as his residence, he selected a spacious double mansion but a stone's throw from the White House, where behind the hyacinths on the lawn he sat down to spend the long afternoon of a life already so signal in accomplishment and creative toil. Rising at five in summer and six in winter, with break- fast at eight, his mornings were sacred to his work on his- tory, up to two or three o'clock. No visitors were then 212 MASTERMINDS allowed. After this, often without lunch, at three lie sprang into his saddle every day and was off to complete, even at eighty-five, rides as long as thirtj^-two miles in extent. In 1874 appeared the tenth volume of the history, dealing with the fourth epoch of the Revolution, and bringing it up to the Treaty of Peace in 1781. "Scarcely one who \^'^shed me good speed when I first engaged to trace the history of America remains to greet me with a welcome as I near the goal," was his remark at the close of the tenth volume. The unprecedented popularity of the history necessitated edition after edition. In the summers he spent the vacation season at Newport, in "Rose Clyfi'e, " a rambling home overlooking the sea and half hid by roses, his favorite flower. The rest of the year in Washington, with his erect figure and his rapidly whitening hair and beard, he was marked as he strode the floor of Senate or House, or the Capitol Avenue, as a national figure more permanent than passing presidents. Even the little children in Washington recognized him as a father, and cried, "Here comes Grandfather Santa Clans upon his fine horse. ' ' Yet in all of this he was unspoiled and as simple as a child. Springing off his spirited horse, which he rode daily, he would essay, for instance, to rebuckle the girth of one of the mount of a troop of young friends galloping by his side, saAang to a little maid as she thanked him : "Don't call me Mr. Bancroft; call me George." "Are you not very imprudent at your age to be riding on horseback?" a contemporary asked. GEORGE BANCROFT 213 "Are you not very imprudent at your age not to be riding on horseback?" he replied. Here in the spot of which he had said, ' ' I may choose to draw my mantle around me before I depart," he did not seem so much to grow old as to ripen. "The true manner of being in old age is to gather a cir- cle of friends, who," he said, "are devoted to the culture of truth, think with the freedom of men gifted with reason, and patient or even fond of differences of opinion. If but half dozen of such men would but meet weekly at dinner at my house, I should find instruction and delight, and beguile infirmities of years by the perennial never-ending enjoy- ment of friendship and intelligence. ' ' Such was the circle with wliich he was surrounded, and amid which he grew from gi*ay to white. Yet this did not mean cessation of industry nor a killing of time. ' ' A game of cards I never can consent to take a hand in without shame for waste of time," he declared. Only nine years before his death, in 1882, he remarked, "I was trained to look upon life here as a season for labor. Being more than fourscore years old, I know the time for my release will soon come. Conscious of being near the shore of eternity, I await with impatience and without dread the hand which will soon beckon me to rest. ' ' Notwithstanding such declarations, in 1887, as though a young man he set out, eighty-seven years old, on a journey to Nashville, Tennessee, to search for Polk's letters. In the years 1882-85 he made the last revision of the sev- eral revisions of his ten-volumed history. He had made previous revisions, but this he especially chastened and pruned. 214 MASTER MINDS In 1888, though eighty-eight years old, he wrote the "His- tory of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States." In reply to a question, he said of the Constitution, "I have your letter asking what changes had better be made in the Constitution. I know of none. If any change is needed, it is in ourselves, that we may more respect that basis of primal law. "^ Bancroft not only "WTote, like Cicero, classics on old age — he lived a classic old age. "Let us old folks cheer one another as we draw nearer and nearer to the shores of eternity, which are already in full sight," he insisted. "I contemplate my end with per- fect tranquillity, thinking death should be looked upon neither with d^ire nor fear. — Old age is like sitting under the trees of the garden in early winter; the bloom and ver- dure of summer are gone; by their departure it becomes easier to see the stars." On the last Sunday in December of 1890, Senator George Frisbie Hoar called upon the nonagenarian historian in his library : "It was not an old man's memory of the past," said Senator Hoar, ' ' but the fresh and vigorous thought on new topics which were suggested to him in conversation. I think he exhibited a quickness and vigor of thought, and spoke with a beauty of diction that no man I know could have surpassed." Not long after this, January 17th, 1891, when ninety-one years old, nine years before the century with which he lOne of his most earnest monographs was one entitled, "A Plea for the Constitution Wounded in the House of its Guardians." GEORGE BAN CROFT 215 began ended, Bancroft's soul went to the God of his- tory.^ BANCROFT A PROPHET OF HIS COUNTRY Bancroft's life began with the failure of the priest. It ended with the halo of the prophet. The memory of the little pulpits that refused him is swallowed up under the sounding-boards of the nation, where he was sought to voice her oracles and interpret her destiny. Bancroft was a prophet ! As the Hebrew prophets were misinterpreted and refused the Temple, so was he; as the Hebrew prophet in the grand old original of the term wrote the history of the past, and the statesmanship of the present, and penetrated and shot it through with insight, so did he. He, like them, was a historical prophet, a seer, and extracted out of the past the laws for the future, whether of judgment or of promise. They wrote history, the history of a leading people of the world ; so did he. They, relegated to obscurity, at darkest crises when professional prophets and priests were dumb, were called from the places where they were snubbed as nobodies or crushed under heel, to become for their nation in jeopardy tongues of fire. As they were then called, exactly so was he. They interpreted the hand of God in history; so did he. That made them prophets; so did that make Bancroft a prophet. He was, at his best, a "iHistorian of America he made it the high purpose of a life which nearly spanned a century to show her part in the advance- ment of man and from the resources of his genius, his learning and his labor to ennoble the story of her birth." — From the inscrip- tion upon Ms tomh in Rural Cemetery, Worcester, Massachusetts. 216 MASTER MINDS prophet of his country in the grand sense of the Mosaic and Hebrew seer. So, at the obscurity at first, he was pre- dominantly so at the last. In form, patriarchal with white beard and piercing eye, with nose like an eagle's beak; in spirit well poised, rising against the wind, he led American minds up from the hot tangled wilderness, out of the clear- ing, to the stage in which God's men have moved according to His will, and God's enemies have equally fallen accord- ing to His will. "It is because God is visible in History," Bancroft declared, ' ' that its office is the noblest. ' ' "She not only watches the great encounters of life, but recalls what had vanished, and partaking of a bliss like that of creating, restores it to animated being. History, as she reclines in the lap of eternity, sees the mind of human- ity itself engaged in formative efforts, constructive sciences, promulgating laws, organizing commonwealths and displaying its energies on the visible monument of its intelligence. Of all pursuits that require analysis, history therefore stands first. It is grander than the material sciences, for its study is man, the last work of creation, and the most perfect in its relation with the Infinite. ' ' Each page of history may begin and end with : Great is God, and marvelous are His works among the children of men. — And I defy a man to penetrate the secrets and laws of events without something of faith. He may look on and see, as it were, the twinkling of stars and planets, and measure their distances and motions, but the life of history- will escape him. He may pile a heap of stones, but he will not get at the soul. ' * John Rartholomeu' Gough (The third picture shows Cough's wife also, and with the first two, taken after his reform, is from rare and unprinted daguerreotypes owned l)y his niece) JOHN BARTHOLOMEW GOUGH GREATEST APOSTLE OP TEMPERANCE WHILE John Bartholomew Gough as a soul and as a personality was discovered in Worcester, Massa- chusetts, in the latter part of October, 1842, he was bom in Sandgate, England, August 22d, 1817, twenty- five years before. But the second birth is the real point of departure for any man 's life so far as it is his own and not his ancestors'. Therefore we commence his life at "Worces- ter, the place of this second birth. "Seven damning years of degradation from eighteen to twenty-five," as he termed them, landed him in a garret in the Massachusetts city. Already his girl wife and his infant child^ had died. He himself was ready to go. He aimed at the railroad track, where, having drained a vial of laudanum, he would stretch what was left of his rum- soaked frame across the rail and end all. To the track he did go down. But the Beyond at first held him back. Perhaps it would not end all! This drove him again to his corner in a cold garret. ' ' Though thirty-eight years have passed away, ' ' he later was accustomed to say, "that garret bedroom, my bed, my broken trunk, the window on the roof, the little strip of carpet, the water-jug, my shabby clothing as it lay on the one chair in the room, are so vividly present before me that were I an artist, I could reproduce the scene in all its detail." lAs gleaned from the death records of Worcester, Gough 's first wife died May 20th, 1842, the child living nine days. 218 MASTERMINDS This is an unmarked spot; but it is a great place, for it is the birth-place of John Gough's soul. "Here," he declared, "I fought that battle alone for six days." "What battle was this, and why did he go back here to fight it out and begin again? There had not been in the past much reason that he should. Things were just the other way. A strolling comic singer and stage "super" when he had four weeks before struck "Worcester in the fall of 1842, he had written his wife at Newburyport to meet him at the stage-door and let him take her to a modest home, near the place where he had found good employment at skilled labor at Hutchinson & Crosby 's. But no sooner was he at home than he cleared out his little house of the furniture he had bought and sold it for alcohol. Two quarts of stimulant for the w4fe, who by this time was in a decline, he fed to himself to appease his uncontrollable thirst. But half conscious that his wife's confinement was to end in her own death and that of her new-born infant, more like a beast than a man, in delirium tremens ten days he lay drunk. In this time the young mother died, together with the infant. But after the marble touch of her dead fore- head, Gough's one instinct was to reach again for the flask beneath the pillow. Upon this, his employers denied him his wages except those they gave him for his needs. But he refused to be thus held down. Even what few sticks of furniture were left after the funeral, he then sold for whiskey. These gone, he sold himself by offering to any drunken set of grog-shop bums who would treat him to "a bracer and a chaser," his comic songs, his jokes and his ventrilo- quism. JOHN B ART n LOME W GOUGH 219 Dis^ace dragged him down till, as though wholly given over to the devil and mocking at all things good, he rose up in a church in drunken glee and passed a cuspidor for the alms-basin. Fined in court, and now branded legally as well as socially, he walked out to insult and taunt all that was good, temperance speakers being his especial target. ' ' Yet, ' ' he declared, ' ' a change was about to take place — a circumstance which eventually turned the whole current of my life into a new and unhoped-for channel." It was this event that accounts for his return off the street to his struggle in the garret. GOUGH 'S DISCOVERY ON THE STREETS OF WORCESTER It was Sunday evening. All the day he had been lying around half drunk in the meadows in the countryside. Under cover of night he was sneaking back. But the attic would be cold and through the chinks the fall frost sting him. He shivered as he clutched his tattered coat and knew no other stood between him and winter. He thought again of the railroad-track and laudanum. Just then re- covering himself from a stagger, he felt — some one tap him on the shoulder! Turning to meet, not the clasp of a gruff policeman, but the surprise of a kind look, he drank in the sensation, because since a long time it was the first display of human cordiality. "It went right to my heart," he confessed, "and trou- bled the waters in that stagnant pool of affection and made them once more reflect a little of the light of human love. ' ' "Mr. Gough, I believe," spoke the gentlemanly voice of an unknown person. 220 3IA8TER3IIND8 ' ' That is my name, ' ' Gougli mumbled, and staggered on. "You have been drinldng to-day." The kind tone ex- pelled resentment. "Yes, sir, I have." ' ' Why did you not sign the pledge ? ' ' Gough blurted out that he had no hope of ever being sober again, adding that he hadn't a friend in the world, and would die soon. The stranger took his arm, melted his suspicions with a look of benevolence, asked if he would not like again to be "respectable and esteemed, well-clad, and sitting in a place of worship, — enabled to meet old friends, — a useful member of society?" "No expectation," Gough muttered. "Such a change is not possible." "Only sig-n our pledge and I will warrant that it shall be so. Sign it and I will introduce you, myself, to good friends who will take an interest in your welfare and take pleasure in helping you to keep your good resolutions." Gough confides to us in his memories that his crushed and bruised heart, long a stranger to such words of kind- ness, then felt awakening within it new feelings. "A chord had been touched," he recounted, "which vibrated to the tone of love; hope once more dawned." "Well— I will sign it." "When?" "I cannot do so to-night, for I must have some drink presently ; but certainly I will to-morrow. ' ' "We have a temperance meeting to-morrow evening. Will you sign it then ? ' ' "I will." "That is right," said he, grasping my hand. "I will be there to see you." JO RN BARTHOLOMEW O TJ TI 221 ''You shall!" said Gough. In his aiitobioorraphy, which toerether with ''Sunlight and Shadow" and "Platform Echoes" we follow as the chief sources for his life, he concludes: "I went on my way much touched by the kind interest which at last some one had taken in my welfare. I said to myself: 'If it should be the last act of my life, I will perform my promise and sign it even though I die in the attempt, for that man has confidence in me, and on that account I love him.' " The name of the stranger Gough never was to forget was Joel Stratton, simply a waiter at a temperance hotel. Years after when he lay sick unto death, after an honest life as a trusted mechanic in Worcester, the man he tapped on the shoulder, then become world-famed, thus sought him out. "God bless you, Joel Stratton. Thousands are thank- ful that you ever lived." Quoting a letter received that day from England which mentioned Stratton 's name as one "for whom we often pray and whom we all love," he read it aloud. "When I laid my hand on your shoulder that night, I never dreamed all this would come to pass, did you?" asked the sick man. "No," said Gough, the far-away look in his eyes dim- ming with tears, — "But — it — has!" Even so deep from a man so simple sank this touch in a man so low. It was made in one yet drunk ; a man then on his way to his cups at a hotel-bar in Lincoln Square; a man about to drain dry the next hour the contents of several brandy glasses ; a man to go reeling back to his garret w'orse than ever, — and yet underneath all this, it penetrated. 222 MASTERMINDS Underneath "many a man's hunger and thirst in this world, where vice is virtue misdirected and e\al is good per- verted, is a deeper hunger and thirst of which the former is a part, though perverted. He who finds this finds the man. The real reformer sees this and seeks not simply to destroy a thirst for conviviality, or an inordinate hunger for love, but to replace it with higher food and drink and feast of soul for which the other was only the base substitute of a blind craving. The truest redeemer of his fellows seeks not, therefore, to destroy passion, but to tear it from its perversion. Like most sin, intoxication is often the per- version of the good. The successful restorer of his kind will therefore not seek to tear down the mental passion of which it is a "sport," but to tear the passion from its perversion and leave the true passion in its place. He will put something else in place of that which the blind reformer only condemns. Unless he does this, no tem- perance reform, or any other, will ever perpetuate itself either in its converts or in society. Joel Stratton, waiter that he was upon man's wants, divined this fact — a fact as deep as the mind of the author of Christendom. Stratton saw Gough's perverted hunger and thirst as the distortion of a deeper hunger and thirst that was not satisfied, but that Gough had only sought to satisfy in the wrong way. In its place there was a good hunger for love and a thirst for the cordial of human confidence. At once he offered these objectives in place of the cup and company that cheer but inebriate. The effect was immediate. The blind hunger and thirst for love and confidence with which to feast his soul Gough had mistakenly sought in alcoholic conviviality, he now saw had led him wrong. He saw that while he could not satiate the deeper cravings there, he could elsewhere. He saw JOHN BARTHOLOMEW GOUGII 223 that Joel Stratton did not destroy his hunger for love and thirst for society, but replaced the lower with a higher, whose satisfaction he projected before the lost toper whom he had found again. Leaving the base substitute, Strat- ton let Gough keep the underlying passion and direct it toward this new objective of human hearts till, lo, — in time, Gough poured out his soul and gained the cordiality of millions who in turn poured their souls back in love and confidence ! Of this more than most, he could drink with men and Joel Stratton showed him how — but in a better way. Ah, Joel Stratton ! Your finger, though that of a waiter and a serving man, touched^ the point of magic change, and under your touch, though intuitive and infinitely quick, was set to working a law of human redemption successful from the practice of man's Master Redeemer till to-day. Straight in line with all that latest mind studies have revealed was Joel Stratton 's second point. He had Gough follow emotion with execution — made him make it a part of himself — made him take the pledge, and act, not merely feel. Gough could not get away from that. He awoke in the morning w^hen the dawning light fell upon the new hope and the night's promise. Yet the fateful pledge in per- formance of the promise was to be made that Mon- day night. "But bitters in the stomach or death" — he moaned, and strung his nerves by a whiskey sling. At noon once more he partook of the old stimulant as a farewell health to the devil. Then began the battle terrible. Under cover of dusk, he forced his steps to the lower Town Hall in Worcester. i"He touched me!" were the words in Gough 's later speeches from which vibrated a world of meaning and of pathos. 224 MASTERMINDS In an old hand-me-down brown overcoat which he clenched about his neck to cover his worse ^^ndercoat of rags, he rose at the time for testimony. The love-light of Joel Stratton's searching eyes sought him out and again found his soul, so that he dared lift a drink-palsied hand and draw the curtain from the chapter of his life thus far. Invoking an imagination that surprised himself and en- thralled his hearers as it was from that time to sway them in ever increasing circles, he stood again as twenty-five years before at the edge of the English sea and at the ocean brink of a mother's love. He recalled his father, a pensioner of the English Army, of Corunna, of Talavera and of Salamanca. He recalled County Kent where was his sire's humble cot, and in which his military sternness was the background of the other gentler parent's super- abundant affection. Did he tell of smuggler's footsteps chasing through the streets as, recovering their trench of goods from where it was sunk in the offing, they were detected and followed by government officials? Did he tell of the ancient castles and martyrs ' chapels of the middle ages whose ruins he clambered through, feeding his imagi- nation with romance? Did he tell of the French Cliffs exciting to visions across the channel but twenty -two miles away? Did he tell of his schooling up to ten in good schools, and of his going to Folkestone at ten to a private school where he was such an admirable reader he assisted the teacher and thereafter was hired at times to read to the gentry ? Did he tell of Wilberf orce, the great ref onner, who was pleased with the boy's ability and who placed his hand on his head as if in prophecy? Did he tell of his village church and Sunday-school? Did he tell of his being accidentally struck on the head with a spade which JOHN BARTHOLOMEW GOUGII 225 knocked him senseless and ever after left him liable to concussion of the brain from one of which strokes indeed he was to drop dead? Did he tell of all this boyhood? We know not. Whether he told it all then or not, we are not informed. Certainly later in the recountal he did again and again, shooting it through with his realistic imagination till his hearers lived it all over with him. One thing no doubt he did recall. Of that we are sure. It was the friend of his boyhood. "Through the mists of memory my mother's face would often appear ! ' ' That face never was out of his perspective of the past, but stood monumentalized at the focus of an avenue of light an.d shade. She was a woman of gifted mind so intellectual that she was chosen to teach in the village school. Her talents descended to her boy, and to her under God he owed a grace of expression that was later to cast its spell over the hundreds of thousands in both hemispheres. It did not seem so then. Then her tears were chiefly visible as her tired fingers made lace and failed to sell it after walks of eight miles. The scene never left him nor his gleam of joy when at one time after a liberal reward for reading he gave a crown-piece into her despairing hands. To help her he recalled how he gleaned in the fields after the reapers with his sister, two years younger, and with her trundled the sheafs home to winnow in frugal thrift. This lit up his fancy's chambers with a rush light that could not be put out even when other lights were failing. "Through the mists of memory my mother's face would often appear ! ' ' The last time in England he recalled it appearing was when as a boy of twelve there came the day of his emigra- 15 226 MASTERMINDS tion to America, June 4, 1829. The sailing-vessel was becalmed some miles off Sandgate, a fact his people noticed. At first his father, and later his mother rowed out. At midnight his mother came from the dark shore, though miles awaj^ together with his sister. Up from below came her voice. She was the last figure he had seen from the shore as she crouched one-half mile in advance on the stage-road which carried her son off. Now again she was the last to see him, though it was midnight and a long way off from the land. Hailed to the deck, he was clasped in her ai'ms — to let her go only when the wind freshened and the anchor-flukes were hauled from the bottom. In the time from 1829 to 1831, a few touches of the life on a New York farm in America his memory brushed aside, until his leaving for New York with fifty cents in his pocket to find Cortland Street under his feet, and himself a boy of fourteen, unl^nown and unbefriended. Then he managed to obtain the sum of two dollars and twenty-five cents a week at the Methodist Book Concern. As a book-binder here he was able to room only in a garret. By 1833 another position opened, good enough to allow him to send for his mother and sister. Hard times again brought loss of Avork, and his love of fellowship led to con- viviality and cheap theatres. Indeed he was ' ' off with the crowd" when, while splitting kindling in an attic where she was preparing to boil rice for his supper, his mother dropped dead! Memory's ineraseable tracks led him back where he plunged into further dissipation to drown his sor- row — then down, down, down, till, singing his comic songs and performing his tricks of ventriloquism in a strolling stage company in New England cities, he finally had stranded with one such company in Worcester. Here, rum his sole comfort, delirium tremens became his sole terror, JOHN BARTHOLOMEW OOUGH 227 and the bitters that first gave him sweetness ended in giving him bitterness. Parehings, burnings, ringings, dead stillnesses, sleeplessness, cramps, temporary blindness, falling sensations, objects about him wriggling into foul mouths and eyes — all these things, till at last the delirium at its worst burst upon him. When he told this, no matter be it this the first time, or thereafter the one thousandth time, he felt as if he were living the battle over. Such impressions had branded their way into the brain-tracts ineffaceably. With such judgments written there he had only to read the handwriting on the wall in order to give his peerless phi- lippic against drink, and his motto: "Young man, keep your record clean." Ending his testimony amid the silence of every one in the room in the lower Town Hall, he affixed his signa- ture to the pledge and walked out from the ovation of hand-clasps, exclaiming : " I have done it ! I have done it ! " Shivering spine, flushing hot waves, and fiendish pleas to return to his cups pressed upon him, but could not induce him to stake all again on a glass. "I do agree that I will not use it; and I must fight it out," he murmured. Replace a lower hunger wdth a higher hunger, a lower thirst with a higher thirst, a lower objective which is wrong, not with no objective in its place, but with a higher objective which is right — this we have said is the one immortal recipe under God for changing and keeping changed a life given to perversity. This corollary of character the following incident proves conversely. Gough went to his employer next morning. "I signed the pledge last night," he said. "I know you did," half-heartedly said the employer. 228 MASTER MINDS "1 mean to keep it." was Gough's desperate rejoinder, "So they all say, and I hope you will." "You do not believe I will. You have no confidence in me." ' ' None whatever ! ' ' Broken-hearted, crushed and paralyzed. Gough says in his confession that he returned to his t-ask undone — will- power gone, mind gone, enough sense only to feel suddenly the small bar of iron he held in his hand wriggle and start to move. He griped it. It moved more. He griped it harder. Yet it moved so that it seemed to tear the palm out of his hand, so that he dropped it but to see it before him a coiled snake looking at him with green eyes and spitting tongue. His system convulsed at the sight all the more because he had sense enough left to know that it was worse than a snake, that it was the phantasmagoria of his own poisoned mind that hatched it. "I cannot fight this out. Oh, my God. I shall die! I cannot fight it out," he sobbed. "We mark now, as a proposition proved back again, how the good will of confidence feeds a drunkard's soul-hunger and deeper thirst and enables him to fight it out. "Good morning, Mr. Gough," came a word of cheer. "Good morning. I saw you sign the pledge last night." "Yes sir, I did it." "I was verj^ glad to see you do it, and many young men followed your example. It is just such men as you that we want, and I hope you wiU be the means of doing a great deal of good. My oflSce is in the Exchange; come in and see me. I shall be happy to make your acquain- tance. I have only a minute or two to spare, but I thought I would just call in and tell you to keep up a brave heart. Good bye. God bless you. Come in and see me." JOHN BARTHOLOMEW GOV GH 229 The stranger was Jesse W. Goodrich, a Worcester lawyer. "It would be impossible," Mr. Goiigh has declared, "to describe how this little act of kindness cheered me. With the exception of Joel Stratton who was a waiter at a temperance hotel and who had asked me to sign the pledge, no one had assisted me for months in a manner which would lead me to think any one cared for me or what might be my fate. Now I was not altogether alone in the world; tliere was a hope of my being rescued from the slough of despond, where I had so long been floundering. I felt that the fountain of human kindness was not utterly sealed up, and again a green spot, an oasis — small indeed, but cheering — appeared in the desert of life. I had some- thing to live for. A new desire for life seemed suddenly to spring up. The universal boundaiy of human sympathy included even my wretched self in its cheering circle. All these sensations were generated by a few kind words at the right time." "Yes, now I can fight; and I did fight six days and six nights — encouraged and helped by a few words of sympathy. He said, 'Come in and see me' — I will. He said he w'ould be pleased to make my acquaintance; he will. He said, 'Keep up a brave heart !' By God 's help I will." So awful was the fight alone in the little garret chamber which we have described as the place of the travail of Gough's soul that it took six days' wrestling there in tor- ture without food or drink. It was indeed a soul fighting against a hell on earth. The walls featured gorgon faces writhing into life; the floor squirmed with bloated insects whose tendrils gradually wriggled up about his face like ten thousand spiders. At the same time knife-blades con- torted themselves in his hand till the flesh seemed shredded. Yet he kept himself from drink and — conquered ! 230 MASTERMINDS After six days and nights, on the seventh day, sunlight began the stimulus of nature's tonic and, the weak image of himself, he tottered out into the world of men to go back to his task with order and regularity. gough's first speeches The Temperance Circle, whose fore-runners, Joel Strat- ton and Jesse Goodrich, had saved him, kept about him and asked him to narrate a^ain his experience. Its narration was sought a second time at a temperance meeting on Bum- coat Plain, where in rags and tatters he stood making his audience by the vividness of the narration of his battle forget that in an over-heated room he had clenched all the time the brown overcoat about his neck. Never did Luther or any other man so see the demons materialize his sin and dance before him as devils to be overthrown as did Gough when, with an awakened gleam and fierce gaze, he lived the crises over and communicated what he felt to the people as an action in a drama. Millbury asked him to tell his simple tale from the pul- pit. In a new suit of black he waged over the battle, with a strange heroic grace and sublime self-forgetfulness — a picture of the orator to be. West Boylston found him out, and after that many Worcester County towns com- bined to complete the discovery of John B. Gough. At the end of the year 1842 his mail was filled with invitations, and he left his shop-work for a short time. But the laid-aside tool was never reclasped, God having put into his power against King Alcohol a greater tool, the two-edged sword of truth. The reaction from over-exertion in such a campaign led from exaltation to depression. Tired nature recoiled. His emaciated form was pumped past the limit to supply JOHN BARTHOLOMEW GOVGH 231 blood for his flood of eloquence, and it gave way. Thirty towns in succession were upon his itinerary and his system broke under the strain. The old head-pain from his boy- hood's injury with a spade began to palpitate. For relax- ation and a change he took the train for Boston. After a play in a leading theatre to which he had been invited, he sat down in a ginll to partalte of oysters, the condiment to which M^as a glass of brandy. Without thinking, in his abandon of good fellowship, he drained it and several more. It suddenly flashed over him, he recounts, that this was a violation of his vow, a betrayal of his temperance friends and thousands of Worcester County enthusiasts who had trusted him, discovered him, drawn him out! It spelled ruin, he was sure. Next morning he took the train for Newburyport, the opposite way. Returning to Boston again, he dared not go on to Worcester, and drained another cup to get up his courage. Saturday he compelled himself to return, con- fess all, quit the town and the cause and remove forever from Massachusetts. Burning his papers and appointments, he felt his me- teoric career eclipsed, and packed his clothes ready to start. But the royal group who first stood by understood the reaction. They forgave him. They induced him to re- sign and fight again. At a large meeting called in Wor- cester Town Hall, Gough stood forth and proclaimed his broken vow. When he threw himself upon the mercy and judgment of the temperance folks as to whether he should retire from tlie field or no, they unanimously voted that he should remain. Deep down in his own soul, excusable as his lapse was, if we look at it from physical causes, he knew there was 232 MASTERMINDS a deeper reason. The first six months he had been en- thused by his remarkable reception by Worcester County audiences, and he had for strength relied on his own self- confidence and on the human confidence of his friends. True as was this self-confidence and human confidence to turn him, it could not keep him turned. It needed for this, strength other than human. This is the lesson he confessed to the world as one dearly learned and dearly bought. "When I signed the pledge," he writes in "Sunlight and Shadow," "I was an unbeliever. The appeal to me was on the ground of personal advantage; there was not a thought of God. My motive in that act and declaration was a merely selfish one. In all my struggle I had not offered a prayer. I said during the struggle, '0 God, I shall die. ' I heedlessly used a term. I fought that battle alone for six days. I continued for five months an ab- stainer from drink. I entered the field as a lecturer, self- reliant and boastful. Then I fell. It was after that lapse I cried out — " 'Oh, my Father, may Thy hand support me and my prayer ever be, hold Thou me up and I shall be safe. ' ' ' gough's temperance plea wins national fame Other counties than Worcester, other states than Mas- sachusetts, now called to the pleading of the new voice. The first year in three hundred and sixty-five days he gave three hundred and sixty-five addresses, for which he received but one hundred and five dollars and ninety cents in all, out of which he paid his expenses. The sums paid him ranged from six dollars to seventy-five cents. But in JOHN BARTnOLOMEW GOVGU 233 this short time he obtained fifteen thousand two hun- dred and eighteen names of those who swore to stop drinking ! In 1843 Boston called for his services, a call he much feared, as he had spoken almost altogether in towns. This was the first of three hundred and twenty-one public lectures in Boston besides talks to children. At his second November engagement the mammoth auditorium of the Odeon became packed to overflowing. The Washingtonian wave for temperance, on whose crest he rode, included not merely the masses, but the leaders of the land — men like N. P. Banks, Franklin Pierce, the Beechers, and almost every reformer of the day. November 23, 1843, occurred the marriage of Mr. Gough to Mary Whitcomb, whom he took from the homestead of Captain Stephen Flagg of Boylston, a homestead a por- tion of which in later years he reclaimed as his estate and over which he made his wife the happy head. But at the time of the marriage three dollars and fifty cents was all that he owned after he had paid his marriage fee to a Worcester minister. All he could take his bride to then was one room in Roxbury and a boarding-house table. By May, 1844, Gough 's fame spread down the coast to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, to which places he was soon after called to lecture. Even now, however, in his platform mastery of an audience, he had to make his way anew, as the audience in New York began to go out when he started to speak. In Philadelphia they decreased to but occasional liandfuls. Speaking from a Presbyterian pulpit, even on Sunday he received little enthusiasm and no thanks. This, however, was but the ice-breaking to a later acquaintance of unbounded enthu- siasm and success. 234 MASTER MINDS But back in Worcester County and New England, amongst the peoples that discovered him, he found the response to his genius that always as in the first days drew him out of himself into his best. A temperance jubilee in Boston May 30, 1844, celebrated this temperance revolution — a kind of revolution which Abraham Lincoln declared was the greatest this country could ever have. The city was in regalia, radiating ban- ners of every hue, and celebrant with jubilant outbursts. Every county sent its quota. A children's crusade fol- lowed the procession. The old Common swayed with bunt- ing, with which the State House was afloat. The climax of the day lay in the speeches by the Governor, Mr. Gough and others in Tremont Temple, overflowing to the doors as it was with the populace. Such a wave of enthusiasm sent the name of Gough far away. He was called back to New York, which again claimed him — not half-heartedly this time, but with fervent acclaim as the peerless Apostle of Temperance and the voice of the whole movement. In these addresses he won the gi*eat metropolis of America and proceeded back to Boston to find Faneuil Hall packed to the doors and win- dows to hear him. At the end of 1844, best of all to welcome him was the growing army of human faces of men who had taken the pledge and kept it and who in a triumphant host greeted the reformer in ever increasing numbers. Next, Philadelphia withdrew the cold shoulder, and the beginning of the year found Gough opening a great cam- paign in Pennsylvania. It was not a movement of mere emotion. Medical colleges sent their students in flocks to hear him, and colleges closed their recitations to have him touch their youth with his fire. New Jersey's Legis- JOHN BARTHOLOMEW GOUGII 235 latiire opened its doors, and so did New York's. Prisons and penitentiaries he equally overcame by the spell of his sway. In advance of the Washingtonian idea, splendid as it was in its moral suasion over the individual, Mr. Gough advocated legal movement against the saloon as the fortress of King Alcohol. So potent was his contention against them that traps by liquor sympathizers were set on more than one occasion to defeat and snare him. Slanders, threats, and even hints at assassination, accu- mulated. The most notorious trap was partially success- ful. It was laid in New York in September, 1845. Playing upon his well-known aversion to priggishness, especially before the laborer or poor man, who might expect him on accoimt of his risen estate to show his superiority, a man accosted him in New York city on Broadway. * ' I used to work in the same shop with you in this city. I suppose you are pious now and have got to be so proud that you would not drink a glass of soda with an old shopmate. ' ' "Oh, yes; I'll drink a glass of soda with anybody; I'll drink a glass with you if you will go in here," said Mr. Gough, pointing to the celebrated Thompson Fountain. ' ' We shall never get served there. I know a place where we can get better soda than we can here. ' ' Down Chambers Street to Chatham they proceeded to a small shop, to which Mr. Gough, taunted by the man's reference to his being too proud to drink a cup of soda with a workingman, innocently went. Calling for soda with raspberry syrup, with his hand over the brim the supposed laborer passed Gough his glass. 236 MASTERMINDS Drinking it unsuspectingly for soda, he perceived when he reached Broadway he had been drugged! It went to his brain, and half-consciously taking the relief of a draught of brandy some one passed him in a grocery store, he wandered about the streets till dark. Accosted by a woman who offered to take him home, he wearily was led like a half -asleep child. In his stupor he was given fur- ther drink. At last, after he was there in this place over Saturday, his friends were notified, and the fact that he was found there in a questionable place published abroad, the very thing desired by the conspirators. ' ' Oh, take me away from this, ' ' was the moan with which he met several distinguished gentlemen of Brooklyn, who so absolutely believed in his integrity and on his being the dupe of a trap that they took him to their own homes. The celebrated Mount Vernon Congregational Church of Boston, headed by Dr. Kirk, its pastor, verified the above steps of Cough's own account, exonerating him from all censure. Rev. Theodore Cuyler, Mr. George Ripley of Brooklyn, with the best of the press and pulpit everyw^here, expressed their faith in Mr. Cough and their pity for him as the victim of a nefarious plot. A flood of lecture calls demonstrated the people's faith, and commencing at Boston he began a triumphant tour extending into New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Princeton; thence south to Baltimore, Washington, Rich- mond and other Southern cities, to which he was recalled in June, so intense was the impression awakened by the cam- paign. At all these meetings the pledge was the focal part and specific issue, thousands upon thousands signing their names. Cold-water armies, followed by crusades of chil- dren, everywhere enrolled their enlistments. JOHN BARTHOLOMEW GOUGH 237 Every public speaker is criticisable for his human im- perfections which men in private life have equally, or more, yet hide behind the coward's castle of privacy. The defects of his qualities Gough's enemies harped upon, styling him at different times "humbug," "theatri- cal performer," "mountebank," "clown," "buffoon," "ungraceful," "homely," "round-shouldered," "crooked- legs," "hypocrite," "mercenary scoundrel," "consummate villain," "base slanderer," "liar," "dnmkard," "wear- ing long hair," "wearing jewelry," "sensual mouth," with "idiotic ravings," "a rehash of other people's thoughts," "balderdash" and "insane bellowings. " Such things are but the reverse side of the impressions which formed the positive face of other men's convictions, and they merely added to his fame, a fame unsurpassed by any great American orator. The greatest of these them- selves admitted this. Henry "Ward Beecher once exclaimed, "I never was intoxicated but once. That was when I heard John B. Gough." In August, 1847, he crossed the line into Canada, getting a first taste of the English spirit which later fanned the British homeland into flame. In Faneuil Hall, Boston, occurred a riot on October 21st, incited by two hundred thugs and topers. First hurling abuse, then joining hands, they advanced upon the platform to seize Gough. The temperance men gathered around the orator and finally seamen from the receiving ship Ohio ejected the leaders of the attack. Further lec- tures proceeded in the hall, where Gough's tongue of fire captivated assembly after assembly. Though not at all suffering stage-fright at such a time, at others Gough was sorely afflicted with it. 238 MASTER MINDS Before his one hundred and sixty-first lecture in Boston, he paced the street without, unable to force himself within. The hour was up, the entrances crowded. At the last moment he gained courage to press his way in, but was refused admittance. "I wish you would keep me out," he replied to the door- keeper. "Ah, Mr. Gough, is that you? — Make way there!" "I haven't a thought. I can say notliing to-night," he confessed to the chairman. "Ladies and Gentlemen: I have nothing to say," he con- fessed to the people as he stood up. "I almost wish I could feel as a gentleman in New York told the people he felt when he addressed them. 'I am never afraid of an audience. I imagine the people are so many cabbage heads.' I wish I could feel so." Then struck by a counter thought, he exclaimed : * ' No, I do not wish that. When I look into your faces — an assemblage of rational and immortal beings, and re- member how drink has debased and dragged down the loftiest and noblest minds — I cannot feel so; I thank God I cannot feel so." Then through the flood-gates opened up by this counter- suggestion, flowed an hour and a half of convincing elo- quence. It was an unconscious secret of Gough's hold of an audience that he so agreeably disappointed them at first. His first appearance was like Lincoln's, ungainly and un- prepossessing. "I hope," said one chairman in introducing him, "he'll prove far better than he looks to be" — a thing which he invariably did. JOHN BARTHOLOMEW GOUGH 239 Five miles from Worcester and a mile and a half from Boylston lay the slope of rolling farm-lands belonging to the Flagg family. As a place of relief from human wear and tear, so impressed was the weary lecturer with the overlook of the hillside farm from which he took his wife that, as he stood on its uplands with Mr. Stephen Flagg on a bright morning in May, he declared : * ' What a fine site for a house ! ' ' At once acting upon the inspiration of the moment, he had twenty-six acres conveyed to his hands. Here he planted the stately cedars that now mark it as an ideal rural retreat, well hid from the road, yet overtopping the peaks of surrounding trees and commanding the gentle slopes for miles beyond. In 1848-50 his lectures went on over the entire country, casting their spell over a wider and wider field. There came lists of applications he could not possibly fill. Pledges to the number of one hundred and fifty thousand were signed. In Cincinnati alone there were seven thou- sand six hundred and forty-nine, in Detroit two thousand four hundred and forty-six, and in 1851 at Buffalo after one engagement five thousand and eighty-two. Literary men and Congressmen at Washington whose streets had been lined w^th saloons and bars came alike under the magic of his convictions. * ' The farther they fall the deeper they go, ' ' was Gough 's verdict, as he made no exception to the rich and respectable drunkards, but even blamed them more. ''No respecter of persons," he allowed no class distinctions, but man- fully made his plea to all men equally. In himself, showing what wonderful changes were pos- sible, Gough impersonated what he said, and as a violent man took the kingdom by force. At times he would end 240 MASTER MINDS his lecture to find blood upon his hands which he had clinched and driven unconsciously against near objects so that he broke the skin and tore the flesh in his re-enacted fight with the devil of drink. "I have said and I believe," he declared, "that when a man is thoroughly absorbed in his theme — when his sub- ject fills him — he will so far forget all and everything in his intense desire to make his audience feel as he wishes them to feel that physical suffering will not only be en- dured and triumphed over, but he may become uncon- scious of pain in the overwhelming power of his subject on himself. I know that on the subject of temperance I feel what I say. I know it. I miist feel on this theme deeply. No lapse of time can weaken the intensity of my feeling. Burned into my memory are the years of suffering and degradation, and I do feel deeply and must ever on this great question. Sometimes when speaking on temperance, I seem to be absolutely engaged in a battle, the enemy before me — ^not as a man of straw, but the real living hor- ror; and in the wrestling with that, face to face, hand to hand, again, I have forgotten audiences and circumstances, sickness and pain under the power of this reality. ' ' GOUGH S VICTORY IN ENGLAND In the summer of 1853 he began a victorious and sweep- ing campaign in England. It was not merely a popular ovation, but a revolution of sentiment that stirred the whole empire from aristocrat to commoner. The impression was that of "a great original, a genius, and no servile copy." His first fear was that the English and Scotch would demand the academic and scholastic in place of his own JOHN BARTHOLOMEW GOUGH 241 self -realized utterance. He forgot that the truly cultured discern and discover and welcome the original genius in distinction from the scholjistic, with whose plethora they are surfeited. He forgot Lowell's saying that he who speaks with the full force of unconscious sincerity says that which is at once ideal and universal. Therefore, because he mistrusted his English reception he borrowed two hun- dred and fifty dollars to pay his fare back in case of the anticipated failure. "John, my son, don't fear," said Lyman Beecher, grip- ping his hand, * ' Go, and in God 's name talk to the people. ' ' His appearance on the platform was but a foil for the unsheathed sword that suddenly gleamed forth before the astonished assemblage piercing to the thoughts and intents of the heart. Exeter Hall, London's great auditorium, full to the doors with Englishmen, fell under the spell of his power. "As he willed," the London Weekly News recounted, "it was moved to laughter or melted to tears." England, trained for centuries to detect sham and to dis- cover reality, surpassed America in acclaiming the virtue of his voice, which was but a replica of his acts. England discerned it was not fine words, but life, flesh and blood in drama, tragedy, comedy. So the verdict of England's people was, "No servile copy, but a real original." While he held his audiences two hours by his tongue of fire, the British Press said he could have held them till midnight. He was at this, the zenith of his international fame, but thirty-seven years old, and had been but twelve years on the platform since his first discovery in the hills of Worcester. Nothing was too good for this new knight errant in the list of the liquor tourney. For liquor voices England 's foe 16 242 MASTERMINDS — its worst foe — which had entrenched itself in the very nerves and corpuscles of her life and the best in England felt they had in him a master and a victor. Distinguished leaders in England celebrated at Sand- gate his thirty-seventh birthday, which Mr. Gough com- memorated on the spot of his birth. At Sandgate the townsmen -iinhitched the horses from the carriage and drew the former village boy back to his home with their own hands! Gough always suffered from modesty and hated being lionized. At this time he pro- tested, saying constantly under his breath: "I don't like it. I don't like it." The Earl of Shaftesbury, introducing him at Old Drury Lane in 1854, voices the best sentiment of Britain when he said that the value of Gough 's labors "could not be over- rated, but v\^ere above all praise." English critical judgment, the keenest tempered and lev- elest in the world, appraised him thus through the pen of the celebrated Dr. Campbell: ' ' The voice of Mr. Gough, ' ' whom the critic described as appearing humbly like a person who had still to learn that he was somebody, ''unites to carry on the deception. At the outset it is merely strong and deep, but it gives no sign of the inherent flexibility and astonishing resources both of power and pathos. It is in perfect keeping with the entire outer man which at ease seems to draw itself up to the smallest possible dimensions, but when fired becomes erect, expanding in magnitude and stature so as to present another and entirely new man. Mr. Gough is a well- adjusted mixture of the poet, orator and dramatist. Ora- torically he is never at fault. There is nothing false. All is truth. The result is undeviating pleasure and irresist- ible truth." JOHN BARTHOLOMEW GOUGH 243 The Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Duncan McLaren, headed Scotch enthusiasm with an equal reception. So prolonged was the reception that Gough was called into every part of the United Kingdom, which refused to let him go, and what he thought would be an uncer- tain stay of two months, by 1854 lengthened out to two years. Cruikshank, the artist; Newman Hall, John Bright, and other men who incarnated English genius, formed his in- nermost circle of friends and supporters, often even travel- ing with him on his remarkable tours. Upon these tours lec- tures were demanded not only singly, but in series of twelve and thirteen, in places where he frequently had to stay five weeks at a time. He conquered Oxford, passing through the ordeal of rapid-fire jokes with which they try out their speakers. He brought the banter to an end by proposing they select a champion to contest the theme with him in a bout of ten minutes each. They could not present a man. Thus floor- ing them, Gough came out at the end victor, master of the situation and beloved by his hearers, who invited him again to speak the next day, and gave their undivided attention and allegiance. Public sentiment as to drink, the great foe of the Eng- lish race, Gough visibly and sensibly affected even in a people where he had to cut prejudice against the grain. Whether the effect was upon the thousands of outcasts and the wrecks of men and women, or upon the flower of Eng- lish society at such centres as Hartwell House, the result on the English mind was the same — a great upheaval of hearts. This was the result of his four hundred and thirty-eight lectures and his tour of twenty-three thousand two hun- dred and twenty-four English miles. 244 MASTER MINDS Home to America in August, 1855, calls for Gough's speeches came from as far as the new West. Yet Gough the man was never spoiled because he had become Gough the publicist and the international oracle of temperance. He loved nothing so much as the domestic peace of Hillside, his Worcester County home on the hills. At the little Boylston Church he kept his touch with the higher efforts of the soul, where he not only rested, but strove, teaching in the Sunday-school and starting a great rural revival. In April, 1857, after farewell ovations in the great cities, he began a second English tour. Moral suasion had become so much the habit of Mr. Gough that he perhaps failed to appreciate the political power of prohibition as championed by Neal Dow of Maine. In general the effect of such prohibition up to that time he called, compared with moral suasion, "a dead letter." Among those who were reformers only according to the letter of the law, this stirred up a hornets' nest, and operat- ing in England, caused jealous enemies to rise up to try to undo him. To silence these writers who sought as with a muck-rake to drag up the past as a means of turning pub- lic sentiment against him, he laid their statements before a court of equity. Governors of the United States, college presidents, Henry Ward Beecher. Lyman Beecher, mem- bers of Congress and leaders throughout America sent memorials to England proving the falsifiers' claims untrue. But led by Dr. F. R. Lees the tide of slander went on till June 2d, 1858, the Court of Exchequer, Westminster, brought the case to its conclusion and the verdict was ren- dered in Gough's favor and retraction demanded from Lees. During these three years until August, 1860, the back- fire only intensified Gough's supporters, under whose "\ovsG Man, Kkep Youk Rkcoi:d Clean!" (P'rom the oriKiiinl piiinting of John B. (iough on the public platform, in Mechanics Hall, Worcester) JOHN BARTHOLOMEW GOUGE 245 auspices he delivered six hundred and five lectures, travel- ing forty thousand two hundred and seventeen miles, where five hundred thousand hearers heard hira and twelve thou- sand signed pledge-cards. In liistoric Exeter Hall alone he delivered ninety-five addresses. * ' Thousands upon thousands in Britain bless him for his work's sake," was the press conclusion of a notable organ. "Mr. Gough will ever be esteemed one of the most eminent trophies of the return to that higher standard of nature's eloquence. ' ' "young man, keep your record clean!" In America from May 14th, 1843 (a time before his Eng- lish tour), till June, 1869, he delivered six thousand sixty- four public addresses and traveled two hundred seventy-two thousand two hundred and thirty-five miles. Even by 1853 he had obtained two hundred fifteen thousand one hundred and seventy-nine pledges, the results of which in reborn men, happy wives and saved children, no one can accu- rately computate. "Young man, keep your record clean!" This was his last injunction to mankind. February 15, 1886, at Frankford, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he had spoken twenty minutes to a packed audience when, uttering these burning words which seemed to focus the light of his whole life, he lifted his hand to a pain back of his scarred forehead, and fell backward, stricken with apoplexy. Three days later, aged sixty-nine, he died. A faded handkerchief spotted with a woman's tears was the most signal emblem his wife placed as the badge of mourning upon his casket at the funeral service in 246 MASTER MINDS Boylston, It bespoke louder than anything else the speak- ing silence of thousands upon thousands of regenerated homes. Decades before, in England, the faded handkerchief had come to Mrs. Gough with these words: "I am very poor. I married with fairest prospects. But my husband took to drinking, and everything went until at last I found myself in one miserable room. My husband lay drunk in the corner and my sick child lay moaning on my knee. I wet this handkerchief^ with my tears. My husband met yours. He spoke a few words and gave a grasp of the hand, and now for six years my husband has been to me all that a husband can be to a wife. I have brought your husband the very handkerchief I wet that night with my tears, and I want him to remember that he has wiped away those tears from my eyes. ' ' iTbis pathetic memento, with many another, lies in a collection at the house of John B. Gough 's niece, Mrs. Charles G. Eeed of Worcester. Here is the little Bible, the gift of his mother, inscribed by her hand, lying strangely enough side by side with the illuminated vellum greetings signed on his victorious return years later by England's peers, church canons and reformers. Here by the score are Cruikshank's original drawings, of which Gough, Cruikshank's bosom friend, made a complete collection from the artist's first hand work. Original copies of Gough 's lectures, illustrating the way he prepared them, also lie in this collection, with their care- fully penned words, each letter a half inch in size, so that the lecturer if using manuscript could see it easily. Senatoii (ir.or.i.i: Fnismic IIciar Tn Later Life and Karly Manhood (The corner vignette is from a rare, imprinted dafruer- reotype in the possession of liis iianf,'literi GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR AN AMERICAN IDEAL STATESMAN THE family tree of George Frisbie Hoar, from whicli he sprang August 29th, 1826, is most interesting and distinguished. Its branches have sheltered many of the greatest movements of our time and of past times. Its roots started with our history. But that was not his career. He began as any other man begins when he took root for himself in his own place and in his own way. His autobiography began when he came to himself. "There is," he once said, "once in a while, though the quality is rare, an historian or an author, a writer of fiction, or a preacher or a pastor, or an orator, or a poet, or an influential or beloved citizen, who in everything he says or does seems to be sending a personal message from himself. The message is inspired and tinctured and charged and made electric with the quality of the individual soul. We know where it comes from. No mask, no shrinking modesty can hide the individual. Every man knows from whom it comes and hails it as a special message to himself. We say that is from my friend to me ! The message may be read by a million eyes and reach a million souls. But every one deems it private and confidential to him. ' ' In this very way George Frisbie Hoar comes to us because he at first came to Jmnself and at last gave himself. Had he not come to himself, all the ancestors in the world would have made nothing but a bright background for his dismal failure. It is because he came to himself that he gets a hold of ourselves. 248 MASTER MINDS He came to himself as a student of truth, as a statesman, and as a ripened soul. AS A STUDENT OP TRUTH He entered Harvard when sixteen years old, in the year 1842, after preparation in Concord and under the famous preceptress, Sarah Ripley. As a student he confessed him- self a time-killer, a lounger and an idler. "President Eliot," he remarked, speaking of his life as a boy, ' ' said he had a great respect for his little self. I can not say that of my young self at Harvard. My time was largely wasted in novel-reading, or reading books which had not much to do with the college studies, and lounging about my rooms or that of the other students. ' ' "Old Dr. Bartlett, who always uttered what was in his heart, said that after my two oldest brothers and I had grown up, Samuel Hoar's boys used to be the three biggest rascals in Concord. ' ' But the mischievous lad and student loafer came to him- self, underwent a great reaction and witnessed this counter confession : "When I graduated, I looked back on my wasted four years with a good deal of chagrin and remorse. I think I can fairly say that I have had few idle moments since. I have probably put as much hard work into life as most men on this continent — certainly I have put into it all the work that my physical powers, especially my eyes, would permit. I studied law in Concord the first year after graduation. I used to get up at six o'clock in the morning, go to the office, make a fire, and read law till breakfast-time. Then I went home to breakfast and got back in about three quar- ters of an hour, and spent the forenoon until one diligently reading law. After dinner, at two o'clock, I read history GEOROE F RISE IE HOAR 249 until four. I spent the next two hours in walking alone in the woods and roads. At seven I read a little geometry and algebra, reviewing the slender mathematics which I had studied in college, and then spent two hours in reading Greek. I read through Thueydides, Homer, and Xeno- phon 's Hellenica, and some other Greek books in that year. ' ' On Sunday his programme began with that observance of the Sabbath which he maintained weekly and for the protection of which he later headed the Sabbath Protective League.^ "I have no remorse for wasted hours during those two years in Concord, ' ' he concluded. By this act, the assertion of a richly endowed but idle will, and the putting of it to work on his own responsibility, George Frisbie Hoar came to the psychological moment of his life. By this moral act he unlocked the latent layers of his soul which otherwise would have slept uselessly on. iFor eight years previous to his death Senator Hoar was Pres- ident of the Sabbath Protective League, and he thus expressed himself: * ' There is in my judgment no more commanding public duty than attendance at church on a Sunday. ... I believe we best main- tain the country we love, and the State of which we are a part, and of whose government we have our share of personal responsibility, by a constant attendance on the public and social worship of God. I believe it to be to the interest of the country, of the town, and of the individual soul that the habit be not abandoned. ... It would, in my judgment, if that were to happen, be impossible to maintain liberty, self-government, or any form of republic, which depends for its success on the character of its citizenship. ... I know the temptations on a summer 's day to get into the country, among fields and forests, and, to use a familiar phrase, to stretch your legs by a walk or a ride. But whether it be better to do it may possibly depend on the question whether the legs or the soul be the most important part of a man." 250 MASTERMINDS This lesson is nowhere more vividly pictured for our age than in Abbey's mural painting in the Public Library at Boston, of Sir Galahad in the quest of the Grail. Abbey paints here no mere brilliant maze of mediaeval color and chivalrous romance. It is alive with a vital applica- tion. It is an exponent of every thoughtless heir who comes to himself. First is the favored youth, born in the purple. The good will of heaven is prefigured by divine benedicite. Red cardinals endue him in pomp and ceremonial with every indulgence of Holy Church. The school confers its finest teacher — a teacher without force and who catered to the child, not daring to cross his assumption that he could get everything for nothing. For did not the State, King Arthur and the Round Table set him apart and decorate him as picked flower of knight errantry to seek the Grail, remove the spell of the city's sin and wear the sword Excalibur? Everything is to be done for him, and he need do nothing for himself. Triply blessed with all the world had to give — Church, State and School — he sets out — but to fail! This is depicted in the tragedy at the end wall. He can- not remove the spell from the city which lies enshadowed by evil while rulers and citizens sleep as moral corpses. Hmnbled to the dregs of his soul by his failure, crushed with defeat, the proud knight turns empty away, learning the great lesson of life that, even royally backed as he was, he could not get something for nothing; he could not he victor by having everything done for him and by doing nothing for himself. Suddenly, on the next wall, a voluptuous temptress, beau- tifully gowned, rides by. His eye sees in her lap the skulls GEORGE F RISE IE HOAR 251 of her moral victims. He sees — refuses — turns — exerts for the first time in his life moral struggle and exerts it with sweat of blood. Here springs up within him the motor whose friction generates a current that connects his will- power with the power of the Infinite. Not only does it unlock the pent layers of moral energy in his own soul, but back in the city it dispels the cloud of sin and moral stupor! King and people awake to righteousness and sin not. Before him falls the drawbridge over which, empowered with invisible power, he slays the vices and releases the virtues. Resisting even with virtue's daughter a stay of duty, he pushes on to the gleam incar- nadined in the Grail whose Christ-blood he now beholds. He ends the quest in a barque that breasts the crimson sea of glass mingled with fire until it bears him to the entrance to the Holy City. The determinant of destiny for that young knight was just at this point in the moral tragedy — not where in mag- nificence everything was done for him, but where, the first time in his life, alone and humbled, he did something for himself and brought emotion into execution. Just at this point was Hoar's determinant of destiny! Here under God through the exertions of his own will he came not to his ancestral, but to his own birthday; he attained not to his inherited, but to his own birthrights. AS A STATESMAN Thus reborn, first as a student of truth, he next came to himself as a statesman. Whittier once said to a young man wishing to live a life of worth : Give yourself to some great cause not yet become popular. When Hoar began his manhood, such a cause had its underground stream then existent. It took 252 MASTERMINDS hold of his emptied soul, became the fountain-head of his life, and altogether possessed him. Had it not been for this, his career, at least as it was, would not have been. He supposed, he confused, that he was absolutely without capacity for public speaking, expected never to be married, perhaps to earn twelve or fifteen hundred dollars a year, which would enable him to have a room of his own in some quiet house and to earn enough to collect rare books. A harmless book-worm — such was his ambitious program. But something happened! It was the pulse of this new young cause throbbing through the East. "When I first came to manhood," he recounted, "and began to take part in public affairs, that greatest of crimes, human slavery, was entrenched everywhere in power in this republic. Congress and the Supreme Court, commerce and trade and social life alike submitted to its imperious and arrogant sway. JMr, Webster declared that there was no North and that the South went clear up to the Canada line. The hope of many wise and conservative and, as I now believe, patriotic men, of saving this country from being rent into fragments was in leaving to slavery forever the great territory between the Mississippi and the Pacific, in the fugitive slave law, a law under which freemen were taken from the soil of Massachusetts. There was some- thing in that struggle with slavery which exalted the hearts of those who had a part in it, however terrible, as no other political battle in history. I became of age at just about the time when the Free-soil party was bom. It awakened in my heart in early youth all the enthusiasm which my nature was capable of holding, an enthusiasm which from that day to this has never grown cold. No political party in history was ever formed for objects so GEO ROE F RISE IE HOAR 253 great and noble. It was a pretty good education, better than that of our nniversity, to be a young Free-soiler in Massachusetts." In 1848, with yoiuig Hoar's father a founder, the Free-soil movement, later to grow into the Republican party, came into being in the famous Free-soil convention in Worcester. The heroism of the cause was everywhere in the air. Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell and Bryant were baptizing the movement with song. Such was its force exerted upon the young man's imagi- nation that in 1847 its pressure had drawn him to settle in Worcester, the city that mothered it at the Commonwealth 's Heart. "I have never regretted the choice," he once concluded, "and have spent my life there, except when in Washington, for considerably more than half a century, Worcester com- bines the youth and vigor and ambition of a Western city with the refinement and conveniences and the pride in a noble history of an old American community. I can con- ceive of no life more delightful for a man of public spirits than to belong to a community like that. ' ' Shortly before the end of his life he said, "I believe I shall die this after- noon. I have done the best I could. I have always loved this town and its people. ' ' To the law-office where he was beginning practice in Worcester, came such leaders as Sumner, Adams, Andrew, Palfrey, Garrison, Burlingame, Howe, Dana, Henry Wil- son and Samuel Hoar. Though drawn irresistibly to settle by the cradle of the new passion, believing that where the heart is the home is, beyond that young Hoar was silent and an onlooker. But in 1850 events were rapidly coming to a crisis. Webster's Seventh of March Speech broke faith with his 254 MASTERMINDS Free-soil supporters and raised the Free-soil party to a pitch of unbounded excitement against the extension of slavery into the territories. "Hoar! Hoar!" he heard cried at a great Mechanics Hall meeting in the autumn of this year, 1850, when the expected speaker failed to appear. Reddening in confu- sion, the young man stammered an excuse. "Platform! Platform!" insisted the people. He spoke, and his speech found out a new vein and evoked in him confidence in himself as a speaker, while it evoked in the people such a reception that thenceforward he was con- stantly called upon. Thus he began as a statesman. In the meantime Judge Emory Washburn had received Hoar into partnersliip for practice in Worcester County, a prac- tice he soon was to succeed to, owing to the election of Judge Washburn as Governor. From 1849 to 1869 so great grew the professional service that at one time or other Hoar became counsel for every one of the fifty-two towns of Worcester County. Under the stj*ain, too much for any man, his health broke in 1868, and he departed for Europe. Up to this time, at the early age of twenty-five, he had been elected to the Legislature and served the House in 1851, where he was a member of the Law Committee. He declined reelection. In 1857 his party sent him to the Massachusetts Senate, where he became chairman of the Judiciary Committee, when he accomplished the abolishment of the old common law sys- tem of pleading in Massachusetts, and, marked as a progres- sive in other ways, was derided for making the first ten- hour-a-day labor speech for a shorter day. In 1854 the Know-nothing party in an anti-foreign cam- paign swept the State. It was opposed to the last ditch by GEORGE F RISE IE HOAR 255 the same sane spirit in which Hoar lat^r opposed the A. P. A. When absent in Europe in 1868, as he had already against his will been pressed into service as a young statesman in the State Legislature, so now still against his will, during his absence, his name was decided upon as a candidate for his district's national Representative at Congress. Back from abroad, during the session of the "Worcester conven- tion that nominated him, he had no desire to be nominated and went for a long ride. When, with difficulty, he was prevailed upon to accept, he stood out and declared the principle that always made him a statesman -.''It is by your free choice that this nomination has been conferred. It has not been begged for or bargained for or intrigued for or crawled into." Such was the declaration of statesmanship to which, in season and out of season, he kept true up to the end when he concluded: "7 have never lifted my finger or spoken a word to any man to secure or to promote my own election to any office." When entering the House of Representatives in 1869, Grant's administration was at its height and at its depth. Henry Wilson and Sumner were there of the old war- horses, and Blaine, Garfield, Allison and others of the new. Sunset Cox sought to turn down the new member by saying after he had made a maiden speech : ' ' Massachusetts does not send her Hector to the field ! ' ' " It is not necessary when the attack is led by Thersites, ' ' was the retort — a rejoinder that won Hoar the field. Into the Republican camp of reconstruction, Hoar came as a purging finger, not as a blind partisan. He believed and was a moving leader in all the positive essentials the party of Lincoln was carrying out. He rejoiced in the return of the Southern States to the Union, and in the five 256 MASTER MINDS million f reedmen and their riorht to labor and receive wages. He led in the treatment of the huge war-debt and the exaction of the war-claim from England. He did not, however, hide his eyes from the failures of reconstruction, South or North, As to the North he deplored the failure to vote sums for education in the South, for white as well as black. He frankly recognized the defects of the Northern man- agement of reconstruction, saying: "I myself, although I have always maintained, and do now, the equal right of all men of whatever color or race to a share in the government of the country, felt a thrill of sadness when I saw the Legislature of Louisiana in session in the winter of 1873. They (the Southerners) had persuaded themselves to believe that a contest for political power with a party largely com- posed of negroes was a contest for their civilization itself. They thought it to be a fight for life with a pack of wolves. I incline to think that a large number of the men who got political office in the South, when the men who had taken part in the Rebellion were still disfranchised, were of a character that would not be tolerated in public office in the North. In general, it was impossible not to feel a cer- tain sympathy with a people who, whatever else had been their fault, never were guilty of corruption or meanness or the desire to make money out of public office, in the in- tolerable loathing which they felt for these strangers who had taken possession of the high places." With this sympathy, he yet fought fiercely against the refusal of the Southern people to secure the negro the bal- lot. As to his Northern brethren his most outstanding contest was against the corruption at the heart of the Republican party itself. ' ' When I entered Congress in 1869, ' ' he con- GEORGE FBI SB IE HOAR 257 fessed, ''the corridors of the Capitol and the committee- rooms were crowded with lohliyists. Adroit and solf-soekinp: men were often able, in the mnltitnde of claims which must necessarily be disposed of by a rapid examination, to impose on committees of the House." Reviewing: the period when he had left the House a little later, he said, ''My own pub- lic life has been a very brief and insif^rnificant one, extend- ing little beyond the duration of a sing:le term of Senatorial ofifice, but in that brief period I have seen five judpres of a high court of the United States driven from office by threats of impeachment for corruption or mal-administration. " Among the chief of corrupt acts was when "the national triiunph, ' ' the Union Pacific Railroad, from ocean to ocean, became by the verdict of three Congressional committees the "national shame." The business of this corporation was mixed with the Credit Mohilier, in which Peter was robbed to pay Paul, and in which the money borrowed to construct the road was divided in bonus dividends, men paying thirty cents on one dollar. Shares of stock alsp were offered as gifts to secure favorable legislation as to the Union Pacific Railroad. All was a source of shame to every patriotic Congressman until the issue was met and punish- ment meted out — a rectification in which Hoar was a leader. But other corruption was rampant. For example, in 1872, a man, John D. Sanborn, applied for a collection of withheld taxes, and from application to a few distillers increased his. list in 1878 to two thousand and five hun- dred and ninety-two, collecting half a million, of which he took one half himself! Such was the kind of claimants that arose during the administration under Gen- eral Grant, whose good-natured trust blinded him to the crimes of the corruptionists of which these two are but samples. The Tweed ring and New York gang of grafters 17 258 MASTER MINDS were bad enough. But Hoar's hands were full with the Massachusetts centre of evil. He saw that Massachusetts indeed furnished the leaders in a school of national corrup- tion within the Republican partj', which with dismay he hastened to expose. This Massachusetts ring came to a head in General Benjamin F. Butler, whom Grant had relieved from duty in the army in the Ci\'il War only to allow him to enter his party counsels in his later Pres- idency. ' ' The success, ' ' declared Mr. Hoar, ' ' of Butler 's attempt to use and consolidate the political forces of Massachusetts would have been the corruption of her youth, the destruc- tion of everything valuable in her character and the estab- lishment at the mouth of the Charles River of another New York with its frauds, Tweed rings and scandals. ' ' As early as 1871 the fight took the form of a death struggle between Hoar and Butler. At Washington and on home ground Hoar contested every inch, first preventing Butler from receiving the nomination for Governor at a Worcester convention, in which, to guard against a Butler disorder, fifty police had to be called in. By 1873 open rup- ture resulted, in which Butler attacked Hoar with fiercest broadsides, and Hoar replied effectively. Butler, who had been the counsel for the corrupt deal of the Union Pacific Railroad and Credit Mohilier, was also the father of the greenback measure for irredeemable paper money, which meant for the immense war-debt, repudiation. The oppo- sition led by Hoar and others killed the measure, and Pres- ident Grant declared, "Let it be understood that no repudi- ator of one farthing of our public debt will be trusted in public place." "I am compelled to declare with great reluctance and regret," declared Governor John A. Andrew, "that the GEORGE F RISE IE HOAR 259 whole course of proceeding under General Butler in this Commonwealth seems to have been desijorned and adopted to afford means to persons of bad character to make money unauspiciously. ' ' Speakinc: of such abuses from within the Republican parts'-, IToar did not cover it up, but exclaimed: "Who writes the history of our time will record them with inex- orable pen. ' ' In destroyinc: such men who prey upon the nation's vitals, Hoar led with others in producino; a civil-service law to take one hundred thousand offices out of the system of public patronasre and Senatorial dictation. All the time as a Representative and Con^essman, and later as Senator, Hoar was serving regularly on the various committees by which the hard and important work of Con- gress is transacted. The Judiciary Committee he especially mastered. He was also largely interested in the matter of exonerating Oliver 0. Howard from blame in the contro- versy as to his conduct of the Freedmen's Bureau. He led the Eads bill to victory which secured the open- ing of the Misvsissippi to commerce by the means of jetties. Against a large majority of the Republicans who would claim it without such a commission, it was his exercise of independent judgment that led him to vote with the Demo- crats of the House for the Electoral Commission bill of 1877 to decide upon the Presidential election in the contested election between Hayes and Tilden. By this act what might have been another civil war was averted from the nation. At the close of his Congressional service. Congressman Hoar sought to end his public life and refused renomination to the House. In 1877 the people of the Commonwealth chose him United States Senator. He attributed it not to his own 260 MASTER 31 IND8 greatness, but to their desire to rid the State of the misrule of Butler. "I'll not get twenty-five votes," he declared when first approached. ' ' I can truly say, ' ' he added after- wards, "that I was as indifferent to the result as to the question whether I should walk on one side of the street or the other. I had an infinite longing for my home, my pro- fession and my library." — "I never found public employ- ment pleasant or congenial. ' ' Probably no senator was ever a greater worker or, undis- turbed by social cares, took his duties more conscientiously. Living in the plainest boarding-houses with his wife, on fare often that a two-doUar-a-day laborer surpassed, he worked harder in continuous labor than any other member of Con- gress or senator has ever worked. His fratemals thus marked his appearance: "In the Senate," said Senator Lodge, "he was a great debater, quick in retort, with all the resources of his mind always at his command. Although he had no marked gifts of presence, voice or delivery, he was none the less a master of brilliant and powerful speech. His style was noble and dignified, with a touch of the stateliness of the eighteenth century, rich in imagery and allusion, full of the apt quota- tions which an unerring taste, an iron memory, and the widest reading combined to furnish. When he was roused, when his imagination was fired, his feelings engaged, or his indignation awakened, he was capable of a pasaonate eloquence which touched every chord of emotion and left no one who listened to him unmoved. At these moments, whether he spoke on the floor of the Senate, in the presence of a great popular audience, or in the intimacy of private conversation, the words glowed, the sentences marshaled themselves in stately sequence, and the idealism which was the dominant note of his Ufe was heard sounding clear and GEORGE FBI SB IE HOAR 261 strong above and beyond all pleas of interest or expediency. ' ' "One watching him in the Senate," said another col- league, ' * might think him idly passing away the hour. He was watching and listening. He seemed indifferent to what was going on. But let an error in argument be made or a misstatement of fact asserted, or, to him, false conclusions drawn in the course of that debate, and instantly his voice would ring throughout the chamber. ' ' * ' I doubt, ' ' said a keen neighbor of his Senatorial desk, "if he ever really knew an idle waking hour. How often as we watched him we saw his lips moving, framing the words of his unuttered thought. Those who knew him best could not help feeling that even in his moment of apparent relax- ation and good fellowship, there was going on within him that mysterious thing which we sometimes call ' unconscious cerebration;' that his mind was ever at work solving the weightiest questions. ' ' Grounded in American and English history, certain of whose epochs he himself treated in monographs and papers. Senator Hoar's mind was preeminently fitted to deal with questions from the point of view of a patriotic student and statesman.^ As Senator he thus was an active sharer and close observer of the high tasks of statesmanship from Sumner's day to the congresses of a later day. To such committees as the Conunittee of Judiciary, which he frequently graced and guided ; of Indian Affairs and Agriculture ; of Patents ; of the Revision of the Laws ; of the Library Committee ; of iHe was at one time President of the American Antiquarian Society, whose original manuscripts and data of past epochs as they lie in the Worcester society's building are sources of national value. 262 MASTERMINDS the early Committee on War Claims, involving hundreds and hundreds of millions — is to be added the Committee of Privileges and Elections, in which he put forward one of his most contested bills — the Federal Election Bill in 1890 — for the control of the uncorrupted ballot in the South through national supervision. The bill was lost by a slight margin. It is to be recalled that he was one of the three senators against all the others to support President Hayes in his institution of civil-service reform. Offered the distin- guished post of ambassador to England by President Hayes, he declined, as he likewise did when offered the same post by President McKinley. He also took great pleasure in fathering the Fisheries Treaty, July 10, 1888, by which he secured favorable rights for our fishermen off the northern coasts of America. Were measures unpopular that he deemed right, he never flinched or trimmed. The Eiver and Harbor Bill of 1882, to grant eighteen mil- lion for rendering navigable the Mississippi and other streams, he deeply espoused. Against him was the popular opinion. Democratic and Republican. Excitement ran high. "This measure is right," he concluded with himself. "Is my father's son to sneak home to Massachusetts having voted against a bill that is clearly righteous and just because he is afraid of public sentiment ? ' ' He thereupon risked his seat and voted ' ' yes ' ' in the face of a widespread and almost universal protest of indignation among press and people. "If I had flinched or apologized, I should have been destroyed ! ' ' was his verdict afterwards, ' ' but I stood to my guns." The greatest problem in statesmanship on which Hoar independently moved on the troubled waters which are yet unsettled, is that of the race question. "The relation to GEOUGE F RISE IE HOAR 263 each other in a republic of men of different races is a ques- tion which has vexed the American people from the bej^in- ning. It is, if I am not mistaken, to vex them still more. As surely as the path in which our fathers entered a hun- dred years ago led to safety, to strength, to glor>', so surely will the path in which we now propose to enter bring us to shame, to weakness and to peril. * ' In dealing with a class of immigrants, I would prescribe as strict a rule as the strictest for ascertaining whether the immigrant meant in good faith to be an American citizen, whether he meant to end his life here, to bring his wife and children with him, whether he loved American institutions, whether he was fit to understand the political problems with which the people had to deal, whether he had individual worth or health of body or mind. I would make, if need be, ten years or twenty years as the necessary period of resi- dence for naturalization. One tiling I have never con- sented to is that a man shall be kept out of this country, or kept in a position of inferiority, while he is in it, because of his color, because of his birthplace, or because of his race. ' ' Senator Hoar began to utter these principles from which he has never moved, as early as the exclusion in California of Chinese at the end of the sixties. He charged it a con- flict with the doctrines on which our fathers founded the republic, with the principles of the constitution of almost all the states, including that of California, and with the declaration of leading statesmen at the time of the Bur- lingame treaty up to the year 1868 and to 1878 at the time of the bill against Chinese laborers. His stand thus taken in 1880 he also maintained in the bill to exclude Chinese laborers. When it expired in twenty years, and was renewed with moderation in 1902, he declared: "I feel bound to enter a protest. ' ' His stand was one not as to the 264 MASTERMINDS Chinese, but as to a principle which he saw, and propheti- cally saw, would involve, and has involved us, in the most serious national problem of our time — class distinction as to the races. "I hold," he has declared, "that every human soul has its rights dependent upon its individual personal worth and not dependent upon color or race, and that all races, all colors, all nationalities contain persons entitled to be recognized everywhere they go on the face of the earth as the equals of every other man ! The problem of to-day is not to convert the heathen from heathenism. It is to convert the Christian from heathenism. How our race troubles would disappear if the dominant Saxon would but obey in liis treatment of the heathen races the authority of the fundamental laws on which his own insti- tutions rest. We easily forgive our own white fellow cit- izens for the unutterable and terrible cruelties they have committed on men of other races. But if a people just coming out of slavery or barbarism commit a hundredth part of the same offense, our righteous indignation knows no bounds." As to the acquisition of Hawaii he said in the Senate July 5, 1898 : " If this be the first step in the acquisition of dominion over bai'barous archipelagoes in distant seas; if we are to enter into competition with the great powers of Europe in the plundering of China, in the division of Africa; if we are to quit our own to stand on foreign lands; if our commerce is hereafter to be forced upon unwilling peoples at the cannon's mouth; if we are our- selves to be governed in part by people to whom the Decla- ration of Independence is a stranger, or, worse stiU, if we are to govern subject and vassal states, trampling as we do it on our great charter, which records aloft the liberty and GEORGE FKISBIE IIOAB 265 the destiny of individual manhood, — then let us resist this thing* in the bej^inninfi^, and let us resist it to death!" Later as to the Philippines he stated directly out and out: "I do not agree with those gentlemen who tliink we should wrest the Philippine Islands from Spain and take charge of them ourselves. I do not think we should acquire Cuba, as the result of the existing war, to be annexed to the United States." After the treaty of December 18, 1898, by which we bought the Philippines from Spain, President McKinley thus greeted Senator Hoar: "How are you feeling this morning, Mr. Senator?" "Pretty pugnacious, I confess, Mr. President." Tears arose in the benignant chief exec- utive's eyes as he said: "I shall always love you whatever you do," "I know,"^ were Hoar's ringing words, "how feeble is a single voice amid this din and tempest, this delirium of empire. It may be that the battle for this day is lost, but I have an assured faith in the future. I have an assured faith in justice and the love of liberty of the American people. The stars in their courses fight for freedom. The Ruler of the heavens is on that side. If the battle of to-day go against it, I appeal to anotlier day, not distant and sure to come. I appeal from the clapping of hands and the stamping of feet and the brawling and shouting to the quiet chamber where the fathers gathered in Philadel- phia. I appeal from the empire to the republic. I appeal from the millionaire and the boss and the wire-puller and the manager to the statesman of the elder time, in whose eyes a guinea never glistened, who lived and died poor, and who left to his children and his countrymen a good name, lUttered somewhat later. 266 MASTERMINDS far better than riches. I appeal from the present, bloated with material prosperity, drunk with the lust of empire, to another and better age. I appeal from the present to the future and to the past. ' ' ' ' The treaty was ratified by the Senate February 6, 1899, late in the afternoon," recounts Congressman Lovering of Massachusetts, ' ' and it so happened that I went over to the Senate next morning to ask Senator Hoar to get the appro- priation in the River and Harbor Bill increased for Plymouth Harbor. A great storm had washed away a mile of breakwater, and I said to him that there was danger of Plymouth Rock's being washed away. He replied very seriously, and almost with tears in his eyes, ' ' Mr. Lovering, Plymouth Rock was washed away yesterday afternoon at four o'clock." Senator Hoar clung to his conviction even during the war. "I think that under the head of Mabini and Aguinaldo, and their associates, but for our interference a republic would have been established at Luzon which would have compared with the best of the republican governments between the United States and Cape Horn. If we had treated them as we did Cuba, we should have been saved the public shame of violating not only our own pledges, but the rule of conduct which we had declared to be self- evident truth in the beginning of our history. ' ' Senator Hoar here as throughout was an independent within his party and remained there, declaring he could accomplish organic results he elsewise, as an independent without a party, never could have accomplished. One vote in his party would have saved the vote that went for the Philippine Treaty, he declared, and one would have held back the Spanish Treaty on the part of those disagreeing with the party who had left it as independents. GEORGE FRI8BIE HOAR 267 Nevertheless he spared not the rod. ''When I think of my party, whose ??loiy and whose service to liberty are the pride of my life, crushing out this people in their effort to establish a good republic, I feel very much as if I had learned that my father or some other honored an- cestor had been a slaveholder, or had boasted that he had introduced a new and better kind of handcuffs or fetters to be worn by the slaves during the horrors of the middle passage." In the case of the colonies, which since have beheld the republic leaning back more to his view. Hoar rises to an eloquence equal to that of those who championed America in Parliament in the Revolution. "I would rather," he exclaimed, ''have the gratitude of the poor people of the Philippine Islands amid their sorrow, and have it true that what I may say or do has brought a ray of hope into the gloomy covering in which the oppressed people of Asia dwell, than to receive a ducal coronet from every monarch in Europe or command the applause of listening senates or read my history in a nation's eyes." With all this opposition Senator Hoar fronted his party just previous to the 4th of March election of 1901 ! He also sharply differed from Senator Lodge, his Massachu- setts coUeague, as well as with President McKinley, who had changed opinion, he believed, under popular pressure. Yet when election came he was elected by the Legislature without opposition, with all the Republican and with many of the Democratic votes! This vindicated his conviction that "the great secret of all statesmanship" is "that he that withstands the people on fit occasions is commonly the man who trusts them most and always in the end the man they trust most!" 268 MASTERMINDS "I have throTighout my whole political life," he later stated, "acted upon my own judgment. I have done what I thought for the public interest without much troubling myself. It has required no courage for any representative of Massachusetts to do what he thought was right. She is apt to select, to speak for her, certainly those whom she sends to the United States Senate, in which choice the whole Commonwealtli has a part — men who are, in gen- eral, of the same way of thinking and governed by the same principles as are the majority of her people. When she has chasen them, she expects them to act according to their best judgment. She likes independence better than obsequiousness. The one thing the people of Massachusetts will not forgive in a public servant is that he should act against his own honest judgment to please them. So I claim no credit that I have always voted and spoken as I thought, always without stopping to consider whether pub- lic opinion would support me. I have never in my life cast a vote or done an act in legislation that I did not at that time believe to be right and that I am not now willing to avow and to defend and debate with any champion of sufficient importance who desires to attack it at any time and in my presence. I have throughout my whole political life acted upon my own judgment. I have done what I thought for the public interest, without much troubling myself about public opinion. I account it my great good fortune that although I have never flinched from uttering whatever I thought and acting according to my own con- viction of public duty, as I am approaching fourscore years I have, almost without an exception, the good-will of my countrymen. In nearly every one of which, I am sorry to say, are the numerous instances where I have been compelled to act upon my judgment against that of my GEORGE F RISE IE HOAR 260 own countrymen, the people have always come around to my way of thinking, and in all of them, I believe, I have had on my side the opinion of the great men of the genera- tions of the past." In choosing the national President in the four great national Republican conventions — 1876, 1880, 1884, 1888 — Senator Hoar moved as a power behind the throne of the King of America, — Public Opinion. He favored Hayes in 1876 and the exit of Grant. In 1880 at the landslide for Garfield after his nomination, Senator Hoar was presiding officer of the Convention and came over to its opinion. ''Next to the assassination of Lincoln, Garfield's death," he asserted, "was the greatest national misfortune caused to this country by the loss of a single life." In 1884, active for Sherman, he lived to see later the defeat of the nominee, Blaine. In 1888 Benjamin Harrison was nominated. Hoar favored Allison. An international bi-metallist, he boldly stated his agreement with Alexander Hamilton, and in Europe sought the agreement with. European nations, es- pecially England and France, to an international bi-metal- lic system. He opposed Mr. Bryan's free coinage of silver by one nation alone as repudiation. He also opposed Mr. Bryan on the Philippine Treaty, believing that had the great Commoner not favored it, it would not have been enacted.^ By Senator Hoar's statesmanship came "the Presidential Succession," the constitutional change that makes the iln 1908 Mr. Bryan stated privately in the presence of the author that the urging of that treaty he regarded as the greatest act of statesmanship in his life. 270 MASTERMINDS Presidential office succeed in case of the Chief Executive's death or removal, to the Vice-president and the Cabinet membere, beginning: with the Secretary of State. From the Free-soil movement to the Colonial question, not as a politician trimming his sails to the populace, but as a statesman acting up to his independent judgment, Senator Hoar, in a way unsurpassed by any other modem statesman, came not to others' views, but to his own; not to majorities, but to himself; not to the dictation of others' minds, whether of Presidents or Senates or the crowds at the hustings, but he came under God to the dictation of his own mind. AS A RIPENED SOUL But in the third place he came to himself also as a ripened soul. He mellowed toward opponents, and more and more saw the good on the other side as well as the evil on his own. Preeminently was this true of the Southern Democrats. "They are a noble race," he insisted. "We may well pattern from them on some of the great virtues which make up their strength as they make the glory of the free states. Their love of home, their chivalrous respect for woman, their courage, their delicate sense of humor, their constancy, which can abide by an opinion or a pur- pose or an interest of their states, through adversity and through prosperity, through the years and through the generations, are things by which the people of the North may take a lesson. And there is another thing — covet- ousness, corruption, the low temptation of money, have not yet found any place in our Southern politics. We cannot afford to live, and do not wish to live in a state of estrangement from a people who possess these GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 271 qualities. They are oiir kindred, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood, and wliatever may be the temporary error of any Southern states, I for one, if I have a right to speak for Massachusetts, say to her: 'Entreat me not to leave thee, nor to return from following' after thee, for where thou ^oest I will go, and where thou stayest I will stay also, and thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God.' " As to caste and class bitterly arraigned as an aristo- crat, he used in reply his famous "fish-ball letter," writ- ten to the editor of the Pittsburg Post in August, 1890 : — Washington, D. C, Au^st 10, 1890. To the Editor of the Pittsburg Post. My dear Man: What can have put such an extravagant yarn into the head of so amiable and good-natured a fellow? I never said the thing you attribute to me in any interview, caucus or anywhere else. I never inherited any wealth or land. My father was a lawyer in very large practice for his days, but he was a very generous and liberal man and never put much value in money. My share of his estate was ten thousand five hundred dollars. All the revenue-producing property I have in the world, or ever had, yields a little less than eighteen hundred dollars a year; eight hundred dollars of that is from a life estate, and the other thousand comes from a corporation which has only paid dividends for the last two or three years, and which, I am afraid, will pay no dividend or much smaller ones after two or three years to come. With that exception the house where I live, with its contents, with about four acres of land, constitutes my whole worldly possession, except one or two vacant lots which would not bring me five thousand dollars, all told. I could not sell them for enough to pay my debts. I have been in my day an extravagant collector of books, and have a library which you would like to see, and which I should like to show you. Now as to office-holding and working, I think there are few men on this continent who have put so much hard work into life as I 272 MASTER MINDS have. I went one winter to the Massachusetts House of Repre- sentatives, when I was twenty-five years old, and one winter to the Massachusetts Senate, when I was thirty years old. The pay was two dollars a day at that time. I was nominated, much to my surprise, and on both occasions declined a renomination. I afterward twice refused a nomination for mayor of my city, have twice refused a seat on the Supreme Bench of Massachusetts, and refused for years to go to Congress when the opportunity was in my power. I was at last broken down with overwork and went to Europe for my health. During my absence the arrangements were made for my nomination to Congress, from which when I got home I could not well escape. The result is I have been here twenty years as Representative and Senator, the whole time getting a little poorer year by year. If you think I have not made a good one, you have my full authority for saying anywhere that I entirely agree with you. During all this time I have never been able to hire a house in Washington. My wife and I have experienced the varying fortunes of Washington boarding-houses, sometimes very comfortable, and a good deal of the time living in a fashion to which no laborer earning two dollars a day would subject his household. Your terrapin is all in my eye, very little in my mouth. The chief carnal luxury of my life is in breakfasting every Sunday morning with an Orthodox friend, a lady who has a real gift of making fish-balls and coffee. . You unfortunate and benighted Pennsylvanians can never know the exquisite fliavor of the codfish salted, made into balls and eaten Sunday morning by a person whose theology is Orthodox, and who believes in all the five points of Calvinism. I myself am but an unworthy heretic, but I am of Puritan stock, of the recent generation, and there is vouchsafed to me also my share of that ecstasy and a dim glimpse of that beatific vision. Be assured, my benighted Pennsylvania friend, that in that day when the week begins, all the terrapin of Philadelphia and Baltimore and all the soft-shelled crabs of the Atlantic shore might pull at my trousers-legs and thrust themselves on my notice in vain. Yours faithfully, George F. Hoar. GEORGE FBI SB IE HOAR 273 A LOVER OF THE HOME "With the advancement of years Senator Hoar took boyish glee in democratic simplicity and, quite the oppo- site of affecting' the patrician, threw off every artifice of dignity. "I have never got over being a boy," he exclaimed. **It does not seem likely I ever shall. I have today, at the age of threescore and sixteen, less sense of my own dignity than I had when I walked for the first time into the college chapel at Harvard, clad, as the statute required, in a black or a black mixed coat, with buttons of the same color, and the admiring world, with its eyes on the venerable freshman, seemed to me to be saying to itself: ''Ecce caudam' — 'Behold the tail.' " As if championing oppressed peoples was not enough, in 1897, as a lover of the birds, he championed our feathered race of nature's songsters, and in the name of the birds themselves, by a petition in the form of a pictoric pastoral he had offered in the Legislature, he carried an enactment for their preservation. This petition, unsigned except by the pictures and names underneath, of all Massachusetts' birds, hangs in the hall of his home. In this home as well as in his home town he counted his friends his choicest treasures, and the meeting with a friend was to him the bright spot of a day. Opening out of the hall is the library, running the full breadtii of the house, with its windows commanding a stately, terraced acreage of oaks and maples. But within, breaks upon the eye the real court circle of the Senator's private life. It looks down from three sides of the impos- ing chamber from thousands of books whose authors, of all 18 274 MASTER MINDS ages and times, were the companions of the statesman's mind, and their words the stimulus of his soul. Behind the empty chair at the desk, as though an ever present shepherd and pastor, stands a massive bust of Edward Everett Hale, majestically rugged and heroically moulded. In addition to this splendid head of Hale are busts of Eoger Sherman, of Emerson, and of Samuel Hoar, Senator Hoar's father. At the other end is a regal painting of Webster, brought from the Capitol. Over the fireplace and on either side are three mural mottoes, one in Greek, one in Latin, one in English. The English motto is from George Herbert, and reads: "Man is no Star, But a Quick Ooal of Mortal Fire. Who blows it not nor doth control a Faint Desire Lets His Own Ashes Choke His Soul. ' ' Before the Latin motto the Senator would heartfully turn to his friends, and paraphrase it thus : "Rest I at Home — . Why Seek I more; Here's Comfort, Books and Mrs. Hoar." All this delicately betrays Senator Hoar's fidelity to home and to a helpmeet the love-light of whose face is so expressive in the picture with President Roosevelt, the Sen- ator and the children. The statesman's love of children is nowhere better shown than where he and his wife stand on the portico of the house, clasping hands with the country's Chief Executive, their grand-daughters and two little Syrian immigrants between them.^ Unjustly detained at immi- iThe rare photograph of the group has been kindly lent by the artist, Schervee, of Worcester. GEORGE FRISBIE HOAR 275 fixation headquarters and in danger of deportation, Senator Hoar's great heart responded to their cry, interfered in their behalf, and through the President, with whom he stands, broke down the cruel bar that separated them from their new home. On the mantel of the fireplace a model of Lincoln's hand grasps a rod, tj^jifying that for which he existed — the breaking of the rod of the oppressor. On to the left of the library hangs on massive hinges a carven black oak door removed from the ancient house of Charles Hoare, Gloucester, England, who lived there in 1580. Just by this, some nine by three feet, is the massive chest made of timbers from the same old English house. It is also of black oak, and carven with the initials of its owner, Richard Hoare of Gloucester. Close by is a heavily carven black oak table of Charles the Second, dating to the time of his escape after the siege of "Worcester, England. At its side is a black oak carven chair from a pew in Shakespeare's church. "Shakespeare's hands not infrequently touched the wood of this piece," was the Senator's accustomed exclamation. ''What a time the ghosts of the King and the dramatist must have haunting these relics, ' ' he more than once laugh- ingly remarked. Since the death of the late lamented Rockwood Hoar, a daughter having died in earlier years, Miss Mary Hoar is the last of Senator Hoar 's immediate children to survive. The mellowness of soul that overlooked class dis- tinctions of race or religion showed itself as to his attitude to the Irish Catholic people. His intense antag- onism was evoked against the A. P. A. movement against the Catholics, especially as it had its home in the Republi- can party. i 276 MASTER MINDS "This nation is a composite. It is made up of many- streams, of the twisting and winding of many bands. The greatest hope and destiny of our land is expressed in the phrase of our motto, 'E Pluribus Unum' — 'one of many, ' one of many states, one nation ; of many races, one people; of many creeds, one faith; of many bended knees, one family of God." Thus he sang the death-knell of the A. P. A., believing that it would break up the Republican party and en- gender a racial and religious strife. "We are confronted," he said, "with a public danger which comes from the attempt to rouse the old feelings of the dark ages, and which ought to have ended with them, between men who have different forms of faith. It is an attempt to recall on one side the cruelties of the Catholic church and to frighten old women of both sexes ; and, on the other side, to bind the men of the Catholic church together for political action. Both these attempts will fail." He hit hard at its author by saying, "You want to go into a cellar to declare your principles. You want to join an army whose members are ashamed to confess they belong to it. . . You think the way to make good citizens and good men of them and to attract them to Protestant- ism is to exclude them, their sons and daughters from all public employments, and to go yourself into a dark cellar and curse them through the gratings of the windows." "I think the time has come to throw down the walls between Christians and not to build new ones. I think the time has come to inculcate humane and good will be- tween all American citizens, especially between all citi- zens of the old Commonwealth of Massachusetts." At another time, at the death of McKinley, showing his rare spirit of tolerance towards both of these classes GEORGE FRI8BIE HOAR 277 other than his own section and race and religion, he concluded in a burst of hope, nnsnrpassed in political and racial prophecy: "What hope and confidence in the future for a people, when all men and women of all par- ties and nations, of all faiths and creeds, of all classes and conditions are ready to respond as ours have re- sponded to this emotion of a mighty love. ■ "You and I are men of the North. Most of us are Protestants in religion. We are men of native birth. Yet if every Republican were today to fall in his place as William McKinley has fallen, I believe our countrymen of the other party, in spite of what we deem their errors, would take the republic and bear on the flag to liberty and glory. I believe that if every Protestant were to be stricken down by a lightning-stroke, their brethren of the Catholic faith would still carry on the republic in the spirit of a true and liberal freedom. I believe that if every man of native birth within our borders were to die this day, the men of foreign birth, who have come here to seek homes and liberty under the shadow of the republic, would carry it on in God's appointed way. I believe if every man of the North were to die, the new and christened South, with the virtues it has cherished from the beginning, of love of home and love of State, and love of freedom, with its courage and its constancy, would take the country and bear it on to the achievement of its lofty destiny. The anarchist must slay seventy-five million Americans before he can slay the republic." As to religion, "no five points, no Athanasian creed, no thirty-nine articles," he declared, "separate the men and women of our way of thinking from humanity or from divinity." 278 MASTER MINDS He claimed he was one of those to whom '' Judea's news is still glad tidings," who believed "that one day Jesus Christ came to this earth leaving a divine message and giving a divine example." He said he chose to live and die in the faith that ac- tuated one of his own relatives, Sherman Hoar, who, from the fever-haunted hospital and the tropical swamp, and the evening dews and damps of the Spanish War, when the Lord said: "Where is the messenger that will take his life in his hands, that I may send him to carry health to my stricken soldiers and sailors? Whom shall I send?" an- swered, ' ' Here am I ; send me ! " "The difference between Christian sects, like the dif- ference between individual Christians, is not so much the matter of belief or disbelief of portions of the doctrine of the Scripture as in the matter of emphasis."''- "There are two great texts in the Scriptures in whose sublime phrases are contained the germs of all religions, whether natural or revealed. They lay hold on two eternities. One relates to the Deity in His solitude — 'Before Abraham was, I am.' The other is for the future. It sums up the whole duty and the whole destiny of man. 'And now abideth Faith, Hope and Charity, these three.' Hope is placed as the central figure. With Hope, as we have defined it — namely, the confident ex- pectation of the final triumph of righteousness — we are left but a little lower than the angels; without it we are a kind of vermin." "I believe the lesson which is impressed on me daily, and more deeply as I grow old, is the lesson — Good Will lAlmost exactly the wise word of President Taft in a late pro- nouncement on religion. GEORGE F RISE IE HOAR 279 and Good Hope. ... I believe that in spite of so many errors and wrongs and even crimes, my countrymen of all climes desire what is good, and not what is evil." Sick unto death the last few months of the summer of 1904, to solace himself for companionship of soul with the lives of other great men, Senator Hoar read Morley's life of Gladstone. He also reflected in these days on the beautiful life of his wife, whose departure, he said, took from him tlie light and pleasure of living. The deep reli- giousness of his nature was shown by the consolation he took in Watts' hymn, "Our God, our Help in Ages Past," brought to him by his old pastor, Kev. Calvin Stebbins of Framingham, who came at his summons. "I have sent for you, and I want you should read to me Watts' para- phrase of the XCth Psalm," said the Senator, "and I want you should read the whole of it; there are nine verses. It begins not '0 God,' but 'Our God, our Help in Ages Past' " ' ' I recollect very clearly the emphasis he put upon ' Our God, our Help, ' ' ' recalls Mr. Stebbins. * ' His voice, which up to that time had been weak and husky, was as clear as ever. ' ' This was the mood in which the dying statesman followed, stanza after stanza, till the lines: "Our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home." In this faith Senator Hoar died at his home in Wor- cester, Sept. 30th, 1904, and was buried in Concord, the home of his Puritan ancestors. And fitly was he buried here. For Senator Hoar clung more deeply than any statesman to-day to the positive essentials of the Pilgrim. He it was who devoted years to bringing back the Bradford manuscript — the diary of Bradford, the Governor of the Pilgrim Colony — which was carried to England in the Revolution from the Old South Church, 280 MASTERMINDS Boston, where the precious document was stored from early days. Senator Hoar long sought it in its resting- place at Fulham, England. For he declared that it seemed to him the most precious manuscript on earth, unless we could recover one of the four gospels as it came in the beginning from the pen of the Evangelist. "My lord," he said to Bishop Temple, "I think this book ought to go back to Massachusetts." "I did not know that you cared anything about it," answered the Bishop, surprised. "Why, if there were in existence in England a history of King Alfred's reign for thirty years, written by his own hand, it would not be more precious in the eyes of Englishmen than this manuscript is to us," he answered. The question, taken to the Archbishop and Queen Vic- toria, was graciously settled, and the precious manuscript delivered to our country, where it reposes in the State Li- brary at the State House at Boston, open to all at the page where is written the compact in the Mayflower — the first written constitution of freemen. It is seen through the glass above, spotted as it is with the tears of children and strong men. Fittingly, we say, by the home of his ancestors of Puritan stock lie George Frisbie Hoar's mortal remains in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord. Besides America's first men and women of letters there are buried at Concord Revolutionary soldiers, among them his father's great Mn, who on both sides of the Hoar family sprang to their country 's birthrights in the first strife at the Bridge. One of these, without a gun, rushed in with a cane till he seized the musket of one of the two fallen Englishmen. Many of them George Frisbie Hoar knew and saw and heard as a boy. GEORGE F RISE IE HOAR 281 He once described them as he sawthem alive : — * * Scattered about the church were the good grey heads of many survivors of the Revolution, the men who had been at the Bridge on the 19th of April, and who made the first armed resistance to the British power. They were very striking and venerable figures with their queues and knee-breeches, and shoes with shining buckles. They had heard John. Buttrick's order to fire which marked the moment when our country was born. The order was given to the British subjects. It was obeyed by American citizens. Among them was old master Blood who saw the balls strike the water when the British fired the first volley." There in Sleepy Hollow lies his mother, daughter of Roger Sherman of Connecticut, signer of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution, and approved as one of the three greatest minds among the Continental fathers. The mother's best epitaph is in these words of the son, in whom indeed, when he came to himself, as a student of truth, as a statesman and as a ripened soul, his mother's character was in more than one way repro- duced: "My mother was the most perfect democrat, in the best sense of the word, that I ever knew. It was a democracy which was the logical result of the doctrines of the Old Testament and the New. It recognized the dignity of the individual soul, without regard to the acci- dent of birth or wealth or color of the skin. If she were in the company of a queen, it would never have occurred to her that they did not meet as equals, and if the queen were a woman of sense and knew her, it would never occur to the queen. The poorest people in the town, the paupers in the poor-house, thought of her as a personal 282 MASTERMINDS friend to whom they could turn for sympathy and help." As lasting as any memorial of Senator Hoar will be Asnebumslvit, one of the great green hills which are Wor- cester's peculiar glory, and which Senator Hoar loved enough to buy and leave to posterity. In Worcester a charming reminiscence hangs about the sloping heights of Asnebumskit, whose great hill-sides, which the Senator has bequeathed in trust to his two grandchildren, careen toward the city. The statesman, whose independent, fearless soul was itself preeminently eagle-like and Alpine, by accident became the host of a pair of bald eagles and an eaglet, bidding the people of the countryside to let them fly to and fro, free from harm. His own words in a heart-to-heart talk to the people in the Worcester Gazette thus verify the truth of the reminiscence and catch George Frisbie Hoar's heart- tones as well as the classic idealism of his nature: "A Bald Eagle at Asnebumskit?" — "There were a pair in the hill last year with an eaglet (that got out of the nest a little too soon) whom they were feeding and guard- ing with that marvelous love for offspring which so large- ly pervades all animal nature and is the most complete and tender manifestation on earth of God's love for His children. If there be anybody anywhere who cares for me, I beg that the eagle may be let alone. I have been at a good deal of cost and a good deal of trouble to pre- serve this beautiful and lovely spot and make it accep- table to people who cannot afford distant journeys. You can see the blue summits of many an eagle's home in the far horizon when you stand on Asnebumskit. I shall deem myself well repaid if you will not disturb our noble guest. Certainly no Worcester man or boy would lie in GEORGE FBI SB IE HOAR 283 wait to do a wrong to the American eagle. He came on the 19th of April, our country's birthday, the guest of Worcester County. Leave him to be the ornament and glory of the sky. ' ' Other memorials his proud city of Worcester has carved in marble and enduringly erected in bronze and granite. Notable among them is his own inscription deeply carven by the metropolis across the front of the stately Court House: ''Obedience to Law is Liberiy." The bronze statue at the northwest corner of City Hall, on whose site met the first Free-soil party, is also equally impressive, especially when beheld with these words on the brass tablet below: "I believe in God, the Living God, in the American People, a free and brave people, who do not bow the neck or bend the knee to any other, and who desire no other to bow the neck or bend the knee to them. I be- lieve that Liberty, Good Government, Free Institutions, cannot be given by any one people to any other, but must be wrought out for each by itself, slowly, painfully, in the process of years or centuries, as the oak adds ring to ring. I believe that whatever clouds may darken the horizon, the world is growing better, that to-day is better than yester- day, and to-morrow will be better than to-day. ' ' LlTIlKl: lUlII'.ANK l)isc()Vi_TiT of ;i Xi'w I'hnil Wdrld LUTHER BURBANK DISCOVERER OF A NEW PLANT- WORLD THE "forty-niners" who went to California in the gold-fever of fifty years ago opened to the world great wealth. But no forty-niner, nor all the forty- niners and ijold-seekers together, will have opened to the world wealth equal to that to be mined in the veins of a plant and the capsules of a flower by such discoveries as those of a man whose only claim to being a "forty-niner" is that he crossed the golden gate of birth in the Massachu- setts town of Lancaster the 7th of March, 1849. The name of this discoverer of a new plant-creation is, as all the world knows, Luther Burbank. He is a gold- hunter whose fever is to discover treasures hid not in quartz or bullion, but in the plant-cell and the floral calyx. In solid wealth, the srnn total of such riches as these vdll in due time, as the yeare go on, as they multiply, bury out of sight that of the gold-mines of America.^ "I know I shall be regarded as a crazy man when I tell you that the work being done by this one man will pro- duce more wealth than the entire endowment of the Carnegie Institution," declared President Woodward of the Institution. "But I accept this risk and make the state- ment. ' ' iThat this is not a chimera is seen by the fact that the total value of our farm products in 1908 was four times the value of all the mines. 286 MASTERMINDS The inestimable value that will in due time accrue to humanity, wherever Burbank's divining-rod is to touch, is beyond computation. To make this prediction assume the bounds of reason, we need only consider the one billion seven million acres of desert-land lying waste on the globe, and over against this the new cactus he has created to vegetate these wastes, capable of bearing six hundred to one thousand pounds to a plant, its pulpy leaves edible for cattle and its three and a half-inch crim- son fruit palatable for man. Were the population of the world one-third greater, it is his familiar prophecy that because of this improved plant alone, food would exist for all, both man and beast. Furthermore, we recall that, even by causing one more grain in each ear, the annual product in the United States alone would be, of com 5,200,000 bushels more, of wheat 15,000,000 bushels more, of oats 20,000,000 bushels more, of barley 1,000,000 bushels more. By the addition of one tuber to a potato- vine, the potato- crop "Vidll be increased twenty-one million bushels a year. Since his discovery of it years ago, the first product of his creation, the Burbank potato, has, on such eminent author- ity as Hugo De Vries and members of the United States Department of Agriculture, added to the nation wealth equal to about twenty million dollars. If stretched in a line touching each other, the potatoes would measure the distance of four and one-half times to the moon and back. burbank's great purpose Could Burbank live on, and by some patent-right possess these added values, he would be, indeed, a plutocrat. But such is not his passion — a passion altogether too vast to be LUTHER BUR BANK 287 bounded by jyold and silver — a passion which refuses to grain the whole world and lose his own soul. "The plant-breeder will have no time," he has declared, "to make money." "No man ever did a great work for hire!" His is an ideal identical with that of the elder Agas- siz, who declared, when pressed to turn his researches into wealth, "I have no time to make money." Herein lies the distinctive o:enius, the God-jsriven original- ity, the prophetic greatness of the man. Herein lies his master mind. Herein, greater than in all his marvelous creations, is a personality that, distinct from that of a sldlled market-gardener or a gold-gilded money-seeker, is in America just at this time unique and rare. As soon as any such genius is filled with the holy spirit of a great ambition and comes to the consciousness of a God-smitten purpose, he is always at once driven into the wilderness to be tempted. The experience of the great Exemplar and Archetype is universally true. The world, the flesh or the devil always conspires to buy off and wrench such a genius from his task to better the world. Luther Burbank was no stranger to this experience. It confronted him between school-terms at the age of sixteen. This test first faced him when he was sent for summer work to the noise and dirt of a machine-shop in Worcester, in the Ames Plow Company, of which Luther Koss, his uncle, was superintendent. Though not at home in the maddening crowd and the mechanical world, his constructive genius was not yet so caged, "cribbed, cabined and confined" that even here it could be prevented from breaking out into creative power. Such creative power as a fact had been existent and notice- able long years before, as, for instance, when, an old dis- 288 MASTERMINDS jointed mower having to be put together, before the puzzled mechanics on his father's farm, mere boy that he was, he picked the right piece that was missing and adjusted it at once. "How'd you know?" he was asked. ''Because you couldn't put it anywhere else," he answered. This innate inventive power to construct and discover, even in things mechanical, led him now in the plow- factory to hit upon a labor-saving machine that would save the work of a half dozen men. To keep such a brain in the factory's service the Bur- bank boy's pay was multiplied by twenty-five. The ad- vance in pay was due, he tells us to-day, primarily to this labor-saving process of his own invention, which, from the fact that he was allowed to work by the piece, earned for him by its rapid turning out of pieces from $10 to $16 a day. But in the face of this increase, which was enough to carry any boy off his feet, he refused to remain, and clung to his one ruling passion to be true to the plant- world 's call. The switch of every metallic side-track which contin- ually the world kept swinging open, he was repeatedly to close. He closed the switch not because for many another it might not be just the place for their genius, but because it would deflect him from the main line of his mas- ter motive. To this he became wedded, as he has since remained, and \^all remain, "for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health, till death ' them ' do part. ' ' A great voice has said that boldness has genius, and genius boldness, and that — "Indecision brings its own delays; The days are lost lamenting over days. LUTHER BUR BANK 289 Aro you in earnest? Seize the very minute; Wliat you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Truly engage, and then the mind grows heated ; Bcgiu it, and the work will be completed." Burbank had the boldness of genius to begin, and we turn aside to note his beginning. As we watch this first step that linked Burbank to his destiny, chained him to his career and commissioned him to his prophetic call to the plant-world, we stop to recall that on the human side, in this boy, the thirteenth child of his father, flowed the Scotch blood of his mother and the English blood of his father, and that the scene of his first great success along this line of his one and mighty purpose to be a plant-creator, opens upon a spot in his family's market-garden in Lunenburg, out in the farm-lands some miles from his birthplace. His mother's father, before the eyes of the staring lad, had in such a place raised from seed, grapes and rhubarbs, producing new and improved varieties. To Luther it was a spot to be approached, not with scorn, as a place to pull weeds, but as a shrine in which to discern mysteries. It is recorded that once the first great Luther fell down upon his knees in a field of growing wheat and thanked God for the miracle. To this Luther, vegetation and growth meant equally a miracle. There happened to be in that garden on a single Early Eose potato-plant — an unheard-of thing for that variety — a seed-ball. Luther Burbank detected it, and detected, too, that it was an unusual growth. Would not the seedling plants grown from it show still further differences? The New England potatoes then were poor. Could not this offer a departure whence to change their degeneracy ? And 19 290 MASTER MINDS by planting- this seed, could lie not improve the stock ? It took no time to leap to this conclusion. Young Burbank seized upon it without delay. It proved to be the psycho- logical moment of his life. On that day he touched the secret nature held out to him to grasp — the secret of a new plant-world. But soon after this something, perhaps a stray dog, knocked off the seed-ball. He at once noticed the mishap and searched dil- igently till with its twenty-three tiny seeds, he found the ball. Carefully treasuring it, he waited, and the next season planted the seeds. The result was the new and splendid product, the Burbank potato. This potato, which was to bring in value twenty-one mil- lion dollars to the United States alone, he sold for but one hundred and fifty dollars.^ It was with this money and ten of the new potatoes that he resolved to set out for Cali- fornia, to conquer the kingdom of plants. Refusing for the rest of his life to make money of his venture, be the richest man in Lunenburg, and as a horti- jDulturist batten on the income of a recreated tuber, was counter to the advice of the crowd. But their purpose extended no further than the periphery of a silver dollar. His was girdled only by the boundless reach of the plant- zone. Even much earlier than this came an indication of his life-plan. His older sister tenderly recalls to us his infant passion for wild plants and flowers. She portrayed the iMany stories surround this as other major and minor events of Burbank 's life. Even at his native place I have been assured it was five hundred dollars the potatoes sold for. But this, as many other overdrawn little statements, Mr. Burbank and his sister have taken the pains to correct within this article. LUTHER BURBA NE 291 effect they had upon his baby mind. They were his pets, and small the tree or lichen or weed that escaped him. Instead of dolls, he loved the wilding? and the daisy. Where one child would weep at the disfij]rurement of a wax doll, he cried as if his heart would break at the dismemberment of a flower. Holding up the prickly cactus, which was to become his masterpiece of re-creation, his sister distinctly recalls him toddling about, clasping it in his arms, not as a foe, but as a pet. "Mr. Burbank, these are all reflexes from you. Do you not sometimes feel as if you were exerting a psychic force upon these plants, that in some way not yet expressible in scientific terms they are following the suggestions of your imagination?" To this question put to him later in life, we do not wonder that with such inborn instincts he replied, "Yes, why notr'i FROM MASSACHUSETTS TO CALIFORNIA In 1875 young Burbank fulfilled his resolution to set out for California. We have seen in Massachusetts at how great a price he bought the freedom by which his genius might follow its bent. He was on the Pacific coast to pay a iThe Press has recently reported that Francis Darwin, son of the elder Darwin, speaking on the "Consciousness of Plants" before the British Association at Dublin, declared in his address as its President that plants must be classed as animals. He declared that he gladly takes his place before the world as the champion of the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired cluiracters, the lost cause with reference to plants as well as animals. Darwin advanced proof to show that plants have memory, can develop habits, and will conduct themselves differently at times, according to their moods. He also claimed that there is a system in plants that corre- sponds to the nervous framework of animals and that it acts in similar way on their constitutions and tempers. From that he argued 292 MASTER MINDS greater price. Hunger, loneliness, a deadly fever — all these combined between him and his purpose. To the core of his being they were to assault his will-power. For when he reached the Pacific slope he found little work and his small savings from the sale of his new potato were about gone. Unable to pay for proper food and shelter, too proud to let his need be known, he suffered severe physical as well as mental hardships, from which his sensitive, refined nature recoiled. Once the chance to better his condition he thought he saw in shingling a shed; but next day, when he had spent all his savings in a hatchet, it was, as he confirms for us to-day, but to find the job taken by a still lower bidder. He was not wanted ! Nearer to his heart was a laborer's heavy work in a greenhouse, where it was his fate to have to sleep in a damp room in a loft over the steaming hothouse. But human stamina broke under the strain, and Luther Bur- bank lay deathly sick of a dangerous fever. A woman offered him daily a pint of milk from her cow. He refused to take it. He had not a cent to pay her ! He feared, he confessed, he "might never he able." Her insistence, however, forced the nourishment upon him. This good woman saved Luther Burbanlv to the world. , that plants are quite as capable of telegraphing their feelings from one part of their organisms to another as are animals, and that they are sensitive to impressions and show likes and dislikes readily. To some persons they respond with vigorous growth and brilliant blos- soms, and to others they return nothing but the most icommonplace or poor specimens of growth and development. The younger Darwin remarks, "We must believe that in plants there exists a faint copy of what we call consciousness in ourselves. ' ' LUTHER BURBANK 293 All these things were happening to one who was no slum beggar, but the son of proud New Englanders — rela- tives who had been the companions of Agassiz and Emer- son. For such was the intellectual aristocracy with whose books he himself was steeped and whose original inspiration he claims he is now in many ways outworking and express- ing. It is by the force of such clear thought and pure pur- pose that we behold him pressing through the stubborn crust of circumstance. He was to make the countryside where he was, famous. But the people knew it not, and at first, as is the case with every seer, the plant-prophet was ''without honor in his own country and in his own home. ' ' America needed and still needs the personality of Bur- bank — a personality in which quality dominates quantity, in whom mind permeates materialism, and in whom is not the threatened American blight of — The flower without the fragrance, The fruit without the taste, The bigness without the beauty, The wealth that spells but waste. By 1876 the result of his struggles in California left him enough to start a small nursery at Santa Rosa, and this same year he was joined by his mother and sister from New England. To an outward eye his vocation was to be that of a nur- seryman and collector of wild California seeds for eastern and European dealers. In a laughing world, this hermit figure, refusing to be carried away by the coarser quanti- tative genius of materialism, sped silently on his way, searching through the days for specimens of the plant he sought, and burning till late at night the student's lamp. 294 MASTERMINDS Far from understood, he "knew himself," and "a purpose is a good companion." He was also, to put it in his own words, "in a paradise of plants;" in what he called in a letter home, "the chosen spot of all the earth," enough "to set a botanist A^-ild!" "What, therefore, did he care? In but a few years he was to change the scorner's and world- ing's mind, and make scores of thousands from all the world pass by his neighbors' obscure estates and seek him, as one of the seers of his time and day.^ Respectability itself, which because of its exclusiveness is too often dull, did not understand him, and sometimes even in highest places it frowned upon his daring attempts to produce new species. A callow clergyman denounced him in his experiments with plants as trying to change the good laws of God. He even invited Burbank to the church, to hear unsuspectingly his own denunciation. To be befriended was therefore the exception. It was a pleasant surprise for him once to hear a man who was an old settler thereabouts thus address him : ' ' Say, young fel- ler, I've been watching you a long time. You're alius attendin ' to bizness. But a man that kin do what you kin ought to have an easier time than you're havin'. Don't you need a little extry cash once in a while 1 ' ' "A hundred" would stead him for a good investment, Burbank presumed. The old rancher made it "two hundred!" ' * I don 't want no note nor no interest either. When you get ready to pay it, all right." This old man unconsciously did himself honor, because he recognized as a genius, not only one to whom the United i"Let a man do a thing incomparably well and the world will make a path to his door, even though he live in a forest." — Emerson. LUTHER BUB BANK 295 States, in order to perpetuate his work, has been proud to grant from the Carnefjie fund ten thousand dollars a year for ten years, but one at the mention of whose name European chambers of deputies have risen with uncovered heads. It was not long before an advertisement appeared in a California paper to fill an order for twenty thousand prune-trees in nine months. Upon this Burbank at once decided to fill the order, and he searched the countryside for helpers. With their aid he planted all he could obtain of the seeds of the almond, the quickest growing tree. On the sprouts he budded twenty thousand prune-buds. In nine months these were ready, according to stipulation. Soon he had so built up his business that it would mean to him an income of ten thousand dollars a year. But to be a discoverer of God's new world of plants and flowers he threw aside the temptation, amid the usual chorus of mercenary fault-finders. The place Burbank had chosen for the platform of this great undertaking was in the Santa Rosa Valley, about fifty miles north of San Francisco.^ It was in 1878 that he purchased the home-place in Santa Rosa, the spot of his first experiment and testing-garden. Later he added eighteen acres in the Gold Ridge section, near Sebastopol, to which he rides twice a week to inspect and select from the hundreds of thousands of plants constantly under test. The visitor will find just across the street from a new home which he has just built, the original cottage, endraped iBurbank's mother originally purchased four acres, on which Luther started his first nursery. Previous to the coming of their mother to California came Burbank 's other brothers and his sister, Emma Burbank Beeson, a Massachusetts school teacher. W 296 MASTERMINDS with wistaria, ivy, bougainvillaea and passion-vines. It is approached by hedge-row walks, and is flanked by flower- beds and greenhouses, while at the gate it is guarded by stately columns of paradox and royal walnut trees. Here, amid Shasta daisies and rose-trees for thirty years, while she has been growing the roses in her cheeks and the silver in her hair, Burbank has lived with his New England mother, who is now past ninety-six years of age. They tell me there to-day, as we think of this New Eng- land mother, that Burbank had no aid from her New Eng- land home during the year of sickness and privation, sim- ply because his relatives did not realize his circumstances, and because he was too proud to write them. Yet it was by only the next fall that he had so mastered circumstances that he started a small nursery, carrying on horticultural experiments and collecting seeds for eastern and foreign seedsmen. The business increased rapidly, although in 1888 the nursery was sold, notwithstanding the income now amounted, as we have said, to ten thousand dollars a year. By its sale it was possible to devote the whole time and thought to experimental work. THE PLANT KING AT WORK From this threshold and guard-house enter upon his marvelous kingdom of plants, and behold the gardens at Santa Rosa. Here Burbank has had over thirty-six hun- dred different species under experiment. A brief look around reveals many hundreds of species in process of ex- periment. But first recall the secret of the transformation you are to behold. There stands Burbank himself, polUnating a flower! The BiRTHl'I.ACE of LITHEK BllIBANK, AND HiS CuTTAGE AT Santa Rosa, California LUTHER BURBANK 297 Bees, insects and winds are nature 's methods of carrying the pollen from one plant to the other, and crossing the two to produce a third. Burbauk is doing this thing himself, and has brushed off the pollen from the stamen of one kind of plant's bloom to sprinkle it upon the stigma of another. "Practically all evolution and improvement are depend- ent upon crossing, followed by selection." This statement is the principle upon which he chiefly works. He thus secures in the new product variation from the parent plant — a break from its usual course. What by natural selection would take nature one hun- dred years or more to do, he can do by crossing and selection in one or a few years; for crossing, as it were, melts the plant's fixed tendencies, and puts it plastically into his hands to mould it which way he will. The early summer is the busy season when he makes countless crossings. In the morning he watches the bees, nature 's pollen carriers, as they dart from bloom to bloom. When the morning is young and when the bees mark that nature's clock is pointing to pollination time and flit from petal to petal, Burbank at once steals out and gets to work also. He dusts the pollen from the stamen of one plant and drops it upon the stigma of another. The pollen he gathers and places on a watch-glass ready to drop upon the waiting stigma of the bloom to be fertilized. That wind or insect may not refertilize the receiving plant with further pollen, he removes the stamen, cutting away petals, anthers and sepal cup, the pistils alone being left. To secure crosses he thus treats his plants to the number of hundreds of thousands each season. When the latent vital forces are set free by this act, he plants the seed of the pollinated bloom and secures in the new creation a change, "w^abble" or perturbation from the 298 MASTERMINDS parent's past, after which, amid the many specimens of the new kind, he selects the best and rejects what he does not want. The result of a cross between different species of plants is called a hybrid. Hybridization is breedins: together members of different species of plants to make new species and new varieties. It is as a hybridizer and by an astonndinjx ability to select from variations that Burbank stands without a peer in the creation of plants and flowers. After crossing comes selection. The instinct for selec- tion is also Burbank 's by divine right in the kingdom of vegetation. At times from as many as five hundred thou- sand seedlings springing from seeds gathered from cross- bred plants, he selects only a single one as fit to survive. At other times scores of thousands offer not one choice. The judgment flame of mammoth bonfires lights up his plant- gardens many times a year. Here without mercy are con- sumed by tens and hundreds of thousands plants that cum- ber the ground and are unfit to survive. But let us begin with the plants he has redeemed and glorified. HE CROWNS THE DAISY There are the Shasta daisies — white stars centred with sunbursts of yellow; they once were insignificant field- daisies, the vagrants of his Worcester County hillsides. To get them in New England, he stopped tlie cars, or waiting till the next station, went back to the particularly likely specimen he had detected. Once there, he painstakingly selected the best of the clump, and taking with him across the continent these old home wild-flowers of New England, he has raised them to the throne. To its New England hardiness, by crossing he brought the Japanese daisy with LUTHER BUBBANK 299 its snowy whiteness. Again by a second cross he enlarged it by combination with the European daisy; out of this interfused strain, after eight years he evolved the regal bloom whose diameter is from five to seven inches across the face. To commemorate its new home, from the white snow-capped peak of Mt. Shasta, he calls it the Shasta daisy. The Shasta daisy will grow from the Arctic circle to the equator and will remain fresh from two to three weeks. To take a tramp-flower like this from the "byways and hedges," compel it to come into the kingdom and make something of it true and beautiful and good, is with Bur- bank a passion and an evangel. It repeats indeed the facts of his own life and of his faith that — "In the mud and scum of things, Something always, always sings. ' ' For this song of a lost plant prodigal, he always has his ear to the ground. ** Weeds are weeds," he declares, "because they are jostled, crowded, cropped, and trampled on, scorched by fierce heat, starved, or perhaps suffering with cold, wet feet, tormented by insects, pests, or lack of nourishing foods and sunshine. There is not a weed alive but what will sooner or later respond to good cultivation or persist- ent selection. What occupation can be more delightful than adopting the most prominent individuals from among a race of vile, neglected weeds, with settled hoodlum ten- dencies, down-trodden and despised by all, and gradually lifting it up by breeding and education to a higher sphere, to see it gradually change its sprawling habits, its coarse ill-smelling foliage, its insignificant blossoms of dull color, to an upright plant with handsome, glossy, fragrant leaves, 300 MASTERMINDS flowers of every hue and with a perfume as pure and lovely as could be desired ? ' ' HE CREATES PERFUME, TASTE AND COLOR To such a plant-redeemer, to perfume scentless or ill-smelling plants is an exquisite and delicate service. One evening at dusk, when the fragrance hangs upon the atmosphere heavier than usual and apparently odorless flowers give forth new hints of perfume, Burbank detected, while walking in the cool of the day in his garden of ver- benas, traces of a faint odor of the mayflower. But to even his trained instinct the array of scentless verbenas refused to disclose a single one thus gifted. A year passed. But the mayflower ghost of the fragrant verbena haunted him a twelvemonth. Again one night the next summer the arbutus-like whiff of spicy fragrance stole by him as he walked at the same hour through his banks of verbenas. He at last found the particular flower which alone gave forth the scent. Marking it till seed-time he treasured the seeds, and as a result of their planting created a race of redolent verbenas, heavy with the aroma of the one which had in some mysterious way stolen the deliciously sweet scent of the trailing arbutus. This type of verbena now gives forth the breath of our mayflower with more than twice its intensity. Coarse, rank-smelling dahlias Burbank has in like way baptized with an incense like that of the southern magno- lia. To the neutral ealla lily he has added a distinctive fra- grance. Color he likewise changes by means of selection and crossing, taking nature's pigments and using her paint- brush at will. A blue poppy has thus been brought forth LUTHER BUBBANK 301 out of a large quantity of seedling poppies because of a faint suggestion of blue in a single one. Its planted seed produced a plant somewhat bluer. The process continued till now he has one true blue in hue. One of the most distinctive of flowers whose color he has changed is the California poppy. Once, and only once, he espied among the native poppy- banks of gold and orange just one with the welt of a crim- son artery streaking the gold. Its thread of red, where nature had dropped a stitch, was so faint that it showed but on one side. But by selec- tion through a series of years he has achieved out of only this one, to-day's bloom of pure, solid crimson.^ "We note how he can change and evolve color and odor. But it is so not only with color and odor. He can do likewise with flavor. Once he found a plum with a faint taste of a Bartlett pear. By selection he developed from it plums with more of the taste of the Bartlett pear than the pear itself. The tastes of many other fruits he has at will changed or added. VAST FLORAL ALTARS OF SACRIFICE AND CHARITY In uniting two plants to create a third, the hybridized lily-bed presents an altar whose incense reaches farthest of all the perfumed flower-banks at Santa Rosa. "Consider the lilies, Jww they grow!" — five hundred thousand lilies at a single test — 07ie hundred thousand blooming at one time with colors running into every hue, and here and there a queenly stalk over eight feet high, clustered with fifty separate flowers! iThe chemistry of color-changes is itself a study; acid soils, for instance, tending to produce blue and alkali soils red. 302 MASTER MINDS If siicli a lily is called an incensed altar, sacrifice makes it more so. The lily-plants uprooted and burned in mam- moth pyres number hundreds of thousands at a time. Sac- rifice, indeed, is Burbank's price of progress. Should one start a nature-story in plant-life after the habit of our nature-writers of the animal creation, the eclipse of plants like the mesembryanthemum would make a tragic tale. To obtain this plant the plant king took a little insignificant flower, and by selection of several years of experiment developed a plant whose beds of bloom banked their flowers in royal clusters. But in one night some secret enemy accomplished their extermination and the new race of mesembiyanthemum vanished. It has been said of Benjamin Franklin that he con- vinced certain doubters of a plaster fertilizer he had invented by sprinkling it so that w^hen the grass tufts rose richer than the rest, they spelled the letters: "THIS GKASS HAS BEEN PLASTERED." In a much higher way Burbank spells out in flowers and fruit his benevolence and his principles. Originally the amaryllis was a hothouse plant, growing for the rich in the conservatories of great mansions. Why should not the amaryllis, so exceptionally bright in its bank of bloom, weep over the graves of the poor and cheer the homes of the humble? Its gorgeous facets in each colossal flower measure from eight to ten inches across, but he has made it possible for the poor to purchase them. Four or five bulbs were at first worth six dollars apiece. He has so treated the tuber that now there are from forty to fifty bulbs to a plant, and has reduced the price of a bulb to a few cents, and so placed the lustrous creation within the reach of all. LUTHER BUBBANE 303 THE REGAL WALNUTS Not merely delicate flower tendrils, but jxiant trees obey Burbank's master hand, let loose their vital fluid and, plastic to his touch, ^row as quickly as the tiniest flower- slip into his re-creations. Before his house, we have already recalled, towers a line of imperial and monumental walnuts. One kind, the Par- adox, from crossing the California black and English wal- nut, has reached in only fourteen years a height of sixty feet and a diameter of two feet. It is the fastest growing tree in the temperate zone. It will grow practically throughout the United States. For furniture and cabinet- work itvS wood is exceedingly hard, and polishable to a bril- liant lustre unsurpassed in beauty. The other, the Royal walnut — this tree's half-brother — is a cross of the American and California black walnut. The phenomenon of this new creation lies in its nuts, doubled in size, and bearing sometimes a thousand pounds of nuts per tree. The tannin Mr. Burbank has driven from the walnut 's meat, making it a clear, yellowish white. Even the leaves of the walnut-tree he has metamorphosed till they shed the fragrance of different aromatic plants. THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND VARIETIES OF PLUMS Among the fruit-trees, the plumcot represents not only a variant, but a new species, which Mr. Burbank declares he has produced different from any known fruit in the world — different also in color, taste and texture from any of its ancestors. It is a cross between a Japanese plum and the apricot. This species of tree never before pronged 304 MASTERMINDS its roots into the earth till created some six years ago. The color of its fruit's pulpy flesh is white, crimson or yellow, and its delicious flavors equally vary. The stoneless, though not necessarily seedless, plum comes from Mr. Burbank's having read of a partially pitless wild plum grown in France two hundred years ago. Searching till he found its surviving representative, he has produced a plum, from which by crossing the stone has disappeared. To get a plum that would grow in sandy wastes, Mr. Bur- bank first selected as one parent the wilding that sinks its long roots into the beaches and rocky banks of eastern states, going far down for moisture. Plums present to Burbank an especially inviting field of discovery. Seedling-plums he grafts to the stock of mature, vigorous trees, sometimes as many as six hundred in a single tree. Thus, instead of waiting six or eight years, in one or two years he obtains both flower and fruit. Graft- ing is the way in which he makes all fruit mature after pollination in two or three seasons, in place of waiting five or six times as long for the individual itself to mature. As each matured tree-stock is grafted to contain from one to five hundred kinds, more than three hundred thou- sand varieties of plums are now, after twenty-five years' crossing, under experiment at once. Upon his experiment- grounds, already made famous for the world's use, are the America, Chalco, Climax, October Purple, Wickson, Apple, Gold, and many others. Another new species of fruit Burbank has produced by crossing the western dewberry and the Siberian raspberry. The Primus berry, he declares, results — a new and hither- to non-existent species of fruit unknown to the world before. It ripens its main crop before the standard black- berries and raspberries begin to bloom. This for general LUTHER BURBANK 305 culture is not yet recommended, as further improvement will be made. Crossing the California dewberry and the California raspberry results in another berry which Mr. Burbank also ranks as absolutely new to the world. He calls it the Phenomenal berry. It is larjifer than the largest ever known, and of an exquisite, sub-acid flavor. He has also just domesticated the blueberry into a new species — the wonderberry. Where success does come, nowhere does it appear without cost. A white blackberry, the "iceberg," to be produced required in the evolution of the desired plant the raising and destruction of sixty-five thousand bushes. There have been times in these experiments indeed when nine hundred thousand berry-bushes have been destroyed in a single season. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DETHORNBD PLANT Dethoming plants of spicules and thorns has developed from tiny triumphs to Burbank 's greatest work of all. The cross of the raspberry and the strawberry once pro- duced flowers, but no fruit — only thornless canes. Thorn- less roses, blackberries and gooseberries likewise have been evolved by crossing and elimination. In the raspberry-strawberry, thomlessness may have meant nothing. In roses, raspberries and blackberries it may mean something more. But there is one creation where it means everything. It is the thornless cactus. Of all dethomed plants the thornless cactus is the real gigantic achievement known to Burbank 's genius. As has been noted, an area of over a thousand million acres — larger an area by far than the United States — ^is rendered useless on this globe through its being arid, parched desert, unpop- 20 306 MASTERMINDS Tilated save by the bones of men and beasts, by sand and by barbed and deadly cactus. Where all else is scorched to death, it remains that the cactus succeeds in growing: and surviving. But it is worse than useless, as the hardiest sheep that are allowed to roam suffer torture and die cruel deaths from the piercing thorns and spicules that the cactus lodges in their intestines and eyeballs. Out of nearly one thousand varieties for which Burbank searched over all the Saharas of the globe, he has found a few specimens nearly thornless. Could he breed into them properties that would create a thornless cactus, he (Could begin to change this tremendous desert area into rich and productive land, teeming with food for man and beast. It was a mighty imaginative sweep of vision, than which Burbank has never had a greater. It was a vision almost akin to Isaiah's, where we read in the thirty-fifth chapter of the Major Prophet : "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them ; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall bloom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing; the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon. For in the wilderness shall waters break out and streams in the desert. And the glowing sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of Avater, in the habitations of jackals, where each lay shall be grass with reeds and rushes." The result of the study of nearly a thousand species and varieties of cactus from all the world's deserts resulted, we have already said, in the discovery of several partially thornless varieties. Seeds from each were planted. When flowers came, Burbank made thousands of crossings by pollination. For fifteen years the plant- prophet silently worked, watched and waited. Tens of The (Acrrs — Bf:FOi;K and After Above is the original thorny kind of seedling cacti, with but two or three dethorned. Below are tliree-year-old cactus plants, free from thorns, with their second crop of fruit, one-third fjrown. but when ripe three inches long, two inches in diameter, smooth, delicious, and of many colors and flavors. The giant cacti are from eight to twenty fei't liigh, and weigh nearly a ton LUTHER BURBANK 307 thousands showed no improvement. They were as thorny as ever. A few less barbed with spicules and thorns he sep- arated. This process beinof followed out year after year, to-day the result is a number of g^iant cacti, many of which grow from eight to twenty feet high and weigh at the maximum a ton or more each, with no thorns, prickers, or spicules. Its pulpy leaves are from five to ten inches wide, two feet long, and often two inches in thickness. They will furnish good fodder for cattle and sheep, whose eye- balls and intestines will no longer be pierced as they munch the luscious nourishment. These thomless cacti present in their broad, smooth, slab-like leaves on an average six hun- dred pounds to one plant, about one-half as nutritious as ordinary pasture grasses. For human consumption they produce great quantities of yellow, white and orange- colored fruits, usually three and one-half inches in length and two inches in diameter, in shape like a banana or a cucumber, its meat flavored like the peach, the melon, the pineapple or the blackberry. Of forage they can produce two hundred tons to an acre. In comparison with the twenty tons produced by coarse vegetables like beets, car- rots, turnips or cabbage, they thus offer the tremendous proportionate increase of two hundred to twenty. Based on fact, therefore, is Burbank's prophecy that were the population of the globe increased one-third, there could, together with what is already produced, be grown from this desert plant "food enough for all." It is not a mental mirage of the desert. The cactus' value is already highly appreciated and its use has extended to every continent. Orders are constantly arriv- ing from the deserts on other sides of the globe. From the sale of the first five leaves to an Australian firm was built the beautiful new home which Mr. Burbank now occupies. 308 MASTER MINDS Kingliest of all Burbank 's colossal creations is this plant, whose leaves shall be for the "healing of the nations." BUBBANK FROM THE POINT OP VIEW OF SCIENCE Exaggeration is not needed in presenting the work of Burbank. To the plant-creator it is intensely distasteful — even painful. He would have no one think that he is the sole discoverer of his process. In qualifying some state- ment in this sketch, Burbank 's sister, Mrs. Emma Burbank Beeson, with whom he overlooked this chapter, stopped to say : ' ' Truth is a passion with my brother. He desires nothing so much as the truth. ' ' From Pliny's day, when the Latin writer recorded new fruits produced by grafting, to men like Mr. Burbank 's own grandfather before him, not only have gardeners grafted, budded and evolved better plants and fruit- trees, but scientific gardeners and horticulturists before and since, down even to the present habit of hybridizing, have also crossed two plants to grow a third. Mr. Burbank has not discovered the method of crossing, as neither did he discover hybridizing, which is crossing two distinctly different species to produce a new. He was the first to discern and make use of the fact that the great variations occur in the second and third generations from the crossing. A journalism prone to exaggeration, and a mercurial reading public jumping at conclusion, in their ignorance assume Burbank as the discoverer of the methods of crossing and hybridizing. This is a fiction which Mr. Burbank is the first to disclaim. But granting all this, it does not subtract from achievements which outstrip any- thing hitherto known, and rank Burbank in the sense of LUTHER BURBANK 309 being a "doer of the word," the greatest scientific re-creator of plants and flowers tlie world has kno^v^^.^ Hugo De Vries, the world's greatest botanist, by no means agrees in all points with Mr. Burbank, but is at odds with him over certain scientific deductions. Therefore he is all the better as authority. It is he who has declared : ' * Mr. Burbank is doubtless the most skillful promoter in the formation of new forms of plant-life by the process of crossing and selection. "^ He is "a great and unique genius. Such knowledge of nature and such ability to handle plant-life would be possible only to one possessing genius of a high order. Burbank is the man who creates unique novelties in horticulture, a work which every man cannot do. It requires a great genius. It is rightly pre- sumed that no possible improvements are beyond his reach. "^ 1" There are a few men in the United States in whom there is an intense interest because of their achievements. The most prominent of these are Booker T. Washington, Jacob Kiis, Benjamin B. Lind- sey and Luther Burbank, and in some respects the interest in Mr. Burbank is the keenest. His triumphs are more tangible, because they represent unquestioned power, almost miraculous power, over nature. Mr. Burbank has created more important new fruits, flowers, berries, etc., than any one else, and he has done most of it, defying all hitherto accepted theories of plant creation." — Bos- ton Journal of Education. 2So great is the Carnegie Institute's regard that it not only grants him ten thousand dollars a year, but has its representative, Dr. Shull, constantly searching on Burbank 's grounds the records of transformations, recording them for science and mankind. The time will come when for the sake of science and humanity as a result of Dr. Shull's observing, the Carnegie Institution will issue his results in many volumes, the preparation of which is now going on. 3The President of the Carnegie Institute at Washington in his report of 1906 adds these words: "The President desires to record 310 MASTER MINDS Certain scientific deductions Mr. Burbank has, through his matchless experimentation, naturally questioned. First we may mention the law of "mutation." In the verdict of the world's premier botanist, De Vries, mutation occurs at only periodic times in a plant's history. Burbank 's muta- tions (or elemental changes) De Vries declares but "sports," i. e., a reverberation to some ancestral trait latent in the organism. "No," answered Burbank; "a thousand new variations and mutations occur by cross-breeding." Another difference is as to what constitutes inheritance in plants. Burbank claims acquired characters are inher- ited, while De Vries claims species take origin by muta- tion. Burbank 's stand is that he has disproved De Vries' theory that acquired characters are never transmitted, and has proved that acquired characters are the only ones that are transmitted. All this is in harmony with the Burbank main conclusion that "inheritance is the sum of all past environment. ' ' As the difference between the two men is largely one of definition, the lay reader as well as the student will rest his verdict with the man who has the largest experimental observation. This, of course, is Burbank, who has had mil- lions of variant plants under observation, while the other has but a few score. In addition to his incomparably greater field of observa- tion, another quality is universally granted Burbank by scientists , namely, his peerless eye for detecting variations, an instinctive gift no study can create. his warm esteem of the scientific spirit of co-operation shown in this enterprise by Mr. Burbank, by the members of the committee, by Dr. Shull, and by numerous colleagues whose counsel has been sought. ' ' LUTHER B URBANE 311 He applies this initiative insight to other scientific con- clusions. For instance, the Mendelian laws have calculated that a certain and fixed proportion of characters descends to the evolved plant from each respective parent. He declares these Mendelian laws only partially explain the changes resulting from almost countless experiments where "for years," as David Starr Jordan has lately declared, "Burbank has kept a hundred thousand different experi- ments going, more than all the scientific laborers in the world. ' ' As the plant-creator goes to the woods without a gun, he goes to the flowers without a book. Naturally he breaks asunder the bonds of old terminologies and has to create new terms, even constantly having to coin words for hith- erto unknown creations every week. For laws as well as terms he is no more bound to the book and bell of a De Vries than he is to those of a Linnteus. No book has ever been written to enchart his new discoveries of laws ; and no book has anticipated them. Columbus' discovery of the new world no book antici- pated. So no book anticipates Burbank's explorations. He is discovering a new plant-world hitherto uncharted and unformulated. His chief book is nature, which he reads at first hand without a mediator. ''You're wrong, De Vries," he once burst forth at an unhappy moment when the world's greatest botanist once questioned nature. "You are wrong. Nature never lies!" A PROPHET OF THE PLANT W'ORLD Such a man has a prophet's originality and creativeness. It is first proof of Burbank's genius that he is not a priest 312 MASTER MINDS of nature, thumbing over Latin classifications. It is first proof of his genius that he is not a straight-laced defender of the faith, telling over the worn beads of botanical rosa- ries and repeating academic credos in the foot-trodden cathedral of dead botanists. He is the plant-prophet of God 's world to-day. ' ' The chief work of botanists of yesterday, ' ' he declared, "was the study and classification of dried, shriveled plants, plant-mummies whose souls had fled, rather than the living, plastic forms. They thought their classified species were more fixed and unchangeable than anything in heaven or earth one can imagine. We have learned that they were as plastic in our hands as clay in the hands of the potter, or color on the artist's canvas. In pursuing the study of any of the universal and everlasting laws of nature, pre- conceived notions, dogmas and all personal prejudices must be laid aside and, listening patiently, quietly, reverently to the lessons, one by one, which Mother Nature has to teach, shedding light on that which was before a mystery, all who will may see and know. She conveys her truth only to those who are passive and receptive, accepting truths as suggested, wherever they may be had ; then at last man has a solid foundation for science." BURBANK THE WHOLE-SOULED MAN Such a mind, acquainted with but unfettered by books, we may naturally expect to overleap the barriers of not only other fences, but the barriers of his own field. We may expect him to look into other fields of progress, to which he will apply universal laws that, though learned in his own, are equally true for aU. LUTHER BURBANK 313 So through not only physical nature, but through human nature, up to nature's God, Burbank goes till he halts only before the Universal and the Infinite, at what he calls "the fringe of the ocean of force." "My theories," he concludes, "of the laws and princi- ples of plant-creation in many respects are opposed to the theories of materialists. I am a firm believer in a higher power than man's. All my investigations have led me away from the idea of a dead, material universe tossed about by variant forces to those of a universe absolutely all force, life, soul, thought, or whatever name we may choose to call it." "I believe emphatically in religion. God made religion and man made theology, just as God made the country and man made the town. I have the largest sympathy for reli- gion. ' '^ To him * ' the social and spiritual import, ' ' his sister, Mrs. Beeson, declares to us, "is far greater than the practical and economic. " "A day will come, ' ' he prophesies, * ' when man shall offer his brother man, not bullets nor bayonets, but richer grasses, better fruits, fairer flowers." "the training of the human plant " "If such work can be wrought with plants," he declares, ' ' what may not be done with man, the most sensi- tive of all to his environment. "2 America's greatest ques- tion of immigration and child-life therefore concerns him primarily. It is his working idea, gained from plant laws, that "on the crossing of species wisely directed and accom- i"The Training of the Human Plant," p. 28. 314 MASTER MINDS panied by a rigid selection of the best, and a rigid exclu- sion of the poorest, rests the hope of all progress. ' ' "In it," he adds, "we face the opportunity of the United States of observing and aiding, in what is the grandest opportunity ever presented of developing the finest race the world has ever known, out of the vast min- gling of races brought here by immigration." Fifty dis- tinct nationalities he traces, and in the blending of these he finds our weal or woe. ' ' Just as the plant-breeder always notices sudden changes and breaks, as well as many minor modifications, when he joins two or more plants of diverse type from widely separate quarters of the globe, some- times merging an absolutely wild strain with one that, long over-civilized, has largely lost virility, and just as he finds among the descendants a plant that is likely to be stronger and better than either ancestor, so may we notice constant changes and breaks and modifications going on about us in this vast combination of races, and so we may hope for a far stronger and better race, if right principles are fol- lowed — a magnificent race far superior to any preceding it. ' ' "The hardiness of the north" can be blended with "the rich emotionalism of the south." The staid and phleg- matic he points to as combinable with the quick-tempered and hot-blooded, and the mentally equipped with the bodily vigorous. The one needs the other. As to the place to begin, he starts, as with a plant, with the plastic embryo and with the child. "Nothing else is doing so much to break down the nervous systems of Amer- icans, not even the rush of maturer years, as this over- crowding and cramming of child-life before ten. With the nervoas system shattered, what is life worth? Suppose you began the education, so called, of your child at three or four. If he be unusually bright in the kindergarten, keep LUTHER BUBBANK 315 on, and push him to the uttermost. Outraged nature may be left to take care of the rest. ' ' The plastic child can be changed not only by proper intermarriage, but by environment, because even inheri- tance itself is the ' ' sum. of all past environment. ' ' He indicts as the present default of our educational sys- tem O'uer-education of mind and wwcZe r-education of body and conscience. ' * The work of breaking down the nervous system of the children of the United States is now well under way. We stuff them, cram them, and overwork them until their little brains are crowded up to and by the danger-line. Seldom is substantial progi*ess made by one whose individuality has been stifled in the schools. ' ' In place of forcing studies upon the mind before it is ripe, he first demands "a close touch with nature, a bare- foot boy, with all that it implies, for physical stamina. ' ' "Of all living things," he concludes, "the child is the most sensitive. A child absorbs environment. It is the most susceptible thing in the world to influence." "I wish to lay special stress upon the absurdity of running children through the same mill in a lot, with absolutely no real reference to their individuality. No two children are alike ; you cannot expect them to develop alike. It is when one breaks away absolutely from all precedent and rule, and carves out a new place in the world, that any substan- tial progress is ever made, and seldom is this done by those whose individuality has been stifled in the schools." By this he does not mean to neglect the child, or leave it to itself. "Bear in mind that this child life, in these first ten years, is the most sensitive thing in the world; never lose sight of that. Children respond to ten thousand subtle influences which would have no more influence upon a 316 MASTER MINDS plant than they would upon the sphinx. Vastly more sen- sitive is it than the most sensitive plant. ' ' Here is the time best possible, he insists, to ingrain hon- esty. "The voice of public dishonesty, which seems to be sweeping over this country, is chiefly due to a lack of proper training — breeding, if you will, in the formative years of life." Here also is the time to inculcate purity. ' ' The child is the purest thing in the world. It is absolute truth; that's why we love children. Here in the child, too, is the place to ingrain purity in the race. Its life is stainless, open to receive all infusions, just as is the life in the plant, and far more pliant and responsive to influences, and to influences to which no plant is capable of being responsive. Upon the child before the age of ten, we have an unparalleled opportunity to work; for nowhere else is there material so plastic. The atmosphere must be pure around it. It must be free from every kind of indelicacy or coarseness. The most dangerous man in the community is the one who would pollute the stream of a child's life. Whoever was responsible for saying that ' boys will be boys, ' and a young man 'must sow his wild oats,' was perhaps guilty of a crime. ' ' In accomplishing all this, the state must take the upper hand, Burbank demands, and as the result is above all else the salvation or overturning of the state, the state must make the child a matter of law. "Especially," he continues, "must this be true of the children of the poor, and these unfortunate waifs and foundlings. ' ' ' ' Cut loose from all precedent, and begin systematic State and National aid ; not next year, or a decade from now, but to-day. Begin training these outcasts, begin the cultiva- LUTEEB BUBBANK 317 tion of them, if you will, much as we cultivate the plants. ' ' "How m^any plants are there in the world to-day that were not in a sense once abnormalities? No, it is the influence of cultivation, of selection, of surroundings, of environments, that makes the change from the abnormal to the normal. From the children that we are led to call abnormal may come, under wise cultivation and training, splendid normal natures." Vicious or defective tendencies can be outbred from plants, he demonstrates, in from six to ten generations, and by the repetition of treatment, the new habits ensue. ' * So can it be with the races, through the training of a child. Only it will be immeasurably easier to produce and fix any desired traits in the child than in the plant." "For the most stubborn living thing in this world, the most difficult to swerve, is a plant once fixed in certain habits, habits which have been growing stronger and stronger upon it by repetition through thousands and thousands of years. The human will is a weak thing beside the will of a plant. But see how this whole plant's life-long stubbornness is broken swiftly by blending a new life with it, making, by crossing, a complete change in its life." With such traits and purposes emerges Burbank, the Man, having considered "the lily, how it grows," only like the Great Exemplar, to direct his vision to mankind. Horticultural science, great as it is, has been to him but a ladder whose rounds have advanced his soul to an ascend- ancy where not vegetation but Being is supreme. "Poet, whose words are like the tight-paoked seed Sealed in the capsule of a silver flower, Still at your art we wonder aa we read The art dynamic charging each word with power ! ' ' ■/5 THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW. RETD MAY 181998 1; J Series 9482 ocsovvifi BtG\o';!!^v ^c^^^ll- ^^ 000 874 595