iiiiill liiM^^^^^^ H i HI lit i) illiCil' LI. RA':Y EAC::er« ARBaRA.i STATE TEACHERS C L FOE SA.STA BARBARA. CALlF'jRNIA i \ ■ ■ ^ COLLEGE READINGS IN ENGLISH PROSE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY HEW VORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS ATLANTA • SAK FRANCISCO MACMII.LAN & CO., Limited LONDON • IIOMIIAV • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO COLLEGE READLNGS IN ENGLISH PROSE SELECTED AND EDITED BY FRANKLIN WILLIAM SCOTT ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AND JACOB ZEITLIN ASSOCIATE IN ENGLISH IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS Wete gorfe THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1921 AH ngkl'' "c served Copyright, 1914, By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and elcctrotyped. Published December. 1914 Xorisooli ^rrss J. 8. Cunhlng C... - Berwick A Smith Co. Norw'xxl, MaHA., U.S.A. PREFACE The specimens included in this volume may lay claim to representing a greater range in subject matter, in typical forms, and in levels of style than other compilations of the same kind. Here will be found a good deal of that literature of ideas which forms the staple of some recent volumes of selections. But in addition to those things which form a common ground of interest to all students, the editors have taken account of the special interest of the engineering and agricultural student, and aimed to provide material which should appeal particularly to his taste without being so technical in treatment as to baffle the lay intelligence. To diminish further the " literary " and " classical " odium, the volume includes a few models which do not rise above respectable mediocrity, mechanically correct and workmanlike pieces of writing, devoid of all distinction of style but fulfilling certain definite requirements of modern journalistic practice, A similar purpose is served by the appendix of student themes, which have been chosen as affording a standard of writing which the undergraduate might reasonably be expected to attain. It is in accordance, furthermore, with the same principle of immediacy of appeal that a considerable proportion of the matter has been taken from contemporary writers. Contempo- rary models are of value in the first place as illustrating the standard practice, but they have an additional advantage in that they do not overawe the beginner as the mighty masters of old are likely to. They are helpful indeed in emphasizing the enduring force of the principles which underlie the practice of the traditional masters of writing. Between the acknowledged masterpieces and the less tried material in this volume the editors have aimed to preserve an equal balance. V vi PREFACE The reason for the classitication, the particular function of each selection in the {;eneral scheme, the analysis of features of technical and stylistic interest, ami the explanations of facts and allusions necessary to the understanding of the text consti- tute the substance of the notes. Such matters as diction, sen- tence structure, and para<:;raphing, as well as larger structural qualities and points of literary technique, are briefly discussed at some appropriate point in the notes and frecpiently alluded to throughout. Out of fear of omitting suggestions that some stu- dents and instructors might tind helpful, these notes often risk the peril of being obvious. Perhaps they need no other apology than that those who find them superfluous can safely neglect them. The secondary classification (in Appendix 11) of Expo- sition and Argument according to the kinds of material and of Description according to features of technical interest is in- tended as an index to the difTerent points of view from which the material in this volume may be approached. The editors wish to acknowledge their obligation to pub- lishers and authors for generous permission to use material, notably : The Macmillan Company, G. P. Putnam's Sons, Harper and Brothers, Doubleday, Page and Company, T. Y. Crowell and Company, Charles Scribner's Sons, Longmans, Green and Company, I). C. Heath and Company, The Century Company, Columbia University Press, University of Chicago Press, Cambridge University Press, TJu North Americaii Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Outlook, The Imlcpendent, McClure's Magazine, Edinbur}^h Rerie^u, Political Science Quarterly, The (New \'ork) Nation, Eni^ineerini^ Record, Scientific American, The (New York) World, Mr. Fabian Franklin, Mr. Arnold liennett, Mr. K. Dana Durand, Mr. Stuart P. Sherman, Mr. John Dewey, and Mr. A. E. Shipley, Head-Master of Christ's College, Cambridge. They wish also to acknowledge their indebtedness to many friends for helpful suggestions. CONTENTS A. Definitions; I. EXPOSITION Slang What is Thought ? Socialism Familiar Style The Aim of a University Educa tion .... Henry Bradley ... 1 John Dewey .... 2 Ira B. Cross .... 6 William Hazlitt ... 14 John Henry Newman . . 16 B. Explanations of Mechanisms and Processes: Making Camp Breeding Brown Pelicans The Formation of Vowels House of Representatives Mine Helmets A Mechanical Dishwasher How the Panama Locks are Op erated .... Stewart Edward White C. William Bee be . Ediuard B. Tylor . Woodrow Wilson . Joseph Husband " Popular Mechanics " '^Scienti^c American " 18 27 30 31 43 46 47 C. Discussions of Facts and Ideas : Beginning of Cabinet Government The Esthetic Value of Efficiency The Honey Bee .... The Panama Canal On the Physical Basis of Life The Middle and Lower Classes in England under the Stuarts . Inaugural Address John Richard Green 55 Ethel Puffer Howes 58 A. E. Shipley 70 James Bryce . . . . 85 Thomas Henry Huxley . 90 George Macaulay Trevelyan . 99 Woodrow Wilson . 109 VUI coM'i'.srs Lincoln as More than an Anicri can .... English and .\mcrican Sports manship Sclf-ciillivation in Knghsh . The .Social Value of the College bred .... Hfrbert Croly John Corl'in . George Hirlnrt Palmer W'llliavi James rAGB IB \1\ 130 137 D. Expository Hioc.r.mmiv Francis I'arkman . Goldwin Smith Ilcnry Cabot Lodge James Bryee . 145 149 E. Inform.m. Ess.w : The Realm of the Commonplace L. 11. Bailey .... 165 .•\n .\pology for Idlers . Koheti Louis Stevenson . . 173 On the Feeling of Immortality in \outh Ifil/iam ILazlitt . . .182 /'. Revirws and Criticisms: Jane Austen's " Emma " On the " Tatler " The Waverley Novels . Mark Twain Turner's " Slave Ship " On the Classical Landscapes of Claude IValierSeott .... 19,'. William LLazlitt . . .201 George Edward Woodberry . 203 Stuart Pratt Sherman . . 208 Jo An Pus kin . . . .214 Jo/in Ruskin .... 215 G. Editori,\ls: East and West A Vicious Proposal The Nation's Pledge Wireless in Railroad .Service .Absorption of the Indian •-■Nationalism and Peace (Lj)ndon) " Times" . 219 . " TAe Outlook" . . 221 . {A'trw York) " World" . . 223 . " Engineering Record " . . 228 . {.Ve-.u York) ''Nation" . . 228 . {Ne7u York) ''Nation " . . 230 CONTENTS ix II. ARGUMENT A. Elements : I. Introduction, huluding Special Issues The Three Hypotheses Respect- page ing the History of Nature . Thomas Henry Huxley . . 232 Letter to General McClellan . Abraham Lincoln . . . 239 The Case against the Single Tax Alvin Saunders Johnson . 239 2. Evidence Council Government 7't'rj/^ J Mayor Government . . . . E. Dana Durand . . . 241 Professor Huxley's Lectures . £. L. Godkin , . . 248 J. Body of Argument Speech on Old Age Pensions . Arthur J. Balfour . . . 257 A Defense of the House of Lords Sir William Anson , . 271 4. Refutation and Conclusion The Intellectual Powers of Woman Fabian Franklin . . . 276 The Mathematician and the Engi- neer ..... ^'■Engineering" . , . 291 Popular Control of National Wealth O. C. Barber . . . .296 J. Persuasion Address at Swarthmore College . Woodro%v Wilson . . . 301 Address at Gettysburg . . Abraham Lincoln . . . 304 B. Elements in Combination : The Monroe Doctrine . , William Howard Taft . . 306 C. Informal Argument: — r[s Agriculture Declining .'' . . Kenyon L. Butterfisld State Control and the Individual A. D. Lindsay Organization of Farmers . . Kenyon L. Btitterfield The Organization of Labor . Herbert Croly Direct Presidential Nominations " The Independent" 324 325 327 330 336 coy TESTS III. DKSCRIl'TION A. Senses : —Sunrise at Tort-of-Spain A Tropical Sunset Cloud Kflfects The Yellow-breasted Chat Odors of Vegetation The Sound of Summer The Ploughing H Landscape: Cape Cod . The Upper Mississippi In the Sahel A Pine Forest A Grove of Sequoias . The Spirit of the Garden The Scenery of the I^kes C. Cities: Valparaiso «,. An Indian Village In Front of the Royal Exchange /J. Buildings: English Cottages The Keeper's House . Exposition Hall and Bridge Shop Second-story Bungalow Apart ments .... The Doctor's Home Landor's Cottage The Ancient Palar.- nf leypore St Mark's . £. ANtMAL.S: ■^ The Walrus .... Kusa-Hibari The Hen Hawk . A Trout .... TAGB iMfcadio Ileam 340 Lafcadio J/eum 341 John Kuskin . 342 John Burro 11 ghs 344 Wilson Flagg 345 Rich a rd Jeff erics 347 Frank Xorris 348 I/eiin' David Thoreau . 352 Francis Parkman . 352 George Edward IVoodherry 354 Steioart Edward White . 357 Stavart Ed-ward White . 358 L. If. Bailey . 360 William Wordsworth 361 James Bryce . 366 Francis Parkman . 368 Kichard Jefferies 369 John Rtiskin . 372 Thomas Hardy 373 " Engineering Record " . 375 " Popular Mechanics " . 376 /'" Ilopkinson Smith 377 Edgar Allan Poe 379 Rudyard Kipling . 381 John Ruskin . 383 C. Lloyd Morgan . 393 Lajcadio //earn 394 John Burroughs 396 Richard Jefferies 397 G. CONTENTS XI Persons : I. Real PAGE Sir Richard Grenville . Charles Kingsley . 399 Francis Drake Charles Kingsley . 400 John Sterling Thomas Carlyle 400 Percy Bysshe Shelley . . . T.J.Hogg . . . 401 Father Prout . ' . . William Bates - 402 Edward the First . John Richard Green 2. Lnaginary 403 An Accountant . Charles Lamb 405 A Portrait . . John Galsworthy . 407 Charles Cheeryble Charles Dickens 408 Harold Skimpole Charles Dickens 409 Mr. George . Charles Dickens 410 Aunt Clara . . Arnold Bennett 410 Bud Tilden . . F. Hop kin son Smith 412 A Group of Mourners . . Sir Walter Scott . 415 Mental States : In the Hurricane . Joseph Conrad 418 On the Wind at Night . Stezvart Edward White . 420 IV. NARRATIVE A. Anecdote : Irish Patriots Henty Labonchire B. Incident: The Tragedy of the Mine . . Joseph Husband . An Elephant Hunt . . . Theodore Roosevelt. C. Biography and Autobiography: Jeanne D'Arc Going into Business D. Historical Narrative: The Death of Queen Mary The Capture of Quebec The Beggars' League . John Richard Green Jacob A. Riis . 423 . 424 . 430 437 442 Thomas Babington Macanlay 457 Francis Parkman . . 461 John Lathrop Motley . . 470 Xii COXTl.STS £. Elements ok Story-writint. : /. hhident PACE Jennie at the Pump George liomnv . 476 Denry at the Dance . AntolJ Bennett . 477 The Pursuit of the Outlaw . Frank Norris . 486 2. Description Nature Speaks .... George Meredith 498 F. Short Stories: The Sire de Maletroit's Door Robert Louis Ste-iensou . . 502 A Gala Dress .... Mar}> Wilkins Freeman 523 Mammon and the Archer . O. Henry .... 536 V. LETTERS Dean Swift to Stella 543 Samuel Johnson to I^rd Chesterfield ....... 544 Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth 545 Charles Darwin to W. D. Fox 545 Abraham Lincoln to Mrs. Bixby 548 James Russell Lowell to Charles Eliot Norton 549 R. L S. to W. E. Henley 551 APPENDIX I. STUDENT THEMES Exposition : The Manufacture of .Malleable Iron (with outline) . . . 553 How a Rosebud Uncloses 557 Strawberrj' Picking 557 The College Girl's Vocabulary 559 Fuzzy : The Idea Man ......... 560 The College Springtime : A " Now" (Imitated from I^igh Hunt) 563 The Fear of Pew 565 Use of Dialogue in "The Young Man with the Cream Tarts" . 566 John Masefield 567 Mr. Roosevelt in Palestine 571 Our Military Unpreparedness . 572 CONTENTS Xlll PAGE The Underwood Tariff Bill 573 Of the Importance Attached to Athletic Sports .... 573 II. Argument: Brief on the Hetch-Hetchy Question ...... 574 The Value of Intercollegiate Debating ..... 584 III. Description : Pittsburgh by Night 588 The Song of the Vacuum-cleaner 588 The Desert 589 Summer ........... 589 In a Church 590 Mademoiselle Fifi 590 My Grandfather . . .591 Anger 593 IV. Narrative: Tony 593 The Fireman 594 The Blood Tie .599 APPENDIX II Exposition and Argument (classified as to topics) . . . 607 Description (classified as to technical elements) .... 609 NOTES 611 COLLEGE READINGS IN ENGLISH PROSE I. A. DEFINITIONS SLANG 1 Henry Bradley Although the term "slang" is sometimes used with more or less intentional inexactness, and has often been carelessly defined, the notion to which it corresponds in general use seems to be tolerably precise. There are two principal characteristics which, taken in conjunction, may serve to distinguish what is properly called slang from certain other varieties of diction that in some respects resemble it. The first of these is that slang is a conscious offence against some conventional standard of pro- priety. A mere vulgarism is not slang, except when it is pur- posely adopted, and acquires an artificial currency, among some class of persons to whom it is not native. The other distinctive feature of slang is that it is neither a part of the ordinary lan- guage, nor an attempt to supply its deficiencies. The slang word is a deliberate substitute for a word of the vernacular, just as the characters of a cipher are substitutes for the letters of the alphabet, or as a nickname is a substitute for a personal name. The latter comparison is the more exact of the two ; indeed, nicknames, as a general rule, maybe accurately described as a kind of slang. A slang expression, like a nickname, may be used for the purpose of concealing the meaning from unin- ' From Encyclopadia BrUaiinica (nth ed.), article on " Slang."' Reprinted by permission. B I 2 DKIIMTIOXS iliali'tl lu-ariTS, or it may bo cnipluyt-cl sportively ()r out of aver- sion to dij^nity or formality of speech. The essential point is tliat it does not, like the words of ordinary lanj^uage, oriji;inate in the desire to be understood. The slang word is not invented or used because it is in any respect better than the accej)ted term, but because it is different. No doubt it may accidentally hajipen that a word which originates as slang is superior in expressiveness to its regular synonym (much as a nickname may identify a person better than his name does), or that in time it develops a shade of meaning which the ordinary language cannot convey. But when such a word comes to be used mainly on account of its intrinsic merit, and not because it is a wrong word, it is already ceasing to be slang. So long as the usage of good society continues to proscribe it, it may be called a vul- garism ; but unless the need which it serves is supplied in some other way, it is likely to find its way into the standard speech. WHAT IS THOUGHT?! John Dewey No words are oftener on our lips than thinking and thought. So profuse and varied, indeed, is our use of these words that it is not easy to define just what we mean by them. The aim of this chapter is to find a single consistent meaning. Assistance may be had by considering some typical ways in which the terms are employed. In the first place thought is used broadly, not to say loosely. Everything that comes to mind, that "goes through our heads," is called a thought. To think of a thing is just to be conscious of it in any way whatsoever. Second, the term is restricted by excluding whatever is directly pre- sented ; wc think Cor think of) only such things as we do not directly see, hear, smell, or taste. Then, third, the meaning is further limited to beliefs that rest upon some kind of evidence ' From Ucw Wc Think. D. C. Heath & Company, igio. Reprinted by peiQUioion. WHAT IS THOUGHT? 3 or testimony. Of this third type, two kinds — or, rather, two degrees — must be discriminated. In some cases, a belief is accepted with slight or almost no attempt to state the grounds that support it. In other case?, the ground or basis for a belief is deliberately sought and its adequacy to support the belief examined. This process is called reflective thought ; it alone is truly educative in value, and it forms, accordingly, the principal subject of this volume. We shall now briefly describe each of the four senses. I. In its loosest sense, thinking signifies everything that, as we say, is "in our heads" or that "goes through our minds." He who offers "a penny for your thoughts" does not expect to drive any great bargain. In calling the object of his demand thoughts, he does not intend to ascribe to them dignity, con- secutiveness, or truth. Any idle fancy, trivial recollection, or flitting impression will satisfy his demand. Daydreaming, building of castles in the air, that loose flux of casual and dis- connected material that floats through our minds in relaxed moments are, in this random sense, thinking. More of our wak- ing life than we should care to admit, even to ourselves, is likely to be whiled away in this inconsequential trifling with idle fancy and unsubstantial hope. In this sense, silly folk and dullards think. The story is told of a man in slight repute for intelligence, who, desiring to be chosen selectman in his New England town, addressed a knot of neighbors in this wise: "I hear you don't believe I know enough to hold office. I wish you to understand that I am think- ing about something or other most of the time." Now reflective thought is like this random coursing of things through the mind in that it consists of a succession of things thought of ; but it is unlike, in that the mere chance occurrence of any chance "some- thing or other " in an irregular sequence does not suffice. Reflec- tion involves not simply a sequence of ideas, but a consequence — a consecutive ordering in such a way that each determines the next as its proper outcome, while each in turn leans back on its predecessors. The successive portions of the reflective thought grow out of one another and support one another ; they do not 4 DEFIMlJOys come and )io in a nuilky. Each phase is a stcj) from some- thing U) something — technically speaking, it is a term of thought. Each term leaves a deposit which is utilized in the next term. The stream or llow becomes a train, chain, or thread. II. Even when thinking is used in a broad sense, it is usually restricted to matters not directly perceived : to what we do not see, smell, hear, or touch. We ask the man telling a story if he saw a certain incident happen, and his reply may be, "No, I only thought of it." A note of invention, as distinct from faithful record of observation, is present. Most important in tiiis class are successions of imaginative incidents and episodes which, haWng a certain coherence, hanging together on a con- tinuous thread, lie between kaleidoscopic flights of fancy and considerations deliberately employed to establish a conclusion. The imaginative stories poured forth by children possess all degrees of internal congruity; some are disjointed, some are articulated. When connected, they simulate reflective thought ; indeed, they usually occur in minds of logical capacity. These imaginative enterprises often precede thinking of the close-knit t\pe and prepare the way for it. But they do not aim at knowl- edge, at belief about facts or in truths; and thereby they are marked oflf from reflective thought even when they most re- semble it. Those who express such thoughts do not expect credence, but rather credit for a well-constructed plot or a well- arranged climax. They produce good stories, not — unless by chance — knowledge. Such thoughts are an efilorescence of feeling; the enhancement of a mood or sentiment is their aim; congruity of emotion, their binding tie. III. In its next sense, thought denotes belief resting upon some basis ; that is, real or supposed knowledge going beyond what is directly present. It is marked by acceptance or rejection of something as reasonably probable or improbable. This phase of thought, however, includes two such distinct types of belief that, even though their difference is strictly one of degree, not of kind, it becomes practically important to consider them separately. Some beliefs are accepted when their grounds have WHAT IS THOUGHT? 5 not themselves been considered, others are accepted because their grounds have been examined. When we say, "Men used to think the world was flat," or "I thought you went to the house," we express belief : something is accepted, held to, acquiesced in, or affirmed. But such thoughts may mean a supposition accepted without reference to its real grounds. These may be adequate, they may not; but their value with reference to the support they afford the belief has not been considered. Such thoughts grow up unconsciously and without reference to the attainment of correct belief. They are picked up — we know not how. From obscure sources and by unnoticed chan- nels they insinuate themselves into acceptance and become un- consciously a part of our mental furniture. Tradition, instruc- tion, imitation — all of which depend upon authority in some form, or appeal to our own advantage, or fall in with a strong passion — are responsible for them. Such thoughts are preju- dices, that is, prejudgments, not judgments proper that rest upon a survey of evidence. IV. Thoughts that result in belief have an importance attached to them which leads to reflective thought, to con- scious inquiry into the nature, conditions, and bearings of the belief. To think of whales and camels in the clouds is to enter- tain ourselves with fancies, terminable at our pleasure, which do not lead to any belief in particular. But to think of the world as flat is to ascribe a quality to a real thing as its real property. This conclusion denotes a connection among things and hence is not, like imaginative thought, plastic to our mood. Belief in the world's flatness commits him who holds it to think- ing in certain specific ways of other objects, such as the heavenly bodies, antipodes, the possibility of navigation. It prescribes to him actions in accordance with his conception of these objects. The consequences of a belief upon other beliefs and upon behavior may be so important, then, that men are forced to consider the grounds or reasons of their belief and its logical consequences. This means reflective thought — thought in its eulogistic and emphatic sense. 6 Dr.Fr\'iTfn\\our tin cans, if you have any; slice your bacon; clean your fish ; pluck your birds ; mix your dough or batter ; sj-iread yuur tal)le tinware on your tarpaulin or a sheet of birch liark; cut a kettle-lifter; see that everything you are going to need is within reach of your hand as you squat on your heels before the fireplace. Now light your fire. The civilized method is to build a fire and then to touch i match to the completed structure. If well done and in a grate or stove, this works beautifully. Only in the woods you have no grate. The only sure way is as follows: Hold a piece of birch bark in your hand. Shelter your match all you know how. When the bark has caught, lay it in your fireplace, assist it with more bark, and gradually build up, twig by twig, stick li\- stick, from the first pin-point of flame, all the fire you are going to need. It will not be much. The little hot blaze rising between the parallel logs directly against the aluminum of your utensils \nll do the business in very short order. In fifteen minutes at most your meal is ready. And you have been able to attain to hot food thus quickly because you were prepared. In case of very wet weather the affair is altered somewhat. If the rain has just commenced, do not stop to clear out very thoroughly, but get your tent up as quickly as possible, in order to preserve an area of comparatively dry ground. But if the earth is already soaked, you had best build a bonfire to dry out by, while you cook over a smaller fire a little distance removed, leaving the tent until later. Or it may be well not to pitch the tent at all, but to lay it across slanting supports at an angle to reflect the heat against the ground. It is no joke to light a fire in the rain. An Indian can do it more easily than a white man, but even an Indian has more trouble than the story-books acknowledge. You wdll need a greater quantity of birch bark, a bigger pile of resinous dead limbs from the pine trees, and perhaps the heart of a dead pine stub or stump. Then, with infinite patience, you may be able to tease the flame. Sometimes a small dead birch contains in ON MAKING CAMP 25 the waterproof envelope of its bark a species of powdery, dry touchwood that takes the flame readily. Still, it is easy enough to start a blaze — a very fine-looking, cheerful, healthy blaze ; the difficulty is to prevent its petering out the moment your back is turned. But the depths of woe are sounded and the limit of patience reached when you are forced to get breakfast in the dripping forest. After the chill of early dawn you are always reluctant in the best of circumstances to leave your blankets, to fimible with numbed fingers for matches, to handle cold steel and siippeiy fish. But when every leaf, twig, sapling, and tree contains a douche of cold water ; when the wetness oozes about your moc- casins from the soggy earth with every step you take; when you look about you and realize that somehow, before you can get a mouthful to banish that before-breakfast ill-humor, you must brave cold water in an attempt to find enough fuel to cook with, then your philosophy and early religious training avail you little. The first ninety-nine times you are forced to do this you will probably squirm circumspectly through the brush in a vain attempt to avoid shaking water down on yourself; you will resent each failure to do so, and at the end your rage will personify the wilderness for the purpose of one sweeping anathema. The hundredth time will bring you wisdom. You will do the anathema — rueful rather than enraged — from the tent opening. Then you will plunge boldly in and get wet. It is not pleasant, but it has to be done, and you will save much temper, not to speak of time. Dick and I earned our diplomas at this sort of work. It rained twelve of the first fourteen days we were out. Toward the end of that two weeks I doubt if even an Indian could have discovered a dry stick of wood in the entire country. The land was of Laurentian rock formation, running in parallel ridges of bare stone separated by hollows carpeted with a thin layer of earth. The ridges were naturally ill adapted to camping, and the cup hollows speedily filled with water until they became most creditable little marshes. Often we hunted for an hour or so before we could find any sort of a spot to pitch our tent. As ^6 EXPUXATIOXS OF .\fFCnANIS.\fS AXf) PROCESSES (or ;i tin-, it was a niatlcr of thoppiii}^ down dead trees large onouuli to have remained dry inside, of armfuls of birch bark, and of the patient dryinj,' out, by repeated ignition, of enough fuel to cook very simple meals. Of course we could have kept a big tire going easily encnigh, but we were travelling steadily and had not time enough for that. In these trying circumstances Dick showed that, no matter how much of a tenderfoot he might be. he was game enough under stress. But to return to our pleasant afternoon. While you are consuming the supper you will hang o\'er some water to heat for the dish-washing, and the dish-washing you will attend to the moment you have finished eating. Do not commit the fallacy of sitting down for a little rest. Better finish the job completely while you are about it. You will appreciate leisure so much more later. In lack of a wash-rag you will find that a bunch of tall grass bent double makes an ideal swab. Now brush the flies from your tent, drop the mosquito-proof lining, and enjoy yourself. The whole task, from first to last, has consumed but a little over an hour. And you are through for the day. In the woods, as nowhere else, you will earn your leisure only by forethought. Make no move until you know it follows the line of greatest economy. To putter is to wallow in endless desolation. If you cannot move directly and sw'iftly and certainly along the line of least resistance in everything you do, take a guide with you ; you are not of the woods people. You will ne\'er enjoy doing for yourself, for your days will be crammed with unending labor. It is but a little after seven. The long crimson shadows of the North Country are lifting across the aisles of the forest. You sit on a log, or lie on your back, and blow contented clouds straight up into the air. Nothing can disturb you now. The wilflerness is yours, for you have taken from it the essentials of primitive civilization, — shelter, warmth, and food. An hour ago a rainstorm would have been a minor catastrophe. Xow you do not care. Blow high, blow low, you have made for yourself an abiding place, so that the signs of the sky are less important to you than to the city dweller who wonders if BREEDING BROWN PELICANS 27 he should take an umbrella. From your doorstep you can look placidly out on the great unknown. The noises of the forest draw close about you their circle of mystery, but the circle can- not break upon you, for here you have conjured the homely sounds of kettle and crackling flame to keep ward. Thronging down through the twilight steal the jealous woodland shadows, awful in the sublimity of the Silent Places, but at the sentry outposts of your fire-lit trees they pause like wild animals, hesitating to advance. The wilderness, untamed, dreadful at night, is all about ; but this one little spot you have reclaimed. Here is something before unknown to the eerie spirits of the woods. As you sleepily knock the ashes from the pipe, you look about on the famihar scene with accustomed satisfaction. You are at home. BREEDING BROWN PELICANS ^ C. William Beebe It is a great compliment to the conditions under which birds in captivity are kept when such a large and wary species as the brown pelican will breed successfully. For many years these birds have played with sticks in the large flying cage, gather- ing them into tentative heaps and allowing them again to be scattered. Two seasons ago when a severe wind storm had filled the cage with a large quantity of twigs, the birds seemed to receive a correspondingly strong stimulation and went to work with a will, erecting a firm, well-built structure. One stick at a time, however small, was brought in the very tip of their great beaks and with the utmost seriousness added to the nest, tucked in with gentle pokings, sometimes only to be re- moved and placed elsewhere. A single egg was laid, but nothing came of the venture. This year an abundance of sticks and twigs was supplied as soon as the birds were placed out of doors, and nest-building 1 Zoological Society Bulletin, May, 1914. jS KA77..I.V.ir/0.V.S- ()/• .\fi:cnAXf.SMS A\D PROCESS f-lS l>c<:an nt onto. Two pairs were thus occupitui, and near the imIrc oi the water two nests were built. One nesl resulted in tailure, hut upon the sinp;le egg of the second pair of brown peli- cans |>atient incubation soon began. At last the reward came, and the first young pelican ever hatched north of Florida l)roke through its shell. There are few more ugly things in the world than a young pelican. Ljnng prone in the nest it appears wholly lifeless, and of the color and texture rather of a bit of water-soaked beef than a bird. It seems to have no definite organs or symmetry'. It is naked, dirty-gray, with tiny, crooked, wormlike wings, and a blind, featureless head. The newly hatched chick is an avian postu- late which we must accept but which requires all our faith in Mother Nature — and the pelican. Nevertheless in the little creature are the latent possibilities of a splendid winged creature which can swim upon the water, walk on the land, soar for hours at a time on ahnost motionless wings high in the heaven, and finally dive into the ocean in pursuit of its prey. Surely the pelican in the course of its development offers the utmost an- tithesis of helplessness and achievement. After a fortnight our faith has its reward, for the gray nestling worm has sprouted a garb of grayish white down ; its eyes have opened, and in the somewhat lengthened beak we may even discern the promise of the future capacious pouch. In place of helpless quiescence it moves about, and when chilly, pushes beneath the warm breast plumage of the mother, and at times clamors for food. In the last newly acquired character lies one of the most interesting facts in the life of this species. It truly calls for its food. Not, to be sure, with the pleasant urging of young chicks, but at least with a decided vocal demand — a rasping croak, so strong that it may be heard many yards away. The far distant ancestors of pelicans undoubtedly had need of voices. They may even ha\e had a song for all we know. And now, to the chick, as long as it requires food, is vouchsafed a voice, V»Taen it begins to forage for itself and takes up the serious business of life — that of fishing — silence falls gradually upon it, the croak becomes weaker day by day, and soon the hiss BREEDING BROWN PELICANS 2g of air rushing through the throat is the only sound it can pro- duce. The only vocal sound that is, for it can clatter its beak vigorously when it strives to frighten an enemy. On Pelican Island I have listened with wonder to the uproar from the throats of scores of young birds, while the parents were leaving and re- turning, all mutely, dumbly busy with their life work. It is a problem, both interesting to the ornithologist and significant to the philosophical lover of wild things, why the ears of the old pelican remain so keenly attuned to the cries of the young birds while they themselves are wholly unable to communicate with one another. To the few naturalists who have enjoyed watching a breeding colony of brown pelicans, the method of feeding has always been of great interest. Heretofore we have known it in New York from descriptions and photographs, but now we may look for- ward each season to the opportunity of observing it at first hand in the aviary of the Zoological Society. The mother has fed, fish after fish being engulfed and swallowed whole, and after a time she returns to her nest, her great wings fanning the air, yet allowing her to come to rest so gently that the topmost twigs are hardly disturbed. The young bird renews its imperious clamor, and, clad in its fluffy white down, stands in front of the parent, wildly waving the stumpy, crooked organs which rep- resent wings. The croaks never cease until the mother pelican opens her immense beak, points it downward, and the young bird, eagerly pressing forward, pokes its head into the gaping, leathery pouch. Farther and farther it goes, at last actually stepping upon the rim of the beak. At this point the spectators begin to be nervous and more than once have been on the point of summoning keepers to prevent the horrible tragedy about to be enacted before their eyes. All sympathy is with the young bird as it apparently pushes on to its doom, a quick death in the deep interior of the mother. From this point, however, events proceed too rapidly for intervention. Up and up, and then down goes the young bird, until he has pushed his way beyond the beak and down the neck. Then begin contortions which turn the sympathy of the spectators to the mother, for a terrible ^O /•:A7»L.I.Y.I770A*.S- of .\fECIIAXrS.\fS AM) PROCESSES contrst is apparently takinp plait- between the youn^ bird and its parent, and it seems inevitable that one must emerge from the conllict mangled and disabled. After a moment of quiet the nestling pelican again appears in the light of day, not only unhurt, but replete with a bountiful repast of fish, which stills the croaks until a few hours have passed, when hunger again arouses him to vocal utterance. He steps out of his mother's beak, balances for a moment on very wobbly legs, looks about wholly unconscious of the varying emotions he has aroused in the onlooker, and turning, burrows deeply beneath the living coverlet of feathers which for so many weeks has patiently sheltered him day and night from cold, from rain, and the threatened attacks of other birds in the great cage which is his world. THE for:matiox of vowels 1 Edward B. Tylor What vowels are, is a matter which has been for some years well understood. They are compound musical tones such as, in the vox humana stop of the organ, are sounded by reeds (vibrating tongues) fitted to organ pipes of particular con- struction. The manner of formation of vowels by the voice is shortly this. There are situated in the larynx a pair of vibrat- ing membranes called the vocal chords, which may be rudely imitated by stretching a piece of sheet india-rubber over the open end of a tube, so as to form tw'o half covers to it, "like the parchment of a drum split across the middle ;", when the tube is blown through, the india-rubber flaps will vibrate as the vocal chords do in the larynx, and give out a sound. In the human voice, the mu.sical ellect of the vibrating chords is increased by the cavity of the mouth, which acts as a resonator or sounding- box, and which also, Vjy its shape at any moment, modifies the musical "quality" of the sound produced. Quality, which is independent of pitch, depends on the harmonic overtones ac- ' From Primitive Culture, Chap. V. OUTLINE: THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 31 companying the fundamental tone which alone musical notation takes account of : this quality makes the difference between the same note on two instruments, flute and piano for instance, while some instruments, as the violin, can give to one note a wide variation of quality. To such quality the formation of vowels is due. This is perfectly shown by the common Jews'- harp. which when struck can be made to utter the vowels a, e, i, 0, u, etc., by simply putting the mouth in the proper position for speaking these vowels. In this experiment the player's voice emits no sound, but the vibrating tongue of the Jews'-harp placed in front of the mouth acts as a substitute for the vocal chords, and the vowel sounds are produced by the various positions of the cavity of the mouth modifying the quality of the note, by bringing out with different degrees of strength the series of harmonic tones of which it is composed. OUTLINE: THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES WooDROw Wilson I. The House of Representatives is the chamber in which the people are directly represented. A. It differs in purpose and constitution from the Senate. II. The House is a business body rather than a deliberative as- sembly. III. It is organized, for the transaction of business, into a number of standing committees. A . There are fifty-seven 01 these committees, each charged with some special branch of legislative business. IV. The committees decide what matters shall be presented before the House. A. Every bill introduced by a member is sent to the appro- priate committee, which throws it aside altogether or alters it to suit its own views. B. A private bill can be taken up directly in the House only by a suspension of the rules. V. The transaction of business is regulated by the Speaker and the Committee on Rules. : XPLAXATlOyS OF MECIIAMSMS A.\D PROCESSES \ I The Speaker of the House has greater powers than the presiding DtViccr of any other legislative assembly. A. He apjHjints all the loniniillees, and in such a way as Lo re- tain direct control of the action of the House. I. Even though he is limited by well-established precedents, he can always iletermine the majority of the appoint- ments. B. He decides the committee to which a question shall be re- ferred when there is any doubt about the reference. C". He assigns the reports of the committees to the several calendars upon which the business of the House is allotted its time for consideration. 1 . In this way he can make it likely that a bill shall not be reached at all. D. He controls debate by his prerogative of "recognition." 1. No one can be " recognized " w'ithout the previous con- sent of the chairman of the reporting committee or the Speaker. 2. In the intervals of calendar business, no one but the leader on the floor of either party can gain the floor to make a motion unless he has previously declared his intention to the Speaker. E. He directly controls the Committee on Rules, which is a ver>' important part of the party machinery. 1. Originally the Committee on Rules merely reported to each new House the body of standing rules under which it was to act. 2. At present it can sweep aside the ordinary routine and bring in a schedule of action which will enable the House to get at the most important questions. \'ir. The Speaker and the committees are not unrestricted in their action. A. The Speaker is an instrument of the House as well as a leader, and his decisions can be overriden by the House. B. The Committee on Rules is expected to arrange for con- siderable discussion on certain important public measures. \TII. The private member has a court of last resort in the party caucus. A. The caucxis is an outside conference of the members of the majority at which questions are decided which it is im- possible to take up on the floor of the House. OUTLINE: THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES T)^ 1. Attendance is not compulsory, but absence is considered a sign of disloyalty. 2. There is free discussion, but it is a point of honor to keep secret the substance of the discussions. 3. To the conclusions of the caucus the Speaker himself is subject. IX. The committees carry on their business in private. A . Public hearings are granted on certain bills, but such hear- ings are exceptional. B. The reports of the chairmen do not contain the elements of contested opinion which may have shown themselves in private conference. X. Each committee is constituted as a miniature House. A. The minority party is represented in proportion to its numerical strength in the House. B. The minority members are often influential in shaping reports on matters on which no sharp party lines have been drawn. C. On technical matters like manufactures, banking, naval construction, or foreign affairs, members of the minority who have had long experience may even dominate the committees. D. Business is transacted with more efficiency because with less formality and party feeling than on the floor of the House. XI. The minority is organized in the same manner as the ma- jority. A. It has a formally chosen floor leader, who can become Speaker as soon as his party obtains a majority, and a caucus. XII. The House of Representatives is one of the most powerful pieces of our whole governmental machinery and its power is centred and summed up in the Speaker. A . The leader of the Senate must deal with the Speaker alone when there is business to be taken up in conference by the two chambers. B. Without the Speaker's consent and approval the President cannot hope to have legislation adopted. C. Members of the cabinet must study the Speaker's views and purposes if they would obtain appropriations or success for their cherished measures. 34 i:\ri..\.\Ain).\s oi- mixham.sms .wd rRoci'issES rm: iioisi; ok ki:i'KKSEXTAriVES» WooDRow Wilson I. Thk House and Senate arc naturally unlike. They are different both in constitution and. character. They do not rep- resent the same things. The House of Rejiresentatives is by intention the popular chamber, meant to represent the people by direct election through an extensive suffrage, while the Senate was designed to represent the states as political units, as the constituent members of the Union. The terms of membership in the two houses, moreover, are different. The two chambers were unquestionably intended to derive their authority from different sources and to speak A\'ith different voices in affairs ; and however much they may have departed from their original characters in the changeful processes of our politics, they still represent many sharp contrasts to one another, and must be de- scribed as playing, not the same but very distinct and dis- similar roles in affairs. II. Perhaps the contrast between them is in certain respects even sharper and clearer now than in the earlier days of our history, when the House was smaller and its functions simpler. The House once debated ; now it does not debate. It has not the time. There would be too many debaters, and there are too many subjects of debate. It is a business bod}^ and it must get its business done. When the late Mr. Reed once, upon a well-known occasion, thanked God that the House was not a deliberate assembly, there was no doubt a dash of half-cynical humor in the remark, such as so often gave spice and biting force to what he said, but there was the sober earnest of a serious man of affairs, too. He knew the vast mass of business the House undertook to transact: that it had made itself a great organ of direction, and that it would be impossible for it to get through its calendars if it were to attempt to discuss in open house, instead of in its committee rooms, the measures it acted ' From Conslilulional Govrrnmenl in the United Slates. The Columbia University **ress. 1008. Reprinted by permission. THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 35 upon. The Senate has retained its early rules of procedure without material alteration. It is still a place of free and pro- longed debate. It will not curtail the privilege of its members to say what they please, at whatever length. But the senators are comparatively few in number ; they can afford the indulgence. The House cannot. The Senate may remain individualistic, atomistic, but the House must be organic, — an efficient instru- ment, not a talkative assembly. III. A numerous body like the House of Representatives is naturally and of course unfit for organic, creative action through debate. Debate, indeed, is not a creative process. It is critical. It does not produce ; it tests. A large assembly cannot form policies cr formulate measures, and the House of Representatives is merely a large assembly, like any other public meeting in its unfitness for business. Like other public meetings, it must send committees out to formulate its resolves. It organizes itself, therefore, into committees, not occasional committees, formed from time to time, but standing committees permanently charged with its business and given every prerogative of suggestion and explanation, in order that each piece of legislative business may be systematically attended to by a body small enough to digest and perfect it. Ill A. For each important subject of legislation there is a standing committee. There is, for example, a Committee on Appropriations, a Committee on Ways and Means, that is, on the sources and objects of taxation, a Committee on Banking and Currency, a Committee on Commerce, a Committee on Manu- factures, a Committee on Agriculture, a Committee on Rail- ways and Canals, a Committee on Rivers and Harbors, a Com- mittee on the Merchant Marine and Fisheries, a Committee on the Judiciary, a Committee on Foreign Affairs, a Committee on Public Lands, a Committee on Land Claims, a Committee on War Claims, a Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads, a Committee on Military Affairs, a Committee on Naval Affairs, a Committee on Indian Affairs, a Committee on Education, a Committee on Labor, — the business likely to be brought to the attention of the House being thoroughly, indeed somewhat ;() i:xri.A.\ATio.\s or .uf.cii.ixisms a\d processes niinutolv. classifiod and the committiis hiiniz some fifty-seven in numl>cr. rV. Kvery bill introduced must be ^tiiL lo a committee. It woulii probal)ly be impossible to think of any legitimate subject lor legislation upon which a bill could be drawn up for whose consideration no standing committee has been provided. If a new subject should turn up, the House would no doubt presently create a new committee. The thousands of bills annually in- troduced are promptly distributed, therefore; go almost auto- matically to the several committees ; and as automatically, it must be added, disappear. The measures reported to the House are measures which the committees formulate. They may find some member's bill suitable and acceptable, and report it substantially unchanged, or they may pull it about and alter it, or they may throw it aside altogether and frame a measure of their own, or they may do nothing, make no report at all. Few bills ever see the light again after being referred to a com- mittee. The business of the House is what the Committees choose to make it. What the House of Commons depends upon its committee, the Government, to do, the House depends upon its fifty-seven committees to do. The private member's bill has a little better chance, indeed, of being debated in the Commons than in the House of Representatives. The House of Commons does usually set aside one day a week for the con- sideration of private members' bills, when the Government is not pressed for time and does not insist upon using every day itself; and those members who are fortunate enough to draw first places in the make-up of the calendars for those days may have the pleasure of getting their proposals debated and voted upon. But in the House of Representatives there is only the very slender chance of getting the rules suspended, an irregularity which the business-like chamber has grown ver>-shy of permitting. V. The ver\' complexity and bulk of all this machinery is itself burdensome to the House. There are now more than half as many committees in the House as there are members of the Senate. It cannot itself choose so many committees ; it cannot even follow so many. It therefore entrusts every appointment THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 37 to the Speaker, and, when its business gets entangled amongst the multitude of committees and reports, follows a steering committee, which it calls the Committee on Rules. And the power of appointing the committees, which the House has con- ferred upon its Speaker, makes him the almost autocratic master of its actions. VI. In all legislative bodies except ours the presiding officer has only the powers and functions of a chairman. He is sepa- rate from parties and is looked to to be punctiliously impartial. He moderates and gives order to the course of debate, and is ex- pected to administer without personal or party bias the accepted rules of its procedure. For political guidance all other rep- resentative assemblies depend on the Government, not upon committees which their presiding officer has created. But the processes of our parliamentary development have made the Speaker of our great House of Representatives and the Speakers of our State Legislatures party leaders in whom centres the con- trol of all that they do. So far as the House of Representatives and its share in the public business is concerned, the Speaker is undisputed party leader. VI A, B, C. Every one of the committees of the House the Speaker appoints. He not only allows himself to make them up with a view to the kind of legislation he wishes to see enacted ; he is expected to make them up with such a view, — is expected to make them up as a party leader would. He is, it is true, a good deal hampered in the exercise of a free choice in their make-up by certain well-established understandings and precedents, of whose breach the older members of the House at any rate would be very jealous. Seniority of service has to be respected in assign- ing places on the more important committees, and the succession to certain of the chief chairmanships is well understood to go by definite rules of individual preference and personal consideration. But it is always possible for the Speaker to determine the majority of his appointments in such a way as to give him that direct and continuing control of the actions of the House which he is now expected to exercise as the party leader of the majority. Even his own personal views upon particular public cjuestions ^S r.\l'I.A.\ATIO.\S OF Ml-CllAMS.US AM) /'/^0C/vV5/s6' lu' dot's iu)t iKsitalc to enforce in his ai)iH)intmcnts, so thai the very majority he represents may be j)revente{l from ha\inj^ an o|)j)ortunity to vote upon measures it is known to desire because he has niaile up the committees which w^ould report upon them in accordance with his own preferences in the matter. What the committees do uol report the House cannot vote upon. Every bill that is introduced is assigned to a committee picked out by the Speaker's order, if there be any doubt about its character or reference. It is the Speaker's decision, also, that assigns the reports of the committees to the several calendars upon which the business of the House is allotted its time for consideration, and he may often choose whether the place al- lotted them shall be favorable or unfavorable, shall make it likely or unlikely that they will be reached at all. VI D. Moreover, it has come about that by means of his pre- rogative of "recognition" the Speaker is permitted to control de- bate to a very extraordinary degree. It is common parliamentary practice that no one can address an assembly until "recognized," that is, accorded the floor, by the presiding officer. The House of Representatives, feeling always pressed for time, even with regard to the consideration of the reports of its standing com- mittees, which are numerous and amazingly active, restricts debate upon those reports within very narrow limits, and generally allots the greater part of the brief time allowed to any one report to the chairman of the reporting committee. Other members may get a few minutes of time allowed them by pre- \'ious arrangement with the committee's chairman, and a list of those who are thus to be given an opportunity to speak generally lies on the Speaker's desk. These members the Speaker will "recognize," but no others, though they spring to their feet under his very nose in the open space in front of the seats, — unless, indeed, they have seen him beforehand and got his permission. No member who has not previously ar- ranged the matter, either with the chairman of the committee or with the Speaker, need rise or seek to catch the Speaker's eye. And in the intervals of calendar business no one whose intention the Speaker has not been apprised of, unless indeed THt; tlOUSK OF REPRESENTATIVES 39 it be the leader on the floor of the one party or the other, may expect to be accorded the floor to make a motion. The Speaker may, if he choose, determine what proposals he will permit the House to hear. VI E, The Committee on Rules has of recent years had a very singular and significant development of functions. Originally its duty was a very simple one : that of reporting to the House at the opening of each of its biennial sessions, when a new House assembles and a new organization is effected, the body of stand- ing rules under which it was to act ; for the House goes through the form of readopting its whole body of rules each time it re- organizes after fresh congressional elections. From session to session the rules were modified, now in one particular, again in another, on the recommendation of the committee ; and any change in the rules at any time proposed is still referred to it for consideration and report. But now the committee is looked to, besides, for such temporary orders and programs of procedure as will enable the House to disentangle its business and get at the measures which the country expects it to dispose of or the needs of the Government make it necessary that it should not neglect. The party majority is well aware that, if it would keep its credit with the constituencies, it must not allow the miscellany of committee reports on its crowded calendars to stand in the way of matters which it is pledged to act upon. It looks to the Committee on Rules to sweep aside the ordinary rules of procedure whenever necessary, and bring in a schedule of action which will enable it to get at the main things it is inter- ested in, or at any rate the things the party leaders think it most expedient it should dispose of. The committee has thus become a very important part of party machinery. It consists of five members, the Speaker himself, two other representatives of the majority, and two representatives of the minority. The majority members of course control its action ; the representa- tion of the minority is hardly more than formal ; and the two members of the majority associated with the Speaker upon it are usually trusted lieutenants upon whom he can count for loyal support of his leadership. One self-confident Speaker 40 i:.\rLA\.ir/o\s of mixhamsms .iat) pkoci-:ssj-:s smilin«ily described the committee as consisting of the Speaker and two assistants, — a pleasant way of saying that the com- mittee was his instrument to govern the House. His direct control of the Committee on Rules rounds out his powers as an autocrat of the popular chamber. VII A. .And yet the word autocrat has really no jilace in our political vocabulary, if we are to use words of reality and not words of extravagance. The extniordinary jiower of the Speaker is not personal. He is in no proper sense of the word an auto- crat. He is the instrument, as well as the leader, of the ma- jority in controlling the processes of the House. He is obeyed because the majority chooses to be governed thus. The rules are of its own making, and it can unmake them when it pleases. It can override the Speaker's decisions, too, and correct its pre- siding oflScer as every other assembly can. It has simply found it most convenient to put itself in the Speaker's hands, its ob- ject being efliciency, not debate. VII B. And yet it is also an exaggeration to say that House bills go through as the committees propose, practically without debate. Some measures it is clearly in the interest of the party no less than of the public to discuss with some fulness. Many financial measures in particular are debated with a good deal of thoroughness, and most matters that have already attracted public attention. Not everything is left to the oper- ation of the rules, the chances of the calendar, and the dicta- tion of the Speaker and his two assistants. The Committee on Rules may be counted on to arrange for debates upon the important bills as w^ell as for putting unimportant bills out of the way. Vni. And standing o\'er all is the party caucus, the outside conference of the members of the majority, to whose conclusions the Speaker himself is subject, and to which members can appeal whenever they think the Speaker too irresponsible, too arbitrary, too masterful, too little heedful of the opinions prevalent on the floor among the rank and file. The caucus is an established and much respected piece of party machinery, and what the party has not the organization to decide on the floor of the assembly THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 41 itself it decides in this conference outside the House. Members who do not wish to be bound by decisions of the caucus can refuse to attend it; but that is a very serious breach of party discipline and may get the men who venture upon it the unpleas- ant reputation of disloyalty. Members who wish to maintain their standing in the party are expected to attend ; and those who attend are expected to abide by the decisions of the con- ference. It is a thoroughgoing means of maintaining party unity. Caucuses are free conferences, where a man may say what he pleases ; but they are held behind closed doors, and it is usually made a matter of honorable punctilio not to speak out- side of the dissensions their debates may have disclosed. IX. It is thus that the House has made itself "efficient." Its ideal is the transaction of business. It is as much afraid of be- coming a talking shop as Mr. Carlyle could have wished it to be. If it must talk, it talks in sections, in its committee rooms, not in public on the floor of the chamber itself. The Committee rooms are private. No one has the right to enter them except by express permission of the committees themselves. Not in- frequently committees do hold formal public hearings with regard to certain bills, inviting all whose interests are affected to be represented and present their views either for or against the proposed legislation. But such hearings are recognized as exceptional, not of right, and as a rule the public hears nothing of the arguments which have induced any committee to make its particular recommendations to the House. The formal ex- planations of the chairman of a committee, made upon the floor of the House, contain few of the elements of contested opinion which undoubtedly showed themselves plainly enough in the private conference of the committee. X. For each committee is a miniature House. The minority is accorded representation upon it in proportion to its numerical strength in the House. In every committee, therefore, there are men representing both party views, and it sometimes happens that the arguments of the minority members are very influential in shaping reports made upon measures concerning which no sharp party lines have been drawn. With regard to matters 42 EXPLAXATIONS OF AfECIIAMSAfS AND PROCESSES ujx)n whidi llic niajDrity is known to have taken a definite jjosi- lion before the constituencies the majority memijers of a com- mittee will of course insist upon having their own way. They are apt to be in frequent consultation with the Speaker about thcni. But with regard to measures on which no party issue has been made up they are willing on occasion to give a good deal of weight to the opinions of their minority colleagues. There is a \ery easy and amicable relation between majority and minority in the committees, and it will often happen that in committees which have to deal with highly technical matters, like manufactures or banking or naval construction or the regulation of judicial procedure, or with matters inv^olved in precedent and to be understood only in the light of somewhat extended and intimate experience, like foreign affairs, members of the minority of long service in the House and of long familiarity with the subject-matter under discussion will in fact in no small degree guide and dominate the committees to which they have been assigned. Business is more like business, because less formal and less touched with party feeling in the committee rooms than on the floor of the House. XI. The minority has its own party organization like that of the majority : its formally chosen leader for the floor, its caucus to secure common counsel. It is, indeed, usually less thoroughly disciplined than the majority, because it is in opposition, not in power, and can afTord to allow its members freer play in choos- ing what they shall individually do and say. But its organiza- tion suffices to draw its forces together for common action when any matter of real party significance comes to the surface and the country expects it to put itself on record ; and it is ready, at very short notice, to turn itself into an organization as com- plete and powerful as that of the majority, should the elections favor it and its leader become Speaker. XII. All lines of analysis come back to the Speaker, whether you speak of the organization or of the action and political power of the House. Such an organization, so systematized and so con- centrated, has of course made the House of Representatives one of the most powerful pieces of our whole governmental machinery. THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 43 and its Speaker, in whom its power is centred and summed up, has come to be regarded as the greatest figure in our complex system, next to the President himself. The whole powerful machinery of the great popular chamber is at his disposal, and all the country knows how effectually he can use it. What- ever may be the influence and importance of the Senate, its energies are not centred in any one man. There is no senator who sums up in himself the power of a great organ of govern- ment. The leaders of the Senate deal in ail counsel with the other chamber with regard to legislative business with this single leader, this impersonation of the House. So do also the President and the members of the cabinet. As national leader of his party, the President must reckon always with the guide and master of the House, without whose approval and consent it is practically impossible to get any legislative measure adopted. Measures which are to prosper must have his countenance and support. Members of the cabinet must study his views and purposes, if they are to obtain the appropriations they desire or to see measures brought to a happy and successful issue which they deem necessary to the administration of their departments. One might sum up the active elements of our government as consisting of the President, with all his sweep of powers ; the Speaker of the House, with all that he represents as spokesman of the party majority in the popular chamber, with its singularly effective machinery at his disposal ; and the talkative, debating Senate, guided no doubt by a few influential and trusted mem- bers, but a council, not an organization. MINE-HELMETS Joseph Husband The gases which filled the mine consisted principally of carbon monoxide, or white-damp, and carbon dioxide, or black-damp, with a small additional percentage of other gases. White- ' From A Year in a Coal Mine. Houghton Mifflin & Company, 191 2. Re- printed by permission. 44 r.Xri.AXATIO.XS Ol SflXllASISMS A\n PROCESSES damp is the gas most feared by the miners, for its properties render it difticult to detect, inasmuch as it is tasteless, odorless, and colorless, and when mixed in the proportion of about one part gas to nine parts air is called "lire-damp," and becomes explosive to a degree hard to realize unless one has seen its ef- fects. Black-damp, unlike white-damp, is heavier than air: a non-explosive gas which may be detected by its peculiar odor. Again, unlike the other, its clTect is to sulTocate and extinguish fire. This gas is so heaxy and mo\es with such a sluggish liow that, occasionally, when miners have been trai)pcd in a mine following an explosion and have detected the black-damp creep- ing in upon them by its smell, they have been able to stop its advance by erecting dams or barricades along the floor, building them liigher as the volume of gas increased, and keeping the air within their little enclosure comparatively clear by rude impro\ised fans. Following an explosion, these two gases be- come mingled and form a mixed gas possessing all the dreaded qualities of each, which is known as " after-damp," and it is this mixture of gases which destroys any life that may remain follow- ing a mine disaster. To contend with these almost impossible conditions, it was determined to make the descent equipped with air-tight helmets, somewhat resembling in ai)pearance those used by deep-sea divers. This ingenious device, which enables a man to exist under such conditions and to conduct investigations for a period of two hours, consists of a steel headpiece completely covering the fore part of the head and leaving the ears exposed, made air-tight by means of a pneumatic washer which passes in a circle around the top of the head and dow^n each side of the face in front of the ears, connecting under the chin. This washer is inflated as soon as the helmet is adjusted, and pressing out closely against the steel shell of the helmet on one side, conforms closely to the contours of the head on the other, leaving the ears exposed. In the front of each helmet is a round bull's-eye of heavy mica, protected by steel rods; and below the bull's- eye, an inch below the mouth, is the main valve which is closed immediately before the man enters the poisoned atmosphere. MINE-HELMETS 45. From the helmet, m front, hangs a pair of false lungs, or large rubber sacks, protected by a leather apron; and on the back, held by straps over the shoulders and supported by plates fitting closely to the small of the back, hangs a heavy knapsack weigh- ing about forty pounds. This knapsack consists of two steel cylinders, each one containing pure oxygen compressed to one hundred and thirty atmospheres, sufficient to support life for one hour, the two together being sufficient for two hours. Above the oxygen cylinders are two cartridges, or cans, containing loose crystals of hydrate of potassium sufficient to absorb two hours' exhalation of carbonic acid gas. With the helmet these car- tridges and the oxygen cylinders are connected in a continuous circuit, and as soon as the oxygen is turned on there is a flow up from the oxygen cylinders by a tube under the right arm to the helmet, and down under the left arm to the cartridges, and through them again to the tube at the oxygen valve. Upon adjusting the helmet, the wearer takes several large breaths of pure air, which he exhales into the false lungs on his chest, and immediately shuts the mouth valve. At the same in- stant, with his right hand behind his back, he turns on the oxygen, and this, regulated by valves to an even feed to last for exactly two hours, forces itself up the tube into the helmet, and by its pressure and reverse suction, draws down through the other tube and through the cans of potassium hydrate the exhaled breath. Air being a mixture of pure nitrogen and pure oxygen, the oxy- gen cylinders furnish one necessary element. The second — the nitrogen — already exists in the several breaths that the man has taken into the false lungs, for the nitrogen atoms are in- destructible, and, mixed with oxygen, can be used indefinitely. Passing through the potassium-hydrate cylinders, the carbonic acid gas is entirely absorbed, leaving the free nitrogen atoms to unite with the oxygen below ; and so for two hours, a steady stream of air passes up through the right-hand tube, and for two hours the cans of potassium hydrate absorb the impurities exhaled, and pass on the nitrogen atoms to unite with the fresh oxygen ever flowing up from the cylinders. In order that the helmet-men might keep exact account of the 46 KxrLAy.iTioss or .\n:ciiA.\/s.\fs axd processes amount of oxyjion used, thcrt' was a clock fastened to the knaj)- sack. When the helmet was adjusted and the oxygen turned on, the hand of the clock pointed to two hours, and as the pres- sure in the cylinders was reduced, the hand slid back to one hour, thirty minutes, fifteen, and finally zero, when it would be necessary to open the valves and breathe the outer air tjr suffocate. We could not see the clocks on our own knapsacks, as they were behind our backs, and so every fifteen minutes or so we would gather in the gas-filled tunnels, and with our electric torches read the minutes remaining on each other's clocks. Thirty minutes left meant a start for top, even if we were near the hoist. We could take no chances. Unconscious men are hard to move, especially when one's own air has almost gone. A MECHANICAL DISH-WASHERS A SIMPLE tjpe of dish-washing machine has been invented and placed on the market. This machine consists of a cylindrical metal tank finished in aluminum and mounted on four stout legs with casters to permit easy rolling about the kitchen or from kitchen to china closet. A pump placed in the centre of the tank, and operated by the lever at the top of the machine, works in such a way as to throw the hot water in a strong stream against and among the dishes. China is placed at the bottom of the tank, all pieces being turned toward the centre and ar- ranged to drain easily, while glass and sih'erware are placed in a wire basket near the top of the tank. After all pieces are in place, boiling water is poured into the tank and sprinkled with soap powder, the lid is closed, and the pump handle is worked for one or two minutes. The suds are then drawn off through a faucet at the bottom, scalding rinse water is poured into the tank, and the pumping operation is repeated. The dishes are sterilized by the hot water and are so hot when they come from the machine that they dry quickly. ' From Popular Mechanics, October, 1913. HOW THE PANAMA LOCKS ARE OPERATED 47 HOW THE PANAMA LOCKS ARE OPERATED ^ The mechanism which will operate the ponderous locks at Gatun, Miraflores, and Pedro Miguel in the Panama Canal is quite unlike anything used elsewhere in the world. Heretofore it has been the practice to distribute a large operating force practically along the full length of the locks in a canal. Such a force is difficult to coordinate into an efficient operating system. Moreover, the great size of the Panama locks made it highly desirable that all operations should be centralized. The fUght of locks at Gatun, for example, extends over a distance of six thousand one hundred and fifty-two feet, and the principal operating machines are distributed over a distance of four thousand one hundred and fifteen feet. The Isthmian Canal Commission decided that the locks must be electrically controlled from some central station in each case, because thus the number of operators, the operating ex- pense, and the liability to accident could be reduced. Great electrical control-boards have therefore been especially invented which are installed at Gatun, Miraflores, and Pedro Miguel — control-boards which are so ingeniously conceived and con- structed that a single man, who need never see the ships which are passing through the canal, opens and closes lock gates veighing many tons and governs the course of thousands and thousands of gallons of water. Before we can understand how this is done, we must explain how the locks themselves are constructed and what is the char- acter of the lock machinery to be controlled. The lock cham- bers are one thousand feet long. At each end of a lock chamber, so-called mitering gates are to be found, which consist of two massive leaves pivoted on the lock walls and operating in- dependently of each other. Immediately beyond each pair of mitering gates at each end of a lock chamber a duplicate pair of mitering gates is to be found. These are guard gates. Lastly, still other mitering gates open and close within the lock 1 From Scientific American, March 7, 1914. Reprinted by permission. 48 r.xrLA.\ATio.\s or mkchamsms a.\d i-rucesses chamber itself. These, which are called intermediate miterinj; gates, are used to divide the one-thousand-foot locks into smalK r compartments when vessels of short length are to be handled. Thus, much water is saved. All the mitering gates, when closed, are clamped tightly together by a device called a miter forcing machine. In front of all the mitering gates which are exposed to the upper lock level and also in front of the guard gates at the lower end are chain fenders. These chains are taut when the gates behind are closed and are lowered when the gates are opened for the passing of a ship. The chains are raised and lowered by a method similar to that followed in hydraulic elevators, with the additional feature that if a ship approaches the gate at a dan- gerous speed and runs into the chains, the chain is paid out in such a way as to stop the ship gradually before it reaches the gates. Two motors lower the chains for the passage of a vessel and raise it again after the vessel has passed. One motor driv-es the main pump supply water under pressure, and the other operates a valve which controls the direction of movement of the chain. These two operations are combined in one, each motor being stopped automatically by a limit switch when the motor has performed its function. The locks are filled and emptied by three culverts, one in the middle wall and one in each side wall. The flow of water is con- trolled by what are known as rising stem valves. These valves are located in the culverts at points opposite each end of each lock, so that the culvert can be shut off at any desired point for filling a lock with water from above, or upstream, or for empty- ing it by allowing it to flow out and down to the ne.xt lock. Lateral culverts conduct the water from the main culverts under the lock chambers and up through openings in the lock floors. The rising stem valves are installed in pairs, and each pair is a duplicate. Moreover, each culvert is divided into two par- allel halves at these valves by a vertical wall. This arrange- ment reduces the size of each valve, so that it may be more easily operated. Even then, each valve measures eight by eighteen feet and is raised and lowered by a forty horse-power HOW THE PANAMA LOCKS ARE OPERATED 49 motor requiring one minute for complete closing. One pair of duplicates is left open as a guard or reverse pair ; the other pair is used for operating, so that in case of an obstruction in the culvert or of an accident to the machinery, the duplicate pair can be used. At the upper ends of the culverts at the side walls, the du- plication is accomplished by three valves in parallel, called the guard valves. Their service is exactly similar to that of the rising stem valves, except that three valves in parallel in this case must conform with the same laws as the two in parallel in the other case. The culvert in the middle wall must serve the locks on both sides, and to control this feature cylindrical valves are placed in the lateral culverts that branch out on each side. There are ten of these on each side of the culvert at each lock. At the upper end of each set of locks there are two valves in the side walls for regulating the height of water between the upper gates and upper guard gates, as it is desired to maintain the level of the water between these gates at an elevation in- termediate between that of the lake above and that of the upper lock when the upper lock is not at the same level as the lakes. These valves are called the auxiliary culvert valves. To give an idea of the number and sizes of the motors to be controlled in operating the lock machinery it may be mentioned that each miter gate leaf is moved by a twenty-five horse-power motor. There are forty such motors at Gatun, twenty-four at Pedro Miguel, twenty-eight at Miraflores, a total of ninety- two, with an aggregate horse-power of twenty-three hundred. Each miter-gate forcing machine is worked by a seven horse- power motor. Of these motors there are twenty at Gatun, twelve at Pedro Miguel, fourteen at Miraflores, — a total of forty- six, with an aggregate horse-power of three hundred and twenty- two. So, at Gatun, Pedro Miguel, and Miraflores there are in all forty-eight motors of seventy horse-power ea';h, which work the main pumps of the fender chains and which have an ag- gregate horse-power of thirty-three hundred and sixty ; forty- eight motors of one-half horse-power each for operating the 50 F.XPL.l.\ATro\S OF \rECIIANISMS AND PROCESSES valves of the various fender chains and which have an aggregate horse-power of twenty-four ; one hundred and sixteen motors of forty horse-jK)wer each which operate the rising stem gate valves; one hundred antl twenty motors of seven horse-power each which operate the cylindrical valves; eighteen motors of twenty-five horse-power each, which operate the guard valves ; and twelve motors of seven horse-power each which operate the auxiliary culvert valves. Hence, there arc five hundred motors of various kinds at Gatun, Pedro Miguel, and Miraflores, with an aggregate horse-power of twelve thousand and twenty to be controlled. The electrical control boards which control all these many motors, valves, and pumps were designed and built at .Schenec- tady, New ^'ork, from specifications prepared under the super- vision of Mr. Edward Schildhauer, electrical and mechanical engineer of the Isthmian Canal Commission, ably assisted by Engineers C. B. Larzelere, W. R. McCann, and others, and will long be used as models of skilled and painstaking engineering, in which every contingency was foreseen and all the safeguards installed that expert engineers could suggest. The control boards for each lock are to be found in control houses located on the middle walls at points which afford the best vnew of the locks, although this view is not depended upon to know the position of the gates or other apparatus. They are flat benches thirty-two inches high by fifty-four inches wide, built in sections. The board at Gatun is sixty-four feet long; that at Pedro Miguel, thirty-six feet long ; and that at Mira- flores, fifty-two feet long. The control boards are approximately operating miniatures of the locks themselves. They have in- dicating de\'ices which always show the exact position of valves, lock gates, chains, and water levels in the various lock chambers, and, so far as is necessary, are synchronous with the movement of the lock machinery-. The side and center walls of the locks are represented on the board by cast-iron plates, and the water in the locks by blue Vermont marble slabs. In designing the indicators, efforts were made to represent the actual machines, the operations of which were to be in- HOW THE PANAMA LOCKS ARE OPERATED 51 dicated. For example, the chain fender index consists of a small aluminium chain representing the larger chain of the lock itself. Just as the large chain is lowered into a slot in the bottom of the lock, so the small chain is lowered into a slot in the top of the board. With equal fidelity the miter gate is reproduced. The miter gate indicator consists of a pair of aluminium leaves or pointers which represent a pair of the large miter gates and which move in a horizontal plane just above the marble slab representing the water in the lock. The rising stem valve indicators, however, presented a more serious problem, because the valves themselves are located in a culvert and the operating machinery is concealed below the lock wall ; yet for the purpose of observation it was necessary that the indicators project visibly above the surface of the board. The rising stem gate valves of the locks, it has been stated, occur in pairs. For that reason the indicators for these valves have likewise been made in pairs on the board. Each of these in- dicators may well be likened to a miniature elevator, the car being used to indicate the position of the valve gates. In order that the indication might be visible from various points up and down the board, a novel scheme was resorted to. The under side of the car is equipped with reflectors so arranged as to reflect, parallel to the surface of the board, the light of several incan- descent lamps located underneath the board. This light is reflected through openings in the indicator facing both up and down the board, the openings being closed with opal glass. The reflected light gives a sharp shadow on the bottom edge of the car, all portions of the indicator above this line being dark and all portions below being illuminated. The illuminated portions show how far the gate of the valve is open. If the indicator is dark, the valve is entirely closed ; if the indicator is illuminated, the valve is entirely open. The one-quarter, one-half, and three- quarter positions of the gate are indicated by heavy black lines on the glass. For the water level indicator, great accuracy was required. The specifications demanded that the level of the water be indicated to within five-eighths of an inch of the actual level, 52 EXPLAXATIOXS OF M ECU AS ISMS AND PROCESSES but the indicators attained an accuracy sonKwhal ;^rcater than this. The height of the water is indicated by a rising and falling hollow cylinder having pointers which move over scales. The scales arc illuniinated by tungsten lamps located in both the base and the to]) caj) of the indicator. The indicators for the miter forcing machines, which force the end surfaces of the lock gates into alignment, are not op- erated by means of position-indicator machines. Since all the operator cares to know about them is whether they are in the open or closed position, they are operated merely by control switches. The open and closed positions of all cylindrical valves are indicated by means of red and green lamps, the intermediate positions not being indicated in any way because the operators need not take cognizance of them. In order to make it necessary for the operator to maneuver the control switch handles always in a certain order, corre- sponding with a predetermined sequence of operation of the lock machinery, and to prevent the operator in control of one channel from interfering with the machinery under jurisdiction of the operator controlling the other channel, an elaborate interlocking system has been devised. The limitations of space forbid an elaborate description of this wonderful interlocking mechanism. The interlocking system is essentially a bell crank mechanism, connecting the shaft of the control switch directly to a movable horizontal bar, forming one of many such bars in an interlocking rack below the control board. A horizontal connecting rod is used between the cranks on the control switch shaft and the vertical operating shaft. The interlocking rack consists of a rigid frame constructed of three-eighths- inch thick steel and having five horizontal members. Upon these horizontal mem- bers and tying them together are located at convenient inter- vals a set of vertical straps of three-eighths-inch by two-inch steel. These carry the brass posts that provide the runways for the horizontal and vertical interlocking bars. The back of the steel strap is grooved and counter-sunk in such a manner that a key is provided which prevents turning of the posts. The interlocking system depends mainly on the action of HOW THE PANAMA LOCKS ARE OPERATED 53 engaging bevel dogs located on the horizontal and vertical bars, the movement of a horizontal bar tending to lift a vertical bar by bevels on the dogs. A horizontal bar cannot be moved with- out raising a vertical bar. Thus, if at any time a dog on a horizontal bar rests against the upper end of a dog on a vertical bar, no movement of the horizontal bar where the dog engages the vertical bar can take place, and the control handle con- nected with that particular horizontal bar is locked. The inter- locking system forces the attendant to operate the chain fenders, gates, and valves always in the proper sequence, and also pre- vents him from operating these devices in incorrect sequence ; for instance, opening a gate when the chain fender is not in position or when the valves are open, etc. There is also an interlocking combination that is used in connection with the intermediate gates which divide the locks into short sections. This arrangement is fitted with a Yale lock and key, so that the intermediate gates can be used only when the attendant has unlocked the combination, this also being subject to the general interlocking system. Certain valves are used to cross-fill between locks. These also are in- terlocked, so that they can be operated only in proper order and combination to equalize the water between a pair of locks and save water which would otherwise be wasted. This cross- filling consists in allowing water from one lock, which is full, to flow into a lock by its side in the other channel until the level of the water is the same in both locks, thus using a portion of the water over again. The fact that the control board is a working miniature of the lock which it operates shows the operator the actual condition of gates, height of water, etc., and, consequently, having the whole condition in miniature under his eye, he knows what to do next and when to do it. The operator receives his informa- tion as to the movement of the vessel from a towing master. Let us now take a vessel through a set of locks. It proceeds into the lock forebay either under its own power or that of a tug, and comes to a full stop. It then proceeds under the power and control of four electric locomotives — two forward to take 54 KXPLAXATIOyS 01- MIX'IIAMSMS AXD PROCESSES it along — one on c;uh side — and two others astern — one on each side -^ to keep the vessel in tlie middle of the waterway, to stop it when it has reached the proper j)oint, and to prexent it from moving forward too rajiidiy. After the vessel comes to a full stop in the forebay, its position is given by the towing master to the switchboard attendant, who, by mo\ing a control switch lever, causes the lowering of the fender chain and the miniature fender chain on the control board after the lock gate is in the proper position. Now the vessel advances into the lock by means of the elec- tric locomotives. The fender chain is raised, and then the mas- sive gates are shut behind, the miniature control board gates in the meantime indicating this mo\ement. When the water on opposite sides of the gates in front of the vessel has been raised or lowered, as the case may be, until the water on both sides is at the same level, as shown on the water level indicators on the control board, these gates are opened and the boat is pulled into the next compartment. I. C. DISCUSSIONS OF FACTS AND IDEAS BEGINNING OF CABINET GOVERNMENT i John Richard Green In outer seeming the Revolution of 1688 had only transferred the sovereignty over England from James to William and Mary. In actual fact it had given a powerful and decisive impulse to the great constitutional progress which was transferring the sov- ereignty from the King to the House of Commons. From the moment when its sole right to tax the nation was established by the Bill of Rights, and when its own resolve settled the practice of granting none but annual supplies to the Crown, the House of Commons became the supreme power in the State. It was impossible permanently to suspend its sittings or in the long run to oppose its will when either course must end in leaving the Government penniless, in breaking up the army and navy, and in suspending the public service. But though the constitutional change was complete, the machinery of government was far from having adapted itself to the new conditions of political life which such a change brought about. However powerful the will of the House of Commons might be, it had no means of bringing its will directly to bear upon the conduct of public affairs. The Ministers who had charge of them were not its servants, but the servants of the Crown ; it was from the King that they looked for direction, and to the King that they held themselves responsible. By impeachment or more indirect means the Commons could force a King to remove a Minister who contradicted their will ; but they had no constitutional power to replace the fallen statesman by a Minister who would carry out their will. ' From A History of Ike English People, Book VIII, Chap. III. 55 56 DISCrS.SlOXS OF lACTS AM) IDIwlS The result was the j2;ro\vlii of a temper in the Lower House which (lro\e William and his Ministers to despair. It became as corrupt, as jealous of power, as fickle in its resolves and factious in spirit as bodies always become whose consciousness of the possession of power is untempered by a corresponding con- sciousness of the practical difficulties or the moral responsibilities of the power which they possess. It grumljlcd at the ill-success of the war, at the suffering of the merchants, at the discontent of the Churchmen ; and it blamed the Crown and its Ministers for all at which it grumbled. But it was hard to find out what policy or measures it would have preferred. Its mood changed, as Wilham bitterly complained, with every hour. His own hold over it grew less day by day. It was only through great pressure that he succeeded in defeating by a majority of two a Place Bill which would have rendered all his servants and Ministers incapable of sitting in the Commons. He was obliged to use his veto to defeat a Triennial Bill which, as he believed, would have destroyed what little stability of purpose there was in the present Parliament. The Houses were in fact without the guidance of recognized leaders, without adequate information, and destitute of that organization out of wliich alone a definite policy can come. Nothing better proves the inborn poUtical capacity of the English mind than that it should at once have found a simple and effective solution of such a difficulty as this. The credit of the solution belongs to a man whose political character was of the lowest type. Robert, Earl of Sunderland, had been a Minister in the later days of Charles the Second; and he had remained Minister through almost all the reign of James. He had held office at last only by compUance with the worst tyranny of his master and by a feigned conversion to the Roman Catholic faith, but the ruin of James was no sooner certain than he had secured pardon and protection from William by the betrayal of the master to whom he had sacrificed his conscience and his honor. Since the Revo- lution Sunderland had striven only to escape public observation in a countr}- retirement, h)ut at this crisis he came secretly for- ward to bring his unequalled sagacity to the aid of the King. BEGINNING OF CABINET GOVERNMENT 57 His counsel was to recognize practically the new power of the Commons by choosing the Ministers of the Crown exclusively from among the members of the party which was strongest in the Lower House. As yet no Ministry in the modern sense of the term had ex- isted. Each great officer of State, Treasurer or Secretary or Lord Privy Seal, had in theory been independent of his fellow- officers; each was the "King's servant" and responsible for the discharge of his special duties to the King alone. From time to time one Minister, like Clarendon, might tower above the rest and give a general direction to the whole course of government, but the predominance was merely personal and never permanent ; and even in such a case there were colleagues who were ready to oppose or even impeach the statesman who overshadowed them. It was common for the King to choose or dismiss a single Minister without any communication with the rest; and so far was even William from aiming at Minis- terial unity that he had striven to reproduce in the Cabinet itself the balance of parties which prevailed outside it. Sunder- land's plan aimed at replacing these independent Ministers by a homogeneous Ministry, chosen from the same party, repre- senting the same sentiments, and bound together for common action by a sense of responsibility and loyalty to the party to which it belonged. Not only was such a plan likely to secure a unity of administration which had been unknown till then, but it gave an organization to the House of Commons which it had never had before. The Ministers who were representative of the majority of its members became the natural leaders of the House. Small factions were drawn together into the two great parties which supported or opposed the Ministry of the Crown. Above all it brought about in the simplest possible way the solution of the problem which had so long vexed both Kings and Commons. The new Ministers ceased in all but name to be the King's servants. They became simply an Executive Committee representing the will of the majority of the House of Commons, and capable of being easily set aside by it and replaced by a similar Committee whenever the balance of power shifted from 58 DISCUSSIONS OF FACTS AM) ID FAS one side oi tlu- llou.sc lu the other. Such was the orij^iii of that system of representative ossil)lo to si)ciul town money for schools. In this one tield all the inlluence that the company could bring to bear was openly exerted. It was augmented by this time by a large group of energetic young men, friends and relatives of the original pioneer, all of whom li\ed in the town. This again sounds to Eastern ears like a commonplace, but in truth it is almost unheard of in lumber towns and other such large enterprises in the South. Hardly one but suffers from absentee landlord- ism. But our Westerner and his associates served on the school boards, sent their children to the public schools, and fought for them year in and year out, in large and in detail. Other citi- zens demanded more public buildings, paved streets. " After we have good schools," answered the lumbermen. In 1905 the average annual expenditure per pupil in daily attendance in the South was S9.75, in the North about S28.45. In 1900, Missis- sippi spent but $6.17 per pupil. But the Vateria school budget has been for years $35,000 for a town of 8500 people, or $20 per year per white pupil. The result is that the schools of Vateria are acknowledged the best in the whole state. The good old country stock thereabout, of English and Scotch-Irish descent, has awakened to the opportunity. Family after family moves to town that its children may be educated, and the personal level of the workmen available has been, in consequence of this large material for selection, obviously raised. The proportion, among the employees, of American countr)^ people settled in their own homes, to the nomad workers, is enormously greater than that in other mill towns and camps. In the town of one great enterprise in this field a teacher of the lowest grade school was asked as to the nationality of her charges. " All dagoes," she answered. " They are very quick to learn, but they get little schooling, because their parents never stay any time in the same place." In the light of these facts, and their significance for the community life, the unpaved streets and homely vistas of Vateria ceased to have a negative aesthetic value. A breath of energy and of hope seemed to blow across them. . . . And what of the aesthetic meaning of Vateria? The town THE ESTHETIC VALUE OF EFFICIENCY 69 does not lack all outward fairness. It has dignified public buildings. Stately long-leaf pines in its park stand up against the western sky ; around them are some charming houses, lovely gardens. But not by these is it aesthetically saved. Nor is material prosperity here to be regarded as compensation for vanished beauty, though it may, indeed, be accepted as such on occasion — no doubt every ugly thriving town might make the claim. And not even does the effective activity of the indus- trial system give warrant for according it a positive sesthetic quality. There are many smooth-working great industrial machines in which there is no essential distinction between the animate and the inanimate elements. Such industrial machines are just over the aesthetic threshold — they have the low-grade unity of the steam engine and the dynamo. As, in criticism, the highest place is refused to that literature which, however integral in plan and exquisite in workmanship, conspicuously lets go the prime factor in human beings, will and its obligations, — as the book which aims to deal with life and yet ignores its es- sential meaning, fails of great art, — so the industrial creation which aims at organic perfection, and yet takes no account of its essential element, human character and its needs, fails in the same way. There is a fatal flaw in that integrity which alone can give it aesthetic value. Here is the distinction of Vateria. The genius of the pioneer lumberman lay in the way he made every improvement in method subserve the character and training of his workers, and every improvement in character of the workers subserve the organic growth of the enterprise. Vateria is no little Elysium of " welfare work." Of such there is very little ; the employers are too just, the workers too proud, to allow it. It is rather a place where intense effort toward industrial excellence and simple justice in financial policy have been made an opportunity for individual growth. This it is which makes the aesthetic value of efficiency in the industrial system. This ultimate in- tegrity of the industrial organism is gained by guarding the self-respect and the moral and mental growth of the employee by the mutual practice of industrial efficiency. 70 DISCi'SSIO.WS OF 1-ACTS AM) IDEAS The authentic charm oi \'ateria is in the harmonious action of its spirit of conscious competence. That spirit of competence turns to the best human uses its hard-won material gain, and turns again the energy drawn from mental and moral freedom back into the conduct of affairs. The reasoned appreciation of such sturdy, self-complete civic entities is worth encouraging in America to-day. Too often is the City Beautiful held to be a matter of parkways, fountains, groupings, and vistas. Let us rather learn to see the quality of beauty where there is lucid excellence of civic and industrial performance. THE HONEY-BEE 1 A. E. Shipley, F. R. S. The social life of the honey-bee {Apis mcllifica) is more com- plex than that of any other animal save man, and in some respects the differentiation of the units which compose the society surpasses anything we can recognize in human economy. Among other bees and wasps the future of the race is wrapped up throughout the winter months in the body of one fertilized female ; should she die, the particular race is at an end ; but the honey-bee colony lives through the winter and is permanent, or at any rate potentially permanent. Although a "queen" is cherished, the life of the hive is socialistic. No private prop- erty exists; "all is the state's; the state pro\ddes for all." In devotion to duty, in single-mindedness of purpose, in energy expended for others, in whole-hearted devotion to the welfare of the community which shelters her, the worker-bee is unique. As every one knows, the inhabitants of a hive comprise three ranks of bees. U) The queen, as a rule but one at a time, is ver}' literally the mother of her people, for she alone lays eggs; (n) the workers, in structure females, though — with rare ex- ceptions — never laying eggs, but doing with tireless energy the work of the hive ; {Hi) the drones or males, absolutely use- ' From the Edinburgh Review, January, 1914. Reprinted by permission. THE HONEY-BEE 7 1 less except that amongst them will be found one — probably the strongest — who fertilizes the queen-bee. Let us consider for a brief space the activities of these varying ranks. A hive has swarmed — that is to say, a number of workers, together with a smaller number of drones and the existing queen, have left the hive and are hanging clustered together in a mass of moving insects, perhaps as small as a cricket ball, perhaps five feet in height and at its widest a foot or more in diameter. The swarm either finds a new home for itself in a hollow tree, or more usually is "hived" by a bee- master in a skip. After cleaning out and if necessary smooth- ing the walls of their new home, the worker bees immediately begin the formation of the new combs. An uppermost row of bees clasps the roof of the hive with their fore legs supporting other rows below them, until we find a living veil of bees hanging from the roof of the hive. All these bees are secreting wax on the wax plates of their abdomens. To produce this they must previously have produced much honey. Latter tells us that to produce one pound of wax fifteen pounds of honey must be eaten. Right and left of this veil ot bees will be parallel veils engaged in forming other combs so accurately spaced that ultimately the empty plane between two finished combs is just wide enough to allow two bees to pass each other. The topmost row of bees, after kneading and moulding the wax with their jaws (mandibles), press it in a line along the roof to form a foundation for the comb. This of course is an upside-down foundation, for bees construct their comb from above downwards. More wax is then supplied by the hanging bees below and passed forward to the builders of the foundation. As soon as the foundation is secured, the living veil disintegrates and the constituent bees begin to work independently at the building of the comb. No bee or group of bees works at one cell or group of cells ; always fresh workers are coming and fastening their mite of wax to one or the other part of the comb. All seems unorganized, undirected, confused, and without guidance. There is no foreman builder; there is no experience, for many of the builders have scarcely emerged from the pupa stage for three days ; there is no means even of 72 DISCISSIONS OF FACTS AND IDEAS seeinp, for the inside of a hive is pilch dark. Vet the bees pro- duce with machine-like rapidity and mathematical accuracy a cell so uniform in size that "at the time when the decimal sys- tem was established, and a fixed measure sought in nature as a starting-point and an incontestable standard, it was pro- posed by Reaumur to select for this purpose the cell of the bee." ' Bees, and wasps also, have learned that to obtain most space with the use of the least material and consequently least labor, the columnar cells should be six-sided in cross-section. The vertical comb of bees consists of two layers of cells back to back. The bottom of each cell is a three-sided pyramid, just the shape that is seen when the eighth part of a cube is removed ; on the six edges thus shown the six sides of the cell arise. The walls of the cells are not of uniform thickness ; they become thinner as they near the mouth, which, however, has a thickened rim. These cells are all of one size and serve as the homes of the young workers and for the storing of the collected pollen and honey. But atter some weeks the inhabitants of the hive begin to think of rearing drones and queens. Appropriate cells for these are now prepared. The drone-cell has to accommodate a bigger lar\'a than the worker-cell and is correspondingly bigger and about one-third deeper, but except in size the difference is negligible. Among wild honey-bees, drone-cells are often placed in special drone-combs, but in the artificial hive these cells are intermingled with the worker-cells. They are, to begin Mith, very few in number, usually four or five ; thirty seems almost to be a record in a flourishing colony. All trace of- a six-sided column disappears; the cell is cylindrical inside, but irregular and often marked with the scars of worker-cells outside. The cell is about the size of an acorn ; the wall is very stout, two to three millimeters thick, and the mouth opens downwards. As a rule these queen-cells stand out from under the edge of the worker-comb, rarely are they found on the drone's comb. The worker-cells are used over and over again for successive breeds • Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, translated by Alfred Sutro, p. 189. THE HONEY-BEE 73 of these undeveloped females, and the same is true of the drone- cells ; but as soon as the young queen has emerged from the royal-cell, it is broken up and the wax is carried off to be used elsewhere. The "middle-plate" between the two layers of cells of one comb is separated from the "middle-plate" of the next comb by a space of 35 mm. The depth of each brood-cell is 12.5 mm., and this leaves a space between each adjacent comb of 10 mm., room enough for the bees to pass back to back as they run over the open mouths of the cells tending the inmates. But since when filling or emptying the honey-cells there is no need for the bees to pass one another, the honey-cells are deeper (16-17 mm.), and the space between them is consequently narrowed, and the bulky queen-bee cannot traverse it. The rate of growth of the comb depends on the rate of growth of the colony, and often it happens that the lower part is left in an incomplete state. A young comb is white, translucent, very brittle, but it soon hardens and toughens. The larva housed in each cell before turning into the cocoon spins a silken sac. When she emerges from the cell as a perfect insect, she leaves this sac behind her, and although the vacated cell is at once and carefully cleaned out, this silken sac is suffered to remain, and so with each new occupant of the cell the number of sacs increases, adding greatly to the strength of the comb. The cells of old combs — • and combs are often years old — may contain dozens of these silken webs, and although each is of extreme tenuity, their accumu- lated bulk often necessitates the enlargement of the cell if it is to accommodate further larvae. The cell covers of the worker and drone brood-cells are convex and are easily distinguished from the flat caps of the honey-cells. One of the constant cares of the ever-busy bee is that of keep- ing the comb in repair, and constant reparation is needed. Another duty is to keep it clean. As soon as a cell is empty, it is "swept and garnished." Dust, fungi, dead bees, old remains of food, the dejecta of the queen and of the drones, are all re- moved by the workers. In fact these indefatigable spinsters 74 DISCL'SSIOXS OF FACTS AM) IDEAS enjoy, as thcv deserve to do. a perpetual sprinp;-cleaniiij4, so dear to the female heart. One other substance besides honey and pollen is brought by the workers into the liive, and that is the gummy, sticky exuda- tion of certain trees — for instance, that of the horse-chestnut buds. This propolis, as it is called, is never stored in cells. It is used to stop crannies in the hive and so prevent draughts; sometimes it is plastered nearly all over the inner wall, and at other times invading snails or moths or even mice, which are too big for the bees to remove, find a sticky sepulture entombed in propolis within the hive : — "And with their stores of gathcr'd glue contrive To slop the rents and crannies of their hive. No bird-lime, no Idean pitch, produce A more tenacious mass of clammy juice." — \'IRGIL, Fourth Gcorgic. An average hive will contain some 30,000 workers, 2000 drones, and one queen, but in a strongly stocked community these numbers may be doubled or even trebled. The cjueen alone lays eggs and is a fully functional female; she is bigger than the worker, and her abdomen is enlarged to accommodate her enormous ovary which pours forth a ceaseless flow of eggs. The hind legs of the queen are devoid of those modifications which enable the worker to collect and store the pollen; the wax glands again are reduced and apparently never used. The drone is the male ; he is bigger than the workers and the queen, and is more stoutly built ; his hairs are densely placed and short, his eyes are so large that they meet on the top of the head, the hind legs have no modifications for pollen collecting, etc., the antennae have an extra joint; his hum is deeper and louder than that of the workers. He has altogether a stronger and more virile organism, and yet, with the sole exception of fertilizing the queen, he does absolutely nothing helpful in the life of the hive. When the queen moves on her egg-Ia^ing progress, she first explores each empty cell with her antennae, putting her head THE HONEY-BEE 75 deep into the cell ; then turnmg around, she clasps the edge of the cell with her hind legs, and inserting her abdomen, deposits a single egg in the centre floor of the cell. Then she passes on to the next cell, and never does she tire or in any circumstance miss a cell. During this progress she is accompanied by a small couxt of worker-bees who, as courtiers should do, walk back- wards before her. Some of them are engaged in fanning the queen with their wings, others stroke or lick with their " tongue" the royal thorax or abdomen, others feed her on their half- digested "pap" or "royal jelly," and all are humming in a most soothing and comforting manner. A young queen at the height of the season (May or June) lays some 2000 to 3500 eggs in the four-and-twenty hours. After the second year her fecundity is somewhat abated, but in the course of her four to five years' life she produces many hundred thousand ova. To show the meaning of this amazing power of metabolism. Dr. H. Stadler has calculated that one gram of bee flesh will produce yearly no grams of bee eggs. There is, however, a peculiar relation — quite inexplicable — between the state of the hive and the number of eggs laid. The latter varies with the strength of the community; if the number of the hive is in some way lowered, the egg-laying is intermitted. No egg is laid unless there are enough able-bodied workers to tend the resulting larva. In the tropics the activity of the hive does not vary 'all the year round, but in temperate climes the queen ceases laying in the autumn and retires into winter quarters, to recommence her task early in the following spring. In the worker-cells and the queen-cells the queen lays fer- tilized eggs ; but in the drone-cells the eggs are, as far as is known, invariably unfertilized. The birth of the drone or male bee may therefore be described as a case of parthenogenesis. What stimulus induces the reproductive organs of the queen to give the spermatozoa access to the egg in the former case, and to withhold it in the latter, is not understood. It can hardly be a matter of season, for the worker-eggs are laid at all times, the drones only when the swarming of the hive seems im- minent, and the queen-eggs later than the drone. Neither can 76 Discrssioxs of facts a.\p in fas it be the stimulus of the variation in the si/.e of the cell, for if all the larjie male-cells are removed, the queen will lay an un- fertilized ep;^ in a worker-cell, and conversely, sh(juld the stock of worker-cells be exhausted, she will lay worker-eggs in male- celis. The i\\e or sbc queen-eggs laid in the sj)acious royal - cells are not laid simultaneously, but one after another at inter- vals of one or two days, and the resultant young cjueens emerge at similar intervals. This arrangement has an important bear- ing on the swarming of the hive. As soon as an egg is laid, the motherly instincts of those "barren virgins," the worker-bees, are aroused. They push their heads into the cell and apparently do something to the egg, though no one knows what. Within three days, a minute white, maggot-like grub emerges and at once demands the attention of several workers. It is de\-oid of almost everything we associate with bees. It has no wings, no legs, no sting, no anteimae, no proboscis, no hairs, no hard chitinous cuticle, only one pair of saUvary glands (not three) whose secretion hardens to form the cocoon ; the alimentary canal ends blindly, and in- deed the digestion of the small larva is so complete that there is no reason why it should end in any other way. As soon as the larva has left the eggshell, the workers hurry up with a supply of nutriment. At first this consists of food which they themselves secrete from their salivary glands. It is known as "pap" or "royal jelly," and has a white or yellowish jellylike appearance. The workers fill the cell with this food, and the larva not only eagerly laps it into her mouth but prob- ably absorbs this pabulum, in which she floats, through her tender skin. On the fourth day the worker larva is partially weaned, and her food is now mixed with honey ; after the same period the drones are completely weaned and are fed hence- forth entirely on honey and pollen. The queen larvae, on the other hand, are always fed on "royal pap," and consume great quantities of it, the roomy royal-cell being flooded with it. This food has an extraordinary effect on the future of the brood ; if continuously given to a larva of the worker class, that larva will develop into a queen-bee ; if continuously given to a drone- THE HONEY-BEE 'j'j larva, the resultant drone will be of an enormous and monstrous growth, but its testes will suffer a fatty degeneration and dis- appear. After five and a half days the queen larvae, and after six days the drone and worker larvae, cease to feed. The worker-bees now close with a convex cap the cell which shelters the larva, and the entombed larva proceeds to secrete from its salivary glands a cocoon which fills the cell, except in the case of a royal- cell, where the cocoon occupies about one-third of the space. Within this the larva becomes first a "pronymph" and then a true pupa in which the body of the adult bee is being rebuilt from larval tissues. On the ''allotted day," when thechitinous cuirass of the adult has to some extent hardened, the young bee is ready to leave her cell and commences to gnaw through the waxen cover of the cell, a task in which she is helped by numerous workers outside. Soon the way is cleared and she staggers forth into the darkness, heat, and bustle of the hive. Attendant workers wait upon her, arrange her dishevelled hairs, clean her, and offer her honey to eat. But she has undergone a resurrection, and is at first bewildered at the new world into which she has stepped, trembling and feeble. Soon, however, things settle down, her wings expand and harden, her legs lengthen, and without guidance, without experience, she in a short time is beating her wings and dancing over the cells now ready to open for the exit of her younger sisters. Both drones and workers require two days to become really active and capable of full power, but half a day suffices for the young queen. Neither workers nor drones quit the hive till the sixth day after emergence, but the time of the workers is not wasted; hanging in motionless but living garlands, they secrete from four pairs of "pockets" situate on the underside of the abdomen, eight plates of snow-white wax as light as foam ; they also secrete the royal jelly, and with it feed the larvae ; they carry to the "honey-pots" the honey brought into the hive by older workers ; they press with their heads into the pollen-cells the pollen col- lected by their elders, they help the emerging bees into the jS DISCrsSIOXS OF FACTS AXD IDEAS outer darkness of the hive ; ihey cleanse the vacated cells, and, standing in parallel rows, obliquely one behind another, they regulate by the fanning of their wings the \-entilation of the hive, and drive oil the superfluous water in the "nectar" until it obtains the consistency of honey. All this is done, and done well, without guidance and without practice. Only after a week or eight days do our young workers venture into the light, and this great adventure is fearfully and timidly undertaken. Crossing the threshold, they attemjit at first short flights, enlarging them each time, but never do they turn their head in any direction save that of their hive and home. During their first flight their trachea? — their breathing tubes — are for the first time filled, and they now attain their normal figure. Soon, however, they return to resume their household duties, for, like Martha, they are "cumbered about much serving.'' Day by day, if the weather be fav'orable, these trial flights are resumed about noon, until the young workers are well orientated as to the position of their hive amongst sur- rounding objects; as a rule many of the younger bees and drones fly together, producing a veritable cloud of flying insects. After another eight or ten days the workers are strong enough to go in search of honey, pollen, water, or the sticky propoUs. Both color and scent in the flowers attract the bees ; their favorite hue is blue and certain purplish reds ; then come in descending order, violet, red, white, and lastly yellow. When collecting the pollen, the bee hovers close to the flower and be- sprinkles the anthers with a httle honey and saUva ; then, approaching the blossom, she kneads the now moistened and sticky mass of pollen with her jaws, and finally packs it away in baskets or corbicida on the outer surface of the tibia of the last pair of legs. But much pollen is collected in a more in- direct way. As the bee moves about in and on the flower, pollen-grains fall all over her body and readily adhere to the branched hairs which are thickly scattered over its surface. The first joint of each foot (tarsus) is provided with a thick coating of moistened bristles, and these are used to brush to- gether and collect the pollen scattered over the body of the bee. THE HONEY-BEE 79 Unless the honey harvest be unusually bountiful, the young bee which has just started collecting food will confine herself to pollen, but after some days she will turn her attention to honey, or rather to nectar, which is not at all the same thing as honey. The proboscis is sunk into the nectaries of the flower and the sweet juice is sucked up. The nectar is stored in the so-called honey crop for transference to the hive, and when a bee is seen seeking her home with her abdomen dis- tended by a full honey crop, it is useless to search her for pollen ; reciprocally, a bee whose hinder legs are burdened with pollen has ever a slender abdomen. Except at the time of swarming, when the bees that leave the hive gorge themselves with honey so as to have some provision for their new home, no worker ever leaves the hive laden with honey. A bee with a swollen abdo- men is always a homing bee. The area from which bees collect nectar and pollen usually extends over a circle whose radius is three to four kilometres, although, under special circiunstances, i.e. an unusually rich supply of nectar, bees may fly six or even seven kilometres, but first they carefully orientate themselves so as to fix the position of the hive in their brain. The return journey causes no trouble and is quick, a heavily laden bee flying home at the rate of twelve to twenty kilometres an hour. A bee without honey and without pollen is said by some observers to fly at the rate of thirty-two kilometres an hour, whilst others claim that a speed of sixty-five kilometres an hour can be attained. Nectar is a sweet watery fluid which in almost every case has a specific flavor associated with the flower from which it is drawn. This specific flavor as a rule disappears in the honey, which is a much less watery fluid than the nectar. The several changes which nectar undergoes in becoming honey begin in the honey crop, where the saliva which is mixed with the nectar starts the transformation of the cane-sugar of the nectar into the dextrose (grape-sugar) and Isevulose (fruit-sugar) of the honey, and this process continues after the fluid has been de- posited in the waxen cells. When honey is plentiful, the cells stored with the pollen will receive, before they are covered in. 8o nrscussfoxs of facts axd ideas a little hdiicy as woU as a littK' saliva, together with a nilraite drop of formic acid which acts as a preservative. The need of honey in the hive surpasses that of |)oIlen, and the honey-cells are more numerous than "bee-bread" cells. The stored honey and pollen serve for the daily food of the workers, the drones, and the queen, but in a healthy hive there is a suqilus store, and this surplus store enables the community of honey-bees to last year after year, whilst the existence of, say, a wasp nest depends on the success of a single individual in tiding over the winter months. Although in the winter the activities of the hive drop to a minimum, still there is some movement of the bees and so food is imperative. The fresh nectar poured out of the body of the bee contains 80 per cent of water and is very fluid. Why it remains in the cell and does not pour out before the cell is "cap[)ed" is rather a mystery. Truly, the cells are tipped a little upw^ards, but not enough to explain this ; later, when it thickens into honey, it may be said to be too viscous to flow out, yet if the comb be lightly shaken down, it comes in a sweet and sticky stream. One of the most interesting factors in the conversion of nectar to honey is the removal of the superfluous water. The worker- bees after a hard day in the field return to the hive, and after depositing their evening harvest, take their stand in serried rows and begin fanning with their wings. Tireless and ap- parently without fatigue, they continue this exercise hour after hour until the rising of the sun recalls them to their harvest fields. A good hive will in the course of a night drive out of a skip an amount of aqueous vapor equivalent to 1.5 litres of water, and so gradually the amount of water is reduced from 80 per cent in the nectar to 25 per cent in the honey. Both worker- cells and drone-cells are used for storing honey, and if the supply necessitates the building of new cells to house the precious fluid, drone-cells are built, for they are easier to construct and require comparatively less wax. Dr. Stadler has made an ingenious calculation as to the num- ber of journeys a worker-bee makes at harvest time, and arrives at the conclusion that each bee makes between seventy-nve and THE HONEY-BEE 8 1 one hundred flights a day. Even bee protoplasm cannot stand such a life. Working like the students at Osborne or Dart- mouth "at the double" all day, standing with vibrant wings all night, occupied with the cares of the hive in between times, never having any sleep, never taking any rest, it is little wonder that the frail body of the worker is at the height of the season worn out in five or six weeks. True to her devotion to the cleanliness of the hive, she usually dies outside it, but if by any chance she dies inside, the body is removed by the survivers like any other piece of lumber. Virgil's statement put into Enghsh by Dryden : — "Their friends attend the hearse, the next relations mourn " cannot be justified even by poetic licence. Their friends and relations are totally indifferent. Bees know neither love nor regret. It is the general rule amongst the social Hymenoptera that new colonies are started by the unaided efforts of a single queen, but this rule is broken by the honey-bee. Here the queen, when starting a new colony, is accompanied by a large number of workers and a few drones, the whole constituting the swarm The preliminaries to swarming are many ; the first is the laying of unfertiUzed eggs in the drone-cells, old or new, for the drones take the longest time in reaching maturity; then a certain number of queen-cells are built and provided with fertilized eggs, laid one after another so that they will be ripe for entrance into the hive at successive intervals of forty-eight hours. When once the cover is placed on the first of these royal cells, which hang usually to the number of six or eight from the lower edge of a comb, with the mouth downwards, the reigning queen be- comes restless. She intermits her egg-laying, moves uneasily hither and thither, and with an unbridled jealousy tries to break into the royal cells and so destroy her royal offspring and pos- sible successors. These, however, are safely guarded by the workers, and seldom does she succeed. If the weather be favorable, and if the provision of honey and bee-bread be ample, the workers are also seized with the demon of unrest. Those 8- niSCLSSlO.WS OI- FACTS AM) IDEAS enRURcd in colk'clinjT nectar ami honey cease their lalxirsand remain at home. On a still, warm day in May or June, numerous bees may be seen resting and motionless outside the hive ; these are joined by others, and gradually they all collect together and hang like a beard in front of the hive. More bees attach themselves to the beard, and then suddenly the whole thing breaks up and the constituent bees pour into the hive and till themselves up with honey as a pro\'ision for their future home. The excitement within the hive increases, the noise becomes louder and louder, and then suddenly a vast stream of bees, both workers and drones, with their queen, pours out of the mouth of the liive in a state of delirious tumult. Soon, how- ever, they settle on some bough or wall chosen by the queen. Some hang to the support, the others hang on to them. The queen is hidden within the living, seething mass. Here the swarm may hang for hours and even for days, but, as a rule, within a few hours they are guided by certain scouts, who have been investigating the possibilities of the neighborhood, to some hollow tree or shelter under a roof, and to this retreat the whole swarm flies by the shortest possible route. The workers at once set to work to clean the new hive and to prepare the comb, and as soon as possible the queen resumes her interminable egg- laying. It may be noted that whilst thus swarming, the queen sees the light for the second time in her life. When swarming, bees are very loath to sting, and, according to Latter, should they do so, the sting is ''comparatively innocuous." An aver- age swarm is about the size of a football and weighs about four pounds. The hive which the swarm has left has for the time no queen, though potentialities of royalty exist in the numerous royal- cells. As soon as the first of these young queens is ready to emerge, she bites through the cover of her cell, aided by some of the workers, and steps into the hive ; but this does not take place until eight days ha\e elapsed since the sMarming. As soon as the young queen has been cleaned and has acquired a little strength, and her wings have hardened, she begins to mo\'e about, and when she becomes aware of the other royal-cells with THE HONEY-BEE 83 the pupas of her sisters therein, she becomes violently excited, utters a well-known war-note, and attempts to tear open the cell of the oldest. Sometimes this is permitted, and the ruthless young monarch slays with her sting in turn the whole succession of royal infants. Should her strength fail her, the slaughter is continued by the workers, who in any case greedily consume what royal jelly is left in the cells, and draw the corpses of their victims out of the cells and cast them out of the hive. This process of slaughter is, however, a very risky proceeding, for if anything should happen to the conquering and sole re- maining queen on her wedding flight, or at any other time, and if there were no larvae under three days of age (these can be reared into queens by a continuous diet of royal jelly), the hive would become queenless, and a queenless hive rapidly falls into a state of "death, damnation, and despair." Therefore the bees usually guard the cells until the first queen has been fertilized and has returned to the hive, and also until it has been clearly settled that a second swarming is not to take place, for in that case the first hatched queen would lead the swarm, and one of her sisters would be wanted to replace her in the hive. Should there be a second swarm, it will centre round the young queen as yet unfertilized, and it may be that some of her sisters may then escape and join the swarm, in which case it either breaks up into as many small swarms as there are queens, or the queens fight till but one remains, or the workers put all to death save one. A fight between two queens is a venomous and a deadly affair. Although sisters, although members of the same exalted and exiguous caste, they seem to be animated by the bitterest hatred, yet so strongly implanted in their being is their devotion to the future of the community, that when, as they sometimes do, they get into a mutually murderous position where a stroke of the sting of each would kill the other, they im- mediately cease fighting and retire trembling for a time, ap- parently appalled at the prospect of the queenless hive which would result from their kiUing each other. After a time, how- ever, the combat is renewed and one or other is slain. Sometimes, when a second queen enters the hive and the 84 DISCUSSIOXS OF FACTS AXD IDEAS reigning queen is busy la}ing eggs, ihe presence of the intruder is concealed, and a crowd of workers surrounds her on every side,- "balling" her in until she dies of hunger and sulTocation, but they never sting her to death. For the first few days (from two to six after her birth) the young queen shows no disposition to be married. Then a change occurs. She becomes restless, runs to the hive mouth and back, presently makes a short experimental flight, for the first time seeing the sun and inflating to the full her breathing tubes. Soon she takes wider flights, always keeping her head directed to the hive. After a time she is followed by a group of drones, and as she towers into space, one by one these suitors drop off until one, the strongest, remains to mate with her high up in the heavens. The act of mating is fatal to the male. It is thought that he dies of nerve shock. Whatever the cause, most of his body falls dead to the earth, but he leaves part of it in the queen ; this can only be removed when it has shrivelled up, and then, in some cases, only by the aid of the workers. The fertilized queen returns to the hive, having in her spernia- theca no less than 200,000,000 spermatozoa, a supply equal to even her prodigious fecundity. Once the queen is fertilized and has begun her ceaseless egg- laying, the drones are more useless than ever. They have always been a nuisance in the hive, devouring the best honey, hustling the workers, impeding the w'ork, and fouling the comb ; for, unlike the workers, who can only rid themselves of undigested food when on the wing, the drones and the queen deposit their excreta in the hive for the workers to clear away. Useless, and a great drain on the hive, they are yet suffered to su^vi^'e a little while, but in a few days that curious socialistic instinct that persistently impels the honey-bee to sacrifice the individual for the sake of the community — "V esprit de la ruche" as Maeterlinck calls it — is awakened, and the workers unite to destroy the drones, either by driving them forth, or by forcing them into an empty comb and starving them to death, or by savagely attacking them with sting and jaws, till they are killed outright. THE PANAMA CANAL 85 The same ^'esprit de la riiche," the same overwhelming in- stinct to provide at all costs for the continuance of the race, causes the worker-bees to work themselves to death in a few weeks for the sake of succeeding generations, and condemns the queen-bee to a life sentence, which often takes four or five years to work out, of penal servitude in pitchy darkness. THE PANAMA CANAL ^ James Bryce Of the Canal itself a few words must now be said, just enough to convey some preliminary general notion of it to those who two years hence, when the time for its formal opening arrives, will be deluged with details. It will be fifty miles in length, from deep water to deep water, though only forty from tide-end to tide-end. The minimum bottom width will be three hundred feet, the minimum depth forty-one feet, the breadth and depth being, however, for the larger part of its length, greater than these figures. Its highest point above sea-level will be eighty-five feet at the sur- face of the water and forty feet at the bottom, the depth at this point being forty- five feet ; i.e. it will be cut down through the dividing ridge of the Continent to a point forty feet above the two oceans. The simplest way to realize its character is to consider it as consisting of four sections which I will call (a) the Atlantic Level, (b) the Lake, (c) the Cutting, and (d) the Pacific section (in two levels separated by a lock). The Atlantic Level is a straight channel, unbroken by locks, of eight miles, from deep water at the mouth of the shallow Bay of Limon, a little west of Colon^ to Gatun, where it reaches the valley of the Chagres River. Now the Chagres River had always been reckoned as one of the chief difficulties in the way of making a canal. It 'From South America — Observations and Impressions. The Macmillan Com- pany. Reprinted by permission. 86 DiscLssio.xs or iacts and ideas occupied the bottom of thai natural tleprcssion along whidi all surveyors had long ago perceived tliat any canal must run. Hut the difi'iculty of widening and deepening the river channel till it should become a usable canal, was a formidable one, because in the wet season the river swells to an unmanageable si/e under the tropical rains, sometimes rising over forty feet in twenty-four hours. This difficulty was at last met and the stream ingeniously utilized by erecting right across the course of the Chagres a stupendous dam at Gatun, which by impound- ing the water of the river turns its valley into a lake. This lake will have along the central channel a depth of from eighty- five to forty-five feet of water, sufficient for the largest ship. At the Gatun dam there are three locks, built of concrete, with a total rise of eighty-five feet, by which vessels will be lifted up into the lake. The lake will fill not only the valley of the Chagres itself, but the bottom of its tributary valleys to the east and west, so that it will cover 164 square miles in all, and will be dotted by many islands. The central and deepest lines of this artificial piece of water, nearly twenty-four miles long, is the second of our four canal sections, and will be the prettiest, for the banks are richly wooded. At the point called Bas Obispo, where the Chagres \-aIley, which has been running south-southeast towards the Pacific turns away to the north- east among the hills, the line of the canal leaves the Gatun river-lake, and we enter the third section, which I have called the Cutting. Here hills are encountered ; so it became neces- sary, in order to avoid the making of more locks, to cut deep into the central line of the continent, with its ridge of rock which connects the Cordilleras of the southern continent with the Sierras of the northern. After five miles of comparatively shallow cutting southward from the Lake, a tall and steep emi- nence, Gold Hill, the continental watershed, its top 665 feet high, bars the way. Through it there has been carved out a mighty gash, the "Culebra Cut," of which more anon. A little further south, eight miles from the Lake, the ground begins to fail rapidly towards the other sea, and we reach the fourth or Pacific section at a point called Pedro Miguel. Here is a lock THE PANAMA CANAL 87 by which the Canal is lowered thirty feet to another but much smaller artificial lake, formed by a long dam built across the valley at a spot called Miraflores, where we find two more locks, by which vessels will be lowered fifty-five feet to the level of the Pacific. Thence the Canal runs straight out into the ocean, here so shallow that a deep-water channel has been dredged out for some miles, and a great dike or mole erected along its eastern side to keep the southerly current from silting up the harbor. From Pedro Miguel to Miraflores it is nearly two miles, and from the locks at the latter to the Pacific eight miles, so the length of this fourth Pacific section, which, unlike the Atlantic section, is on two different levels divided by the Miraflores dam and locks, is ten miles. In it there has been comparatively little land excavation, because the ground is flat, though a great deal of dredging, both to carry a sea channel out through the shallow bay into the open Pacific, and also to provide space for vessels to lie and load or discharge without blocking the traffic. Thus the voyager of the future, in the ten or twelve hours of his passage from ocean to ocean, will have much variety. The level light of the fiery tropic dawn will fall on the houses of Colon as he approaches it in the morning, when vessels usually arrive. When his ship has mounted the majestic staircase of the three Gatun locks from the Atlantic level, he will glide slowly and softly along the waters of a broad lake which gradually narrows toward its head, a lake enclosed by rich forests of that velvety softness one sees in the tropics, with vistas of forest- girt islets stretching far off to the right and left among the hills, a welcome change from the restless Caribbean Sea which he has left. Then the mountains will close in upon him, steep slopes of grass or brushwood rising two hundred feet above him as he passes through the Great Cut. From the level of the Miguel lock he will look southward down the broad vale that opens on the ocean flooded with the light of the decHning sun, and see the rocky islets rising, between which in the twilight his course will lie out into the vast Pacific. At Suez the passage from sea to sea is through a dreary and monotonous waste of shifting SS DISCUSSIOyS OF FACTS A\D IDEAS sand and barren clay. Here one is for a few hours in the centre of a verdant continent, floating on smooth waters, shut ofT from sight of the ocean behind and the ocean before, a short sweet present of tranquillity between a stormy past and a stormy future. In these forty miles of canal (or fifty if we reckon from deep water to deep water) the two most remarkable pieces of engineer- ing work are the gigantic dam (with its locks) at Gatun and the gigantic cutting at Culebra, each the hugest of its kind that the world has to show. The dam is nearly a mile and a half long; its base nearly half a mile thick, and it is 400 feet wide at the water line of the lake which it will support. Each of the three locks is double, so that one of the pair can be used by vessels passing from north to south, the other by those passing from south to north. Each has a usable length of 1000 feet, a usable width of no feet. They are big enough in length, width, and depth for the largest vessels that were afloat in 191 1. He who stands inside one of them seems, when he looks up, to be at the bottom of a rocky glen, " a canyon of cement." Noth- ing less than an earthquake will affect them, and of earthquakes there is no record in this region, though they are frequent in Costa Rica, two hundred miles away. The locks will be worked, and vessels will be towed through them, by electric power, which is to be generated by the fall of the Chagres River over the spillway which carries its water from the lake to the Atlantic. The great Culebra Cut is interesting not only to the engineer, but also to the geologist, as being what he calls a Section. It is the deepest open cutting an}-where in the world, and shows curious phenomena in the injection of igneous rocks, apparently very recent, among the loose sedimentary beds, chiefly clays and soft sandstones of the latest tertiary epoch. A trouble- some result, partly of this intermixture, and partly of the fri- ability and instability not only of the sedimentary strata but also of some of the volcanic rocks, has been noted in the con- stant slips and slides of rock and earth down the sides of the cutting into the bed of the canal that is to be. This source of expense and delay was always foreseen by those who knew the THE PANAMA CANAL 89 character of the soil and the power of torrential tropical rains, and was long dwelt upon as a fatal objection to a sea-level canal. It has caused even more delay and more expenditure than was expected. But it has now been overcome, though to avert the risk of future damage to the work when completed the engineers have been obliged to give a much lower slope to the sides of the cutting than was originally contemplated, so that the width of the cutting at the top is also greater than had been planned, and the quantity of material excavated has been correspondingly larger.^ In order to lessen further washing down, the slopes will be sown with creeping grasses and other plants calculated to hold the soil. The interior of the Cuiebra Cut presented, during the period of excavation, a striking sight. Within the nine miles of the whole cutting, two hundred miles of railroad track had been laid down side by side, some on the lowest level on terraces along which the excavating shovels were at work. Within the deepest part of the cutting, whose length is less than a mile, many hundreds of railroad construction cars and many thou- sands of men were at work, some busy in setting dynamite charges for blasting, some cleaning away the rubbish scattered round by an explosion, some working the huge moving shovels which were digging into the softer parts of the hill or were re- moving the material loosened by explosions, the rest working the trains of cars that were perpetually being made up and run out of the cutting at each end to dump the excavated ma- terial wherever it was needed somewhere along the line of the Canal. Every here and there one saw little puffs of steam, some from the locomotives, some where the compressed air by which power was applied to the shovels was escaping from the pipes, and condensing the vapor-s^turated atmosphere. There is something in the magnitude and the methods of this enterprise which a poet might take as his theme. Never before ' The highest point of excavation at Gold Hill is 534 feet above sea level and the highest elevation of the original surface of the ground along the centre line of the Canal was 312 feet above sea level. The vertical depth of the cut on the centre line is thus 272 feet, the bottom of the cut being 40 feet above sea level. 90 DISCUSSIOXS OF FACTS ASD IDEAS oil our planet have so much hil)or, so much scientific knowledge, and so much executive skill been concentrated on a work de- signed to "bring the nations nearer to one another and serve the interests of all mankind. OX THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE » Thomas Hexry Huxley In order to make the title of this discourse generally intelli- gible, I have translated the term "Protoplasm," which is the scientific name of the substance of which I am about to speak, by the words "the physical basis of life." I suppose that, to many, the idea that there is such a thing as a physical basis, or matter, of life may be novel — so widely spread is the con- ception of life as a something which works through matter, but is independent of it ; and even those who are aware that matter and life are inseparably connected, may not be prepared for the conclusion plainly suggested by the phrase, "//?c physical basis (^r matter of life,'' that there is some one kind of matter which is common to all li\ing beings, and that their endless diversities are bound together by a physical, as well as an ideal, unity. In fact, when first apprehended, such a doctrine as this appears almost shocking to common sense. What, truly, can seem to be more obviously different from one another, in faculty, in form, and in substance, than the various kinds of li\'ing beings? What community of faculty can there be between the brightly colored lichen, which so nearly resembles a mere mineral incrustation of the bare rock on which it grows, and the painter, to whom it is instinct \nth beauty, or the botanist, whom it feeds wth knowledge ? Again, think of the microscopic fungus — a mere iBfinitesimal ovoid particle, which finds space and duration enough to mul- tiply into countless millions in the body of a living fly; and then of the wtalth of foliage, the luxuriance of flower and fruit, ' From Lay Sermons. D. Appleton & Company, 1870. ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 91 v;hich lies between this bald sketch of a plant and the giant pine of California, towering to the dimensions of a cathedral spire, or the Indian fig, which covers acres with its profound shadow, and endures while nations and empires come and go around its vast circumference. Or, turning to the other half of the world of life, picture to yourselves the great Finner whale, hugest of beasts that live, or have lived, disporting his eighty or ninety feet of bone, muscle, and blubber, with easy roll, among waves in which the stoutest ship that ever left dockyard would flounder hopelessly ; and contrast him with the invisible animal- cules — mere gelatinous specks, multitudes of which could, in fact, dance upon the point of a needle with the same ease as the angels of the Schoolmen could, in imagination. With these images before your minds, you may well ask, what community of form, or structure, is there between the animalcule and the whale ; or between the fungus and the fig-tree ? And, a fortiori, between all four ? Finally, if we regard substance, or material composition, what hidden bond can connect the flower which a girl wears in her hair and the blood which courses through her youthful veins ; or, what is there in common between the dense and re- sisting mass of the oak, or the strong fabric of the tortoise, and those broad disks of glassy jelly which may be seen pulsating through the waters of a calm sea, but which drain away to mere films in the hand which raises them out of their element ? Such objections as these must, I think, arise in the mind of every one who ponders, for the first time, upon the conception of a single physical basis of life underlying all the diversities of vital existence ; but I propose to demonstrate to you that, not- withstanding these apparent difficulties, a threefold unity — namely a unity of power or faculty, a unity of form, and a unity of substantial composition — does pervade the whole living world. No very abstruse argumentation is needed, in the first place, to prove that the powers, or faculties, of all kinds of living matter, diverse as they may be in degree, are substantially similar in kind. 92 DISCUSSIOSS OF FACTS AND IDEAS Goethe has condensed a survey of all powers of mankind into the well-known epigram : — " Warum ircibt sich das \'olk so und sehrcit ? Es will sich crnahrcn, Kinder zeugon, und die niihrcn so gut cs vermag. * * * * * In * Wcitcr hringt es kein Mensch, stell' er sich wie cr auch will." In physiological language this means, that all the multifarious and complicated activities of man are comprehensible under three categories. Either they are immediately directed toward the maintenance and development of the body, or they effect transitory changes in the relative positions of parts of the body, or they tend towards the continuance of the species. Even those manifestations of intellect, of feehng, and of will, which we rightly name the higher faculties, are not excluded from this clas.sification, inasmuch as to every one but the subject of them, they are known only as transitory changes in the relative positions of parts of the body. Speech, gesture, and every other form of human action are, in the long run, resolvable into muscular contraction, and muscular contraction is but a transitory change in the relative positions of the parts of a muscle. But the scheme which is large enough to embrace the activ-ities of the highest form of life, covers all those of the lower creatures. The lowest plant, or animalcule, feeds, grows, and reproduces its kind. In addition, all animals manifest those transitory changes of form which we class under irritability and contractility ; and, it is more than probable, that when the vegetable v.orld is thoroughly explored, we shall find all plants in possession of the same powers, at one time or other of their existence. I am not now alluding to such phenomena, at once rare and conspicuous, as those exhibited hy the leaflets of the sensitive plants, or the stamens of the barberry, but to much more widely spread, and, at the same time, more subtle and hidden, mani- festations of vegetable contractility. You are doubtless aware that the common nettle owes its stinging property to the in- numerable stifif and needle-like, though exquisitely delicate, ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 93 hairs which cover its surface. Each stinging-needle tapers from a broad base to a slender summit, which, though rounded at the end, is of such microscopic fineness that it readily penetrates, and breaks off in, the skin. The whole hair consists of a very delicate outer case of wood, closely applied to the inner surface of which is a layer of semi-fluid matter, full of innumerable granules of extreme minuteness. This semi-fluid lining is pro- toplasm, which thus constitutes a kind of bag, full of a limpid liquid, and roughly corresponding in form with the interior of the hair which it fills. When viewed with a sufficiently high magnifying power, the protoplasmic layer of the nettle hair is seen to be in a condition of unceasing activity. Local contrac- tions of the whole thickness of its substance pass slowly and gradually from point to point, and give rise to the appearance of progressive waves, just as the bending of successive stalks of corn by a breeze produces the apparent billows of a cornfield. But, in addition to these movements, and independently of them, the granules are driven, in relatively rapid streams, through channels in the protoplasm which seem to have a con- siderable amount of persistence. Most commonly, the currents in adjacent parts of the protoplasm take similar directions; and, thus, there is a general stream up one side of the hair and down the other. But this does not prevent the existence of partial currents which take different routes ; and sometimes trains of granules may be seen coursing swiftly in opposite directions within a twenty-thousandth of an inch of one an- other; while, occasionally, opposite streams come into direct collision, and, after a longer or shorter struggle, one predomi- nates. The cause of these currents seems to lie in contractions of the protoplasm which bounds the channels in which they flow, but which are so minute that the best microscopes show only their effects, and not themselves. The spectacle afforded by the wonderful energies prisoned within the compass of the microscopic hair of a plant, which we commonly regard as a merely passive organism, is not easily forgotten by one who has watched its display, continued hour after hour, without pause or sign of weakening. The possible 04 DISCUSSIONS 0/ I- ACTS AND IDEAS complexity of many other organic forms, seemingly as simple as the protoplasm of the nettle, dawTis upon one ; and the comparison of such a protoplasm to a body with an internal circulation, which has lieen put forward by an eminent physiol- ogist, loses much of its startling character. Currents similar to those of the hairs of the nettle have been observed in a great multitude of very different plants, and weighty authorities have suggested that they probably occur, in more or less perfection, in all young vegetable cells. If such be the case, the wonderful noonday silence of a tropical forest is, after all, due only to the dulncss of our hearing ; and could our ears catch the murmurs of these tiny Maelstroms, as they whirl in the innumerable myriads of living cells which constitute each tree, we should be stunned, as with the roar of a great city. Among the lower plants, it is the rule rather than the excep- tion, that contractility should be still more openly manifested at some periods of their existence. The protoplasm of Alga and Fungi becomes, under many circumstances, partially, or completely, freed from its woody case, and exhibits movements of its whole mass, or is propelled by the contractility of one, or moi':, hair-like prolongations of its body, which are called vibra- tile ciUa. And, so far as the conditions of the manifestation of the phenomena of contractility have yet been studied, they are the same for the plant as for the animal. Heat and electric shocks influence both, and in the same way, though it may be in different degrees. It is by no means my intention to suggest that there is no difference in faculty between the lowest plant and the highest, or between plants and animals. But the difference between the powers of the lowest plant, or animal, and those of the highest, is one of degree, not of kind, and depends, as Milne-Edwards long ago so well pointed out, upon the extent to which the principle of the division of labor is carried out in the living economy. In the lowest organism all parts are competent to perform all functions, and one and the same portion of protoplasm may successfully take on the func- tion of feeding, moving, or reproducing apparatus. In the highest, on the contrary, a great number of parts combine to ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 95 perform each function, each part doing its allotted share of the work with greater accuracy and efficiency, but being useless for any other purpose. On the other hand, notwithstanding all the fundamental re- semblances which exist between the powers of the protoplasm in plants and in animals, they present a striking difference (to which I shall advert more at length presently), in the fact that plants can manufacture fresh protoplasm out of mineral com- pounds, whereas animals are obliged to procure it ready-made, and hence, in the long run, depend upon plants. Upon what condition this difference in the powers of the two great divisions of the world of life depends, nothing is at present known. With such qualifications as arise out of the last-mentioned fact, it may be truly said that the acts of all living things are fundamentally one. Is any such unity predicable of their forms ? Let us seek in easily verified facts for a reply to this question. If a drop of blood be drawn by pricking one's finger, and viewed with proper precautions, and under a sufficiently high micro- scopic power, there will be seen, among the innumerable multi- tude of little, circular, discoidal bodies, or corpuscles, which float in it and give it its color, a comparatively small number of colorless corpuscles, of somewhat larger size and very irregular shape. If the drop of blood be kept at the temperature of the body, these colorless corpuscles will be seen to exhibit a marvel- lous activity, changing their forms with great rapidity, drawing in and thrusting out prolongations of their substance, and creep- ing about as if they were independent organisms. The substance which is thus active is a mass of protoplasm, and its activity differs in detail, rather than in principle, from that of the protoplasm of the nettle. Under sundry circum- stances the corpuscle dies and becomes distended into a round mass, in the midst of which is seen a smaller spherical body, which existed, but was more or less hidden, in the living cor- puscle, and is called its nucleus. Corpuscles of essentially similar structure are to be found in the skin, in the lining of the mouth, and scattered through the whole framework of the body. Nay, more ; in the earliest condition of the human 00 DFSCL'SSIO.WS or I-ACTS AXD IDEAS organism, in that state in which it has but just Ijcconic cUs- tinguishable from the egg in which it arises, it is nothing but an aggregation of such cori)Uscles, and every organ of the body was, once, no more than such an aggregation. Thus a nucleated mass of protophism turns out to be what may be termed the structural unit of the human body. As a matter of fact, the body, in its earliest state, is a mere multiple of such units; and in its perfect condition, it is a nuiltiplc of such units, variously modified. But does the formula which expresses the essential structural character of the highest animal cover all the rest, as the state- ment of its powers and faculties covered all the others ? Very nearly. Beast and fowl, reptile and fish, mollusk, worm, and poh"pe, are all composed of structural units of the same char- acter, namely, masses of protoplasm with a nucleus. There are sundry very low animals, each of which, structurally, is a mere colorless blood-corpuscle, leading an independent life. But, at the very bottom of the animal scale, even this simplicity becomes simplified, and all the phenomena of life are mani- fested by a particle of protoplasm without a nucleus. Nor are such organisms insignificant by reason of their want of com- plexity. It is a fair question whether the protoplasm of those simplest forms of life, which people an immense extent of the bottom of the sea, would not outweigh that of all the higher Uving beings which inhabit the land put together. And in ancient times, no less than at the present day, such living beings as these ha\e been the greatest of rock builders. What has been said of the animal world is no less true of plants. Embedded in the protoplasm at the broad, or attached, end of the nettle hair, there lies a spheroidal nucleus. Careful examina- tion further proves that the whole substance of the nettle is made up of a repetition of such masses of nucleated protoplasm, each contained in a wooden case, which is modified in form, some- times into a woody fibre, sometimes into a duct or spiral vessel, sometimes into a pollen grain, or an ovule. Traced back to its earliest state, the nettle arises as the man does, in a particle of nucleated protoplasm. And in the lowest plants, as in the lowest ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 97 animals, a single mass of such protoplasm may constitute the whole plant, or the protoplasm may exist without a nucleus. Under these circumstances it may well be asked, how is one mass of non-nucleated protoplasm to be distinguished from an- other? why call one "plant" and the other "animal"? The only reply is that, so far as form is concerned, plants and animals are not separable, and that, in many cases, it is a mere matter of convention whether we call a given organism an ani- mal or a plant. There is a living body called Jithalium septiciim, which appears upon decaying vegetable substances, and in one of its forms is common upon the surfaces of tan-pits. In this condition it is, to all intents and purposes, a fungus, and formerly was always regarded as such ; but the remarkable investigations of De Bary have shown that, in another condition, the Mthalium is an actively locomotive creature, and takes in solid matters, upon which, apparently, it feeds, thus exhibiting the most characteristic feature of animality. Is this a plant ; or is it an animal ? Is it both ; or is it neither ? Some decide in favor of the last supposition, and establish an intermediate kingdom, a sort of biological No Man's Land for all these questionable forms. But, as it is admittedly impossible to draw any distinct boundary line between this no man's land and the vegetable world on the one hand, or the animal, on the other, it appears to me that this proceeding merely doubles the difficulty which, before, was single. Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter: which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod. Thus it becomes clear that all living powers are cognate, and that all living forms are fundamentally of one character. The researches of the chemist have revealed a no less striking uniformity of material composition in living matter. In perfect strictness, it is true that chemical investigation can tell us little or nothing, directly, of the composition of living matter, inasmuch as such matter must needs die in the act of analysis, — and upon this very obvious ground, objec- 98 DISCUSSIONS OF FACTS AND IDEAS tions, which 1 confess seem to me to be somewhat frivolous, have been raised to the drawing of any conclusions whatever respect ins: the composition of actually living matter, from that of the deail matter of life, which alone is accessible to us. But objectors of this class do not seem to reflect that it is also, in strictness, true that we know nothing about the composition of any body whatever, as it is. The statement that a crystal of calc-spar consists of carbonate of lime is quite true, if we only mean that, by appropriate processes, it may be resolved into carbonic acid and quicklime. If you pass the same car- bonic acid over the very quicklime thus obtained, you will obtain carbonate of lime again ; but it will not be calc-spar, nor any- thing like it. Can it, therefore, be said that chemical analysis teaches nothing about the chemical composition of calc-spar ? Such a statement would be absurd; but it is hardly more so than the talk one occasionally hears about the uselessness of applying the results of chemical analysis to the living bodies which have pelded them. One fact, at any rate, is out of reach of such refinements, and this is, that all the forms of protoplasm which have yet been examined contain the four elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, in very complex union, and that they behave similarly towards several reagents. To this complex combina- tion, the nature of which has never been determined with exact- ness, the name of Protein has been applied. And if we use this term with such caution as may properly arise out of our com- parative ignorance of the things for which it stands, it may be truly said, that all protoplasm is proteinaceous, or, as the white, or albumen, of an egg is one of the commonest examples of a nearly pure protein matter, we may say that all living matter is more or less albuminoid. Perhaps it would not yet be safe to say that all forms of protoplasm are affected by the direct action of electric shocks ; and yet the number of cases in which the contraction of pro- toplasm is shown to be affected by this agency increases every day. Nor can it be afiSrmed with perfect confidence, that all forms ENGLAND UNDER THE STUARTS 99 of protoplasm are liable to undergo that peculiar coagulation at a temperature of 4o°-5o° centigrade, which has been called "heat-stiffening," though Kiihne's beautiful researches have proved this occurrence to take place in so many and such diverse living beings, that it is hardly rash to expect that the law holds good for all. Enough has perhaps been said to prove the existence of a general uniformity in the character of the protoplasm, or physical basis, of life, in whatever group of living beings it may be studied. But it will be understood that this general uniformity by no means excludes any amount of special modifications of the fundamental substance. The mineral, carbonate of lime, assumes an immense diversity of characters, though no one doubts that, under all the Protean changes, it is one and the same thing. THE MIDDLE AND LOWER CLASSES IN ENGLAND UNDER THE STUARTS ^ George Macaulay Trevelyan At the opening of the twentieth century England may be compared to a garden, a ground cut up for purposes of cultivation by hedgerows and lines of trees. The regularity of this garden is pleasantly broken by woods and coppices artificially main- tained by man for his use or pleasure. But through this fertile territory, the new economy of industrialism is pushing out its iron claws, changing vast tracts of garden into town, and alter- ing the character and appearance of the rest by introducing, even in agricultural districts, materials and houses of uniform type. That part of the population which lives permanently under the influence of industrial sights and sounds is larger than that which lives in the garden ; and even the inhabitants of the rural districts have lost their own characteristic ideals of life 1 From England under the Stuarts. G. P. Putnam's Sons. Reprinted by permis- sion. » IOC 3f FACTS ASD IDEAS | Tfn'ier the aJi-nie^ - ~'rp ^4 the tmrns- One cncKfitMa her A -e of France a.rn-^ Gennaxiv to-dav. B-cct me z. eve~ — - • — .- — - '''" iss J 1 tree; tiw; ssxien t&e nmetee: — es i ascendecL tfie turoiae, -^'greai 'Traes, bat by va^ trarte of wii.ieniess m comnnrrL ^ acairceiv' aiffiected. tJae Ifcvres §ii - 1^ bajoe •;: -s to wMck it ^^3■T: impr:;Tr*id the appearajjce of nature, fcr :.:: xsr «o>- The ippearxrce c« tbe cocntiy ^i< r .: -::^:ed oat strife aud iirac^ ^tb>>ei:"^ " " ^ ~"r essdij^ ■ "~ hc-i^es:itm»scxL!tiv:itedbytiie€»c-- vi*e?»e«'< catde ot the larboste village. At barv>e»4 . off tiat part oj tbe ftdd vbkb bek>«»: . .- . .. _ -- Tteior period many of tbese opes. f.eiis -w^if brosbea up iad sarrouiKkdbybc- : - - "rliurcor. .^ -.^ £irat> of die nKx\- Ve^ : vdnoed to cv^a^pietioa. i: nrjt raro Stuarts wsore th... ..,..,.. - stili opea land, ctiltivited by tb? cvNKittvc ecorr? : - after tbe metbdds porstted by tbetr Tvler, And tbe vbofct acresse o£ I02 DISCL'SSIOXS OF FACTS A.\D IDEAS and unenclosed, scarcely equalled the wilderness still unre- claimed.' The change from the common cultivation of open strips of field to individual responsibility for pieces of enclosed ground, brought to the front two figures characteristic of English agri- cultural history — the tenant-farmer and the yeoman. These two classes existed under the old system, but wherever the new order was established they gained a new importance. For on the farmer and the yeoman rested the first opportunity for initiative in those improvements which comj)act farms and hedges had at last rendered possible. Individual farmers could do nothing to introduce new methods of agriculture on that half of the corn land of England which was still unenclosed, and cultivated by the common efforts of the whole village. On the newly enclosed lands the farmers of the seventeenth century had some power of improvement, but not on a large scale. For it was not yet the fashion, as it became in the next century, for landlords to sink great sums of capital in scientific improve- ments, and the farmers, left to themseh^es, had little capital and less education. The great day of the tenant-farmer was yet to come ; and in the Stuart epoch he was neither wealthy, independent, nor interesting. The yeomen, who were computed to be more numerous than the tenant-farmers,- were at least their match in agricultural ' Gregory King calculated that in the reign of William III, out of thirty-nine million acres in England, one million was water and road or roadside, ten millions were "heaths, moors, mountains, and barren lands," three "woods and coppices," three "forests, parks, and commons." (Political Observations, 1606, Chalmers' ed., 1810, p. 52.) The Comment of his friend Davcnant (Balance of Trade, i6gg), that "anno 1600" " there were more forests, woods, commons, coppices, and waste ground " than in their own day, is correct (see Nisbet, Our Forests and Woodlands, 1900, pp. 72-80). Indeed as early as 1662 the spread of tillage, and of manufacture by fur- naces, had exciterl the alarm of the Dockyard .\uthorities and of the Royal Society, and Evelyn wrote his Sylva to recommend them to make plantations by way of supplying the ground lately lost by natural fortwt. * Gregory King estimated the yeomen, at the end of the Stuart period, when their decline had already begun, at 180,000 families, or one-sixth of the total number of families in the countrv' ; the farmers at 150,000 families. His tables calculating the numbers of each class can be found in his own Observations, 1696, and in Davenant's Balance of Trade, 1699, p. 23, where the number of yeomen families is placed at 160,000. i ENGLAND UNDER THE STUARTS 103 enterprise, and were not, like their rivals, discouraged by the prospect of raised rents and fines on their improvements. What little advance in methods was made at this period was due either to the wealthier members of the yeoman class, or to gentlemen who, like Cromwell, worked their own land. But the want of capital and the want of education delayed any such improvement in methods as might have been expected to follow at once, wherever the system of common tillage was abandoned.^ But while in the eye of the pure economist the yeoman was scarcely in advance of the farmer, his social standing was far more enviable. In an age when no one even pretended to think it wrong for a man to enforce political and religious conformity among those over whose fortunes he had control, the yeoman reaping his own field enjoyed an independence denied to many pursuing more lucrative and more cultivated professions. To be counted as a yeoman a man must be able to spend 405. a year derived from his own freehold land.- This was also the quali- fication for the Parliamentary franchise in the counties, a priv- ilege which the yeoman exercised with more complete freedom than the tenant-farmer and field laborer in our own day. So far from desiring the protection of secrecy at the poll, the yeo- men took a jolly pride in voting, as eventually in fighting, on the opposite side to the neighboring squire. The yeomanry (wrote Fuller in the reign of Charles I) is an estate of people almost peculiar to England. France and Italy are like a die which hath no point between sink and ace, nobUity and peasantry. . . . The yeoman wears russet clothes, but makes golden payment, having tin in his buttons and silver in his pocket. ... In his own country he is a main man in Juries. He seldom ' Methods of caltle breeding were improved, and root crops introduced to feed the cattle. But turnips were only introduced in some places, and even then were badly cultivated. Artificial grasses were discussed but not introduced. Little was (lone to improve the cultivation of cereals, partly perhaps because the Dutch, whose methods were most studied and imitated, knew more about cattle, roots, and grasses than about corn. (Cunningham, Growth oj English Induslry and Commerce. Modern Times (ed. igoj), pp. 545, 546, s4q, 550.) ^ And yet .some of the more privileged copyholders of the North of England, like the Cumberland "statesmen," must be counted in the yeomen class. I04 Discussioxs or facts axd ideas goes far abroad, and his credit stretches further than his travel. He goes not to London, but sc-dcfcudcudo, to save himself a fine, being returntxi of a Jury, where seeing tlie King once, he prays for him ever aftcrwanls.' Such pious and simple yeomen were the backbone of Charles's cause in the Western shires when the hour of need came; but in East Anglia the jjrayers of the yeomen were sent uj) less often for the King's health than for the King's conversion. There are few things in the history of Europe so unaccountable as the ebb and flow of political agitation among the peasantry. At the close of the Middle Ages the tillers of the soil rose in revolt against feudal .society, first in France and England during the Hundred Years' War, then towards the beginning of the Lutheran movement, in Germany and in the Hungarian King- dom. Yet after these strange outbreaks, the peasantry of the continent relapsed into a long quiescence under wrongs which they had once refused to endure, until the great Revolution in French society aroused in the ancient villages of many distant lands, hopes and passions that had been buried for centuries in the soil. Nor was there in England any agitation among the peasantry during the Stuart epoch. In the reign of Edward VI the enclosures had caused local assemblies of armed peasants, not wholly unlike, in theory and in spirit, to the more general rising of 1381 ; but from these last stirrings of mediaeval revolt down to the time of Cobbett, the social agitator was almost unknown on the \dllage green. Even during the Common- wealth, when 30.000 political pamphlets were issued, and all men were invited by the spirit of the age to question the very basis of social conventions, there was no important movement among the peasantry on their own behalf.'- But although these ' The Holy State, Book II, Chap. XVIII. 'The score of "diggers on St. George's Hill" initiated an interesting but wholly powerless communistic movement in 1640 (see G. P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, 189S (Cambridge Historical Essays, No. X), pp. 2i4-225,andp. 282, note, below). The only other stirring of peasant revolt through- out the Stuart period was some unimportant rioting in 1607 in Warwickshire and Leicestershire, where enclosure for pasturage was still in progress after it had ceased elsewhere, and where the fashionable rage for deer-parks made further inroads on ENGLAND UNDER THE STUARTS 105 centuries of social peace in England corresponded in time with the same phenomenon on the continent, the English peasant was not resting in the same status as his brother across the channel. The French and German peasant was a serf ; the English peasant was now, by law, a freeman. The French peasant was pre- paring a bright future for his descendants by acquiring land, but at present his own position was unenviable : the wars of religion in France and Germany, followed by the endless cam- paigns dictated by the proud policy of the House of Bourbon, reduced the tillers of the soil to a state of misery such as in a former age had caused the terrible outbreak of the Jacquerie to interrupt the wars of Froissart. But in peaceful England the economic effect of the brief war between Charles and his Parliament was to raise the wage of the agricultural laborer. English travellers were shocked at the "wooden shoes and straw hats" of the foreign peasantry, and the "grass herbs and roots" which was too often their only food.^ But though the English field laborer was ahead of the German and French in economic and legal position, we must not ascribe the abeyance of rural agitation so much to the absence of rural grievances, as to the division of class interests and the want of leadership from above. The farmers and yeomen were now more divided off from the agricultural laborer, and more con- tented with their own economic and social position than in the days of Wat Tyler. These two classes, thus already ranged on the side of social conservatism, formed in the Stuart epoch a far larger proportion of the whole agricultural com- munity than they form to-day. Society in England was based on the stable and prosperous foundation of a very large number of small farms and small estates. The evils in- sei)arable from private property in land, the loss of liberty which it too often inflicts on those who have to live and work on the land of others, were in those days limited by the high proportion of landowners to the total population. agricultural land. But though the peasants pulled down some fences, the affair scarcely amounted to a rising. 1 Arber's Reprints, viii, Howell's Instructions, p. 74. IO() DISCUSSIONS OF FACTS AND IDEAS Ikit even then ihe iigricullural laborer for hire represented the most numerous class. The English peasant, though badly paid, was in some cases well fed by his emjiloyer. The "servant in husbandry' "' only went into a separate cottage when he married. Until then he boarded in the farm-house, and partook freely at the family table of the staple dish of meat, though not always of the puddings and delicacies. There was a closer contact between master and men- than now ; most of the farmers and yeomen were small and ujipretentious people, lixing on intimate terms with their ser\-ants, whose families had often been on the same farm for generations. The food of the farm-house, which the unmarried "servant in husbandry" shared, varied according to each season of the year, with its traditional fasts and feasts. In Lent all ate fish — fresh, if near seas and rivers, but salted, if in dry and upland districts. For meat was prohibited, both by immemorial custom, which must in many places have still been in part religious, and by the statutes of Protestant Parliaments. Those shrewd legislators continued to enforce the observance of Lent, not, as they were careful to state, for superstitious reasons, but to encourage the fisheries as the great school of seamanship and national defence. But the chief reason why the Lenten fast was still observed was because the ordinary rural ^ household had no meat to hand at that time of year except the flitch of bacon and the beef that had been slaughtered and salted last Martinmas Day (nth November). At midsummer fresh beef and mutton was killed amid general rejoicings, and continued to grace the tables until winter. At Christmas, during the "twelve days" of the year when least was to be gained by labor in the fields, the agricultural world made holiday, feasting on collars of brawn, fowls, turkeys, mince-pies and plum-pottage, besides nameless dishes, which the park-forester was not in- vited to share unless he came to court the honest yeoman's daughter ; the roasting piece of beef was stuck with rosemary, and though Jeremiah Carpenter standing by the spit testified ' Town butchers sometimes killed by stealth in the forbidden season {Court and Times of Charles I, 1848, ii, p. 72). ENGLAND UNDER THE STUARTS 107 concerning meats offered to idols, yet notwithstanding surely he ate thereof. Compared to other sorts of food, there was abundance of meat to be had in old England, for besides flocks of sheep, and herds of cattle and pigs, the country-side swarmed with rabbits, hares, and birds of all kinds, which, as the game- laws then stood, were the legitimate prey of the yeomen over whose land they strayed. The farm, which had to supply all the food of its inmates, except perhaps a little bad fish during Lent, could boast of a few vegetables in the garden but none in the fields. Fruit was more common ; strawberries, raspberries, and gooseberries had been grown in farm gardens fifty years before James came to the throne.^ But the abundance of meat food procurable off the farm is not the only reason why it is unsafe to judge of the real condition of the agricultural laborer solely from the statistics of wages and prices.^ Common land for pasturage of cows, pigs, and poultry, common rights of collecting fuel and fowling on moor and waste, were an important part of the cottagers' livelihood, though already encroached upon by deer-park enclosures, and destined to extinction in the great robbery of the poor by the rich at the close of the eighteenth century. Moreover, the wages of the head of the cottar family might be augmented by those of his wife and children, who were often separately employed and paid by the farmers. In haytime and harvest the whole population turned out ; and the mothers worked, putting their babies to play together in a corner of the busy field. At most ■ Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce (ed. 1802), p. ig3. W. A. S. Hewins, English Trade and Finance, pp. 88-96. A. H. Hamilton, Quarter Sessions, from Elizabeth to Anne (1878), p. 14. Also see Tusser's rhymes mSomers' Tracts, iii, for an intimate account of farm life in the middle of the Tudor period. Meat was so common that foreigners in the year 1602 remarked with surprise that the I'Lnglish rejected the entrails and feet for the table (Diary of the Duke of Stettin in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1892, p. 47). '^ .Agricultural wages were generally somewhere between 35. and 55. a week (when food was not given), but rose slowly throughout the century. Wheat, varying very greatly from year to year and county to county, was generally between 20.?. and 50.V., the average price, 1600-1610, being 34.S. Oid. ; and 1620-1630 licing 436-. o\d. (Miss Leonard, Early History of English Poor Relief, 1900, pp. 145, 301, 198, igg. Hamilton, Quarter Sessions from Elizahcth to Anne, pp. 12-14, 163. Hewins, English Trade and Finance, p. 86. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries, pp. 391-394, 426, 427). loS Discrssroxs or facts and ideas other times throughout the year tlie unmarried girls were em- ployed, as now, at certain kinds of agricultural labor, but not at the more severe ditching and carr\-ing. That last sacrilice of poverty was sixired. English gentlemen going out to join Prince Charles at Madrid, were shocked at the sight of the Spanish women staggering under loads, and going through that round of labor which brought the women of some of the most beautiful races of Europe to premature old age.^ But besides their work in the fields, country women were largely employed in industry. The cloth manufacture was organized by the "clothiers" of the towns ; but much labor was carried on in distant cottages, each of which was visited by the clothier on his periodic rounds. The old woolpack inns of England recall the time when it was common to meet, round the turning of a country lane, a train of horses laden with sacks of wool hanging to the ground on either side, or a clothier riding into market with pieces of cloth upon his saddle-bow. In this and other employments boys and girls were set to work at an early age. Although the state of things among the families of the continental peasantry was perhaps worse, yet English women and children were overworked long before the era of the factory system. Under the first two Stuarts all classes who lived on the land, and yet more those who were gathered in the towns, were in perpetual terror of plague. Disease and infant mortality pre- vented the rapid increase of the population. Medicine, as commonly practiced, was a formulated superstition rather than a science ; rules of health were little understood ; sanitar} habits were free and filthy among rich as well as poor. Our ancestors washed little, and their standard of public decency in trivialities was that of some modern nations which we now readily condemn. Prudery was rare even among Puritans; and cleanliness even among courtiers, who compounded by free use of oils and scents. Drinking-water was often contaminated, and the danger seldom recognized. Little value was set on fresh air indoors. The population, though thinly scattered on the soil, was closely ' Memoirs of (he V'erney Family, i, p. 78. INAUGURAL ADDRESS 109 packed in the houses. Servants and apprentices generally slept in holes among the rafters, and industry was often con- ducted in the crowded dweUing-rooms of the family. Many of the worst conditions of slum life existed in a small and chiefly rural population, who had, however, the supreme advantage of open air and the beauties of nature outside their door. It is not possible to know whether the general standard of physique was higher or lower than it is in the present day under con- ditions so much better and so much worse. INAUGURAL ADDRESS ^ WooDROw Wilson There has been a change of government. It began two years ago, when the House of Representatives became Demo- cratic by a decisive majority. It has now been completed. The Senate about to assemble will also be Democratic. The offices of President and Vice-President have been put into the hands of Democrats. What does the change mean? That is the question that is uppermost in our minds to-day. That is the question I am going to try to answer, in order, if I may, to interpret the occasion. It means much more than the mere success of a party. The success of a party means little except when the Nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose. No one can mistake the purpose for which the Nation now seeks to use the Democratic Party. It seeks to use it to interpret a change in its own plans and point of view. Some old things with which we had grown familiar, and which had begun to creep into the very habit of our thought and of our lives, have altered their aspect as we have latterly looked critically upon them, with fresh, awakened eyes ; have dropped their disguises and shown themselves alien and sinister. Some new things, as we look frankly upon them, willing to comprehend their real character, have come to assiune 1 Delivered at the Capitol, March 4, 1913. no DiscLssioys OF r.icrs and ideas the aspect of things lonj; believed in and familiar, slutT of our own convictions. We have l)een refreshed by a now insi;i;ht into our own hfe. We see that, in many things, that life is very great. It is incomparably great in its material aspects, in its body of wealth, in the diversity and sweep of its energy, in the industries which have been conceived and built up by the genius of individual men and the limitless enterprise of groups of men. It is great, also, very great, in its moral force. Nowhere else in the world have noble men and women exhibited in more striking forms the beauty and the energy of sympathy and helpfulness and counsel in their efforts to rectify wrong, alle\iate suffering, and set the weak in the way of strength and hope. We have built up, moreover, a great system of government, which has stood through a long age as in many respects a model for those who seek to set liberty upon foundations that will endure against fortuitous change, against storm and accident. Our life con- tains ever}' great thing, and contains it in rich abundance. But the evil has come with the good, and much fine gold has been corroded. With riches has come inexcusable waste. We have squandered a great part of what we might have used, and have not stopped to conserve the exceeding bounty of nature, without which our genius for enterprise would have been worth- less and impotent, scorning to be careful, shamefully prodigal as well as admirably efficient. We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through. The groans and agony of it all had not yet reached our ears, the solemn, moving undertone of our life, coming up out of the mines and factories and out of every home where the struggle had its intimate and familiar seat. With the great Government went many deep secret things which we too long delayed to look into and scrutinize with candid, fearless eyes. The great Government we loved has too often INAUGURAL ADDRESS III been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people. At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and vital. With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life without weakening or sentimentaliz- ing it. There has been something crude and heartless and un- feeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been "Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself," while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of con- trol should have a chance to look out for themselves. We had not forgotten our morals. We remembered well enough that we had set up a policy which was meant to serve the hum- blest as well as the most powerful, with an eye single to the standards of justice and fair play, and remembered it with pride. But we were very heedless and in a hurry to be great. We have come now to the sober second thpught. The scales of heedlessness have fallen from our eyes. We have made up our minds to square every process of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried at our hearts. Our work is a work of restoration. We have itemized with some degree of particularity the things that ought to be altered and here are some of the chief items : A tariff which cuts us off from our proper part in the commerce of the world, violates the just principles of taxation, and makes the Government a facile instrument in the hands of private interests ; a banking and currency system based upon the neces- sity of the Government to sell its bonds fifty years ago and perfectly adapted to concentrating cash and restricting credits ; an industrial system which, take it on all its sides, financial as well as administrative, holds capital in leading strings, restricts the liberties and limits the opportunities of labor, and exploits, without renewing or conserving, the natural resources of the country; a body of agricultural activities never yet given the 112 DISCUSSIONS OF FACTS AXD IDEAS efficiency of great business undertakings or served as it should be through the instrumontahty of science taken directly to the farm, or afforded the facilities of crecUt best suited to its practical needs; watercourses undeveloped, waste places unreclaimed, forests untended, fast disappearing without plan or prospect of renewal, unregarded waste heaps at every mine. We ha\e studied, as perhai^s no other nation has, the most elTective means of production, but we have not studied cost or economy as we should, either as organizers of industry, as statesmen, or as individuals. Nor have we studied and perfected the means by which govern- ment may be put at the service of humanity, in safeguarding the health of the Nation, the health of its men and its women and its children, as well as their rights in the struggle for existence. This is no sentimental duty. The firm basis of government is justice, not pity. These are matters of justice. There can be no equality of opportunity, the first essential of justice in the body poHtic, if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with. Society must see to it that it does not itself crush or weaken or damage its own constituent parts. The first duty of law is to keep sound the society it serves. Sanitary laws, pure food laws, and laws determining conditions of labor w^hich indi\aduals are powerless to determine for them- selves, are intimate parts of the very business of justice and legal efficiency. These are some of the things we ought to do, and not leave the others undone, the old-fashioned, never- to-be-neglected, fundamental safeguarding of property and of individual right. This is the high enterprise of the new day : To lift everything that concerns our life as a Nation to the light that shines from the hearthfire of every man's conscience and vision of the right. It is inconceivable that we should do this as partisans; it is inconceivable we should do it in ignorance of the facts as they are, or in blind haste. We shall restore, not destroy. We shall deal with our economic system as it is and as it may be INAUGURAL ADDRESS II3 modified, not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to write upon ; and step by step we shall make it what it should be, in the spirit of those who question their own wisdom and seek counsel and knowledge, not shallow self-satisfaction or the excitement of excursions whither they cannot tell. Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto. And yet it will be no cool process of mere science. The Nation has been deeply stirred, stirred by a solemn passion, stirred by the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often debauched and made an instrument of evil. The feelings with which we face this new age of right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of God's own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are one. We know our task to be no mere task of politics, but a task which shall search us through and through, whether we be able to understand our time and the need of our people, whether we be indeed their spokesmen and interpreters, whether we have the pure heart to comprehend and the rectified will to choose our high course of action. This is not a day of triumph ; it is a day of dedication. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men's hearts wait upon us ; men's lives hang in the balance ; men's hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust ? Who dares fail to try ? I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me ! LINCOLN AS MORE THAN AN AMERICAN ^ Herbert Croly Lincoln's services to his country have been rewarded with such abundant appreciation that it may seem superfluous to ■ From The Promise of American Life. The Macmillan Company, 1909. Re- printed by permission. I 114 DISCL'SSIO.XS OF FACTS ASD IDEAS insist upH»n them once ajj;ain ; hut I bt'licvc that from the point of \it'w of this book an even higher vahie may be placed, if not upon his patriotic service, at least upon his j)ersonal worth. The Union might well have been saved and slavery extinguished without his assistance ; but the life of no other American haij revealed with anything like the same completeness the peculiar moral promise of genuine democracy. He shows us by the full but unconscious integrity of his example the kind of himian excellence which a political and social democracy may and should fashion ; and its most grateful and hopeful aspect is, not merely that there is something partially American about the manner of his excellence, but that it can be fairly compared with the classic types of consummate personal distinction. To all appearance nobody could have been more than Abraham Lincoln a man of his own time and place. Until 1858 his outer life ran much in the same groove as that of hundreds of other Western politicians and lawyers. Beginning as a poor and ignorant boy, even less provided Avith props and stepping-stones than were his associates, he had worked his way to a position of ordinary professional and political distinction. He was not, like Douglas, a brilliant success. He was not, like Grant, an apparently hopeless failure. He had achieved as much and as little as hundreds of others had achieved. He was respected by his neighbors as an honest man and as a competent lawyer. They credited him with ability, but not to any extraordinary extent. No one would have pointed him out as a remarkable and distinguished man. He had shown himself to be desirous of recognition and influence; but ambition had not been the compelling motive in his life. In most respects his ideas, interests, and standards were precisely the same as those of his associates. He accepted with them the fabric of traditional American political thought and the ordinary standards of con- temporary political morality. He had none of the moral strenu- ousness of the reformer, none of the exclusiveness of a man whose purposes and ideas were consciously perched higher than those of his neighbors. Probably the majority of his more successful associates classed him as a good and able man who LINCOLN AS MORE THAN AN AMERICAN 115 was somewhat lacking in ambition and had too much of a dis- position to loaf. He was most at home, not in his own house, but in the corner grocery store, where he could sit with his feet on the stove swapping stories with his friends ; and if an English traveller of 1850 had happened in on the group, he would most assuredly have discovered another instance of the distressing vulgarity to which the absence of an hereditary aristocracy and an established church condemned the American democracy. Thus no man could apparently have been more the average product of his day and generation. Nevertheless, at bottom Abraham Lincoln differed as essentially from the ordinary Western American of the Middle Period as St. Francis of Assisi differed from the ordinary Benedictine monk of the thirteenth century. The average Western American of Lincoln's generation was fundamentally a man who subordinated his intelligence to cer- tain dominant practical interests and purposes. He was far from being a stupid or slow-witted man. On the contrary, his wits had been sharpened by the traffic of American politics and business, and his mind was shrewd, flexible, and alert. But he was wholly incapable either of disinterested or of con- centrated intellectual exertion. His energies were bent in the conquest of certain stubborn external forces, and he used his intelligence almost exclusively to this end. The struggles, the hardships, and the necessary self-denial of pioneer life con- stituted an admirable training of the will. It developed a body of men with great resolution of purpose and with great ingenuity and fertility in adapting their insufficient means to the real- ization of their important business affairs. But their almost exclusive preoccupation with practical tasks and their failure to grant their intelligence any room for independent exercise bent them into exceedingly warped and one-sided human beings. Lincoln, on the contrary, much as he was a man of his own time and people, was precisely an example of high and disin- terested intellectual culture. During all the formative years in which his life did not superficially differ from that of his associates, he was in point of fact using every chance which the material ii6 DrscL'ssroNS of facts and ideas of Western life atTordeil tci discipline and inform his mind. These materials were not very abundant ; and in the use which he proceeded tt) make of ihem Lincoln had no assistance, either from a sound tradition or from a better educated master. On the contrary, as the history of the times shows, there was every temptation for a man with a strong intellectual bent to be betrayed into mere extravagance and aberration. But with the sound instinct of a well-balanced intelligence Lincoln seized upon the three available books, the earnest study of which might best help to develop harmoniously a strong and many-sided intelligence. He seized, that is, upon the Bible, Shakespeare, and Euclid. To his contemporaries the Bible was for the most part a fountain of fanatic revivalism, and Shakespeare, if any- thing, a mine of quotations. But in the case of Lincoln, Shake- speare and the Bible served, not merely to awaken his taste and fashion his style, but also to liberate his literary and moral imagination. At the same time he was training his powers of thought by an assiduous study of algebra and geometry. The absorbing hours he spent over his Euclid were apparently of no use to him in his profession ; but Lincoln was in his way an intellectual gymnast and enjoyed the e.\ertion for its own sake. Such a use of his leisure must have seemed a sheer waste of time to his more practical friends, and they might well have accounted for his comparative lack of success by his indulgence in such secret and useless pastimes. Neither would this criticism have been beside the mark, for if Lincoln's great energy and powers of work had been devoted exclusively to practical ends, he might well have become in the early days a more prominent lawyer and politician than he actually was. But he preferred the satis- faction of his own intellectual and social instincts, and so qualified himself for achievements beyond the power of a Douglas. In addition, however, to these private gymnastics Lincoln shared with his neighbors a public and popular source of intel- lectual and human insight. The Western pioneers, for all their exclusive devotion to practical purposes, wasted a good deal of time on apparently useless social intercourse. In the Middle Western towns of that day there was, as we have seen, an ex- LINCOLN AS MORE THAN AN AMERICAN 117 traordinary amount of good-fellowship, which was quite the most wholesome and humanizing thing which entered into the lives of these hard-working and hard-featured men. The whole male countryside was in its way a club ; and when the presence of women did not make them awkward and sentimental, the men let themselves loose in an amount of rough pleasantry and free conversation, which added the one genial and liberating touch to their lives. This club life of his own people Lincoln enjoyed and shared much more than did his average neighbor. He passed the greater part of what he would have called his leisure time in swapping with his friends stories, in which the genial and humorous side of Western life was embodied. Doubtless his domestic unhappiness had much to do with his vagrancy ; but his native instinct for the wholesome and illuminating aspect of the life around him brought him more frequently than any other cause to the club of loafers in the general store. And whatever the promiscuous conversation and the racy yarns meant to his associates, they meant vastly more to Lincoln. His hours of social vagrancy really completed the process of his intellectual training. It relieved his culture from the taint of bookishness. It gave substance to his humor. It humanized his wisdom and enabled him to express it in a familiar and dramatic form. It placed at his disposal, that is, the great classic vehicle of popular expression, which is the parable and the spoken word. Of course, it was just because he shared so completely the amusements and the occupations of his neighbors that his private personal culture had no embarrassing effects. Neither he nor his neighbors were in the least aware that he had been placed thereby in a different intellectual class. No doubt the loneliness and sadness of his personal life may be partly explained by a dumb sense of difference from his fellows ; and no doubt this very loneliness and sadness intensified the mental preoccupation which was both the sign and the result of his personal culture. But his unconsciousness of his own distinction, as well as his regular participation in political and professional practice, kept his will as firm and vigorous as if he were really no more than a man of action. His natural steadiness of purpose had ikS discussio\:> of facts a.mj idfias bfc'ii loughcnccl in tin- hcginnini; by the hardships aiul struggles which he shared with his neighbors; and his self-imposed in- tellectual discipline in no way impaired the stability of his character, because his personal culture never alienated him from his neighbors and threw him into a consciously critical frame of mind. The time which he spent in intellectual diver- sion may have diminished to some extent his practical efficiency previous to the gathering crisis. It certainly made him less inclined to the aggressive self-assertion which a successful political career demanded. But when the crisis came, when the minds of Northern patriots were stirred by the ugly alternative offered to them by the South, and when Lincoln was by the course of events restored to active participation in politics, he soon showed that he had reached the highest of all objects of personal culture. While still remaining one of a body of men who, all unconsciously, impoverished their minds in order to increase the momentum of their practical energy, he none the less achieved for himself a mutually helpful relation between a firm will and a luminous intelligence. The training of his mind, the awakening of his imagination, the formation of his taste and style, the humorous dramatizing of his experience, — all this discipline had failed to pervert his character, narrow his sympathies, or undermine his purposes. His intelligence served to enlighten his will, and his will, to establish the mature decisions of his intelligence. Late in life the two faculties became in their exercise almost indistinguishable. His judgments, in so far as they were decisive, were charged with momentum, and his actions were instinct with sympathy and understanding. Just because his actions were instinct with sympathy and understanding, Lincoln was certainly the most humane states- man who ever guided a nation through a great crisis. He al- ways regarded other men and acted towards them, not merely as the embodiment of an erroneous or harmful idea, but as human beings, capable of better things ; and consequently all of his thoughts and actions looked in the direction of a higher level of human association. It is this characteristic which makes him a better and, be it hoi)ed, a more prophetic democrat than LINCOLN AS MORE THAN AN AMERICAN iig any other national American leader. His peculiar distinction does not consist in the fact that he was a "Man of the People" who passed from the condition of splitting rails to the condition of being President. No doubt he was in this respect as good a democrat as you please, and no doubt it was desirable that he should be this kind of a democrat. But many other Americans could be named who were also men of the people, and who passed from the most insignificant to the most honored positions in American life. Lincoln's peculiar and permanent distinction as a democrat will depend rather upon the fact that his thoughts and his actions looked towards the realization of the highest and most edifying democratic ideal. Whatever his theories were, he showed by his general outlook and behavior that de- mocracy meant to him more than anything else the spirit and principle of brotherhood. He was the foremost to deny liberty to the South, and he had his sensible doubts about the equality between the negro and the white man ; but he actually treated everybody — the Southern rebel, the negro slave, the Northern deserter, the personal enemy — in a just and kindly spirit. Neither was this kindliness merely an instance of ordinary American amiability and good nature. It was the result, not of superficial feeling which could be easily ruffled, but of his personal, moral, and intellectual discipline. He had made for himself a second nature, compact of insight and loving-kindness. It must be remembered, also, that this higher humanity resided in a man who was the human instrument partly re- sponsible for an awful amount of slaughter and human anguish. He was not only the commander-in-chief of a great army which fought a long and bloody war, but he was the statesman who had insisted that, if necessary, the war should be fought. His mental attitude was dictated by a mixture of practical common sense with genuine human insight, and it is just this mixture which makes him so rare a man and, be it hoped, so prophetic a democrat. He could at one and the same moment order his countrymen to be killed for seeking to destroy the American nation and forgive them for their error. His kindliness and his brotherly feeling did not lead him, after the manner of Jefferson, 120 Discussioxs or iwcrs and ideas to shirk the necessity and duty of national defence. Neither did it lead him, after the manner of William Lloyd Garrison, to advocate non-resistance, wliile at the same time arousinj^ in his fellow-countrymen a spirit of fratricidal warfare. In the midst of that hideous civil contest which was pro\^oked, perhaj^s un- necessarily, by hatred, irresponsibility, jiassion, and disloyalty, and which has been the fruitful cause of national disloyalty down to the present day, Lincoln did not for a moment cherish a bitter or unjust feeling against the national enemies. The Southerners, filled as they were with a passionate democratic devotion to their own interests and liberties, abused Lincoln until they really came to believe that he was a military tyrant, yet he never failed to treat them in a fair and forgiving si)irit. When he w'as assassinated, it was the South, as well as the American nation, which had lost its best friend, because he alone among the Republican leaders had the wisdom to see that the divided House could only be restored by justice and kind- ness; and if there are any defects in its restoration to-day, they are chiefly due to the baleful spirit of injustice and hatred which the Republicans took over from the Abolitionists. His superiority to his political associates in constructive states- manship is measured by his superiority in personal character. There are many men who are able to forgive the enemies of their country-, but there are few who can forgive their personal enemies. I need not rehearse the well-known instances of Lincoln's mag- nanimity. He not only cherished no resentment against men who had intentionally #nd even maliciously injured him, but he seems at times to have gone out of his way to do them a service. This is, perhaps, his greatest distinction. Lincoln's magnanimity is the final proof of the completeness of his self-discipline. The quality of being magnanimous is both the consummate virtue and the one which is least natural. It was certainly far from being natural among Lincoln's own people. Americans of his time were generally of the opinion that it was dishonorable to overlook a personal injury. They considered it weak and un- manly not to quarrel with another man a little harder than he quarrelled with you. The pioneer was good-natured and kindly ; LINCOLN AS MORE THAN AN AMERICAN 12 1 but he was aggressive, quick-tempered, unreasonable, and utterly devoid of personal discipline. A slight or an insult to his per- sonality became in his eyes a moral wrong which must be cherished and avenged, and which relieved him of any obligation to be just or kind to his enemy. Many conspicuous illustrations of this quarrelsome spirit are to be found in the political life of the middle period, which, indeed, cannot be understood with- out constantly falling back upon the influence of lively personal resentments. Every prominent politician cordially disliked or hated a certain number of his political adversaries and as- sociates ; and his public actions were often dictated by a purpose either to injure these men or to get ahead of them. After the retirement of Jackson these enmities and resentments came to have a smaller influence ; but a man's right and duty to quarrel with anybody who, in his opinion, had done him an injury was unchallenged, and was generally considered to be the necessary accompaniment of American democratic virility. As I have intimated above, Andrew Jackson was the most conspicuous example of this quarrelsome spirit, and for this reason he is wholly inferior to Lincoln as a type of democratic manhood. Jackson had many admirable qualities and on the whole he served his country well. He also was a "Man of the People" who understood and represented the mass of his fellow- countrymen, and who played the part, according to his lights, of a courageous and independent political leader. He also loved and defended the Union. But with all his excellence he should never be held up as a model to American youth. The world was divided into his personal friends and followers and his personal enemies, and he was as eager to do the latter an injury as he was to do the former a service. His quarrels were not petty, because Jackson was, on the whole, a big rather than a little man, but they were fierce and they were for the most part irreconcilable. They bulk so large in his life that they can- not be overlooked. They stamp him a type of the vindictive man without personal discipline, just as Lincoln's behavior towards Stanton, Chase, and others stamps him a type of the man who has achieved magnanimity. He is the kind of 122 DISCUSSIONS OF FACTS AND IDEAS national hero tho admirinc; imitation of whom can do nolliinji but gt^xl. Lincohi had abandoned the illusion of his own peculiar |)er- sonal importance. He had become profoundly and sincerely humble, and his humility was as far as possible from beinp; either a conventional pose or a matter of nervous self-distrust. It did not impair the firmness of his will. It did not betray him into shirkin'-value ; so that in a broad sense the hu- manities mean literature primarily, and in a still broader sense, the study of masterpieces in almost any field of human endeavor. Literature keeps the primacy ; for it not onh' consists of master- pieces, but is largely about masterpieces, being little more than an appreciative chronicle of human master-strokes, so far as it takes the form of criticism and history. You can give human- istic value to almost anything by teaching it historically. Geol- ogy, economics, mechanics, are humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being. Not taught thus, literature remains grammar, art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures. THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED 139 The sifting of human creations ! — nothing less than this is what we ought to mean by the humanities. Essentially this means biography ; what our colleges should teach is, therefore, biographical history, that not of politics merely, but of any- tliing and everything so far as human efforts and conquests are factors that have played their part. Studying in this way, we learn what types of activity have stood the test of time; we acquire standards of the excellent and durable. All our arts and sciences and institutions are but so many quests of perfec- tion on the part of men; and when we see how diverse the types of excellence may be, how various the tests, how flexible the adaptations, we gain a richer sense of what the terms "better" and "worse" may signify in general. Our critical sensibihties grow both more acute and less fanatical. We sympathize with men's mistakes even in the act of penetrating them ; we feel the pathos of lost causes and misguided epochs even while we applaud what overcame them. Such words are vague and such ideas are inadequate, but their meaning is unmistakable. What the colleges — teaching hu- manities by examples which may be special, but which must be typical and pregnant — should at least try to give us, is a general sense of what, under various disguises, superiority has always signified and may still signify. The feeling for a good human job anywhere, the admiration of the really admirable, the dis- esteem of what is cheap and trashy and impermanent — this is what we call the critical sense, the sense for ideal values. It is the better part of what men know as wisdom. Some of us are wise in this way naturally and by genius ; some of us never become so. But to have spent one's youth at college, in contact with the choice and rare and precious, and yet still to be a blind prig or vulgarian, unable to scent out human excellence or to divine it amid its accidents, to know it only when ticketed and labelled and forced on us by others, this indeed should be ac- counted the very calamity and shipwreck of a higher education. The sense for human superiority ought, then, to be considered our line, as boring subways is the engineer's line and the sur- geon's is appendicitis. Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a 14© DlSCL'SSrOXS OF FACTS AXD IDF.AS lasting relish for the lictter kind of man, a hiss of appetite for metliocrities, and a disgust for chcapjacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the ditlcrence of quality in men and their projwsals when we enter the world of alTairs about us. Expertness in this might well atone for some of our awkwardness at accounts, for some of our ignorance of dynamos. The best claim we can make for the higher education, the best single phrase in which we can tell what it ought to do for us, is, then, exactly what I said: it should enable us to know a ^ood man when ive sec Jiim. That the phrase is anything but an empty epigram follows from the fact that if you ask in what line it is most important that a democracy like ours should have its sons and daughters skilful, you see that it is this line more than any other. "The people in their ^^^sdom" — this is the kind of \\isdom most needed by the people. Democracy is on its trial, and no one knows how it \\i\\ stand the ordeal. Abounding about us are pessimistic prophets. Fickleness and N-iolence used to be, but are no longer, the \ices which they charge to democracy. What its critics now affirm is that its preferences are inveterately for the inferior. So it was in the beginning, they say, and so it will be world -without end. Vulgarity enthroned and institution- alized, elbo\N'ing everything superior from the highway, this, they tell us, is our irremediable destiny ; and the picture-papers of the European continent are already dra\\'ing Uncle Sam with the hog instead of the eagle for his heraldic emblem. The priv- ileged aristocracies of the foretime, with all their iniquities, did at least preserve some taste for higher human quality and honor certain forms of refinement by their enduring traditions. But when democracy is sovereign, its doubters say, nobility \vi\\ form a sort of invisible church, and sincerity and refinement, stripped of honor, precedence, and favor, will have to vegetate on suf- ferance in private comers. They will have no general influence. They will be harmless eccentricities. Now, who can be absolutely certain that this may not be the career of democracy ? Nothing future is quite secure ; states enough have inwardly rotted ; and democracy as a whole may undergo self-poisoning. But, on the other hand, democracy is THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED 141 a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and Utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture. The best of us are filled with the contrary vision of a democracy stumbling through every error till its institutions glow with justice and its customs shine with beauty. Our better men shall show the way and we shall follow them ; so we are brought round again to the mission of the higher education in helping us to know the better kind of man whenever we see him. The notion that a people can run itself and its affairs anony- mously is now well known to be the silliest of absurdities. Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small, and imitation by the rest of us — these are the sole factors active in human progress. Individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns, which common people then adopt and follow. The rivalry of the patterns is the history of the world. Our democratic problem thus is statable in ultra-simple terms : Who are the kind of men from whom our majorities shall take their cue? Whom shall they treat as rightful leaders ? We and our leaders are the x and the y of the equation here ; all other historic circumstances, be they eco- nomical, political, or intellectual, are only the background of occasion on which the living drama works itself out between us. In this very simple way does the value of our educated class define itself : we more than others should be able to divine the worthier and better leaders. The terms here are monstrously simplified, of course, but such a bird's-eye view lets us im- mediately take our bearings. In our democracy, where every- thing else is so shifting, we alumni and alumnae of the colleges are the only permanent presence that corresponds to the aris- tocracy in older countries. We have continuous traditions, as they have ; our motto, too, is noblesse oblige : and, unlike them, we stand for ideal interests solely, for we have no corporate selfishness and wield no powers of corruption. We ought to have our own class-consciousness. " Les intellectuels " ! What 142 DfSCi'SSrOXS OF FACTS A.\D IDf-.AS prouder club-name could there he than this one, used ironically by the party of "red l)lood," the party of every stu|)id prejudice and passion, durinj^ the anti-Dreyfus cra/e, to satiri/.e the men in France who still retained some critical sense and jud<;ment ! Critical sense, it has to be confessed, is not an exciting term, hardly a banner to carry in processions. Affections for okl habit, currents of self-interest, and j^ales of passion are the forces that keep the human ship moving ; and the pressure of the judicious pilot's hand upon the tiller is a relatively insignificant energ>'. But the affections, passions, and interest are shifting, successive, and distraught ; they blow in alternation while the pilot's hand is steadfast. He knows the compass, and, with all the leeways he is obliged to tack toward, he always makes some headway. A small force, if it never lets up, will accumu- late effects more considerable than those of much greater forces if these work inconsistently. The ceaseless whisper of the more permanent ideals, the steady tug of truth and justice, give them but time, must warp the world in their direction. This bird's-eye view of the general steering function of the college-bred amid the driftings of democracy ought to help us to a wider \'ision of what our colleges themselves should aim at. If we are to be the yeast-cake for democracy's dough, if we are to make it rise with culture's preferences, we must see to it that culture spreads broad sails. We must shake the old double reefs out of the canvas into the -wind and sunshine, and let in ever>' modern subject, sure that any subject will prove human- istic, if its setting be kept only \Nide enough. Stevenson says somewhere to his reader : "You think you are just making this bargain, but you are really la^-ing down a link in the policy of mankind." Well, your technical school should enable you to make your bargain splendidly ; but your college should show you just the place of that kind of bargain — a pretty poor place, possibly — in the whole policy of mankind. That is the kind of liberal outlook, of perspective, of atmosphere, which should surround every subject as a college deals with it. We of the colleges must eradicate a curious notion which numbers of good people have about such ancient seats of learning THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED [43 as Harvard. To many ignorant outsiders, that name suggests little more than a kind of sterilized conceit and incapacity for being pleased. In Edith Wyatt's exquisite book of Chicago sketches called Every One His Own Way, there is a couple who stand for culture in the sense of exclusiveness, Richard Elliot and his feminine counterpart — feeble caricatures of mankind, unable to know any good thing when they see it, incapable of enjoyment unless a printed label gives them leave. Possibly this type of culture may exist near Cambridge and Boston, there may be specimens there, for priggishness is just like painter's colic or any other trade-disease. But every good college makes its students immune against this malady, of which the microbe haunts the neighborhood-printed pages. It does so by its gen- eral tone being too hearty for the microbe's life. Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and dis- dains — under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core. If a college, through the inferior hu- man influences that have grown regnant there, fails to catch the robuster tone, its failure is colossal, for its social function stops ; democracy gives it a wide berth, turns toward it a deaf ear. ''Tone," to be sure, is a terribly vague word to use, but there is no other, and this whole meditation is over questions of tone. By their tone are all things human either lost or saved. If democracy is to be saved it must catch the higher, healthier tone. If we are to impress it with our preferences, we ourselves must use the proper tone, which we, in turn, must have caught from our own teachers. It all reverts in the end to the action of innumerable imitative individuals upon each other and to the question of whose tone has the highest spreading power. As a class, we college graduates should look to it that ours has spreading power. It ought to have the highest spreading power. In our essential function of indicating the better men, we now have formidable competitors outside. McClure's Magazine, the American Magazine, Collier^ s Weekly and, in its fashion, the World's Work, constitute together a real popular uuivcrsit}' 144 DISCUSSIOXS OF FACTS AND IDEAS along this very liiu-. It would be a pity if any future historian were to have to write words like these: "By the middle of the twentieth century the higher institutions of learning had lost all influence over j)ul)lic opinion in the L'nited States. Hut th<; mission of raising the tone of democracy, which they had proved themselves so lamentably unfitted to exert, was assumed with rare enthusiasm and prosecuted with extraordinary skill and success by a new educational power ; and for the claritlcation of their human sympathies and elc\ation of their human prefer- ences, the people at large acquired the habit of resorting ex- clusively to the guidance of certain private literary adventures, commonly designated in the market by the aflfectionate name of ten-cent magazines." Must not we of the colleges see to it that no historian shall ever say anything like this? Vague as the phrase of knowing a good man w^hen you see him may be, diflfuse and indefinite as one must leave its application, is there any other formula that describes so well the result at which our institutions ouf^ht to aim ? If they do that, they do the best thing conceivable. If they fail to do it, they fail in very deed. It surely is a fine synthetic formula. If our faculties and graduates could once collectively come to realize it as the great underlying purpose toward which they have always been more or less obscurely groping, a great clearness would be shed over many of their problems; and, as for their influence in the midst of our social system, it would embark upon a new career of strength. I. D. EXPOSITORY BIOGRAPHY FRANCIS PARKMANi Henry Cabot Lodge I DESIRE to give, if possible, the impression, for it can be no more than an impression, of a life which in its conflicts and victories manifested throughout heroic qualities. Such quali- ties can be shown in many ways, and the field of battle is only one of the fields of human endeavor where heroism can be dis- played. Francis Parkman was born in Boston on September i6, 1822. He came of a well-known family, and was of good Puritan stock. He was rather a delicate boy, with an extremely active mind and of a highly sensitive, nervous organization. Into everything that attracted him he threw himself with feverish energy. His first passion, when he was only about twelve years old, was for chemistry, and his eager boyish experiments in this direction were undoubtedly injurious to his health. The interest in chemistry was succeeded by a passion for the woods and the wilderness, and out of this came the longing to write the history of the men of the wilder- ness, and of the great struggle between France and Eng- land for the control of the North American continent. All through his college career this desire was with him, and while in secret he was reading widely to prepare himself for his task, he also spent a great deal of time in the forests and on the moun- tains. To quote his own words, he was "fond of hardships, and he was vain of enduring them, cherishing a sovereign scorn for every physical weakness or defect ; but deceived, moreover, > From Hero Tales oj American History. The Century Company, 1895. Re- printed by permission. L 145 146 EXPOSITORY BIOGRAPHY hv the rapid development of frame and sinew, \vlii( li llatlered him into the belief that discipline sufficiently unsparing \vt)uld harden him into an athlete, he slii^hted the precautions of a more reasonable woodcraft, tired old foresters with lonj^ marches, stoj^ped neither for heat nor for rain, and slept on the earth without blankets." The result was that his intense energy carried him beyond his strength, and while his muscles strengthened and hardened, his sensitive nervous organization began to give way. It was not merely because he led an active outdoor life. He himself protests against any such conclusion, and says that "if any pale student glued to his desk here seek an apology for a way of life whose natural fruit is that pallid and emasculate scholarship, of which New England has had too many examples, it will be far better that this sketch had not been written. For the student there is, in its season, no better place than the saddle, and no better companion than the rifle or the oar." The evil that was done was due to Parkman's highly irritable organism, which spurred him to excess in everything he under- took. The first special sign of the mischief he was doing to himself and his health appeared in a weakness of sight. It was essential to his plan of historical work to study not only books and records but Indian life from the inside. Therefore, having graduated from college and the law-school, he felt that the time had come for this investigation, which would enable him to gather material for his history and at the same time to rest his eyes. He went to the Rocky Mountains, and after great hardships, living in the saddle, as he said, with weakness and pain, he joined a band of Ogallalla Indians. With them he remained despite his physical sufTering, and from them he learned , as he could not have learned in any other way, what Indian life really was. The immediate result of the journey was his first book, in- stinct with the freshness and wildness of the mountains and the prairies, and called by him The Oregon Trail. Unfortunately, the book was not the only outcome. The illness incurred during his journey from fatigue and exposure was followed by other FRANCIS PARKMAN 147 disorders. The light of the sun became unsupportable, and his nervous system was entirely deranged. His sight was now so impaired that he was almost blind, and could neither read nor write. It was a terrible prospect for a brilliant and ambitious man, but Parkman faced it unflinchingly. He devised a frame by which he could write with closed eyes, and books and manu- scripts were read to him. In this way he began the history of The Conspiracy of Pontiac, and for the first half-year the rate of composition covered about six lines a day. His courage was rewarded by an improvement in his health, and a little more quiet in nerves and brain. In two and a half years he managed to complete the book. He then entered upon his great subject of "France in the New World." The material was mostly in manuscript, and had to be examined, gathered, and selected in Europe and in Canada. He could not read, he could write only a very little and that with difficulty, and yet he pressed on. He slowly collected his material and digested and arranged it, using the eyes of others to do that which he could not do himself, and always on the verge of a complete breakdown of mind and body. In 1851 he had an effusion of water on the left knee, which stopped his outdoor exercise, on which he had always largely depended. All the irritability of the system then centred in the head, resulting in intense pain and in a restless and devouring activity of thought. He himself says: "The whirl, the confusion, and strange undefined tortures attending this condition are only to be conceived by one who has felt them." The resources of surgery and medicine were exhausted in vain. The trouble in the head and eyes constantly recurred. In 1858 there came a period when for four years he was inca- pable of the slightest mental application, and the attacks varied in duration from four hours to as many months. When the pressure was lightened a little, he went back to his work. When work was impossible, he turned to horticulture, grew roses, and wrote a book about the cultivation of those flowers which is a standard authority. As he grew older the attacks moderated, although they never 148 EXPOSITORY HIOGRyiPHY departed. Sleeplessness pursued him always, the slightest cxiitement would deprive him of the power of exertion, his >ight was always sensitive, and at times he was bordering on blindness. In this hard-pressed way he fought the battle of life. He says himself that his books took four times as long to prepare and write as if he had been strong and able to use his faculties. That this should have been the case is little wonder, lor those books came into being with failing sight and shattered nerves, -vN-ith sleeplessness and pain, and the menace of in>anity ever hanging over the brave man who, nevertheless, carried them through to an end. Yet the result of those fifty years, even in amount, is a noble one, and would have been a great achievement for a man who had never known a sick day. In quality, and subject, and method of narration, they leave little to be desired. There, in Parkman's volumes, is told Aividly, strongly, and truthfully, the history of the great struggle between France and England for the master^' of the North American continent, one of the most important events of modern times. This is not the place to give any critical estimate of Mr. Parkman's work. It is enough to say that it stands in the front rank. It is a great contribution to historv', and a still greater gift to the literature of this countr>'. All Americans certainly should read the volumes in which Parkman has told that wonderful story of hardship and adventure, of fighting and of statesmanship, which ga\e this great continent to the English race and the English speech. But better than the literature or the history is the heroic spirit of the man, which triumphed over pain and all other physical obstacles, and brought a work of such value to his countr>^ and his time into existence. There is a great lesson as well as a lofty example in such a career, and in the service which such a man rendered by his life and work to literature and to his countr>'. On the tomb of the conqueror of Quebec it is written: "Here lies Wolfe victorious." The same epitaph might with entire justice be car\'ed above the grave of Wolfe's historian. GOLDWIN SMITH 149 GOLD WIN SMITHS James Bryce The earliest picture in literature of a man of wide knowl- edge and wise thought who has with unquenched powers lived down into a generation not his own is that of Nestor as he is presented to us in the Homeric poems. Nestor had known the grandfathers and fathers of the chieftains of his later years, so all his juniors honored him, and listened respectfully to his long discourses. But when in the vast and constantly chang- ing society of these modern days of ours a sage or a prophet outlives all his contemporaries, there is a certain risk that he may be misunderstood and possibly even disparaged by the generation which did not know him till his prime had passed, and which has forgotten the men and the conditions that formed his character and doctrines. It seems therefore almost a duty laid upon those who, though much his juniors, remember Gold- win Smith in his earlier days, when he was a power in the po- litical and literary world of England, to put on paper their im- pressions of him as he was then, and try to present a view of him which may prevent misconceptions either of his personal quality or of the ideas which he held with unwavering convic- tion and strove during more than half a century to propagate. He left a short Autobiography ; and parts of his correspondence have been published, but it sometimes happens that neither the letters which a man writes nor what he tells of himself con- veys an adequate picture of him as he was in his best years, A brilliant talker, moreover, with a vein of sarcastic humor, says many things which he does not mean to be taken literally, and which, when read in cold print, may easily be misunder- stood. So it may be worth while to give some personal impres- sions formed in a friendship which extended over more than forty-five years. A distinguished man once described him as the last of the 'From the North American Revinv, 1014. Copyripht, 19x4, by the North American Review PubHshing Company. Reprinted by permission. 15© EXPOSITORY BIOGRAPHY prophets of tlu- \"icl*>rian age, and one might extend the same 1)} calling him the last of the prophets of the nineteenth century, one who closed the line which began with S. T. Coleridge and culminated in Thomas Carlyle. Less constructive than the former of these two more famous men, and less poetical than cither of them, he was even more fertile in production, and his actixity covered a longer stretch of time. Born in 1823 he continued to write till the eve of his death in 1910. He could remember the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832 and he lived to see the rejection by the Lords of the Budget Bill of 1909, an event only second in importance to that Bill, for it directly led to the great constitutional change effected by the Parliament Act of 191 1. He was six years old at the election of Andrew Jack- son as President, and he survived the election of William H. Taft. His father was a physician living near Reading in Berkshire, a cultivated man in easy circumstances, who could afford to send his son to Eton. At that school his abilities and especially his gift for Latin and Greek composition made him quickly conspicuous. When he proceeded to Oxford he carried otT all the honors for which he competed, crowning his career by a brilliant essay "On the Political and Moral Benefits of the Eng- lish Reformation," in which he showed himself already a finished master of style. Hardly any of his later writings surpassed this work of his twenty-third year. Entering at the Bar, he lived for some time in London, where he served as secretary to one Royal Commission and as a member of tw^o others, but having some private means he did not seek legal practice, but gave his spare time to political and historical studies, and began to write for the press, first (I think) for the Chronicle, and then for the Saturday Review when the latter journal was established in 1855. His Oxford reputation had secured for him access to the best political as well as literary society in London. He soon came to know most of the leading men among the Liberals, and was still more at home in the Peelite group in w^hich Gladstone, Sydney Herbert, Cardwell, Roundell Palmer (already an Oxford friend) and the Duke of Newcastle were the most prominent figures. He did not, however, try to enter Parliament, but in GOLDWIN SMITH 151 1859 returned to Oxford as Regius Professor of Modern His- tory, and there remained for eight years. This was the most brilliant and effective period in his whole career. Oxford exactly suited his tastes and his gifts. As a fellow of Univer- sity College, he possessed a sort of home Vv'ithin the college walls, but after a few years he built a house for himself on the outskirts of the city. He was admired and respected by the senior teachers and by all those among the undergraduates whose admiration was worth having. There were at that time in Oxford four men of outstanding talents and fame, Arthur Stanley, Professor of Ecclesiastical History and afterward Dean of Westminster ; Benjamin Jowett, Professor of Greek and after- ward Master of Balliol College ; Mark Pattison, tutor and after- ward Warden of Lincoln College ; and Goldwin Smith. Of these four he was the youngest and the one who mixed most in general society and took the largest part in those ecclesiastical and political struggles which some would say "distracted" but as the undergradviates thought, delighted the University. Goldwin Smith was the natural leader of the Liberal party which then included nearly ali the ablest of the younger professors and lecturers. He spoke sometimes in Congregation, the assembly of resident graduates. From time to time he issued a trenchant pamphlet. He was deemed an almost infallible arbiter on questions of scholarship or literary taste, and he was by far the most brilliant talker at all social gatherings. The question which then chiefly agitated the University was that of^ abolish- ing the religious tests which confine professorships, fellowships, and the higher degrees to persons who declare themselves, by subscribing these texts, to be members of the Established Church of England. He gave powerful help to the movement for abolishing this restriction and wrote on its behalf the most lucid and cogent of all the pamphlets and articles about it which issued copiously from the press. When in 1858 the course of sermons delivered on the Bampton foundation by H. L. Mansel (afterward Dean of St. Paul's) raised a keen theological controversy in which F. D. Maurice and other eminent divines of those days took part, Goldwin Smith published a small book 152 EXPOsrroKV r^ioc.RAi'iiv entitled Rational Rrlif^ion and Riilionalislic Ohjcclions, which contained some of the most powerful passages that ever pro- ceeded from his pen. Wit, argument, and sarcasm were never more effectively blended. He did not ajipend his name to the book, but we all recognized it as his, for the style was un- mistakable. As professor of history, he was unsuccessful in one direction and wonderfully successful in another. With all his gifts, he had not the special gifts of the class teacher, freshness, spon- taneity, the enjoyment of reaching the intelligence of others by bringing one's own mind into touch with them and leading them along into new paths of knowledge. Whether it was shyness and reserve — he was the most reserved man I have ever known — or something that lay still deeper in the constitution of his mind, he did not enjoy and scarcely even attempted giving of instruction to a class of learners. I recall my own experiences when in 1861, being then under- graduate, I went to him on seeing public notice that the Regius Professor would see undergraduates who were studying modern history at a given hour in the hall of his College. Entering the large hall, I saw a long, gaunt figure leaning back in an armchair near the fire, a grim figure apparently buried in meditation. Drawing a chair toward him, I sat down and waited. Presently he said, "Of what did King John die?" I did not know, and admitted my ignorance. "He died of a surfeit of peaches and new ale," said the professor, adding in a reflective tone, "it would give a man a considerable belly-ache"; thereupon he proceeded to deliver in grave and measured accents, a discourse upon the Ange\in Kings and their policy which, so far as I can remember it, was exactly what may be found in the History of Euflland, entitled "The United Kingdom," which he published thirty-eight years later. Few w'ere the undergraduates who presented themselves before him on these solemn occasions, and I doulat if any were bold enough to interrupt the flow of his speech by any ciuestions. Whether he ever formed a class I cannot now recall, but certainly his teaching of undergraduates came to very little. GOLDWIN SMITH 153 The other part of liis activity as professor consisted in de- livering several times in each year what were called Public Lectures — i.e. highly finished addresses to a general Univer- sity audience, which generally included the chief teachers of the place, with a sprinkling of the more studious undergraduates, and not a few ladies. These were performances of extraordinary brilhance, for the thought soared high and the literary form was perfect. Some had touches of humor, others sparkled with epigram, but all were stately, and one, on Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein, lives in my memory as the finest lecture that I ever heard at Oxford. It had the impressive solemnity of a Greek tragedy. Meanwhile his interest in current politics had been quicken- ing, and he grew more definitely Radical in his sentiments. Cobden and Bright came to visit him. He was invited to speak in the towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and more than one constituency in those counties would gladly have sent him as its member to the House of Commons. Especially was he prominent as the most powerful voice and pen that defended the course of the Northern States during the American Civil War. In 1864 he had gone to the United States, had visited Abraham Lincoln and also General Grant, then commanding in Virginia, and had delivered at Boston a memorable address which was reprinted in England and produced a profound effect there. From that time his relations with America were close and constant. In 1867 his father fell ill, and he resigned his Chair at Oxford in order to go and live at home; and in 1868 he astonished Oxford and the world by suddenly announcing that he meant to leave England altogether and settle at Ithaca, in New York State, as professor in the University just founded there by Mr. Ezra Cornell. Why should one who in his own country had reached the height of literary fame, one who enjoyed the friend- ship of the leading men in politics, one who had a Parliamentary career awaiting him if he would but say the word — why should such an one choose at forty-five years of age to expatriate himself and take up his dwelling in a village among the hills of 154 EXPOSirOKV lilOGRAPIiy W't'storn Xrw \'tirk? The explanations which he j;a\e tlien ami subse(iuenlly, that he wished to study and write upon American history, antl thought this could be conveniently done as a lecturer at Cornell, do not seem to explain so strange a decision. To some of his Oxford friends it appeared probable that he was tired of his own country and a little weary of the Tniversity, perhaps weary of England, and that not finite know- ing what to make of himself there, he cut the knot by lea\-ing the country altogether. And he may possibly have felt on the one hand that if he remained in England he would be unable to resist the i)ressure put on him to enter the House of Commons, while on the other hand he knew that its Parliamentary life would try to the utmost liis extremely sensitive temperament. His austere judgments and formidable sarcasms would have made him many enemies, and however superior to their assaults he might have felt himself to be, the wounds would rankle. In doubting his own fitness for a popular assembly he was right. His oratorical capacity, remarkable as it was, did not include the power of debate. Neither would he have found it easy to work with others as a member of a Cabinet, for only by com- promises do Cabinets hold together. To Ithaca he went, and there I visited him in 1870 in com- pany with his and my friend, Mr. Albert Dicey, afterward Pro- fessor of English Law at Oxford. We reached him just after the fall of the Emperor Louis Napoleon, and found him happier than I ever saw him before or since, for he detested the liona- partes and all their works, and had poured out the vials of his wrath upon the French ruler and Court many a time and oft in the paper of the Saturday Review. With all the Oxford Liberals of those days, except Jowett, hatred of the French Emperor was the first article of faith, looking upon France as the disturber of Europe. Goldwin Smith was, not indeed an admirer of Bismarck, yet a warm partisan of Germany in the war of 1870. He was more prone to racial antagonisms than an historian ought to permit himself to be ; was markedly anti- Semitic, and had the old-fashioned English suspicion of the Gallic race. GOLDWIN SMITH 155 To us he seemed quite at home in Cornell. He liked the scenery of Cayuga Lake, was more affable to the undergraduates than he had ever been at Oxford, enjoyed the simplicity of American ways and the friendliness of American manners. Indeed he never ceased to have a warm affection for the Ameri- can people, and in later days was fond of coming to spend a few days in Boston or Washington or Lakewood, New Jersey. But he had already formed a low opinion of politics as practiced in the United States. Tweed and his gang were then ruling New York, and when, after listening to his description of the doings of the Ring and their allies Jim Fisk and Judge Barnard, we asked him what the "good citizens" could do to protect themselves, his answer was, "Hire gladiators, perhaps, as they did at Rome in the days of Cicero." He was incensed at a speech which Sumner had shortly before delivered against England in the Senate, apropos of the Alabama claims, for though he had quitted England forever, his English patriotism and sen- sitiveness for his country had suffered no eclipse. In 187 1 he went to Toronto, where he had some relations, and presently settled there, though he retained his connection with Cornell, and from time to time came across the border to lecture. In 1875 he married a Boston lady, widow of an emi- nent Canadian, and thenceforward made Toronto his home. Nothing could have been more happy than his domestic life till this union ended with his wife's death thirty-three years later. He had not been long in Canada before he threw himself into the politics of the Dominion, which the British North America act of 1867 had recently called into being; and from that time till his last illness he never ceased to write on public affairs. It is however only one branch of his political activity in his adopted country that needs to be noticed, and to it I shall pres- ently advert. Regarded as a politician, Goldwin Smith belonged to a type rare in his own generation and now practically extinct, a type whose nearest affinities were to be found in the republicans of Rome or, still better, such English statesmen of the seventeenth 15^ PIXPOSITORV BJOGRA PIIY centun- as Pyni, or Sir Henry Vane the younger, or Algernon Sydney. He was an austere moralist, with more of the ancient Stoic than of the Christian in his view of life, and his politics were built on the foundation of his ethics. Theoretically a re- publican, and i")ractically, as he would hav'e deemed himself, a democrat, there was nothing Jeffersonian in his view of the people. He felt for the sulTerings of the poor as a Christian ought to do, and he valued human equality as a philosopher ought to do. He disliked courts and all distinctions of rank, and above all the power of wealth. But he had no great faith in the multitude. His Radicalism in British politics expressed itself not so much in wishing to deliver power to the masses as in wishing to take it away from the classes that were, as he thought, abusing it for their selfish purposes. He had not the making of a jiopular leader, for he would have felt bound to tell the people of their faults. When in the fifties he began to think and write on the politics of Britain, the belief that the colonies would soon fall away from the mother-country, and that it would be for their good and her good that they should become independent communi- ties, was pretty general among British statesmen. It may be found expressed even in a letter of Disraeli's, and it was doubt- less held by Cobden, though I do not remember that Mr. Glad- stone ever committed himself to it. Goldwin Smith accepted it the more readily because his feelings of humanity were often shocked by the oppressions practiced by Europeans upon the native races with whom they came in contact, and he wished to keep England free from any such stain. Jingoism, though not yet called by that name, was just beginning to show itself in England, and it filled him with disgust. In 1863 he published in a book, called The Empire, a series of letters in w^hich he argued against any further extension of British dominion, and assumed the ultimate independence of the colonies inhal)ited by white men to be the natural and proper issue of their develop- ment. When he settled in Canada he applied this doctrine to her case, at first contemplating her growth into an independent republic, but afterward conceiving that she ought to unite with GOLDWIN SMITH 157 the United States. Geographical and commercial considera- tions seemed to him decisive on the point. When it was pointed out to him that it was better that more than one experiment in democracy should be tried, and that the English-speaking race on the American continent ought not to put all their eggs in one basket, he half admitted some force in the argument, but presently fell back to his previous conviction. This view, which had in 1871 some supporters in Canada, found less and less favor there as years went on and as the Dominion grew. But Goldmn Smith was not the man to yield to any majority, how- ever large. The more impopular his opinions became, the more vehemently did he continue to urge them, till at last most Canadians knew him chiefly as the man who wanted them to turn their backs on the mother-land and be swallowed up in the vast republic to the South. He was, for a scholar, and his- torian of first-rate ability, extraordinarily set and dogged in his views and unwilling to recognize the signs of the times when they went against him. In 1897 he was well aware to how much odium his attitude had exposed him, for I remember that when on the occasion of a conferring of some honorary degrees by a Canadian University, I observed to him, "You of course have one already," he replied that he was the last person to whom they v/ould give one. It was not until 1907 that he sadly admitted to me that his cause was hopeless, there being by that time virtually no Canadian voices raised in favor of union with the United States. This discouragement, however, and this sense of his own un- popularity, neither lessened his activity nor embittered his language. He was far too proud to complain, or to let any one conceive whatever vexation he felt, and he continued to pour forth a stream of brilliant writing on current Canadian issues, denouncing anything that savored, however faintly, of corrup- tion, censuring what he called the "oijportunism" of successive Prime Ministers, deploring the evils of party government, and pointing out to the Canadian farmers the benefits which free trade would confer on them. His productivity was the more wonderful because he wrote with equal mastery on historical, 15S EXPOSITORY BIOGRAPHY economic, and litcniry topics. His magazine called The By- stander, was all the work of his single pen. Neither did he neg- lect ICuropean alTairs. He Ireciuently wrote letters to English newspapers ; and wlien Mr. Gladstone brought in his first Home Rule bill, in 18S6, he appeared as one of its most deter- mined opponents. To many English Liberals this came as a painful surprise, for he had written, thirty years previously, the most powerful indictment of English rule in Ireland that had ever proceeded from an English historian. Irish History and Irish Character is one of the best of his books, presenting in small compass a complete sketch of the causes which produced the misfortunes and the discontent of the Irish people. How- ever, the remedy which Mr. Gladstone proposed seemed to him to go too far, and his sympathy had been, like Mr. Bright's, alienated by the acts of violence which had stained the Irish agitation, and by the bitterly anti-English attitude at the election of 1885 of some of the Irish leaders.^ Little as his opponents knew it, Goldwin Smith was an in- tensely patriotic Englishman, though his idea of patriotism ditTered from theirs, and disposed him to openly condemn his country when, as in the case of the South African War, he thought her in the wrong. He was more of a statesman than of a politician, and more of a political thinker than of a practical statesman, by which I mean that his gift lay rather in seeing the principles to be applied than in knowing when and how to apply them. His thinking was broad, luminous, comprehensive, elevated, and if it was less imaginative than Burke's and less ingenious than Walter Bagehot's, there was perhaps no one, except Bagehot, among his contemporaries who rose superior to him in grasp, and certainly no one who equalled him in the power of expres- sion. Yet this very gift of expression was a source of weakness, > In the course of his denunciations of Home Rule he attacked with some acrimony Mr. E. L. Godkin, who was advocating it. Mr. Godkin, who never took anything "lying down," replied in a similar strain, and a breach of friendly relations followed. Some years afterward Goldwin .Smith repented, and wrote desiring a reconciliation. Godkin accepted gladly the outstretched hand. Both were preachers of righteous- ness in politics, so there was joy among their common friends. GOLDWIN SMITH 159 or perhaps the revelation of a fault in the structure of his mind. When he came to England in 1876 for the first time after his departure in 1868, I invited several eminent historians to meet him at dinner, and among them John Richard Green. Goldwin Smith talked brilliantly, as always; and the next time I met Green I asked him how he had been impressed. "He ap- peared to me," was the reply, "to be always locking the door." Green meant, as he explained, that Goldwin's habit was to sum up all he had to say on a subject in two or three striking phrases, which seemed to leave nothing more to be said, and arrested the further play of mind and talk on the question under dis- cussion. Never before had I quite understood what it was that made his conversation, full of knowledge, reflection, and penetration as it was, unsatisfying. His intellect, strong and clear, lacked that sort of fineness which perceives that there is a subtlety in nature — i.e. in human things as well as external objects — which no power of words can fully compass or ex- press, and it lacked also that flexibility which enters into the minds of others and feels that the phrase which satisfies the speaker himself may not satisfy them. His conversation was not monologue, for he did not, like Macaulay, appropriate the field to the exclusion of others. But it was the deliverance of his own opinions rather than an interchange of ideas, and the interlocutor seldom felt that what he put forward had much effect in modifying what Goldwin had already settled for him- self. There was in him that note, characteristic of the prophet, that you could not argue with him, for, like other prophets, he was eventually a solitary soul, and did his thinking alone, brooding in silence over all he read or saw, seldom influenced by others. When he began to deliver himself, it would hardly have startled one if the first sentence had been "Thus saith the Lord." Without the glowing intensity of Mazzini, he gave the same impression of unshakable conviction. The weakness of this splendid independence is that it often disables a man from, following the movements of opinion in the world around him. As Mazzini would never admit that Italy could be free and l6o EXPOSITORY lilOGRAPIIY prosperous except under a republic, Goklwin Smith continued to cling to the ideals and doctrines of his early manhood. Some of those doctrines have been proved to be sound. It would have been well for the British people if they had taken the advice he gave them forty years ago to reconstruct their House of Lords in a deliberate way before a party crisis arrived. But even l)efore old age overtook him he had lost touch with British politics, though he continued to write about them with the old confidence. About seventeen years ago I had from him one letter after another urging that English Liberals should unite themselves and find a live political issue in a campaign for the disestablishing of the Church of England. That was just the time when every careful observer in England had begun to perceive that the sentiment for disestablishment was becom- ing weaker, because other questions had begun to fill the public mind, and that to raise the issue would bring no strength to any party that raised it. Aversion to ecclesiastical power had been always among the principles he most cherished. It was the only thing he had in common wth Froude, whom he heartily distrusted and disliked. Though he had dropped all dogmas, he was of a profoundly rehgious temper, and held that religion had suffered and would continue to suffer from any connection with the civil power, whether as ruled or as ruler. Though two prophets could be hardly more unlike than were he and Carlyle, there was this point of resemblance, that both talked exactly like their books. Carlyle was, to be sure, far more picturesque and vivid, but Goldwin Smith's discourse was more perfect in form. . Evcrv' sentence might have been printed just as it fell from his lips without needing any correc- tion, yet there was no sense of effort, no straining after effect. He had, indeed, a genius for expression, and a power over lan- guage, even more remarkable than his power of thought. Nor was this confined to English. His Latin style was unexception- ally classical — i.e. whatever a Roman might have thought of it, no one at 0.xford or Cambridge could detect any error. Yet it was not, like the Latin compositions of nearly all modern scholars, imitated from Cicero or Livy or Tacitus. It was his GOLDWIN SMITH l6l own style, just as the Latin of Erasmus or Francis Bacon is their own. He handled the language with the same ease and felicity as he did his mother-tongue. He was one of four men who may be deemed to have been in his time the chief masters of English prose. Two of them everybody will place in the front rank. I mean J. H. Newman and John Ruskin. A third is less known, because he wrote on subjects that do not attract the general public, but those who have studied the collected essays of F. W. H. Myers, a poet who wrote so little that he is almost forgotten except by those who read him when he and they were under thirty, will prob- ably agree with the view that no richer and more melodious prose has been produced in our time The supreme merit of Goldwin Smith's writing is the union ot clearness, strength, and brevity. Its weakness lies not in the diction, for that is hardly to be surpassed, but in the fact that, in his articles or books the argument does not march. Each, be it book or article, is not so much a connected whole as a series of splendid paragraphs. There is no effort, and the epigrams are not dropped in or plastered on to light up the narrative and argument. They seem ine^dtable, because the most natural as well as exact expression of the writer's thought. Surely no one in our time Kas possessed an equal gift for terseness. His history of the United States is a slim volume which can be read through between lunch and dinner, but it contains everything that is essential for a comprehension of the growth of the North American colonies, of the causes and course of the Revolutionary struggle, of the struggle over slavery and the Ci\dl War that followed. Compressed narrative is usually dry narrative. But his skill in selecting the salient facts and his power of setting in the strongest light, by a few touches, a character or a dramatic situation keeps the reader's interest from flagging for a moment. Froude also wrote well. But one could not trust Froude; for he was a partisan, he was capable of hideous blunders, and he was apt to sacrifice truth to literary effect. Goldwin Smith was as thorough in the substance as he was finished in the execu- M l62 EXrOSITORV lUOCRArilV tion oi his work. I niiK'niher ii rciiiark of K. A. Freeman, made when they were both in Oxford: "Where," he said, "does Cioldwin gel his knowledge? He is not a great reader, he is not what you woukl call a learned man, like Stubbs, yet he seems never to make mistakes." He was not very learned, but he had that instinct of a trained historical mind wliich keeps a man out of errors. If he knew a thing, he knew it right. If he did not know it, he knew his own ignorance and avoided the pitfalls into which heedless men stumbled. And he had also a talent for hitting on some small trait or incident characteristic of the man or the time, and enlivening his narrative by it. One of the charms of his talk was the profusion of anecdotes of the famous men of the generation just before his own which he liked to pour forth, as he lay back in his leather armchair beside the fireplace in his stately old house at Toronto, raising and dropping his head as he talked, poising the heel of one foot upon the toe of the other, and slowly swinging both from side to side. WTiy, with talents which made him the peer of the greatest men of his time in England or in North America, and with the enormous advantage of being able to command his whole time because he ne\'er had to work for his li\ang, why did not his untiring industry issue in some historical or philosophical work which would have seized and held the attention of the world and preserved his name for many a year to come ? The ob\dous answer is that his interest in what was passing, and his eager- ness to refute errors and denounce e\dl-doers, lured him into journalism and made it a habit without which he could not live. But one may suspect that his mind was really rather critical than constructive ; and that some sort of subconscious- ness of this fact prevented him from essaying any very large task in which he would have had to fit many parts into a great whole. Moreover the historian, hardly less than the politician, must be able to go on always learning, following the movements of increasing knowledge and the course of events as they hap- pen, and letting all the breezes of the time blow through his mind. This was not Goldwnn Smith's way. His opinions on history, as well as on politics, had crystallized long before he GOLDWIN SMITH 1 63 was fifty, and though he added much to his store of knowledge, his views underwent no development. For thirty years he continued to repeat that party government was a crying e\al both in Canada and in Britain, but never did he suggest any other means of working a Parliamentary system. In this glacial fixity of opinion he resembled Disraeli and Bright, who (from causes that need not be here discussed) retained through life, very little modified, the views each held when he entered Par- liament, but was unlike Peel and Gladstone, both of whom kept an open, and, as some thought, a too open, mind. But one must remember that Peel and Gladstone lived in the middle of the strenuous and multiform public life of England, where many influences of men equal to them in knowledge if not in power were always playing on them. Goldwin Smith stood isolated in Toronto, in little direct contact with practical politicians, his intellectual primacy so generally recognized that the views of others failed to have their due effect upon him. Better had it been for him to have remained in the midst of the political life of London or of the intellectual life of Oxford. As things turned out, one must regretfully admit that his life work in politics at least was less than might have been expected from such admirable gifts. So far as Canada was concerned, he was the apostle of a lost cause ; and perhaps his greatest service, both to the United States and to Great Britain, was rendered in the days of the American Civil War, for at a time when a large part of what called itself "society" in England, and still more in France, had shown itself in sympathy with the Slave States, his writings presented the case for the Union with in- comparable earnestness and power. Those who were struck by his grave and almost stern aspect, no less than those who read his scathing censures of the sins of public men, were apt to mistake his character. Austere indeed it was, making too little indulgence for human weakness, but beneath his austerity there was not only an abundant sense of humor, but a great tenderness and power of sympathy. His many acts of personal kindness to the suffering and needy were known to few, for he carefully concealed them. His willingness l64 EXPOSITOKV lilOORAPIlV to exert himself and spend his time in the ]>r(imotion of any ijood cause was unfailing. He was perfectly disinterested, altoDiether suiH^rior to any of the vul<^ar ambitions. Though more sensitive than a pohtician ought to be, he was not vindic- tive. His strictures on DisraeU were no more severe after Dis- raeli attacked him than they had been before, and they were due. not to any personal resentment, but to the scorn which he felt for Disraeli's untruthfulness. No imputation could have been more absurd than that which the latter cast on him of being "a social parasite," for he was an intensely proud man who never asked a favor or met any one except on terms of equality. With him, indeed, pride was so great as to exclude vanity. He hardly ever referred to any success he had acliieved, and when his Oxford friends \\'ished to present to the University picture gallery in the Bodleian a portrait or bust of him," he declined the com- pliment. It was a pity, for he had a noble head, with features which well expressed the dignit>- of his character. Few men ha\'e so consistently lived up to the lofty standard of conduct which they set for themselves and exacted from others, and few have sho\\Ti in their writings as well as in their action a more constant loyalty to truth and to the highest interests of humanity. The last time I ever saw him in public was in 1907 at a gathering of the Canadian Club in Toronto under the presi- dency of the Governor of the Province. He attended it, not meaning to speak, though he ultimately said a few words. There was in the large and crowded hall hardly any one, either among the elder men, leaders in local society or of the youth of the city, who agreed -vv-ith his political x-iews, and many of the younger sort had been brought up to look upon him as the dangerous man who wished to see Canada annexed to the United States. But when he walked slowly through the throng to his seat on the dais, his stately figure still erect in extreme old age, they all remembered how many acts of private benevolence he had done, how sincere, how upright, how cour- ageous his course of life had been, what an example of un- selfishness he had set, what lustre his genius had reflected on their city and their country, and a sudden tempest of applause swept over the hall. I. E. INFORMAL ESSAY THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE L. H. Bailey The best possible introduction to nature is that afforded by a sympathetic person who knows some aspect of nature well. You imbibe your friend's enthusiasm at the same time that you learn birds, or plants, or fishes, or the sculpturing of the fields. By enthusiasm I mean never exclamation, but that quiet and persistent zeal that follows a subject to the end for the love of it, even though it take a month. This person need not be a professed "scientist," unless he is also a good teacher and knows what is most important in the subject and most relevant to you. The earlier the child has such a guide — if arrived at the age of reason — the more vital and lasting the effect : even one or two excursions afield may change the point of view and open the way for new experiences, although neither the guide nor the child may be aware of it at the time. . . . That which is worth knowing is that which is nearest at hand. The nearest at hand, in the natural surroundings, is the weather. Every day of our lives, on land or sea, whether we will or no, the air and the clouds and the sky environ us. So variable is this environment, from morning till evening and from evening till morning and from season to season, that we are always conscious of it. It is to the changes in this en\dronment that we apply the folk-word "weather," — weather, that is akin to wind. No man is efficient who is at cross-purposes with the main currents of his life ; no man is content and happy who is out of sympathy with the environment in which he is born to live: 1 From The Outlook to Nature. The Macmillan Company, Revised Edition, igii. Reprinted by permission. i6s 1 66 INFORMAL ESSAY so the hahil of i;rumblinK at the weather is the most senseless ami futile of all expenditures of human elTort. Day by clay we complain and fret at the weather, and when we are done with it we have — the weather. The same amount of energy put into wholesome work would ha\e set civilization far in ad- vance of its present state. Weather is not a human institution, and therefore it cannot be "bad." I have seen bad men, have rcail bad books, have made bad lectures, have lived two years about Boston, — but I have never seen bad weather ! "Bad weather" is mainly the fear of spoiling one's clothes. Fancy clothing is one of the greatest obstacles to a knowledge of nature : in this regard, the farm boy has an immense ad- vantage. It is a misfortune not to have gone barefoot in one's youth. A man cannot be a naturalist in patent-leather shoes. The perfecting of the manufacture of elaborate and fragile fabrics correlates well \nth our growing habit of living indoors. Our clothing is made chiefly for fair weather ; when it becomes worn we use it for stormy weather, although it may be in no respect stormy weather clothing. I am always interested, when abroad with persons, in noting the various mental atti- tudes toward wind; and it is apparent that most of the dis- pleasure from the wind arises from fear of disarranging the coifture or from the difficulty of controlling a garment. If our clothes are not made for the weather, then we have failed to adapt ourselves to our conditions, and we are in worse state than the beasts of the field. Much of our clothing serves neither art nor utility. Nothing can be more prohibitive of an interest in nature than a millinery "hat," even though it be distinguished for its floriculture, landscape gardening, and natu- ral history. Our estimate of weather is perhaps the best criterion of our outlook on nature and the world. The first fault that I would correct in mankind is that of finding fault with the weather. We should put the child right toward the world in which he is to live. What would you think of the mariner who goes to sea only in fair weather? What have not the weather and the climate done for the steadiness and virility of the people of THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE 167 New England ? And is this influence working as strongly to-day as in the times when we had learned less how to escape the weather ? We must believe in all good physical comfort, — it contributes to the amount of work that we can accomplish; but we have forgotten that it is possible to bear an open storm with equanimity and comfort. The person who has never been caught in rain and enjoyed it has missed a privilege and a blessing. Give us the rain and the hail and the snow, the mist, the crashing thunder, and the cold biting wind ! Let us be men enough to face it, and poets enough to enjoy it. In "bad" weather is the time to go abroad in field and wood. You are fellow then with bird and stream and tree ; and you are escaped from the crowd that is forever crying and clanging at your heels. The first consideration of special study should be the in- habitants of your yard and garden : they are yours ; or if they are not yours, you are not living a right life. Do you wish to study botany? There are weeds in your dooryard or trees on your lawn. You say that they are not interesting : that is not their fault. We have made the mistake all along of studying only special cases. We seem to have made up our minds that certain fea- tures are interesting and that all other features are not. It is no mere accident that many persons like plants and animals but dislike botany and zoology. It is more important to study plants than special subjects as exemplified in plants. Why does the weed grow just there? Answer this, and you have put yourself in pertinent relation with the world out-of-doors. If one is a farmer, he has the basis for his natural history in his own possessions, — animals domestic and wild, plants domestic and wild, free soil, pastures and lowlands and wood- lands, crops growing and ripening, the daily expression of the moving pageant of nature. Zoological garden and botanical garden are here at his hand and lying under his title-deed, to have and to hold as he will. No other man has such opportunity. I would also call the attention of the townsman to his oppor- tunity. If the range of nature is not his, he still has the wind 1 68 JNFOR.UAL J-ISSAY and rain, the street trees, the grass of lawns, the weed in its crevice, the town-hn-ing birds, the insects, and I hope that he has his garden. Even the city has its touch of natural history — for all things in the end are natural, and we recognize thcni il we have had the training of a wholesome outlook to the coni- naonplace. . . . I would preach the surface of the earth, because we walk on it. When a youth, I was told that it was impossible for me to study geology to any purpose, because there were no outcrop- pings of rocks in my region. So I grew up in ignorance of the fact that every Uttle part of the earth's surface has a history, that there are reasons for sandbanks and for bogs as well as for stratified rocks. This is but another illustration of the old book-sla\'ery, whereby we are coniined to certain formal prob- lems, whether or not these problems have any relation to our conditions. I well remember what a great surprise it was to learn that the sculpturing of the fields can be understood, and that the reasons for every bank and swamp and knoll and mud-hole can be worked out. There was a field back of the barn that contained hundreds of narrow knolls, averaging three to four feet high. At one side of every hummock was a narrow deep pocket that until midsummer was filled with water. The field was so rough that it could not be.ploughed, and so it was continuously used as a pasture. It was an Elysian field for a boy. Every pool was a world of life, with strange creatures and mysterious depths, and every knoll was a point of vantage. Near one edge of the field ran a rivulet, and beyond the rivulet were great woods. What was beyond the woods, I could only surmise. I recall how year by year I wondered at this field, until it became a sort of I)erpetual and compelling mystery, and somehow it came to be woven as a natural part of the fabric of my life. To this day I try once each year to \'isit this dear old field, even though it is long since levelled. All the sweep of my childhood comes back to me unbidden. The field is still a pasture, and generations of cows have passed on since then. Yet, as much as this field meant to me, I do not remember to have had any distinct feel- THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE 169 ing that there was any cause for the pools and knolls. My father cut the field from the forest, yet I do not remember that I ever asked him why this field was so ; and I never heard any person express any curiosity about it. We all seemed to have accepted it, just as we accept the air. As I think of it now, this field must have been the path of a tornado that turned over the trees ; and long before the settlers came, the prostrate trunks had decayed and a second forest had grown. Would that I could have known that simple explanation ! One sentence would have given me the clew. How the mystery of the an- cient tornado and the rise of another forest would have con- jured a new world of marvel and discovery ! When I had written this sketch of my pasture field, I called in a little schoolgirl and read it to her. I wanted to hear her estimate of it. "That's a nice story," she said; "but I don't want to study such things in school." "And why not?" I asked. "Because they are hard and dry," she said. Poor child ! She was thinking of her books ; and I remem- bered that I also had written books ! I would preach the sky; for the sky compels one to look upward. When in the open country, we are impressed most with the sense of room and with the sky. City persons have no sky, but only fragments of a leaky roof ; for the city is one structure and needs only a cover to make it a single building. They have no free horizon line, no including circle laid on the earth, no welkin. There are no clouds, — only an undefined something that portends rain or hides the sun. One must have free vision if he is to know the sky. He must see the clouds sweep across the firmament, changing and dis- solving as they go. He must look deep into the zenith, beyond the highest cirrus. We have almost lost the habit of looldng up: — "Look unto the heavens, and see ; And behold the skies, which are higher than thou." 170 INFORMAL ESSAY \Al- on your hack in some (|uict spot, and let yourself go out into the enilless distances. Or, if we note the sky, it is chielly a midday or sunset recogni- tion. Our literature is rich in sunsets, but relatively poor in sunrises. Civilization has led us away from the morning, and at the Siime time it has led us away from youthfulness. We have telescoped the day far into the night, and morning is be- coming obsolete. I know that this cannot be helped ; but it can be mentioned. I ha\e asked person after person whether he ever saw the sun rise. The large number have said no ; and most of those who had seen the sun rise had seen it against their will and remem- bered it with a sense of weariness. Here, again, our farm boy has the ad\'antage : he leads something like a natural life. I doubt whether a man can be a poet if he has not known the sunrise. The sky is the one part of the environment that is beyond our reach. We cannot change it ; we cannot despoil it ; we cannot paint signs on it. The sky is forever new and young ; the seasons come out of it ; the winds blow out of it ; the weather is born from it : — "Hast thou entered the treasuries of the snow, Or hast thou seen the treasuries of the hail ?" I preach the mountains, and everything that is taller than a man. Yet it is to be feared that many persons see too many moun- tains and too many great landscapes, and that the "seeing" of nature becomes a business as redundant and wearisome as other alTairs. One who lives on the mountains does not know how high they are. Let us have one inspiration that lifts us clear of ourselves : this is better than to see so many mountains that we remember only their names. The best objects that you can see are those in your own realm ; but your own realm becomes larger and means more for the sight of something beyond. It is worth while to cherish the few objects and phenomena THE REALM OF THE COMMONPLACE 171 that have impressed us greatly, and it is well to recount them often, until they become part of us. One such phenomenon is idealized in my own memory. It was the sight of sunrise on Mt. Shasta, seen from the southeastern side from a point that was then untouched by travellers. From this point only the main dome of the mountain is seen. I had left the railway train at Upton's and had ridden on a flat-car over a lumber railroad some eighteen miles to the southeast. From this destination, I drove far into the great forest, over volcano dust that floated through the woods like smoke as it was stirred up by our horses and wagon wheels. I was a guest for the night in one of those luxurious lodges which true nature lovers, wishing wholly to escape the affairs of cities, build in remote and inaccessible places. The lodge stood on a low promontory, around three sides of which a deep swift mountain stream ran in wild tumult. Giant shafts of trees, such shafts as one sees only in the stu- pendous forests of the far West, shot straight into the sky from the very cornices of the house. It is always a marvel to the easterner how shafts of such extraordinary height could have been nourished by the very thin and narrow crowns that they bear. One always wonders, also, at the great distance the sap- water must carry its freight of mineral from root to leaf and its heavier freight from leaf to root. We were up before the dawn. We made a pot of coffee, and the horses were ready, — fine mounts, accustomed to woods, trails, and hard slopes. It was hardly light enough to enable us to pick our way. We were as two pygmies, so titanic was the forest. The trails led us up and up, under pitchy boughs becoming fragrant, over needle-strewn floors still heavy with darkness, disclosing glimpses now and then of gray light showing eastward between the boles. Suddenly the forest stopped, and we found ourselves on the crest of a great ridge : and sheer before us stood the great cone of Shasta, cold and gray and silent, floating on a sea of darkness from which even the highest tree crowns did not emerge. Scarcely had we spoken in the course of our ascent, and now words would be sacrilege. Almost automatically we dismounted, letting the reins fall over the X-J2 INFORMAL I-SSAY horsi^s' necks, and removed our hats. The horses stood, and dropped their lieads. Uncovered, we sat ourselves on the dry leaves and waited. It was the morning of the creation. Out of the pure stuff of nebuLe the cone had just been shaped and flung adrift until a workl should be created on which it might rest. The gray light grew into white. Wrinkles and features grew into the mountain. Gradually a ruddy light appeared in the east. Then a flash of red shot out of the horizon, struck on a point of the summit, and caught from crag to crag and snow to snow until the great mass was streaked and splashed with Are. Slowly the darkness settled away from its base ; a tree emerged ; a bird chirped ; and the morning was born ! Now a great nether world began to rise up out of Chaos. Far hills rose first through rolling billows of mist. Then came wide forests of conifer. As the panorama arose, the mountain changed from red to gold. The stars had faded out and left the great mass to itself on the bosom of the rising world, — the mountain fully created now and stablished. Spriggy bushes and little leaves — little green-brown leaves and tender tufts of herbs — trembled out of the woods. The illimitable circle of the world stretched away and away, its edges still hung in the stuff from which it had just been fashioned. Then the forest awoke with caUs of birds and the penetrating light, and the creation was complete. I have now rc\aewed some of the elements of the sympathetic attitude toward nature, and have tried to show how this outlook means greater efficiency, hopefulness, and repose. I have no mind to be iconoclast, to try to tear down what has been built, or to advise any man to change his occupation or his walk in life. That would be impossible to accompHsh, even were it desirable to advise. But even in the midst of all our eagerness and involvedness, it is stiU possible to open the mind toward nature, and it will sweeten and strengthen our lives. Nature is our environment, and we cannot escape it if we would. The problem of our life is not yonder : it is here. The seeking of truth in fresh fields and for the love of it is AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 173 akin to the enthusiasm of youth. Men keep young by knowing nature. They also keep close to the essentials. One of the New Sayings of Jesus is this: ''Raise the stone, and there thou shalt find me ; cleave the wood, and there am I." AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS ^ Robert Louis Stevenson Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of /e^e-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labor therein with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are content when they have enough, and like to look on and en- joy in the meanwhile, savors a little of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be. Idleness, so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his determination, votes for the sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism, "goes for" them. And while such an one is ploughing distressfully up the road, it is not hard to understand his resentment, when he perceives cool persons in the meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at their elbow. Alexander is touched in a very delicate place by the disregard of Diogenes. Where was the glory of having taken Rome for these tumultuous barbarians who poured into the Senate-house and found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their success? It is a sore thing to have labored along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. > From Virginibus Puerisquc Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons. Reprinted by permission. 174 INFORMAL /i55.4F HfiKt' pliysicists conik-nin the unphysical ; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered ; and peoi)Ie of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none. But thouj^h this is one difficulty of tiie subject, it is not the greatest. Vou could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventrj' for speaking Hke a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well ; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favor of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say. To state one argument is not necessarily to be deaf to all others, and that a man has written a book of travels on Montenegro is no reason why he should never have been to Richmond. It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay may escape from school honors with all his wits about him, most boys pay so dear for their medals that they never after- wards have a shot in their locker, and begin the world bankrupt. And the same holds true during all the time a lad is educating himself, or suffers others to educate him. It must have been a very foolish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford in these words: "Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come upon you, you wall find that poring upon books will be but an irksome task." The old gentleman seems to have been unaware that many other things besides reading grow irksome, and not a few become impossible, by the time a man has to use spectacles and cannot walk without a stick. Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality. And ii a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought. If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the full, viNad, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; ^A' APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 1 75 you would rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking in the class. For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my time. I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But though I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant. This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of education which was the favorite school of Dickens and of Balzac, and turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this : if a lad does not learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant always in the streets ; for if he pre- fers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke in- numerable pipes to the tune of the water on the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there he may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new perspective. Why, if this be not education, what is ? We may conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such an one, and the conversation that should thereupon ensue : — • "How now, young fellow, what dost thou here?" "Truly, .sir, I take mine ease." *'Is not this the hour of the class? and should'st thou not be plying thy Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest obtain knowledge?" "Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your leave." "Learning, quotha! After what fashion, I pray thee? Is it mathematics ? " "No, to be sure." "Is it metaphysics?" "Nor that." "Is it some language?" "Nay, it is no language." "Isit a trade?" ■'Nor a trade, neither." 176 INFORMAL E^SAY "Why, then, what is't?" ''Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go upon Pilgrimage, I am desirous to note what is commonly done by persons in my case, and where are the ugliest Sloughs and Thickets on the Road ; as also, what manner of Stall is of the best ser\ice. Moreover, I lie here, by this water, to learn by root-of-heart a lesson which my master teaches me to call Peace, or Contentment." Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman wa? much commoved \\-ith passion, and shaking his cane with a very threatful coun- tenance, broke forth upon this wise : "Learning, quotha ! " said he ; "I would have all such rogues scourged by the Hangman ! " And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat with a crackle of starch, like a turkey when it spreads its feathers. Now this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the corrunon opinion. A fact is not called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one of your scholastic categories. An inquiry must be in some acknowledged direction, with a name to go by ; or else you are not inquiring at all, only lounging ; and the workhouse is" too good for you. It is supposed that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end of a telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few years ere we go hence ; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in Chapter xx, which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter xxxLx, which is hearing the band play in the gardens. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a hfe of heroic \igils. There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science ; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. While others are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn some really useful art : to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 1 77 to all varieties of men. Many who have "plied their book diligently," and know all about some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and owl- like demeanor, and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life. Many make a large for- tune, who remain underbred and pathetically stupid to the last. And meantime there goes the idler, who began life along with them — by your leave, a different picture. He has had time to take care of his health and his spirits ; he has been a great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of all things for both body and mind ; and if he has never read the great Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to excellent purpose. Might not the student afford some Hebrew roots, and the business man some of his half-crowns, for a share of the idler's knowledge of life at large, and Art of Living? Nay, and the idler has another and more important quality than these. I mean his wisdom. He who has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in their hobbies, will regard his own with only a very ironical indulgence. He will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he finds no out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself with no very burning falsehood. His way takes him along a by-road, not much frequented, but very even and pleasant, which is called Commonplace Lane, and leads to the Belvedere of Com- mon Sense. Thence he shall command an agreeable, if no very noble prospect ; and while others behold the East and West, the Devil and the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort of morning hour upon all sublunary things, with an army of shadows running speedily and in many different directions into the great daylight of Eternity. The shadows and the generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent wars, go by into ultimate silence and emptiness ; but underneath all this, a man may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green and peaceful landscape ; many firelit parlors ; good people laughing, drinking, and making love as they did before the Flood or the French Revolution ; and the old shepherd telHng his tale under the hawthorn. 178 INFORMAL ESSAV Kxtrcmr hu.sinrss, whctluT at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality ; and faculty for idleness im- plies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of i)ersonal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some con- ventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity ; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations ; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stanrl still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough ; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When they do not require to go to the office, when they are not hungry, and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with ; you would imagine they were paralyzed or alienated ; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal ; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play ; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train. Before he was breeched he might have clambered on the boxes ; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls ; but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appeal to me as being Success in Life. But it is not only the person himself who suffers from his AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 1 79 busy habits, but his wife and children, his friends and relations, and down to the very people he sits with in a railway carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. And it is not by any means certain that a man's business is the most important thing he has to do'. To an impartial estimate it will seem clear that many of the wisest, most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are to be played upon the Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers, and pass, among the world at large, as phases of idleness. For in that Theatre, not only the walking gentlemen, singing cham- bermaids, and diligent fiddlers in the orchestra, but those who look on and clap their hands from the benches, do really play a part and fulfil important offices towards the general result. You are no doubt very dependent on the care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards and signalmen who convey you rapidly from place to place, and the policemen who walk the streets for your protection ; but is there not a thought of grati- tude in your heart for certain other benefactors who set you smiling when they fall in your way, or season your dinner with good company? Colonel Newcome helped to lose his friend's money; Fred Bayham had an ugly trick of borrowing shirts; and yet they were better people to fall among than Mr. Barnes. And though Falstaff was neither sober nor very honest, I think I could name one or two long-faced Barabbases whom the world could better have done without. Hazlitt mentions that he was more sensible of obligation to Northcote, who had never done him anything he could call a service, than to his whole circle of ostentatious friends ; for he thought a good companion emphatically the greatest benefactor. I know there are people in the world who cannot feel grateful unless the favor has been done them at the cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish disposition. A man may send you six sheets of letter- paper covered with the most entertaining gossip, or you may pass half an hour pleasantly, perhaps profitably, over an article of his. Do you think the service would l)e greater, if he had made the manuscript in his heart's blood, like a compact with l8o IM'OK.\fAL KSSAV the (ie\il ? Do you really fancy you should Ik- mort- beholden to your correspondent, if he had been damning you all the while for your importunity ? Pleasures arc more beneficial than duties, because, like the quality of mercy, they are not strained, and they arc twice blest. There must always be two to a kiss, and there may be a score in a jest ; but wherever there is an element of sacrifice, the favor is conferred with pain, and, among generous ]ieople, recei\ed with confusion. There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being hai)py. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or, when they are disclosed, sur- prise nobody so much as the benefactor. The other day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran down the street after a marble, with so jolly an air that he set everyone he passed into a good humor ; one of these persons, who had been delivered from more than usually black thoughts, stopped the little fellow and gave him some money with this remark: "You see what sometimes comes of looking pleased." If he had looked pleased before, he had now to look both pleased and mystified. For my part, I justify this encouragement of smiling rather than tearful children; I do not want to pay for tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal largely in the opposite commodity. A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of good- will ; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition ; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Li\'cableness of Life. Consequently, if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary precei)t ; but, thanks to hunger and the work- house, one not easily to be abused ; and, within practical limits, it is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of Morality. Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps indigestion ; he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous derangement in retvirn. Either he absents ^.V APOLOGY FOR IDLERS l8l himself entirely from all fellowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a leaden inkpot ; or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his whole nervous system, to discharge some temper before he returns to work. I do not care how much or how well he works, this fellow is an evil feature in other people's lives. They would be happier if he were dead. They would easier do without his services in the Circumlocution Ofifice, than they can tolerate his fractious spirits. He poisons life at the well-head. It is better to be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle. And what, in God's name, is all this pother about ? For what cause do they embitter their own and other people's lives? That a man should publish three or thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not finish his great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest to the world. The ranks of life are full ; and although a thousand fall, there are always some to go into the breach. When they told Joan of Arc she should be at home minding women's work, she answered there were plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your own rare gifts ! When nature is "so careless of the single life," why should we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional importance? Suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark night in Sir Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would have wagged no better or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and the student to his book ; and no one been any the wiser of the loss. There are not many works extant, if you look the alternative all over, which are worth the price of a pound of tobacco to a man of limited means. This is a sobering reflection for the proudest of our earthly vanities. Even a tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no great cause for personal vainglory in the phrase ; for although tobacco is an admirable sedative, the qualities necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious in themselves. Alas and alas ! you may take it how you will, but the services of no single individual are indispensable. Atlas was just a gentleman with a protracted nightmare ! And yet you see merchants who 1 82 INFORMAL ESSAY go and labor themselves into a <;rcat fortune and thence into the bankruptcy court ; scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles until their temper is a cross to all who come about them, as though Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid ; and line young men who work themselves into a decline, and are driven olT in a hearse with white ])lumes ui)on it. Would you not suppose these persons had been whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise of some momen- tous destiny ? and that this lukewarm bullet on which they play their farces was the bull's-eye and centre-point of all the universe ? And yet it is not so. The ends for which they gi\'e away their priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or hurtful ; the glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them indifferent ; and they and the world they in- habit are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the thought. OX THE FEELING OF IMMORTALITY IN YOUTH 1 William Hazlitt No young man believes he shall ever die. It was a saying of my brother's and a fine one. There is a feeling of Eternity in youth which makes us amends for everything. To be young is to be as one of the Immortals. One half of time indeed is spent — the other half remains in store for us, with all its count- less treasures, for there is no line drawn, and we see no No young man believes he shall ever die. It was a saying of my brother's, and a fine one. There is a feeling of Eternity in youth, which makes us amends for everything. To be young is to be as one of the Immortal Gods. One half of time indeed is flown — the other half remains in store for us with all its countless treasures ; for there > From Sketches and Essays, ed. W. C. Hazlitt. The Bohn Library. The reasons for printing two texts of this essay are given in the Notes. ON THE FEELING OF IMMORTALITY IN YOUTH 183 limit to our hopes and wishes. We make the coming age our own — "The vast, the unbounded prospect hes before us." Death, old age, are words without a meaning, a dream, a fiction, with which we have nothing to do. Others may have undergone, or may still undergo them — we "bear a charmed life," which laughs to scorn all such idle fancies. As, in setting out on a delightful journey, we strain our eager sight forward, "Bidding the lovely scenes at distance hail," and see no end to prospect after prospect, new objects presenting themselves as we advance, so in the outset of life we see no end to our desires nor to the opportunities of gratifying them. We have as yet found no obstacle, no disposition to flag, and it seems that we can go on so for ever. We look round in a new world, full of life and motion, and ceaseless progress, and feel in ourselves all the vigor and spirit to keep pace with it, and do not foresee from is no line drawn, and we see no limit to our hopes and wishes. We make the coming age our own. "The vast, the unbounded prospect lies before us." Death, old age, are words without a meaning, that pass by us like the idle air which we regard not. Others may have undergone, or may still be liable to them — we "bear a charmed life," which laughs to scorn all such sickly fancies. As, in setting out on a delightful journey, we strain our eager gaze forward — • " Bidding the lovely scenes at distance hail," — and see no end to the landscape, new objects presenting themselves as we advance ; so, in the commencement of life, we set no bounds to our inclinations, nor to the unrestricted opporttmities oi gratiiyingthem. We have as yet found no obstacle, no disposition to flag; and it seems that we can go on so for ever. We look round in a new world, full of life and motion, and ceaseless progress, and feel in ourselves all the vigor and spirit to keep pace with it, and do not foresee from lS4 IS' FORMAL ESSAY any present signs how wt- shall ho left behind in the race, decline into olil aj^e, and drop into the grave. It is the simplicity and, as it were, abstractedness of our feelings in youth that (so to speak) identifies us with nature and (our experience being weak and our passions strong) makes lis fancy ourselves immortal like it. Our short-lived connection with being, we fondly flatter ourselves, is an indissoluble and lasting union. vVs infants smile and sleep, we are rocked in the cradle of our desires, and hushed into fancied security by the roar of the universe around us — we ciuafT the cup of life with eager thirst without draining it, and joy and hope seem ever mantling to the brim — objects press around us, filling the mind with their magnitude and with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that there is no room for the thoughts of death. We are too much dazzled by the gorgcousncss and novelty of the bright waking dream about us to discern the dim shadoio lingering/or us in the distance. Nor would any present symptoms how we shall be left behind in the natural course of things, decline into old age, and drop into the grave. It is the simplicity, and as it were abstractedness of our feelings in youth, that (so to speak) identifies us with nature, and (our experience being slight and our passions strong) deludes us into a belief of being immortal like it. Our short-lived connection with existence, wc fondly flatter ourselves, is an' indissoluble and lasting union — [a honey-moon that knows neither coldness, jar, nor separation.] As infants smile and sleep, we are rocked in the cradle of our wayward fancies , and hdled into security by the roar of the universe around us — we quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only over- flows the tnore — objects press around us, filling the mind with their magnitude and with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death. [From that plenitude of our being, we cannot change all at once to dust and ashes, we can- not imagine "this sensible, warm motion, to become a kneaded clod"] — we are too much dazzled by the brightness of the waking dream arouiul us to look into the darkness of the tomb. [We no more see our end than our beginning : the one is lost in oblivion and vacancy, as the other is hid from us by the crowd and hurry of approaching events. Or the grim shadow is seen lingering in the horizon, which we are doomed never to overtake, or whose last, faint, glimmering outline i ON THE FEELING OF IMMORTALITY IN YOUTH 185 the hold that life has taken of us permit us to detach our thoughts that way, even if we could. We are too much absorbed in present objects and pursuits. While the spirit of youth remains un- impaired, ere "the wine of life is drunk," we are like people intoxicated or in a fever, who are hurried away by the violence of their own sensations : it is only as present objects begin to pall upon the sense, as we have been disappointed in our favorite pursuits, cut off from our closest ties, that we by degrees become weaned from the world, that passion loosens its hold upon futurity, and that we begin to contemplate as in a glass darkly the possibility of parting with it for good. Till then, the example of others has no effect upon us. Casualties we avoid; the slow approaches of age we play at hide-and-seek with. Like the foolish fat scullion in Sterne, who hears that Master Bobby is dead, our only reflection is, "So am not I !" The idea of death, instead touches upon Heaven and translates us to the skies !] Nor would the hold that life has taken of us permit us to detach our thoughts from present objects and pursuits, even if we would. [What is there more opposed to health, than sickness ; to strength and beauty, than decay and dissolution ; to the active search of knowledge, than mere oblivion ? Or is there none of the usual advantage to bar the approach of Death, and mock his idle threats ; Hope supplies their place, and draws a veil over the abrupt termination of all our cherished schemes.] While the spirit of youth remains unimpaired, ere the "wine of life is drank iip," we are like people intoxicated or in a fever, who are hurried away by the violence of their own sensations : it is only as present objects begin to pall upon the sense, as we have been disappointed in our favorite pursuits, cut off from our closest tics, that passion loosens its hold upon the breast, that we by degrees become weaned from the world, and allow ourselves to contemplate, "as in a glass, darkly," the possibility of parting with it for good. The example of others, the voice of experience, has no effect upon us what- ever. Casualties we must avoid: the slow and deliberate advances of age we can play at hide-and-seek with. [We think ourselves too lusty and too nimble for that blear-eyed decrepit old gentleman to catch us.] Like the foolish fat scullion in Sterne, when she hears that Master Bobby is dead, our only reflection is — "So am not I !" The idea of death, instead of staggering our confidence, rather seems to strengthen l86 IMVRMAL fiSSAY ol staggorinp our conridcncc, only seems to strengthen and en- hance our .'icnsc of the possession and enjoyment ol Hfe. Others may fall around us like leaves, or be mowed down by the scythe oi Time like grass: these are but metaphors to the unreflecting, buoyant ears and oversveening presumption of youth. It is not till we see the flowers of Love, Hope, and Joy withering around us, that we give up the flattering delusions that be/ore led us on, and that the emptiness and dreariness of the prospect before us reconciles us hy pathetically to the silence of the grave. Life is indeed a strange gift, and its privileges are most mysterious. No -wonder when it is first granted to us, that our gratitude, our admiration and our delight should prevent us from reflecting on our own nothingness, or from thinking it will ever be recalled. Our first and strongest impressions are borrowed from the mighty scene that is opened to us, and we unconsciously transfer its durability as well as its splendor to and enhance our possession and our enjoyment of life. Others may fall around us like leaves, or be mowed down like flowers b)' the scythe of Time : these are but tropes and figures, to the unreflecting ears and overweening presumption of youth. It is not till we see the flowers of Love. Hope, and Joy withering around us, [and our own pleasures cut up by the roots,] that we bring the moral home to ourselves, that "ur abate something of the wanton extravagance of our pretensions, or that the emptiness and dreariness of the prospect before us reconciles us to the stillness of the grave ! ["Life ! thou strange thing, that hast a power to feel Thou art, and to perceive that others are." Well might the poet begin his indignant invective against an art, whose professed object is its destruction, with this animated apos- trophe to life.] Life is indeed a strange gift, and its privileges are most miraculous. Nor is it singular that when the splendid boon is first granted us, our gratitude, our admiration, and our delight should prevent us from reflecting on our own nothingness, or from thinking it will ever be recalled. Our first and strongest impressions are taken from the mighty scene that is opened to us, and we very inno- cently transfer its durability as well as magnificence to ourselves. So ON THE FEELING OF IMMORTALITY IN YOUTH 187 ourselves. So newly found, we cannot think of parting with it yet, or at least put off that consideration sine die. Like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thought of going home, or that it will soon be night. We know our existence only by ourselves^ and confound our knowledge with the objects oj it. We and Nature are therefore one. Otherwise the illusion, the "feast of reason and the flow of soul," to which we are invited, is a mockery and a cruel insult. We do not go from a play till the last act is ended, and the lights are about to be extinguished. But the fairy face of Nature still shines on : shall we be called away before the curtain falls, or ere we have scarce had a glimpse of what is going on? Like children, our stepmother Nature holds us up to see the raree-show of the universe, and then, as if ive were a burden to her to support, lets us fall down again. Yet what brave sublunary things does not this pageant present, like a ball or fete of the universe I To see the golden sun, the azure sky, the outstretched ocean ; to walk upon the green earth, and be lord of a thousand crea- newly found, we cannot make up our minds to parting with it yet, and at least put off that consideration to an indefinite term. Like a clown at a fair, we are full of amazement and rapture, and have no thoughts of going home, or that it will soon be night. We know our existence only for external objects, and we measure it by them. We can never be satisfied with gazing; and nature will still want us to look on and applaud. Otherwise, the sumptuous entertainment, "the feast of reason and the flow of soul," to which they were invited, seems little better than a mockery and a cruel insult. We do not go from a play till the scene is ended and the lights are ready to be extinguished. But the fair face of things still shines on ; shall we be called away before the cur- tain falls, or ere we have scarce had a glimpse of what is going on ? Like children, our stepmother Nature holds us up to see the raree- show of the universe ; and then, as if life were a burthen to support, lets us instantly down again. Yet in tliat short interval, what "brave sublunary things" does not the spectacle unfold; lUze a bubble, at one minute reflecting the universe, and the next, shook to air! — To see the golden sun and the azure sky, the outstretched ocean, to walk upon the green earth, and to be lord of a thousand creatures, to look down giddy precipices or over distant flowery vales, to see the world spread iSS IXrOKMAL i:SSAV luro ; lo look clown ya'wninf^ precipices or over distant sunny vales; to see the world spread out under one's /cc/ on a ma|); to bring the stars near ; to \-iew the smallest insects lliruni^h a microscope ; to read history, and consider the revolutions of empire and the successions of generations ; to hear of the glor}- of Tyre, of Sidon, of Babylon, and of Susa, and to say air these were before me and are now nothing ; to say I exist in such a IxMnt of time, and in such a point of space ; to be a spectator and a part of its ever-moving scene ; to witness the change of season, of spring and autumn, of winter and summer ; to feel Iwt and cold, pleasure and pain, [beauty and deformity,] right and wrong ; [to be sensible to the accidents of nature ; to consider the mighty world of eye and ear ;] lo listen to tJie stock-dove's notes amid the forest deep; to journey over tnoor and mountain; to hear the midnight sainted choir; to \-isit lighted halls, or the cathedraVs gloom, or sit in crowded theatres and see life itself mocked ; to study the works of art and refine the sense of beauty to agony ; to worship fame, and to dream of immortality ; [to look upon the Vatican,] and to read Shakespeare ; [to gather up the wisdom of the ancients, and to pry into the future ; to listen to the trump out under one's finger in a map, to bring the stars near, to view the smallest insects in a microscope, to read history, and witness the revo- lutions of empires and the succession of generations, to hear of the glory of Sidon and Tyre, of Babylon and Susa, [as of a faded pageant,] and to say all these were, and are now nothing, to think that we exist in such a point of time, and in such a corner of space, to be at once specta- tors and a part of the moving scene, to watch the return of the seasons, of spring and autumn, to hear — "The stockdove plain amid the forest deep, [That drowsy rustles to the sighing gale " — ] to traverse desert wildernesses, to listen to the midnight choir, to visit lighted halls, or plunge into the dungeon's gloom, or sit in crowded theatres and see hfe itself mocked, to feel heat and cold, pleasure and pain, right and wrong, [truth and falsehood,] to study the works of art and refine the sense of beauty to agony, to worship fame and to dream of immortality, to have read Shakespeare [and belong to the ON THE FEELING OF IMMORTALITY IN YOUTH 189 of war, the shout of victory ; to question history as to the move- ments of the human heart ; to seek for truth ; to plead the cause of humanity; to overlook the world as if time and Nature poured their treasures at our feet — ] to be and to do all this, and then in a moment to be nothing — to have it all snatched from us by a juggler's trick or a phantasmagoria ! There is something in this transition from all to nothing that shocks us and damps the enthusiasm of youth new flushed with hope and pleasure, and we cast the comfortless thought as far from us as we can. In the first enjoyment of the estate of life we discard the fear of debts and duns, and never think of the final payment of our great debt to Nature. Art, we know, is long; life, we flatter ourselves, should be so too. We see no end of the difiiculties and delays we have to encounter : perfection is slow of attain- ment, and we must have time to accomplish it in. The fame of the great names we look up to is immortal : and shall not we who contemplate it imbibe a portion of ethereal fire, the divinoe particula aura, which nothing can extinguish? A wTinkle in Rembrandt or in Nature takes whole days to resolve itself into its component parts, its softenings and its sharpnesses ; we re- fine upon our perfections, and unfold the intricacies of Nature. What a prospect for the future ! What a task have we not begun ! And shall we be arrested in the middle of it ? We do not count our time thus employed lost, or our pains thrown away ; we do not flag or grow tired, but gain new vigor at our endless task. Shall Time, then, grudge us to finish what we have begun, and have formed a compact with Nature to do? same species as Sir Isaac Newton ;] to be and to do all this, and then in a moment to be nothing, to have it all snatched from one like a juggler's ball or a phantasmagoria ; there is something revolting and incredible to sense in the transition ; and no wonder that, aided by youth and warm blood, and the flush of enthusiasm, the mind contrives for a long lime to reject it with disdain and loathing as a monstrous and improbable fiction. . . .^ 1 From this point for several pages the correspondence lietween the two versions is very slight, the earher being much more diffuse. i()o rxFOR.\r.\L i:.ssAV Why not till up ihc blank lluit is Icll us in ihis manner ? I have looked for hours at a Rembrandt without being conscious of the lliuht of time, but with ever new wonder and delight, have thought that nol only my own but another existence I could pass in the same manner. This rarefied, relined existence seemed to have no end, nor stint, nor principle of decay in it. The print would remain long after I who looked on it had become the prey of worms. The thing seems in itself out of all reason : health, strength, appetite, are opposed to the idea of death, and we are not ready to credit it till we have found our illusions vanished and our hopes grown cold. Objects in youth, from novelty, &c., are stamped upon the brain with such force and integrity that one thinks nothing can remove or obliterate them. They are riveted there, and appear to us as an element of our nature. It must be a mere violence that destroys them, not a natural decay. ' In the very strength of this persuasion we seem to enjoy an age by anticipation. We melt down years into a single moment of intense sympathy, and by anticipating the fruits defy the ravages of time. If, then, a single moment of our lives is worth years, shall we set any limits to its total value and extent? Again, does it not happen that so secure do we think ourselves of an indefinite period of existence, that at times, when left to ourselves, and impatient of novelty, we feel annoyed at what seems to us the slow and creeping progress of time, and argue that if it always moves at this tedious snail's- pace it will never come to an end ? How ready are we to sac- rifice any space of time which separates us from a favorite object, little thinking that before long we shall find it move too fast! For my part, I started in life with the French Revolution, and I have lived, alas ! to see the end of it. But I did not fore- see this result. My sun arose with the first dawn of liberty, and I did not think how soon both must set. The new impulse to ardor given to men's minds, imparted a congenial warmth and glow to mine ; we were strong to run a race together, and I little dreamed that long before mine was set, the sun of liberty would turn to blocd, or set once more in the night of despotism. ON THE FEELING OF IMMORTALITY IN YOUTH 191 Since then, I confess, I have no longer felt myself young, for with that my hopes fell. I have since turned my thoughts to gathering up some of the fragments of my early recollections, and putting them into a form to which I might occasionally revert. The future was barred to my progress, and I turned for consolation and en- couragement to the past. It is thus that, while we find our personal and substantial identity vanishing from us, we strive to gain a reflected and vicarious one in our thoughts : we do not like to perish wholly, and wish to bequeath our names, at least, to posterity. As long as we can make our cherished thoughts and nearest interests live in the minds of others, we do not appear to have retired altogether from the stage. We still occupy the breasts oj others, aitd exert an influence and power over them, and it is only our bodies that are reduced to dust and powder. Our favorite speculations still find encouragement, and we make as great a figure in the eye of the world, or perhaps a greater, than in our lifetime. The demands of our self-love are thus satisfied, [and these are the most imperious and unre- mitting.] Besides, if by our intellectual superiority we survive ourselves in this world, by our virtues and faith we may attain an It is thus, that when we find our personal and substantial identity vanishing from us, we strive to gain a reflected and substituted one in our thoughts : we do not like to perish wholly, and wish to bequeath our names, at least, to posterity. As long as we can keep alive our cherished thoughts and nearest interests in the minds of others, we do not appear to have retired altogether from the stage, we still occupy a place in the estimation of mankind, exercise a powerful influence over tliem, and it is only our bodies that are trampled into dust or dispersed to air. Our darling speculations still find favor and encouragement, and we make as good a figure in the eyes of our descendants, nay, per- haps, a better than we did in our life-time. [This is one point gained ;] the demands of our self-love are so far satisfied. Besides, if by the proofs of intellectual superiority we survive ourselves in this world, by exemplary virtue or unblemished faith, we are taught to ensure an interest in another and a higher state of being, and to anticipate at the same time the applauses of men and angels. 192 INFORMAL ESSAY intiTcsl in anolluT and a hij^hcr state of being, and may thus be 'ii/yitnts at the same time of men and of angels. "E'en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries, E'en in our iishes live their wonted fires." As we f^rou' old, our sense of the value of time becomes vivid. Nothing else, indeed, seems of any consequence. We can never cease wondering l/i-at that which has ever been should cease to be. We tind many things remain the same : why, then, should there be change in us ? This adds a convulsive grasp of whatever is, a sense of a fallacious hoUowness in all we see. Instead, of the full, pulpy feeling of youth, [tasting existence and every object in it,] all is flat and vapid, — a whited sepulchre, fair without, but full of ravening and all uncleanness within. The world is a witch that puts us off with false shows and appearances. The simplicity of youth, the confiding expectation, the bomuJless raptures, are gone; [we only think of getting out of it as well as we can, and without any great mischance or annoyance. The liush of illusion, even the complacent retrospect of past joys and hopes, is o\er :] if we can slip out of life without indignity, can escape with little bodily infirmity, and frame our minds to the calm and respectable composure of still-life before we return to "Even from the tomb the voice of nature cries; Even in our ashes live their wonted fires." As we advance in life, we acquire a keener sense of the value of time. Nothing else, indeed, seems of any consequence ; [and we become misers in this respect. We try to arrest its few last tottering steps, and to make it linger on the brink of the grave.] We can never leave off wondering //du' that which has ever been should cease to be, [and would still live on. that we may wonder at our own shadow, and when "all the life of life is flown," dwell on the retrospect of the past.] This is accompanied by a mechanical tenaciousness of whatever we possess, by a distrust atui a sense of fallacious hollowncss in all we see. Instead of the full, pulpy feeling of youth, everything is fiat and insipid. The world is a painted witch, that puts us off with false shows and letnpting appenrances. The ease, the jocund gaiety, the unsuspecting security of ON THE FEELING OF IMMORTALITY IN YOUTH 193 physical nothingness, it is as much as we can expect. We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after facility, [interest after interest], attachment after attachment, disappear: we are torn from our- selves while living, year after year sees us no longer the same, and death only consigns the last fragment of what we were to the grave. That we should wear out by slow stages, and dwindle at last into nothing, is not wonderful, when even in our prime our strongest impressions leave little trace but for the moment, and we are the creatures of petty circumstance. How little efiect is made on us in our best days by the books we have read, the scenes we have witnessed, the sensations we have gone through ! Think only of the feelings we experience in reading a fine romance [one of Sir Walter's, for instance;] what beauty, what sublimity, youth are fled: [nor can we, without flying in the face of common sense, "From the last dregs of life, hope to receive What its first sprightly runnings could not give."] If we can slip out of the world without notice or mischance, can tam- per with bodily infirmity, and frame our minds to the becoming com- posure of still-life, before we sinii into total insensibility, it is as much as we ought to expect. We do not in the regtdar course of nature die all at once: we have mouldered away gradually long before ; faculty after faculty, attachment after attachment, we are torn from ourselves piece-meal while living ; year after year lakes something from us; and death only consigns the last remnant of what we were to the grave. [The revulsion is not so great, and a quiet euthanasia is a wmding-up of the plot, that is not out of reason or nature.] That we should thus in a manner outlive ourselves, and dwindle imperceptibly into nothing, is not surprising, when even in our prime the strongest impressions leave so little traces of themselves behind, and the last object is driven out by the succeeding one. How little effect is produced on us at any time by the books we have read, the scenes we have witnessed, the sufferings we have gone through ! Think only of the variety of feelings we experience in reading an interesting ro- mance, [or being present at a fine play — ] what beauty, what sub- Umity, what soothing, what heart-rending emotions ! You would o 104 IMVRMAI. ESSAY what iukrcst, what hcart-rciuiinp; emotions ! You would sup- pose t/w jcclini^s you then rxprriciucd would last for ever, or sub- due the mind to their (rwii harmony and tone: while we are reading, it seems as if nothing coukl ever put us out of our way or trouble us: — the first splash of mud that we get on entering the street, the frst twopence we are cheated out of, the feeling vanishes clean out of our winds, and we become the prey oj petty and annoying circumstance. The mind soars to the lofty : it is at home in the grovelling, the disagreeable, and the little. [And yet we wonder that age should be feeble and querulous, — that the freshness of youth should fade away. Both worlds would hardly satisfy the extravagance of our desires and of our pre- sumption.] suppose these would last for ever, or at least subdue the mind to a corre- spondent lone and harmony — while we turn over the page [while the scene is passing before us,] it seems as if nothing could ever after shake our resolution, [that "treason domestic, foreign levy, nothing could touch us farther !"] The first splash of mud we get, on entering the street, the first pettifogging shop-keeper that cheats us out of twopence, and the whole vanishes clean out of our remembrance, and we become the idle prey of the most petty and annoying circumstances. The mind soars by an ejfort to the grand and lofty : it is at home in the grovelling, the disagreeable, and the little. [This happens in the height and hey- day of our existence, when novelty gives a stronger impulse to the blood and takes a faster hold of the brain, (I have known the impression on coming out of a gallery of pictures then last half a day) — as we grow old, we become more feeble and querulous, every object "reverbs its own hollowness," and both worlds are not enough to satisfy the peevish importunity and extravagant presumption of our desires ! There are a few superior, happy beings, who are born with a temper exempt from ever>' trifling annoyance. This spirit sits serene and smiling as in its native skies, and a divine harmony (whether heard or not) plays around them. This is to be at peace. Without this, it is in vain to fly into deserts, or to build a hermitage on the top of rocks, if regret and ill-humor follow us there : and with this, it is needless to make the experiment. The only true retirement is that of the heart ; the only true leisure is the repose of the passions. To such persons it makes little difference whether they are young or old ; and they die as they have lived, with graceful resignation.] I. F. REVIEWS AND CRITICISMS JANE AUSTEN'S EMMA Walter Scott He who paints le beau ideal, if his scenes and sentiments are striking and interesting, is in a great measure exempted from the difficult task of reconciling them with the ordinary proba- bilities of life ; but he who paints a scene of common occur- rence places his composition within that extensive range of criticism which general experience offers to every reader. The resemblance of a statue of Hercules we must take on the artist's judgment ; but every one can criticize that which is presented as the portrait of a friend or neighbor, [i'^omething more than a mere sign-post likeness is also demanded. The portrait must have spirit and character, as well as resemblance ; and being deprived of all that which, according to Bayes, "goes to elevate and surprise," it must make amends by displaying depth of knowledge and dexterity of execution. We therefore bestow no mean compliment upon the author of Emma, when we say that, keeping close to common incidents and to such characters as occupy the ordinary walks of life, she has produced sketches of such spirit and originality, that we never miss the excitation which depends upon a narrative of uncommon events, arising from the consideration of minds, manners, and sentiments greatly above our own. In this class she stands almost alone ; for the scenes of Miss Edgeworth are laid in higher life, varied by more romantic incident, and by her remarkable power of embodying and illustrating national character. But the author of Emma confines herself chiefly to the middling classes of society ; her most distinguished characters do not rise greatly above well-bred country gentlemen and ladies ; and those which l()6 REVIEWS AXD CRITICISMS arc sketcht'd with most orij^inality and precision, belong lo a class rather l)eknv that standard. The narrative of all her novels is composed of such common occurrences as may have fallen under the oliservation of most folks; and her dramatis pcrs&nct conduct themselves upon the motives aiid principles which the readers may recognise as ruling their ow^n and that of most of their acquaintances. The kind of moral, also, which these novels inculcate applies ecjually to the paths of common life, as will best appear from a short notice of the author's former works, with a more full abstract of that which we at present have under consideration. Saise ami Sensihility, the first of these compositions, contains the history of two sisters. The elder, a young lady of prudence and regulated feelings, becomes gradually attached to a man of an excellent heart and limited talents, who happens unfor- tunately to be fettered by a rash and ill-assorted engagement. In the younger sister, the influence of sensibility and imagina- tion predominates; and she, as was to be expected, also falls in love, but with more unbridled and wilful passion. Her lover, gifted with all the qualities of exterior polish and vivacity, proves faithless, and marries a woman of large fortune. The interest and merit of the piece depend altogether upon the behavior of the elder sister, while obliged at once to sustain her own disappointment with fortitude, and to support her sister, who abandons herself, with unsuppressed feelings, to the indulgence of grief. The marriage of the unworthy rival at length relieves her own lover from his imprudent engagement, while her sister, turned wise by precept, example, and experience, transfers her affection to a very respectable and somewhat too serious ad- mirer, who had nourished an unsuccessful passion through three volumes. In Prvle and Prejudice the author presents us with a family of young women, bred up under a foolish and vulgar mother, and a father whose good abilities lay hid under such a load of in- dolence and insensibility, that he had become contented to make the foibles and follies of his wife and daughters the subject of dry and humorous sarcasm, rather than of admonition, or JANE AUSTEN'S EMMA 197 restraint. This is one of the portraits from ordinary life which shows OUT author's talents in a very strong point of view. A friend of ours, whom the author never saw or heard of, was at once recognized by his own family as the original of Mr. Bennet, and we do not know if he has yet got rid of the nickname. A Mr. Collins, too, a formal, conceited, yet servile young sprig of divinity, is drawn with the same force and precision. The story of the piece consists chiefly in the fate of the second sister, to whom a man of high birth, large fortune, but haughty and reserved manners, becomes attached in spite of the discredit thrown upon the object of his affection by the vulgarity and ill- conduct of her relations. The lady, on the contrary, hurt at the contempt of her connections, which the lover does not even attempt to suppress, and prejudiced against him on other ac- counts, refuses the hand which he ungraciously offers, and does not perceive that she has done a foolish thing until she acci- dentally visits a very handsome seat and grounds belonging to her admirer. They chance to meet exactly as her prudence had begun to subdue her prejudice; and* after some essential ser- vices rendered to her family, the lover becomes encouraged to renew his addresses, and the novel ends happily. Emma has even less story than either of the preceding novels. Miss Emma Woodhouse, from whom the book takes its name, is the daughter of a gentleman of wealth and consequence residing at his seat in the immediate vicinage of a country village called Highbury. The father, a good-natured silly valetudinary, abandons the management of his household to Emma, he him- self being only occupied by his summer and winter walk, his apothecary, his gruel, and his whist table. The latter is sup- plied from the neighboring village of Highbury with precisely the sort of persons who occupy the vacant corners of a regular whist table, when a village is in the neighborhood, and better cannot be found within the family. We have the smiling and courteous vicar, who nourishes the ambitious hope of obtaining Miss Woodhouse's hand. We have Mrs. Bates, the wife of a former rector, past everything but tea and whist ; her daughter, Miss Bates, a good-natured, vulgar, and foolish old maid; Mr. 19S REVIKWS A.\D CRITICISMS WostiMi, a gentleman of a frank disposiliDn and moderate for- tune, in the vicinity, and his wife, an amiable and accomplished person, who had been Emma's governess, anil is devotedly attached to her. Amongst all these personages, Miss Wood- house walks forth, the princess paramount, superior to all her com[xinions in wit, beauty, fortune, and accomplishments, doted upon by her father and the Westons, admired, and al- most worshipped, by the more humble companions of the whist table. The object of most young ladies is, or at least is usually supposed to be, a desirable connection in marriage. But Emma Woodhouse, either anticipating the taste of a later period of life, or, like a good sovereign preferring the weal of her subjects of Highbury to her own private interest, sets generously about making matches for her friends without thinking of matrimony on her own account. We are informed that she had been emi- nently successful in the case of Mr. and Mrs. Weston ; and when the novel commences she is exerting her influence in favor of Miss Harriet Smith, a boarding-school girl without family or fortune, very good humored, very pretty, very silly, and, what suited Miss Woodhouse's purpose best of all, very much dis- posed to be married. In these conjugal machinations Emma is frequently inter- rupted, not only by the cautions of her father, who had a par- ticular objection to anybody committing the rash act of matri- mony, but also by the sturdy reproof and remonstrances of Mr. Knightly, the elder brother of her sister's husband, a sen- sible country gentleman of thirty-five, who had known Emma from her cradle, and was the only person who ventured to find fault with her. In spite, however, of his censure and warning, Emma lays a plan of marrying Harriet Smith to the \dcar ; and though she succeeds perfectly in diverting her simple friend's thoughts from an honest farmer who had made her a very suitable offer, and in flattering her into a passion for Mr. Elton, yet, on the other hand, that conceited divine totally mistakes the nature of the encouragement held out to him, and attrib- utes the favor which he found in Miss Woodhouse's eyes to a lurkinp affection on her own part. This at length encourages JANE AUSTEN'S EMMA 199 him to a presumptuous declaration of his sentiments; upon receiving a repulse, he looks abroad elsewhere, and enriches the Highbury society by uniting himself to a dashing young woman with as many thousands as are usually called ten, and a cor- responding quantity of presumption and ill-breeding. While Emma is thus vainly engaged in forging wedlock-fetters for others, her friends have views of the same kind upon her, in favor of a son of Mr. Weston by a former marriage who bears the name, lives under the patronage, and is to inherit the fortune of a rich uncle. Unfortunately, Mr. Frank Churchill had al- ready settled his affections on Miss Jane Fairfax, a young lady of reduced fortune ; but as this was a concealed affair, Emma, when Mr. Churchill first appears on the stage, has some thoughts of being in love with him herself ; speedily, however, recovering from that dangerous propensity, she is disposed to confer him upon her deserted friend Harriet Smith. Harriet has in the interim fallen desperately in love wdth Mr. Knightly, the sturdy advice-giving bachelor ; and, as all the village supposes Frank Churchill and Emma to be attached to each other, there are cross purposes enough (were the novel of a more romantic cast) for cutting half the men's throats, and breaking all the women's hearts. But at Highbury Cupid walks decorously, and with good discretion, bearing his torch under a lanthorn, instead of flourishing it around to set the house on fire. All these entanglements bring on only a train of mistakes and em- barrassing situations, and dialogues at balls and parties of pleas- ure, in which the author displays her peculiar powers of humor and knowledge of human life. The plot is extricated with great simplicity. The aunt of Frank Churchill dies ; his uncle, no longer under her baneful influence, consents to his marriage with Jane Fairfax. Mr. Knightly and Emma are ed, by this unexpected incident, to discover that they had been in love with each other all along. Mr. Woodhouse's objections to the mar- riage of his daughter are overpowered by the fears of house- breakers, and the comfort which he hopes to derive from having a stout son-in-law resident in the family ; and the facile affec- tions of Harriet Smith are transferred, like a bank bill by in- 200 REVIEWS AND CRITICISMS dorsation, to her former suitor, the lioncst farmer, who ha(^ ol)taincd a favorable opportunity of renewing his addresses. Such is the simple plan of a story which we peruse with pleasure, if not with deep interest, and which perhaps we might more willingly resume than one of those narratives where the atten- tion is strongly riveted, during the first perusal, by the powerful excitement of curiosity. The author's knowledge of the world, and the peculiar tact with which she presents characters that the reader cannot fail to recognize, reminds us something of the merits of the Flemish school of painting. The subjects are not often elegant, and certainly never grand ; but they are finished up to nature, and with a precision which delights the reader. This is a merit which it is very difficult to illustrate by extracts, because it per- vades the whole work, and is not to be comprehended from a single passage. ******* The faults, on the contrary, arise from the minute detail which the author's plan comprehends. Characters of folly or sim- plicity, such as those of old Woodhouse and Miss Bates, are ridiculous when first presented, but if too often brought forward or too long dwelt upon, their prosing is apt to become as tiresome in fiction as in real society. Upon the whole, the turn of this author's novels bears the same relation to that of the sentimental and romantic cast, that cornfields and cottages and meadows bear to the highly adorned grounds of a show mansion, or the rugged sublimities of a mountain landscape. It is neither so captivating as the one, nor so grand as the other, but it affords to those who frequent it a pleasure nearly allied with the ex- perience of their own social habits ; and what is of some impor- tance, the youthful wanderer may return from his promenade to the ordinary' business of life, without any chance of having his head turned by the recollection of the scene through which he has been wandering. ON THE TATLE^^^^-Xh^Jcfjf, 20t ON THE TATLER^ William Hazlitt Of all the periodical Essayists (our ingenious predecessors), the Taller has always appeared to us the most accomplished and agreeable. Montaigne, who was the father of this kind of per- sonal authorship among the moderns, in which the reader is admitted behind the curtain, and sits down with the writer in his gown and slippers, was a most magnanimous and undis- guised egotist; but Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., was the more dis- interested gossip of the two. The French author is contented to describe the peculiarities of his own mind and person, which he does with a most copious and unsparing hand. The English journalist, goodnaturedly, lets you into the secret both of his own affairs and those of his neighbors. A young lady, on the other side of Temple Bar, cannot be seen at her glass for half a day together, but Mr. Bickerstaff takes due notice of it ; and he has the first intelligence of the symptoms of the belle passion appearing in any young gentleman at the west end of the town. The departures and arrivals of widows with handsome jointures, either to bury their grief in the country, or to procure a second husband in town, are regularly recorded in his pages. He is well acquainted with the celebrated beauties of the last age at the Court of Charles the Second, and the old gentleman often grows romantic in recounting the disastrous strokes which his youth suffered from the glance of their bright eyes and their unaccountable caprices. In particular, he dwells with a secret satisfaction on one of his mistresses who left him for a rival, and whose constant reproach to her husband, on occasion of any quarrel between them, was, "I, that might have married the famous Mr. Bickerstaff, to be treated in this manner!" The club at the Trumpet consists of a set of persons as entertaining as himself. The cavalcade of the justice of the peace, the knight of the shire, the country squire, and the young gentleman, ' From the Round Table. 202 REVIEWS AND CRITICISMS his nephew, who waited on him at his chainl»ers in siuli form and ceremony, seem not to have settled the order of their i)recedencc to this hour ; and we should hope the upholsterer and his coni- panions in the Green Park stand as fair a chance for immortality as some modern politicians. Mr. BickerstafT himself is a gentle- man and a scholar, a humorist and a man of the world, with a great deal of nice easy naivete about him. If he walks out and is caught in a shower of rain, he makes us amends for this un- lucky accident by a criticism on the shower in Virgil, and con- cludes \yith a burlesciue copy of verses on a city shower. He entertains us, when he dares, from his own apartment, with a quotation from Plutarch or a moral reflection ; from the Grecian cofifeehouse with politics, and from WilVs or the Temple with the poets and players, the beaux and men of wit and pleasure about town. In reading the pages of the Tatler we seem as if suddenly transported to the age of Queen Anne — of toupees and full-bottomed periwigs. The whole appearance of our dress and manners undergoes a delightful metamorphosis. We are surprised with the rustling of hoops and the glittering of paste buckles. The Ijeaux and belles are of a quite different species ; we distinguish the dappers, the smarts, and the pretty fellows, as they pass ; we are introduced to Betterton and Mrs. Oldfield behind the scenes — are made familiar with the persons of Mr. Penkethman and Mr. Bullock ; we listen to a dispute at a tavern on the merits of the Duke of Marlborough or Marshal Turenne ; or are present at the first rehearsal of a play by Van- brugh, or the reading of a new poem by Mr. Pope. The privi- lege of thus virtually transporting ourselves to past times is even greater than that of visiting distant places. London a hundred years ago would be better worth seeing than Paris at the present moment. THE WAVERLEV NOVELS 203 THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 1 George Edward Woodberry The basis of reality in the Waverley Novels is one of their most distinguishing qualities, and underlies their endurance in literature. It is not merely that particular characters are studied from life ; that George Constable and John Clerk sat for The Antiquary, that Scott himself is Mr. Mannering, that Laidlaw or another is Dandie Dinmont ; nor is it that other characters, like Meg Merrillies and the gypsies are suggestions from living figures that had arrested the author's passing glance. It is not that the scene of Castle Dangerous is governed by what his eye beheld on his visit there, or the whole landscape of The Pirate transcribed from his voyages among the islands of the north. Still less is it what he gained from books, either of ordinary history and records of events or such sermons as those from which he transferred the dark and intense eloquence of Old Mortality. He had such a marvellous memory for whatever bore the national stamp, he was so brain-packed with the ocular and audible experience of his converse with the people, so full of their physiognomy, gesture, and phrase, that he fed his nar- rative incessantly with actuality ; and such was his surplus of treasure of this sort that in his general edition he continued to pour out an illustrative stream of anecdote, reminiscence, and antiquarian lore in the notes and prefaces. A keen friend was confirmed in his belief of Scott's authorship by the presence of a striking phrase that he heard him once use. The Scotch novels are, as it were, an amalgam of memory. When he came to write them, all his love of tradition and the country-side with which his mind was impregnated, was precipitated in an un- failing flow. It was because Scott was so much alive with Scotland, that he made his characters live with that intense reality, that instant conviction of their truth, in which he is to ■ From the essay on Scott in Great Writers. The Macmillan Company, igo7. Reprinter] by permission. 204 REVIEWS AND CRITICfSMS be compared only with Shakespeare. It is true that it is a man of letters who wrote the Wavcrley Novels, a mind fed on the stulT of mediicval romance and on the tradition of the English drama, the " old play " of which he was so fond ; but the literary element in the tales is a thing of allusion, like VVaverley's studies, or episodical, as in the character of Bunce or on a more impor- tant scale of Sir Percie Shafton, or else its rambling antiquarian- ism serves to set forth Scotch pedantry appropriately. The Waverley Novels are not a development out of older literature, they are an original growth, a fresh form of the imaginative in- terpretation of the human past, a new and vital rendering straight from life. Even in the tales whose scene is laid in England and the continent, where Scott was more dependent on printed sources, the literary element is little more perceptible than in the Scotch novels themselves ; the sense of reality in them is not appreciably less. Rut Scott already had the best historical education as a living discipline in assimilating his own country, and he came to the interpretation of history in other lands with trained powers of understanchng and imagination in that field. A distinguished historian once expressed to me his admiration for Count Robert of Paris, and I w'as glad to find such unexpected support for my own liking of this novel, ivhich is generally regarded, I believe, as a pitiable example of Scott's mental decline ; but my friend had been struck, he said, by its remarkable grasp of history, its brilliant adequacy in that way. It was the same power with which Scott had grasped Ivanhoe, and told the tale of Quentin Durward, and made Richard Lion- heart like one of Shakespeare's kings. He had learned the way by making history- alive on his own heath in the most living con- tact with the past that ever man had. Veracity is the first great quality of the Waverley Novels. The second is emotional power. Scott was a man of strength ; he liked strong deeds and strong men ; and he liked strong emotions. I do not mean the passion of love, in which he showed little interest. The way of a man with a maid was not to him the whole of life. In the national temperament in its action in history he found two great emotions : the passion of loyalty, THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 205 which was incarnate in the Cavaliers and clans, and the en- thusiasm of religion which filled the Covenanters. These were social forces and supported a lifelong character in men. They gave ideal elevation to the tragic and cruel events which belong to Scotch history, and made an atmosphere about the actors which glowed with life. Scott shared to the full the national capacity for enthusiasm, and was in his own imaginary world as much a Jacobite as he was a border-raider ; and he put into his representation a fervor hardly less than contemporary. He was master, too, on the scale of private as opposed to public feeling, of all the moods of sorrow, and especially of that dark and brooding spirit, frequent in the Scotch character, which he has repeatedly drawn. Such emotion, in the people or in in- dividuals, is the crucible of romance. He used its fires to the full. Whether the scene be battle-broad or dungeon-narrow, whether the passion involves the fortune of a crown or burns in the single breast of Ravenswood, he finds in those deep-flowing and overmastering human feelings the ideal substance which makes his romances so charged with power over the heart, with the essential meaning of human life, in its course in character, and at its moments of personal crisis. The homogeneity of this power of passion with the events of Scotch history and with the character of the people is complete, the unity of the whole is reinforced by the romantic quality of the landscape, which is its appropriate setting. The state of society, its stage in civiliza- tion, is also in keeping. It is, in fact, a kind of Homeric world, without any fancifulness ; or if, when the parallel is stated, the difference is more felt than the likeness, it is a world of free action, bold character, primitive customs, as well as of high feeling and enterprise, such as has fallen to the lot of no other author since Homer to depict with the same breadth and ele- vation. It was good fortune for Scott, too, that he could follow Shakespeare's example in relieving the serious scene with humor. It is humor of the first quality, which lies in character itself, and not in farcical action or the buffoonery of words. It centres in and proceeds from eccentricity, in which the Scot- tish character is also rich; nor in general is the eccentricity 2o6 REVIEWS AXD CRITICISMS overstrained i>r monotonously insisted on. Scott is very tender of his fools, whose defectiveness in nature is never made a re- proach or cruel burden to themselves ; and the humorous side of his serious characters only completes their humanity. All parts of life thus enter into his general material, but harmoni- ously. His share of artistic power was instinctive ; he was never very conscious of it ; but it was most remarkable in the perfect blend he made of the elements he used. The Pirate is an admirable example. It is a sea story, and takes its whole atmosphere from the coasts where its action lies. The struggle with the elements in Mordaunt's opening journey is like an overture ; the rescue of the sailor-castaway, the cliff-setting of Mertoun's house, the old Norse of the patriarch's home, and the life of the beach there with its fishing fleet, the superstitious character of Xorna, the weird familiar of the winds, the bardic lays of Claude Halcro, the sentimental pirate-father, and the son with his crew, the secret of the past which unlocks the plot, — all these make a combination of land, character, and story, each raised in power by imaginative treatment to a romantic height, and echoing the same note of the sea one to the other in a blend as naturally one as sky, cliff, and weather. As a sea piece, given by character and event as well as by description, it is an unrivalled work, and this is due to its artistic keeping. This power of blend was an essential element in Scott's genius ; by it his romance becomes integral in plot, character, and setting ; and this felicity of composition achieves in its own way the same end in artistic effect that is sought in another way by construction in the strict sense. Scott never fails in unity of feeling ; it was a part of his emotional gift. The third commanding trait of the Waverley Novels is crea- tive power. It is this that places Scott among the greatest imaginative prose writers of the world, and makes him the first of romancers as Shakespeare is the first of dramatists. He had that highest faculty of genius which works with the simplicity of nature herself and has something magical in its immediacy, in the way in which it escapes observation and in its total suc- cess ; he speaks the word, and there is a world of men, moving, THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 207 acting, suffering in the wholeness of Ufe. These masters of imagination, too, have as many moulds as nature; whoever appears on the scene of Homer or Shakespeare, no one is surprised ; and Scott was as fertile as any of his kind. He is a master of behavior, for both gentleman and peasant, and of the phrases that seem the very speech of a man's mouth. The world of gentlemen is represented in its motives and interests, its sacrifices and ideas for both age and youth, with a sympathetic comprehension that makes it seem the most just tribute ever given to the essential nobility of that kind of life, aristocratic in ideal, warring, terrible in what it did and what it suffered, but habitually moving in a high plane of conduct and having for its life-breath that passion of loyalty, which, however un- reasoning or mistaken, is one of the glorious virtues of men. The world of humble life, likewise, is rendered with vivid truth in its pursuits, trials, and submissions, the virtues welling from the bloo'd itself in peril, sorrow, natural affection, for man and woman, for every time of life and in every station of the poor. It is in the language of these characters that the life lies with most efficacy; only nature makes men and women who can speak thus ; and the solidity of their speech is part of the sim- plicity of their lives. Cuddle's mother in Old Mortality, the old fisherman, Mucklebackit, in The Antiquary, Jennie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian, are examples ; but Scott's truth of touch in such dealing with the poor is unfailing. If the behavior of his gentlemen appeals to the sense of chivalry in every gen- erous breast, the words of his humble persons go straight to the heart of all humanity. In both classes there is a vitality that is distinguishable from life itself only by its higher power. He creates from within ; he shows character in action so fused that the being and the doing are one ; he achieves expression in its highest form — the expression of a soul using its human powers in earthly life. This is the creative act ; not the scientific exhibit of the development of character, not the analytic ex- amination of psychology and motivation, for which inferior talent suffices, but the reveaUng flash of genius which shows the fair soul in the fair act, be it in the highest or the lowest of 20S KEVIEWS AXD CRITICISMS mon, in t^ood fortiiiu- or bad, triuni[)hanl or tragic, or on the. level of all men's days. It belonged to Scott's conception of life that character and act should be in perfect equipoise; to find them so is the su[)reme moment of art. It was the moment of Shakespeare and Homer, in drama and epic ; and it is the moment of Scott in the novel. The living power of his men and women by virtue of which once in the mind they never die out of it, but remain with the other enduring figures of imagination, "forms more real than living man," proceeds from this union of passion, truth, and creative power with the form and pressure of life itself. The material is always noble, and the form into which Scott throws it is manly. The impression of all he creates is of nobility; not the nobility that requires high cultivation or special consecration to supreme self-sacrifice, but such nobility as is within the reach of most men, to be honest and brave, tender and strong, simple, true, and gallant, fair to a foe and faithful to our own. MARK TWAIN 1 Stuart Pratt Sherman Not by his subtlety, nor his depth, nor his elevation, but by his understanding and his unflinching assertion of the ordinary self of the ordinary American, did Mark Twain become our "foremost man of letters." He was geographically an American ; he knew his land and its idioms at first hand — Missouri, the Mississippi River and its banks, Nevada, California, New England, New York, the great cities. It is insufficiently recognized that to love one's country intelligently one must know its body, as well as its mind. He had the good fortune to be born in the West ; so that, of course, he had to go East — otherwise he might, instead of becoming an American, have remained a mere Bostonian or New Yorker all his life, and never have learned to love Chicago ' From the fXew York) Nation, May 12, 1910. (Vol. XC, pp. 478-480.) Re- printed by permission of the author. MARK TWAIN 209 and San Francisco at all. At various times and places he was pilot, printer, editor, reporter, minister, lecturer, author, and publisher. But during the first half of his life, he went most freely with "powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers of families." The books in which he em- bodies his early experiences — Tom Sawyer, Roughing It, Huckle- berry Finn — are almost entirely delightful. They breathe the spirit of eternal boyhood, they are richly provincial, they spring out of the fresh earth. There is a touch of melodrama in the first and more than a touch of farce in the last, but in the main they are as native as a bluff to the Mississippi or a pine tree to a red spur of the Rockies. It is when an American carries his virtues abroad that the lines of his character become salient. Mark Twain was a self- made man, of small Latin and less Greek, indifferent to ab- stractions, deficient in historical sympathy and imagination, insensitive to delicate social differences, content and at home in modern workaday realities. I confess with great apprehension that I do not much care for his books of foreign travel. Like the story told on Whittier's birthday, they are "smart and sat- urated with humor"; but for some almost indefinable reason my emotions fail to enter into the spirit of the occasion. An uneasy doubt about the point of view binds my mirth as with a "black frost." I find myself concerned for my fellow-citizen, the author behind the books ; beneath the surface gayety the whole affair seems to be of appalling seriousness for us both. Ostensibly light-hearted burlesques of the poetical and senti- mental volumes of travel, these books are in reality an amazingly faithful record of the way Europe and the Orient strike the "divine average" — the typical American — the man for whom the world .was created in 1776. Wandering through exhumed Pompeii, he peoples its solemn ruins with the American pro- letariat, and fancies that he sees upon the walls of its theatre the placard, "Positively No Free List, Except Members of the Press." He digresses from an account of the ascent of Vesuvius to compare the prices of gloves, linen shirts, and dress suits in Paris and in Italy. At length arrived at the summit of the 210 RliVfKlVS AM) CRITICISMS mountain, he describes its crater as a "circular ditch"; some of tlu- party light their cigars in the fissures; he descends, ob- serving that the volcano is a poor affair when compared with K.ilauea. in the Sandwich Ishmds. He visits the Parthenon in the night ; obviously, the memorable feature of the expedition was robbing the vineyards on the way back to the ship. The most famous picture galleries of Europe are hung with "cele- brated rubbish"; the immemorial Mosque of St. Sophia is the "mustiest barn in heathendom" ; the Sea of Galilee is nothing tc Lake Tahoe. The Mississippi pilot, homely, naive, arrogantly candid, refuses to sink his identity in the object contemplated — that, as Corporal Xym would have said, is the humor of it. He is the kind of travelling companion that makes you wonder why you went abroad. He turns the Old World into a laughing- stock by shearing it of its storied humanity — simply because there is nothing in him to respond to the glory that was Greece, to the grandeur that was Rome — simply because nothing is holier to him than a joko. He does not throw the comic light upon counterfeit enthusiasm ; he laughs at art, history, and antiquity from the point of xiew of one who is ignorant of them and mightily well satisfied with his ignorance. And, unless I am very much mistaken, the "overwhelming majority" of his fellow-citizens — those who made the success of Innocents A broad and .1 Tramp A broad — have laughed with him, not at him. So, too, unquestionably, in the nearly parallel case of that bludgeoning burlesque, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court. What endears a public man to us is what he has in common with us — not his occasional supereminences. It does not dam- age Frankhn to say that he was not so graceful as Lord Chester- field ; nor Lincoln to say that he was not so handsome as Count D'Orsay; nor Mr. Roosevelt to say that one misses in his literary st\le I know not what that one finds in the style of Walter Savage Landor. Writing from Khartum, the hunter tells us that, in consequence of hard service in camp, his pigskin books were "stained wnth blood, sweat, gun oil, dust, and ashes." We have a mystical feeling that this is very appropriate MARK TWAIN 211 and beautiful — that a good American's books ought to be stained with gun oil and ashes. " Fear grace — fear deUcatesse," cries the author of Chants Democratic. It does not damage Mark Twain to say that there was not a drop of the aristocrat in his veins. In pontics he was an intelligent but unspeculative democrat, committed to the principles of the preamble to the Constitution, preserving a tang of Tom Paine's contempt for kings, and not without a suggestion of the republican insolence caricatured by Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit. I do not think that he gave a ''square deal" either to Europe or to the Arthurian realm; but within his own territory he had a very genuine sense of the brotherhood of man. He was not, like some more exquisite men of letters, a democrat in his study and a snob in his drawing- room ; he was of the people and for the people at all times. His tender regard for the social contract permeated his humor. It will be remembered that Pudd'nhead Wilson earned his nick-name and ruined his chances as a lawyer for twenty years by an incomprehensible remark about a howling dog. "I wish I owned half of that dog," said Wilson. "Why?" somebody asked. "Because I would kill my half." No one understood him — the sensitive, symbolic democracy of the expression was too compact for their intelligence, and they fell into a delicious discussion of how one half could be killed without injury to the other half. That, to be sure, is also one of the problems of democracy; but Wilson's implications were, I believe, both simpler and deeper than that. In not molesting another man's dog he showed the American reverence for property. The American desire to be moderately well-to-do (Mr. Roosevelt's "neither rich nor poor") he indicated by desiring to own only half the dog. In saying that he would kill his half, he expressed his sacred and inalienable right to dispose of his own property as he chose, while at the same time he recognized his neighbor's sacred and inalienable right to let his half of the property howl. Indeed, I am not sure that he did not recognize that the dog itself had a certain property right in howling. With almost every qualification for a successful political 212 REVFEWS A.\n CRIT/CfS.US career, Mark Twain could never lui\e aspired to the Presidencv, for he was not a regular attendant at church — a shortcoming, by the way, which interfered seriously with Mr. Taft's campaign till his former pastor testified in the pul)lic prints that the can- didate had once at a church social taken the part of a fairy. In religion, Twain appeared to be a mugwump, or, more classi- cally speaking, an agnostic over whom had fallen the shadow of Robert Ingersoll of pious memory. The irreligion of that generation is touched with a raw, philistine rationalism, but is thoroughly honest. Like all Americans, the author of 7o;« Sawyer received his rehgious culture in the Sunday-school, but stumbled over the book of Genesis and kindred difficulties, and was "emancipated." The loss of faith which, in proper con- ditions, is a terrible bereavement, was to him a blessed relief ; when the God of the Sunday-school and the camp meeting ceases to terrify, he ordinarily becomes a deadly bore. Having never known the magnificent poetry of faith, he never felt the magnif- icent melancholy of unbelief. His experience was typical, however, and his very unspirituality was social. In his exam- ination of Christian Science, he admitted that every man is entitled to his own favorite brand of insanity, and insisted that he himself was as insane as anybody. That was enough to assure most of us that he was sound on "all essentials." "Be good and you will be lonesome" is, I suppose, one of Mark Twain's most widely quoted utterances on moral topics. At first thought, one may wonder why this apparently Bohemian apothegm should have taken such hold upon the heart of a nation which above all things else adores virtue. But the diffi- culty disappears the instant one reflects that these seven words express as in a nutshell precisely the kind and temper of virtue that the nation adores. Like Wilson's observation on the dog, the saying is cryptic and requires explication. Twain tells us in his autobiography that when he was a boy his mother always allowed about thirty per cent on what he said for "embroidery" and so "struck the average." The saying means, as I take it, first of all. Don't lose your sense of humor as those do who be- come infatuated with their own particular hobbies in goodness. MARK TWAIN 213 Calculate to keep about in the middle of the road, but make allowance for all reasonable shades of difference in taste and opinion. Don't be too good or you will find yourself in a barren and uninfiuential minority of one. In America, whatever is not social is not virtue. When he put his shoulder under the debts of his bankrupt publishing house, the author of the apo- thegm himself explained its meaning. Natively fond of strong language, careless of peccadilloes, tolerant of all human frailties though he was — kin-making touches of nature — his feet were "mortised and tenoned" in domestic rectitude and common morality. . "We cannot live always on the cold heights of the sublime — ■ the thin air stifles" — I have forgotten who said it. We cannot flush always with the high ardor of the signers of the Declaration, nor remain on the level of the address at Gettys- burg, nor cry continually, "O Beautiful! My country!" Yet, in the dull long interspaces between these sacred moments we need some one to remind us that we are a nation. For in the dead vast and middle of the years, insidious foes are stirring — anaemic refinements, cosmopolitan decadencies, the egotistic and usurping pride of great cities, the cold sickening of the heart at the reiterated exposures of giant fraud and corruption. When our countrymen migrate because we have no kings or castles, we are thankful to any one who will tell us what we can count on. When they complain that our soil lacks the humanity essential to great literature, we are grateful even for the firing of a national joke heard round the world. And when Mark Twain, robust, big-hearted, gifted with the divine power to use words, makes us all laugh together, builds true romances with prairie fire and western clay, and shows us that we are at one on all the main points, we feel that he has been appointed by Providence to see to it that the precious ordinary self of the Republic shall suffer no harm. 214 RFA n:\VS AM) CRITICISMS TLRM:RS "SLAVE SHir"i John- Ruskin Tni-: noblest sea that Turner has ever painted, and, if so, the noblest certainly eN'er painted by man, is that of the "Slave Shij)," the chief Academy picture of the Exhibition of 1840. It is a sunset on the Atlantic after prolonged storm ; but the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming rain-clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the holloM- of the night. The whole surface of sea included in the jMcture is di\-ided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad hea\'ing of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deep-drawn breath after the torture of the storm. Between these two ridges, the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendor which burns like gold and bathes like blood. Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly dixided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam. They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under strength of the swell compels or permits them ; leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fear- fully dyed from above with the indistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labors amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, • From Modern Painters. THE CLASSICAL LANDSCAPES OF CLAUDE 215 and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, — and cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea. I believe, if I were reduced to rest Turner's immortality upon any single work, I should choose this. Its daring conception — ideal in the highest sense of the word — is based on the purest truth, and wrought out with the concentrated knowledge of a life ; its color is absolutely perfect, not one false or morbid hue in any part or line, and so modulated that every square inch of canvas is a perfect composition ; its drawing as accurate as fearless ; the ship buoyant, bending, and full of motion ; its tones as true as they are wonderful; and the whole picture dedicated to the most sublime of subjects and impressions . . . the power, majesty, and deathfulness of the open, deep, illimit- able sea. THE CLASSICAL LANDSCAPES OF CLAUDE ^ John Ruskin Claude had a fine feeling for beauty of form and considerable tenderness of perception. His aerial effects are unequalled. Their character appears to me to arise rather from a delicacy of bodily constitution in Claude, than from any mental sensibility ; such as they are, they give a kind of feminine charm to his work, which partly accounts for its wide influence. To whatever the character may be traced, it renders him incapable of enjoying or painting anything energetic or terrible. Hence the weakness of his conception of rough sea. He had sincerity of purpose. But in common with other landscape painters of his day, neither earnestness, humility, nor love, such as would ever cause him to forget himself. That is to say, as far as he felt the truth, he tried to be true ; but he never felt it enough to sacrifice supposed propriety, or habitual method to it. Very few of his sketches, and none of his pictures, From Modern Painters. 2l6 REVIEWS AXD CRITICISMS show evidence of interest in other natural phenomena than the quiet afternoon sunshine which would fall methodically into a composition. One would suppose he had never seen scarlet in a morninjT clouil, nor a storm burst on the Apennines. But he enjoys a quiet misty afternoon in a ruminant sort of way, yet truly ; and strives for the likeness of it, therein diflering from Salvator, who never attemjits to be truthful, but only to be impressive. His seas are the most beautiful in old art. For he studied tame waves, as he did tame skies, with great sincerity, and some affection ; and modelled them with more care not only than any other landscape painter of his day, but even than any of the greater men ; for they, seeing the perfect painting of the sea to be impossible, gave up the attempt, and treated it convention- ally. But Claude took so much pains about this, feeling it was one of his forks, that I suppose no one can model a small wave better than he. He first set the pictorial sun in the pictorial heaven. We will give him the credit of this, with no drawbacks. He had hardly any knowledge of physical science, and shows a peculiar incapacity of understanding the main point of a matter. Connected with which incapacity is his want of har- mony in expression. Such were the principal qualities of the leading painter of classical landscape, his eflfeminate softness carr^ang him to dis- like all evidences of toil, or distress, or terror, and to delight in the calm formalities which mark the school. Although he often introduces romantic incidents and mediaeval as well as Greek or Roman personages, his landscape is always in the true sense classic — everything being "elegantly" (select- ingly or tastefully), not passionately, treated. The absence of indications of rural labor, of hedges, ditches, haystacks, ploughed fields, and the like ; the frequent occurrence of ruined temples, or masses of ruined palaces ; and the graceful wildness of growth in his trees, are the principal sources of the "elevated" character which so many persons feel in his scenery. - There is no other sentiment traceable in his work than his THE CLASSICAL LANDSCAPES OF CLAUDE 217 weak dislike to entertain the conception of toil or suffering. Ideas of relation, in the true sense, he has none ; nor ever makes an effort to conceive an event in its probable circumstances, but fills his foregrounds with decorative figures, using commonest conventionalism to indicate the subject he intends. We may- take two examples, merely to show the general character of such designs of his. 1 . St. George and the Dragon. The scene is a beautiful opening in woods by a river side, a pleasant fountain springs on the right, and the usual rich vegetation covers the foreground. The dragon is about the size of ten bramble leaves, and is being killed by the remains of a lance, barely the thickness of a walking- stick, in his throat, curling his tail in a highly offensive and threatening manner. St. George, notwithstanding, on a pranc- ing horse, brandishes his sword, at about thirty yards' distance from the offensive animal. A semicircular shelf of rocks encircles the foreground, by which the theatre of action is divided into pit and boxes. Some women and children having descended unadvisedly into the pit, are helping each other out of it again, with marked precipitation. A prudent person of rank has taken a front seat in the boxes, — crosses his legs, leans his head on his hand, and contemplates the proceedings with the air of a connoisseur. Two attendants stand in graceful attitudes behind him, and two more walk away under the trees, conversing on general subjects. 2. Worship of the Golden Calf. The scene is nearly the same as that of the St. George; but, in order better to express the desert of Sinai, the river is much larger, and the tree and vege- tation softer. Two people, uninterested in the idolatrous cere- monies, are rowing in a pleasure boat on the river. The calf is about sixteen inches long (perhaps we ought to give Claude credit for remembering that it was made of ear-rings, though he might as well have inquired how large Egyptian ear-rings were). Aaron has put it on a handsome pillar, under which five people are dancing, and twenty-eight, with several children, worship- ping. Refreshments for the dancers are provided in four large vases under a tree on the left, presided over by a dignified person 2i8 REVIEWS AyO CRITICISMS holding u iloc; in a leash. Under the distant group of trees appears Moses, conducted by some younger personage (Nadab or Abihu). This younger j^ersonage holds up his hands, and Moses, in the way usually ex|5ected of him, breaks the tables of the law, which arc as large as an ordinary octavo volume. I need not i)roceed farther, for any reader of sense or ordinary powers of thought can thus examine the subjects of Claude, one by one, for himself. We may quit him with these few final statements concerning him. The admiration of his works was legitimate, so far as it re- garded their sunlight effects and their graceful details. It was base, in so far as it in\olved irreverence both for the deeper powers of nature, and carelessness as to conception of subject. Large admiration of Claude is wholly impossible in any period of national vigor in art. He may by such tenderness as he possesses, and by the very fact of his banishing painfulness, exercise considerable influence over certain classes of minds; but this influence is almost exclusively hurtful to them. Nevertheless, on account of such small sterling qualities as they possess,, and of their general pleasantness, as well as their importance in the history of art, genuine Claudes must always possess a considerable value, either as drawing-room ornaments or museum relics. They may be ranked with fine pieces of China manufacture, and other agreeable curiosities, of which the price depends on the rarity rather than the merit, yet always on a merit of a certain low kind. I. G. EDITORIALS EAST AND WESTi Once again the stimulating contrast of the very new with the very old which the Far East presents, is thrust forcibly upon our minds. On Thursday last week the Dowager Empress of Japan died in the Numadzu Palace. Next day the lifeless body made its State entry into Tokyo with the same pomp and circumstance accorded to living majesty. It is not befitting for a member of the Imperial House to meet death outside the capital ; and when death visits one of them beyond the walls, custom immemorial prescribes that the corpse shall be treated as a living person until it has been brought within the precincts where tradition ordains that Royalty may die. There is something magnificent in an etiquette which can ignore death itself — something, too, quite inconceivable to our Western modes of thought. The whole Japanese people do homage to the amazing convention. In the Palace where the Empress had died her dead body gave farewell audiences. On its arrival at Tokyo, Princes and nobles, Min- isters and officials, attended to receive it as though it lived. It was driven through the streets at a trot in the same carriage and with the same escort. The same troops lined the route and the same masses of people watched the procession on its way. Only their unbroken silence, as the State coach passed in the moon- light with its drawn blinds, showed that they knew the grim burden that it bore. Then came the most dreadful part of the strange ceremonial. At the door of the Imperial Palace the living Empress had to welcome as yet alive the poor remains of her dead relative. The function was not yet done. The corpse must be escorted into its apartments and put into possession of 1 From the London Times (Weekly Edition), April 17, 1914. 219 220 EDITORIALS them. Then, and not till then, was it permissible to proclaim what the world knew, and to atknowledj^e that the Dowager Empress was no more. Within the Palace it wiis etifjuette for her to have died. Like the messages which the most advanced of Chinese Re- publicans delivered at the Imjierial tombs, like the attribution which Japanese heroes made of their successes in the war to the virtues of the reigning Emperor and of his sacred ancestors, like the declarations of the Emperor himself when the Constitution was established, and like the rites at his burial, this grim yet impressive ceremony reveals how immense is the gulf between the thoughts of the East and of the West. The news of the Empress's illness or death was sent by telephone. It was at the railway station that the great officers of State went through the ghastly form of pav'ing to the dead the homage proper to the living. The Ministers who w^ere present belong to one of the most enlightened and progressive Governments in the world. The troops which escorted the corpse are amongst the first and most highly trained of modern soldiers. In every detail of the story, as our Tokyo correspondent tells it, the most modern of the material discoveries of the West come sharply into contact with these customs of a civilization going back six-and-twenty centuries. The convention that members of the Imperial House must not die except within the appointed area is doubtless connected with the cardinal doctrine of Japan- ese religion and of Japanese patriotism, that the Emperor is the descendant of the gods, who sits upon "the throne of a lineal succession unbroken for ages eternal," and that to his \-irtues and the virtues of his ancestors the prosperity and the glory of the Empire are due. That is the faith upon which the greatness of Japan and of her people is built. The Emperor rules by divine right in a sense very diflferent, and far more personal, than ever was claimed by the proudest of Christian Kings. The right is still freely and fully acknowledged by the immense majority of his subjects. The unanimity with which all classes have agreed in supporting the strange fiction that the dead yet lived, indicates how general the acknowledgment A VICIOUS PROPOSAL 221 still is, and how universal the obedience of Japan to received tradition. But the question inevitably presents itself how long these beliefs and feelings can resist unmodified the impact of Western learning and of Western habits of thought. That they must be affected by the new conception of all things which this learning is daily spreading in Japan amongst thousands of keen intellects seems certain. How they will be affected, what form they may ultimately adopt, what action in their altered form they may exercise on the mind of Asia, and what reaction on the mind of the West, are amongst the greatest problems of the future. We make no attempt to approach them even from afar. We only note the startling ceremonial of last week as a reminder that one of the most civilized and most brilliant nations of the world is passing through a pregnant phase in its devel- opment. A VICIOUS PROPOSAL! Nothing worse in the form of legislation has been authorita- tively proposed for a long while than the amendment to the Army Appropriation Bill which would forbid any army officer to serve as chief of staff unless he shall have served ten years as a commissioned officer of the line with rank below that of brigadier-general. This amendment did not appear, as we understand it, when the Army Appropriation Bill was originally before either house, but was brought forth only after the bill was submitted to the Conference Committee of both houses. There are four reasons why such an amendment should be re- garded as pernicious. In the first place, such a piece of legis- lation ought to be offered on its merits. When a vital matter of this sort is presented as the rider of an appropriation bill, it may be assumed to be of the sort that cannot stand examina- tion or debate. When legislators make it necessary to imperil a great appropriation bill in order to defeat a special proposal of this kind, it means that they are depending for success, not ' The Outlook, June 8, 1912. (Vol. CI, p. 279.) 2 22 EDITORIALS upon the merits of tlu- hill, t)ut upon the necessities of the Gov- ernment. In the second place, this special amenfiment bears all the earmarks of "personal ie<^isIation." The present Chief •1 Staff, Major-Gcncrai Leonard Wood, did not serve ten years as commissioned officer below the rank of brij^adier-general. He was made Brigadier-General of the United States Army in February, igoi, by President McKinley. In the course of his duties he has incurred the enmity of men of influence. If this amendment was not devised to legislate him out of office, it has all the signs of having been devised to do so. Of course any measure which is designed to make use of Congress as the means of serving personal grudges should not be tolerated for a moment. In the third place, this provision will impair the efficiency of the army. Not only would it legislate out of office the present Chief of Staff, but it would stand as an obstacle to the appointment of men who might on occasions be the most competent for the position. In a statement which Mr. Stim- son, Secretary of War, has made, it is asserted that such a pro- vision "would have rendered ineligible for service as Chief of Staff every one except four of the nineteen generals who have served as Chief of the American army since General Washing- ton. It would have disqualified General Winfield Scott of the old army, and would also have disqualified Generals Sheridan, McClellan, McPherson, Meade, Warren, Halleck, Schofield, O. O. Howard, and Horace Porter, among others in the Union army of the Civil War; Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Beauregard, Forrest, and Joe Wheeler of the Confederacy. General Grant would barely have escaped its restriction by one year's service, and General Sherman by two months. Coming down to modern times, it permanently disqualifies practically the entire engineer corps — the high honor men of West Point. It disqualifies, for example. General Goethals and all of his assistants on the Panama Canal ; General Crozier, the Chief of Ordnance ; General Funston, General Francis V. Greene, and many other officers." In the fourth place, — this in some re- spects is the most serious of all, — the provision is a suggestion that Congress should encroach upon the authority of the Presi- THE NATION'S PLEDGE 223 dent of the United States, who, by the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, is the Commander-in-Chief of the Army. Congress should not even entertain such a proposition. THE NATION'S PLEDGE 1 The Clayton-Bulwer treaty was a convention to define the joint policy of the United States and Great Britain "with refer- ence to any means of communication by ship-canal which may be constructed between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by way of the River San Juan de Nicaragua and either or both the Lakes of Nicaragua or Managua to any port or place on the Pacific Ocean." This treaty, which was ratified by the Senate May 22, 1850, provided that — The Governments of the United States and Great Britain hereby declare that neither the one nor the other will ever obtain or main- tain for itself any exclusive control over said ship-canal ; agreeing that neither will ever erect nor maintain any fortifications commanding the same or in the vicinity thereof, or occupy, or fortify, or colonize, or assume or exercise any dominion over Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito Coast, or any part of Central America. If the treaty had stopped there, the United States would have been spared much controversy and vexation ; but it did not stop there. In their anxiety to extend the general prin- ciples of this treaty to every possible Isthmian route between the Atlantic and Pacific, and thereby prevent interference on the part of other governments, the American and British di- plomatists included in the convention a further provision that : — The Governments of the United States and Great Britain, having not only desired, in entering into this convention, to accomplish a particular object, but also to establish a general principle, they hereby agree to extend their protection, by treaty stipulations, to any other practicable communications, whether by canal or railway, across > The (New York) World, March 18, 1914. 224 EDITORIALS the Isthmus which connects North and South America, and especially to the interoceanic communications, should the same prove to be practicable, whether by canal or railway, which are now proposed to be established by the way of Tehuanlepec or Panama. This treaty was hailed at the time as a notable victory for American diplomacy. It ended all American misgivings as to the objects of the British policy on the Mosquito Coast, and it was regarded as more favorable to American than to British interests. The United States was not prepared to build a canal, and it was well satisfied to have any canal that might be built subject to the joint protection of the two English-speaking nations. After ratification the treaty went to sleep, and for many years neither the United States nor Great Britain manifested further interest in the subject of a trans-Isthmian canal except in an academic way. Finally de Lesseps appeared upon the scene, and the ques- tion became acute again. Hayes, who was then President, de- clared that any canal ought to be under American control and the line of that canal should be considered "a part of the coast- line of the United States." A House committee reported a resolu- tion March 8, 1880, that the United States was entitled to control any Isthmian canal and authorizing the President to terminate any treaty conflicting with that principle. The resolution was called up for the second time March 3, 1881, and failed to pass. Congress thus refused to abrogate the Clayton-Bulwer treaty. Garfield modified Hayes's coast-line dictum into an assertion that we did not seek "peculiar or commercial privileges in any commercial route." Frelinghuysen, who was Arthur's Secre- tary of State, undertook to put the Clayton-Bulwer treaty to the test and negotiated a treaty with Nicaragua for the con- struction of a canal entirely under American control. One of Cleveland's first official acts after he became President in 1885 was to withdraw this treaty from the Senate. The Spanish-American war made the canal question a vital issue in American politics, and John Hay, then Secretary of State, undertook to bring about a modification of the Clayton- THE NATION'S PLEDGE 225 Bulwer treaty. The first Hay-Pauncefote treaty was amended by the Senate, much to Secretary Hay's mortification. A new compromise treaty was then negotiated "to facilitate the con- struction of a ship-canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by whatever route may be considered expedient," and to "remove any objection which may arise out of the convention of the 19th of April, 1850, commonly known as the Clayton- Bulwer treaty, to the construction of such canal under the auspices of the Government of the United States, without im- pairing the 'general principle' of neutralization established in Article VIII of that convention." This treaty, which was received as another brilliant achieve- ment in American diplomacy, provides that — The canal shall be free and open to the vessels of commerce and of war of all nations observing these rules, on terms of entire equality, so that there shall be no discrimination against any such nation, or its citizens or subjects, in respect of the conditions or charges of traffic, or otherwise. Such conditions and charges of traffic shall be just and equitable. If ever language was clear, this language is clear. If this clause does not mean what it says, it means nothing. Indeed, the whole history of the treaty relations between the United States and Great Britain in respect to an Isthmian canal goes to prove that such a provision, even though it were as clumsily drawn as this provision is plainly drawn, could not mean any- thing else. Until the coastwise-shipping monopoly saw a chance to grab a million dollars or so a year at the expense of the National Treasury and of the national honor, nobody ever pretended that it meant anything else. Mr. Hay is dead and Lord Pauncefote is dead ; but Joseph H. Choate, who as American Ambassador to Great Britain helped negotiate the treaty, is still alive. No other living man is so well qualified to give testimony as to the meaning of this pro- vision, and this is what Mr. Choate says : — As the lips of both these diplomatists and great patriots, who were true to their own countries and each regardful of the rights of the other, Q 2 2t) EDITORIALS arc scaled in death, I think that it is proper that I should say what I think. l)oth of thcni, il" they were here to-day. would say — that the clause in the i'anama Toll act exempting coastwise American shipping from the payment of tolls is in direct violation of the treaty. I venture to say that in the whole course of the negotiations of this particular treaty, no claim, no suggestion, was made that there should be any exemption of anybody. The whole ci\nlized world is against the United States on this i.ssue. As Senator Lodge says, we are threatened with the stigma of an "outlaw Nation" which has no respect for its solemn word or its solemn pledges. The President of the United States, in urging Congress to repeal the special canal privileges granted to the coastwise monopoly, has said : — I ask this of you in support of the foreign policy of the Administra- tion. I shall not know how to deal with matters of even greater delicacy and nearer consequence if you do not grant it to me in un- grudging measure. In the face of the record and of such a solemn appeal, Lewis NLxon writes to The World to say that he has "never seen a sincere or logical argument to uphold the Hay-Pauncefote pro- visions against remission of tolls." Senator O'Gorman, who is helping the coastwise monopoly keep its hand in the National Treasury, has even forgotten that he was once eminent as a Judge, and falls back upon the pettifogging argument that — The word "vessels" as used in the treaty applies solely to ships in the overseas trade. It does not apply and was never intended to apply to the coastwise trade. In other words, a vessel is a vessel if it does not get a sub- sidy, but it is a raft or a derrick or a pike-pole if it does get a subsidy. The Constitution provides that all treaties made under the authority of the United States shall be part of "the supreme law of the land." But Congress has recognized a higher law than this supreme law. That higher law is in the pockets of the THE NATION'S PLEDGE 227 coastwise-shipping monopoly. In order to give a million dollars a year to men who are already protected against every form of foreign competition, Congress undertakes to violate a treaty and break the pledge of the Nation. The Democratic part of Congress which upholds this tolls exemption is also turning its back upon the fundamental principle of its party and voting special privileges to a special interest at the expense both of the public Treasury and the public faith. And to what pur- pose ? Not to build up an American merchant marine, for not a cent's worth of privilege is given to ?.ny American ship in the foreign trade. Every ship flying the American flag which goes through the Panama Canal bound to any foreign port must pay the same tells as a British ship or a German ship or a French ship. The subsidy is all for the shipping that has no foreign com- petition. The treaty-breaking is all for a monopoly that has no foreign competition. The honor of the Nation and the his- toric principles of the Democratic party are alike flouted for the profit of a few coastwise carriers, while 95,000,000 American people are made to pay the bill in money and to pay the bill in international enmity. The United States built the canal subject to the provisions of the Hay-Pauncefote treaty and it is bound by those pro- visions. There is no external power or tribunal which can com- pel this country to respect its pledges, but the pledges are as valid as if we were the weakest instead of the strongest of nations. This country began its national existence by proclaiming in the Declaration of Independence its "decent respect for the opinions of mankind." It must still maintain that decent respect for the opinions of mankind. Whatever Congress may think or whatever Congress may do at the behest of a monop- oly's lobby, the American people are a people who want to keep the faith. 2 28 EDITORIALS WIRELESS IX RAILROAD SERVICE » The successful use of wireless telegraphy in communicating with moving trains on the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad has been much exploited in the public prints, but the full significance of the wireless in railroad service has been over- looked. While communication with trains is the most spectac- ular feature of the work, the value of having a system of com- munication independent of interruptions by weather is very important. In a recent sleet storm, for example, in the Eastern section of the country, when wire ser\'ice was interrupted, the Lackawanna was able to handle its messages satisfactorily through its fixed wireless stations. One other point that has not been sufiiciently emphasized is the economy that will result in transmitting messages to heavy freight trains without the necessity of bringing them to a stop. The savftig in time, in wear and tear on equipment, and in power is evident. The latest development in the Lackawanna's experiments is in setting signals by wireless. While it is unofficially reported that the experiments have had some success, full details as to the results have not yet been given out. It is apparent, there- fore, that, far from being a toy or a curiosity, wireless holds forth great possibilities in railway service. THE ABSORPTION OF THE INDIAN 2 Last week occurred an event v/hich, picturesquely celebrated at Muskogee and Tulsa, Oklahoma, may be regarded as a land- mark in the record of our Indian relations : the Cherokee Nation dissolving tribal relationships. Since the war in the Carolinas a decade before the Revolution, the Cherokees have been peace- ful, industrious, and more and more civilized. These 41,000 Indians hold nearly 5,000,000 acres. One of their blood sits in the Senate; they have long maintained a constitutional ' The Engineering Record, January 24, 1914. * From The (New York) Nation, July 9, 1914. THE ABSORPTION OF THE INDIAN 229 government and native newspapers; and they have produced more teachers than all the other tribes combined. Their chief title to notice has, perhaps, been in the alphabet invented by Sequoyah ninety years ago, and its effect on their development. Readers of The Gilded Age will remember the frequent proverbs in this unique charactery which Mark Twain included among his polyglot chapter headings. With the end of the Nation comes the announcement that Oklahoma will commemorate Sequoyah in Statuary Hall at Washington. This is the first large achievement of the Government in its policy of bringing about the cessation of all tribes as individual entities — the first policy worthy of the name it has had. The Cherokees were the last of the Five Nations to enter into a treaty to that end ; and the record of the contentious lawsuits involved in completing the transaction is, with the tragic his- tory of their early deportation, an epitome of much of the in- justice of the United States towards its wards. The other Nations, Creek and Chickasaw, Seminole and Choctaw, which suffered equally from an "independence" in Indian Territory that attracted every outlaw in the Southwest, can rejoice that they also will shortly pass. It was the greed of Georgia for gold discovered on native lands which drove the Cherokees, in spite of the Supreme Court, on a march that cost thousands of lives. Little by little, after the Civil War, they were forced to part with their holdings, the most important sale being of the 8,000,000-acre Cherokee Outlet to the United States in 1892, for $1 an acre and a settlement of long-standing charges for the cost of their removal westward in the 'thirties. This settlement, through Congressional delay, dragged for thirteen years, when the Court of Claims found the United States Hablefor $4,500,000 ; and litigation between various branches of the Indians, and over huge fees charged by white lawyers, has lasted until a few months ago. The clearing up of their affairs and the conver- sion of all tribal property into cash to be distributed, thus sees a measure of final justice done a people that once claimed a vast empire. It is a first goal reached on the road marked out when, in 1887, Congress, abandoning the wretched reservation 2^0 EDITORIALS iik-a, enacted the Land Allotment law, authorizing the liivision of Indian lands into individual allotments, each to be held in Government trust until an allottee was felt competent to receive full letters patent. Such patents, carrying citizenship, have been issued to each member of the tribe. NATIONALISM AND PEACE ' The American people is not terrified by the Slavonic bogey. We do not concede that Germany, Austria, or any other Western Power is charged with the responsibility of defeating Slavonic aspiration to national form and expression. Not peril, but safety, comes of achieved nationality. Italy, distraught and divided, Germany, a thing of shreds and patches, Ireland, thwarted and discordant, Alsace-Lorraine, Poland, Finland, and Bosnia, wrenched from their congenial associations — these, by reason of their irmer instability, threaten the peace and happi- ness of Europe. It has proved difficult enough for powerful nations to Romanize, Anglicize, Germanize, or exterminate scattered and uncultivated populations ; small areas detached from organized civilizations have proved entirely indigestible. Germany has not digested either Poland or Alsace ; England is confessing its inability to assimilate Ireland. The Russian- ization of the non-Slavonic Europe is an utter impossibility, even if there were the least danger of its being attempted. If national aspiration is something to be heeded as legitimate and wholesome, the race that aspires to unity must by the same token respect the unity of other states and nations. If the Teuton accepts and welcomes the integrity of a Slavonic state, precisely the same principle protects him from arbitrary aggres- sion. The conduct of Germany is resented because, having gloriously vindicated her own nationality, she has in these latter days been content to play the part that Austria played in Italy and in Germany itself. America refuses to believe that if the achievement of Teutonic nationality is a blessing, the recogni- » From The Nation, August 27, 1914. NATIONALISM AND PEACE 231 tion of Slavonic self-consciousness is a crime. German diplo- macy attached itself to an obsolete and impossible object when it undertook blindly to sustain Austria in its historic obstructive role. It discredited its own spirit when it permitted the annexa- tion of an unwilling Bosnia and sanctioned the attempted hu- miliation of Servia. Would not an enlightened and modern diplomacy seek rather to discern and to work with the significant and permanent currents of feeling that have expressed them- selves in modern Italy and modern Germany ? Assuredly this were a nobler and more fruitful task than that of vainly en- deavoring to snatch unnatural and perishable advantages such as go with the annexation of a sullen and alien people. The most enduring fame of Lord John Russell resulted from the steps he took to make a united Italy possible. Not until the diplo- mats of the Continent conceive their function along similar lines will the nations of Europe lay aside their fatal jealousies. II. ARGUMENT A. ELEMENTS I. Introduction, Including Special Issues THE THREE HYPOTHESES RESPECTING THE HIS- TORY OF NATURE! T. H. Huxley We live in and form part of a system of things of immense diversity and perplexity, which we call Nature ; and it is a matter of the deepest interest to all of us that we should form just conceptions of the constitution of that system and of its past history. With relation to this universe, man is, in extent, little more than a mathematical point ; in duration but a fleet- ing shadow ; he is a mere reed shaken in the winds of force. But as Pascal long ago remarked, although a mere reed, he is a thinking reed ; and in virtue of that wonderful capacity of thought, he has the power of framing for himself a symbolic conception of the universe, which, although doubtless highly imperfect and inadequate as a picture of the great whole, is yet sufficient to serve him as a chart for the guidance of his practical affairs. It has taken long ages of toilsome and often fruitless labor to enable men to look steadily at the shifting scenes of the phantasmagoria of Nature, to notice what is fLxed among her fluctuations, and what is regular among her apparent irregularities; and it is only comparatively lately, within the last few centuries, that the conception of a universal order and of a defmite course of things, which we term the course of Nature, has emerged. 'From Collected Essays. (Vol. IV; Science and Hebrew Tradition; Lectures on Evolution.) D. Appleton and Company. 232 I THREE HYPOTHESES RESPECTING HISTORY OF NA TURE 233 But, once originated, the conception of the constancy of the order of Nature has become the dominant idea of modern thought. To any person who is familiar with the facts upon which that conception is based, and is competent to estimate their significance, it has ceased to be conceivable that chance should have any place in the universe, or that events should depend upon any but the natural sequence of cause and effect. We have come to look upon the present as the child of the past and as the parent of the future ; and, as we have excluded chance from a place in the universe, so we ignore, even as a possibility, the notion of any interference with the order of Nature. What- ever may be men's speculative doctrines, it is quite certain that every intelligent person guides his life and risks his fortune upon the belief that the order of Nature is constant, and that the chain of natural causation is never broken. In fact, no belief which we entertain has so complete a logical basis as that to which I have just referred. It tacitly under- lies every process of reasoning ; it is the foundation of every act of the will. It is based upon the broadest induction, and it is verified by the most constant, regular, and universal of deductive processes. But we must recollect that any human belief, however broad its basis, however defensible it may seem, is, after all, only a probable belief, and that our widest and safest generalizations are simply statements of the highest degree of probability. Though we are quite clear about the constancy of the order of Nature, at the present time, and in the present state of things, it by no means necessarily follows that we are justified in expanding this generalization into the infinite past, and in denying, absolutely, that there may have been a time when Nature did not follow a fixed order, when the relations of cause and effect were not definite, and when extra-natural agencies interfered with the general course of Nature. Cautious men will allow that a universe so different from that which we know may have existed ; just as a very candid thinker may admit that a world in which two and two do not make four, and in which two straight lines do en- close a space, may exist. But the same caution which forces 234 lyTRODLCTION TO ARGUMENT ihe admission of such possibilities demands a great deal of evidence before it recognizes them to be anything more sub- stantial. And when it is asserted that, so many thousand years ago, events occurred in a manner utterh' foreign to and inconsistent with the existing laws of Nature, men, who with- out being particularly cautious are simply honest thinkers, unwilling to deceive themselves or delude others, ask for trust- worthy evidence of the fact. Did things so happen or did they not ? This is a historical question, and one the answer to which must be sought in the same way as the solution of any other historical problem. So far as I know, there are only three hypotheses which ever have been entertained, or which well can be entertained, re- specting the past history of Nature. I will, in the first place, state the hypotheses, and then I will consider what evidence bearing upon them is in our possession, and by what light of criticism that evidence is to be interpreted. Upon the first h>-pothesis the assumption is, that phenomena of Nature similar to those exhibited by the present world have always existed ; in other words, that the universe has existed, from all eternity, in what may be broadly termed its present condition. The second h}-pothesis is that the present state of things has had only a limited duration ; and that, at some period in the past, a condition of the world, essentially similar to that which we now know, came into existence, without any precedent con- dition from which it could have naturally proceeded. The assumption that successive states of Nature have arisen, each without any relation of natural causation to an antecedent state, is a mere modification of this second hypothesis. The third h^-pothesis also assumes that the present state of things has had but a limited duration ; but it supposes that this state has been evolved by a natural process from an antecedent state, and that from another, and so on ; and, on this hypothesis, the attempt to assign any limit to the series of past changes is, usually, given up. It is so needful to form clear and distinct notions of what is THREE H YPOTHESES RESPECTING HISTOR Y OF NA TURE 235 really meant by each of these hypotheses that I will ask you to imagine what, according to each, would have been visible to a spectator of the events which constitute the history of the earth. On the first hypothesis, how^ever far back in time that spectator might be placed, he would see a world essentially, though perhaps not in all its details, similar to that which now exists. The animals which existed would be the ancestors ot those which now live, and similar to them ; the plants, in like manner, would be such as we know ; and the mountains, plains, and waters would foreshadow the salient features of our present land and water. This view was held more or less distinctly, sometimes combined with the notion of recurrent cycles of change, in ancient times ; and its influence has been felt down to the present day. It is worthy of remark that it is a hypothesis which is not inconsistent with the doctrine of Uniformitarian- ism, with which geologists are familiar. That doctrine was held by Hutton, and in his earlier days by Lyell. Hutton was struck by the demonstration of astronomers that the pertur- bations of the planetary bodies, however great they may be, yet sooner or later right themselves ; and that the solar system possesses a self-adjusting power by which these aberrations are all brought back to a mean condition. Hutton imagined that the like might be true of terrestrial changes ; although no one recognized more clearly than he the fact that the dry land is being constantly washed down by rain and rivers and deposited in the sea; and that thus, in a longer or shorter time, the in- equalities of the earth's siirface must be levelled, and its high lands brought down to the ocean. But, taking into account the internal forces of the earth, which, upheaving the sea- bottom, give rise to new land, he thought that these operations of degradation and elevation might compensate each other; and that thus, for any assignable time, the general features of our planet might remain what they are. And inasmuch as, under these circumstances, there need be no limit to the propa- gation of animals and plants, it is clear that the consistent working out of the uniform itarian idea might lead to the con- ception of the eternity of the world. Not that I mean to say 236 INTRODl'CTIOX TO ARGUMENT lluil tillicr Hutltui or l.yrll luld this coiueption — assuredly not; they would have been the first to rejjudiate it. Never- theless, the logical development of some of their arguments tends directly towards this hypothesis. The second hypothesis supposes that the present order of things, at some no very remote time, had a sudden origin, and that the world, such as it now is, had chaos for its phenomenal antecedent. This is the doctrine which you will find stated most fully and clearly in the immortal poem of John Milton — the English Diviiia Commcdia — "Paradise Lost." I believe it is largely to the influence of that remarkable work, combined with the daily teachings to which w'e have all listened in our childhood, that this hypothesis owes its general wide diffusion as one of the current beliefs of English-speaking people. If you turn to the seventh book of Paradise Lost, you will find there stated the hypothesis to which I refer, which is briefly this : That this \'isible universe of ours came into existence at no great distance of time from the present ; and that the parts of which it is composed made their appearance, in a certain definite order, in the space of six natural days, in such a manner that, on the first of these days, light appeared ; that on the second, the firmament, or sky, separated the waters above from the waters beneath the firmament ; that on the third day, the waters drew away from the dry land, and upon it a varied vege- table life, similar to that which now exists, made its appear- ance ; that the fourth day was signalized by the apparition of the sun, the stars, the moon, and the planets ; that on the fifth day, aquatic animals originated within the waters ; that on the sixth day, the earth gave rise to our four-footed terrestrial creatures, and to all varieties of terrestrial animals except birds, which had appeared on the preceding day; and finally, that man appeared upon the earth, and the emergence of the uni- verse from chaos was finished. Milton tells us, without the least ambiguity, what a spectator of these marvellous occur- rences would have witnessed. I doubt not that his poem is familiar to all of you, but I should like to recall one passage to your minds, in order that I may be justified in what I have THREE HYPOTHESES RESPECTING HISTORY OF NA TURE 237 said regarding the perfectly concrete, definite picture of the origin of the animal world which Milton draws. He says : — "The sixth, and of creation last, arose With evening harps and matin, when God said, 'Let the earth bring forth soul living in her kind, Cattle and creeping things, and beast of the earth, Each in their kind ! ' The earth obeyed, and, straight Opening her fertile womb, teemed at a birth Innumerous living creatures, perfect forms. Limbed and full-grown. Out of the ground uprose. As from his lair, the wild beast, where he wons In forest wild, in thicket, brake, or den ; Among the trees in pairs they rose, they walked ; The cattle in the fields and meadows green ; Those rare and solitary ; these in flocks Pasturing at once, and in broad herds upsprung. The grassy clods now calved ; now half appears The tawny lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts — then springs, as broke from bonds, And rampant shakes his brinded mane ; the ounce, The libbard, and the tiger, as the mole Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw In hillocks ; the swift stag from underground Bore up his branching head ; scarce from his mould Behemoth, biggest born of earth, upheaved His vastness ; fleeced the flocks and bleating rose As plants ; ambiguous between sea and land. The river-horse and scaly crocodile. At once came forth whatever creeps the ground, Insect or worm." There is no doubt as to the meaning of this statement, nor as to what a man of Milton's genius expected would have been actually visible to an eye-witness of this mode of origination of living things. The third hypothesis, or the hypothesis of evolution, sup- poses that, at any comparatively late period of past time, our imaginary spectator would meet with a state of things very similar to that which now obtains ; but that the likeness of the 2}S ISTRODUCTIOX TO ARGIMEXT past to the present would gradually become less and less, in proiK)rtion to the remoteness of his period of obserNulion from the present day ; that the existing distribution of mountains and plains, of rivers and seas, would show itself to be the product of a slow process of natural change operating ujion more and more widely dilTerent antecedent conditions of the mineral framework of the earth ; until, at length, in place of that frame- work, he would behold only a vast nebulous mass, representing the constituents of the sun and of the planetary bodies. Pre- ceding the forms of life which now exist, our observer would see animals and plants, not identical with them, but like them, increasing their differences with their antiquity and, at the same time, becoming simpler and simpler; until, finally, the world of life would present nothing but that undifferentiated protoplasmic matter which, so far as our present knowledge goes, is the common foundation of all vital activity. The h^-pothesis of evolution supposes that in all this vast progression there would be no breach of continuity, no point at which we could say "This is a natural process," and "This is not a natural process"; but that the whole might be com- pared to that wonderful operation of development which may be seen going on every day under our eyes, in virtue of which there arises, out of the semi-fluid comparatively homogeneous substance which we call an egg, the complicated organization of one of the higher animals. That, in a few words, is what is meant by the hypothesis of evolution. I have already suggested that, in dealing with these three hjTDotheses, in endeavoring to form a judgment as to which of them is the more worthy of belief — in which case our condi- tion of mind should be that suspension of judgment which is so difRcult to all but trained intellects — we should be in- different to all a priori considerations. The question is a ques- tion of historical fact. The universe has come into existence somehow or other, and the problem is, whether it came into exist- ence in one fashion, or whether it came into existence in another. THE CASE AGAINST THE SINGLE TAX 239 LETTER TO GENERAL McCLELLAN Executive Mansion, Washington, February 3, 1862. Major-General McClellan. My Dear Sir : You and I have distinct and different plans for a movement of the army of the Potomac — yours to be down the Chesapeake, up the Rappahannock to Urbana, across land to the terminus of the railroad on the York river ; mine to move directly to a point southwest of Manassas. If you will give me satisfactory answers to the following questions, I shall gladly yield my plan to yours. First. Does not your plan involve a greatly larger expendi- ture of time and money than mine ? Second. Wherein is a victory more certain by your plan than mine ? Third. Wherein is a victory more valuable by your plan than mine? Fourth. In fact, would it not be less valuable in this, that it would break no great line of the enemy's communications, while mine would ? Fifth. In case of a disaster, wotdd not a retreat be more difficult by your plan than mine ? Yours truly, Abraham Lincoln. THE CASE AGAINST THE SINGLE TAX^ Alvin Saunders Johnson The Single-Tax programme — it is almost superfluous to 1 state — contemplates the substitution of a land-tax for all the miscellaneous taxes and imposts now existing. As interpreted t by most Single-Taxers, the project implies the abolition of pro- j ^ Trom The Allanlic Monthly, 'iz.nxis.ry, 1014. Reprinted by permission. J40 IXTRODICTIOX TO ARGUMENT U"(.ti\c as well as rcvcmic duties, and of excises such as those levied upon tobacco aiul alcoholic beverages. It would be unfair to the Single-Taxers, however, to hold them strictly to this narrow interpretation. There is no reason why one might not be a Single-Taxer in principle, and still sup- port the policies of protection and of sumptuary taxation. All that is essential to the system is that no tax other than that upon land shall be levied mainly for revenue purposes. A tax upon land-rent or land value, according to the accepted theory, rests upon the owner of the land. He cannot shift it to the consumer by raising the price of his products. He is forced to accept it as a net deduction from the rent of his land. And since the value of land is ultimately dependent upon its rent, the adoption of the Single Tax would necessarily result in a great depreciation of land values. If the tax is made so heavy as to absorb the entire net income from land — and this is the express object of the Single-Taxers — the value of the land will utterly disappear. The individual may retain the husk of ownership, but the value kernel of landed property will have been seized by the state. The Single-Tax movement would, therefore, be aptly desig- nated as a propaganda for the universal confiscation of land. And this designation the Single-Taxers themseh^es would accept without reservation. If they prefer to call themselves Single- Taxers instead of Land-Confiscationists, it is solely on the ground of euphony. Confiscation is an ugly word ; but the Single- Taxers are "intellectuals," and it is not characteristic of their type to stick at mere words. The confiscation of land, as every one recognizes, would result in the ruin of many individuals, and, presumably, in the enrich- ment of others. The same thing, however, is true of any other sweeping economic reform. It was true, for example, of the abolition of slavery. Whether an economic reform can be justified or not depends, not so much upon whether it despoils certain individuals, as upon whether the individuals so sacrificed form a class that may advantageously be despoiled. The slave- owners formed such a class, since their essential function was COUNCIL GOVERNMENT VS. MAYOR GOVERNMENT 241 the oppression of their fellow-men. The landowners, according to the Single-Taxers, form a similar class : they are regarded as typical monopolists and men of great wealth, an unacknowledged landed aristocracy. Furthermore, whether the landowner is rich or poor, he is, in Single-Tax theory, a social parasite. All social economic functions, it is urged, would be exercised as well if he were eliminated. It is upon these two contentions of the Single-Taxers that the whole issue turns. If they are valid, we are forced to accept the Single-Tax programme, unless we possess private interests that we prefer to the public interest. If they are not valid, we must either reject the Single-Tax programme, or accept it as a step in the direction of the confiscation of all private property. Accordingly, as impartial students of the Single Tax, we are required, in the first place, to form an estimate as to the actual distribution of land values in the United States ; and, in the second place, to determine the relation of such values to our productive mechanism. There are many other points of sub- sidiary importance, but these alone are vital. 2. Evidence COUNCIL GOVERNMENT VERSUS MAYOR GOV- ERNMENT 1 E. Dana Durand We are told that the American city council has proved itself in practice unfit to be trusted. Its powers have been taken away only because it has abused them. Whatever methods of election or of organization have been tried, it has been found impossible to secure good councilmen. The system of council rule worked well enough in the early days, with simple adminis- trative problems and a comparatively high c^ualification for the electorate. But with the introduction of universal suffrage, the influx of foreign immigrants, the intrusion of party politics, and > From Pnlilical Science Quarterly, Vol. XV. Reprinted by permission. R 242 EVIDESCE the growth of municipal functions, the system broke down completely. These statements are usually made as if they were self-evident commonplaces of history. Seldom is any detailed study brought to their supi)ort. But historical evidence must be handled with the greatest care in order to be conclusive. Failure rightly to analyze causes and effects and to take account of dilTerences in conditions is apt to vitiate our reasoning. Not yet have we sufficient knowledge of municipal history or sufficient outlook into the future to justify dogmatic conclu- sions as to the relative success of council rule and mayor rule. A few considerations may be presented, however, which show- how comparatively weak is this argument in favor of the mayor system from our experience in city government. It is very generally admitted, nor need we stop to prove, that up to the end of the third or fourth decade of this century American cities, which were then usually under the practically absolute control of the council, were more honestly and, in pro- portion to the technical advancement of the time, more effi- ciently governed than they are to-day. Indeed, the influence of the example of our federal Constitution must be looked upon as probably the chief explanation of the movement to withdraw executive powers from the council. In 1829 New York was already a very considerable city, having a population of more than 200,000 inhabitants. The city convention which met at that time was unable to advance charges against the municipal administration in the faintest degree comparable to those which are made every day against the government of our present cities possessing equal population. Nevertheless, some evils were found ; and the natural remedy seemed to the charter framers, imbued with the principles of our national and state constitu- tions, to separate the executive from the legislative powers. But we have not the slightest proof that they correctly diagnosed the disease or prescribed the right remedy. From that time on, in fact, both council and administrative officers degenerated rapidly ; and while this may be partly explained by the general lowering of the tone of politics and by the great influx of for- eigners, no small share in the demoralization of the council, at COUNCIL GOVERNMENT VS. MAYOR GOVERNMENT 243 least, was doubtless due to the weakening of its powers. After the still greater reductions in its authority by the charters of 1849 and 1857 and by the gro-^ing interference of the state legislature, the council fell yet more markedly in character. Each abuse of some remaining function was made the signal for the transfer of that function to the state government or to an independent commission.^ There was no attempt to con- centrate the powers thus taken away from the council in the hands of the mayor, or indeed to establish in any way harmony of policy and centralized responsibility for action. The result was a municipal government so disorganized that inefl&ciency and corruption could not but increase appallingly. It was with a view to bringing some order into this chaos that later legisla- tion gradually placed the various branches of the city adminis- tration under the control of the mayor. The history of the decay of the authority of the municipal assembly has been much the same in other cities as in New York, though the process has gone on with different degrees of rapidity and completeness in the various municipalities. We Americans too often fail to seek and to root out the fundamental causes of our political evils. We rush for some external pallia- tive, some patent nostrum. Not one of the steps by which our city councils were robbed of authority was taken on the basis of careful study of political principles. Each was a makeshift remedy for an immediate ill. Nor was there usually the faintest evidence that any of the better results which occasionally fol- lowed such changes were really due to them. No form of gov- ernment could, under the conditions then any more than now, give thoroughly good administration. Had the council been left with the main authority, we should undoubtedly have had poor enough government ; but there is no certainty whatever that it would have been better under the most thoroughgoing one-man sway. We have, indeed, every reason to believe that a continuation of the earlier council rule would have been 1 For fuller description of the process by which the council in New York was de- prived of its powers and of the effects of that deprivation, see the writer's Finances of New York Cily, Chaps. Ill and IV. 244 EVIDENCE better than the system which actually became established in most of our cities ilurinj^ the years from about 1840 to 1880 — a system characterized by hopeless dilTusion and confusion of power and responsibility, legislative as well as executive, among state legislature, council, mayor, and well-nigh independent ad- ministrative officers and boards. Every candid thinker must admit the truth of this statement ; yet we are too prone to for- get that the form of government for w^hose evils concentration of power in the mayor was introduced as a remedy was very far from being genuine council government. Infinitely better is it to centralize authority and responsibility than to scatter and dissipate them ; but it does not immediately follow that it is better to centralize them in one man than in a representative council. Because council government was not perfect and be- cause mayor go\-ernment has been more satisfactory than the hodge-podge which preceded it, many have drawn the quite unwarranted conclusion that rule by the council is necessarily and always inferior to rule by the mayor. We have at present in the United States no city where the council is the one con- trolling power, so that comparison of this system with the system of one-man government, both working under similar conditions, is impossible. Some approach toward the council system is, indeed, found in a few of our cities; and in those where the council has the greatest power, such as Minneapolis and Atlanta, the integrity and efficiency of the administration, according to competent local observers, compare most favorably with those of other American cities.^ But it cannot be pre- tended that this evidence constitutes a strong argument in favor of the council system — any more than the experience of other cities with corrupt councils or with mayors, good or bad, is conclusive as to the best form of city government. There has been far too little method in American municipal experiments, and far too little scientific recording of their results, for us to hope to gain much information from our municipal history. The fallacy of the line of reasoning which we have been 1 Minneapolis Conference for Good City Government, p. 93 ; Baltimore Conference, pp. 96-101. COUNCIL GOVERNMENT VS. MAYOR GOVERNMENT 245 criticising is aggravated by the fact that, in pointing out the results which have come from centraHzing power in the mayor, no account is made of the growth of pubhc sentiment demand- ing better government and compelHng the choice of worthier men for office — men who would have made improvement in the administration under any form of organization. Flagrant abuses from time to time stir up the "good citizens," who are always in the majority, if they will only act and act together. A wave of reform overturns with the same sweep forms and individuals ; for the American reformer is never content unless he tinkers the governmental machine at the same time that he puts new men in charge of it. The improvement which comes perhaps solely from the change of men is then attributed pri- marily to the change in form. That this is a fairly correct description of what has taken place in recent years in some American cities which have introduced the mayor system seems to be evidenced by the fact that the character of the govern- ment has often been but temporarily improved after the change, or at least has fluctuated with the rise and fall of the reform spirit among the citizens. It is too early to judge finally the practical working of the system. Undoubtedly there has been some permanent increase in the interest of the people in munic- ipal government and in their devotion to the civic welfare, and this fact will tend in itself to give us a higher level of city administration. But the path of one-man rule is not all rose- strewn. Many bad mayors have got into power and, by the abuse of their immense prerogatives, have given administration scarcely equalled in extravagance, inefficiency, and corruption, during the worst periods of the earlier regime. Nor have the people always been able, ■ — as they should have been, accord- ing to the theory of the one-man system, — by at once placing the blame where it belonged, to overthrow the unworthy ruler and establish an upright one in his stead. The untrammelled mayor, with his enormous patronage, his control of the election machinery, his ability often to conceal from the public the true character of his administration, has not unfrequently succeeded in securing reelection for himself or triumph for his ring. Only 2 40 EVIDEXCE .1 iVw instances of the unsutcessful workinj^ of mayor rule can Id- ciled from amonp the many whose existence any candid >tu(ient of recent municipal history must admit. It must be confessed that Boston has for the most part elected efficient and upright mayors during recent years, but other cities have not been so fortunate. In New York City the prominence of the mayoralty has at times driven even Tammany Hall to put up good men, such as Grace and Hewitt. But within this very decade, in the face of the growing reform sen- timent, that organization has elected to the mayor's chair for two successive terms an "illiterate and obscure man" who filled all vacant offices with ''adventurers of the lowest character"; while under the rule of his successor, also elected by Tammany, a legislative investigating committee unearthed in the police department scandals such as scarcely any other civilized city has ever known. ^ The first election under the Greater New ^'ork charter resulted in the defeat of Seth Low, well known to have been the best mayor Brooklyn had ever had, by a man who has followed almost absolutely, in his appointments and his general policy, the dictation of the Tammany boss and whose connection with the Ice Trust has been by no means creditable. In Brooklyn the first election under its famous "model char- ter" brought Mr. Low into the mayor's chair, but for eight years after he left office "mayors were elected, and appoint- ments were made by them, on party grounds" ; ^ while the ad- ministration of the city was "believed to be feeble and untrust- worthy, its public moneys and franchises to be unscrupuloush' wasted. . . ." ^ This last is the admission of a strong advocate of the mayor system, who insists that it was even then working well in Brookl^m, for the reason that the people knew precisely who was at fault, but who fails to show us why they did not straightway put better men into office. Philadelphia, too, since the great increase in the power of ' E. L. Godkin, "The Problems of Municipal Government," Annals of the Ameri- can Academy of PolUical and Social Science, IV, 857. - D. B. Eaton, The Government of Municipalities, p. 188. * E. M. Shepard, "The Brooklyn Idea in City Government," Forum, XVI, .38. COUNCIL GOVERNMENT VS. MAYOR GOVERNMENT 247 the mayor in 1887, has found it impossible, with perhaps a single exception, to elect good men to that office, while the character of the council has fallen lower than ever before.^ A state investigation, made in 1897,- revealed many abuses — favoritism and extravagance in letting contracts, interference by the police in elections and connivance by them in all sorts of violations of law 9,nd, above all, a complete undermining of the civil service reform system, this last evil being emphatically corroborated by the secretary of the National Civil Service Reform Association. The recent attempt of the mayor and city officers to blackmail Mr. Wanamaker illustrates the char- acter of the administration ; while the lease of the gas works in 1897 appears to have been accompanied by wholesale corrup- tion. Philadelphia's expenditures rose from $13,273,000 in 1887 to $23,491,000 in 1895. Similar, too, has been the experience of several smaller cities which have changed to the one-man system. Indianapolis, since the adoption of her centralizing charter in 1891, has not elected a single mayor who has obeyed the spirit, or even the letter, of the laws regulating the civil service. All appoint- ments have been made on strictly partisan grounds.^ Four years after Quincy, Mass., greatly increased the power of the mayor, Mr. Gamaliel Bradford, who had specially urged the change, was forced to confess that ''extravagance of expendi- ture, local jobbing, and caucus politics are as rampant as in any other city in the state." ^ In Cleveland the mayor has abused his appointing power for the sake of aiding his own political ambitions.^ Nowhere, in fact, can the advocate of mayor domination, if he be candid, point to anything like thoroughly and continuously good administration where that system has ' Mayor vs. Council, p. 28, quoting A. K. McClure, editor Philadelphia Times. 2 "Notes on Municipal Government," Annals of Ike American Academy of Political and Social Science, X, 122. ' Mayor vs. Council, p. 27 ; S. G. Swift, in Indianapolis Conference for Good City Governments, i8g8. '' G. Bradford, "Our Failures in Municipal Government," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, III, 6g9. '• Circulars of the Cleveland Municipal League. 248 EVIDENCE prc\ailed. Temporary inipri)vcment has often followed a change to mayor rule ; permanent improvement even has re- sulted in certain cases from doing away with the anomalies and complexities of earlier charters ; but the actual success of the centralization of power has fallen very far short of fulfilling the promises which were held out to us. PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S LECTURES ^ E. L. GODKIN Biologists like Professor Huxley have, as popular lecturers, the advantage over scientific men in other fields, of occupying themselves with what is to ninety-nine men and women out of a hundred the most momentous of all problems — the manner in which life on this globe began, and in which men and other animals came to be what they are. The doctrine of evolution as a solution of these problems, or of one of them, derives ad- ditional interest from the fact that in many minds it runs counter to ideas which a very large proportion of the population above the age of thirty imbibed with the earliest and most impressive portion of their education. Down to 1850 the bulk of intelli- gent men and women believed that the world, and all that is therein, originated in the precise manner described in the first chapter of Genesis, and about six thousand years ago. Most of the adaptations, or attempts at adaptation, of what is called the Mosaic account of the creation, of the chronological theories of the geologists and evolutionists by theologians and Biblical scholars have been made within that period, and it may be safely said that it is only within ten or fifteen years that any clear knowledge of the "conflict between science and religion" has reached that portion of the people who take a lively or, indeed, any interest, in religious matters. It would not, in fact, be rash to say that little or nothing is known about this conflict to this hour among the great body of Methodists or ' From Reflections and Comments. Charles Scribner's Sons. Reprinted by per- mission. PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S LECTURES 249 Catholics, or the evangelical portion of other denominations, and that their religious outlook is little, if at all, affected by it. One would never detect, for instance, in Mr. Moody's preaching, any indication that he had ever heard of any such conflict, or that the doctrines of the Orthodox Protestant Church had under- gone any sensible modification within a hundred years. Pro- fessor Huxley and men like him, therefore, make their appear- ance now not simply as manipulators of a most interesting sub- ject, but as disturbers of beliefs which are widely spread, deeply rooted, and surrounded by the tenderest and most sacred asso- ciations of human existence. That under such circumstances he has met with so little opposition is, on the whole, rather surprising. As far as our observation has gone, no strong hostility whatever to himself or his teachings has been shown, except in one or two instances, by either the clergy or the religious press. Indeed, ministers formed a very prominent and attentive portion of his audience at the recent lectures at Chickering Hall. But it has been made apparent by the articles and letters which these lectures have called out in the newspapers that the religious public has hardly understood him. The collision between the theologians and the scientific men has been very slight among us ; and, indeed, the waves of the controversy hardly reached this country until the storm had passed away in Europe, so that it is difficult for Americans to appreciate the combative tone of Mr. Huxley's oratory. Of this difficulty the effect of his substitution of Milton for Moses as the historian of the creation, on the night of his first lecture, has furnished an amusing illustration. The audience, or at least that portion of it which was gifted with any sense of humor, saw the joke and laughed over it heartily. It was simply a telling rhetorical device, intended to point a sarcasm directed against the biblical commentators who have been trying to extract the doctrines of evolution from the first chapter of Genesis. But many of the newspapers all over the country took it up seriously, and the professor must, if he saw them, have enjoyed mightily the various letters and articles which have endeavored in solemn earnest to show that Milton 250 EVIDh.SCE was ndl justly entitled to the rank of a scientific expositor, and that it was a cowardly thinjj; in the lecturer to attack Moses over Milton's shoulders. Whenever Professor Huxley enters on the defence of his science, as distinguished from the exposition of it, there are traces in his language of the f^aiidiutn certaminis which has found expression in so many hard-fougl)t fields in his own > ountry, and which has made him perhaps the most formidable antagonist, in so far as dialectics go, that the transcendental philoso{)hers have ever encountered. He is, par excellence, a fighting man, but certainly his pugnacity diminishes neither his worth nor his capacity. In many of the comments which his lectures have called out in the newspapers one meets ever\' now and then with a curious failure to comprehend the position which an average non- scientific man occupies in such a conflict as is now going on over the doctrines of evolution. Professor Huxley was very careful not to repeat the error which delivered Professor Tyndall into the hands of the enemy at Belfast. He expressed no opinion as to the nature of the causal force which called the world into existence. He did not profess to know anything about the sources of life. He consequently did not once place himself on the level of the theologian or the unscientific spectator. What he undertook to do and did was to present to the audience some specimens of the evidence by which evolutionists have been led to the conclusion that their theory is correct. Now, the mistake which a good many newspaper writers — some of them ministers — have made in passing judgment on the lec- tures lies in their supposing that this evndence must be weak and incomplete because they have not been convinced. There is probably no more widely diffused fallacy, or one which works more mischief in all walks of life, than the notion that it is only those whose business it is to persuade who need to be trained in the art of proof, and that those who are to be persuaded need no process of preparation at all. The fact is that skill in reasoning is as necessary on the one side as the other. He cannot be fully and rightly convinced who does not himself know how to convince, and no man is PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S LECTURES 251 competent to judge in the last resort of the force of an argument who is not on something hke an equahty of knowledge and dialectical skill with the person using it. This is true in all fields of discussion; it is preeminently true in scientific fields. Of course, therefore, the real public of the scientific man — the public which settles finally whether he has made out his case — is a small one. Outside of it there is another and larger one on which his reasoning may act with irresistible force ; but just as the fact that it does so act does not prove that his hypothesis is true, so also the fact that it has failed to convince proves nothing against its soundness. In other words, a man's occup)^- ing the position of a listener does not necessarily clothe him with the attributes of a judge, and there may be as much folly and impertinence in his going about saying, "I do not agret- with Huxley ; he has not satisfied me ; he will have to produce more proof than that before I believe in evolution," as in going about saying, "I know as much about evolution as Huxley and could give as good a lecture on it as he any day." And yet a good many people are guilty of the one who would blush at the mere thought of the other. Another fertile source of confusion in this and similar con- troversies is the habit which transcendentalists, theological and other, have of using the term "truth" in two different senses, the scientific sense and the religious or spiritual sense. The scientific man only uses it in one. Truth to him is something capable of demonstration by some one of the canons of induction. He knows nothing of any truth which cannot be proved. The religious man, on the other hand, and especially the minister, has been bred in the application of the term to facts of an en- tirely different order — that is, to emotions produced by cer- tain beliefs which he cannot justify by any arguments, and about which to him no argument is necessary. These are the "spiritual truths" which are said to be perceptible often to the simple-minded and unlearned, though hidden from the wise and prudent. Now there is no decently educated religious man who does not perceive the distinction between these two kinds of truths, and few who do not think they keep this distinction :-j 1AII)/:.\CE in ir.iiid when passiiii; upDii tlu- i^roat problems of ihe oriifin and j^nnvth o\ the universe. Hul, as a matter of fact, we see the distinction ij^nored ever\- (la\-. Peo|)le <;o to scientific lectures and read scientific books with their heads tilled with spiritual truths, which have come they know not whence, and which give them infinite comfort in all the trying passages of life, and in view of this comfort must, they think, connect them by invisible lines of communication with the great Secret of the Universe, toward which philosophers try to make their way by visi])le lines. When, then, they find that the scientific man's induction makes no impression on this other truth, and that he cannot dislodge any theory of the growth or government of the world which has become firmly imbedded in it, they are apt to conclude that there is something faulty in his methods, or rash and presumptuous in his conclusions. But there is only one course for the leaders of religious thought to follow in order to pre\ent the disastrous confusion which comes of the sudden and complete breakdown of the moral standards and sanctions hx which the mass of mankind live, and that is to put an end at once, and gracefully, to the theory that the spiritual truth which brings the peace that passeth understanding has any necessary connection with any theory of the physical universe, or can be used to refute it or used as a substitute for it, or is dependent on the authenticity or interpretation of any book. They must not flatter themselves because a scientific man. here and there doubts or gainsays, or because some learned theologian is still unconvinced, or because the mental habits of which faith is born seem to hold their ground or show signs of revival, that the philosophy of which Huxley is a master is not slowly but surely gaining ground. The proofs may not yet be complete, but they grow day by day ; some of the elder scientific men may scout, but no young ones are appearing to take their places and preach their creed. The tide seems sometimes to ebb from month to month, but it rises from year to year. The true course of spiritually minded men under these circumstances is to sepa- rate their faith from all theories of the precise manner in which the world originated, or of the length of time it has lasted, as PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S LECTURES 253 matters, for their purposes, of little or no moment. The secret springs of hope and courage from which each of us draws strength in the great crises of existence would flow all the same whether life appeared on the planet ten million or ten thousand years ago, and whether the present forms of life were the product of one day or of many ages. And we doubt very much whether any one has ever listened in a candid and dispassionate frame of mind to the evolutionist's history of the globe without find- ing that it had deepened for him the mystery of the universe, and magnified the Power which stands behind it. Not the least interesting feature in the discussion about the theory of evolution is the prominent part taken in it by clergy- men of various denominations. There is hardly one of them who, since Huxley's lectures, has not preached a sermon bearing on the matter in some way, and several have made it the topic of special articles or lectures. In fact, we do not think we ex- aggerate when we say that three-fourths of all that has been recently said or written about the hypothesis in this country has been said or written by ministers. There is no denying that the theory, if true, does, in appearance at least, militate against the account of the creation given in the first chapter of Genesis, or, in other words, against the view of the origin of life on the globe which has been held by the Christian world for seventeen centuries. It would, therefore, be by no means surprising that ministers should meet it, either by showing that the Mosaic account of the creation was really inspired — was, in short, the account given by the Creator himself — or that the modern interpretations of it were incorrect, and that it was really, when perfectly understood, easily reconciled with the conclusions reached of late years by geologists and biologists. This is the way in which a great many ministers have hitherto met the evolutionists, and for this sort of work they are undoubtedly fitted by education and experience. If it can be done by any- one, they are the men to do it. If it be maintained that the biblical account is literally true, they are more familiar than any other class of men with the evidence and arguments accumulated by the Church in favor of the inspiration of the Scriptures ; or :;4 KVIDESCE :. on the other hand, it be desired to reconcile the Bible with e\olution. they are more familiar than any other class of men with the exejzetical process by which this reconciliation can be effected. They are specialh" trained in ecclesiastical history and tradition, in Greek and Hebrew religious literature, and in the methods of interpretation which have been for ages in use among theologians. Of late, however, they have shown a decided inclination to abandon the purely ecclesiastical approach to the controversy altogether, and this is especially remarkable in the discussion now pending over Hu.xley. They do not seek to defend the biblical account of the creation, or to reconcile it to the theory of the evolutionists. Far from it, they have come down, in most of the recent cases, into the scientific arena, and are meeting the men of science with their own weapons. They tell Huxley and Darwin and Tyndall that their evidence is imperfect, and their reasoning from it faulty. Noticing their activity in this new field, and the marked contrast which this activity presents to the modesty or indifference of the other professions — the lawyers and doctors, for instance, who on general grounds have fullv as much reason to be interested in evolution as the ministers, and have hitherto been at least as well fitted to discuss it — we asked ourselves whether it was possible that, without our knowl- edge, any change had of late years been made in the curriculum of the divinity schools or theological seminaries with the view of fitting ministers to take a prominent part in the solution of the increasingly important and startling problems raised by physical science. In order to satisfy ourselves, we lately turned over the catalogues of all the principal divinity schools in the country, to see if any chairs of natural science had been established, or if candidates for the ministry had to undergo any compulsory instruction in geology or physics, or the higher mathematics, or biology, or palaeontology, or astronomy, or had to become versed in the methods of scientific investiga- tion in the laboratory or in the dissecting-room, or were sub- jected to any unusually severe discipline in the use of the in- ductive process. Not much to our surprise, we found nothing PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S LECTURES 255 of the kind. We found that, to all appearance, not even the smallest smattering of natural science in any of its branches is considered necessary to a minister's education; no astronomy, no chemistry, no biology, no geology, no higher mathematics, no comparative anatomy, and nothing severe in logic. In fact, of special preparation for the discussion of such a theme as the origin of life on the earth, there does not appear to be in the ordinary course of our divinity schools any trace. We then said to ourselves. But ministers are modest, truthful men ; they would not knowingly pass themselves off as com- petent on a subject with which they were unfitted to deal. They are no less candid and self-distrustful, for instance, than lawyers and doctors, and a lawyer or doctor who ventured to tackle a professed scientist on a scientific subject to which he had given no systematic study would be laughed at by his professional brethren, and would suffer from it even in his professional reputation, as it would be taken to indicate a dangerous want of self-knowledge. Perhaps, then, the training given in the di- vinity schools, though it does not touch special fields of science, is such as to prepare the mind for the work of induction by some course of intellectual gymnastics. Perhaps, though it does not familiarize a man with the facts of geology and biology and astronomy, it so disciplines him in the work of collecting and arranging facts of any kind, and reasoning from them, that he will be a master in the art of proof, and that, in short, though he may not have a scientific man's knowledge, he will have his mental habits. But we found this second supposition as far from the truth as the first one was. Moreover, the mental constitution of the young men who choose the ministry as a profession is riot apt to be of a kind well fitted for scientific investigation. Reverence is one of their prominent characteristics, and reverence pre- disposes them to accept things on authority. They are inclined to seek truth rather as a means of repose than for its own sake, and to fancy that it is associated closely with spiritual comfort, and that they have secured the truth when they feel the comfort. Though, last not least, they enter the seminary with a strong 2^6 EVIDENCE l)ia> ill t'iivor o{ oiu- particular theory of the orip;in of life and ol the history of the race, and their subsequent studies are marked out and pursued with the set purpose of strengthening; this bias and of quahfying them to defend it and spread it, and of associat- ing in their minds the doubt or rejection of it with moral evil. The consequence is that they go forth, trained not as investi- gators or incjuirers, but as advocates, charged with the defence against all comers of a view of the universe which they have accepted ready-made from teachers. A worse preparation for scientific pursuits of any kind can hardly be imagined. The slightest trace of such a state of mind in a scientific man — that is, of a disposition to believe a thing on grounds of feeling or interest, or with reference to practical consequences, or to jump over gaps in proof in order to reach pleasant conclusions — discredits him with his fellows, and throws doubt on his state- ments. We are not condemning this state of mind for all purposes. Indeed, we think the wide-spread prevalence of the philosophic way of looking at things would be in many respects a great mis- fortune for the race, and we acknowledge that a rigidly trained philosopher would be unfit for most of a minister's functions ; but we have only to describe a minister's education in order to show his exceeding unreadiness for contentions such as some of his brethren are carrying on with geologists and physicists and biologists. In fact, there is no educated calling whose members are not, on the whole, better equipped for fighting in scientific fields over the hvpothesis of evolution. Our surprise at seeing lawyers and doctors engaged in it would be very much less justifiable, for a portion at least of the training received in these professions is of a scientific cast, and concerns the selection and classification of facts, while a clergyman's is almost wholly devoted to the study of the opinions and sayings of other men. In truth, theology, properly so called, is a collection of opinions. Xor do these objections to a clergyman's mingling in scientific disputes arise out of his belief about the origin and government of the world per se, because one does not think of making them to trained religious philosophers; for instance, to Principal SPEECH ON OLD-AGE PENSIONS 257 Dawson or Mr. St. George Mivart. Some may think or say that the reUgious prepossessions of these gentlemen lessen the weight of their opinions on a certain class of scientific questions, but no one would question their right to share in scientific discussions. 3. Body of Argument SPEECH ON OLD-AGE PENSIONS Introduction There are three questions raised by the proposed Bill. I. Is the plan outlined in the Bill practicable ? II. What is the relation of this Bill to the wider problems of social reform ? III. How will it affect the national finances ? Argument The present Bill should not be enacted into law, for I. There are insuperable difficulties in the way of carrying out the plan proposed, for A. It will be almost impossible to ascertain the age of appli- cants for pensions, for 1. The machinery of investigation is inadequate, for a. The three bodies entrusted with this duty have no special training for this work. 2. Legal proof of the date of birth is often not obtainable, for a. Many laborers come from places where there was no registration of births. B. The intentions of the Bill with regard to qualifications of character cannot be carried out, for 1. It is not easy for officials to pass judgment on the lives of the poorer classes. 2. It is impossible to obtain the facts for the huge floating populations of large cities. 3. A very deserving class of persons may be excluded, for a. Any one who has accepted Poor Law Relief is ineligible to the pension. 258 ARGUMENT 4. WDrthlcss persons miRhl he benefited, for (J. Wulows. wliatcvor ihcir rhuraclcr, would receive pen- sions if I heir husbands had compUed with certain requirements. 5. Intirni persons over seventy would be thrown on the workhouse antl thereby deprived of their pensions. C. The six or seven millions of sterling involved would be a source of bribery and waste, for 1. The bodies lo which the sums are entrusted are respon- sible to no legal tribunal. 2. Personal prejudice and party politics are bound to deter- mine the distribution. 3. Good nature is likely to relax the rigidity of the require- ments. II. This Bill will interfere with wider schemes of reform, for A. It will be treated as an addition to existing Poor Law Re- lief, for I. The class of people affected will not make any line dis- tinction between pensions and Poor Law Relief, for a. Already in many parishes no discredit attaches to receiving Poor Law Relief. B. It will become a subvention of wages, for 1. Men still capable of work will earn just enough to enable them to draw pensions, and 2. Employers will benefit by labor which may be worth more. C. It will destroy the work of the Royal Commission ap- pointed to consider the problem of the Poor Laws, for I. The Bill changes conditions and modifies the problem. III. This Bill does not take account of the financial burden imposed upon the country, for A. No statement has been made as to where the money will come from, for I. The belief that it matters not whether the money is paid by charitable institutions and through the Poor Law as at present, or by the Treasury, is unsound, for a. The mere fact that there is money to be obtained does not make it easy for the Chancellor to obtain it. B. The sum needed is likely to be £11,500,000 and not £6,500,- 000 or £7,500,000. C. It absolutely cuts oflF future expenditure for all other impor- tant causes of social betterment. SPEECH ON OLD-AGE PENSIONS 259 Conclusion The Bill is hastily drawn and ill-considered, for I. It does not satisfy legitimate demands. II. It throws a heavy burden on the resources of the state and crip- ples future schemes of improvement. * SPEECH ON OLD-AGE PENSIONS ^ A. J. Balfour I HAVE some reluctance in intervening in a debate of which I have not heard the important speeches on either side, or any of the speeches until a few minutes ago, and am, therefore, not quite aware of the arguments on either side. I am, however, reluctant to leave this Bill, discussed as it has been, without making some observations and attempting to sum up and bring to a focus, if I can, some of the impressions that it has aroused in my mind. I listened with interest to the speech of the honorable Member for Northumberland, who has just sat down, and thought much of it extremely interesting, but was sorry that, contrary to his ordinary Parliamentary habit, he should have travelled some- what outside the scope of the Bill into controversial politics of ten years ago. I have not the smallest objection to that. I live in an atmosphere of controversial politics. I do not, how- ever, think it very interesting or relevant to the Bill. He thinks that while undoubtedly the majority of the Unionist Party have for many years been in favor of old-age pensions, they ought to have taken the opportunity of bringing in a Bill either in the session of 1S96, 1897, or 1898 — before, that is, the South African war, and he thinks that the fact that the Government did not bring in a Bill in one of those three years is a slur on their political reputation. I do not agree with the honorable Gentle- man. I do not think that the financial position of the country at that time would have justified any such experiment as the Govern- * Parliamentary Debates. Fourth Scries, Vol. ig2, col. 175-187. jOO ARGLMi:.\T mcnt is now tryinc;, and if the lapsf of three years is supposed to condemn a (iovernment for not brin^^inji a Hill. I should have tht>ught that the prLsent Government would hardly escape. But that is not an important part of the controversy with regard to this Bill, because we are all agreed that .some scheme of pensions is extremely desirable, and the only thing we have doubt about is the manner in which the Government has gone to work in carrying out that unanimously accepted object. It is that that gives me, for one, very serious misgivings. I think that neither the actual pro\'isions of this Bill nor the mode in which the Government has allowed it to be discussed gives us the smallest security that one of the greatest and most costly experiments in social legislation is going to be tried under cir- cumstances that will give any hope of permanent success. There are three main questions raised by the scheme. The first is, will this Bill work according to its avowed objects ? Is the machinery of the Bill, in other words, going to give pensions on the plan that the Government say is desirable ? The second is, how is it going to affect the broader and wider problems of social reform ? And the third is, how is it going to affect the national finances ? These are the three problems that every man in this House, no matter in which quarter he may sit, should really consider if he wants to estimate the value of the legis- lative experiment the Government are now trj'ing. The first point is whether the Bill is really going to work out according to the theory of its framers ; and, if it does, what will be its results ? The theory of its framers is a very simple one. They say that, pending the acquisition of further national re- sources, they must limit their Bill to pensions for persons seventy years of age, and, to put it broadly, of good character. How is this Bill going to attain these two objects ? How is the machinery going to limit the Bill to persons of seventy and to persons of good character? And will the machinery work smoothly, justly, and to pubhc advantage? I cannot really believe that the Government have thoroughly thought out the method in which their own machinery is going to work. Take the first of the two conditions, that of age. That is one SPEECH ON OLD-AGE PENSIONS 26 1 of the subjects we have discussed. We have not had an op- portunity of discussing the age as between seventy and sixty-five, because that was shut out by the closure, but we have discussed on more than one occasion the machinery by which the age of seventy is be to arrived at. I do not think that by any state- ment the Government have shown a clear idea of the difili- culties by which that investigation is surrounded or the means by which those difficulties are to be surmounted. In the first place, who are the investigators ? They are officers of the Inland Revenue, a single committee for each county and large borough, and ultimately the President of the Local Government Board. For the life of me I cannot see that an investigation can be carried out by any of these three bodies. I made some remarks in Committee with regard to the Inland Revenue officers which I believe have given pain to those most estimable public officers. If I have said anything that gave them pain, I most heartily withdraw it. They are a most valuable body of men, and carry out duties of great responsibility with perfect uprightness and great efiiciency. But I ask whether the most admirable per- formance of the duties of the Inland Revenue either gives a man the training or provides him with the machinery by which this kind of investigation is to be carried out. Take the case of an unskilled laborer in London. He reaches an age that he himself thinks seventy or very nearly so. He believes that he has worked hard all his life, and that if anybody deserves a pension he does. He applies to the Inland Revenue officer and says: "My name is O'Grady." Mr. John Wilson : Make it Smith, and then you are safe. Mr. Balfour : I chose an Irish name for a particular reason which will appear directly. He says: "My age is seventy, and I desire to be supplied with a pension. I come from Cork." The Inland Revenue officer says: "What proof have you that you are seventy?" He has no proof. Why should he have a proof ? I do not believe I should know my own age if it were not that tactless friends are constantly reminding me of it. Most assuredly a dock laborer who left Cork thirty years ago may very well be excused if he has not proof of his age, since 262 ARGUMF.ST hi- was born in a country whcTc there was no rcijistration of l)irths at the time wlu-n he was [)resunial)ly Ijorn. How is this unl'ortunate ofiicial t^oinR to investi;;ate in the cily of Cork whether Mr. O'Grady working at the docks is or is not seventy years of age? The thing appears to be wholly impossible, and there is no machinery for doing it. The county committee to which he refers are no better off than himself, and if they refer to the head of the Local Government Jioard, he is no better ofJ. The machinery cannot be found and will not be supplied. These are considerations that the Government have never faced, for, though they have been urged more than once in Committee, the Chancellor of the E.xchequer has never really replied to them. He contented himself with pointing out, what nobody denied, that in every village the age of everybody is known, and that there are places and professions where there would be no difficulty. That does not get over the difficult point with regard to the very people you want to help with these pensions, the poor of the large towns, the unorganized, those who do not belong to trade unions. In these cases neither they nor anybody else can produce that legal proof which is at the ver\' basis of the Bill. If the difficulties with regard to age are overwhelming, what are we to say with regard to the investigation as to char- acter ? None of us are without some misgivings as to the enor- mous power given to an Imperial officer and to a local com- mittee to form a judgment on the way in which the poorer classes of the community have carried out their life's duty. It is not a pleasant thing to have to do, and if it is done honestly and conscientiously, it will be a very painful duty thrown on those who may have to do it. Here, again, we really have very little means of obtaining assistance. Do not let us consider the country village where every one's character is known. There may be an opportunity for favoritism or vindictive attacks on unpopular persons, but the facts will be known and may be fairly and properly judged upon. But how can the facts be known with regard to the great floating population of the huge industrial centres ? They cannot be known. SPEECH ON OLD-AGE PENSIONS 263 It seems to me we may go further and say even that the in- tentions of Government with regard to character are not being carried out. Will anybody look at the Bill and consider the position of the widow ? Take the case of a widow of respectable character with a number of children, who has been obliged since the first of January to appeal to the guardians. She cannot get a pension. She is absolutely excluded. Is there a more deserving case in the world than the woman left without a husband to work for her, living with the care and responsibility of children incapable of working for themselves? I cannot imagine any case more worthy of assistance ; but it will not be assisted. The woman has been driven to accept Poor Law relief, and she is excluded. When you turn to the case of a man who has subscribed to a friendly society from the age of sixty, it does not matter w^hat his wife's character may be. She is sure of a pension. The Chancellor of the Exchequer dealt with that question on the Report stage, and thoroughly misunder- stood it. He thought my noble friend the Member for Mary- lebone was maintaining the proposition that a wife who carried out her household duties with economy and efficiency was not really helping to earn the pension of which her husband, by subscribing to a friendly society, was securing possession. That was not my noble friend's contention. He was pointing out that a husband might have been thrifty, and might have sub- scribed for ten years to a friendly society, but if he died a year after reaching the age of seventy, his widow, whatever had happened before, if she had every vice incident to poor humanity, would have an absolute right to a pension because her husband, in spite of thriftless ways and worse, had been able to continue his subscriptions for ten years. I cannot see that that carries out the views of the Government and of the House, yet that is the Bill as it must go to a House where it is impossible, even if the Government desire to allow it, to make any change in the amount charged upon the taxpayers. There is another point as to character. Of all the people we want to assist, I have warmer sympathy with none than with the man or woman who, towards the end of a long and honorable 264 ARGUMEXT life, is not well c'noii,L!;h after the a^e of seventy to be looked after in his or her own home. What is the remedy for that person? There is none save the workhouse infirmary. We ha\e heard a great deal of the brand and stigma of Poor Law relief. It may have been e.xaggerated by some ; but we all agree that the self- re.sj^ecting among the poor look with extreme repulsion upon receiving assistance through the machinery of the Poor Law or in Poor Law buildings. But these })eople, who have, by the necessity of their condition, to make use of Poor Law machinery and buildings are to be deprived of what is called, we believe most falsely, the right to a pension. They are not to have five shillings a week ; they are to lose their homes ; they are to suffer the stigma of Poor Law relief. It is a great mistake to suppose that the Bill touches the cases of all the poor over seventy years of age, or even deals with the most deserving cases. It does not, and the professions of the Government in this respect, as well as in others, are wholly baseless. There is one other point on which I must say a word. You are dealing with a sum which at the lowest is £6,500,000, and, according to the Honorable Member who last spoke, will be much more. You are giving that over absolutely to bodies which are responsible to no legal tribunal whatever. I have the utmost confidence in the general honesty of the committees and county councils and of the officials of the Government ; but are we wrong to look with some suspicion on the possibility that this vast potentiality of bribery will never be misused ? The six or seven million sterling is to be distributed at the discretion of certain individuals. That discretion is not fettered by strict legal interpretation ; it is a matter of estimate and judgment. If an Imperial officer thinks that a man has not really been a very creditable character, or if somebody has enemies, it is conceivable that that person may lose both his pension and his vote. I do not believe there is much danger of abuse in this country. I do not believe that this Bill will lead to it. Even if the theory is ever worked out, which I do not believe it will be, I admit that, if there is a danger, it is not a great one here. I am n(jt so sure that where party politics run high, as in Ireland, you can SPEECH ON OLD-AGE PENSIONS 265 be so certain of the working of it. It is not that Irishmen have a larger portion of original sin than the rest of us ; but the way in which local administration is worked in Ireland has a tinge of party politics which it has not in any other part of the United Kingdom, and I am afraid that if the Bill is worked on the theory of the Government, it will be found that every friend of a local authority in Ireland will be over the age of seventy, while no enemy of the local authority will ever get beyond the age of sixty-nine. I have been endeavoring to show that if it is attempted to work the Bill according to theory, you throw an almost im- possible task upon the executive, and your discrimination will be arbitrary, and the class you most want to help will be ex- cluded. But will the Bill be worked according to theory? Will its operation be confined to persons over seventy, and of virtuous character? I do not believe for one moment that it will. We are very good-natured people, particularly so when we are dealing with other people's money; and the duty of ex- cluding anybody from the benefits of the Act will be a pain- ful and also an expensive one. Every committee which declares a person in its district, or county, or borough, to be ineligible for a pension, has to do that which is very painful from the point of view of humanity, and very disagreeable from the point of view of the local purse. When humanity and economy are on one side, I think they are too strong for any legislative dikes which the Government may raise against them, and I do not believe that the dikes that the Government have raised will keep out the waters of expenditure for one moment. Honorable Gentlemen below the gangway greatly regretted that they could not discuss their Amendment for reducing the age from seventy to sixty-five. I do not think that it will make very much difference. I believe that under this Bill everybody who desires a pension and can show a decent appearance of being seventy will probably be found eligible by a kindly Imperial officer and a charitable county committee. That raises one or two points of very great importance. The first point touches on what I have described as the second 266 ARGUMEST great question raised hy this liill — namely, its future efiect on social reform. If you are going to use, as I am sure you are going to use, this Bill as a mere method of giving pensions at the taxpayers' expense to persons in declining years, and who have not got a very black mark, against their characters, how will you i)revent its becoming a mere part of the outdoor relief system of the country? You cannot do it. It is quite true that you have got a different machinery for allocating the money, but to suj^pose that the ordinary citizen is going nicely to dis- tinguish between what he gets through the Imperial officer and the committee and what he gets through the relieving officer and the board of guardians, and to regard one as discreditable and the other as creditable, is really trespassing upon our credulity. There will not be that broad distinction in the inihlic mind. It will gradually be thought, what is, indeed, the fact, that this is a mere addition to outdoor relief as outdoor relief is now administered in a large number of parishes in this country. In a very large number of unions in this country it is perfectly well known that outdoor relief is given on easy terms to persons who can show a good character. In those districts it ceases to be a badge of discredit. A proof of poverty it may be, but it is not a badge of discredit, and these pensions, which will certainly be given in somewhat reckless fashion under this Bill, will be regarded as a substitute — an improved substitute I admit, because it is larger in amount — for that outdoor relief, and there will not be that broad distinction between out relief on the one side and pensions on the other which, I think, every- body would desire should be kept unimpaired. And, remember, if you give, as I think you will give, these five shilling pensions, easily and without examination, to persons whose age has not been proved, though ad\anced in life, they really do become a subvention of wages. The man of sixty-five or sixty-sLx who conceives himself, or is conceived by his neighbors, to be, roughly enough for the puri)oses of this Bill, of the age of seventy, and is still capable of a fair day's work, \vill be very glad to supple- ment his pension by doing a certain amount of odd jobs if he can get anybody to employ him. But he will neither desire, nor SPEECH ON OLD-AGE PENSIONS 267 will he obtain, an amount of wages which will diminish the amount he gets from the State. What he will get will be as much as, but no more than, will enable him to get the full five shillings and, if his labor is worth more than that, the employer gets labor at less than its true market price, and these pensions become quite clearly and plainly a subvention in aid of wages, as was the case under the old Poor Law. This leads to another question connected with social reform on which I confess I feel very strongly. What is to be the re- lation of this measure to the inquiry now going on with regard to the reform of the Poor Law and to the legislation which the Government propose to found thereon at some future period? The late Government, conscious that the Poor Law system of the country was antiquated and utterly worn out, appointed a Royal Commission to consider the subject. That commission has been working hard for three years. The Government hope that it will report this year. I go merely on common rumor when I say I think that that 13 a somewhat sanguine estimate. It might have been accurate before this Bill, but this Bill has wholly changed the problem which is before them. The Com- mission was appointed to consider the Poor Law as it stood in igo6, but you have profoundly altered the Poor Law by this Bill, and I cannot imagine — I have had no communication with any member of the Commission — how the commissioners are going to report without fresh investigation and without waiting to see how this Bill is going to affect the problem of outdoor relief. I believe this Bill is going to substitute five shilling pensions, broadly speaking, for outdoor relief almost all over the country. If it is going to do that, it is quite evident that the whole problem of outdoor relief will be completely changed, and I do not know how in these circumstances you can expect a Commission, dealing with so complex a subject, to report with any confidence to the Government and the House. The truth is the Government must be perfectly well aware that they ought to have taken this question of old-age pensions as part of the general problem of poverty. You cannot divorce the two. If only for the purpose of distinguishing pension 268 ARGL'MKXT from l\)i>r Law relief you iiuisl consi(kr I he two t()e fi T a fandmost vital defect in all these discussions is their total neglect of the question of numbers. "No woman has at- tained the highest rank in science, literature, or art " — granted. But in all the ages of the world there have been but a handful of men who have a ttained this rank ; and only an utterly insig- nificant fraction of the female sex can be regarded as ha\ing been in any sense in the running for these high honors. Among the writers who hold Mrs. Buckler's view, one never finds the slight- est attempt to take into account the relation of these numbers. With all but an insignificant fraction of the sex ruled out, would not women have contributed more than their quota if they had furnished even one name to the list of immortals ? The force of this inquiry will become much more apparent if we turn aside for a moment from the woman question. Take our own great country, and ask whether any American has at- tained the highest rank in science, literature, or art. We have had no Newton, no Darwin, no Gauss ; there has not only been THE INTELLECTUAL POWERS OF WOMAN 279 no American Shakespeare or Dante, but no American Goethe or Burns ; and neither Beethoven nor Michael Angelo has even a distant relative on the roll of American glory. Does it enter any one's mind to infer, hence, that Americans are intrinsically in- capable of the greatest triumphs in science, in literature, or in art? And yet the number of American men who have in the past hundred years been placed in circumstances conducive to the accomplishment of great work is incomparably larger than that of all the women who have ever been so placed. Other examples will point the moral cpite as strikingly. Take the history of German literature. Between the romances and songs of chivalry which were produced in the twelfth and thir- teenth centuries, and the revival of German literature in the eighteenth century, there lies a dreary interval of five hundred years during which Germany produced not a single literary figure of importance, to say nothing of the "highest rank." And all this time her universities were keeping up the love of learning ; she had ancient capitals and historic courts ; she went through the stimulating experience of the Protestant Reformation, and it was within her bounds and during this period that the art of printing was invented. Or, again, take Scotland. An English- man writing in the year 1750 could far more justly have said of Scotchmen than any one can to-day say of women, that his- torical experience had proved that we could not expect from them writings capable of attracting the attention or influencing the thought of the world. Yet the next half-century found Scot- land furnishing to philosophy the preeminent name of Hume, to political economy the illustrious Adam Smith, to poetry Burns, and to prose Walter Scott. One is tempted here to introduce examples in which the course of history has been the reverse of this — cases where a period of glory has been followed by ages of utter insignificance. Of these, incomparably the most striking is that of Greece, or, let us say, of Athens. But the phenomenon presented by tlie magnificent flowering of Greek genius in a single century, followed by two millennia of obscurity, illustrates much more than this lesson of numbers, and may well serve to introduce the second great 28o REFUTATION di'fcct of the historical arRumcnt against the capabilities of women. For not only has almost the entire mass of womankind, in all historic ages up to the last two or three decades, been prac- tically placed completely out of the running, but the extremely small minority from whom high achievement might possibly l)e cxpectetl have been wholly cut olT from those inllucnces which have, in the case of men, so great a share in the stimulation of ambition and the development of genius. Men who have had the spark of genius or even of talent in them have been spurred to elTort by all their surroundings, by the traditions of the race, by rivalry- wiih their comrades, by the admiration which the opposite sex accords to brilliant achievements, by the dread of disappointing the high expectations of relatives and friends, by the thousand nameless forces which impel and animate to exer- tion. What of all this has there been for women ? How many have been so placed as to even think of an intellectual career as a possibility? Of these few, how many have been otherwise than solitary in their youthful aspirations and efforts? None has had the goad of the humiliation of failure to urge her on, for from none was anything great expected or looked for. And the very absorption in a high intellectual interest, which in the case of a boy would be hailed with delight even by the humblest par- ents as an earnest of future greatness, was, in the case of girls, up to the last two or three decades, universally condemned and repressed and thwarted even in the most cultivated families. There is, of course, a ver>' easy answer to all this. Genius, it will be said, rises superior to all obstacles, and will manifest itself in spite of all disadvantages. The widespread acceptance of this comfortable doctrine is an interesting example of the way in which opinions that, when examined, are seen to be mutually contradictory, may jog along together in the same mind without inconvenience. The same persons who hold this view of the infinite resources of genius will accept without hesitation the current explanation of the brilliant periods in the intellectual history of the world, or of a particular nation. But if the great- ness of English literature in the time of Elizabeth is to be ex- plained by reference to the glories of her reign in arms and ad- THE INTELLECTUAL POWERS OF WOMAN 281 venture and statesmanship ; if it is not to be considered as an accident that Italy's preeminence in art and literature was coincident with the period when her rival states were at their highest point of wealth and political importance and civic pride ; if Augustus had something to do with the Augustan age, and we find it quite natural that Virgil and Horace wrote then, and not in the reign of Augustulus ; if we find a line of succession like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, or like ^schylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and recognize in it something most impressive, in- deed, but nothing abnormal or miraculous ; if we see nothing strange in the failure of the Greek race to produce a single world- name in two thousand years, after having, within the compass of a century and a half, furnished a considerable fraction of all the names on the brief list of the world's greatest men — if all these things are so, what becomes of the notion that inborn genius will triumph over all adversity of circumstance? In one breath we recognize that intellectual glory can be looked for only when the spirit of the time and the conditions of the national Ufe are favorable to it ; shall we say, the next moment, that genius is sure to assert itself under all circumstances ? Evi- dently the two positions are incompatible. So much for the inconsistency of the notion that "genius will out" with the all but universally accepted view that great things are, as a rule, done only in times somehow favorable to greatness. That it is the first, and not the second, of these doctrines which is at fault may easily be shown almost to demonstration ; one has only to run over any list of the world's intellectual heroes and strike out those who belonged to some great period. Leave only the solitary giants who arose unheralded and alone, who wrote noble verse in an ignoble time, or made immortal works of art for a down-trodden or mean-spirited people, or extended the bounds of human knowledge at a time when learning was held in contempt. Is it necessary actually to go through the task? Is it not plain at once that, if it were performed, the splendid roll of immortals would shrink almost to nothing ? And yet, if this be so, it is clear that, far from being sure to triumph over all the obstacles of circumstance, native genius depends 282 REFriATlOX almost invarial)ly ior its fruitful (li'vclo])im'nt upon influences to which it. alonjj with nu-ancr ciuiownicnts, is subjected. Hy this is not to be understood any approval oi the evolutionary cant which at one time was so prevalent and which asserted that works of f^enius were a mere "proiluct" of the environment. The environment cannot make a genius, and cannot '"evolve" his work. On the other hand, however, genius is not endowed with omnipotence, but, as common sense would indicate, and as historic experience amply demonstrates, it may be powerfully helped or fatally hindered by the atmosphere which it fmds itself compelled to breathe. But the ordinary dilTerences of atmosphere between one age and another, which we thus readily recognize to have an influence so powerful upon literature and art, are insignificant in compari- son with the dilTerence between the atmosphere which has sur- rounded women and the atmosphere which has surrounded men in all times. To suppose that absolute exclusion from the oppor- tunities of culture is the only important factor that has to be taken into account would be to overlook in this c^uestion what all acknowledge as of predominant importance when we are con- sidering the history of civilization at large. Most vital of all the adverse influences, except such absolute exclusion, has been the prevalent sentiment as to what is fitting and commendable, as well as the prevalent estimate of what is possible, for women. The elTect of such influence has been well expressed by Colonel Higginson: "Systematically discourage any individual, from birth to death, and they learn, in nine cases out of ten, to ac- quiesce in their degradation, if not to claim it as a crown of glory. If the Abbe Choisy praised the Duchesse de Fontanges for being 'beautiful as an angel and silly as a goose,' it was natural that all the young ladies of the court should resolve to make up in folly what they wanted in charms." Only those of us who are very young have any need of historical research to assure ourselves that up to an extremely recent date there was not one person in a hundred, of either sex, who did not look upon a really learned woman as a monstrosity. And yet it is instructive to take an occasional glance farther back THE INTELLECTUAL POWERS OF WOMAN 283 and find, for instance, that when, in the sixteenth century, Frangoise de Saintanges wished to establish girls' schools in France, she w^as hooted at in the streets and her father called together four doctors learned in the law to decide whether she was not possessed by the devil to think of educating women {"pour s'' assurer qu'instrnire des femmes n'etait pas un oeuvre du demon") ; or that Fenelon held virgin delicacy to be almost as incompatible with learning as with vice ; or that Dr. Gregory, in his book A Legacy to His Daughters, which seems to have been regarded as a standard work on female propriety at the end of the eighteenth century, utters such a warning as this: "Be cautious even in displaying your good sense ; it will be thought you assume a superiority over the rest of the company. But if you have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts and cultivated understanding." Every one knows that the two women who in our century have won most distinction by their mathematical work had to acquire the elements of the science surreptitiously and in the face of un- yielding parental opposition, though both belonged to families of culture and high social standing. No one fails to see that this was getting knowledge under difficulties ; but few realize the more important lesson that it teaches. For who shall say how many girls may have had mathematical powers greater than Mrs. Somerville's or Madame Kovalewski's, without possessing those other qualities which braced these two to fly in the face of what they had been steadily taught from infancy to regard as right and becoming in a woman ? One might go on almost indefinitely, pointing out the vast differences between the motives and ideals of the two sexes. But these considerations will easily occur to every one. The youthful dreams and aspirations of a gifted boy cluster around high achievement and resounding fame, because all that he hears and reads tends to arouse in him such ambitions ; from earliest childhood, a girl learns to look forward to quite other things as her ideal. Beginning with the fairy tale and going on through poetry and romance and the talk of real life, the only thing which 284 REFIT ATJON is held up to her as ])raiscworthy is the tL-iuier ministering to the needs of those around her ; and it is the conquest of men by beauty and charm which is presented to her imagination as the one triumph that a woman prizes. The very girls who are most capable of great work, those possessing an abounding vitality, high spirits, the pride of life, are sure to go in for the great prize of happiness, and they cannot unite the winning of the prize with intellectual work so long as intellectual work is regarded as unfcminine. But it is not my purpose to make an exhaustive list of the hindrances to woman's intellectual achievements. I have wished merely to fasten attention upon them, and to show their bearing upon that matter of numbers, which, while it is the vital element of the whole question, is so strangely ignored by the supporters of the view maintained in the article under dis- cussion. Let us quote one or two passages from it. "Taking literature as our first topic, we find women from the earliest days expressing their thoughts in verse and prose. Yet as real poets we can only mention the half mythical Sappho, and pos- sibly, in our own day, Mrs. Browning and Christina Rossetti." " Women from the earliest days " ; yes, but how many, and under what circumstances? "In physics and mathematics we find feminine enthusiasts at quite an early date. . . . Vet, taken all in all, these few individual instances of female achievement in science serve only to prove the rule that women as discoverers are inferior to men." In such a dictum the fact is entirely lost sight of that the whole number of women who acquired the elements of the infinitesimal calculus, in the two centuries from its creation by Newton and Leibnitz to the opening of Vassar College in 1865, was probably less than the number of mathe- matical honor men the single University of Cambridge turns out in a single year. Yet of the ten thousand men or so whom the University of Cambridge has, within the past hundred years, stamped with her certificate of honor, after a course of training upon which that stronghold of English mathematics concentrates all her powers, only two, or at most three, have achieved high rank as discoverers in pure mathematics. THE INTELLECTUAL POWERS OF WOMAN 285 In drawing conclusions like those just cited, writers continu- ally forget that great distinction is, ex vi termini, an extremely rare thing. The truth is that they are impelled to the conclu- sion not so much by the facts which they cite in support of it, as by a predisposition to believe it. Of this predisposition they may themselves be entirely unconscious; but that it exists is shown by their failure to draw like inferences from similar and indeed much stronger premises, where there is no foregone con- clusion to point the way. Almost every word, for instance, that is said of the failure of women to achieve the very highest distinction in science, literature, and art, may be said with equal truth of Americans, and with vastly greater emphasis of the in- habitants of almost any of our great States, say Pennsylvania ; yet no one thinks of inferring from this that Americans or Pennsylvanians are utterly barred by inherent defect from ever attaining the highest intellectual glory. It will be a long time before women may be truthfully said to have had a test in comparison with men anything like as fair as that which Ameri- cans have had, or perhaps even that which Pennsylvanians have had, in comparison with the world at large ; but because America has produced no Dante, no Newton, no Beethoven, it does not enter any one's mind to conclude that the middle heights of fame must be the limit of an American's ambition. But this is not the only way in which the predisposition to a foregone conclusion manifests itself. I have freely granted the literal correctness of the assertion that women have not in any department achieved the very highest distinction ; but when it comes to drawing a much lower line than this, and asserting that women have never come up to it, the case is very different. Writers adopting the view which Mrs. Buckler holds are very apt to betray the kind of bias that shows itself in the famous jeu d'esprit about German scholarship written before the days of Germany's preeminence in philology : — The Germans in Greek Are sadly to seek ; All save only Hermann — And Hermann's a German. 286 REFUTATION Work which, if ilone by ii man, would be regarded as falling little short of the highest, takes on in the minds of these writers a feminine littleness or limitation, for no discoverable reason except that the author of it was a woman. Why, for instance, does Mrs. Buckler repeatedly speak of the "domestic" novel as marking the limits of woman's possibilities in the art of fiction? Could anything be more gratuitous? Is Romola a domestic novel? I take Brockhaus' Encyclopedia, which hap- pens to be at my side, and find that this German authority describes it as "a picture of the Italian Renaissance of the last half of the fifteenth century, drawn with a master hand." We all know that it is this and much more; and evidently the writer omitted to mention specifically, in so condensed an account, its other high qualities only because he had just given the following characterization of the earlier novel, Adam Bede: "Its excellences are a development of character as profound as it is brilliant, true epic force and richness, a style of extraordi- nary individuality and purity, \x\d a highly original represen- tation of English provincial life." Does one speak in this way of a mere "domestic novel"? In what derogatory sense can any of George Eliot's novels be so designated? And yet the behttlement implied in the words is heightened by the context ; for we find hymn-making, letter-writing, and the composing of domestic novels put together as constituting that "hurhbler species" in literature which "woman's kind" not only has always been, but "probably will always be found to be." This underestimation of woman's achievement in a direction in which many women have been distinguished and a few have been truly great is so remarkable, and is so instructive as show- ing how large a part unconscious bias may play in these judg- ments, that I shall dwell upon it a moment longer, and forego all criticism of estimates of feminine performance in other fields, which, though not open to so strong an objection, are yet vitiated in the same manner. In a passage other than that just quoted we again find "letter-writing and novels of domestic life" coupled together on an apparently equal footing; and here we find women's excellence in these departments ascribed THE INTELLECTUAL POWERS OF WOMAN 287 to "their special demand for the feminine quaHties of quick emotion and ready observation." Let me place alongside of this unfavorable estimate some words about George Sand written by the greatest of English critics : — Whether or not the number of George Sand's works — always fresh, always attractive, but poured out too lavishly and rapidly — is likely to prove a hindrance to her fame, I do not care to consider. Posterity, alarmed at the way in which its literary baggage grows upon it, always seeks to leave behind it as much as it can, as much as it dares — ■ everything but masterpieces. But the immense vibra ■ tion of George Sand's voice upon the ear of Europe will not soon die away. Her passions and her errors have been abundantly talked of. She left them behind her, and men's memory of her will leave them behind also. There will remain of her to mankind the sense of beneiit and stimulus from the passage upon earth of that large and frank nature, of that large and pure utterance — the large utterance of the early gods. — Matthew Arnold, Mixed Essays. The object of this article was stated at the outset to be a negative one. Its purpose was to show that "the facts of his- tory are not only not conclusive, but cannot properly be re- garded as establishing even a presumption concerning the limi- tations of the intellectual powers of woman." The positive proposition that women are capable of doing such work as has been done by a few score only of all the thousands of millions of men in the world's history, I have made no attempt to estab- lish. But that the absence, up to the present time, of supreme preeminence on the part of any woman cannot be allowed any logical weight in support of the conclusion that the sex is in- capable of such distinction, I think the foregoing considerations sufficiently show. I have pointed out, in the first place, that those who draw such an inference entirely fail to pay regard to the all-important question of numbers ; they forget for the time being how very rare the kind of achievement is upon the absence of which they base their conclusions. Great nations have gone on for hundreds of years without producing a single important literary figure; and it must be plain to any fair- 288 REFUTATION minded person that the whole number of women in all nations and all times who may have been said to be so placed as justly to be considered in the comparison, is far less than that of the men so placed in any great nation in a single century. It is only within the last few decades that any cunsideraljle num- ber of girls have grown up with any other notion than that serious intellectual work in their sex is a monstrosity; and only in England and America has a dilTcrcnt view of the matter been widely entertained even in our time, the "woman move- ment'' having attained an important character in Germany only within the past five or ten years. In the second place, I have endeavored to emphasize the fact that even this numerical exclusion of all but an extremely small fraction of the sex does not begin to measure the disadv^antage of women in the comparison. Every one must recognize that the minute fraction which may properly be considered at all has not been surrounded by the atmosphere, affected by the agencies, impelled by the stimuli, which exercise so incalculable an influence upon human achievement; but there is a not un- natural tendency to think that after all there ought to have been some women who had risen superior to all these things. It is for this reason that I have dwelt on the utter absence of intellectual greatness in periods of national decadence, and on the universally acknowledged inliuence of general conditions upon the flourishing of literature, art, and science. But surely the ordinary' differences in these conditions, which have been uniformly found sufficient wholly to prevent the emergence of genius among men, are insignificant in comparison with the unfavorable dillerence which has always existed in the conditions surrounding women, in every direction of intellectual eftort. A final word as to the importance or unimportance of the whole discussion. There would be no harm in leaving the question entirely open ; what is to be deplored is an erroneous behef that it has been settled. In a matter of keen human interest — however unsubstantial or speculative that interest may be — any error is to be deplored, simply as error. But in this case there is another and more special reason for regret. THE INTELLECTUAL POWERS OF WOMAN 289 It is that the conclusion which I have been engaged in con- troverting is sure to be understood by the generality of people as meaning vastly more than in its exact terms it professes to convey. Even those who are not "the generality" slide im- perceptibly into this exaggeration of its purport. The most that could be claimed as shown by history, even were the con- siderations adduced in the present article wholly ignored, would be that women cannot reach the highest heights; yet we see the very able and gifted writer of the article to which this is a reply, belittling achievements of members of her own sex which are of undeniable greatness, a thing which can hardly be as- cribed to anything else than the bias due to a preconceived theory. Whether or not any woman can be as great as the greatest men, it is quite certain that some women can be as great as very great men ; for some women have been. The capacity for doing excellent work in the most difficult departments of university study, positive experience has now shown to be no more abnormal among women than among men. Yet we see surviving to our own day — and probably, if the truth were known, still very widely entertained — the notion that, leaving out a possible lusus naturcB here and there, women are incapable of doing high university work. In a recent num- ber of a prominent Review, I find a Lecturer on History in the University of Cambridge making the utterly ridiculous state- ment that he had "never seen a woman's paper equal to a man's"; which, if understood literally, would mean that the ablest of the women whose papers have ever come under his eye was not equal to the most stupid of the men. This doubt- less is not what he meant to say, but the expression shows the persistence in his mind of an utterly baseless belief in woman's essential inferiority. Any one whose memory extends back twenty-five years will remember the time when the belief was practically universal that women were incapable of mastering the higher mathematics. Go back a little farther, and we find a schoolmaster in one of the principal towns of Massachusetts set down as a visionary because he proposed to undertake to teach girls fractions, A century ago no less a man than Kant u 290 REFUTATfON dcclarod the unlitncss o{ wonun for fho study of geometry. "It is generally believed in Germany," writes Professor Klein,' one of the greatest of living mathematicians, " that mathematical studies are beyond the capacity of women"; but he assures us that the women who have attended the mathematical course at Gottingen "have constantly shown themselves from every jioint of xiew as able as their male competitors." And it may be remarked that the mathematical work here referred to is as far beyond anything that was taught in America before the opening of the Johns Hopkins University as the work in our best colleges in those days was beyond that of a country school. It is because the view combated in this article not only is lacking in foundation, but tends to strengthen the hold of beliefs which still cling to the majority of persons, though they have been amply proved to be erroneous, that I feel it to be important that it should be opposed. It is impossible to deter- mine the relative powers of men and women ; it will be long before experience can show, even with a moderate degree of probability, what limits there may be to the possibilities of woman in the realm of intellect. Let us not, in the meanwhile, belittle the actual work of women, in pursuance of a baseless dogma of essential inferiority. Let us refrain, for instance, from saying, with Mr. Gosse, that women cannot write poetry requiring art "because they lack the artistic impulse," when we know not only that they have written such poetry, but that paintings like those of Miss Mary Cassatt or Mme. Demont- Breton, not to speak of older names, show the possession of an extremely high artistic impulse. Let Americans, at least, not talk glibly of women's power in scientific discovery being essen- tially inferior to men's, until such time as some American mathematician receives as high recognition as that bestowed by the French Academy on the work of Sonia Kovalewski, the judg- ment being pronounced without knowledge of the writer's sex. Let us not regard the results of women's attempts in poetry and • "Les Femmes dans la Science." By A. Rebiere, Paris, 1897 (page .318). THE MATHEMATICIAN AND THE ENGINEER 291 music as utterly fatal to aspirations however high, when we remember that our country has thus far produced neither a great composer nor, in the high sense of the word, a great poet. Let us not lay too great stress on the fact that "in dramatic literature no woman has ever gained for herself any lasting fame," when it is remembered that America has never produced a drama of even moderate excellence ; while, on the other hand, I find Professor Kuno Francke, of Harvard, saying in The Nation a few weeks ago, of a drama recently written by a German woman, Gisela von Arnim, the wife of Hermann Grimm, that its chief scene is "one of the most affecting in dramatic litera- ture," that the personages of the play are "characters of genuine grandeur," and that in it the longings and aspirations of the author "have found a supreme poetic expression." In a word, as to what woman may do in the future, let us frankly acknowl- edge that the future alone can decide, the experience of the past being far too slight to furnish the materials for a forecast ; and as to what women have done in the past, or are doing in the present, let us recognize it as what it is, and not as what, in accordance with an unproved generalization, we imagine it must of necessity be. THE MATHEMATICIAN AND THE ENGINEERS It is not a little remarkable that the pure mathematician still retains a very exaggerated view of the value of the services he is, in the immediate present, capable of rendering to the practicing engineer. What the value of his researches may be to engineers of a future generation is another matter, and judging from past experience, it may very well be high ; but as matters stand, there is no justification whatever for such a claim as that recently made in Nature by Mr. D. M. Mair. This writer, in an other- wise not unfair appreciation of the actual state of affairs, makes the following statement : "The engineer has an outfit of mathe- 1 From Engineering, May 9, 1913. ?92 REFUTATION inatical Uxils suflicicnt for his orciinan- needs, but at times he meets with |)roblcms lor which his tO()ls are useless. He may then spend thousands of pounds on the determination of some |x>int which tht mathematician could have settled for a five- pound note." We believe that this belief is not uncommon amonj^ mathematicians, but on considering the many ad\'ances made in engineering during the past twenty-five years, it is im- I)ossible to recall a single instance in which this view could be e\en partially justified. The fact is, the aid of the mathema- tician is not wanted until the engineer by hard thinking and by careful experiment has solved in some fashion the problem in view. The mathematician may then, taking the engineer's coefBcients and experience as a basis, show that certain methods of calculation may be shortened, and a few hours may thus be saved and labor economized. The earlier of the builders of continuous girders, for example, were, we believe, unacquainted \\'ith the theorem of three moments, and had to determine the reactions at the various piers by a more or less tentative process. Direct methods, of which the theorem of three moments is one, are now available, by the use of which a. considerable reduction may be made in the amount of arithmetical work necessary. An analogous case arose some little time ago, when a firm found it necessar\' to calculate the critical speed of the rotor of a generator on the assumption that the direction of the shaft was fixed at each bearing. A direct solution of this problem is not, of course, difficult, but actually the solution was found by a system of trial and error. A little more time was needed than by the direct process, which was at least partially compensated for by the fact that each successive approximation served to check the accuracy of the preceding one. Even in this matter of time-sa\ing, however, the services of the mathematician, pure and simple, are steadily becoming of less and less immediate importance, since the average engineer is himself acquiring a greater and greater master>' of mathemati- cal methods, and he has the great advantage of realizing much more adequately than it would be possible for an "external" mathematician 'o do, the physical characteristics'ofth 3 problem THE MATHEMATICIAN AND THE ENGINEER 293 by which he is confronted. In all work of a novel character these physical considerations provide, in fact, the only check on the accuracy and adequacy of any theory proposed. In building the Assuan Dam, for example, Sir Benjamin Baker attributed much less importance to the magnitude of the stresses calculated by the more or less satisfactory theory available, than he did to the possible effect of the incalculable distortions due to the rapid changes of temperature between the night and day. On this point the mathematician could afford him little or no assistance, and reliance had to be placed wholly on conclusions reached as the result of observation and experience. An interesting example, which illustrates very happily the way in which an engineer can evade at need the purely mathe- matical difficulties of his problem, is afforded by the early his- tory of electrical distribution. Here the electrical engineer was faced with the problem of fixing the proportions of his dis- tributing network. Edison was probably the first to have to find a way out of the difficulty, and the mathematical resources of himself and his assistants were insufficient to do this by compu- tation. The solution of the problem was therefore effected by running up a small model of the proposed network, and deter- mining by actual measurement the conductivities and voltages required. The expense was, no doubt, a little greater than would now be involved in the analytical solution of the problem, but not inordinately so, and there was no chance of the numeri- cal errors which are so difl&cult to guard against when the experi- ence is still lacking by which some idea may be obtained as to the order of the result to be expected. Naval architects, again, inform us that the hydro-mechanics of the mathematician have so far been of extremely little service in ship construction and in propeller design. The general ideas of stream-line motion and the like have, no doubt, proved of great service, but the engineer has quite as good a grasp of these general principles as has the average mathematician, and he has sufficient knowledge of the methods of the latter to apply these to the fullest extent justified by the actual nature of the problem presented to him. In a similar way, all the many problems J 1)4 REFUTATION presented by the Brennan mono-rail system, in which the stabil- ity of the car was secured by a gyroscope, were worked out by mathematical methods, but not by i)rofessional mathematicians. In fact, when the latter attempt to advise engineers, their suggestions are often singularly unwise. It was a mathemati- cian of recognized standing who proposed to determine the stresses in a masonry dam by dilTerentiating a curve experimen- tally determined and known to be on the average some twenty per cent in error from point to point, so that the probable errors in the values obtained by diflerentiation might well be as much as one hundred per cent. Sixty years ago conditions, no doubt, were difTerent, and the services of Lord Kelvin proved of the greatest advantage to the establishment of trans-Atlantic te- legraphy. Lord Kehin, however, had to make himself into an engineer in order that his services might be ellective, and, in fact, he always viewed physical problems very much from the engineer's standpoint. His article on "Elasticity" in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopedia Britaiwica, for instance, treats the subject in a way which contrasts most remarkably with the cor- resi)onding article in the new edition, which is due to a very emi- nent and competent mathematician. Kelvin's article can still be read with profit by the engineer, and in it many views, gener- ally considered modern and attributed to other writers, are most suggestively and interestingly set forth. Mr. Mair, in the article to w-hich reference has already been made, suggests that it is for the mathematician to hold out the olive branch to the engineer and to say : " Yes, we have often enough given you reason for thinking us fools ; but we think we can help you this time. Only let us try ; if we fail, you are no worse otT than before." The frank confession with which this appeal begins goes far to disarm criticism ; but the trouble is that, in practically every case, once the engineer has reduced his problem to a state in which the mathematician can help him, the value of the assistance possible has shrunk to somewhat insignificant proportions. When Mr. Marconi and Professor Ewing were initiating wireless telegraphy across the Atlantic, help from the professional mathematician would have been most THE MATHEMATICIAN AND THE ENGINEER 295 welcome, but the latter was not in a position to afford it. Even had the purely mathematical aspect of the problem been com- pletely solved, the coefficients involved were unknown, and could only be guessed at by general considerations, as to which the mathematician's judgment was much more likely to be at fault than that of men who were compelled to concentrate their atten- tion on the physical aspects of the problem involved. It is noteworthy that the fallacy that physics is merely a branch of mathematics is still held by many. It was in protest against this view that Faraday published his Experimental Researches in Electricity; but in an interesting paper read at the recent International Congress of Mathematicians, Miss Gwatkin, of Newnham, contends yet again that "physics is, of course, the science which is entirely based on mathematics." This is, we believe, a totally erroneous view, both actually and historically. The cases are exceedingly few in which the mathe- matician has anticipated the experimenter, and in the future, as in the past, physics will in the main be based on experiment and intuition, checked by the aid of mathematics. Another claim in the paper referred to was that the study of mathematics involved the development of the logical faculty, and this, no doubt, is true. Unfortunately, however, experience has shown that the logically-minded man is by no means neces- sarily the one whose judgment in the practical matters of life is the least at fault. A keen appreciation of the third part of a syllogism may, and frequently is, accompanied by a certain reck- lessness as to the sufficiency of the major and minor premises of the complete argument. Young men of necessity have to base their actions largely on logical deductions from general principles, whilst older men trust mainly to their experience. Nine times out of ten the non-logical mental processes of the latter prove to be the more trustworthy. On the tenth or the hundredth time past experience may be falsified, and the younger genera- tion may, as a consequence, give civilization a further push for- ward. Russell may be quite right in claiming that "one of the chief ends served by mathematics is to awaken the learner's be- lief in reason, his confidence in the truth of what has been 296 REFUTATION demonstrated, ami in the value of demonstrations." In no case, liDWover, can a conclusion thus derived be more unassailable than the premises on which it is based ; and in the practical allairs of life the real difficulty is not the deduction of conclusions, but the establishment of adequate premises. For this reason it might fairly be claimed that a study of the scientific aspect of engineering should prove a highly valuable portion of a liberal education, and tliis feature was emphasized in a suggestive paper contributed to the Mathematical Congress by Professor Bertram Hopkinson. The engineer has always to check his computations by his common sense. If the two lead to contrary- conclusions, and the calculation is free from arithmetical errors, the probabil- ity is that some essential factor has been neglected in the premises forming the basis of the deduction. At ever>' point the engineer has therefore to ask not merely "Is my logical method unassail- able ? " but " Is my result such as I should anticipate from general considerations?" It would be certainly highly advantageous if our enthusiastic social reformers, who propose by legisla- tion to construct Utopias of one form or another, could be brought to view political problems by the methods of the engi- neer. To ask themselves at each step not if their deductions followed logically from their premises, but, rather, did experience and the history of mankind in the past give reason for the belief that this or that proposal will work in practice ? Unfortunately, however, even an engineer's training will not ensure that a man shall apply the engineer's methods in other departments of his activities, men being curiously prone to form mental water- tight compartments. POPULAR CONTROL OF NATIONAL WEALTH ^ O. C. Barber Summing it all up briefly, we should have for our own imme- diate welfare and to insure posterity against conditions which will impose excessive and inevitable hardship : Government * From The Outlook, July ig, 1913. Reprinted by permission. POPULAR CONTROL OF NATIONAL WEALTH 297 ownership of the railways, the express and telegraph companies, the coal, phosphate, and potash lands, a more extensive reserva- tion of timber lands, and a speedy cessation of the practice of granting water power franchises without the stipulation of rigid Government supervision. What would be the immediate results ? Transportation. By taking over the railway, express, and telegraph companies, Uncle Sam could furnish, at greatly re- duced rates, a vastly improved freight, express, and telegraph service with a saving of more than a million dollars a day. The natural economies of the centralization of management, the elimination of duplication of duties, and the purchase and dis- tribution of suppHes would speedily effect this. Consequent improvements in roadbed and equipment would materially re- duce the present awful death toll. And the rights of way would furnish broad highways, already at grade, for the underground gas mains and telegraph and electric power conduits. Coal. Controlling the coal lands. Uncle Sam might lease them for operation at private hands under strict regulations which would enforce the taking of every precaution to save human life, limit the output to actual needs, require in coke pro- duction the adoption of Scientific methods for the saving of the now wasted by-products worth millions annually, reduce prices all around, and eventually pro\dde for the conversion of all coal into gas for fuel purposes in every section where the plan could be employed successfully. Or he might operate the mines to this same end. Such ownership and operation of the railways and coal mines would put an end to the disastrous strikes which periodically result from wage disagreements between coal operators and miners and railway companies and their employees. Timber. With an extended forest reserve Uncle Sam could insure the timber resources against early exhaustion and at the same time market annually sufficient timber from these reserves at such prices and under such conditions as would preclude the further increased gouging of the people by the lumber monopoly. Water Power. All future water power franchises would be 29S REFUTATION AND CONCLUSION granted under conditions which wouhl make impossible any aniai^aniation of these interests and would retain for the Govern- ment the rii^ht to reguhite rates, terminate all franchises within a reasonable time, and provide for periodical revaluations. Agruiilturc. For the farmer Uncle Sam might work wonders. Owning the phosphate beds, he could reduce present prices at least two-thirds. By de\'eloi>ing the potash deposits, and evolving a practical method of extracting potash from the Pacific coast sea- weed, the alunite veins of the West, and the granites of the East and South, relief would be insured from the German monopoly which now charges a price four times greater than the cost of potash production and delivery at Atlantic coast ports. As for nitrate, the scientifically operated coke ovens w^ould provide $20,000,000 worth a year, seventy-five per cent of which now goes to waste. All of which looks good. Now, the paramount objection to any or all of this seems to be a fear in the public mind that successful operation would be impossible at the hands of the Government. The railways sowed and cultivated this belief in the old days when Govern- ment ownership was first being discussed and stock-watering was much better than it is now. This fear took root and has grown ever since despite the fact that public ownership under the direction of municipalities is being vindicated at every hand. Somehow the public appears to forget the smooth-running departmental w'ork of the Government which disburses more than three quarters of a billion dollars annually with so little fuss that the people aren't even interested. At the top of the list is the Post-OfUce Department, which expends about $250,- 000,000 and is fast becoming self-supporting. Then a little $400,000,000 job like building the Panama Canal, wdthout a hitch or a hint at graft, inspires no confidence whatever in Uncle Sam's ability to do big things in a big w^ay. Queer, isn't it ? Every time Government ow-nership is mentioned some railway attorney bobs up and calls attention to Article V of the Amend- ments to the Federal Constitution providing that citizens may not be deprived of their property for public use without due POPULAR CONTROL OF NATIONAL WEALTH 299 process of law and just compensation. Then he sits back and smiles complacently, as if that settled the whole proposition by forever barring it. Of course Uncle Sam wouldn't think for a moment of flatly confiscating any of these properties. Neither would the long- sufifering public expect nor demand that. No one would object to the allowance of a just compensation, save perhaps the present owners. But it would be the particular duty of the Govern- ment to see that the compensation was just and no more. Other countries do these things quite readily. Twenty-odd years ago New Zealand was parcelled off in huge landed estates inhabited mostly by sheep. The Government wanted farms for the rapidly increasing influx of immigrants, but the landowners refused to sell. So the Government simply had passed an act permitting it to use public funds to purchase estates to be thrown open to settlement, then went out and took the lands and arbi- trated the cjuestion of valuation. The Government and prop- erty-owner each named an arbitrator, these two naming the third and the trio fixing the values. To their final valuation the Government added five per cent, and the landowner was com- pelled to accept the award whether it suited him or not. He was a bar to the public welfare and the Government summarily removed him. A present-day example was the taking over last year by the British Government of the telephone systems in England. Late in 191 1 Parliament decided that the Government should conduct the business. So on January i, 1912, the Post-Office Depart- ment quietly took charge of the stations, apparatus, operation, business — everything. This action incited no revolution. The question of valuation was referred to the Railway and Canal Commission by agreement between the Government and the telephone companies, the latter asking approximately twenty- one million pounds for their properties. After a hearing lasting seventy-two days the Commission awarded them twelve and a half million pounds. A little difference of forty-odd million dollars ; but the companies probably will accept the finding, and there the matter will end. 3do REIVrATIOX AND CONCLUSION 'Vhv way will he easy enough for Uncle Sam once the people voice an rmphatic demand that it be done. FiiKincint^ the {proposition should be the easiest part of it. There are millions of stock.in.ja '^ 302 PERSUASION fully recalled the sympathy of a frieinl of mine in the Yale faculty who said that after twenty years of teaching he had come to the conclusion that the human mind had infinite resources for re- sisting the introduction of knowledge. Yet I have my serious doubts as to whether the main object of a college is the introduc- tion of knowledge. It may be the transmission of knowledge through the human system, but not much of it sticks. Its introduction is temporary ; it is for the discipline of the hour. Most of what a man learns in college he assiduously forgets afterwards. Not because he purposes to forget it, but l)ccause the crowding events of the days that follow seem somehow to eliminate it. What a man ought never to forget with regard to a college is that it is a nursery of principle and of honor. I cannot help thinking of William Penn as a sort of spiritual knight who went cut upon his adventures to carry the torch that had been put in his hands, so that other men might have the path illuminated for them which led to justice and to liberty. I cannot admit that a man establishes his right to call himself a college graduate by showing me his diploma. The only way he can prove it is by showing that his eyes are lifted to some horizon which other men less instructed than he have not been privileged to see. Un- less he carries freight of the spirit he has not been bred where spirits are bred. This man Penn, representing the sweet enterprise of the quiet and powerful sect that called themselves Friends, proved his right to the title by being the friend of mankind. He crossed the ocean, not merely to establish estates in America, but to set up a free commonwealth in America and to show that he w^as of the lineage of those who had been bred in the best traditions of the human spirit. I would not be interested in celebrating the mem- ory of William Penn if his conquest had been merely a material one. Sometimes we have been laughed at — by foreigners in particular — for boasting of the size of the American Continent, the size of our own domain as a nation ; for they have, naturally enough, suggested that we did not make it. But I claim that every race and every man is as big as the thing that he takes ADDRESS AT SWARTHMORE COLLEGE 303 possession of, and that the size of America is in some sense a standard of the size and capacity of the American people. And yet the mere extent of the American conquest is not what gives America distinction in the annals of the world, but the professed purpose of the conquest, which was to see to it that every foot of this land should be the home of free, self-governed people, who should have no government whatever which did not rest upon the consent of the governed. I would like to believe that all this hemisphere is devoted to the same sacred purpose, and that no- where can any government endure which is stained by blood or supported by anything but the consent of the governed. The spirit of Penn will not be stayed. You cannot set limits to such knightly adventurers. After their own day is gone, their spirits stalk the world, carrying inspiration everywhere that they go and reminding men of the lineage, the fine lineage, of those who have sought justice and right. It is no small matter, there- fore, for a college to have as its patron saint a man who went out upon such a conquest. What I would like to ask you young people to-day is : How many of you have devoted yourselves to the like adventure ? How many of you will volunteer to carry these spiritual messages of liberty to the world ? How many of you will forego anything except your allegiance to that which is just and that which is right? We die but once, and we die without distinction if we are not willing to die the death of sacri- fice. Do you covet honor? You will never get it by serving yourself. Do you covet distinction? You will get it only as the servant of mankind Do not forget, then, as you walk these classic places, why you are here. You are not here merely to prepare to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand. It seems to me that there is no great difference between the ideals of the college and the ideals of the State. Can you not translate the one into the other ? Men have not had to come to college, let me remind you, to quaff the fountains of this inspira- tion. You are merely more privileged than they. Men out of 304 PERSUASION cvt-ry walk of life, men without advantages of any kind, have seen tlie vision, and you, with it written Uirge upon every jjage of your studies, are the more bhnd if you do not see it when it is pointed out. Vou could not be forgiven for overlooking it. 'I'hey might have been. But they did not await instruction. They simply drew the breath of hfe into their lungs, felt the aspirations that must come to every human soul, looked out upon their brothers, and felt their pulses beat as their fellows' beat, and then sought by counsel and action to move forward to common ends that would be crowned with honor and achievement. This is the only glory of America. Let every generation of Swarthmore men and women add to the strength of that lineage and the glory of that crown of life ! ADDRESS AT GETTYSBURG Abraham Lincoln Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil w^ar, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting- place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might Hve. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate — we cannot conse- crate — we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they ADDRESS AT GETTYSBURG 305 gave the last full measure of devotion ; that we here highly re- solve that these dead shall not have died in vain ; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom ; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. II. B. ELEMENTS IN COMBINATION THE MONROE DOCTRINE: ITS LIMITATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS Resolved that the United States should continue to maintain the principles of the Monroe Doctrine properly understood and limited. Introduction I. The Monroe Doctrine was announced ninety years ago by Presi- dent Monroe in a message to Congress. A. It declared that any effort on the part of a European govern- ment to force its poUtical system upon a people of this hemisphere, or to oppress it, would affect the safety of the United States and would be inimical to her interests. I. It was feared at that time that the Holy .\lliance would attempt to assist Spain in reconquering the newly liber- ated South American republics. B. It declared also that colonization by any European govern- ment of any part of the two American continents, all of which was held to be within the lawful jurisdiction of some government, would be equally objectionable. I. Russia was claiming control over territory on the north- west coast of North America to which the United States then asserted title. C. It did not purpose to interfere with Spain's effort to regain her lost colonies, or with the continued exercise of jurisdic- tion by European governments over any colonies or terri- tories which they then held in America. D. The Monroe Doctrine is a policy of the United States ano not an obligation of international law binding upon any of the countries affected, either European or American. E. It does not even involve an obligation on the part of the United States to enforce it. 306 THE MONROE DOCTRINE 307 II. The principles of the Monroe Doctrine have been enforced on many occasions. A. Webster, as Secretary of State, blocked an agreement by England, France, and Spain for the disposal of Cuba, say- ing that we coilld not consent to the ownership of the island by any other power than Spain. B. President Polk advised the insurrectos in Yucatan that we could not consent to a transfer of dominion and sovereignty either to Spain, Great Britain, or any other power. C After the Civil War, Secretary of State Seward forced France to withdraw her troops from Mexico, where an Empire had been set up under Maximilian. D. President Grant, in sending the Santo Domingo treaty to the Senate, announced that thereafter no territory on theconti- nent should be regarded as subject to transfer to a European power, and that this was in adherence to the Monroe Doc- trine as a measure of national protection. E. Finally, in the Venezuela boundary dispute with Great Britain during Cleveland's administration, Mr. Olney asserted: "To-day the United States is practically sover- eign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition." F. England prompted the original declaration of the Doctrine, and English statesmen while in oiiice have frequently declared that they do not object to its maintenance. G. Other European governments, though not openly acquiescing, have never insisted on violating the Doctrine when the question came up. III. Those who are opposed to the maintenance of the Monroe Doc- trine contend that A. The Doctrine is obsolete. B. That it pretends to keep under its tutelage powerful and self-sustaining nations like the Argentine republic, Brazil, and Chile. C. That it is an assertion of suzerainty by the United States over both continents. D. That it creates ill feeling in our Latin-American neighbors and so injures our trade relations with them. T,oS ELEMESTS IS COMBIXATIO.X TlIK MONROE DOCTRINE: ITS LIMITATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS 1 William II. Taft It is now ninety years since what the world has always called the Monroe Doctrine was announced by President Monroe in a message to Congress. It was a declaration to the world that any effort on the part of a European government to force its political system upon a people of this hemisphere, or to oppress it, would affect the safety of the United States and would be inimi- cal to her interests, and further that the subjecting to coloniza- tion by any European government of any part of the t'.YO American continents, all of which was held to be within the lawful jurisdiction of some government, would be equally objec- tionable. The first part of the declaration was prompted by the fear that the then Holy Alliance of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and France would attempt to assist Spain in reconquering the Central and South American republics that had revolted from Spain and set up independent governments which had been rec- ognized by the United States. The other part, against coloniza- tion, was prompted by certain claims that Russia was making to control over territory' on the northwest coast of North America, to which the United States then asserted title. There was ex- pressly excepted from the Doctrine thus announced any pur- pose to interfere with Spain's effort to regain her lost colonies, or the continued exercise of jurisdiction by European govern- ments over any colonies or territories which they then had in America. I have not time to give the details of the instances in which the President, representing our country in its foreign relations, found it necessary to insist upon compliance with the Monroe Doctrine. \Mien ^Mr. Webster was Secretary of State, on behalf of our Government he declined to consider a proposition by Eng- land and France for a joint agreement with Spain as to the dis- ' From The Independent, December i8, igi3. Copyright, 1913, by The Inde- pendent. Reprinted by permission. THE MONROE DOCTRINE 309 position of Cuba, stating that while the United States did not intend to interfere with the control of Cuba by Spain, it could not consent to the ownership of the island by any other power. Again, when Yucatan had been temporarily separated from Mexico by insurrection, and the insurrecto leaders sought to dispose of the country to the United States, or to England, or to Spain, President Polk, in declining their offer to the United States, advised them that we could not consent to a transfer of dominion and sovereignty either to Spain, Great Britain, or any other power, because "dangerous to our peace and safety." Without directly citing the Monroe Doctrine by name, Mr. Seward protested against the occupation of Mexico by France during the Civil War, with the purpose of colonizing or setting up a new government on the ruins of the Mexican Government. France denied having any other purpose than to collect its debts and redress its wrongs. Afterward the Mexican Government was overthrown and an empire established, with an Austrian Archduke at its head. The American Civil War closed, the American troops were massed on the Mexican border under Sheridan, and France was requested to withdraw her troops. She did so, and the collapse of the Maximilian Government followed. President Grant, in sending the San Domingo treaty to the Senate, announced that thereafter no territory on the continent should be regarded as subject to transfer to an European power, and that tliis was an adherence to the Monroe Doctrine as a measure of national protection. Again, the policy was insisted upon and maintained by Mr. Olney and Mr. Cleveland in reference to England's declination to arbitrate the boundary issue between Venezuela and British Guiana, in which Mr. Cleveland and Mr. Olney believed that they saw a desire on the part of Great Britain, through a boun- dary dispute, to sequester a considerable part of Venezuela, val- uable because of the discovery of gold mines in it. Mr. Cleve- land's position in the matter was sustained by a resolution which was passed by both Houses. In this instance Mr. Olney used the expression : — jio ELEMENTS IX COM HI NATION To-day tho Tnitcd States is practically sovereign on this continent, a;ul its li.il is law upon the subjects to which it confuus its interposi- tion. The original declaration of the Monroe Doctrine was prompted by England's wish, when Canning was Foreign Minister, that England and the United States should make a joint declaration of such a policy. Since its announcement by President Monroe, there have been frequent intimations by English statesmen while in office that they do not object to its maintenance. Whether the other governments of Europe have acquiesced in it or not, it is certain that none of them have insisted upon \'io- lating it when the matter was called to their attention by the United States. Every one admits that its maintenance until recently has made for the peace of the world, has kept European governments from intermeddling in the politics of this hemi- sphere, and has enabled all the various Latin- American republics that were offshoots from Spain to maintain their own govern- ments and their independence. While it may be truly said that it has not made for peace between them, still that was not within the scojje of its purpose. It has, however, restrained the land hunger and the gro\\'ing disposition for colonization by some European go\-ernments, which otherwise would certainly have carried them into this hemisphere. The very revolutions and instabilities of many of the Latin-American republics would have offered frequent excuse and oi)portunity for intervention by European governments, which they would ha\'e promptly improved. But now we are told that under changed conditions the Mon- roe Doctrine has becoine an obsolete shibboleth, and that it pro- motes friction with our Latin-American neighbors, and that it is time for us to abandon it. It is said that it is an assertion of a suzerainty by the United States over both continents, that it seeks to keep under the tutelage of the United States great and powerful nations like the Argentine Republic, Brazil, and Chile, that its continuance as a declared policy of this Government alienates these and other republics of South America, injures THE MONROE DOCTRINE 311 their proper national pride, creates a resentment against us, which interferes with our trade relations, and does not promote the friendly feeling that strengthens the cause of peace. Before we proceed to consider this proposition, we ought to make clear certain deiinite limitations of the Monroe policy that are not always given weight by those who condemn it. In the first place, the Monroe Doctrine is a policy of the United States, and is not an obligation of international law binding upon any of the countries affected, either the European countries whose action it seeks to limit, or the countries whose government and territory it seeks to protect. Nor indeed does it create an abso- lute obligation on the part of the United States to enforce it. It rests primarily upon the danger to the interest and safety of the United States, and, therefore, the nearer to her boundaries the attempted violation of the Doctrine, the more directly her safety is affected and the more acute her interest ; and, naturally, therefore, the more extreme will be the measures to which she would resort to enforce it. While the assertion of the Doctrine covers both continents, the measures of the United States in ob- jecting to an invasion of the policy might be much less emphatic in the case where it was attempted in countries as remote as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile than in the countries surrounding the Caribbean Sea, or that will be brought close to the United States by the opening of the Panama Canal. It is well that the declared policy has in the past covered both continents, because this certainly contributed to the causes which made Argentina, Brazil, and Chile the powerful countries they have become. But as Daniel Webster said in Congress, in 1826, speaking of the plans of the Holy Alliance : — "If an armament had been furnished by the allies to act against provinces the most remote from us, as Chile or Buenos Ayres, the distance of the scene of action diminishing our apprehension of dan- ger, and diminishing, also, our means of effectual interposition, might still have left us to content ourselves with remonstrance. But a very different case would have arisen if an army equipped and main- tained by these powers had been landed on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and commenced the war in our own immediate neighborhood. 312 ELEMENTS IX COMBINATION Such an event might justly be regarded as dangerous lo ourselves, and on that ground call for decided and immediate interference by us." In other words, the extent of our interxeution to enforce the policy is a matter of our own judgment, with a notice that it covers all Arnerica. It therefore follows that the Monroe Doc- trine, so far as it applies to Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, the so- called A. B. C. governments of South America, is now never likely to be pressed, first because they have reached such a point that they are able to protect themselves against any European interference," and, second, because they are so remote from us that a \iolation of the Doctrine with respect to them would be little harmful to our interests and safety. The second great limitation of the Monroe Doctrine is that it does not contemplate any interference on our part with the right of an European government to declare and make war upon any American go\-ernment, or to pursue such course in the vindica- tion of its national rights as would be a proper method under the rules of international law. This was expressly declared to be a proper term in the statement of the Doctrine by Mr. Seward during our Civil War, when Spain made war against Chile. He announced our intention to observe neutrality be- tween the two nations, and he laid down the proposition that the Doctrine did not require the United States, in a consistent pursuit of it, to protect any government in this hemisphere, either by a defensive alliance against the attacking European power or by interfering to prevent such punishment as it might inflict, pro\dded only that in the end the conquering power did not force its own go\'ernment upon the conquered people, or compel a permanent transfer to it of their territory^ or resort to any other unjustly oppressive measures against them. And Mr. Roosevelt, in his communications to Congress, has again and again asserted that maintenance of the Doctrine does not require our Government to object to armed measures on the part of European governments to collect their debts and the debts of their nationals against governments in this continent that are in default of their just obUgations, provided only that THE MONROE DOCTRINE ZT-Z they do not attempt to satisfy those obHgations by taking over to themselves ownership and possession of the territory of the debtor governments, or by other oppressive measures. It may be conceded that Mr. Olney used language that was unfortunate in describing the effect of the Monroe Doctrine upon the position of the United States in this hemisphere. It is not remarkable that it has been construed to be the claim of suzerainty over the territory of the two American continents. Our fiat is not law to control the domestic concerns, or indeed the internal policies, or the foreign policies of the Latin-American republics, or of other American governments, nor do we exercise substantial sovereignty over them. We are concerned that their govern- ments shall not be interfered with by European governments ; we are concerned that tliis hemisphere shall not be a field for land aggrandizement and the chase for increased political power by European governments, such as we have witnessed in Africa and in China and Manchuria, and we believe that such a condi- tion would be inimical to our safety and interests. More than this, where a controversy between an European government and a Latin-American republic is of such a character that it is likely to lead to war, we feel that our earnest desire to escape the pos- sible result against which the Monroe Doctrine is aimed, is sufficient to justify our mediating between the European power and the Latin-American republic, and bringing about by negotia- tion, if possible, a peaceable settlement of the difference. This is what Mr. Roosevelt did in Venezuela and in Santo Domingo. It was not that the use of force or threatened force to collect their debts by the European powers constituted a violation of the Monroe Doctrine that induced Mr. Roosevelt to act, but only a general desire to promote peace and also a wish to avoid circum- stances in which an invasion of the Monroe Doctrine might easily follow. It is said — and this is what frightened peace advocates from the Monroe Doctrine — that it rests on force, and ultimately on the strength of our army and our navy. That is true, if its enforcement is resisted. Its ultimate sanction and vindication are in our ability to maintain it ; but our constant upholding and 314 ELEMEXTS IX COMBIXATIUIS assertion of the Doctrine have enabled us, with the conflicting interests of European powers and the support of some and the acquiescence of others, to give etlfect to that Doctrine for now nearly a century, and that without the firing of a single shot. This has given the Doctrine a traditional weight that assertion of a new policy by the United States never could have. It is a national asset, and, indeed, an asset of the highest value for those who would promote the peace of the world. The mere fact that the further successful maintenance of the Monroe Doc- trine, in the improbable event that any European power shall deliberately violate it, will require the exercise of force upon our part, is certainly not a reason for the most sincere advocate of peace to insist upon sacrificing its beneficent influence and pres- tige as an instrument of peace to pre\ent European intermed- dling in this hemisphere, which a century of successful insistence without actual use of force has given it. Much as the Doctrine may be criticised by the Continental press of Europe, it is an institution of one hundred years' stand- ing, it is something that its age is bound to make Europe respect. It was advanced at a time when we were but a small nation with little power, and it has acquired additional force and prestige as our nation has grown to the size and strength and interna- tional influence that it now has. Were we to abandon the Doctrine and thus in effect notify the European governments that, so far as our remonstrance or interposition was concerned, they might take possession of Santo Domingo, of Haiti, or of any of the Central American republics, or of any South American republics that might be disturbed by revolution, and that might give them some inter- national excuse for intervention, it would be a very short time before we would be forced into controversies that would be much more dangerous to the peace of this hemisphere than our con- tinued assertion of the Doctrine properly understood and Hmited. I fully sympathize with the desire to make such countries as the Argentine Republic, Brazil, Chile, and other powers in South America that are acquiring stability and maintaining law and order within their boundaries, understand that we do not THE MONROE DOCTRINE 31 5 claim to exercise over them any suzerainty at all, and that we are not tendering our guardianship as if they were children or as if they needed it. We reserve to ourselves the right, should oppression or injustice be manifested in a warlike way by any of the European countries against them, and should they be un- fortunate enough not to be able to give effective resistance; to determine whether it is not in our own interest to intervene and prevent an overturning of their government or an appropriation of their territory. But we recognize that this possibility is so remote that it practically removes them from the operation of the Monroe Doctrine. I am glad to see that Mr. Roosevelt, in his visit to those countries, has sought to impress them with the same view of the Monroe Doctrine that I have thus expressed. Indeed, he would have helped them, and us, too, far more, if he had confined his teachings and lectures to explanations and limitations of the Monroe Doctrine and had not sought to destroy the independence of the judiciary and demoralize the administration of justice — in two continents. But it is said that we ought to invite in these so-called A. B. C. powers of South America to assist us in upholding the Doctrine and also in doing what the Doctrine, as well as neighborhood interests, may lead us to do with near-by countries around the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, and that we ought to establish some sort of relationship with these great powers as members of a kind of hegemony to decide upon Latin-American questions and participate in intervention to help along the smaller countries, and thus put such powers on an equality with us in our American policy and give assurance of our disinterested- ness. If we could do this, I would be glad to have it done, be- cause it would relieve us of part of a burden and would give greater weight to the declaration of the policy. I would be glad to have an effort tactfully made to this end, and I don't want to discourage it ; but I fear we should find that these powers would be loath to assume responsibility or burden in the matter of the welfare of a government like one of the Central American re- publics, or Haiti, or Santo Domingo, so remote from them and so near to us. We attempted in case of disturbance in the 3i6 ELEMESTS 7.V COMBISATION Central American governments once or twice to interest Mexico, when Mexico had a responsible government and was very near at hand, but President Diaz was loath to take any part with the United States in such an arran^^emcnt, and we found that what- ever had to be done had to be done larf^ely on the responsibility of the United States. If action in respect of any republic of South America were necessary under the Monroe Doctrine, the joining of the A. B. C. powers with the United States might involve suspicion and jealousy on the part of other South American republics not quite so prosperous or so stable as the A. B. C. powers. Thus, instead of helping the situation, the participation of part of the South American go\ernments might only complicate it. I know something about the character of those coiintries myself, not from personal observation, but from a study of the character of Spanish descended civilizations and societies, and I \'enture to say that sensitive as they all may be in respect to suspected encroachments of the United States, they are even more sensi- tive as between themselves and their respective ambitions. During my administration, Mr. Knox, the Secretajy of State, tendered the good offices of the United States as between South American go\ernments who were bitter against each other over boundaries and other disputes, and successfully brought them to a peaceful solution, but in those controversies it was quite ap- parent that whatever then might be general feeling against the United States, their suspicions of each other, when their interests were at variance, were quite as intense. Indeed it is not too much to say that the fear in the hearts of the less powerful peoples of South America, of a South American hegemony, is more real than any genuine fear they may have of the actual suzerainty of our Government. My belief, therefore, is that unless we could organize a union of all the countries of two continents, which would be so clumsy as to be entirely impracticable, the influence of the United States can probably be exerted in sup- port of the Monroe Doctrine more effectively and much less invidiously alone, than by an attempt to unite certain of the South American powers in an effort to preserve its successful THE MONROE DOCTRINE 31 7 maintenance. I hope that my fear in this respect will prove to be unfounded, and that the plan suggested may be successful. I have read with a great deal of interest the account given by Professor Bingham of South American public opinion toward the United States in his most interesting book, which he calls The Monroe Doctrine an Obsolete Shibboleth. His views were based on an extended and very valuable opportunity for obser- vation in nearly all the South American countries. He pictures with great force the feeling that is cultivated by the press of those countries against the United States, the deep suspicion that the people of South America have toward her professions of disin- terestedness in South American and Central American politics, and their resentment at what they regard as an assumption of guardianship and of suzerainty over them, and a patronizing attitude which they believe to be involved in the maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine. He sets out the construction put by them on the various acts of the United States, and the mean and selfish and greedy motives they attribute to her, judging by speeches by their statesmen and politicians, and by editorials of their newspapers. I know something of the opportunity the Spanish language affords to convey, with the most studied and graceful periods and with an assumption of courteous and impartial treatment, insinuations and suspicions of the sincerity of a person or a government against whom the writer desires to awaken the hostility of his readers. Professor Bingham, without discussing the merits of the acts of authorities of the United States, to which he invites attention, merely gives the view that the South Ameri- can press of different countries took of those acts. No one can read the book but see how utterly unjust is much of the criticism of the United States. Nevertheless, I quite agree that it is the bounden duty of this Government and her people to avoid as much as possible those acts which can give rise to a miscon- struction of her motives, and to take a course which shall deprive them of any appearance of a desire to use her power in this hemi- sphere or to enforce and extend the Monroe Doctrine with a view to her selfish aggrandizement. I know the attractiveness of the Spanish-American ; I know his high-born courtesy, I know his 3l8 ELEMENTS IN COM I'.I NATION love of art, his poet nature, his response to generous treatment and I ivnow how easily he misunderstands the thoughtless blunt ness of an Anglo-Saxon dij)lomacy, and the too frecjuent lack (tf rcganl for the feelings of others that we have inherited. I sympathize ileeply with every effort to remove every obstacle to good feeling between us and a great and growing people, if only we are not called upon in doing so to gi\'c u]) something valuable to us and to the world. The injustice of the attitude which Professor Bingham and others who take his views describe as that of the South American j^ress, may be seen by one or two references. Our Cuban war was begun with the most unselfish moti\-es on our part and with a self-denying declaration, but it has been flaunted in South America as a war of aggression for aggrandizement and the ex))loitation of new territory, because the people of Porto Rico desired to come under our go\'ernment and we accepted them, and because we found the Philippines in such a condition of an- archy that we had to take them over. We have not exploited either Porto Rico or the Philippines. We have only given them a better government and more prosperity and individual liberty than they ever had. We have promised the Filipinos that when their people acquire sufficient education and knowledge to make their government stable, we will turn over the government to them. Twice Cuba has been under our control, and twice we have turned the island back to the people to whom we promised to do so when we entered upon the war. It has cost us hundreds of millions of money and many valuable lives to give her her independence. Nevertheless, our conduct, as unselfish and self- sacrificing as history shows, is treated among the South American people as an indication of our desire to enlarge our territorial control. Had we desired to extend our territory, how easily we could have done it 1 How many opportunities have been pre- sented to us that we have rejected ! Now is it a reason for us to give up a doctrine that has for near a century helped along the cause of peace, that our motives in maintaining it have been misconstrued by the persons who have so much profited by our enforcing it ? If we had entered upon the policy merely because THE MONROE DOCTRINE 319 those people asked us to assert it, and for no other reason, then their wish to end it might properly be given great weight, but the Doctrine was originally declared to be one in our own interest and for our own safety. True, it has greatly strengthened our insistence upon the Doctrine that it helped these people to main- tain their governmental integrity and independence. Never- theless, the question whether we shall continue it ought not to be controlled by their unjust feeling that our continued main- tenance of the Doctrine, with its proper limitations, in our own interest, is in some way or other a reflection upon their national prestige and international standing. It has made for peace in ninety years. Why will it not make for peace in the next one hundred years if we preserve it ? But it is said that the Doctrine has been greatly extended and that it has led to intermeddling by our Government in the politics of the smaller countries, like Santo Domingo and the Central American republics, and that we are exercising a protectorate of a direct character over some of them. What we are doing with respect to them is in the interest of civilization, and we ought to do it to aid our neighboring governments, whether the Monroe Doctrine prevails or not. My hope, as an earnest ad- vocate of world peace, is that ultimately by international agree- ment we shall establish a court like that of The Hague, into which any government aggrieved by any other government may bring the offending government (before an impartial tribunal) to answer for its fault and to abide the judgment of the court as to the remedy or damages that shall be judged against it, if any. Now it is utterly impossible that the peace of the world may be brought about under such an arrangement as long as there are governments that cannot maintain peace within their own bor- ders, and whose instability is such that war is rather the normal than the exceptional status within their territory. One of the "Tiost crying needs in the cause of general peace is the promotion of stability in government in badly governed territcjry. This has been the case with Santo Domingo and Haiti. It has been true in a majority of the republics of Central America, and until recently was true in the northern part of South America. Revo- 320 y././..i/A.\ /.s /.\ iUMBIXATION lutit)ns m those countries lui\e been constant, j)cace has been the exception, and prosperity, health, haj)piness, law, and order have all been impossible under such conditions and in such governments. The nearer they are to our borders, the more of a nuisance they have become to us and the more injurious they are to our national interests. It was the neij^hborhood nuisance that led to the Cuban war and justilied it. Now- when we prop- erly may, with the consent of those in authority in such govern- ments, and without too much sacritice on our part, aid those governments in bringing about stability and law and order, without involving ourseh'es in their cix'il wars, it is proper na- tional policy for us to do so. It is not only proper national policy, but it is international philanthropy. We owe it as much as the fortunate man owes aid to the unfortunate in the same neighborhood and in the same community. We arc interna- tional trustees of the prosperity we have and the power we en- joy, and we are in duty bound to use them when it is both con- venient and i)roper to help our neighbors. When this help pre- vents the happening of events that may prove to be an acute N'iolation of the Monroe Doctrine by European governments, our duty in this regard is only increased and amplified. Therefore it was that Mr. Roosevelt mediated between Venezuela and the governments of England, Germany, and Italy, as I have already explained. So it was in the case of Santo Domingo, w'here a simi- lar situation was foreshadowed, and in wliich, in order to relieve that situation, we assumed the burden of appointing tax collec- tors and custom house officials who were under our protection and who were thereby removed from revolutionary attacks. We thus took away any motive for re\'olution, because it could not be successful without the funds w'liich the seizure of custom houses and the instrumentalities for the collection of taxes would furnish. This arrangement was perfected in a treaty, and it has been most profitable for the people of Santo Domingo, and has relieved them from a succession of revolutions that had been their fate before it was adopted. The policy does not involve and ought not to involve a protectorate or any greater interven- tion in their internal affairs or a control of them, than this power THE MONROE DOCTRINE 32I to protect custom houses may involve. This is ample to secure pacification. We cannot be too careful to avoid forcing our own ideas of government on peoples who, in favoring popular government, have such different ideas as to what constitutes it, and whose needs in respect to the forms of government that promote pros- perity and happiness for them are mdely variant from our own requirements. Arrangements similar to that made with Santo Domingo were sought from the United States by the governments of Honduras and Nicaragua, and treaties were made, but they were defeated by the Senate of the United States without good ground, as it seems to me. I am glad to note that the present Administration is looking with more favor upon treaties of this kind than its present supporters in the Senate were willing to give them when they were tendered to them for ratification by a Republican Administration. When we come to Mexico, where anarchy seems now to reign, the question is a most delicate one. Intervention by force means the expenditure of enormous treasure on our part, the loss of most valuable lives, and the dragging out of a tedious war against guerillas in a trackless country, which will arouse no high pa- triotic spirit and which, after we have finished it, and completed the work of tranquillity, will leave us still a problem full of difficulty and danger. All that those of us who are not in the Government can do, is to support the hands of the President and the Secretary of State, and to present to the European powers and the world a solid front, with the prayer that the policy which is being pursued, whatever it may be, will be a successful one, and relieve us from the awful burden of such a war as that I have described. In spite of the discouraging conditions in Mexico, however, the present situation illustrates the beneficent influence of the Monroe Doctrine on the attitude of the European powers, which, in spite of injury to the property and persons of their nationals, look to the United States as the guide whom they are willing to follow in working out a solution. The condition of Mexico is bad enough, to be sure, but if it had involved us in Y 322 ELEMESTS /.V COM/UXATIOX European complications, such as would have been likely to arise had there been European intervention, its consequences mijj;ht have been a great deal worse. Excejition is taken to the resolution which the Senate ado])ted in August, IQI2, in which it was declared: — Thai when any harbor or other place on the American continent is so situated that the occupation thereof for naval or military pur- poses might threaten the communications or the safety of the United States, the Government of the United States could not see without grave concern the possession of such harbor or other place by any cor- poration or association which has such a relation to another govern- ment, not American, as to give that government practical power of control for national purposes. It suffices to say that this is not an enlargement of the Monroe Doctrine. It only calls special attention to a way of indirection by which it can be violated. The policy of making such an announcement at the time may perhaps be questioned, but that such an indirect method of securing a military outpost threaten- ing to the safety of the United States would be injurious to her interests does not admit of doubt. I do not intend here to go into the question of the merits of the controversy over the justice of our acc^uisition of the Canal Zone, enabling us to construct the Panama Canal. It w^ould involve too long a discussion and is not relevant to the subject matter of this address, because what was done in that case by our Government was not any assertion of the Monroe Doctrine, was not justified on the ground of the Monroe Doctrine, and our right to do what we did was based on very different principles. Earnest and sincere efforts were made in my administration to satisfy the United States of Colombia. A treaty was made with her re[)resentative, in Mr. Roosevelt's administration, w^hich seemed fair, but it was immediately rejected. All efforts to secure an adjustment of her grievances have failed, and recently negotiations were postponed by her, with the belief that the in- coming Administration, of different political complexion, would be more willing than mine to do what she regards as exact justice THE MONROE DOCTRINE 323 to her. We should, therefore, await with hope that the present Administration may solve what for us was an insoluble difficulty. Mr. Root, whose great constructive labors in the cause of world peace have just received most just recognition in the Nobel Prize, in his visit to South America attempted to convince the people of those republics that we wish no more territory, and that we wish only the prosperity of all our neighbors. And Mr. Knox in his visit to Venezuela, and to all the republics of the West Indies and Central America, made the same effort. I hope that Mr. Roosevelt may carry the same message to South America. Doubtless he is doing so. After some years, I hope that a consistent course on our part may effect an abatement of the present feeling described by Professor Bingham and others. But however that may be, and whatever injustice the South American peoples may do us in suspecting us of selfish plans against them and their territory, we ought not to allow the present expressed hostility to the Monroe Doctrine, which involves no assertion of suzerainty or sovereignty over them, to change our course. The Doctrine is based on a wise policy in our own interest to exclude from this hemisphere the selfish political interference of European govern- ments, and their appropriation of territory, not for the purpose of increasing our power or territory, but for the purpose of pro- moting the prosperity, independence, and happiness of the peoples of these two continents and so of insuring our own peace and safety. IT. C. INFORMAL ARGUMENT IS AGRICULTURE DECLINING?' Kenyon L. Butterfield There is no likelihood that the number of rural people will cveT be less than now. There can be no doubt that, relatively, agriculture as an industry and the number of persons engaged in rural pursuits are declining. This fact has led some thinkers to the apparent conclusion that because urban population and industry are eventually to be the more dominant features of our civilization, rural industry and rural population must be- come minor factors in American life. Indeed this idea leads some to suppose that the temper of rural life is to be one of decadence. Of course the very fact that agriculture as an in- dustry has not advanced so rapidly as manufacturing, is a cause for some concern; although the business of agriculture as a whole is now so flourishing, that we are not much given to worry about it. What causes still greater concern is the small return that comes to the average farmer for his labor and use of capital. This is a matter of first importance in a business so large as that of agriculture. We cannot afford to have on our land a class of workers generally underpaid. But let us dwell for a moment upon this cj[uestion of the numbers of rural residents. Josiah Strong states that the tendency city- ward will persist because fewer men than formerly are needed on our farms to produce the food required by the city dwellers. There is no doubt about the general principle ; but there are some important qualifications to it. In the first place, the very fact of city growth makes constantly new demands upon agri- ' From The Country Church and the Rural Problem. University of Chicago Press Reprinted by permission. 324 STATE CONTROL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 325 culture. The more people who must buy their food, the greater the supply needed. Higher standards of living also require higher grades of food products. True, it is a well-known eco- nomic law that the proportion of income spent for food de- creases as the income increases. But the total amount spent for food does increase with general growth of population ; besides, the increased expenditures for other things, if made in purchase of the results of productive enterprise, create a new and con- siderable, if indirect, demand for more food, on the part of the workers thus given new employment. Another qualification lies in the fact that while the product per agricultural worker has steadily increased, a great part of our enlarged food supply in America has come from the use of new areas. We are pass- ing rapidly out of this condition. While millions of acres are yet to be redeemed by irrigation, and other millions by drain- age, the era of great farm land expansion has passed. Of the two processes, it is vastly easier as a practical matter to in- crease production by the use of new land than by better use of the old. We have then a rapidly increasing non-agricultural population, coincident with a check in the supply of new agri- cultural land. More scientific farming is to be the outcome. Each farm worker will produce more than now ; but it does not necessarily follow that less than the present number of workers will be needed on our farms. In fact, it is probable that the number of agricultural workers, and consequently of the rural population, will slowly but steadily increase for an indefinite period of time. STATE CONTROL AND THE INDIVIDUAL ^ A. D. Lindsay "The only real moral worth is in choice and spontaneity: government action destroys choice and therefore destroys moral worth." This argument depends on an almost wage fund 1 From Introduction to the Essays of John Stuart Mill. 3J() IXfOKMAJ. AKGIWIKST llu'ory of choice. It supposes that if the state docs for me com- j^ulsorily what I might have done for myself, I am robbed of an opportunity for choice. Actually, if the state action is at all sensible, my opportunities for action, and therefore for choice, are greatly increased. If it were left to me to mend or neglect the road in front of my house, I might go through an excellent moral discipline in making up my mind to mend it, however much the state of the road where my neighbors had not responded to their moral opportunities made traffic impos- sible. If the state levies a compulsory rate on all, and provides a good road, though that particular moral discipline may be gone, I need not sit and mourn that I might have been mend- ing the road had not a paternal go\'ernment robbed me of my choice. Easy communication made possible by good roads will bring the opportunities of countless social duties ne\'er thought of before. The notion that the moral struggle in itself is the only thing of value, implies that we ought never to form moral habits, since in so doing -we shall decrease the area of moral struggle. Given that I am a person who cannot pass a public house without going through a moral struggle against the temptation to get drunk withm, is it really an advantage that I should pass a hundred rather than one ? I shall have a hundred more moral struggles, provided I do not succumb ; but I shall be incapable of thinking of anything else. If I never thought of it at all, I should have the opportunity of proving myself a really good citizen instead of struggling not to be a very bad one. To suggest that any means which produce this result would destroy true temperance is to suggest J:hat getting drunk or not getting drunk is the only moral alternative which we are capable of considering. The theory is abstract. It isolates, not only the individual, but the action of the indi\-idual, and examines the effect of social action in that. No account of liberty can be satisfactory which does not see the individual as he actually exists, a member of society in relation to other members. Society may not give him full liberty, but without society he can have none at all. ORGANIZATION OF FARMERS 327 ORGANIZATION OF FARMERS ' Kenyon L. Butterfield The history of agricultural organizations in America is a very interesting one, beginning with the development of the agricul- tural fairs, the farmers' clubs, etc., and including the greater farmers' movement of the last third of the nineteenth century, which arose during the period of general agricultural discon- tent, and which attempted to combine the entire farming class into one compact organization. It would take us too far afield to describe even briefly these various efforts to secure the group strength of the farmers. It is important, however, not to omit from a discussion of the rural problem the place which organization fills in its solution. It is a fundamental necessity. It may sound like an echo of the doctrine of brute strength to assert that the farming class, like other classes, needs to assert itself in order to play its part in on-going civilization. I would call your attention to a remark made by Professor Charles H. Cooley : — The self-assertion of the wage-earning class, so far as it is orderly and pursuant of details which all classes share, has commanded not only the respect but the good will of the people at large. Weakness — intrinsic weakness, the failure of the member to assert its function — is instinctively despised. I am so far in sympathy with the strug- gle for existence as to think that passive kindliness alone, apart from self-assertion, is a demoralizing ideal, or would be if it were likely to become ascendant. But the self which is asserted, the ideal fought for, must be a generous one — involving perhaps self-sacrifice as that is ordinarily understood — or the struggle is degrading. Organization, then, becomes a test of class efhciency. Has a great class of people like the farmers the power to combine, the intelligence to combine, the will to combine ? Organization, moreover, and by the same token, tends to conserve class effi- ciency. Can the class maintain an organization that enables ' From The Country Church and the Rural Problem. University of Chicago Press. Reprinted by permission. 328 INFOKilAL ARGUMENT it to assert itself, to make itself felt for its own interests and for the interests of the nation? Organization is also a powerful educational force. When- ever a class of people organizes for a gi\'en purpose, it is bound to debate the most fundamental considerations of political and industrial life, and such discussion cannot but be educative in its results. The process is far more educative than to raise merely academic questions. Moreover, farmers, because of their isolation and individualism, particularly need the force of organization to bring them together, to get them to see their problems in a large way. They cannot possibly exert their best influence on national life unless rural public opinion can be crystallized, incarnated, put at work. Of course this will be done to some extent through the ballot box, but it is common knowledge that the ballot box does not give full expression to the social activity of our people. The social tendency of the age is clearly toward social self- direction. We set up goals for civilization, and we endeavor to organize public opinion in such a way that the goals may be realized. We plan for the direction in which society shall go. This process is just as important for the farming class as for any other class. It is a mark of progress when a class can organize and determine its course. The fact that other classes are organized is therefore a very good reason why the farmers should organize. They need to organize for self-protection. They need to make themselves felt on behalf of their ow^n in- terests. There must necessarily be more or less friction between classes. Even a large class of people like the farmers will often have their rights invaded, unless they are in a position to pro- tect themselves. Not only so, but no class of people can in an unorganized form assert itself as a part of the national life. In some way there must be a chance to gather up the group sentiment, the group power, the group opinion, and bring them to bear on the great issues of our common life. At two points particularly is there great need for adequate organization of the agricultural classes. The present unsatis- factory system of distribution of farm products can never be ORGANIZATION OF FARMERS 329 fully remedied until farmers combine in a systematic and com- prehensive fashion for business cooperation. Buying together, selling together, cooperative activities in many minor neigh- borhood enterprises, are essential to permanent industrial success in agriculture. It is also vitally necessary that farmers shall insist upon legislation favorable to their own interests. I do not mean class legislation in an individual sense, but laws that give sub- stantial justice to the farmers as producers. Individual farmers become more and more helpless against the aggressions of capitalism. In the recent tariff discussion in Congress, for in- stance, there was very little said about the way in which the schedules would affect the farmers. The alleged attempt to monopolize the water power of the nation will have, if successful, a very important bearing upon agricultural welfare. Of course there are possible disadvantages coming from ■farmers' organizations. They may emphasize undesirable class distinctions. They may be unwisely led. They may tend to eliminate the individual. These are small things about which we may be cautious. Fundamentally, organization is essential to rural progress and the solution of the rural problem. Only those who have had something to do with farmers through a period of years can appreciate how difficult it is, however, to develop farmers' organizations. There are the in- grained habits of individual initiative ; there is a lack of leader- ship ; there is the fact that those composing the rural class as a whole do not always have a common interest with respect to social ideals, economic needs, or political creeds. Sometimes financial considerations stand in the way ; sometimes economic or political fallacies kill off otherwise good organizations; sometimes mere suspicion prevents cooperation. Organizations for social and educational ends are particularly needed, and have been supplied perhaps best of all by the Grange. The Grange has also done something to secure busi- ness cooperation. Probably the great development of agri- cultural organization in the future lies along the lines of busi- ness cooperation. 330 L\FOK.\fAL ARGUMENT THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR ^ Herbert Croly The necessity for the formation of some constructive policy in respect to labor is as patent as is that for the formulation of a similar ]x-)licy in respect to corporate wealth. Any progress in the solution of the problem of the better distribution of wealth will, of course, have a profound indirect elTect on the ameliora- tion of the condition of labor ; but such progress will be at best extremely slow, and in the meantime the labor problem presses for some immediate and direct action. As we have seen, Ameri- can labor has not been content with the traditional politico- economic optimism. Like all aggressive men alive to their own interest, the laborer soon decided that what he really needed was not equal rights, but special opportunities. He also soon learned that in order to get these special opportunities he must conquer them by main force — which he proceeded to do with, on the whole, about as much respect for the law as was exhibited by the big capitalists. In spite of many setbacks, the unionizing of industrial labor has been attended with almost as much success as the consolidating of industrial power and wealth ; and now that the labor unions have earned the alle- giance of their members by certain considerable and indis- pensable services, they find themselves placed, in the eyes of the law, in precisely the same situation as combinations of cor- porate wealth. Both of these attempts at industrial organiza- tion are condemned by the Sherman Anti-Trust Law and by certain similar state legislation as conspiracies against the free- dom of trade and industry. The labor unions, consequently, like the big corporations, need legal recognition ; and this legal recognition means in their case, also, substantial discrimination by the state in their favor. Of course, the unionist leaders appeal to public opinion with the usual American cant. According to their manifestoes they ■ From The Promise of American Life. The Macmillan Company, 1909. Re- printed by permission. THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR 331 demand nothing but "fair play" ; but the demand for fair play is as usual merely the hypocritical exterior of a demand for substantial favoritism. Just as there can be no effective com- petition between the huge corporation controlling machinery of production which cannot be duplicated and the small manu- facturer in the same line, so there can be no effective com- petition between the individual laborer and the really efficient labor union. To recognize the labor union, and to incorporate it into the American legal system, is equivalent to the desertion by the state of the non-union laborer. It means that in the American political and economic system the organization of labor into unions should be preferred to its disorganized separa- tion into competing individuals. Complete freedom of com- petition among laborers, which is often supposed to be for the interest of the individual laborer, can only be preserved as an effective public poHcy by active discrimination against the unions. An admission that the recognition of labor unions amounts to a substantial discrimination in their favor, would do much to clear up the whole labor question. So far as we declare that the labor unions ought to be recognized, we declare that they ought to be favored ; and so far as we declare that the labor union ought to be favored, we have made a great advance towards the organization of labor in the national interest. The labor unions deserve to be favored, because they are the most effective machinery which has as yet been forged for the economic and social amelioration of the laboring class. They have helped to raise the standard of living, to mitigate the rigors of com- petition among individual laborers, and in this way to secure for labor a larger share of the total industrial product. A demo- cratic government has little or less reason to interfere on behalf of the non-union laborer than it has to interfere in favor of the small producer. As a type the non-union laborer is a species of industrial derelict. He is the laborer who has gone astray and who either from apathy, unintelligence, incompetence, or some immediately pressing need prefers his own individual interest to the joint interests of himself and his fellow-laborers. 332 IN FORM A L A RGUMENT From the point of \ie\v of a constructive national policy he does not deserve any special protection. In fact, I am willinj]; to ^o farther and assert that the non-union industrial laborer should, in the interest of a genuinely democratic organization of labor, be rejected ; and he should be rejected as emphatically, if not as ruthlessly, as the gardener rejects the weeds in his garden for the benefit of fruit- and flower-bearing plants. The statement just made unciuestionably has the appearance of proposing a harsh and unjust policy in respect to non-union laborers ; but before the policy is stigmatized as really harsh or unjust the reader should wait until he has pursued the argu- ment to its end. Our attitude towards the non-union laborer must be determined by our opinion of the results of his economic action. In the majority of discussions of the labor question, the non-union laborer is figured as the independent working man who is asserting his right to labor when and how he prefers against the tyranny of the labcr union. One of the most in- telligent political and social thinkers in our country has gone so far as to describe them as industrial heroes, who are fighting the battle of individual independence against the army of class oppression. Neither is this estimate of the non-union laborer wholly without foundation. The organization and policy of the contemporary labor union being what they are, cases will occa- sionally and even frequently occur in which the non-union laborer will represent the protest of an individual against in- jurious restrictions imposed by the union upon his opportunities and his work. But such cases are rare compared to the much larger number of instances in which the non-union laborer is to be considered as essentially the individual industrial derelict. In the competition among laboring men for work there will always be a certain considerable proportion who, in order to get some kind of work for a while, will accept almost any con- ditions of labor or scale of reward offered to them. Men of this kind, cither because of irresponsibility, unintelligence, or a total lack of social standards and training, are continually con- verting the competition of the labor market into a force which degrades the standard of living and prevents masses of their THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR 333 fellow workmen from obtaining any real industrial indepen- dence. They it is who bring about the result that the most dis- agreeable and dangerous classes of labor remain the poorest paid; and as long as they are permitted to have their full effects upon the labor situation, progress to a higher standard of living is miserably slow and always suffers a severe setback during a period of hard times. From any comprehensive point of view union and not non-miion labor represents the inde- pendence of the laborer, because under existing conditions such independence must be bought by association. Worthy indi- \dduals will sometimes be sacrificed by this process of associa- tion ; but every process of industrial organization or change, even one in a constructive direction, necessarily involves in- dividual cases of injustice. Hence it is that the policy of so-called impartiality is both impracticable and inexpedient. The politician who solemnly declares that he beheves in the right of the laboring man to organize, and that labor unions are deserving of approval, but that he also believes in the right of the individual laborer to eschew unionism whenever it suits his individual purpose or lack of purpose, — such familiar declarations constitute merely one more illustration of our traditional habit of ''having it both ways." It is always possible to have it both ways, in case the two ways do not come into conflict; but where they do conflict in fact and in theory, the sensible man must make his choice. The labor question will never be advanced towards solution by proclaiming it to be a matter of antagonistic in- dividual rights. It involves a fundamental public interest — the interest which a democracy must necessarily take in the economic welfare of its own citizens ; and this interest demands that a decisive preference be shown for labor organization. The labor unions are perfectly right in believing that all who are not for them are against them, and that a state which was really "impartial" would be adopting a hypocritical method of retarding the laborer from improving his condition. The unions deserve frank and loyal support ; and until they obtain it, they will remain, as they are at present, merely a class or- 334 INFOK.\fAL ARGUMENT ganization for the jnirpose of extorting from the political and economic authorities the maximum of their special interests. The labor unions should be granted their justifiable demand for recognition, partly because only by means of recognition can an etlective fight be made against their unjustifialjle de- mands. The large American employer of labor, and the whole official politico-economic system, is placed upon the defensive by a refusal frankly to prefer unionism. Union labor is allowed to conquer at the sword's point a preferential treatment which should never have been refused ; and the consequence is that its victory, so far as it is victorious, is that of an industrial faction. The large employer and the state are disqualified from insisting on their essential and justifiable interests in respect to the organization of labor, because they have rejected a demand essential to the interest of the laborer. They have remained consistently on the defensive ; and a merely defen- sive policy in warfare is a losing policy. Every battle the unions win is a clear gain. Every fight which they lose means merely a temporary suspension of their aggressive tactics. They lose nothing by it but a part of their equipment and prestige, which can be restored by a short period of inaction and accumulation. A few generations more of this sort of war- fare will leave the unions in substantial possession of the whole area of conflict ; and their victory may well turn their heads so completely that its effects will be intolerable and disastrous. The alternative policy would consist in a combination of con- ciliation and aggressive w'arfare. The spokesman of a con- structive national policy in respect to the organization of labor would address the unions in some such words as these: "Yes ! You are perfectly right in demanding recognition, and in de- manding that none but union labor be employed in industrial work. That demand will be granted, but only on definite terms. You should not expect an employer to recognize a union which establishes conditions and rules of labor inimical to a desirable measure of individual economic distinction and independence. Your recognition, that is, must depend upon conformity to an- other set of conditions, imposed in the interest of efficiency and THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR 335 individual economic independence. In this respect you will be treated precisely as large corporations are treated. The state will recognize the kind of union which in contributing to the interest of its members contributes also to the general economic interest. On the other hand, it will not only refuse to recognize a union whose rules and methods are inimical to the public economic interest, but it will aggressively and relentlessly fight such unions. Employment will be denied to laborers who belong to unions of that character. In trades where such unions are dominant, counter-unions will be organized, and the mem- bers of these counter-unions alone will have any chance of obtaining work. In this way the organization of labor, like the organization of capital, may gradually be fitted into a nationalized economic system." The conditions to which a "good" labor union ought to con- form are more easily definable than the conditions to which a "good" trust ought to conform. In the first place the union should have the right to demand a minimum wage and a mini- mum working day. This minimum would vary, of course, in different trades, in different branches of the same trade, and in different parts of the country ; and it might vary, also, at different industrial seasons. It would be reached by collective bargaining between the organizations of the employer and those of the employee. The unions would be expected to make the best terms that they could ; and under the circumstances they ought to be able to make terms as good as trade conditions would allow. These agreements would be absolute within the limits contained in the bond. The employer should not have to keep on his pay-roll any man who in his opinion was not worth the money ; but if any man was employed, he could not be obliged to work for less than for a certain sum. On the other hand, in return for such a privileged position, the unions would have to abandon a number of rules upon which they now insist. Collective bargaining should establish the minimum amount of work and pay; but the maximum of work and pay should be left to individual arrangement. An employer should be able to give a peculiarly able or energetic laborer as much more than 336 INFOR}fAL ARGUMENT tlu' minimum \va.c;c as in his opinion the man was worth; and mon might bo iH'rmittccl to work over time, provided they were paid for the over time one and one-half or two times as much as they were paid for an ordinary working hour. The agree- ment between the employers and the union should also provide for the terms upon which men would be atlmitted into the union. The employer, if he employed only union men, should have a right to demand that the supply of labor should not be artificially restricted, and that he could depend upon procuring as much labor as the growth of his business might require. Finally in all skilled trades there should obviously be some con- nection between the unions and the trade schools ; and it might be in this respect that the union would enter into closest rela- tions with the state. The state would have a manifest interest in making the instruction in these schools of the very best, and in furnishing it free to as many apprentices as the trade agree- ment permitted. DIRECT PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATIONS ^ After the tariff — the currency, after the currency — the trusts, after the trusts — the Presidential primary. In his address to Congress last December President Wilson urged "the prompt enactment of legislation which will provide for primary elections throughout the country at which the voters of the several parties may choose their nominees for the Presi- dency without the intervention of nominating conventions." There are indications that Mr. Wilson expects this to be the next big task which he will urge Congress to undertake. The proposal for the direct nomination of candidates for the Presidency is based upon solid grounds. It is a logical development. The direct primary has for fifteen years been making steady and irresistible progress from state to state. In only one state was a direct primary law ever repealed, and there it was promptly reenacted. Thirty-seven • Independent, February 23, 1914. Reprinted by permission. DIRECT PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATIONS 337 governors are to-day nominated at the direct primary. If a governor, why not a president? The extension of the direct primary to the nation is irrefutably logical. It is democracy. It is trite to say that the very core of that great entity, the American republic, is the free, unhampered, absolute rule of the people — or it would be trite if it were not so profoundly true. When "we, the People of the United States" did "ordain and establish" the Constitution of the United States, the matter was settled once for all. Whenever in our political processes we allow ourselves to be led away from the complete and untrammeled rule of the people, we are false to our national ideals. The direct primary is a means for facilitating popular rule. Where it has been used, it has helped to preserve and develop popular rule. It is democracy. It is an instrument of representative government. It is one of the favorite grounds of criticism of the direct primary that since ours is a representative government and not a pure democ- racy, we must apply the methods of representative government to the selection of party candidates as well as to the business of government. Since we do not legislate by town-meeting, we ought not to nominate candidates by town-meeting. This argu- ment, frequently advanced and hotly defended, is the result of loose thinking. The direct primary is not a denial of represent- ative government, it is the best way to attain it. There are two essential elements in representative government — the one negative, the other positive. The first is that the people do not govern directly. This is the negative essential, the most emphasized, but the least important. The other essen- tial is that those who do govern represent the people. They are not autocrats, carrying out their own will ; they are not despots, however benevolent, imposing upon the people, how- ever graciously and altruistically, what they decide that they should have. They are representatives. Their power is not their own, it belongs to the people. The will they wield as a sceptre is not their own, it is the will of the people. It matters not a bit how much the people may have divested themselves of the duty of direct government ; if those who govern do not 338 rNroR}f.n. argiwient truly rcprt'sont tlu-ni, it is no roi)rcsentative governnicnl that we have but a base imitation of it. Now the best, indeed the only infallible, way discovered by mankind for making sure that representatives actually reprc' sent is to have them directly selected by those they are to rejire- sent. Every obstacle placed between the people and their choice of representatives is a bar to representative government. Public officials who owe their selection for office to any one except the people themselves will naturally, inevitably, tend to represent, not the people, who did not select them, but the boss, or the special interest, or the political machine, or what- ever it was, that did. The direct primary brings the official close to the people from the very beginning. It makes difficult the inter\-ention of the boss. It puts a stumbling block in the way of the special interest. It tends strongly to make party nominees truly representative of the party members. It works well. For fifteen years the direct primary has been found to be a workable, effective, and useful instrument of democracy. In a few states which tried the experiment of the presidential preference primary two years ago, the results were far more satisfactory than under the old convention system. The only difficulties in those states arose from the fact that a hybrid system was being used. The voters were trying to do two things at once — express their preference for party candi- date for president and select delegates to go to a national con- vention. The two things were incompatible. One of them was utterly superfluous. If the voters in those states had been asked only to cast their votes for their choice for party candi- date, the result in every one of them would have been perfectly satisfactory and harmonious. If every state had had a presi- dential primary, the regrettable spectacle of the Chicago con- vention would have been an impossibility. The direct primary works ; the presidential primary will work. Various arguments are urged against the presidential pri- mary, besides the one which we have sought to dispose of — that it is opposed to the principle of representative government. It is said that the voters will not come to the polls. It is DIRECT PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATIONS 339 hard enough to get them out for an election ; to get them out twice will be impossible. The answer is simple and based on experience. More will certainly come to the primary than come to a caucus under the old system to elect delegates to a convention ; and every additional voter who can be brought to take part in the making of nominations is a clear gain for democracy. The expense of a primary campaign will be so great, it is urged, that it will put a premium on wealth ; only a rich man will be able to run for a nomination. But they have solved that problem in Oregon and New Jerse}^ by strict laws limiting the amounts that may be expended. It is contended that the people need leadership which the direct primary system does not encourage. The reverse is the fact. The direct primary produces leadership ; the conven- tion system produces bosses. The real arguments against the presidential primary come from two kinds of persons : bosses and other usurpers of political power who know that their continued prestige and profit de- pends upon the success with which they interpose machinery between the voter and the ultimate selection of public officials ; and conservative and cautious citizens who do not quite trust the mass of the voters to know what is best for them and to do it. Every real believer in democracy, every one who thinks that the people on the whole and in the long run can be trusted to be right more often than they are wrong, every one who believes with De Tocqueville that the remedy for the evils of democracy is more democracy, every one with his face to the future and an abiding faith in the American people in his heart, should give kis support to the proposal for the presidential primary. III. DESCRIPTION A. SENSES SUNRISE AT PORT-OF-SPAIN » Lafc.\dio Hearn SuNTJiSE : a morning of supernal beauty, — the sky of a fairy tale, the sea of a love-poem. Under a heaven of exquisitely tender blue, the whole smooth sea has a perfect luminous dove color, the horizon being filled to a great height with greenish-golden haze, — a mist of un- speakably sweet tint, a hue that, imitated in any aquarelle, would be cried out against as an impossibility. As yet the hills are nearly all gray, the forests also inwrapping them are gray and ghostly, for the sun has but just risen above them, and vapors hang like a veil between. Then, over the glassy level of the flood, bands of purple and violet and pale blue and fluid gold begin to shoot and quiver and broaden ; these are the currents of the morning, catching var\ang color with the deepen- ing of the day and the lifting of the tide. Then, as the sun rises higher, green masses begin to glimmer among the grays ; the outlines of the forest summits commence to define themselves through the vapory light, to left and right of the great glow. Only the city still remains invisible ; it lies exactly between us and the downpour of solar splendor, and the mists there have caught such radiance that the place seems hidden by a fog of fire. Gradually the gold-green of the horizon changes to a pure yellow ; the hills take soft, rich, sensuous colors. One of the more remote has turned a marvellous tone, > From Two Years in the French West Indies. Copyright, 1890, by Haiper and Brothers. Reprinted by permission. .S40 A TROPICAL SUNSET 341 a seemingly diaphanous aureate color, the very ghost of gold. But at last all of them sharpen bluely, show bright folds and ribbings of green through their haze. The valleys remain awhile clouded, as if filled with something like blue smoke; but the projecting masses of cliff and slope swiftly change their misty green to a warmer hue. All these tints and colors have a spec- tral charm, a preternatural loveliness; everything seems sub- dued, softened, semi-vaporized, the only very sharply defined silhouettes being those of the little becalmed ships sprinkling the western water, all spreading colored wings to catch the morning breeze. The more the sun ascends, the more rapid the development of the landscape out of vapory blue ; the hills all become green- faced, reveal the details of frondage. The wind fills the waiting sails — white, red, yellow, — ripples the water, and turns it green. Little fish begin to leap ; they spring and fall in glitter- ing showers like opalescent blown spray. And at last, through the fading vapor, dew-glittering red-tiled roofs reveal them- selves : the city is unveiled. A TROPICAL SUNSET 1 Lafcadio Hearn Almost to the zenith the sky flames up from the sea, one tremendous orange incandescence, rapidly deepening to ver- milion as the sun dips. The indescribable intensity of this mighty burning makes one totally unprepared for the spectacle of its sudden passing : a seeming drawing down behind the sea of the whole vast flare of light. Instantly the world becomes indigo. The air grows humid, weighty with vapor ; frogs com- mence to make a queer bubbling noise ; and some unknown creature begins in the trees a singular music, not trilling, like the note of our cricket, but one continuous shrill tone, high, ' From Two Years in the French West Indies. Copyright, 1890, by Harper and Brothers. Reprinted by permission. 342 SEXSES keen, as of a thin jet of steam leaking through a valve. Strong vegetal scents, aromatic and novel, rise up. Under the trees -eJtroiir:-iial From " Spring at the Capital " in Wake Robin. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. ODORS OF VEGETATION 345 passes directly along, the bird may scarcely break the silence. But pause a while, or loiter quietly about, and your presence stimulates him to do his best. He peeps quizzically at you from beneath the branches, and gives a sharp feline mew. In a moment more he says very distinctly, who, who. Then in rapid succession follow notes the most discordant that ever broke the sylvan silence. Now he barks like a puppy, then quacks like a duck, then rattles like a kingfisher, then squalls like a fox, then caws like a crow, then mews like a cat. Now he calls as if to be heard a long way off, then changes his key, as if address- ing his spectator. Though very shy, and carefully keeping himself screened when you show any disposition to get a better view, he will presently, if you remain quiet, ascend a twig, or hop out on a branch in plain sight, lop his tail, droop his wings, cock his head, and become very melodramatic. In less than half a minute, he darts into the bushes again, and again tunes up, no Frenchman rolhng his r's so fluently : C-r-r-r-r-r, — whrr, — that's it, — chee, — quack, cluck, — yit-yit-yit, — now hit it, — tr-r-r, — when, caw, caw, — cut, cut, — tea-boy, — who, who, — mew, mew, — and so on till you are tired of Hstening. Observing one very closely one day, I discovered that he was limited to six notes or changes, which he went through in regular order, scarcely varying a note in a dozen repetitions. ODORS OF VEGETATION 1 Wilson Flagg The characteristic odors of the seasons come chiefly from flowers in the spring and early summer, from herbs and foliage in the later summer, and from the ripened harvest and withered leaves in autumn. Winter is without odors, except those of the forest and seaside. The first aroma that pervades the at- mosphere in spring is that of willows and poplars, which are very distinct; the former resembling that of lilacs, the latter more ' From Halcyon Days. Estes and Laurial. ^46 SENSES Ivilsamic, and proceeding no less from the glutinous buds than fr(Mii the flowers. Nature never seems so capricious as when she distributes her odors among the dillerent species of vege- tation. Why should the flowers of the elm and the maple be stcntle.ss. dilTcring in this respect so notably from other sjiring flowers? Fragrance is denied them, perhaps as a superlluity, l)ecause they bloom and fade before the insect tribes are abroad. \Vc are all familiar with the scent of flowering orchard trees. It is the incense that May ditluses over the landscape just before lier departure. The ])lossom of linden trees succeeds, and brings along with it a universal hum of insects, that seem into.xicated with its sweets. From this bloom the bee gathers the choicest honey. If the linden tree had no other extraordinary merit, I should preserve it for its unrix'alled sweetness. Its fragrant emanations are scattered abroad so widely that not an insect loses a message from its proffered feast of nectar ; and the hum of the innumerable hosts of different species attracts our atten- tion as one of the picturesque phenomena of the season. The true seasonal fragrance of summer is that of new-mown hay, for the air is filled with it during all the time of hay-making. This is indeed the "balm of a thousand flowers"; for though a greater part of the aroma comes from the leaves of clover and different kinds of grasses, the whole is the grateful result of many species with their flowers, when cut down by the scythe. Almost any combination of healthful herbs, when spread out to the sun and \nnd, after being mowed, will produce an aroma like that of new-mown hay. If you mix ^\^th these any considerable quantity of those noxious or innutritious herbs which are not acceptable to cattle, there comes from the mixture a rank her- baceous smell that indicates their presence. Nature is always true to the instincts of her creatures, and sets up no false al- lurements to tempt them to that which is unheal thful. To the scent of new-mown hay succeeds that of the grain harvest, — the odor of ripened vegetation. We now mark the difference between the savor of herbs when they are cut down in blossom and after they have ripened their seeds. The odors of summer are more spicy or aromatic, and have more of an THE SOUND OF SUMMER 347 intoxicating quality, than those of the harvest. Nature has denied fragrance to the autumnal flowers, except a few that resemble the flowers of spring; such is the graceful neottia, breathing the odor of hyacinths, which is so obscure that it would be overlooked by the insects, if they were not guided by its perfume. Autumn indeed seems niggardly of her gifts to the honey-sipping insects, for the flowers of this season are as destitute of sweetness as of fragrance. The charms of autumn are chiefly for the eye, — of tinted woods and gorgeous flowers, that attract us more by their glowing profusion than by any particular beauty as individual objects. THE SOUND OF SUMMERS Richard Jefferies Besides the singing and calling, there is a peculiar sound which is only heard in summer. Waiting quietly to discover what birds are about, I become aware of a sound in the very air. It is not the midsummer hum which will soon be heard over the heated hay in the valley and over the cooler hills alike. It is not enough to be called a hum, and does but just tremble at the extreme edge of hearing. If the branches wave and rustle, they overbear it ; the buzz of a passing bee is so much louder, it overcomes all of it that is in the whole field. I cannot define it except by calling the hours of winter to mind — they are silent ; you hear a branch crack or creak as it rubs another in the wood, you hear the hoar frost crunch on the grass beneath your feet, but the air is without sound in itself. The sound of summer is everywhere — in the passing breeze, in the hedge, in the broad- branching trees, in the grass as it swings ; all the myriad particles that together make the summer arc in motion. The sap moves in the trees, the pollen is pushed out from grass and flower, and yet again these acres and acres of leaves and square miles of grass blades r— for they would cover acres and square miles 1 Froto "The Pageant of Summer " in The Life 0/ the fields. ^48 SENSES if reckoned edge to edge — are drawing their strength from the atmosphere. K\ccedinj:;ly minute as these vibrations must be, their numbers perhaps give them a volume ahnost reaching in the aggregate to the power of the ear. Besides the quivering leaf, the s\\-inging grass, the fluttering bird's wing, and the thou- sand oval membranes which innumerable insects whirl about, a faint resonance seems to come from the very earth itself. The fer\-or of the sunbeams descending in a tidal flood rings on the strung harp of the earth. It is this exquisite undertone, heard and yet unheard, which brings the mind into sweet ac- cordance with the wonderful instrument of nature. THE PLOUGHING 1 Frank Norris The day was fine. Since the first rain of the season, there had been no other. Now the sky was without a cloud, pale blue, delicate, luminous, scintillating with morning. The great brown earth turned a huge flank to it, exhaling the moisture of the early dew. The atmosphere, washed clean of dust and mist, was translucent as crystal. Far off to the east, the hills on the other side of Broderson Creek stood out against the pallid saffron of the horizon as flat and as sharply outlined as if pasted on the sky. The campanile of the ancient Mission of San Juan seemed as fine as frost work. All about between the horizons, the carpet of the land unrolled itself to infinity. But now it was no longer parched with heat, cracked and warped by a merciless sun, powdered \nth dust. The rain had done its work ; not a clod that was not swollen with fertility, not a fissure that did not exhale the sense of fecundity. The ploughs, thirty-five in number, each drawn by its team of ten, stretched in an interminable line, nearly a quarter of a mile in length, behind and ahead of Vanamee. They were arranged, as it were, en echelon, not in file — not one directly 1 From The Octopus, Doubleday, Page and Company. Reprinted by permission. THE PLOUGHING 349 behind the other, but each succeeding plough its own width farther in the field than the one in front of it. Each of these ploughs held five shears, so that when the entire company was in motion, one hundred and seventy-five furrows were made at the same instant. At a distance, the ploughs resembled a great column of field artillery. Each driver was in his place, his glance alternating between his horses and the foreman nearest at hand. Other foremen, in their buggies or buckboards, were at intervals along the line, hke battery lieutenants. Annixter himself, on horseback, in boots and campaign hat, a cigar in his teeth, overlooked the scene. The division superintendent, on the opposite side of the line, galloped past to a position at the head. For a long moment there was a silence. A sense of preparedness ran from end to end of the column. All things were ready, each man in his place. The day's work was about to begin. Suddenly, from a distance at the head of the line came the shrill trilling of a whistle. At once the foreman nearest Vanamee repeated it, at the same time turning down the line, and waving one arm. The signal was repeated, whistle answering whistle, till the sounds lost themselves in the distance. At once the line of ploughs lost its immobility, moving forward, getting slowly under way, the horses straining in the traces. A prolonged movement rippled from team to team, disengaging in its passage a multitude of sounds — the click of buckles, the creak of strain- ing leather, the subdued clash of machinery, the cracking of whips, the deep breathing of nearly four hundred horses, the abrupt commands and cries of the drivers, and, last of all, the prolonged, soothing murmur of the thick brown earth turning steadily from the multitude of advancing shears. The ploughing thus commenced, continued. The sun rose higher. Steadily the hundred iron hands kneaded and furrowed and stroked the brown, humid earth, the hundred iron teeth bit deep into the Titan's flesh. Perched on his scat, the moist living reins slipping and tugging in his hands, Vanamee, in the midst of this steady confusion of constantly varying sensations, sight interrupted by sound, sound mingling with sight, on this ^50 SENSES swaying, vibrating scat, cjuivering with the prolonged thrill of the earth, lapsed into a sort of pleasing numbness, in a sense h\pnolized by the weaving maze of things in which he found himself involved. To keep his team at an even, regular gait, maintaining the precise interval, to run his furrows as closely as possible to those already made by the plough in front — this for the moment was the entire sum of his duties. But while one part of his brain, alert and watchful, took cognizance of these matters, all the greater part was lulled and stupefied with the long monotony of the affair. The ploughing, now in full swing, enveloped him in a vague, slow-moving whirl of things. Underneath him was the jarring, jolting, trembling machine; not a clod was turned, not an obstacle encountered, that he did not receive the swift impres- sion of it through all his body, the very friction of the damp soil, sliding incessantly from the shiny surface of the shears, seemed to reproduce itself in his finger-tips and along the back of his head. He heard the horse hoofs by the myriads crushing down easily, deeply, into the loam, the prolonged cUnking of trace- chains, the working of the smooth brown flanks in the harness, the clatter of wooden hames, the champing of bits, the click of iron shoes against pebbles, the brittle stubble of the surface ground crackling and snapping as the furrows turned, the sonorous, steady breaths wrenched from the deep, laboring chests, strap-bound, shining with sweat, and all along the line the voices of the men talking to the horses. Everywhere there were visions of glossy brown backs, straining, heaving, swollen with muscle ; harness streaked with specks of froth, broad, cup- shaped hoofs, heavy with brown loam ; men's faces red with tan, blue overalls spotted with axle-grease; muscled hands, the knuckles whitened in their grip on the reins, and through it all the ammoniacal smell of the horses, the bitter reek of perspira- tion of beasts and men, the aroma of warm leather, the scent of dead stubble — and stronger and more penetrating than every- thing else, the heavy, enervating odor of the upturned, living earth. At intervals, from the top of one of the rare, low swells of THE PLOUGHING 351 the land, Vanamee overlooked the wider horizon. On the other divisions of the Quien Sabe the same work was in progress. Occasionally he could see another column of ploughs in the adjoining division — sometimes so close at hand that the sub- dued murmur of its movements reached his ear ; sometimes so distant that it resolved itself into a long, brown streak upon the gray of the ground. Farther off to the west on the Osterman ranch other columns came and went, and, once, from the crest of the highest swell on his division, Vanamee caught a distant glimpse of the Broderson ranch. There, too, moving specks indicated that the ploughing was under way. And farther away still, far off there beyond the fine line of the horizons, over the curve of the globe, the shoulder of the earth, he knew were other ranches, and beyond these others, and beyond these still others, the immensities multiplying to infinity. III. B. LANDSCAPES CAPE CODi Henry David Thoreau Cape Cod is the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts: the shoulder is at Buzzard's Bay; the elbow, or crazy-bone, at Capfe Mallebarre ; the wrist at Truro ; and the sandy fist at Provincetown, — behind which the State stands on her guard, with her back to the Green Mountains, and her feet planted on the floor of the ocean, Uke an athlete protecting her Bay, — boxing with northeast storms, and, ever and anon, heaving up her Atlantic adversary from the lap of earth, — ready to thrust forward her other fist, which keeps guard the while upon her breast at Cape Ann. . . . Cape Cod extends from Sandwich eastward thirty-five miles, and thence north and northwest thirty more, in all sixty-five, and has an average breadth of about five miles. In the interior it rises to the height of two hundred, and sometimes perhaps three hundred, feet above the level of the sea. According to Hitchcock, the geologist of the State, it is composed almost entirely of sand, even to the depth of three hundred feet m some places, though there is probably a concealed core of rock a little beneath the surface, and it is of diluvian origin, excepting a small portion at the extremity and elsewhere along the shores, which is alluvial. For the first half of the Cape large blocks of stone are found, here and there, mixed with the sand, but for the last thirty miles boulders, or even gravel, are rarely met with. Hitchcock conjectures that the ocean has, in the course of time, eaten out Boston Harbor and other bays in the mainland, and » From Cape Cod. Houghton, Mifilin and Company. 35 2 THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI 353 that the minute fragments have been deposited by the currents at a distance from the shore, and formed this sandbank. Above the sand, if the surface is subjected to agricultural tests, there is found to be a- thin layer of soil gradually diminishing from Barnstable to Truro, where it ceases ; but there are many holes and rents in this weatherbeaten garment not likely to be stitched in time, which reveals the naked flesh of the Cape, and its extremity is completely bare. THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI! Francis Parkman If Hennepin had had an eye for scenery, he would have found in these his vagabond rovings wherewith to console him- self in some measure for his frequent fasts. The young Mis- sissippi, fresh from its northern springs, unstained as yet by unhallowed union with the riotous Missouri, flowed calmly on its way amid strange and unique beauties ; a wilderness, clothed with velvet grass ; forest-shadowed valleys ; lofty heights, whose smooth slopes seemed levelled with the scythe; domes and pinnacles, ramparts and ruined towers, the work of no human hand. The canoe of the voyagers, borne on the tranquil current, glided in the shade of gray crags festooned with honey- suckles ; by trees mantled with wild grapevines, dells bright with flowers of the wild euphorbia, the blue gentian, and the purple balm; and matted forests, where the red squirrels leaped and chattered. They passed the great cliff whence the Indian maiden threw herself in her despair ; and Lake Pepin lay before them, slumbering in the July sun; the far-reaching sheets of sparkling water, the woody slopes, the tower-like crags, the grassy heights basking in sunlight or shadowed by the passing cloud; all the fair outline of its graceful scenery, the finished and polished masterwork of Nature. And when at evening they made their bivouac fire, and drew up their canoe, while dim, ' From The Discovery of the Great West. 354 LANDSCAPES sultry clouds veiled the west, and the flashes of the silent heat- lit^htnin^ gleamed on the leaden water, they could listen, as they smoked their pipes, to the mournful cry of the whippoor- wills and the quavering scream of the owls. IN THE SAHELi George Edward Woodberry Once on an excursion on the eastern seacoast, the Tunisian Sahel, I left Sousse behind in the noon glare, a busy, thriving, pleasant place, swarming with Arab life in its well-worn ancestral ways and with French enterprise in its pioneering glow. The old Saracen wall lay behind me towered and gated, a true mediaeval girdle of defence, and I gazed back on the white city impearling its high hillside in the right Moslem way, and then settled myself to the long ride southward as I passed through cemeteries, criss-crossed mth barbary fig, and by gardens adjoining the sea, and struck out into the plain, spotted with salty tracks and little cultivated. It is thus that a ride on this soil is apt to begin — with a cemetery ; it is often the master- note that gives the mood to a subsequent landscape, a mood of sadness that is felt to be sterile also, impregnated with fatalism. A Moslem bur^dng-ground may be, at rare places, a garden of repose ; a forsaken garden it is usually, even when most digni- fied and beautiful with its turbaned pillars in the thick cypresses ; but it is always a complete expression of death. The cemetery lies outside at the most used entrance of a town ; and, as a rule, in the country it is of a melancholy indescribable — it lies there in so naked a fashion, a hopeless and huddled stretch of mthercd earth in swells and hummocks, hardly distinguishable from common dirt and debris — the eternal potter's field. It is a fixed feature in the Tunisian landscape, which is made of simple elements, whose continuous repetition gives its monotony to ' From North Africa and the Desert. Charles Scribner's Sons. Reprinted by permission. IN THE SAHEL 355 the land. A ride only rearranges these elements under new lights and in new horizons. Here the great plain was the common background ; my course to Sfax lay over it, broken at first by a blossoming of gardens round a town or village, and twice I came out on the sea ; but always the course was over a plain with elemental mark and quality — with an omnipresence as of the sea on a voyage. The line between man's domain and nature is as sharply drawn on this plain as on a beach; where man has not labored the scene stretches out with nature in full possession, as on the ocean; his habitations and territory are islands. Everything is seen relieved on great spaces, individualized, isolated ; fields of grain, green and moving under a strong land wind ; or olive groves — silvery gleams — on the hillsides, clumps of trees, or long lines of them, whole hillsides, it may be ; or there are gar- dens, closed, secluded, thickly planted with pear or peach or fig or other fruit, with vegetables, perhaps, beneath and palms above. The figure scenes, too, are of the same recurring sim- plicity, — a man leading a spirited horse in the street, a camel meagre and solemn and solitary silhouetting the sky anywhere within a range of miles, boys in couples herding sheep in the middle distances. The town or village emerging at long in- tervals is a monochord — a point of dazzling white far off, dissolving on approach into low houses, a confused mass of uneven roofs skirting the ground except where the minaret and the palm rise and unite it to heaven — to the fire- veined evening sky, deep and tranquil, or the intense blue noon, or the pink morning glory of the spiritualized scene of the dawn. The streets are silent ; by the Moorish cafe lie or sit or crouch motion- less figures, sometimes utterly dull, like logs on the earth, or else holding pipes or gazing at checkers, or vacant — always somnolent, statuesque, sedentary. There are no windows, no neighborhood atmosphere — only a stagnant exterior. The feeling of a retreat, of repose, of being far away is always there. These towns have a curious mixture of the eternal and the ruined, in their first aspect ; as of things left by the tide, derelicts of life, all. A ride in the Sahel is a slow kaleidoscopic combina- 356 LANDSCAPES tion of these things, a reiteration without new meaning, — the town, the cemetery, the grove, the garden, the plain, the fields, camel and sheep, and herdboys, — horizons, somnolence, tran- quillity. What a ride ! and then to come out on the sea at Monastir and Mahdia, — such a boundless sea ! There may be boats with bending sails, the fisher's life, suggesting those strange outljang islands they touch at, exile-islands from long ago, where Marius found hiding, and where the Roman women of pleasure of the grand world were sent to live and die, out of the world — still the home of a race, blending every strain of ancient blood. Mahdia, once an Arab capital and long a seat of power in different ages, is a famous battle-name in Mahometan and crusading and corsair annals ; it stood many a great siege in its rocky peninsula, in Norman and other soldiering hands, however lifeless it may seem now ; but as one looks on its di- minutive harbor, a basin hewn in the rock, it seems now to speak rather of the enmity of the sea and the terror of tempest on this dangerous coast — shallow waters and inhospitable shores. History, human courage, was but a wave that broke over it, and is gone like the others, a momentary foam ; but the sea is always the sea. Everywhere one must grow familiar with the neighboring coastline before the sea will lay off that look of enmity it wears to all at the first gaze ; it is foreign always by nature. To descend here at Mahdia, and to walk by its waves, to hear its roll, to look off to its gulfs and hilltops afar, however brilliant may be the scene, is to invite the deepest melancholy that the waste sea holds — so meaningless that worl(|^ lies in its monotony all about. I remember the Moorish prince who here, after his long victories, stood reflecting on the men who were great before him, and how their glory was gone. It is a more desolate port now. One gladly turns to the land — and there meets the plain, equally vaguely hostile. So I rode on by the unceasing stretch of the way, through town and by garden and grove, into the ever enveloping plain that opened before. It was like putting to sea at every fresh start ; and late in the afternoon, on the last far crest of the rolling plain, I saw the great ruin, El Djem, that rose with immense command- A PINE FOREST 357 ing power and seemed to dominate a world of its own sterile territory. It is a great ruin, — a colosseum : arches still in heaven, and piled and fallen rocks of the old colossal cirque ; it still keeps its massive and uplifted majesty, its Roman character of the eternal city cast down in the waste, its monu- mental splendor, — a hoar and solemn token of the time when there were inhabitants in this desolation to fill the vast theatre on days of festival, and the line of its subject highway stretched unbroken to Tunis and southward, a proud, unending urban way of villas, a road of gardens, where now only stagnates the salty plain, sterile, lifeless. The hamlet beside it is hardly perceptible, like a molehill, a mere trace of human life. I sat out the sunset; and after, under a cold starry sky, Orion re- splendent in the west and the evening star a glory, I set off again by the long road through the sparkling April darkness and a wind that grew winter-cold with night, southward still — the vast heavens broken forth with innumerable starry lights — till after some hours of speeding on a route that was without a living soul, I came again on belated groups of walking Bedouins and fragrant miles of gardens dark by the roadway and many a thick olive grove, and drew up at Sfax. A PINE FOREST 1 Stewart Edward White We rode through the pine forests growing on the ridges and hills in the elevated bowl-like hollows. These were not the so- called ''big trees," — with those we had to do later. They were merely sugar and yellow pines, but never anywhere have I seen finer specimens. They were planted with a grand sumptuousness of space, and their trunks were from five to twelve feet in diameter and upwards of two hundred feet high to the topmost spear. Underbrush, ground growth, even saplings 1 From The Mountains. Doubleday, Page and Company. Reprinted by per- 358 LANDSCAPES of the same species were lacking entirely, so that we proceeded in the clear open aisles of a tremendous and spacious magnifi- cence. This \ ery lack of the smaller and usual growths, the generous plan of spacing, and the size of the trees themselves necessarily deprived us of a standard of comparison. At first the forest seemed immense. But after a little our eyes became accustomed to its proportions. We referred it back to the measures of long experience. The trees, the wood-aisles, the extent of vision shrank to the normal proportions of an Eastern pinery. And then we would lower our gaze. The pack-train would come into \iew. It had become lilliputian, the horses small as white mice, the men like tin soldiers, as though we had undergone an en- chantment. But in a moment, with the rush of a mighty trans- formation, the great trees would tower huge again. A GROVE OF SEQUOIAS 1 Stewart Edward White On the ridges and high plateaus north of the Kaweah River is the forest I describe; and of that forest the trees grow from fifteen to twenty-six feet in diameter. Do you know what that means ? Get up from your chair and pace olT the room you are in. If it is a very big room, its longest dimension would just about contain one of the bigger trunks. Try to imagine a tree like that. It must be a columnar tree straight and true as the supports of a Greek fagade. The least deviation from the perpendicular of such a mass would cause it to fall. The limbs are sturdy like the arras of Hercules, and grow out from the main trunk direct instead of dividing and leading that main trunk to themselves, as is the case with other trees. The column rises with a true taper to its full height; then is finished with the conical effect > From The Mountains. Doubleday, Page and Company. Reprinted by per- mission. A GROVE OF SEQUOIAS 359 of the top of a monument. Strangely enough the frond is ex- ceedingly line, and the cones small. When first you catch sight of a sequoia, it does not impress you particularly except as a very fine tree. Its proportions are so perfect that its effect is rather to belittle its neighbors than to show in its true magnitude. Then, gradually, as your ex- perience takes cognizance of surroundings, — the size of a sugar- pine, of a boulder, of a stream flowing near, — the giant swells and swells before your very vision until he seems at the last even greater than the mere statistics of his inches had led you to believe. And after that first surprise over finding the sequoia something not monstrous but beautiful in proportion has given place to the full realization of what you are beholding, you will always wonder why no one who has seen has ever given any one who has not seen an adequate idea of these magnificent old trees. Perhaps the most insistent note, besides that of mere size and dignity, is of absolute stillness. These trees do not sway to the wind, their trunks are constructed to stand solid. Their branches do not bend and murmur, for they too are rigid in fibre. Their fine thread-like needles may catch the breeze's whisper, may draw together and apart for the exchange of confidences as do the leaves of other trees, but if so, you and I are too far below to distinguish it. All about, the other forest growths may be rustling and bowing and singing with the voices of the air ; the Sequoia stands in the hush of an absolute calm. It is as though he dreamed, too wrapt in still great thoughts of his youth when the earth itself was young, to share the worldlier joys of his neighbor, to be aware of them, even to breathe deeply. You feel in the presence of these trees as you would feel in the presence of a kindly and benignant sage, too occupied with larger things to enter fully into your little affairs, but well dis- ])osed in the wisdom of clear spiritual insight. This combination of dignity, immobility, and a certain serene detachment has on me very much the same effect as does a mountain against the sky. It is quite unlike the impression made by any other tree, however large, and is lovable. 30o L.lXnsCAPKS TIIK sriRI'I' (W TIIK GARDEN » L. H. Hailky I STEP from the house, and at once I am released. I am in a new realm. This realm has just been created, and created for me. I <;ive myself over to the blue vault of the sky; or if it rain, to tlrst-hand relationship with the elements, — for can I not touch the drops that fall from some mysterious height ? I am conscious of a quick smell of the soil, something like the smell of the sea. I hear the call of a bird or a faint rush of wind, or catch a shadow that passes and is gone. There is a sudden sensation of green things tumbled over the ground. I feel that they are living, growing, aspiring, sensitive. Then the details begin to grow up out of the area, every detail perfect in its way, every one individual, yet all harmonious. The late rain compacted the earth ; but here are little grooves and cuts made by tiny rills that ran down the furrows and around the stems of the plants, coalescing and growing as they ran, digging gorges between mountainous clods, spreading into islanded lakelets, depositing deltas, and then plunging headlong toward some far-off sea, — a panorama that needs only to be magnified to make those systems of rivers and plains and moun- tains the names of which I sought so much in my old geography days. Soft green things push up out of the earth, growing by some sweet alchemy that I cannot understand but that I can feel. Green leaves e.xpand to the sun ; buds burst into flowers ; flowers change to fruits ; the pods burst, and berries wither and fall ; the seeds drop and are lost, — yet I know that nature the gar- dener will recover them in due season. Strange plants that I did not want are growing here and there, and now I find that they are as good as the rest, for they spring from the same earth yet are unlike all others, they struggle for place and light, and they too will have their day and will ' From The Outlook to Nature. The Macmillan Company, Revised Edition. Reprinted by permission. THE SCENERY OF THE LAKES 36 1 die away, and in some mysterious process will come again. Insects crawl here and there, coming from strange crevices and all of them intent. Earthworms leave their burrows. All these, too, pass on and die and will come again. A bird darts in and captures a flying insect ; a dog trots across the farther end of the plot ; a cat is hidden under the vines by the wall. A toad dozes under a bench : he will come out to-night. It is all a drama, intense, complex, ever moving, always dying, always re-born. I see a thousand actors moving in and out, always going, always coming. I am part of the drama; I break the earth ; I destroy this plant and that, as if I were the arbiter of life and death. I sow the seed. I see the tender things come up and I feel as if I had created something new and fine, that had not been seen on the earth before ; and I have a new joy as deep and as intangible as the joy of religion. THE SCENERY OF THE LAKES ^ William Wordsworth I KNOW not how to give the reader a distinct image of the outlines of the country more readily, than by requesting him to place himself with me, in imagination, upon some given point ; let it be the top of either of the mountains. Great Gavel, or Scawfell ; or, rather, let us suppose our station to be a cloud hanging midway between those two mountains, at not more than half a mile's distance from the summit of each, and not many yards above their highest elevation ; we shall then see stretched at our feet a number of valleys, not fewer than eight, di\'erging from the point on which we are supposed to stand, like spokes from the nave of a wheel. First we note lying to the south-east the vale of Langdale, which will conduct the eye to the long lake of Winandermere, stretched nearly to the sea ; or rather to the sands of the vast bay of Morcamb, serving here for the rim of this imaginary wheel ; — let us trace it in a direc- ' From A Guide through the District of the Lakes. 362 LA.\D5CAPKS lion ln.)m the south-east towards the south, and wc shall next tix our eyes upon the vale of Coniston, running up likewise from tlie sea, but not (as all the other valleys do) to the nave of the wheel, and therefore it may be not inaptly represented as a broken spoke sticking in the rim. Looking forth again, with an inclination towards the west, we see immediately at our feet the vale of Duddon, in which is no lake, but a copious stream, winding among fields, rocks, mountains, and terminating its course in the sands of Duddon. The fourth vale, next to be observed, viz. that of the Esk, is of the same general character as the last, yet beautifully discriminated from it by peculiar features. Its stream passes under the woody steep upon which stands Muncaster Castle, the ancient seat of the Penningtons, and after forming a short and narrow estuary enters the sea below the small tow-n of Ravenglass. Next, almost due west, look down into and along the deep valley of Wastdale, with its little chapel and half-a-dozen neat dwellings scattered upon a plain of meadow and corn-ground intersected with stone walls apparently innumerable, like a large piece of lawless patch- work, or an array of mathematical figures, such as in the ancient schools of geometry might have been sportively and fantasti- cally traced out upon sand. Beyond this little fertile plain lies, wuthin a bed of steep mountains, the long, narrow% stem, and desolate lake of Wastdale ; and, beyond this, a dusky tract of level ground conducts the eye to the Irish Sea. The stream that issues from Wastwater is named the Irt, and falls into the estuary of the river Esk. Next comes in view Ennerdale, wdth its lake of bold and somew^hat savage shores. Its stream, the Ehen or Enna, flowing through a soft and fertile country, passes the town of Egremont, and the ruins of the castle, — then, seeming, like the other rivers, to break through the barrier of sand thrown up by the winds on this tempestuous coast, enters the Irish Sea. The vale of Buttermere, with the lake and village of that name, and Crummock-water, beyond, next present themselves. We will follow the main stream, the Coker, through the fertile and beautiful vale of Lorton, till it is lost in the Derwent, below the noble ruins of Cockermouth Castle. Lastlv, Borrowdale, of THE SCENERY OF THE LAKES 363 which the vale of Keswick is only a continuation, stretching due north, brings us to a point nearly opposite to the vale of Winandermere with which we began. From this it will appear, that the image of a wheel, thus far exact, is little more than one half complete; but the deficiency on the eastern side may be supplied by the vales of Wytheburn, Ulswater, Hawswater, and the vale of Grasmere and Rydal : none of these, however, run up to the central point between Great Gavel and Scawfell. From this, hitherto our central point, take a flight of not more than four or five miles eastward to the ridge of Helvellyn, and you will look down upon Wytheburn and St. John's Vale, which are a branch of the vale of Keswick ; upon Ulswater, stretching due east. And not far beyond to the south-east (though from this point not visible) lie the vale and lake of Hawswater; and lastly, the vale of Grasmere, Rydal, and Ambleside, brings you back to "W^inandermere, thus completing, though on the eastern side in a somewhat irregular manner, the representative figure of the wheel. Such, concisely given, is the general topographical view of the country of the Lakes in the north of England ; and it may be observed that from the circumference to the centre, that is, from the sea or plain country to the mountain stations specified, there is — in the several ridges that enclose these vales, and di\dde them from each other, I mean in the forms and surfaces, first of the swelling grounds, next of the hills and rocks, and lastly of the mountains — an ascent of almost regular grada- tion, from elegance and richness to their highest point of grandeur and sublimity. It follows therefore from this, first, that these rocks, hills, and mountains must present themselves to view in stages rising above each other, the mountains clustering together towards the central point ; and next, that an observer famihar with the several vales must, from their various position in relation to the sun, have had before his eyes every possible embellishment of beauty, dignity, and splendor, which light and shadow can bestow upon objects so diversified. For example, in the vale of Winandermere, if the spectator looks for gentle and lovely scenes, his eye is turned toward the south ; if for the 364 LAX DSC A PES grand, towards the iiDrth : in the vale of Keswick, which (as luith been said) lies almost due north of this, it is directly the reverse. Hence, when the sun is setting in summer far to the north-west, it is seen by the sjK'ctator from the shores or breast of Winandermere, resting among the summits of the loftiest mountains, some of which will perhaps be half or wholly hidden by clouds, or by the blaze of light which the orb diffuses around it ; and the surface of the lake will reflect before the eye cor- respondent colors through every variety of beauty and through all degrees of splendor. In the vale of Keswick, at the same time, the sun sets over the humbler regions of the landscape, and showers down upon them the radiance which at once veils and glorifies, — sending forth, meanwhile, broad streams of rosy, crimson, purple, or golden light, towards the grand mountains in the south and south-east, which, thus illuminated, with all their projections and cavities, and with an intermixture of solemn shadows, are seen distinctly through a cool and clear atmosphere. Of course, there is as marked a difference between the noontide appearance of these two opposite vales. The bedimming haze that overspreads the south and the clear atmosphere and determined shadows of the clouds in the north, at the same time of the day, are each seen in these several vales with a contrast as striking. The reader will easily conceive in what degree the intermediate vales partake of a kindred variety. I do not indeed know any tract of country in which, within so narrow a compass, may be found an equal variety in the in- fluences of light and shadow upon the sublime or beautiful features of landscape; and it is owing to the combined cir- cumstances to which the reader's attention has been directed. From a point between Great Gavel and Scawfell, a shepherd would not require more than an hour to descend into any one of eight of the principal vales by which he would be surrounded ; and all the others lie (w4th the exception of Hawswater) at but a small distance. Yet, though clustered together, every valley has its distinct and separate character: in some instances, as if they had been formed in studied contrast to each other, and in others with the united pleasing differences and resemblances THE SCENERY OF THE LAKES 365 of a sisterly rivalship. This concentration of interest gives to the country a decided superiority over the most attractive districts of Scotland and Wales, especially for the pedestrian traveller. In Scotland and Wales are found, undoubtedly, individual scenes, which, in their several kinds, cannot be excelled. But, in Scotland particularly, what long tracts of desolate country intervene ! so that the traveller, when he reaches a spot deservedly of great celebrity would find it difficult to determine how much of his pleasure is owing to excellence in- herent in the landscape itself ; and how much to an instantaneous recovery from an oppression left upon his spirits by the barren- ness and desolation through which he has passed. m. C. CITIES VALPARAISO 1 J Aires Bryce Tms is Valparaiso, where the wanderer who has been musing among prehistoric ruins and Bolivian volcanoes finds himself again in the busy modern world. The harbor is full of vessels from all quarters, — coasting steamers that ply to Callao and Panama, sailing ships as well as steamers from San Francisco, and others from Australia, mostly with cargoes of coal, besides vessels that have come from Europe round Cape Horn or through the Straits of Magellan. The so-called harbor is really an open roadstead, for there is no shelter to the north, and when, as often happens, the dreaded gale from that quarter breaks, ves- sels that have not had time to run out under steam are in danger of drifting ashore, for the water deepens so quickly from the land that they cannot anchor far out. Why not build a break- water ? Because the water is so deep that the cost of a break- water long enough to give effective protection would be enor- mous. There is a more sheltered haven some miles to the north, but as all the business offices and warehouses are here, not to speak of the laboring population and their houses, the idea of moving the city and railway terminus has not been seriously considered. Seen from the sea, Valparaiso is picturesque, and has a marked character of its own, though the dryness of the hills and the clearness of the light make it faintly recall one of those Spanish or Italian towns which glitter on the steep shores of the Mediter- ranean. It resembles Messina in Sicily in being very long and ' From Sotith America. The Macmillan Company, 1912. Reprinted by per ■lission. 366 VALPARAISO 367 very narrow, for here, as there, the heights, rising abruptly from the shore, leave little space for houses, and the lower part of the town has less than a quarter of a mile in breadth. On this narrow strip are all the places of business, banks, shipping offices, and shops, as well as the dwellings of most of the poorer class. On the hills above, rising steeply two hundred feet or more, stands the upper town, which consists chiefly of the residences of the richer people. Their villas, interspersed with gardens, have a pretty effect seen from below, and in rambling along the lines that run up to heights behind one gets charming views over the long line of coast to the north. Communication between the lower and upper towns is carried on chiefly by elevators (lifts) or trolley cars worked on the cog-wheel system. At the time of my visit, the city was half in ruins, rebuilding itself after a terrible earthquake. The lower town had suffered most, for here, as at Messina and at San Francisco, buildings erected on soft alluvial ground were overthrown more frequently and completely than those that stood on a rocky foundation. The opportunity was being taken to widen and straighten the principal thoroughfares, and to open up some of the overcrowded poorer districts. The irregularities of the site between a sinuous coastline and spurs projecting from the hills make the city plan less uniform and rectangular than in most Spanish-American cities, and though nothing is old and there is little architectural variety, still the bright colors of the houses washed in blue or white, the glimpses of rocky heights seen at the eastern end of all the cross streets and of the sea glittering at the western give a quality of its own to the lower town, while the upper town has its steep gardens and tree clumps and wide prospects over the bay and the jutting capes beyond. But Valparaiso is perhaps most picturesque when seen from a steamer anchored in the bay, especially when its white houses and hills, green for a few weeks in spring, meet the eyes of one who comes from the barren deserts of Bolivia and the nitrate region. In front are the ocean steamers and the tall spars of Australian clippers ; nearer shore the smaller craft arc tossing on the ocean swell ; the upper town is seen rising on its cliffs 368 CITIILS bfhiiul ihf lower, with liij^h pastures and rocky hummocks still further hack. Far away in the northeast the snowy mass of Aconca.i^ua, loftiest of all American summits, lloats like a white cloud on the horizon. AN INDIAN VILLAGE' Francis Parkman Go to the banks of the Illinois where it flows by the village of Utica, and stand on the meadow that borders it on the north. In front glides the river, a musket-shot in width ; and from the farther bank rises, with a gradual slope, a range of wooded hills that hide from sight the vast prairie behind them. A mile or more on your left these gentle acclivities end abruptly in the lofty front of the great cliff, called by the French the Rock of St. Louis, looking boldly out from the forests that environ it ; and, three miles distant on your right, you discern a gap in the steep bluffs that here bound the valley, marking the mouth of the river Vermilion, called Aramoni by the French. Now stand in fancy on this same spot in the early autumn of the year 1680. You are in the midst of the great town of the Illinois, — hun- dreds of mat-covered lodges, and thousands of congregated savages. Enter one of their dwellings : they will not think you an intruder. Some friendly squaw w^ill lay a mat for you by the fire ; you may seat yourself upon it, smoke your pipe, and study the lodge and its inmates by the light that streams through the hole at the top. Three or four fires smoke and smoulder on the ground down the middle of the long arched structure ; and, as to each fire there are two families, the place is somewhat crowded when all are present. But now there is breathing room, for many are in the field. A squaw sits weaving a mat of rushes ; a warrior, naked except his moccasins, and tattooed with fantastic devices, binds a stone arrow-head to its shaft with the fresh sinews of a buffalo. Some lie asleep, some sit staring in ' I'rom The Discovery oj the Great West. IN FRONT OF THE ROYAL EXCHANGE 369 vacancy, some are eating, some are squatted in lazy chat around a fire. The smoke brings water to your eyes ; the fleas annoy you; small unkempt children, naked as young puppies, crawl about your knees and will not be repelled. You have seen enough. You rise and go out again into the sunlight. It is, if not a peaceful, at least a languid scene. A few voices break the stillness, mingled with the joyous chirping of crickets from the grass. Young men lie flat on their faces, basking in the sun. A group of their elders are smoking around a buffalo skin on which they have just been playing a game of chance with cherry- stones. A lover and his mistress, perhaps, sit together under a shed of bark, without uttering a word. Not far off is the grave- yard, where lie the dead of the village, some buried in the earth, some wrapped in skins and laid aloft on scaffolds, above the reach of wolves. In the cornfields, you see squaws at their labor, and children driving off intruding birds ; and your eye ranges over the meadows beyond, spangled with the yellow blossoms of the resin-weed and the Rudbeckia, or over the bordering hills still green with the foliage of summer. IN FRONT OF THE ROYAL EXCHANGE 1 Richard Jefferies There is a place in front of the Royal Exchange where the wide pavement reaches out like a promontory. It is in the shape of a triangle with a rounded apex. A stream of traffic runs on either side, and other streets send their current down into the open space before it. Like the spokes of a wheel, converging streams of human life flow into this agitated pool. Horses and carriages, carts, vans, omnibuses, cabs, every kind of conveyance cross each other's course in every possible direction. Twisting in and out by the wheels and under the horses' heads, working a devious way, men and women of all conditions wind a path over. They fill the interstices between the carriages and blacken 1 From The Story of My Heart. Longmans, Green and Company. 2 B 370 CITIES the surface, till the vans almost tloat on human hciiiKs. Now tlie streams slacken, anil now they rush amain, but ne\er cease; dark waves are always rollinf^ down the incline opposite, waves swell out from the side rivers, all London converges into this focus. There is an indistinguishable noise — it is not clatter, hum, or roar, it is not resolvable ; made up of a thousand thou- sand footsteps, from a thousand hoofs, a thousand wheels — of haste, and shufile, and quick movements, and ponderous loads ; no attention can resolve it into a fixed sound. Blue carts and yellow omnibuses, varnished carriages and brown vans, green omnibuses and red cabs, pale loads of yellow straw, rusty-red iron clanking on paintless carts, high white woolpacks, gray horses, bay horses, black teams ; sunlight sparkling on brass harness, gleaming from carriage panels; jingle, jingle, jingle ! An intermixed and intertangled, cease- lessly changing jingle, too, of color ; flecks of color champed, as it were, like bits in the horses' teeth, frothed and strewn about, and a surface always of dark-dressed people winding like the curves on fast-flowing water. This is the vortex and whirlpool, the centre of human life to-day on the earth. Now the tide rises and now it sinks, but the flow* of these rivers always con- tinues. Here it seethes and whirls, not for an hour only, but for all present time, hour by hour, day by day, year by year. Here it rushes and pushes, the atoms triturate and grind, and, eagerly thrusting by, pursue their separate ends. Here it ap- pears in its unconcealed personality, indifferent to all else but itself, absorbed and rapt in eager self, devoid and stripped of conventional gloss and politeness, yielding only to get its ow-n way; driving, pushing, carried on in a stress of feverish force like a bullet, dynamic force apart from reason or will, like the force that lifts the tides and sends the clouds onwards. The friction of a thousand interests evolves a condition of electricity in which men are moved to and fro without considering their steps. Yet the agitated pool of life is stonily indifferent, the thought is absent or preoccupied, for it is evident that the mass are unconscious of the scene in which they act. But it is more sternly real than the very stones, for all these IN FRONT OF THE ROYAL EXCHANGE 371 men and women that pass through are driven on by the push of accumulated circumstances; they cannot stay, they must go, their necks are in the slave's ring, they are beaten like seaweed against the solid walls of fact. In ancient times, Xerxes, the king of kings, looking down upon his myriads, wept to think that in a hundred years not one of them would be left. Where will be these millions of to-day in a hundred years ? But, further than that, let us ask. Where will then be the sum and outcome of their labor? If they wither away like summer grass, will not at least a result be left which those of a hundred years hence may be the better for ? No, not one jot ! There will not be any sum or outcome or result of this ceaseless labor and movement ; it vanishes in the moment that it is done ; and in a hundred years nothing will be there, for nothing is there now. There will be no more sum or result than accumulates from the motion of a revolving cowl on a housetop. Nor do they receive any more sunshine during their lives, for they are unconscious of the sun. m. D. BUILDINGS ENGLISH COTTAGES! John Ruskin The principal thing worthy of observation in the lowland cottage of England is its finished neatness. The thatch is firmly pegged down, and mathematically levelled at the edges; and, though the martin is permitted to attach its humble domicile, in undisturbed security, to the eaves, he may be considered as enhancing the effect of the cottage, by increasing its usefulness and making it contribute to the comfort of more beings than one. The whitewash is stainless, and its rough surface catches a side light as brightly as a front one : the luxuriant rose is trained gracefully over the mndow; and the gleaming lattice, dixided not into heavy squares, but into small pointed diamonds, is thrown half open, as is just discovered by its glance among the green leaves of the sweet brier, to admit the breeze, that, as it passes over the flowers, becomes full of their fragrance. The light wooden porch breaks the flat of the cottage face by its projection ; and a branch or two of wandering honeysuckle spread over the low hatch. A few square feet of garden and a latched wicket, persuading the weary and dusty pedestrian, with excessive eloquence, to lean upon it for an instant and request a drink of water or milk, complete a picture, which, if it be far enough from London to be unspoiled by town sophistica- tions, is a very perfect thing in its way. The ideas it awakens are agreeable, and the architecture is all that we want in such a situation. It is pretty and appropriate; and if it boasted of any other perfection, it would be at the expense of its propriety. ' From The Poetry of Arckitec'ure. 372 THE KEEPERS HOUSE 373 THE KEEPER'S HOUSED Thomas Hardy It was a satisfaction to walk into the keeper's house, even as a stranger, on a fine spring morning Hke the present. A curl of wood smoke came from the chimney and drooped over the roof like a blue feather in a lady's hat ; and the sun shone obliquely upon the patch of grass in front, which reflected its brightness through the open doorway and up the staircase opposite, light- ing up each riser with a shiny green radiance and leaving the top of each step in shade. The window-sill of the front room was between four and five feet from the floor, dropping inwardly to a broad low bench, over which, as well as over the whole surface of the wall beneath, there always hung a deep shade, which was considered objec- tionable on every ground save one, namely, that the perpetual sprinkling of seeds and water by the caged canary above was not noticed as an eyesore by visitors. The window was set with thickly leaded diamond glazing, formed, especially in the lower panes, of knotty glass of various shades of green. Nothing was better known to Fancy than the extravagant manner in which these circular knots or eyes distorted everything seen through them from the outside — lifting hats from heads, shoulders from bodies ; scattering the spokes of cart wheels, and bending the straight fir trunks into semicircles. The ceiling was carried by a beam traversing its midst, from the side of which projected a large nail, used solely and constantly as a peg for Geoffrey's hat ; the nail was arched by a rainbow- shaped stain, imprinted by the brim of the said hat when it was hung there dripping wet. The most striking point about the room was the furniture. This was a repetition upon inanimate objects of the old prin- ciple introduced by Noah, consisting for the most part of two articles of every sort. The duplicate system of furnishing owed its existence to the forethought of Fancy's mother, exercised ' From Under the Greenwood Tree. 74 BUILDINGS from the day of Fancy's birthday onwards. The arrangement sj)oke for itself: nobody who knew the tone of the household could look at the goods without being aware that the second set was a i^rovision for Fancy when she should marry and have a house of her own. The most noticeable instance was a pair of green-faced eight-day clocks ticking alternately, which were severally two-and-a-half minutes and three minutes striking the hour of twelve, one proclaiming, in Italian flourishes, Thomas Wood as the name of its maker, and the other — arched at the top, and altogether of more cynical appearance — that of Ezekiel Saunders. They were two departed clockmakers of Casterbridge, whose desperate rivalry throughout their lives was nowhere more emphatically perpetuated than here at Geoffrey's. These chief s[)ecimcns of the marriage provision were supported on the right by a couple of kitchen dressers, each fitted complete with their cups, dishes, and plates, in their turn followed by two dumb-waiters, two family Bibles, two warming- pans, and two intermixed sets of chairs. But the position last reached — the chimney-corner — was, after all, the most attractive side of the parallelogram. It was large enough to admit, in addition to Geoffrey himself, Geoffrey's wiie, her chair, and her work-table, entirely within the line of the mantel, without danger or even inconvenience from the heat of the fire ; and was spacious enough overhead to allow the insertion of wood poles for the hanging of bacon, which were cloaked with long shreds of soot floating on the draught like the tattered banners on the walls of ancient aisles. These points were common to most chimney-corners of the neighborhood ; but one feature there was which made Geoffrey's fireside not only an object of interest to casual aristocratic visi- tors — to whom every cottage fireside was more or less a curi- osity — but the admiration for friends who were accustomed to fireplaces of the ordinary hamlet model. This peculiarity was a little window in the chimney back, almost over the fire, around which the smoke crept caressingly when it left the perpendicular course. The window board was curiously stamped with black circles, burnt thereon by the heated bottoms of drinking-cups EXPOSITION HALL AND BRIDGE SHOP 375 which had rested there after previously standing on the hot ashes of the hearth for the purpose of warming their contents, the result giving to the ledge the look of an envelope which has passed through innumerable post-offices. EXPOSITION HALL AND BRIDGE SHOP ^ One of the principal structures for the International Building Exposition at Leipzig is the 164 X 342 feet steel-frame building designed by Paul Banft, of Leipzig, built by Grohmann & Frosch, and rented to the exposition for use as Machinery Hall. The building was designed with special consideration for its subse- quent use by the builders as a bridge shop, and its arrangement and equipment of travelling cranes are intended to serve both purposes. It is about sixty-seven and one-half feet high to the top of the main roof and has one eighty-five feet centre aisle commanded by two ten-ton travelling cranes, and two thirty-nine feet side aisles with single five-ton cranes. The general design of the building conforms closely to advanced steel-shop construction in this country, but the details vary considerably from it in some of the important members. The wall columns, twenty-three feet apart, carry the side aisle roof trusses directly, and the centre-aisle columns, sixty-nine feet apart, carry riveted longi- tudinal trusses about fourteen feet deep, each of which sup- ports two intermediate centre and side-aisle roof trusses, while every third roof truss is carried directly on the columns. The centre-aisle columns are double with two H-shape shafts four and a half feet apart transversely, with their feet riveted between the webs of a single long, wide, structural-steel pedestal. The inner shaft has a much lighter section and is braced to it with horizontal and diagonal struts forming essentially the wel) members of a vertical truss. Riveted to the face of this column are the runway trusses four and one-half feet deep, of the ten-ton 1 From The Engineering Record, January 17, 1914. 376 lU'lLPLWGS craiio girilors. As tlu'sc jj;ir(U'rs arc thus offset nearly five feet l)ey()iul the centre oi the main lonj^itiuhnal girders, they are sup|H)rtecl from the latter at intermediate points by cantilever brackets twenty-three feet apart, which |)roduce eccentric load- ing on the longitudinal trusses. The building is lighted by large continuous window areas in the side walls and in the inclined clere-story surfaces of the centre-aisle roof and monitor. SECOXD-STORY BUNG.'VLOW APARTMENTS ^ A COLONY of one-Story bungalows built about a court on the roof of a block of stores is a new idea in the apartment houses which has recently been realized in Long Beach, California. From the street the bungalow apartment building looks like an ordinary brick business l)lock with shops below and flats on the second floor. But the stairway from the street, instead of leading to a second story, takes one to a broad sunny court on the roof of the shops. Down the centre of the court is a pergola with flower boxes beneath it, and around the four sides are tlie low gables of seventeen one-story Swiss- chalet bungalows. Flower boxes under the windows, and plaster walls trimmed with dark wood, make them look like a row of bungalows on the street. In all there are two tw^o-room, four three-room, and eleven four-room bungalow apartments about the court. Each pair of bungalows has a common sheltered porch, recessed so that the entrance doors open into the living rooms. Their kitchens and dining rooms face the court and their living and sleeping rooms overlook the street. Each has its own bathroom and plenty of closet room. The common laundry is not in the basement, but on the roof of one of the bungalows, and clothes are hung out on the roofs of the kitchens unseen from the street below. The floor of the court is covered with heavy deck roofing, drained by a gutter in the centre, and garbage is taken care of in boxes with ventilating pipes leading through the roof. > From Popular Mecluinks, October, 1913. THE DOCTOR'S HOME 377 THE DOCTOR'S HOME 1 F. HoPKiNSON Smith The Doctor is not one of your new-fashioned doctors quartered in a brownstone house off the Avenue, with a butler opening the door; a pair of bob- tailed grays; a coupe with a note-book tucked away in its pocket bearing the names of various millionaires ; an office panelled in oak; a waiting-room lined with patients reading last month's magazines until he should send for them. He has no such abode nor belongings. He lives all alone by himself in an old-fashioned house on Bedford Place — oh, such a queer, hunched-up old house and such a quaint old neighbor- hood poked away behind Jefferson Market — and he opens the door himself and sees everybody who comes — there are not a great many of them nowadays, more's the pity. There are only a few such houses left up the queer old-fash- ioned street where he lives. The others were pulled down long ago, or pushed out to the line of the sidewalk and three or four stories piled on top of them. Some of these modern ones have big, carved marble porticos, made of painted zinc and fastened to the new brickwork. Inside these portals are a row of bronze bells and a line of speaking tubes with cards below bearing the names of those who dwell above. The Doctor's house is not like one of these. It would have been had it not belonged to his old mother, who died long ago and who begged him never to sell it while he lived. He was thirty years younger then, but he is still there and so is the old house. It looks a little ashamed of its shabbiness when you come upon it suddenly hiding behind its pushing neighbors. First comes an iron fence with a gate never shut, and then a flagged path dividing a grass-plot, and then an old-fashioned wooden stoop with two steps, guarded by a wooden railing (many a day since these were painted) ; and over these railings and up the supports which carry the roof of the portico, straggles a 'From "'Doc' Shipman's Fee," in 7'/(c I/wier Z?og. Charles Scribncr's Sons. Reprinted by permission. 378 BUILDINGS honeysucklr (hat docs its l)est to hide the shabl)incss of the shinnies and tho old waterspout and saK^ing gutter, and fails miserably when it gets to the farther cornice, which has rotted away, showing under its dismal paint the black and brown rust of decaying wood. Then way in under the portico comes the door with the name- plate, and next to it, level with the floor of the piazza or jwrtico — either you please, for it is a combination of both — are two long French windows, always open in summer evenings and a-light on winter nights with the reflection of the Doctor's soft- coal fire, telling of the warmth and cheer within. For it is a cheery- place. It doesn't look like a doctor's office. There are dingy haircloth sofas, it is true, and a row of shelves with bottles, and funny-looking boxes on the mantel — one an electric batter}' — and rows and rows of books on the walls. But there are no dreadful instruments about. If there are, you don't see them. The big chair he sits in would swallow up a smaller man. It is covered with Turkey red and has a roll cushion for his head. There are two of these chairs — one for you, or me; this last has big arms that come out and catch you under the elbows, a mighty help to a man when he has just learned that his liver or lungs or heart or some other part of him has gone wrong and needs overhauling. Then there is a canary that sings all the time, and a small dog — oh, such a low-down, ill-bred, tousled dog ; kind of a dog that might have been raised around a lumber-yard — was, probably — one ear gone, half of his tail missing ; and there are some pots of flowers, and on the wall near the window where everybody can see is a case of butterflies impaled on pins and covered by a glass. No, you wouldn't think the Doctor's office a gruesome place, and you certainly wouldn't think the Doctor was a grue- some person — not when you come to know him. LANDOR'S COTTAGE 379 LANDOR'S COTTAGE Edgar Allan Poe Nothing could well be more simple — more utterly unpre- tending than this cottage. Its marvellous efect lay altogether in its artistic arrangement as a picture. I could have fancied, while I looked at it, that some eminent landscape painter had built it with his brush. The point of view from which I first saw the cottage was not altogether, although it was nearly, the best point from which to survey the house. I will therefore describe it as I afterwards saw it — from a position on the stone wall at the southern ex- treme of the amphitheatre. The main building was about twenty-four feet long and six- teen broad — certainly not more. Its total height, from the ground to the apex of the roof, could not have exceeded eighteen feet. To the west end of this structure was attached one about a third smaller in all its proportions : — the line of its front standing back about two yards from that of the larger house ; and the line of its roof, of course, being considerably depressed below that of the roof adjoining. At right angles to these buildings, and from the rear of the main one — not exactly in the middle — extended a third compartment, very small — being, in general, one third less than the western wing. The roofs of the two larger were very steep — sweeping down from the ridge-beam with a long concave curve, and extending at least four feet beyond the walls in front, so as to form the roofs of two piazzas. These latter roofs, of course, needed no support ; but as they had the air of needing it, slight and perfectly plain pillars were inserted at the corners alone. The roof of the northern wing was merely an extension of a portion of the main roof. Between the chief building and western wing arose a very tall and rather slender square chimney of hard Dutch bricks, alternately black and red, — a slight cornice of projecting bricks at the top. Over the gables the roofs also projected very much, — in the main building about four feet to the east and two to the 380 iirn.n/.\c;s west. The princijxil door was not exactly in the main division, hcing a little to the east — while the two windows were to the west. These latter did not extend to the floor, but were much longer and narrower than usual — they had single shutters like doors — the panes were of lozenge form, but cjuite large. The door itself had its upper half of glass, also in lozenge jjanes — a movable shutter secured it at night. The door to the west wing was in its gable, and quite simple — a single window looked out to the south. There was no external door to the north wing, and it also had only one window to the east. The blank wall of the eastern gable was relieved by stairs (with a balustrade) running diagonally across it — the ascent being from the south. Under cover of the \ndely projecting cave these steps gave access to a door leading into the garret, or rather loft — for it was lighted only by a single window to the north, and seemed to have been intended as a store-room. The piazzas of the main building and western wing had no floors, as is usual ; but at the doors and at each window, large, flat, irregular slabs of granite lay embedded in the delicious turf, affording comfortable footing in all weather. Excellent paths of the same material — not nicely adapted, but with the velvety sod filling frequent intervals between the stones, led hither and thither from the house, to a crystal spring about five paces off, to the road, or to one or two out-houses that lay to the north, beyond the brook, and were thoroughly concealed by a few locusts and catalpas. Not more than sLx steps from the main door of the cottage stood the dead trunk of a fantastic pear-tree, so clothed from head to foot in the gorgeous begonia blossoms that one required no little scrutiny to determine what manner of sweet thing it could be. From various arms of this tree hung cages of differ- ent kinds. In one, a large wicker cylinder \\dth a ring at top, revelled a mocking bird ; in another, an oriole ; in a third the impudent bobolink — while three or four more delicate prisons were loudly vocal with canaries. The pillars of the piazza were enwreathed in jasmine and sweet honeysuckle ; while from the angle formed by the main struc- THE ANCIENT PALACE AT JEVPORE 38 1 cure and its west wing, sprang a grapevine of unexampled luxuriance. Scorning all restraint, it had clambered first to the lower roof — then to the higher ; and along the ridge of this latter it continued to writhe on, throwing out tendrils to the right and left, until at length it fairly attained the east gable, and fell trailing over the stairs. The whole house, with its wings, was constructed of the old- fashioned Dutch shingles — broad, and with unrounded corners. It is a peculiarity of this material to give houses built of it the appearance of being wider at bottom than top — after the manner of Egyptian architecture ; and in the present instance, this exceedingly picturescjue effect was aided by numerous pots of gorgeous flowers that almost encompassed the base of the buildings. The shingles were painted a dull gray; and the happiness with which this neutral tint melted into the vivid green of the tulip tree leaves that partially overshadowed the cottage, can readily be conceived by an artist. From the position near the stone wall, as described, the buildings were seen at great advantage — for the southeastern angle was thrown forward — so that the eye took in at once the whole of the two fronts, with the picturesque eastern gable, and at the same time obtained just a sufficient glimpse of the north- ern wing, with parts of a pretty roof to the spring-house, and nearly half of a light bridge that spanned the brook in the near vicinity of the main buildings. THE ANCIENT PALACE AT JEYPORE ^ RuDYARD Kipling The Englishman went into this palace built of stone, bedded on stone, springing out of scarped rock, and reached by stone ways — nothing but stone. Presently, he stumbled across a 1 From From Sea lo Sea. 382 Bl'ILDiyCS little temple of Kali, a gem of marble tracery and inlay, very dark and, at that hour of the morning, very cold. If. as Viollet-lc-Duc tells us to believe, a building reflects the character of its inhabitants, it must be impossible for one reared in an Eastern palace to think straightly or speak freely or — but here the annals of Rajputana contradict the theory — to act openly. The cramped and darkened rooms, the narrow smooth- walled passages with recesses where a man might wait for his enemy unseen, the maze of ascending and descending stairs leading nowhither, the ever-present screens of marble tracery that may hide or reveal so much, — all these things breathe of plot and counterplot, league and intrigue. In a living palace where the sight-seer knows and feels that there are human beings everywhere, and that he is followed by scores of unseen eyes, the impression is almost unendurable. In a dead palace — a cemetery of loves and hatreds done with hundreds of years ago, and of plottings that had for their end, though the graybeards who plotted knew it not, the coming of the British tourist with guide-book and sun-hat — oppression gives place to simply impertinent curiosity. The Englishman wandered into all parts of the palace, for there was no one to stop him — not even the ghosts of the dead Queens — through ivory-studded doors, into the women's quarters, where a stream of water once flowed over a chiselled marble channel. A creeper had set its hand upon the lattice there, and there was the dust of old nests in one of the niches in the wall. Did the lady of light virtue who man- aged to become possessed of so great a portion of Jey Singh's library ever set her dainty feet in the trim garden of the Hall of Pleasure beyond the screen-work ? Was it in the forty-pillared Hall of Audience that the order went forth that the Chief of Birjooghar was to be slain, and from what wall did the King look out when the horsemen clattered up the steep stone path to the palace, bearing on their saddle-bows the heads of the bravest of Rajore? There were questions innumerable to be asked in each court and keep and cell ; but the only answer was the cooing of the pigeons. If a man desired beauty, there was enough and to spare in the ST. MARK'S 383 palace; and of strength more than enough. With inlay and carved marble, with glass and color, the Kings who took their pleasure in that now desolate pile made all that their eyes rested upon royal and superb. But any description of the artistic side of the palace, if it were not impossible, would be wearisome. The wise man will visit it when time and occasion serve, and will then, in some small measure, understand what must have been the riotous, sumptuous, murderous life to which our Gov- ernors and Lieutenant-Governors, Commissioners and Deputy- Commissioners, Colonels and Captains and the Subalterns, have put an end. ST. MARK'S 1 John Ruskin And now I wish that the reader, before I bring him into St. Mark's Place, would imagine himself for a little time in a quiet English cathedral town, and walk with me to the west front of its cathedral. Let us go together up the more retired street, at the end of which we can see the pinnacles of one of the towers, and then through the low, gray gateway with its battlemented top and small latticed window in the centre, into the inner private-looking road or close, where nothing goes in but the carts of the tradesmen who supply the bishop and the chapter, and where there are little shaven grass-plots, fenced in by neat rails, before old-fashioned groups of somewhat diminutive and excessively trim houses, with little oriel and bay windows jutting out here and there, and deep wooden cornices and eaves painted cream color and white, and small porches to their doors in the shape of cockle-shells, or little, crooked, thick, indescribable wooden gables warped a little on one side ; and so forward till we come to larger houses, also old-fashioned, but of red brick, and with gardens behind them, and fruit walls, which show here and there, among the nectarines, the vestiges of an old cloister arch or shaft ; and looking in front on the cathedral square itself, ' From The Stones of Venice. 384 BriLDIXGS laid out in rij^id divisions of smooth grass and gravel walk, yet not uncluvrful. csiHrially on the sunny side, where the canons' children are walking with their nursery-maids. And so, taking care not to tread on the grass, we will go along the straight walk to the west front, and there stand for a time, looking u{) at its deep- pointed porches and the dark places between their pillars where there were statues once, and where the fragments, here and there, of a stately tigure are still left, which has in it the likeness of a king, perhaps indeed a king on earth, perhaps a saintly king long ago in heaven ; and so higher and higher up to the great mouldering wall of rugged sculpture and confused arcades, shattered, and gray, and grisly with heads of dragons and mock- ing fiends, worn by the rains and swirling winds into yet un- seemlier shape, and colored on their stony scales by the deep russet-orange lichen, melancholy gold ; and so, higher still, to the bleak towers, so far above that the eye loses itself among the bosses of their traceries, though they are rude and strong, and only sees, like a drift of eddN-ing black points, now closing, now scattering, and now settling suddenly into in\isible places among the bosses and flowers, the crowd of restless birds that fill the whole square with that strange clangor of theirs, so harsh and yet so soothing, like the cries of birds on a solitary coast between the cliits and sea. Think for a little while of that scene, and the meaning of all its small formalisms, mixed with its serene sublimity. Estimate its secluded, continuous, drowsy felicities, and its evidence of the sense and steady performance of such kind of duties as can be regulated by the cathedral clock ; and weigh the influence of those dark towers on all who have passed through the lonely square at their feet for centuries, and on all who ha\e seen them rising far away over the wooded plain, or catching on their square masses the last rays of the sunset, when the city at their feet was infiicated only by the mist at the bend of the river, and then let us quickly recollect that we are in Venice, and land at the extremity of the Calle Lunga San Moise, which may be considered as there answering to the secluded street that led us to our English cathedral gateway. ST. MARK'S 385 We find ourselves in a paved alley, some seven feet wide where it is widest, full of people, and resonant with cries of itinerant salesmen, — a shriek in their beginning, and dying away into a kind of brazen ringing, all the worse for its confinement between the high houses of the passage along which we have to make our way. Overhead, an inextricable confusion of rugged shutters, and iron balconies, and chimney flues, pushed out on brackets to save room, and arched wdndows with projecting sills of Istrian stone, and gleams of green leaves here and there, where a fig-tree branch escapes over a lower wall from some inner cortile, leading the eye up to the narrow stream of blue sky high over all. On each side, a row of shops, as densely set as may be, occupying, in fact, intervals between the square stone shafts, about eight feet high, which carry the first floors : intervals of which one is narrow and serves as a door ; the other is, in the more respect- able shops, wainscoted to the height of the counter and glazed above, but in those of the poorer tradesmen left open to the ground, and the wares laid on benches and tables in the open air, the light in all cases entering at the front only, and fading away in a few feet from the threshold into a gloom which the eye from without cannot penetrate, but which is generally broken by a ray or two from a feeble lamp at the back of the shop, suspended before a print of the Virgin. The less pious shopkeeper some- times leaves his lamp unlighted, and is contented with a penny print ; the more religious one has his print colored and set in a little shrine with a gilded or figured fringe, with perhaps a faded flower or two on each side, and his lamp burning brilliantly. Here, at the fruiterer's, where the dark green watermelons are heaped upon the counter like cannon-balls, the Madonna has a tabernacle of fresh laurel leaves ; but the pewterer next door has let his lamp out, and there is nothing to be seen in his shop but the dull gleam of the studded patterns on the copper pans, hanging from his roof in the darkness. Next comes a " Vendita Frittole e Liquori," where the Virgin, enthroned in a very humble manner beside a tallow candle on a back shelf, presides over certain ambrosial morsels of a nature too ambiguous to be de- fined or enumerated. But, a few steps farther on, at the regular 380 BClLDiyCS wine shop oi the callc, whore wc are olTered "\'in'> Xoslrani a Soldi 28-2:?,'' the Madonna is in grviii j^lory, enthroned above ten or a dozen larj^e red casks of ihree-year-old vintage, and flanked by goodly ranks of bottles of Maraschino, and two crimson lamps; and for the evening, when tlie gondoliers will come to drink out, under her auspices, the money they have gained during the day, s!ie will have a whole chandelier. A yard or two farther, we pass the hostelry of the Black Eagle, and glancing as we pass through the square door of marble, deeply moulded, in the outer wall, we see the shadows of its pergola of \ines resting on an ancient well, with a pointed shield car\'ed on its side ; and so presently emerge on the bridge and Campo San ^ioise, whence to the entrance into St. Mark's Place, called the Bocca di Piazza (mouth of the square), the Venetian character is nearh- destroyed, first by the frightful fa(;ade of San Moise, which we will pause at another time to examine, and then by the modernizing of the shops as they near the piazza, and the mingling with the lower Venetian populace of lounging groups of English and Austrians. We will push fast through them into the shadow of the pillars at the end of the ''Bocca di Piazza," and then we forget them all ; for between those pillars there opens a great Hght, and, in the midst of it, as we advance slowly, the vast tower of St. Mark seems to lift itself visibly forth from the level field of chequered stones ; and, on each side, the countless arches prolong themselves into ranged symmetry, as if the rugged and irregular houses that pressed together abo\e us in the dark alley had been struck back into sudden obedience and lovely order, and all their rude casements and broken walls had been transformed into arches charged with goodly sculpture, and fluted shafts of delicate stone. And well may they fall back, for beyond those troops of or- dered arches there rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we may see it far away ; a multitude of pillars and white domes, clu-stered into a long low pyramid of colored light ; a treasure-heap it seems, partly of gold, and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted ST. MARK'S 387 porches, ceiled with fair mosaic, and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber and delicate as ivory, — sculptures fantastic and involved, of palm leaves and lilies, and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging and fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of buds and plumes ; and, in the midst of it, the solemn forms of angels, sceptred, and robed to the feet, and leaning to each other across the gates, their figures indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded back among the branches of Eden, when first its gates were angel-guarded long ago. And round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles, that half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, "their bluest veins to Idss," — the shadow, as it steals back from them, reveaHng hne after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide leaves the waved sand ; their capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and vine, and mys- tical signs, all beginning and ending in the Cross ; and above them, in the broad archivolts, a continuous chain of language and of life — angels, and the signs of heaven, and the labors of men, each in its appointed season upon the earth ; and above these, another range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with white arches edged with scarlet flowers, — a confusion of delight, amidst which the breasts of the Greek horses are seen blazing in their breadth of golden strength, and the St. Mark's lion, lifted on a blue field covered with stars, until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst. Between that grim cathedral of England and this, what an interval ! There is a type of it in the very birds that haunt them ; for, instead of the restless crowd, hoarse-voiced and sable-winged, drifting on the bleak upper air, the St. Mark's 3S8 BUILDISGS porches are full of ilin-cs, that nestle among the marble foliage, and mingle the soft iridescence of their living jjlumes, changing at every motion, with the tints, hardly less lovely, that have stood unchanged for seven hundred years. And what etTect has this splendor on those who pass beneath it ? You may walk from sunrise to sunset, to and fro, before the gateway of St, Mark's, and you will not see an eye lifted to it, nor a countenance brightened by it. Priest and layman, soldier and civilian, rich and poor, pass by it alike regardlessly. Up to the very recesses of the porches, the meanest tradesmen of the city push their counters ; nay, the foundations of its pillars are themselves the seats — not "of them that sell doves" for sacrifice, but of the vendors of toys and caricatures. Round the whole square in front of the church there is almost a continu- ous line of cafes, where the idle Venetians of the middle classes lounge, and read empty journals; in its centre the Austrian bands play during the time of vespers, their martial music jar- ring with the organ notes, — the march drowning the miserere, and the sullen crowd thickening round them, — a crowd which, if it had its will, would stiletto every soldier that pipes to it. And in the recesses of the porches, all day long, knots of men of the lowest classes, unemployed and listless, lie basking in the sun like lizards ; and unregarded children, — every heavy glance of their young eyes full of desperation and stony depravity, and their throats hoarse with cursing, — gamble, and fight, and snarl, and sleep, hour after hour, clashing their bruised centesimi upon the marble ledges of the church porch. And the images of Christ and His angels look down upon it continually. That we may not enter the church out of the midst of the horror of this, let us turn aside under the portico which looks towards the sea, and passing round within the two massive pil- lars brought from St. Jean d'Acre, we shall find the gate of the Baptistery ; let us enter there. The heavy door closes behind us instantly, and the light and the turbulence of the Piazzetta are together shut out by it. We are in a low vaulted room ; vaulted, not with arches, but with small cupolas starred with gold, and chequered with gloomy ST. MARK'S 389 figures : in the centre is a bronze font charged with rich bas-re- liefs, a small figure of the Baptist standing above it in a single ray of light that glances across the narrow room, dying as it falls from a window high in the wall, and the first thing that it strikes, and the only thing that it strikes brightly, is a tomb. We hardly know if it be a tomb indeed ; for it is like a narrow couch set beside the window, low-roofed and curtained, so that it might seem, but that it is some height above the pavement, to have been drawn towards the window, that the sleeper might be wakened early ; only there are two angels who have drawn the curtain back, and are looking down upon him. Let us look also, and thank that gentle light that rests upon his forehead for ever, and dies away upon his breast. The face is of a man, in middle life, but there are two deep furrows right across the forehead, dividing it like the founda- tions of a tower ; the height of it above is bound by the fillet of the ducal cap. The rest of the features are singularly small and delicate, the lips sharp, perhaps the sharpness of death being added to that of the natural lines ; but there is a sweet smile upon them, and a deep serenity upon the whole countenance. The roof of the canopy above has been blue, filled with stars ; beneath, in the centre of the tomb on which the figure rests, is a seated figure of the Virgin, and the border of it all around is of flowers and soft leaves, growing rich and deep, as if in a field in summer. It is the Doge Andrea Dandolo, a man early great among the great of Venice ; and early lost. She chose him for her king in his thirty-sixth year ; he died ten years later, leaving behind him that history to which we owe half of what we know of her former fortunes. Look around at the room in which he lies. The floor of it is of rich mosaic, encomipassed by a low seat of red marble, and its walls are of alabaster, but worn and shattered, and darkly stained with age, almost a ruin, — in places the slabs of marble have fallen away altogether, and the rugged brickwork is seen through the rents, but all beautiful ; the ravaging fissures fretting their way among the islands and channeled zones of the alabaster, 390 BUILDISGS antl llic tiinc-stains on its translucent masses darkened into fieltis of rich golden brown, like the color of seaweed when the sun strikes on it througii (leeji sea. The light fades away into the recess of the chamber towards the altar, and the eye can hardly trace the lines of the bas-relief behind it of the baptism of Christ : but on the vaulting of the roof the figures are distinct, and there are seen upon it two great circles, one surrounded by the "Principalities and j)owers in heavenly places," of which Milton has expressed the ancient division in the single massy line, — "Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers," and around the other, the Apostles ; Christ the centre of both : and upon the walls, again and again repeated, the gaunt figure of the Baptist, in every circumstance of his life and death ; and the streams of the Jordan running down between their cloven rocks; the axe laid to the root of a fruitless tree that springs upon their shore. "Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit shall be hewn down, and cast into the fire." Yes, verily : to be baptized with fire, or to be cast therein ; it is the choice set before all men. The march-notes still murmur through the grated window, and mingle with the sounding in our ears of the sentence of judgment, which the old Greek has written on that Baptistery wall. Venice has made her choice. He who lies under that stony canopy would have taught her another choice, in his day, if she would have listened to him ; but he and his counsels have long been forgotten by her, and the dust lies upon his lips. Through the heavy door whose bronze network closes the place of his rest, let us enter the church itself. It is lost in still deeper twilight, to which the eye must be accustomed for some moments before the form of the building can be traced; and then there opens before us a vast cave, hewn out into the form of a Cross, and divided into shadowy aisles by many pillars. Round the domes of its roof the light enters only through narrow apertures like large stars ; and here and there a ray or two from some far-away casement wanders into the darkness, and casts a ST. MARK'S 391 narrow phosphoric stream upon the waves of marble that heave and fall in a thousand colors along the floor. What else there is of light is from torches, or silver lamps, burning ceaselessly in the recesses of the chapels ; the roof sheeted with gold, and the polished walls covered vath alabaster, give back at every curve and angle some feeble gleaming to the flames; and the glories round the heads of the sculptured saints flash out upon us as we pass them, and sink again into the gloom. Under foot and over head, a continual succession of crowded imagery, one pic- ture passing into another, as in a dream ; forms beautiful and terrible mixed together; dragons and serpents, and ravening beasts of prey, and graceful birds that in the midst of them drink from running fountains and feed from vases of crystal ; the passions and the pleasures of human life symbolized together, and the mystery of its redemption ; for the mazes of interwoven lines and changeful pictures lead always at last to the Cross, lifted and carved in every place and upon every stone ; some- times with the serpent of eternity wrapt round it, sometimes with doves beneath its arms, and sweet herbage growing forth from its feet ; but conspicuous most of all on the great rood that crosses the church before the altar, raised in bright blazonry against the shadow of the apse. And although in the recesses of the aisles and chapels, when the mist of the incense hangs heavily, we may see continually a figure traced in faint lines upon their marble, a woman standing with her eyes raised to heaven, and the inscription above her, "Mother of God," she is not here the presiding deity. It is the Cross that is first seen, and always burning in the centre of the temple ; and every dome and hollow of its roof has the figure of Christ in the utmost height of it, raised in power, or returning in judgment. Nor is this interior without effect on the minds of the people. At every hour of the day there are groups collected before the various shrines, and solitary worshippers scattered through the darker places of the church, evidently in prayer both deep and reverent, and, for the most part, profoundly sorrowful. The devotees at the greater number of the renowned shrines of Romanism may be seen murmuring their appointed prayers 3q2 • BUILDISGS with Wiindcring ovcs and uiu'n^a}j;c(i gestures ; hut the step ol the stranger chics not disturb those who kneel on the pavement of St. Mark's ; and hardly a monienl passes, from early morning to sunset, in which we may not see some half-veiled figure enter beneath the Arabian porch, cast itself into long al^asement on the lloor of the temple, and then rising slowly with more con- firmed step, and with a passionate kiss and clasp of the arms given to the feet of the crucilix, by which the lamps burn always in the northern aisle, leave the church, as if comforted. m. E. ANIMALS THE WALRUS 1 C. Lloyd Morgan A HUGE ugly brute is the walrus. His blunt stubbly snout, his great tusks, twenty inches or more in length, his small, bloodshot, angry eye, his shaved-off ear, his low forehead (though the form of the brain within points to possibilities of unsuspected intelligence), his wrinkled skin, scarred and gnarled with many a wound, give him anything but a prepossessing appearance. His forequarters are exceedingly massive and heavy, the body tapering backwards; and when he squats on the ice his hind- quarters are so bent forward as to give his back a rounded curve. His front limbs are embedded in the huge forequarters to the elbow and are converted into flipper paddles which can be turned forwards at the wrist. His hind limbs are enveloped in the general skin of the body as far as the ankles, the almost invisible tail lying in the fold of loose skin which connects them heel to heel. The feet can be turned forward at the ankle during progression on land or ice, and their under surfaces, as also those of the fore-feet, are provided with rough warty ridges giving them foothold on smooth ice and rock. With these awkward limbs (awkward for progression on land) they hitch, flop, and straddle along in a clumsy, indolent fashion; though when hard pressed or alarmed they can break into a hobbling canter. Such is the walrus on the ice. But let him tumble into the water and he is a different being. There he is at his ease. The hind feet held backwards form a powerful stern propeller — the ' From Animal Sketches. Edward Arnold. 393 3Q4 ANI\fALS fore flippers, cflkiciU shovel-shaped paddles. I Us unj^ainly awkwardness is exchanged ior complete and most excellent mastery. He will tear through the water; and if he has been hanH)oned he will tow a large boat astern as it if were a cockle- shell. He will dive with consummate ease as to the manner born. The simultaneousness, says Mr. Lamont, with which a hertl of walruses will dive and rea])pear again is remarkable. One moment you see a hundred grisly heads and long gleaming white tusks above the waves ; they give one spout from their blowholes, take one breath of fresh air, and the next moment you see a hundred brown hemispherical backs, the next a hun- dred pair of hind flippers flourishing ; and then in a twinkling they are all down. Yes I The walrus can swim and dive excellently. In the water he is at home. Like the British tar he leaves his awkwardness ashore. KUSA-HIBARI ^ Lafcadio Hearn His cage is exactly two Japanese inches high and one inch and a half wide: its tiny wooden door, turning upon a pivot, will scarcely admit the tip of my little finger. But he has plenty of room in that cage, — room to walk, and jump, and fly ; for he is so small that you must look very carefully through the brown-gauze sides of it in order to catch a glimpse of him. I have always to turn the cage round and round, several times, in a good light, before I can discover his whereabouts ; and then I usually find him resting in one of the upper corners, — clinging, upside down, to his ceiling of gauze. Imagine a cricket about the size of an ordinary mosquito, — with a pair of antenna much longer than his own body, and so fine that you can distinguish them only against the light. Kusa- Hibari, or "Grass-Lark," is the Japanese name of him ; and he is worth in the market exactly twelve cents: that is to say, ' From Kolld. The Macmillan Company, 1902. Reprinted by permission. KUSA-HIBARI 395 very much more than his weight in gold. Twelve cents for such a gnat-like thing ! . . . By day he sleeps or meditates, except while occupied with the slice of fresh egg-plant or cucumber which must be poked into his cage every morning. ... To keep him clean and well fed is somewhat troublesome: could you see him, you would think it absurd to take any pains for the sake of a creature so ridiculously small. But always at sunset the infinitesimal soul of him awakens : then the room begins to fill with a delicate and ghostly music of indescribable sweetness, — a thin, thin silvery rippling and trilling as of tiniest electric bells. As the darkness deepens, the sound becomes sweeter, — sometimes thinning down into the faintest imaginable thread of a voice. But loud or low, it keeps a penetrating quality that is weird. All night the atomy thus sings : he ceases only when the temple bell proclaims the hour of dawn. Now this tiny song is a song of love, — vague love of the un- seen and unknown. It is quite impossible that he should ever have seen or known, in this present existence of his. Not even his ancestors, for many generations back, could have known anything of the night-life of the fields, or the amorous value of song. They were born of eggs hatched in a jar of clay, in the shop of some insect-merchant; and they dwelt thereafter only in cages. But he sings the song of his race as it was sung a myriad years ago, and as faultlessly as if he understood the exact significance of every note. Of course he did not learn the song. It is a song of organic memory, — deep, dim memory of other quintillions of lives, when the ghost of him shrilled at night from the dewy grasses of the hills. Then that song brought him love — and death. He has forgotten all about death ; but he remembers the love. And therefore he sings now — for the bride that will never come. . . . Last evening — the twenty-ninth of the eleventh month — an odd feeling came to me as I sat at my desk : a sense of empti- ness in the room. Then I became aware that my grass-lark was silent, contrary to his wont. I went to the silent cage, 3q6 .1.V/.U.I/.5 and louiul him lying dead beside a dried-up luini) of egg-j)lant as gray and hard as a stone. I'Aidently he had not been fed for three or four days ; but only the night before his death he had been singing wonderfully, — so that I foolishly imagined him to be more than usually contented. My student, Aki, who loves insects, used to feed him ; but Aki had gone into the country for a week's holiday, and the duty of caring for the grass-lark had devolved upon Hana, the housemaid. She is not sympathetic, Hana the housemaid. She says that she did not forget the mite, — but there was no more egg-plant. And she had never thought of substituting a slice of onion or of cucumber ! I spoke words of reproof to Hana the housemaid, and she dutifully expressed contrition. But the fairy-music has stopped ; and the stillness reproaches ; and the room is cold, in spite of the stove. THE HEX HAWKS 1 John Burroughs August is the month of the high-sailing hawks. The hen- hawk is the most noticeable. He likes the haze and calm of these long, warm days. He is a bird of leisure, and seems always at his ease. How beautiful and majestic are his movements ! So self-poised and easy, such an entire absence of haste, such a magnificent amplitude of circles and spirals, such a haughty, imperial grace, and, occasionally, such daring aerial evolutions ! With slow, leisurely movement, rarely vibrating his pinions, he mounts and mounts in an ascending spiral till he appears a mere speck against the summer sky ; then, if the mood seizes him, with wings half closed like a bent bow, he will cleave the air almost perpendicularly, as if intent on dashing himself to pieces against the earth ; but, on nearing the ground, he sud- denly mounts again on broad, expanded wing, as if rebounding ' From "The Return of the Birds" in Wake Robin. Houghton MiflBin and Com- pany. A TROUT 397 upon the air, and sails leisurely away. It is the sublimest feat of the season. One holds one's breath till he sees him rise again. If inclined to a more gradual and less precipitous descent, he fixes his eye on some distant point in the earth beneath him, and thither bends his course. He is still almost meteoric in his speed and boldness. You see his path down the heavens, straight as a line ; if near, you hear the rush of his wings ; his shadow hurtles across the fields, and in an instant you see him quietly perched upon some low tree or decayed stub in a swamp or meadow, with reminiscences of frogs and mice stirring in his maw. When the south wind blows, it is a study to see three or four of these air-kings at the head of the valley far up toward the mountain, balancing and oscillating upon the strong current: now quite stationary, except a slight tremulous motion like the poise of a rope-dancer, then rising and falling in long undulations, and seeming to resign themselves passively to the wind ; or, again, sailing high and level far above the mountain's peak, no bluster and haste, but, as stated, occasionally a terrible earnestness and speed. Fire at one as he sails overhead, and, unless wounded badly, he will not change his course or gait. His flight is a perfect picture of repose in motion. It strikes the eye as more surprising than the flight of the pigeon and swallow even, in that the effort put forth is so uniform and delicate as to escape observation, giving to the movement an air of buoyancy and perpetuity, the effluence of power rather than the conscious application of it. A TROUT 1 Richard Jefferies He is not half a pound, yet in the sunshine has all the beauty of a larger fish. Spots of cochineal and gold dust, finely mixed together, dot his sides ; they are not red nor yellow exactly, as 1 From "By the Exe " in The Life of ike Fields. 398 ANIMAL^i if gold dust were mixed with some bright red. A line is drawn along his glistening greenish side, and across this there are faintly marked lozenges of darker color, so that in swimming past he would appear barred. There are dark spots on the head be- tween the eyes, the tail at its upper and lower edges is pinkish ; his gills are bright scarlet. Projiortioned and exquisitely shaped, he looks like a living arrow, formed to shoot through the water. The delicate little creature is finished in every detail, painted to the utmost minutiae, and carries a wonderful store of force, enabling him easily to surmount the rapids. III. F. PERSONS I. Real Persons SIR RICHARD GRENVILLE ^ Charles Kingsley Among all the heroic faces which the painters of that age have preserved, none, perhaps, hardly excepting Shakespeare's or Spenser's, Alva's or Parma's, is more heroic than that of Gren- ville, as it stands in Prince's Worthies of Devon; of a Spanish type, perhaps (or more truly speaking, a Cornish), rather than an English, with just enough of the British element in it to give delicacy to its massiveness. The forehead and whole brain are of extraordinary loftiness, and perfectly upright ; the nose long, aquiline, and delicately pointed; the mouth fringed with a short silky beard, small and ripe, yet firm as granite, with just pout enough of the lower lip to give hint of that capacity of noble indignation which lay hid under its usual courtly calm and sweetness ; if there be a defect in the face, it is that the eyes are somewhat small, and close together, and the eyebrows, though delicately arched, and without a trace of peevishness, too closely pressed down upon them ; the complexion is dark, the figure tall and graceful ; altogether the likeness of a wise and gallant gentleman, lovely to all good men, awful to all bad men ; in whose presence none dare say or do a mean or a ribald thing ; whom brave men left, feeling themselves nerved to do their duty better, while cowards slipped away, as bats and owls before the sun. 1 J'rom Westa'ard Ho ! 399 400 PERSONS FRANCIS DRAKKi C'lIAKLKS KiNGSLEY Who is that short, sturdy, phiiiil}' dressed man, \vhi) stands with legs a little apart, and hands behind his back, looking up with keen gray eyes, into the face of each speaker? His cap is in his hands, so you can see the bullet head of crisp brown hair antl the wrinkled forehead, as well as the high cheek bones, the short square face, the broad temples, the thick lips, which are yet firm as granite. A coarse plebeian stamp of man : yet the whole figure and attitude are that of boundless determination, self-possession, energy ; and when at last he speaks a few blunt words, all eyes are turned respectfully upon him ; — for his name is Francis Drake. JOHN STERLING 2 Thomas Carlyle Sterling was of rather slim but well-boned wiry figure, per- haps an inch or two from six feet in height ; of blonde com- plexion, without color, yet not pale or sickly ; dark-blonde hair, copious enough, which he usually wore short. The general aspect of him indicated freedom, perfect spontaneity, with a certain careless natural grace. In his apparel, you could notice, he affected dim colors, easy shapes ; cleanly always, yet even in this not fastidious or conspicuous : he sat or stood, oftenest, in loose sloping postures ; walked with long strides, body care- lessly bent, head flung eagerly forward, right hand perhaps grasping a cane, and rather by the middle to swing it, than by the end to use it otherwise. An attitude of frank, cheerful imp'^tuosity, of hopeful speed and alacrity; which indeed his physiognomy, on all sides of it, offered as the chief expression. Alacrity, velocity, joyous ardor, dwelt in the eyes too, which 1 From Westward Ho I - From The Life of John Slerlii:-. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY ^^y^'^^^^^i(i^/^oi■■■ ■■ were of brownish gray, full of bright kindly lifer,* rapid and frank rather than deep or strong. A smile, half of kindly impatience, half of real mirth, often sat on his face. The head was long; high over the vertex ; in the brow, of fair breadth, but not high for such a man. In the voice, which was of good tenor sort, rapid and strik- ingly distinct, powerful too, and except in some of the higher notes harmonious, there was a clear-ringing metallic tone, — which I often thought was wonderfully physiognomic. A certain splendor, beautiful, but not the deepest or the softest, which I could call a splendor as of burnished metal, — fiery valor of heart, swift decisive insight and utterance, then a turn for brilliant elegance, also for ostentation, rashness, etc., etc., — in short a flash as of clear-glancing sharp-cutting steel, lay in the whole nature of the man, in his heart and in his intellect, mark- ing alike the excellence and the limits of them both. His laugh, which on light occasions was ready and frequent, had in it no great depth of gaiety, or sense for the ludicrous in men or things ; you might call it rather a good smile become vocal than a deep real laugh : with his whole man I never saw him laugh. A clear sense of the humorous he had, as of most other things ; but in himself little or no true humor ; — nor did he attem^pt that side of things. To call him deficient in sympathy would seem strange, him whose radiances and resonances went thrilling over all the world, and kept him in brotherly contact with all : but I may say his sympathies dwelt rather with the high and sub- lime than with the low or ludicrous ; and were, in any field, rather light, wide, and lively, than deep, abiding, or great. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY ^ T. J. Hogg I HAD leisure to examine, and I may add, to admire the ap- pearance of my very extraordinary guest. It was the sum of many contradictions. His figure was slight and fragile, and ' From Hogg's Life of Shelley. 402 PERSONS yet liis bones aiul joints were larf^c and strong. He was tall, but he stooped so much, that he seemed of a low stature. His clothes were expensive, and made according to the most ap- proved mode of the day ; but they were tumbled, rumpled, unbrusheil. His gestures were abrupt, and sometimes violent, occasionally even awkward, yet more frequently gentle and graceful. His complexion was delicate, and almost feminine, of the purest red and white ; yet he was tanned and freckled by exposure to the sun, having passed the autumn, as he said, in shooting. His features, his whole face and particularly his head, were, in fact, unusually small ; yet the last appeared of a remark- able bulk, for his hair was long and bushy, and in fits of ab- straction and in the agonies (if I may u'^e the word) of anxious thought, he often rubbed it fiercely with his hands, or passed his fingers quickly through his locks unconsciously, so that it was singularly wild and rough. . . . His features were not symmetrical (the mouth, perhaps, excepted), yet was the effect of the whole extremely powerful. They breathed an anima- tion, a fire, an enthusiasm, a vivid and preternatural intelligence, that I never met with in any other countenance. Nor was the moral expression less beautiful than the intellectual ; for there was a softness, a delicacy, a gentleness, and especially (though this will surprise many) that air of profound religious veneration, that characterizes the best works, and chiefly the frescoes (and into these they infused their whole souls) of the great masters of Florence and Rome. I recognized the very peculiar expres- sion in these wonderful productions long afterwards and with a satisfaction mingled with much sorrow, for it was after the decease of him in whose countenance I had first observed it. FATHER PROUT^ William Bates If you had chanced, somewhere among the "sixties," to drop fnto the well-known reading-room of Galignani at Paris, you ' From the Maclise Portrait Gallery. EDWARD THE FIRST 403 might have observed a short and spare, but thick-set figure of an elderly man, buried in a newspaper, or exchanging a few snappish incisive words with some journalistic friend or chance acciuaint- ance of the place. By-and-by, he would start up suddenly, push away his paper with a jerk, waste no valediction on his interlocutor, and start forth briskly into the open air. You watched him as he disappeared, and set him down as an oddity. His hat, unconscious of brush, was set well back on his occiput, displaying a broad intellectual forehead; his nose was in the air; his keen blue-gray eyes peered out over the rim of his spectacles; his "roguish Hibernian mouth" was mobile with the mocking humor within ; his hands were thrust into his pockets, or otherwise, his right arm was clasped behind him in his left hand ; his coat, of scholarly black, was loose, threadbare, and greasy ; his shirt was buttonless, and not too white ; his face was smooth-shaven ; he stooped in figure and shambled in gait ; and he turned his head from side to side with the quick movement of some "strange old bird." If you had asked an habitual frequenter of the room who this queer personage might be, — with the air of a scholar, the cut of a cleric, and the shabby slovenry of a mendicant, — you might have been in- formed that it was no other than the Rev. Francis Mahony, French correspondent, and part proprietor of the Globe news- paper, and known wherever English letters had found their way as Father Prout, "Incumbent of Watergrasshill, in the county of Cork." EDWARD THE FIRST ^ John Richard Green In his own day and among his own subjects Edward the First was the object of an almost boundless admiration. He was in the truest sense a national King. At the moment when the last trace of foreign conquest passed away, when the de- scendants of those who won and those who lost at Senlac blended 1 From Uistory of the English People. 404 pi:rso\s forevtr into an Mnp;lish ix-oplc, Knn;kin(l saw in hrr ruler no stranger, hut an Enj^lishman. The national tradition returned in more than the golden hair or the li^ngiish name which linked him to our earlier Kings. Edward's very temper was English to the core. In good as in evil he stands out as the typical representative of the race he ruled, like them wilful and im- perious, tenacious of his rights, indomitable in his pride, dogged, stubborn, slow of apprehension, narrow in sympathy, but like them, too, just in the main, unselfish, laborious, conscientious, haughtily observant of truth and self-respect, temperate, rever- ent of duty, religious. It is this oneness with the character of his [)eople which parts the temper of Edward from what had till now been the temper of his house. He inherited indeed from the Angevins their fierce and passionate wrath ; his punish- ments, when he punished in anger, were without pity; and a priest who ventured at a moment of storm into his presence with a remonstrance drop{3ed dead from sheer fright at his feet. But his nature had nothing of the hard selfishness, the vindic- tive obstinacy which had so long characterized the house of Anjou. His wrath passed as quickly as it gathered ; and for the most part his conduct was that of an impulsive, generous man, trustful, averse from cruelty, prone to forgive. "No man ever asked mercy of me," he said in his old age, "and was refused." The rough soldierly nobleness of his nature broke out in incidents like that at Falkirk where he lay on the bare ground among his men, or in his refusal during a Welsh campaign to drink of the one cask of wine which had been saved from ma- rauders. "It is I who have brought you into this strait," he said to his thirsty fellow-soldiers, "and I will have no advantage of you in meat or drink." Beneath the stern imperiousness of his outer bearing lay in fact a strange tenderness and sensitive- ness to affection. Every subject throughout his realm was drawn closer to the King who w'ept bitterly at the news of his father's death though it gave him a crown, whose fiercest burst of vengeance was called out by an insult to his mother, whose crosses rose as memorials of his love and sorrow at every spot where his wife's bier rested. "I loved her tenderly in her life- AN ACCOUNTANT 405 time," wrote Edward to Eleanor's friend, the Abbot of Clugny ; "I do not cease to love her now she is dead." And as it was with mother and wife, so it was with his people at large. All the self-concentrated isolation of the foreign Kings disappeared in Edward. He was the fir«t English ruler since the Conquest who loved his people with a personal love and craved for their love back again. To his trust in them we owe our Parliament, to his care for them the great statutes which stand in the fore- front of our laws. Even in his struggles with her, England understood a temper which was so perfectly her own, and the quarrels between King and people during his reign are quarrels where, doggedly as they fought, neither disputant doubted for a moment the worth or affection of the other. Few scenes in our history are more touching than a scene during the long contest over the Charter, when Edward stood face to face with his people in Westminster Hall and with a sudden burst of tears owned himself frankly in the wrong. 2. Imaginary Persons AN ACCOUNTANT! Charles Lamb JoiiN TiPP neither pretended to high blood, nor in good truth cared one fig about the matter. He "thought an account- ant the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest accountant in it." Yet John was not without his hobby. The fiddle relieved his vacant hours. He sang, certainly, with other notes than to the Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, scream and scrape most abominably. His fine suite of official rooms in Threadneedle Street, which, without anything very substantial appended to them, were enough to enlarge a man's notion of himself that lived in them (I know not who is the occupier of them now), resounded fortnightly to the notes of a concert of ' From "The South-Sea House" in Essays of Elia, 4o6 PERSONS "swoct breasts," as our ancestors would have called them, culled from club-rooms, and orchestras — chorus singers — first and second violoncellos — double basses — and clarionets — who ate his cold mutton and drank, his punch and praised his ear. He sat like Lord Midas among them. But at the desk Tipp was quite another sort of figure. Thence all ideas, that were purely ornamental, were banished. You could not speak of anything romantic w'ithout rebuke. Politics were excluded. A newspaper was thought too refined and abstracted. The whole duty of man consisted in writing oti dividend warrants. The striking of the annual balance in the company's books (which, perhaps, differed from the balance of last year in the sum of 25/. 15. 6d.) occupied his days and nights for a month previous. Not that Tipp was blind to the deadness of things (as they called them in the city) in his beloved house, or did not sigh for a return of the old stirring days when South-Sea hopes were young (he was indeed equal to the wielding of any the most intricate accounts of the most flourishing company in these or those days) : but to a genuine accountant the difference of proceeds is as nothing. The fractional farthing is as dear to his heart as the thousands which stand before it. He is the true actor, who, whether his part be a prince or a peasant, must act it with like intensity. With Tipp form was everything. His Ufe was formal. His actions seemed ruled with a ruler. His pen was not less erring than his heart. He made the best executor in the world : he was plagued w'ith incessant exejcutorships accordingly, which excited his spleen and soothed his vanity in equal ratios. He would swear (for Tipp swore) at the little orphans, whose rights he would guard with a tenacity like the grasp of the dying hand that commended their interests to his protection. With all this there was about him a sort oi timidity (his few enemies used to give it a worse name) — a something which, in reverence to the dead, we will place, if you please, a little on this side of the heroic. Nature certainly had been pleased to endow John Tipp with a sufficient measure of the principle of self-preservation. There is a cowardice which we do not despise, because it has nothing base or treacherous in A PORTRAIT 407 its elements; it betrays itself, not you: it is mere tempera- ment; the absence of the romantic and the enterprising; it sees a lion in the way, and will not, with Fortinbras, "greatly find quarrel in a straw," when some supposed honor is at stake. Tipp never mounted the bor of a stage-coach in his life ; or leaned against the rails of a balcony ; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet ; or looked down a precipice ; or let off a gun ; or went upon a water-party ; or would willingly let you go if he could have helped it : neither was it recorded of him, that for lucre, or for intimidation, he ever forsook friend or principle. A PORTRAIT! John Galsworthy It is at the age of eighty that I picture him, without the vestige of a stoop, rather above middle height, of very well- proportioned figure, whose flatness of back and easy movements were the admiration of all who saw them. His iron-gray eyes had lost none of their color, they were set-in deep, so that their upper lids were invisible, and had a peculiar questioning direct- ness, apt to change suddenly into twinkles. His head was of fine shape — one did not suspect that it required a specially made hat, being a size larger than almost any other head; it was framed in very silky silvery hair, brushed in an arch across his forehead, and falling in becoming curves over the tips of his ears ; and he wore always a full white beard and moustaches, which concealed a jaw and chin of great determination cleft by a dimple. His nose had been broken in his early boyhood ; it was the nose of a thinker, broad and of noticeable shape. The color of his cheeks was a fine dry brown ; his brow very capacious, both wide and high, and endowed with a singular serenity. But it was the balance and poise of his head which commanded so much attention. In a theatre, church, concert- hall, there was never any head so fine as his, for the silvery hair 1 From A Motley. Charles Scribner's Sons. Reprinted by permission. 4o8 PERSONS and beard lent to its massiveness a curious grace and delicacy. The owner of that head could not but be endowed with force, sagacity, humor, and the sense of justice. It expressed, in- deed, his essential quality — equanimity ; for there were two men in him — he of the chin and jaw, a man of action and ten- acity, and he of the nose and brow, the man of si)eculalion and impersonality ; yet these two were so curiously balanced and blended that there was no harsh ungraceful conflict. And what made this equanimity so memorable was the fact that both his power of action and his power of speculation were of high quality. He was not a commonplace person content with a little of both. He wanted and had wanted throughout life, if one may judge by records, a good deal of both, ever demanding with one half of him strong and continuous action, and with the other half, high and clean thought and behavior. The desire for the best both in material and spiritual things remained with him through life. He felt things deeply ; and but for his strange balance, and a yearning for inward peace which never seems to have deserted him, his ship might well have gone down in tragedy. CHL\RLES CHEER YBLEi Charles Dickens Hf, was a sturdy old fellow in a broad-skirted, blue coat, made pretty large, to fit easily, and with no particular waist; his bulky legs clothed in drab breeches and high gaiters, and his head protected by a low-crowned broad-brimmed white hat, such as a wealthy grazier might wear. He wore his coat buttonless ; and his dimpled double chin rested in the folds of a white neckerchief — not one of your stifl-starched, apoplectic cravats, but a good, easy, old-fashioned white neck-cloth that a man might go to bed in and be none the worse for. But what principally attracted the attention of Nicholas was the old ' From Nicholas Nicklehy. HAROLD SKIM POLE 409 gentleman's eye, — never was such a clear, twinkling, honest, merry, happy eye as that. And there he stood, looking a little upward, with one hand thrust into the breast of his coat, and the other playing with the old-fashioned gold watch chain; his head thrown a little on one side, and his hat a little more on one side than his head (but that was evidently accident, not his ordinary way of wearing it), with such a pleasant smile play- ing about his mouth, and such a comical expression of mingled slyness, simplicity, kind-heartedness, and good humor lighting up his jolly old face that Nicholas would have been content to have stood there, and looked at him until evening, and to have forgotten, meanwhile, that there was such a thing as a soured mind or a crabbed countenance to be met with in the whole wide world. HAROLD SKIMPOLEi Charles Dickens He was a little bright creature, with a rather large head ; but a deUcate face, and a sweet voice, and there was a perfect charm in him. All he said was so free from effort and spon- taneous, and was said with such a captivating gayety, that it was fascinating to hear him talk. Being of a more slender figure than Mr. Jarndyce, and having a richer complexion, with browner hair, he looked younger. Indeed, he had more the appearance, in all respects, of a damaged young man, than a well-preserved elderly one. There was an easy negligence in his manner, and even in his dress (his hair carelessly disposed, and his neckerchief loose and flowing, as I have seen artists paint their own portraits), which I could not separate from the idea of a romantic youth who had undergone some unique process of depreciation. It struck me as being not at all like the manner or appearance of a man who had advanced in life by the usual road of years, cares, and experiences. ^ From Bleak Uouse. 4IO PERSONS MR. GEORGE' Charles Dickens He is a swarthy brown man of fifty ; well-made and good- looking ; with crisp dark hair, bright eyes, and a broad chest. His sinewy and powerful hands, as sunburnt as his face, have evidently been used to a pretty rough life. What is curious about him is, that he sits forward on his chair as if he were, from long habit, allowing space for some dress or accoutrements that he has altogether laid aside. His step too is measured and heavy, and would go well with a weighty clash and jingle of spurs. He is close-shaved now, but his mouth is set as if his upper lip had been for years familiar with a great moustache ; and his manner of occasionally laying the open palm of his broad brown hand upon it, is to the same effect. Altogether one might guess Mr. George to have been a trooper once upon a time. AUNT CLARA 2 Arnold Bennett Aunt Clara was a handsome woman. She had been called — but not by men whose manners and code she would have approved — "a damned fine Avoman." Her age was about forty-two, which at that period, in a woman's habit of mind, was the equivalent of about fifty to-day. Her latest photograph was considered to be very successful. It showed her standing behind a velvet chair and leaning her large but still shapely bust slightly over the chair. Her forearms, ruffied and braceleted, lay along the fringed back of the chair, and from one negligent hand depended a rose. A heavy curtain came downwards out of nothing into the picture, and the end of it * From Bleak House. ' From Clayhanger. E. P. Button and Company. Reprinted by permission of the author. AUNT CLARA 41 1 lay coiled and draped on the seat of the chair. The great dress was of slate-colored silk, with sleeves tight to the elbow and thence, from a ribbon bow, broadening to a wide, triangular climax that revealed quantities of lace at the wrists. The pointed cords of the sleeves were picked out with squares of velvet. A short and highly ornamental fringed and looped flounce waved grandly out behind from the waist to the level of the knees ; and the stomacher recalled the ornamentation of the flounce; and both the stomacher and the flounce gave contrasting value to the severe plainness of the skirt, designed to emphasize the quality of the silk. Round the neck was a lace collarette to match the furniture of the wrists, and the broad ends of the collarette were crossed on the bosom and held by a large jet brooch. Above that you saw a fine regular face, with a firm hard mouth and a very straight nose and dark eyebrows ; small ears weighted with heavy jet ear-rings. The photograph could not render the clear perfection of Aunt Clara's rosy skin ; she had the color and the flashing eye of a girl. But it did justice to her really magnificent black hair. This hair was all her own, and the coiffure seemed as ample as a judge's wig. From the low forehead the hair was parted exactly in the middle for about two inches ; then plaited bands crossed and re-crossed the scalp in profusion, forming behind a pattern exceedingly complicated, and down either side of the head, now behind the ear, now hiding it, now resting on the shoulder, now hanging clear of them, fell long multi- tudinous glossy curls. These curls — one of them in the pho- tograph reached as far as the stomacher — could not have been surpassed in Bursley. She was a woman of terrific vitality. Her dead sister had been nothing in comparison with her. She had a glorious diges- tion, and was the envy of her brother-in-law — who suffered much from biliousness — because she could eat with perfect impunity hot buttered toast and raw celery in large quantities. Further, she had independent means, and no children to cause anxieties. Yet she was always, as the phrase went, "bearing up," or, as another phrase went, "leaning hard." Frances 412 PERSONS Ridley Haverpal was her favorite author, and I'raiiccs Ridley Havergal's little book, Lean Hani, was kept on her dressing- table. (The girls, however, averred that she never opened it.) Aunt Clara's spiritual life must be imagined as a continual, almost ph}-sical leaning on Christ. Nevertheless she never complained, and she was seldom depressed. Her desire, and her achievement, was to be bright, to take everything cheer- fully, to look obstinately on the best side of things; and to instil this religion into others. BUD TILDEN, MAIL THIEF ^ F. HoPKiNSON Sauth "That's Bud Tilden, the worst of the bunch," said the jail warden — the warden with the sliced ear and the gorilla hands. "Reminds me of a cat'mount I tried to tame once, only he's twice as ugly." As he spoke, he pointed to a prisoner in a slouch hat clinging halfway up the steel bars of his cage, his head thrust through as far as his cheeks would permit, his legs spread apart like the letter A. "What's he here for?" I asked. "Robbin' the U-nited States mail." "Where?" "Up in the Kentucky mountains, back o' Bug Holler. Laid for the carrier one night, held him up with a gun, pulled him off his horse, slashed the bottom out o' the mail bag with his knife, took what letters he wanted, and lit off in the woods, cool as a chunk o' ice. Oh ! I tell ye, he's no sardine ; you kin see that without my tellin' ye. They'll railroad him, sure." "When was he arrested?" "Last month — come down in the November batch. The dep'ties had a circus 'fore they got the irons on him. Caught him in a clearin' 'bout two miles back o' the Holler. He was * From The Under Dog. Charles Scribner's Sons. Reprinted by permission. BUD TILDEN, MAIL-THIEF 413 up in a corn-crib with a Winchester when they opened on him. Nobody was hurted, but they would a-been if they'd showed the top o' their heads, for he's strong as a bull and kin scalp a squirrel at fifty yards. They never would a-got him if they hadn't waited till dark and smoked him out, so one on 'em told me." He spoke as if the prisoner had been a rattlesnake or a sheep-stealing wolf. The mail-thief evidently overheard, for he dropped, with a catlike movement, to the steel floor and stood looking at us through the bars from under his knit eyebrows, his eyes watch- ing our every movement. There was no question about his strength. As he stood in the glare of the overhead light I could trace the muscles through his rough homespun ■ — for he was a mountaineer, pure and simple, and not a city-bred thief in ready-made clothes. I saw that the bulging muscles of his calves had driven the wrinkles of his butternut trousers close up under the knee-joint, and that those of his thighs had rounded out the coarse cloth from the knee to the hip. The spread of his shoulders had performed a like service for his shirt, which was stretched out of shape over the chest and back. This was crossed by but one sus- pender, and was open at the throat — a tree-trunk of a throat, with all the cords supporting the head firmly planted in the shoulders. The arms were long and had the curved movement of the tentacles of a devil-fish. The hands were big and bony, the fingers knotted together with knuckles of iron. He wore no collar nor any coat ; nor did he ~bring one with him, so the Warden said. I had begun my inventory at his feet as he stood gazing sullenly at us, his great red hands tightly clasped around the bars. When in my inspection I passed from his open collar up his tree-trunk of a throat to his chin, and then to his face, half- sliaded by a big slouch hat, which rested on his flaring ears, and at last looked into his eyes, a slight shock of surprise went through me. I had been examining this wild beast with my judgment already warped by the Warden ; that's why I began at his feet and worked up. If I had started in on on unknown 4M PERSONS subject, prepared to rely entirely upon my own judgment, 1 would have begun at liis eyes and worked down. My shock of suqirise was the result of this upwartl process of inspection. An awakening of this kind, the awakening to an injustice done a man we have half understood, often comes after years of such prejudice and misunderstanding. With me this awakening came with my first glimpse of his eyes. There was nothing of the Warden's estimate in these eyes ; nothing of cruelty nor deceit nor greed. Those I looked into were a light blue — a washed-out china blue ; eyes that shone out of a good heart rather than out of a bad brain ; not very deep eyes ; not ver^' expressive eyes; dull, perhaps, but kindly. The features were none the less attractive ; the mouth was large, well-shaped, and filled with big white teeth, not one missing ; the nose straight, with wide, well-turned nostrils ; the brow low, but not cunning nor revengeful ; the chin strong and well-modelled, the cheeks full and of good color. A boy of twenty I should have said — perhaps twenty-five ; abnor- mally strong, a big animal with small brain power, perfect diges- tion, and with every- function of his body working like a clock. Photograph his head and come upon it suddenly in a collection of others, and you would have said: "A big country' bumpkin who ploughs all day and milks the cows at night." He might be the blood-thirsty ruffian, the human wild beast, the Warden had described, but he certainly did not look it. I wovdd like to have had just such a man on any one of my gangs with old Captain Joe over him. He w^ould have fought the sea with the best of them and made the work of the surf-men twice as easy if he had taken a hand at the watch tackles. I turned to the Warden again. My own summing up differed materially from his estimate, but I did not thrust mine upon him. He had had, of course, a much wider experience among criminals — I, in fact, had had none at all — and could not be deceived by out\vard appearances. A GROUP OF MOURNERS 415 A GROUP OF MOURNERS 1 Sir Walter Scott In the inside of the cottage was a scene which our Wilkie alone could have painted with the exquisite feeling of nature that characterizes his enchanting productions. The body was laid in its coffin within the wooden bedstead which the young fisher had occupied while alive. At a little distance stood the father, whose rugged, weather-beaten coun- tenance, shaded by his grizzled hair, had faced manya stormy night and night-like day. He was apparently revolving his loss in his mind with that strong feeling of painful grief, peculiar to harsh and rough characters, which almost breaks forth into hatred against the world, and all that remain in it after the beloved object is withdrawn. The old man had made the most desperate efforts to save his son, and had only been withheld by main force from renewing them at a moment when, with- out the possibility of assisting the sufferer, he must himself have perished. All this apparently was boiling in his recol- lection. His glance was directed sidelong towards the coffin, as to an object on which he could not steadfastly look, and yet from which he could not withdraw his eyes. His answers t( the necessary questions which were occasionally put to him were brief, harsh, and almost fierce. His family had not yet dared to address to him a Avord, either of sympathy or consola- tion. His masculine wife, virago as she was, and absolute mistress of the family, as she justly boasted herself, on all ordinary occasions, was, by this great loss, terrified into silence and submission, and compelled to hide from her husband's observation the bursts of her female sorrow. As he had re- jected food ever since the disaster had happened, not daring herself to approach him, she had that morning, with affectionate artifice, employed the youngest and favorite child to present her husband with some nourishment. His first action was to ' From The A utiquary. 410 PERSONS push it irom him with an an^ry violence that frit^htcncd the child; his next, to snatch u]:> the boy and devour him with kisses. " Ve'll be a bra' fallow, an ye be si)ared, Patie, — but ye '11 never — never can be — what he was to me ! — He has sailed the coble wi' me since he was ten years auld, and there wasna the like o' liim drew a net betwixt this and Buchan-ness. They say folks maun submit — I will tr>'." And he had been silent from that moment until compelled to answer the necessary questions we have already noticed. Such was the disconsolate state of the father. In another corner of the cottage, her face covered by her apron, which was flung over it, sat the mother, the nature of her grief sufficiently indicated by the wringing of her hands and the convulsive agitation of the bosom which the covering could not conceal. Two of her gossips, officiously whispering into her ear the commonplace topic of resignation under irre- mediable misfortune, seemed as if they were endeavoring to stun the grief which they could not console. The sorrow of the children was mingled with wonder at the preparations they beheld around them and at the unusual dis- play of wheaten bread and wine, which the poorest peasant, or fisher, offers to the guests on these mournful occasions ; and thus their grief for their brother's death was almost already lost in admiration of the splendor of his funeral. But the figure of the old grandmother was the most remark- able of the sorrowing group. Seated on her accustomed chair, with her usual air of apathy and want of interest in what sur- rounded her, she seemed every now and then mechanically to resume the motion of twirUng her spindle — then to look towards her bosom for the distaff, although both had been laid aside. She would then cast her eyes about as if surprised at mLssing the usual implements of her industry, and appear struck by the black color of the gown in which they had dressed her, and embarrassed by the number of persons by whom she was surrounded — then, finally, she would raise her head with a ghastly look, and fix her eyes upon the bed which contained the coffin of her grandson, as if she had at once, and for the first A GROUP OF MOURNERS 417 time, acquired sense to comprehend her inexpressible calamity. These alternate feelings of embarrassment, wonder, and grief, seemed to succeed each other more than once upon her torpid features. But she spoke not a word, neither had she shed a tear ; nor did one of the family understand, either from look or expression, to what extent she comprehended the uncommon bustle around her. Thus she sat among the funeral assembly like a connecting link between the surviving mourners and the dead corpse which they bewailed — a being in whom the light of existence was already obscured by the encroaching shadows of death. WhenOldbuck entered this house of mourning, he was received by a general and silent inclination of the head, and according to the fashion of Scotland on such occasions, wine and spirits and bread were offered round to the guests. Elspeth, as these re- freshments were presented, surprised and startled the whole company by motioning to the person who bore them to stop ; then, taking a glass in her hand, she rose up, and, as the smile of dotage played upon her shrivelled features, she pronounced, with a hollow and tremulous voice, "Wishing a' your healths, «;irs, and often may we hae such merry meetings !" All shrunk from the ominous pledge, and set down the un- tasted liquor with a degree of shuddering horror which will not surprise those who know how many superstitions are still common on such occasions among the Scottish vulgar. But as the old woman tasted the liquor, she suddenly exclaimed with a sort of shriek, "What's this? — this is wine — how should there be wine in my son's house? Ay," she continued with a suppressed groan, "I mind the sorrowful cause now," and, dropping the glass from her hand, she stood a moment gazing fixedly on the bed in which the coffin of her grandson was de- posited, and then sinking gradually into her seat, she covered her eyes and forehead with her withered and pallid hand. 2E m. G. MENTAL STATE IN THE HURRICANE ^ Joseph Conrad Jukes remained indifferent in the overpowering force of the hurricane, which made the very thought of action utterly vain. Besides, being very young, he had found the occupation of keep- ing his heart completely steeled against the worst so full of excite- ment that he had come to feel an impatient dislike towards any other form of activity whatever. The immediate peril had an atrocious side — the violence, the darkness, the uproar — which made the business of enduring it all surprisingly engrossing. He wasn't in the least scared ; he knew that very well ; and the proof of it was that, firmly believing he would never see an- other sunrise, he could be now sitting down, in a manner of speaking, as calm as possible under that belief. These are the moments of do-nothing heroics to which even good men surrender at times. Many officers of ships can no doubt recall a case in their experience when just such a trance of confounded stoicism would come all at once over a whole ship's company. The mere recollection of such a passage is enough to bring back all the original dismay. It is difficult to allude to it without ffinging swear-words backwards into the past; not precisely at the men themselves, which would be like throwing stones, but upon the unhonored memory at large. Jukes, however, had no wide experience of men or storms. He conceived himself to be calm — inexorably calm ; calm as the very statue of calmness in the night and terror of a storm. It suited him to be left alone thus, and it seemed also as though really nothing more could be required of him. But as a matter ^ From Typhoon. Doubleday, Page and Company. Reprinted by permission. 418 IN THE HURRICANE 419 of fact he was cowed ; not abjectly, but only so far as a decent man may, without becoming loathsome to himself. It was rather like a forced-on numbness of spirit. The long, long stress of a gale does it ; the suspense of the interminably culminating catastrophe; the trial of sustained violence going on endlessly, as though time itself were hurled upon one; the formidable hint of annihilation in the sweep and roar of the wind. And there is a bodily fatigue in the mere holding on to existence within the excessive tumult ; a searching and insidious fatigue that penetrates deep into a man's breast to cast down and sadden his heart, which is incorrigible, and of all the gifts of earth — even before life itself — aspires to peace. Jukes was benumbed much more than he supposed. He stood very wet, very cold, stiff in every limb, and in a momentary hallucination of swift visions (it is said a drowning man thus reviews all his life) he was run up against by memories altogether unconnected with his present situation. He remembered his father, for instance ; a worthy but fanciful business man, who, at an unfortunate crisis in his affairs, went quietly to bed and died forthwith in a state of resignation. Jukes did not recall these circumstances, of course; but, remaining otherwise un- concerned, he remembered distinctly the poor man's face, a cer- tain game of nap he played when quite a boy in Table Bay, on board a ship since lost with all hands, the thick eyebrows of his first skipper ; and, without any emotion, as he might years ago have walked listlessly into her room and seen her sitting there with a book, he remembered his mother, — dead, too, now, — the resolute woman left badly off, who had been very firm in his bringing up. It could not have lasted more than a second, perhaps not so much. A heavy arm had fallen about his shoulders ; Captain Mac Whirr's voice was speaking his name into his ear. "Jukes ! Jukes!" 4iO MENTAL STATE ON THE WIND AT NIGHT' Stewart Edward Wotte The winds were indeed abroad that night. They rattled our cabin, they shrieked in our eaves, they pufifed down our chimney, scattering the ashes and leaving in the room a balloon of smoke as though a shell had burst. When we opened the door and stepped out, after good-nights had been said, it caught at our hats and garments as though it had been lying in wait for us. To our eyes, fire-dazzled, the night seemed very dark. There would be a moon later, but at present even the stars seemed only so many pinpoints of dull metal, lustreless, without illu- mination. We felt our way to camp, conscious of the softness of grasses, the uncertainty of stones. At camp the remains of the fire crouched beneath the rating of the storm. Its embers glowed sullen and red, alternately glaring with a half-formed resolution to rebel, and dying to a sulky resignation. Once a feeble flame sprang up for an in- stant, but was immediately pounced on and beaten fiat as though by a \-igilant antagonist. W^e, stumbling, gathered again our tumbled blankets. Across the brow of the knoll lay a huge pine trunk. In its shelter we respread our bedding, and there, standing, dressed for the night. The power of the wind tugged at our loose garments, hoping for spoil. A towel, shaken by accident from the in- terior of a sweater, departed, white winged, like a bird, into the outer blackness. We found it next day caught in the bushes several hundred yards distant. Our voices as we shouted were snatched from our lips and hurled lavishly into space. The very breath of our bodies seemed driven back, so that as we faced the elements, we breathed in gasps, with diffi- culty. * From The Mountains. Doubleday, Page and Company. Reprinted by per- missioD. ON THE WIND AT NIGHT 421 Then we dropped down into our blankets. At once the pros- trate tree-trunk gave us its protection. We lay in a little back- wash of the racing winds, still as a night in June. Over us roared the battle. We felt like sharpshooters in the trenches ; as though, were we to raise our heads, at that instant we should enter a zone of danger. So we lay quietly on our backs and stared at the heavens. The first impression thence given was of stars sailing serene and unaffected, remote from the turbulence of what until this instant had seemed to fill the universe. They were as always, just as we should see them when the evening was warm and the tree-toads chirped clearly audible at half a mile. The im- portance of the tempest shrank. Then below them next we noticed the mountains ; they too were serene and calm. Immediately it was as though the storm were an hallucina- tion ; something not objective ; something real, but within the soul of him who looked upon it. It claimed sudden kinship with those blackest days when nevertheless the sun, the mere external unimportant sun, shines with superlative brilliancy. Emotions of a power to shake the foundations of life seemed vaguely to stir in answer to these their hollow symbols. For after all, we were contented at heart and tranquil in mind, and this was but the outer gorgeous show of an intense emotional experience we did not at the moment prove. Our nerves re- sponded to it automatically. We became excited, keyed to a high tension, and so lay rigid on our backs, as though fighting out the battles of our souls. It was all so unreal and yet so plain to our senses that per- force automatically Our experience had to conclude it psychical. We were in air absolutely still. Yet above us the trees writhed and twisted and turned and bent and struck back, e\idently in the power of a mighty force. Across the calm heavens the murk of flying atmosphere — I have always maintained that if you looked closely enough you could see the wind — the dim, hardly-made-out, fine debris fleeing high in the air ; — these faintly hinted at intense movement rushing down through space. A roar of sound filled the hollow of the sky. Occasion- 42 2 MENTAL STATE ally it intermitted, fallinji; abruptly in volume like the mys- terious rare hushings of a rapid stream. Then the familiar noises of a summer night became audible for the briefest instant, — a horse sneezed, an owl hooted, the wild call of birds came down the wind. And with a howl the legions of good and evil took up their warring. It was too real, and yet it was not reconcilable ^\•ith the calm of our resting-places. For hours we lay thus in all the intensity of an inner storm and stress, which it seemed could not fail to develop us, to mould us, to age us, to leave on us its scars, to bequeath us its peace or remorse or despair, as would some great mysterious dark experience direct from the sources of life. And then abruptly we were e.xhausted, as we should have been by too great emotion. We fell asleep. The morning dawned still and clear, and garnished and set in order as though such things had never been. Only our white towel fluttered like a flag of truce in the direction the mighty elements had departed. IV. NARRATIVE A. ANECDOTE IRISH PATRIOTS 1 Henry Labouchere While I was attache at Washington I was sent by the minis- ter to look after some Irish patriots at Boston. I took up my residence at a small hotel, and wrote down an imaginary name in the hotel book as mine. In the evening I went to a gambling establishment, where I lost all the money I had with me except half a dollar. Then I went to bed, satisfied with my prowess. The next morning the bailiffs seized on the hotel for debt, and all the guests were requested to pay their bills and to take away their luggage. I could not pay mine, arid so I could not take away my luggage. All that I could do was to write to Washington for a remittance, and to wait two days for its arrival. The first day I walked about, and spent my half dollar on food. It was summer, so I slept on a bench on the common, and in the morning went to the bay to wash myself. I felt independent of all the cares and troubles of civilization. But I had nothing with which to buy myself a breakfast. I grew hungry and, towards evening, more hungry still, so much so that I entered a restaurant and ordered dinner without any clear idea how I was to pay for it, except by leaving my coat in pledge. In those days Boston restaurants were mostly in cellars, and there was a bar near the door where the proprietor sat to receive payment. As I ate my dinner I observed that all the waiters, who were Irishmen, were continually staring 1 From The Life of Henry Labouchere. G. P. Putnam's Sons. Reprinted by permission. 423 4-M r NCI D EXT at me, and CN-idcntly spcakin;^ of me to each other. A guilty conscience made me think tliat this was because I had an im- pecunious look, and that they were discussing whether my clothes would cover my bill. At last one of them approached me, and said : " I beg your pardon, sir ; are you the patriot Meagher?" Now this patriot was a gentleman who had aided Smith O'Brien in his Irish rising, had been sent to Australia, and had escaped thence to the United States. It was my busi- ness to look after patriots, so I put my finger before my lips, and said: "Hush I" while I cast up my eyes to the ceiling as though I saw a vision of Erin beckoning to me. It was felt at once that I was Meagher. The choicest viands were placed before me, and most excellent wine. WTien I had done justice to all the good things I approached the bar and asked boldly for my bill. The proprietor, also an Irishman, said: "From a man like you, who has suffered in the good cause, I can take no money ; allow a brother patriot to shake you by the hand." I allowed him. I further allowed all the waiters to shake hands with me, and stalked forth with the stern, resolved, but some- what condescendingly dismal air which I have seen assumed bv patriots in exile. Again I slept on the Common, again I washed in the bay. Then I went to the post-office, found a letter for me from Washington with some money in it, and breakfasted. IV. B. INCIDENT THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINE ^ Joseph Husband I w.\s sitting on the edge of the bed, loosening the heel of one of my rubber boots \\-ith the toe of the other, when sud- denly, through the stillness of the sleeping town, from the power- house half a mile away, came a low and rising note, the great siren whistle in the power-house. Almost fascinated, I listened ' From A Year in a Coal-mine. Houghton, Miffin and Company. Reprinted by permission. THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINE 425 as the great note rose higher and more shrill and died away again. One blast meant a fire in the town ; two blasts, fire in the buildings at the mine ; and three blasts, the most terrible of all, a disaster or trouble in the mine. Once more, after an interminable pause, the sound came again ; and once more rose and died away. I did not move, but there was a sudden cold- ness that came over me as once more, for the third time, the deep note broke out on the quiet air. Almost instantaneously the loud jingle of my telephone brought me to my feet. I took down' the receiver: "The mine's blown up," said a woman's voice. It was half a mile between my room and the gate to the mine-yards, and as my feet beat noisily on the long, straight road, doors opened, yellow against the blackness of the night, and voices called out — women's voices mostly. The gate-man knew little. "She's let go," was all that he could say. There were two men at the fan-house, the fan engineer and his assistant,. ..and in a second I learned from them that there had come a sudden puff up the air-shaft that had spun the fan backward a dozen revolutions on the belt before it picked up again. The explosion doors, built for such an emergency on the new dome above the air-shaft, had banged open noisily and . shut again of their own weight. That was all. There were half a dozen men at the top of the hoisting-shaft. The hoisting engineer sat, white faced, on his seat by the shaft- mouth, one arm laid limply on the window-sill, his hand clenched on the lever. "I tried to telephone 'em," he said, "but they didn't answer. The cage was down. She came out with a puff like you blow out of your pipe ; that's all." He stopped and awkwardly wiped his face. "Then I left the hoist down five minutes and brought her up," he continued, "but there was no one in it. Then I sent it down again. It's down there now." "How long has it been down ? " I asked. "Ten minutes," he hazarded. I gave him the order to hoist ; and the silence was suddenly broken by the grind of the drums as he pulled the lever back, and the cable began to wind slowly upward. A minute later 426 INCIDENT the black toj) of the hoist pushed iq) from the hole, and the decks, one by one, appeared — all empty. There was no one at the mine except the hoisting engineer and some of the night force who were on duty at the power- house and in the engine-room. In the long months of trouble our force had gradually diminished, and of those who had re- mained and who were equal to such an emergency, part were now in the mine, and the rest, worn out and exhausted by the long day's work, were far away in the town, asleep ; or perhaps, if the whistle had aroused them, on their way to the mine. Instant action was necessary, for following an explosion comes the after-damp, and if any were living, this poisonous gas would destroy them. As I turned from the shaft mouth, McPherson, the super- intendent, a square-built, freckled Scotsman about fifty years of age, came running toward the warehouse. There were but two hehnets ready, for so favorably had our work progressed that we had neglected to keep more than two charged with oxygen, and had allowed the rest to be taken apart for repairs. Familiar with the conditions existing in the mine, we realized that the explosion, however slight, must have blown down many of the stoppings which we had erected, and allowed the pent-up gas to rush back into the portion of the mine which we had recovered, and in which the night shift was now imprisoned. If the gas had been ignited by open fire, immediate action was necessary, for our own safety as well as for the chance of rescu- ing the men in the mine ; for in the month preceding we had seen the mine ''repeat" at regular intervals with two explosions, and if the fire had been ignited from open flame, we must enter it, effect the rescue of our comrades, and escape before we could be caught by a second explosion. On the other hand, the chances were equal that the explosion might have been set off by a defective gauze in a safety lamp or some other cause, and that there would be no immediate explosion following the first one. In the hurry of adjusting our helmets, no one noticed that the charge of oxygen in mine was short, and that an hour and THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINE 427 forty minutes was my working limit; and all unconscious of this, I tightened the valve, and with the oxygen hissing in the check-valves, we left the bright light of the room, and felt our way down the steps into the darkness of the yard, where a great arc-light above the hoisting-shaft made objects visible in its lavender light. A crowd had already gathered ; a dark, silent crowd that stood like a flock of frightened sheep around the mouth of the man-hoist. With a man on either side of us to direct us, we walked to the hoist, our electric hand-lanterns throwing long white beams of light before us. There was no sound ; no shrieking of women, no struggling of frenzied mothers or sisters to fight their way into the mine ; but there was a more awful silence, and. as we passed a pile of ties, I heard a whimper- ing noise, like a puppy, and in the light of my lamp saw the doubled form of a woman who crouched alone on the ground, a shawl drawn over her head, sobbing. We stepped on the hoist, and for an instant there came the picture of a solid line of people who hung on the edge of the light; of white faces; of the lavender glare of the arc-lamp, contrasting with the oratUge light from the little square window in the house of the hoisting engineer. "Are you ready?" he called to us. "Let her go," we said ; and the picture was gone as the hoist sank into the blackness of the shaft. We said nothing as we were lowered, for we knew where the men would be if we could reach them, and there was nothing else to talk about. The grind of the shoes on the hoist as they scraped the rails made a sound that drowned out my feeble whistling of the Merry Widow waltz inside of my helmet. We felt the motion of our descent slacken, and then came a sudden roaring splash as the lower deck of the hoist hit the water which filled the sump. Slowly we sank down until the water which flooded that part of the mine rose, cold and dead, to our knees, and the hoist came to a stop. Splashing clumsily over the uneven floor, we climbed the two steps which led to the higher level of B entry, and for a minute turned the white beams of our lights in every direction. There was nothing to be seen, and no trace of any explosion except a thin, white layer 42S IXCIDKXT of dead mist or smoke wliich hunf; lifeless, like cigar-smoke in a quiet room, about four feet from the ground ; but there was a silence that was terrible, for in it we listened in vain for the voices of men. At first we assured ourselves that there was no one around the bottom of the shaft, for we had expected that some one, injured by tlie explosion, might have been able to crawl toward the man-hoist; but there was no trace of any human being. \\'alking slowly and peering before us through the bull's-eyes of our helmets, to right and left, w^e advanced down the entry, our lights cutting the blackness like the white fingers of twin searchlights. Suddenly, far oflf in the darkness, there came a sound. It was laughter. We stopped and listened. High, shrill, and mad, the notes caught our ears. Again we advanced, and the laughter broke into a high, shrill song. To right and left we swung the bars of our searchlights, feeling for the voice. Suddenly the white light brought out of the darkness a tangled mass of blackened timbers which seemed to fill the entry, and into the light from the pile of wreckage staggered the figure of a man, his clothes hanging in sooty ribbons, and his face and body blackened beyond recognition. Only the whites of his eyes seemed to mark him from the wreckage which surrounded him. In a high-pitched voice he called to us, and we knew that he was mad. "Come ! Come !" he cried. "Let's get out of here. Come on, boys! Let's go somewhere"; and then, as his arms instinctively caught our necks, and we felt for his waist, he began talking to Jesus. With our swaying burden, we turned and retraced our steps down the entry, and fifteen minutes after our descent into the mine, we handed out of the hoist the first man rescued, to his friends. Once more came the vision of the great black wall of people in the Ughts at the mine-mouth, and again we plunged down into the blackness and silence of the mine. Reaching bottom, we walked as rapidly as we were able beyond the point where we had found the madman, to where the great structure of the scale-house had once filled a cross-cut between B entry and the air-course behind it. Where once had been solid timbers and THE TRAGEDY OF THE MINE 429 the steel structure of the scales, now remained nothing but the bare walls of the cross-cut, swept clean by a giant force, and in the entry the crumbled and twisted wreckage marked where the force of the explosion had dropped it in its course. With a swing of my light I swept the floor of the cross-cut. Halfway down it, on the floor, lay what seemed to be a long bundle of rags. I knew it was a man. There was no movement as I walked toward it, and as I knelt over it a sudden impulse came to me to disbelieve my first thought that this could be a man. Prevented from seeing clearly by the bull's-eye of my helmet and the poor light of my electric lamp, I felt for his chest,- and as my hand touched his breast, I felt that it was warm and wet. Perhaps he was alive. I ran my light along the bundle. Those were his feet. I turned it the other way. The man was headless. Instantly I got to my feet, and in the faint glimmer of McPherson's hght I saw that he had found some- thing in the wreckage. "What is it?" I bellowed to him through my helmet. He pointed with his ray of light. A body hung in the mass of wreckage, thrown into it like putty against a screen. We turned and continued our way up the entry. Halfway between the shafts there was a temporary canvas stopping, and we knew that if we could tear this down, the air from the fan which had been speeded up must short-circuit, and pass through B entry, clearing out the after-damp before it. Most of the men, if not all, would be in this entry ; of that we were confident. By 'tearing down the brattice and freeing the direction of the ventilation, life might be saved. As I have said, I had entered the mine on my first trip with a short charge of oxygen, and in the urgency had failed to re- plenish it before going down the second time. As I turned from the cross-cut a sudden tugging at my lungs told me that my air was running low. Beside the track, in a pool of water, lay a blackened object that I knew to be a man. He was the only one I recognized, and I knew that it must be Daman, one of the gas inspectors, — the body was so small. A few feet beyond him lay another, and another, all blackened and un- 43© INCIDENT recognizable. The white wall of the brattice gleamed suddenly before us, and in a second we had torn it from its fastenings. One side had already disapiK'ared from the force of the explosion. Why it was not all torn to ribbons, I do not know. As I turned, I called to McPherson that I was in, and as I spoke a sudden blackness engulfed me. My air was gone. The sights of that awful night and the long strain of the months of dangerous work on high-strung nerves had caught me. I came to with my eyes closed, and a clean, sweet taste of fresh air in my mouth. I thought I was above ground, but opening my "eyes I saw that I was looldng through the bull's eye of my helmet at a blackened roof, dim in the single shaft of a lamp. McPherson was talking to me. He had dragged me from where I lay to where he had felt the air blow strongest. My weight, increased by the forty-five pounds of the helmet, made it im- possible for him to think of moving me unaided. There was no time to summon assistance. In the strong current of air, he had opened my valves and trusted that, revived by the fresh air, I could reach the hoisting-shaft under my own locomotion before the after-damp could overcome me. Faint and reeling, I got to my feet ; we started down the entry, our arms about each other's necks. We were both staggering, and halfway to the sump I fell. Then we crawled and rested and crawled again. I think I remember splashing in the water at the foot of the hoisting shaft, but nothing more. We had saved only one man of the twenty-seven who had entered the mine. AN ELEPHANT HUNT ^ Theodore Roosevelt For two days after reaching our camp in the open glade on the mountain side it rained. We were glad of this, because it meant that the elephants would not be in the bamboos, and Cuninghame and the 'Ndorobo went off to hunt for fresh signs, ' From African Game Trails. Charles Scribner's Sons. Reprinted by permission. AN ELEPHANT HUNT 43I Cuninghame is as skilful an elephant hunter as can be found in Africa, and is one of the very few white men able to help even the wild bushmen at their work. By the afternoon of the second day they were fairly well satisfied as to the whereabouts of the quarry. The following morning a fine rain was still falling when Cuninghame, Heller, and I started on our hunt; but by noon it had stopped. Of course we went in single file and on foot ; not even a bear hunter from the cane-brakes of the lower Mis- sissippi could ride through that forest. We left our home camp standing, taking blankets and a coat and change of under- clothing for each of us, and two small Whymper tents, with enough food for three days ; I also took my wash kit and a book from the Pigskin Library. First marched the 'Ndorobo guides, each with his spear, his blanket round his shoulders, and a little bundle of corn and sweet-potato. Then came Cuninghame, followed by his gun-bearer. Then I came, clad in khaki-colored flannel shirt and khaki trousers buttoning down the legs, with hobnailed shoes and a thick slouch hat ; I had intended to wear rubber-soled shoes, but the soaked ground was too slippery. My two gun-bearers followed, carrying the Holland and the Springfield. Then came Heller, at the head of a dozen porters and skinners ; he and they were to fall behind when we actually struck fresh elephant spoor, but to follow our trail by the help of a Dorobo who was left with them. For three hours our route lay along the edge of the woods. We climbed into and out of deep ravines in which groves of tree- ferns clustered. We waded through streams of swift water, whose course was broken by cataract and rapid. We passed through shambas, and by the doors of little hamlets of thatched beehive huts. We met flocks of goats and hairy, fat-tailed sheep guarded by boys ; strings of burden-bearing women stood meekly to one side to let us pass ; parties of young men sauntered by, spear in hand. Then we struck into the great forest, and in an instant the sun was shut from sight by the thick screen of wet foliage. It was a riot of twisted vines, interlacing the trees and bushes ^^2 I NCI DE. XT Only the elephant paths, which, of every age, crossed and re- crossed it hither and thither, made it passable. One of the chief difficulties in hunting elephants in the forest is that it is impos- sible to travel, except very slowly and wath much noise, off these trails, so that it is sometimes very difficult to take advantage of the wind ; and although the sight of the elephant is dull, both its sense of hearing and its sense of smell are exceedingly acute. Hour after hour we worked our way onward through tangled forest and matted jungle. There was little sign of bird or animal life. A troop of long-haired black-and-white monkeys bounded away among the tree-tops. Here and there brilliant flowers lightened the gloom. We ducked under vines and climbed over fallen timber. Poisonous nettles stung our hands. We were drenched by the wet boughs w'hich we brushed aside. Mosses and ferns grew rank and close. The trees were of strange kinds. There were huge trees with little leaves, and small trees with big leaves.' There were trees with bare, fleshy limbs, that writhed out through the neighboring branches, bearing sparse clusters of large frondage. In places the forest w^as low, the trees thirty or forty feet high, the bushes that choked the ground between, fifteen or twenty feet high. In other places mighty monarchs of the wood, straight and tall, towered aloft to an immense height ; among them were trees whose smooth, round boles w'ere spotted like sycamores, while far above our heads their gracefully spreading branches were hung with vines like mistletoe and draped with Spanish moss ; trees whose surfaces were corrugated and knotted as if they were made of bundles of great creepers ; and giants whose buttressed trujiks were four times a man's length across. Twice we got on elephant spoor, once of a single bull, once of a party of three. Then Cuninghame and the 'Ndorobo redoubled their caution. They would minutely examine the fresh dung ; and above all they continually tested the wind, scanning the tree tops and lighting matches to see from the smoke what the eddies were near the ground. Each time after an hour's stealthy stepping and crawling along the twisted trail a slight shift of the wind in the almost still air gave our scent to the game, AN ELEPHANT HUNT 433 and away it went before we could catch a glimpse of it ; and we resumed our walk. The elephant paths led up hill and down — for the beasts are wonderful climbers — and wound in and out in every direction. They were marked by broken branches and the splintered and shattered trunks of the smaller trees, espe- cially where the elephant had stood and fed, trampling down the bushes for many yards around. Where they had crossed the marshy valleys they had punched big round holes, three feet deep in the sticky mud. As evening fell we pitched camp by the side of a little brook at the bottom of a ravine, and dined ravenously on bread, mutton, and tea. The air was keen, and under our blankets we slept in comfort until dawn. Breakfast was soon over and camp struck ; and once more we began our cautious progress through the dim, cool archways of the mountain forest. Two hours after leaving camp we came across the fresh trail of a small herd of perhaps ten or fifteen elephant cows and calves, but including two big herd bulls. At once we took up the trail. Cuninghame and his bush people consulted again and again, scanning every track and mark with minute attention. The sign showed that the elephants had fed in the shambas early in the night, had then returned to the mountain, and stood in one place resting for several hours, and had left this sleeping ground some time before we reached it. After we had followed the trail a short while we made the experiment of trying to force our own way through the jungle, so as to get the wind more favorable; but our progress was too slow and noisy, and we returned to the path the elephants had beaten. Then the 'Ndorobo was ahead, travelling noiselessly and at speed. One of them was clad in a white blanket, and another in a red one, which were conspicuous ; but they were too silent and cautious to let the beasts see them, and could tell exactly where they were and what they were doing by the sounds. When these trackers waited for us they would appear before us like ghosts ; once one of them dropped down from the branches above, having chmbed a tree with monkey-like agility to get a glimpse of the great game. 434 INCIDENT At last wc could hear the elephants, and under Cuninghame's lead we walked more cautiously than ever. The wind was right, and the trail of one elephant led close alongside that of the rest of the herd, and parallel thereto. It was about noon. The elephants moved slowly, and we listened to the boughs crack, and now and then to the curious internal rumblings of the great beasts. Carefully, every sense on the alert, we kept pace with them. My double-barrel was in my hands, and wherever pos- sible, as I followed the trail, I stepped in the huge footprints of the elephant, for where such a weight had pressed there were no sticks left to crack under my feet. It made our veins thrill thus for half an hour to creep stealthily along, but a few rods from the herd, never able to see it, because of the extreme dense- ness of the cover, but always hearing first one and then another of its members, and always trying to guess what each might do, and keeping ceaselessly ready for whatever might befall, A flock of hornbills flew up with noisy clamor, but the elephants did not heed them. At last, we came in sight of the mighty game. The trail took a twist to one side, and there, thirty yards in front of us, we made out part of the gray and massive head of an elephant resting his tusks on the branches of a young tree. A couple of minutes passed before, by cautious scrutiny, we were able to tell whether the animal was a cow or a bull, and whether, if a bull, it carried heavy enough tusks. Then we saw that it was a big bull with good ivory. It turned its head in my direc- tion and I saw its eye ; and I fired a little to one side of the eye, at a spot which I thought would lead to the brain. I struck exactly where I aimed, but the head of an elephant is enormous and the brain is small, and the bullet missed it. How^ever, the shock momentarily stunned the beast. He stumbled forward, half falling, and as he recovered I fired with the second barrel, again aiming for the brain. This time the bullet sped true, and as I lowered the rifle from my shoulder, I saw the great lord of the forest come crashing to the ground. But at that very instant, before there was a moment's time in which to reload, the thick bushes parted immediately on my left AN ELEPHANT HUNT . 435 front, and through them surged the vast bulk of a charging bull elephant, the matted mass of tough creepers snapping like packthread before his rush. He was so close that he could have touched me with his trunk. I leaped to one side and dodged behind a tree trunk, opening the rifle, throwing out the empty shells, and slipping in two cartridges. Meanwhile Cuninghame fired right and left, at the same time throwing himself into the bushes on the other side. Both his bullets went home, and the bull stopped short in his charge, wheeled, and immediately disappeared in the thick cover. We ran forward, but the forest had closed over his wake. We heard him trumpet shrilly, and then all sounds ceased. The 'Ndorobo, who had quite properly disappeared when this second bull charged, now went forward and soon returned with the report that he had fled at speed, but was evidently hard hit, as there was much blood on the spoor. If we had been only after ivory we should have followed him at once : but there was no telling how long a chase he might lead us ; and as we desired to save the skin of the dead elephant entire, there was no time whatever to spare. It is a formidable task, occupying many days, to preserve an elephant for mounting in a museum, and if the skin is to be properly saved, it must be taken off without an hour's unnecessary delay. So back we turned to where the dead tusker lay, and I felt proud indeed as I stood by the immense bulk of the slain monster and put my hand on the ivory. The tusks weighed a hundred and thirty pounds the pair. There was the usual scene of joyful excitement among the gun-bearers — who had behaved excel- lently — and among the wild bush people who had done the tracking for us ; and, as Cuninghame had predicted, the old Masai Dorobo, from pure delight, proceeded to have hysterics on the body of the dead elephant. The scene was repeated when Heller and the porters appeared half an hour later. Then, chattering like monkeys, and as happy as possible, all, porters, gun-bearers, and 'Ndorobo alike, began the work of skinning and cutting up the quarry, under the leadership and supervision of Heller and Cuninghame, and soon they were all splashed with 430 INCIDENT blood from head to foot. One of the trackers took off his blanket and squatted stark naked inside the carcass the better to use his knife. Each laborer rewarded himself by cutting off strips of meat for his private store, and hung them in red festoons from the branches round about. There was no let up in the work until it was stopped by darkness. Our tents were pitched in a small open glade a hundred yards from the dead elephant. The night was clear, the stars shone brightly, and in the west the young moon hung just above the line of tall tree tops. Fires were speedily kindled and the men sat around them, feasting and singing in a strange minor tone until late in the night. The flickering light left them at one moment in black obscurity, and the next brought into bold relief their sinewy crouching figures, their dark faces, gleam- ing eyes, and flashing teeth. When they did sleep, two of the 'Ndorobo slept so close to the fire as to burn themselves; an accident to which they are prone, judging from the many scars of old bums on their legs. I toasted slices of elephant's heart on a pronged stick before the fire, and found it delicious; for I was hungry, and the night was cold. We talked of our success and exulted over it, and made our plans for the morrow ; and then we turned in under our blankets for another night's sleep. IV. C. BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY JEANNE D'ARC^ John Richard Green Jeanne D'Arc was the child of a laborer of Domremy, a little village in the neighborhood of Vaucouleurs on the borders of Lorraine and Champagne. Just without the cottage where she was born began the great woods of the Vosges where the children of Domremy drank in poetry and legend from fairy ring and haunted well, hung their flower garlands on the sacred trees, and sang songs to the "good people" who might not drink of the fountain because of their sins. Jeanne loved the forest ; its birds and beasts came lovingly to her at her childish call. But at home men saw nothing in her but "a good girl, simple and pleasant in her ways," spinning and sewing by her mother's side while the other girls went to the fields, tender to the poor and sick, fond of church, and listening to the church-bell with a dreamy passion of delight which never left her. This c|uiet life was broken by the storm of war as it at last came home to Domremy. As the outcasts and wounded passed by the little village, the young peasant girl gave them her bed and nursed them in their sickness. Her whole nature summed itself up in one absorbing passion: she "had pity," to use the phrase forever on her lip, "on the fair realm of France." As her passion grew she recalled old prophecies that a maid from the Lorraine border should save the land ; she saw visions ; St. Michael appeared to her in a flood of blinding light, and bade her go to the help of the King and restore to him his realm. "Messire," answered the girl, "I am but a poor maiden; I know not how to ride to the wars, or to lead men-at-arms." ' From History of the English People. 437 438 BIOGRAPHY AXD AUTOBIOGRAPHY The archangel returned to give her courage, and to tell her ol " the pity" that there was in heaven for the fair realm of France. The girl wept and longed that the angels who appeared to her would carry her away, but her mission was clear. It was in vain that her father when he heard her purpose swore to drown her ere she should go to the field with men-at-arms. It was in vain that the priest, the wise people of the village, the captain of Vaucouleurs, doubted and refused to aid her. "I must go to the King," persisted the peasant girl, "even if I wear my limbs to the very knees." "I had far rather rest and spin by my mother's side," she pleaded with a touching pathos, "for this is no work of my choosing, but I must go and do it, for my Lord wills it." "And who," they asked, "is your Lord?" "He is God." Words such as these touched the rough captain at last : he took Jeanne by the hand and swore to lead her to the King. She reached Chinon in the opening of March, but here too she found hesitation and doubt. The theologians proved from their books that they ought not to believe her. "There is more in God's book than in yours," Jeanne answered simply. At last Charles himself received her in the midst of a throng of nobles and soldiers. "Gentle Dauphin," said the girl, "my name is Jeanne the Maid. The Heavenly King sends me to tell you that you shall be anointed and crowned in the town of Rheims, and you shall be lieutenant of the Heavenly King who is the King of France." Orleans had already been driven by famine to offers of sur- render when Jeanne appeared in the French court, and a force was gathering under the Count of Dunois at Blois for a final effort at its relief. It was at the head of this force that Jeanne placed herself. The girl was in her eighteenth year, tall, finely formed, with all the vigor and activity of her peasant rearing, able to stay from dawn to nightfall on horseback without meat or drink. As she mounted her charger, clad in white armor from head to foot, with a great white banner studded with fleur-de-lys waving over her head, she seemed "a thing wholly di\ine, whether to see or hear." The ten thousand men-at-arms who followed her from Blois, rough plunderers whose only JEANNE D'ARC 439 prayer was that of La Hire, "Sire Dieu, I pray you to do for La Hire what La Hire would do for you, were you captain-at- arms and he God," left off their oaths and foul Hving at her word and gathered round the altars on their march. Her shrewd peasant humor helped her to manage the wild soldiery, and her followers laughed over their camp-fires at an old warrior who had been so puzzled by her prohibition of oaths that she suffered him still to swear by his baton. For in the midst of her enthu- siasm her good sense never left her. The people crowded round her as she rode along, praying her to work miracles, and bringing crosses and chaplets to be blest by her touch. "Touch them yourself," she said to an old Dame Margaret ; "your touch will be just as good as mine." But her faith in her mission remained as firm as ever. "The Maid prays and requires you," she wrote to Bedford, "to work no more distraction in France but to come in her company to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the Turk." "I bring you," she told Dunois when he sallied out of Orleans to meet her after her two days' march from Blois, "I bring you the best aid ever sent to any one, the aid of the King of Heaven." The besiegers looked on overawed as she entered Orleans, and riding round the walls, bade the people shake off their fear of the forts which surrounded them. Her enthusiasm drove the hesitating generals to engage the handful of besiegers, and the enormous disproportion of forces at once made itself felt. Fort after fort was taken until only the strongest remained, and then the council of war resolved to adjourn the attack. "You have taken your counsel," replied Jeanne, "and I take mine." Placing herself at the head of the men-at-arms, she ordered the gates to be thrown open, and led them against the fort. Few as they were, the English fought desperately, and the Maid, who had fallen wounded while endeavoring to scale its walls, was borne into a vineyard, while Dunois sounded the retreat. "Wait a while!" the girl imperiously pleaded, "eat and drink ! so soon as my standard touches the wall you shall enter the fort." It touched, and the assailants burst in. On the next day the siege was abandoned, and on the eighth of May the force which had conducted it withdrew in good order to the north. 440 BIOGRAl'IIY AM) AUTOBIOGRAPHY In the midst of lu-r triumph Jeanne still remained the pure, tender-hearted peasant girl of the Vosges. Her hrst visit as she entered Orleans was to the great church, and there, as she knelt at mass, she wept in such a passion of devotion that "all the people wept with her." Her tears burst forth afresh at her first sight of bloodshed and of the corpses strewn over the l)attle- field. She grew frightened at her first w^ound, and only threw otlf the touch of womanly fear when she heard the signal for retreat. Yet more womanly was the purity with which she passed through the brutal warriors of a mediaeval camp. It was her care for her honor which led her to clothe herself in a soldier's dress. She wept hot tears when told of the foul taunts of the English, and called passionately to God to witness her chastity. "Yield thee, yield thee, Glasdale," she cried to the English warrior whose insults had been foulest as he fell wounded at her feet, ''you called me harlot ! I have great pity on your soul." But all thought of herself was lost in the thought of her mission. It was in vain that the French generals strove to remain on the Loire. Jeanne was resolute to complete her task, and while the English remained panic-stricken around Paris she brought Charles to march upon Rheims, the old crowning-place of the Kings of France. Troyes and Chalons submitted as she reached them, Rheims drove out the English garrison and threw open her gates to the king. With his coronation the Maid felt her errand to be over. "O gentle King, the pleasure of God is done," she cried, as she flung herself at the feet of Charles and asked leave to go home. "Would it were His good wdll," she pleaded with the Arch- bishop as he forced her to remain, "that I might go and keep sheep once more wth my sisters and my brothers : they would be so glad to see me again!" But the poUcy of the French Court detained her while the cities of the North of France opened their gates to the newly-consecrated King. Bedford, however, who had been left without money or men, had now received re- inforcements. Excluded as Cardinal Beaufort had been from the Council by Gloucester's intrigues, he poured his wealth without stint into the exhausted treasury till his loans to the JEANNE D'ARC 44 1 Crown reached the sum of half-a-miUion ; and at this crisis he unscrupulously diverted an army which he had levied at his own cost for a crusade against the Hussites in Bohemia to his nephew's aid. The tide of success turned again. Charles, after a repulse before the walls of Paris, fell back behind the Loire ; while the towns on the Oise submitted anew to the Duke of Burgundy, whose more active aid Bedford had bought by the cession of Champagne. In the struggle against Duke Philip Jeanne fought with her usual bravery but with the fatal con- sciousness that her mission was at an end, and during the de- fence of Compiegne in the May of 1430 she fell into the power of the Bastard of Vendome, to be sold by her captor into the hands of the Duke of Burgundy and by the Duke into the hands of the English. To the English her triumphs were victories of sorcery, and after a year's imprisonment she was brought to trial on a charge of heresy before an ecclesiastical court with the Bishop of Beauvais at its head. Throughout the long process which followed every art was used to entangle her in her talk. But the simple shrewdness of the peasant girl foiled the efforts of her judges. "Do you believe," they asked, " that you are in a state of grace ?" "If I am not," she repHed, "God will put me in it. If I am, God will keep me in it." Her capture, they argued, showed that God had forsaken her. " Since it has pleased God that I should be taken," she answered meekly, "it is for the best." "Will you submit," they demanded at last, "to the judgment of the Church MiHtant?" "I have come to the King of France," Jeanne replied, "by commission from God and from the Church Triumphant above: to that Church I submit." "I had far rather die," she ended passionately, " than renounce what I have done by my Lord's command." They deprived her of mass. "Our Lord can make me hear it without your aid," she said, weeping. "Do your voices," asked the judges, "forbid you to submit to the Church and the Pope ? " "Ah, no ! our Lord first served." Sick, and deprived of all religious aid, it was no wonder that as the long trial dragged on and question followed question, Jeanne's firmness wavered. On the charge of sorcery and dia- 442 BIOGRAPHY AM) AUTOBIOGRAPHY bolical possession she still appealed firinly to God. "I hold to my Judge," she said, as her earthly judges gave sentence against her, "to the King of Heaven and Ivirth. God has always been my Lord in all that I have done. The d ,-vil has never had power o\er me." It was only with a view to be delivered from the military prison and transferred to the prisons of the Church that she consented to a formal abjuration of heresy. She feared in fact among the soldiery those outrages to her honor, on guard against which she had from the first assumed the dress of a man. In the eyes of the Church her dress was a crime and she abandoned it ; Init a renewed affront forced her to resume the one safeguard left her, and the return to it was treated as a relapse into heresy which doomed her to death. At the close of May, 143 1, a great pile was raised in the market-place of Rouen where her statue now stands. Even the brutal soldiers who snatched the hated "witch" from the hands of the clergy and hurried her to her doom were hushed as she reached the stake. One indeed passed to her a rough cross he had made from a stick he held, and she clasped it to her bosom. As her eyes ranged over the city from the lofty scaffold she was heard to murmur, "0 Rouen, Rouen, I have great fear lest you suffer for my death." "Yes! my voices were of God ! " she suddenly cried as the last moment came; "they have never deceived me!" Soon the flames reached her, the girl's head sank on her breast, there was one cry of "Jesus !" — "We are lost," an English soldier muttered as the crowd broke up; "we have burned a Saint," GOING INTO BUSINESS 1 Jacob A. Rus Somewhat suddenly and quite unexpectedly, a business career opened for me that winter. Once I had tried to crowd into it uninvited, but the result was not good. It was when ' From The Making of an American. The Macmillan Company, 1901. Reprinted by permission. GOING INTO BUSINESS 443 I had observed that, for the want of the window reflectors which were much in use in the old country, American ladies were at a disadvantage in their homes in not being able to make out undesirable company at a distance, themselves unseen, and conveniently forgetting that they were "in." This civilizing agency I set about supplying forthwith. I made a model and took it to a Yankee business man, to whom I explained its use. He listened attentively, took the model, and said he had a good mind to have me locked up for infringing the patent laws of other lands ; but because I had sinned from ignorance he would refrain. His manner was so impressive that he really made me uneasy lest I had broken some kind of a law I knew not of. From the fact that not long after -window reflectors began to make their appearance in Buffalo, I infer that, whatever the enactment, it did not apply to natives, or else that he was a very fearless man, willing to take the risk from which he would save me — a sort of commercial philanthropist. However, by that time I had other things to think of, being a drummer and a very energetic one. It came about in this way : some countrymen of mine had started a cooperative furniture-factory in Jamestown, where there were water-power and cheap lumber. They had no capital, but just below was the oil country, where everybody had money, slathers of it. New wells gushed every day, and boom towns were springing up all along the Alleghany Valley. Men were streaming into it from everywhere, and needed furniture. If once they got the grip on that country, reasoned the furniture- makers, they would get rich quickly with the rest. The thing was to get it. To do that they needed a man who could talk. Perhaps they remembered the creation of the world the year before. At all events, they sent up to Buffalo and asked me if I would try. I slammed my tool-box shut and started for Jamestown on the next train. Twenty-four hours later saw me headed for the oil country, equipped with a mighty album and a price-list. The album contained pictures of the furniture T had for sale. All the way down I studied the price-list, and when I reached 444 BIOGRAPHY A\D AUTOBIOGRAPHY Titusville I knew to a cent what it cost my employers per foot to make ash extension tables. I only wish they had known half as well. M\' first customer was a grumpy old shopkeeper who needed neither tables nor bedsteads, so he said. But I had thought it all over and made up my mind that the first blow was half the battle. Therefore I knew better. I pushed my album under his nose, and it fell open at the extension tables. Cheap, I said, and rattled off the price. I saw him prick up his ears, but he only growled that probably they were no good. What ! my extension tables no good ? I dared him to try them, and he gave me an order for a dozen, but made me sign an agreement that they were to be every way as represented. I would have backed my tables with an order for the whole shop, so sure was I that they could not be beaten. The idea ! With the fit of righteous indignation upon me, I went out and sold every other furniture-dealer in Titusxdlle a bill of tables ; not one of them escaped. At night, when I had sent the order home, I set out for Oil City, so as to lose no valuable time. It was just the same there. For some reason they were sus- picious of the extension tables, yet they wanted nothing else. I had to give ironclad guarantees that they were as represented, which I did impatiently enough. There was a thunderstorm raging at the time. The lightning had struck a tank, and the burning oil ran down a hill and set the town on fire. One end of it was burning while I was canvassing the other, mentally calculating how many extension tables would be needed to re- place those that were lost. People did not seem to have heard of any other kind of furniture in that country. Walnut bed- steads, marble- top bureaus, turned washstands — they passed them all by to fall upon the tables \\*ith shrill demand. I made out their case to suit the facts, as I swept down through that region, scattering extension tables right and left. It was the excitement, I reasoned, the inrush of population from every- where ; probably everybody kept boarders, more every day ; had to extend their tables to seat them. I saw a great oppor- tunity and resolutely grasped it. If it was tables they wanted, GOING INTO BUSINESS 445 tables it should be. I let all the rest of the stock go and threw myself on the tables exclusively. Town after town I filled with them. Night after night the mails groaned under the heavy orders for extension tables I sent north. From Alleghany City alone an order of a thousand dollars' worth from a single repu- table dealer went home, and I figured in my note-book that night a commission of fifty dollars for myself plus my salary. I could know nothing of the despatches that were hot on my trail ever since my first order came from Titusville, telling me to stop, let up on the tables, come home, anything ; there was a mistake in the price. They never overtook me. My pace was too hot for that. Anyhow, I doubt if I would have paid any attention to them. I had my instructions and was selling according to orders. Business was good, getting better every day. The firm wrote to my customers, but they merely sent back copies of the iron-clad contract. They had seen my in- structions, and they knew it was all right. It was not until I brought up, my last penny gone, in Rochester, near the Ohio line, that the firm established communication with me at last. Their instructions were brief : to come home and sell no"^ more tables. They sent ten dollars, but gave me no clew to their curious decision, with things booming as they were. Being in the field I considered that, whatever was up, I had a better command of the situation. I decided that I would not go home, — at least not until I had sold a few more extension tables while they were in such demand. I made that ten dollars go farther than ten dollars ever went before. It took me a little way into Ohio, to Youngstown, and then back to Pennsylvania, to Warren and Meadville and Corry. My previous training in going hungry for days came in handy at last. In the interests of commerce, I let my dinners go. So I was enabled to make a final dash to Erie, where I planted my last batch of tables before I went home, happy. I got home in time to assist in the winding up of the concern. The iron-clad contracts had done the business. My customers would not listen to explanations. When told that the price of those tables was lower than the cost of working up the wood, 446 BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY llu-y rcplictl that il was none of their l)usiness. They had their cDiitracts. The Allci^hany man threatened suit, if I remember rightly, and the firm gave up. Nobody blamed me, for 1 had sold according to orders ; but instead of four hundred and fifty dollars wliich I had figured out as my commission, I got sevent\ - five cents. It was half of what my employer had. He divided squarely, and I could not in reason complain. I sat in the restaurant where he had explained the situation to me, and tried to telescope my ambitions dow-n to the seventy- five-cent standard, when my eyes fell upon a copy of Harper's Weekly that lay on the table. Absent-mindedly I read an ad- vertisement in small t\TDe, spelHng it over idly while I was trying to tliink what to do next. "Wanted," it read, "by the Myers Manufacturing Company, agents to sell a patent flat and fluting iron. Samples seventy- five cents." The address was somewhere in John Street, New York. Samples seventy-five cents ! I repeated it mechanically. Why, that was just the size of my pile. And right in my line of can- vassing, too ! In ten minutes it w'as on the way to New York and I had secured a provisional customer in the cook at the restaurant for an iron that would perform what this one promised, iron the shirt and flute the flounce too. In three days the iron came and proved good. I started in canvassing Jamestown with it, and in a week had secured orders for one hundred and twenty, upon which my profit would be over eighty dollars. Some- thing of business ways must have stuck to me, after all, from my one excursion into the realm of trade ; for when it came to delivering the goods and I had no money, I went boldly to a business man whose wife was on my books, and offered, if he would send for the irons, to pay for them as I took them out of the store. He made no bones about it, but sent for the irons and handed them over to me to pay for when I could. So men are made. Commercial character, as it is rated on 'change, I had none before that ; but I had after. How^ could I dis- appoint a man like that ? The confidence of the commimity I had not lost through my GOING INTO BUSINESS 447 too successful trip as a drummer, at all events. Propositions came speedily to me to "travel in" pianos and pumps for local concerns. It never rains but it pours. An old schoolmate who had been ordained a clergyman wrote to me from Denmark to find him a charge among the Danish settlements out West. But neither pumps, pianos, nor parsons had power to swerve me from my chosen course. With them went bosses and orders ; with the flat-iron cherished independence. When I had sold cut Jamestown, I made a bee-line for Pittsburg, a city that had taken my fancy because of its brisk business ways. They were brisk indeed. Grant's second campaign for the Presidency was in full swing. On my second night in town I went to hear Horace Greeley address an open-air meeting. I can see his noble old head yet above the crowd, and hear his opening appeal. Farther I never got. A marching band of uniformed shouters for Grant had cut right through the crowd. As it passed I felt myself suddenly seized ; an oilcloth cape was thrown over my head, a campaign cap jammed after, and I found myself marching away with a torch on my shoulder to the tune of a brass band just ahead. How many others of Mr. Greeley's hearers fared as I did I do not know. The thing seemed so ludicrous (and if I must march I really cared very little whether it was for Greeley or Grant) that I stuck it out, hoping as we went to come somewhere upon my hat, which had been lost in the sudden attack ; but I never saw it again. Speaking of parading, my old desire to roam, that kept crop- ping out at intervals, played me a characteristic trick at this time. I was passing through a horse market when I saw a fine-looking, shapely young horse put up at what seemed a ridiculously low price. Eighteen dollars was the bid, and it was about to be knocked down at that. The October sun was shining warm and bright. A sudden desire to get on the horse and ride out into the wide world, away from the city and the haunts of men, never to come back, seized me. I raised the bid to nineteen dollars. Almost before I knew, the beast was knocked down to me and I had paid over the money. It left me with exactly six dollars to my name. 448 BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY Loading the animal by the halter, I went down the street and sat on the stoop of the Robinson House to think. With every step, perplexities I hadn't thought of sprang up. Jii the first place, I could not ride. I had always wanted to, but had never learned. Even if I had been able to, where was I going, and to do what? I couldn't ride around and sell flat-irons. The wide world seemed suddenly a cold and far-olT place, and six dollars but small backing in an attack upon it, with a hungry horse waiting to be fed. I hat was only too evident. The beast was tearing the hitching-post with its teeth in a way that brooked no delay. Evidently it had a healthy appetite. The conclusion was slowly dawning upon mc that I had made a fool of myself, when the man who had bid eighteen dollars came by and saw me sitting there. He stopped to ask what was the matter, and I told him frankly. He roared and gave me eighteen dollars for the beast. I was glad enough to give it up. I never owned a horse before or since, and I had that less than fifteen minutes ; but it was the longest quarter of an hour since I worked in the coal-mine. The flat-iron did not go in Pittsburg. It w^as too cheap. During a brief interval I peddled campaign books, but shortly found a more expensive iron, and had five counties in western Pennsylvania allotted to me as territory. There followed a winter of great business. Before it was half over I had achieved a bank account, though how I managed it is a mystery to me till this day. Simple as the reckoning of my daily trade ought to be, by no chance could I ever make it foot up as it should. I tried honestly every night, but the receipts would never square with the expenditures, do what I might. I kept them carefully apart in different pockets, but mixed they would get in spite of all. I had to call it square, however far the footing was out of the way, or sit up all night, which I would not do. I remem- ber well the only time I came out even. I was so astonished that I would not believe it, but had to go all over the account again. That night I slept the sleep of the just. The next morning, when I was starting out on my route with a clean conscience and a clean slate, a shopkeeper rapped on his window GOING INTO BUSINESS 449 as I went by to tell me that I had given him the previous day a twenty-dollar bill for a ten, in making change. After that I gave up trying. I was no longer alone. From Buffalo my old chum Ronne had come, hearing that I was doing well, to join me, and from Denmark an old schoolfellow, whose life at twenty-two had been wrecked by drink and who wrote begging to be allowed to come. His mother pleaded for him too, but it was not needed. He had enclosed in his letter the strongest talisman of all, a letter written by Elizabeth in the long ago when we were children together. I have it yet. He came, and I tried hard to break him of his failing. But I had undertaken a job that was too big for me. Upon my return from a Western trip I found that he had taken to drinking again, and in his cups had enlisted. His curse followed him into the army. He rose to the rank of sergeant, only to fall again and suffer degradation. The other day he shot himself at the post where he was stationed, after nearly thirty years of service. Yet in all his ups and downs he never forgot his home. While his mother lived he helped sup- port her in far-off Denmark ; and when she was gone, no month passed that he did not send home the half of his wages for the support of his crippled sister in the old town. Charles was not bad. He was a poor, helpless, unhappy boy, who came to me for help, and I had none to give, God pity him and me. The Western trip I spoke of was my undoing. Puffed up by my success as a salesman, I yielded in an evil hour to the blan- dishments of my manufacturers, and accepted the general agency of the State of Illinois, with headquarters in Chicago. It sounded well, but it did not work well. Chicago had not yet got upon its feet after the great fire ; and its young men were too sharp for me. In six weeks they had cleaned me out bodily, had run away with my irons and with money they borrowed of me to start them in business. I returned to Pittsburg as poor as ever, to find that the agents I had left behind in my Pennsylvania territory had dealt with me after the same fashion. The firm for which I worked had connived at the frauds. My friends had left me. The one I spoke of was in the army. Ronne 2G 450 BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY had given up in discouragement, and was at worlv in a rolling- mill. In the utter wreck of all my hopes I was alone again. Angry and sore, I went up the Alleghany River, with no definite purpose in mind except to get away from everybody I knew. At Franklin I fell ill with a sneaking fever. It was while I lay helpless in a lonely tavern by the riverside that the crushing blow fell. Letters from home, sent on from Pittsburg, told me that Elizabeth was to be married. A cavalry officer who was in charge of the border police, a dashing fellow and a good soldier, had won her heart. The wedding was to be in the summer. It was then the last week in April. At the thought I turned my face to the wall, and hoped that I might die. But one does not die of love at twenty-four. The days that passed slowly saw me leave my sick-bed and limp down to the river on sunny days, to sit and watch the stream listlessly for hours, hoping nothing, grasping nothing, except that it was all over. In all my misadventures that was the one thing I had never dreamed of. If I did, I as quickly banished the thought as preposterous. That she should be another's bride seemed so utterly impossible that, sick and feeble as I was, I laughed it to scorn even then ; whereat I fell to reading the fatal letter again, and trying to grasp its meaning. It made it all only the more perplexing that I should not know who he was or what he was. I had never heard of him before, in that town where I thought I knew every living soul. That he must be a noble fellow I knew, or he could not have won her ; but who — why — what - what had come over everything in such a short time, and what was this ugly dream that was setting my brain awhirl and shut- ting out the sunlight and the day ? Presently I was in a relapse, and it was all darkness to me, and obli^^on. When at last I got well enough to travel, I set my face toward the east, and journeyed on foot through the northern coal re- gions of Pennsylvania by slow stages, caring little whither I went, and earning just enough by peddling flat-irons to pay my way. It was spring when I started ; the autumn tints were on the leaves when I brought up in New York at last, as nearly restored as youth and the long tramp had power to do. But the GOING INTO BUSINESS 45 1 restless energy that had made of me a successful salesman was gone. I thought only, if I thought at all, of finding some quiet place where I could sit and see the world go by that concerned me no longer. With a dim idea of being sent into the farthest wilds as an operator, I went to a business college on Fourth Avenue and paid twenty dollars to learn telegraphing. It was the last money I had. I attended the school in the afternoon. In the morning I peddled flat-irons, earning money for my board, and so made out. One day, while I was so occupied, I saw among the "want" advertisements in a newspaper one offering the position of city editor on a Long Island City weekly to a competent man. Some- thing of my old ambition stirred within me. It did not occur to me that city editors were not usually obtained by advertising, still less that I was not competent, having only the vaguest no- tions of what the functions of a city editor might be. I applied for the job, and got it at once. Eight dollars a week was to be my salary ; my job, to fill the local coliunn and attend to the affairs of Hunter's Point and Blissville generally, politics ex- cluded. The editor attended to that. In twenty-four hours I was hard at work writing up my then most ill-favored bailiwick. It is none too fine yet, but in those days, when every nuisance crowded out of New York found refuge there, it stunk to heaven. Certainly I had entered journalism by the back door, very far back at that, when I joined the staff of the Review. Signs of that appeared speedily, and multiplied day by day. On the third day of my employment I beheld the editor-in-chief being thrashed down the street by an irate coachman whom he had offended, and when, in a spirit of loyalty, I would have cast in my lot with him, I was held back by one of the printers with the laughing comment that that was his daily diet and that it was good for him. That was the only way any one ever got any satisfaction or anything else out of him. Judging from the goings on about the office in the two weeks I was there, he must have been extensively in debt to all sorts of people who were trying to collect. When, on my second deferred pay-day, I met him on the stairs, propelled by his washer-woman, who brought 452 BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPIIV her basket down on l\is liead with every step he took, calling upon the populace (the stairs were outside the buildinc;) to witness just punishment meted out to him for failing to pay for the wash- ing of his shirts, I rightly concluded that the city editor's claim stood no show. I left him owing me two weeks' pay, but I freely forgive liim. I think I got my money's worth of experi- ence. I did not let grass grow under my feet as "city editor.'' Hunter's Point had received for once a thorough raking o^'er, and I my first lesson in hunting the elusive item and, when found, making a note of it. Except for a Newfoundland pup which some one had given me, I went back over the river as poor as I had come. The dog proved rather a doubtful possession as the days went by. Its appetite was tremendous, and its preference for my society em- barrassingly unrestrained. It would not be content to sleep anywhere else than in my room. If I put it out in the yard, it forthwith organized a search for me in which the entire neigh- borhood was compelled to take part, willy-nilly. Its manner of doing it boomed the local trade in hair-brushes and mantel bric-a-brac, but brought on complications ^^•ith the landlord in the morning that usually resulted in the departure of Bob and myself for other pastures. Part with him I could not ; for Bob loved me. Once I tried, when it seemed that there was no choice. I had been put out for perhaps the tenth time, and I had no more money left to provide for our keep. A Wall Street broker had advertised for a watch-dog, and I went with Bob to see him. But when he would have counted the three gold pieces he offered into my hand, I saw Bob's honest brown eyes watch- ing me with a look of such faithful affection that I dropped the coins as if they burned, and caught him about the neck to tell him that we would never part. Bob put his huge paws on my shoulders, Ucked my face, and barked such a joyous bark of challenge to the world in general that even the Wall Street man was touched. "I guess you are too good friends to part," he said. And so we were. We left Wall Street and its gold behind to go out and starve GOING INTO BUSINESS 453 together. Literally we did that in the days that followed. I had taken to peddling books, an illustrated Dickens issued by the Harpers, but I barely earned enough by it to keep life in us and a transient roof over our heads. I call it transient because it was rarely the same two nights together, for causes which I have explained. In the day Bob made out rather better than I. He could always coax a supper out of the servant at the base- ment gate by his curvetings and tricks, while I pleaded vainly and hungrily with the mistress at the front door. Dickens was a drug in the market. A curious fatality had given me a copy of Hard Times to canvass with. I think no amount of good fortune could turn my head while it stands in my bookcase. One look at it brings back too vividly that day when Bob and I had gone, desperate and breakfastless, from the last bed we might know for many days, to try to sell it and so get the means to keep us for another twenty-four hours. It was not only breakfast we lacked. The day before we had had only a crust together. Two days without food is not good preparation for a day's canvassing. We did the best we could. Bob stood by and wagged his tail persuasively while I did the talking ; but luck was dead against us, and Hard Times stuck to us for all we tried. Evening came and found us down by the Cooper Institute, with never a cent. Faint with hunger, I sat down on the steps under the illuminated clock, while Bob stretched himself at my feet. He had beguiled the cook in one of the last houses we called at, and his stomach was filled. From the corner I had looked on enviously. For me there was no supper, as there had been no dinner and no breakfast. To- morrow there was another day of starvation. How long was this to last ? Was it any use to keep up a struggle so hopeless ? From this very spot I had gone, hungry and wrathful, three years before, when the dining Frenchmen for whom I wanted to fight thrust me forth from their company. Three wasted years ! Then I had one cent in my pocket, I remembered. To-day I had not even so much. I was bankrupt in hope and purpose. Nothing had gone right; nothing would ever go right; and, worse, I did not care. I drummed moodily upon my book. 454 BIOGRAPHY A.\D AL'TOBIOGRAPIIY Wasted ! Yes, that was right. My life was wasted, utterly wasted. A voice hailed me l^y name, and Bob sat up looking attentively at me for liis cue as to the treatment of the owner of it. I recog- nized in liim the principal of the telegraph school where I had gone until my money gave out. He seemed suddenly struck by sometliing. "Why, what are you doing here ? " he asked. I told him Bob and I were just resting after a day of canvassing. "Books !" he snorted. "I guess they won't make you rich. Now, how would you like to be a reporter, if you have got nothing better to do ? The manager of a news agency down town asked me to-day to find him a bright young fellow whom he could break in. It isn't much — ten dollars a week to start with. But it is better than peddling books, I know." He poked over the book in my hand and read the title. ''Hard Times," he said, with a little laugh. " I guess so. What do you say ? I think you will do. Better come along and let me give you a note to liim now." As in a dream, I walked across the street with him to his office and got the letter which was to make me, half-starved and home- less, rich as Croesus, it seemed to me. Bob went along, and be- fore I departed from the school a better home than I could give him was found for him with my benefactor. I was to bring him the next day. I had to admit that it was best so. That night, the last which Bob and I spent together, we walked up and down Broadway, where there was quiet, thinking it over. What had happened had stirred me profoundly. For the second time I saw a hand held out to save me from wreck just w^hen it seemed inevitable ; and I knew it for His hand, to whose will I was at last beginning to bow in humility that had been a stranger to me before. It had ever been my own will, my own way, upon which I insisted. In the shadow of Grace Church I bowed my head against the granite wall of the gray tower and prayed for strength to do the work which I had so long and arduously sought and which had now come to me ; the while Bob sat and looked on, saying clearly enough with his wagging tail that he did not know GOING INTO BUSINESS 455 what was going on, but that he was sure it was all right. Then we resumed our wanderings. One thought, and only one, I had room for. I did not pursue it ; it walked with me wherever I went: She was not married yet. Not yet. When the sun rose, I washed my face and hands in a dog's drinking-trough, pulled my clothes into such shape as I could, and went with Bob to his new home. That parting over, I walked down to 23 Park Row and delivered my letter to the desk editor in the New York News Association, up on the top floor. He looked me over a little doubtfully, but evidently impressed with the early hours I kept, told me that I might try. He waved me to a desk, bidding me wait until he had made out his morning book of assignments ; and with such scant ceremony was I finally introduced to Newspaper Row, that had been to me like an enchanted land. After twenty-seven years of hard work in it, during which I have been behind the scenes of most of the plays that go to make up the simi of the life of the metropolis, it exercises the old spell over me yet. If my sympathies need quickening, my point of view adjusting, I have only to go down to Park Row at eventide, when the crowds are hurrying homeward and the City Hall clock is lighted, particularly when the snow lies on the grass in the park, and stand watching them awhile, to find all things coming right. It is Bob who stands by and watches with me then, as on that night. The assignment that fell to my lot when the book was made out, the first against which my name was written in a New York editor's book, was a lunch of some sort at the Astor House. I have forgotten what was the special occasion. I remember the bearskin hats of the Old Guard in it, but little else. In a kind of haze, I beheld half the savory viands of earth spread under the eyes and nostrils of a man who had not tasted food for the third day. I did not ask for any. I had reached that stage of starvation that is like the still centre of a cyclone, when no hunger is felt. But it may be that a touch of it all crept into my report ; for when the editor had read it, he said briefly : — "You will do. Take that desk, and report at ten every morning, sharp." 456 BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY That night, when I was dismissed from the otfice, I went up the Bowen' to No. 185, where a Danish family kept a boarding- house up under the roof. I had work and wages now, and could pay. On the stairs I fell in a swoon and lay there till some one stumbled o\er me in the dark and carried me in. My strength had at last given out. So began my life as a newspaper man. IV. D. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE THE DEATH OF QUEEN MARY ^ Thomas Babington Macaulay [The Queen] had, during two or three days, been poorly ; and on the preceding evening grave symptoms had appeared. Sir Thomas Millington, who was physician in ordinary to the King, thought that she had the measles. But Radcliffe, who, with coarse manners and Uttle book learning, had raised himself to the first practice in London chiefly by his rare skill in diagnostics, uttered the more alarming words, smallpox. That disease, over which science has since achieved a succession of glorious and beneficent victories, was then the most terrible of all the ministers of death. The havoc of the plague had been far more rapid: but the plague had visited our shores only once or twice within living memory ; and the smallpox was always present, filling the churchyards \vith corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had not yet stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover. Towards the end of the year 1694, this pestilence was more than usually severe. At length the infection spread to the palace, and reached the young and blooming Queen. She received the intimation of her danger with true greatness of soul. She gave orders that every lady of her bedchamber, every maid of honor, nay, every menial servant, who had not had the smallpox, should instantly leave Kensington House. She locked herself up during a short time in her closet, burned some papers, ar- ranged others, and then calmly awaited her fate. ' From History of Enj^land, Chapter XX. 457 458 insroRiCA L .v. i rra ti ve During two or throe days there were many alternations ol hope and fear. The pliysicians contracUcted each other and themselves in a way wliich sufficiently indicates the state of medical science in that age. The disease was measles: it was scarlet fever : it was sjjotted fever : it was erysipelas. At one moment some symptoms, wliich in truth showed that the case was almost hopeless, were hailed as indications of returning health. At length all doubt was over. Radcliffe's opinion proved to be right. It was plain that the Queen was sinking under smallpox of the most malignant type. All this time William remained night and day near her bedside. The little couch on which he slept when he was in camp was spread for him in the antechamber : but he scarcely lay down on it. The sight of his miser}^, the Dutch Envoy wrote, was enough to melt the hardest heart. Nothing seemed to be left of the man whose serene fortitude had been the wonder of old soldiers on the disastrous day of Landen, and of old sailors through that fearful night among the sheets of ice and banks of sand on the coast of Goree. The very domestics saw the tears running un- checked down that face, of which the stern composure had sel- dom been disturbed by any triumph or by any defeat. Several of the prelates were in attendance. The King drew Burnet aside, and gave w-ay to an agony of grief. "There is no hope," he cried. " I was the happiest man on earth ; and I am the most miserable. She has no fault ; none : you know her well, but you could not know, nobody but myself could know, her good- ness." Tenison undertook to tell her that she was dying. He was afraid that such a communication, abruptly made, might agitate her violently, and began with much management. But she soon caught his meaning, and, with that gentle womanly courage which so often puts our bravery to shame, submitted herself to the will of God. She called for a small cabinet in which her most important papers were locked up, gave orders that, as soon as she was no more, it should be delivered to the King, and then dismissed worldly cares from her mind. She received the Eucharist, and repeated her part of the office with unimpaired memory and intelligence, though in a feeble voice. She ob- THE DEATH OF QUEEN MARY 459 served that Tenison had been long standing at her bedside, and, with that sweet courtesy which was habitual to her, faltered out her commands that he would sit down, and repeated them till he obeyed. After she had received the sacrament she sank rapidly, and uttered only a few broken words. Twice she tried to take a last farewell of him whom she had loved so truly and en- tirely : but she was unable to speak. He had a succession of fits so alarming that his Privy Councillors, who were assembled in a neighboring room, were apprehensive for his reason and his life. The Duke of Leeds, at the request of his colleagues, ventured to assume the friendly guardianship of which minds deranged by sorrow stand in need. A few minutes before the Queen expired, William was removed, almost insensible, from the sick room. Mary died in peace with Anne. Before the physicians had pronounced the case hopeless, the Princess, who was then in very delicate health, had sent a kind message ; and Mary had returned a kind answer. The Princess then had proposed to come herself : but William had, in very gracious terms, declined the offer. The excitement of an interview, he said, would be too much for both sisters. If a favorable turn took place. Her Royal Highness should be most welcome to Kensington. A few hours later all was over. The public sorrow was great and general. For Mary's blame- less life, her large charities, and her winning manners had con- quered the hearts of her people. When the Commons next met they sate for a time in profound silence. At length it was moved and resolved that an Address of Condolence should be presented to the King ; and then the House broke up without proceeding to other business. The Dutch Envoy informed the States General that many of the members had handkerchiefs at their eyes. The number of sad faces in the street struck every observer. The mourning was more general than even the mourning for Charles the Second had been. On the Sunday which followed the Queen's death her virtues were celebrated in almost every parish church of the Capital, and in almost every great meeting of nonconform- ists. The most estimable Jacobites resDected the sorrow of William 4t»0 HISTORICAL NARRATIVE and the memory of Mar\ . Hut to the licrccr zealots of the party neither the house of mourning nor the grave was sacred. At Bristol the adherents of Sir John Knight rang the bells as if for a victory. It has often been repeated, and is not at all improb- able, that a non-juring divine, in the midst of the general lamen- tation, preached on the text, " Go : see now this accursed woman and bury her: for she is a King's daughter." It is certain that some of the ejected priests pursued her to the grave with invec- tives. Her death, they said, was evidently a judgment for her crime. God had, from the top of Sinai, in thunder and lightning, promised length of days to children who should honor their parents; and in this promise was plainly implied a menace. What father had ever been worse treated by his daughters than James by Mary and Anne ? Mary was gone, cut off in the prime of life, in the glow of beauty, in the lieight of prosperity ; and Anne would do well to profit by the warning. Wagstaffe went further, and dwelt much on certain w^onderful coincidences of time. James had been driven from his palace and country in Christmas week. Mary had died in Christmas week. There could be no doubt that, if the secrets of Providence were dis- closed to us, we should fmd that the turns of the daughter's com- plaint in December, 1694, bore an exact analogy to the turns of the father's fortune in December, 1688. It was at midnight that the father ran away from Rochester : it was at midnight that the daughter expired. Such was the profundity and such the in- genuity of a writer whom the Jacobite schismatics justly re- garded as one of their ablest chiefs. The Whigs soon had an opportunity of retaliating. They triumphantly related that a scrivener in the Borough, a staunch friend of hereditary right, while exulting in the judgment which had overtaken the Queen, had himself fallen down dead in a fit. The funeral w-as long remembered as the saddest and most august that Westminster had ever seen. WTiile the Queen's remains lay in state at Whitehall, the neighboring streets were filled every day, from sunrise to sunset, by crowds which made all traffic impossible. The two Houses with their maces followed the hearse, the Lords robed in scarlet and ermine, the Commons CAPTURE OF QUEBEC 46 1 in long black mantles. No preceding Sovereign had ever been attended to the grave by a Parliament : for, till then, the Parlia- ment had always expired with the Sovereign. A paper had in- deed been circulated, in which the logic of a small sharp petti- fogger was employed to prove that writs, issued in the joint names of William and Mary, ceased to be of force as soon as William reigned alone. But this paltry cavil had completely failed. It had not even been mentioned in the Lower House, and had been mentioned in the Upper only to be contemptuously overruled. The whole Magistracy of the City swelled the pro- cession. The banners of England and France, Scotland and Ireland, were carried by grand nobles before the corpse. The pall was borne by the chiefs of the illustrious houses of Howard, Seymour, Grey, and Stanley. On the gorgeous cofhn of purple and gold were laid the crown and sceptre of the realm. The day was well suited to such a ceremony. The sky was dark and troubled ; and a few ghastly flakes of snow fell on the black plumes of the funeral car. Within the Abbey, nave, choir, and transept were in a blaze with innumerable waxlights. The body was deposited under a sumptvious canopy in the centre of the church while the Primate preached. The earlier part of his discourse was deformed by pedantic divisions and subdivi- sions : but towards the close he told what he had himself seen and heard with a simplicity and earnestness more affecting than the most skilful rhetoric. Through the whole ceremony the distant booming of cannon was heard every minute from the batteries of the Tower. The gentle Queen sleeps among her illustrious kindred in the southern aisle of the Chapel of Henry the Seventh. CAPTURE OF QUEBEC 1 Francis Parkman Early in June, General Wolfe sailed up the St. Lawrence with a force of eight thousand men, and formed his camp imme- • From The Conspiracy of Ponliac. 462 HISTORICAL XARRATIVE diatcly below Quebec, on the islaiul of Ork'ims. From thence he couUl discern, at a sin.ale glance, how arduous was the task be- fore him. Piles of lofty cliffs rose with sheer ascent on the north- ern border of the river ; and from their summits the boasted citadel of Canada looked down in proud security, with its churches and convents of stone, its ramparts, bastions, and batteries; while over them all, from the brink of the precipice, Lowered the massive walls of the Castle of St. Louis. Above, for many a league, the bank was guarded by an unbroken range of steep acclivities. Below, the river St. Charles, flowing into the St. Lawrence, washed the base of the rocky promontory on which the city stood. Lower yet lay an army of fourteen thousand men, under an able and renowned commander, the Marquis of Montcalm. His front was covered by intrenchments and batter- ies, which lined the bank of the St. Lawrence ; his right wing rested on the city and the St. Charles ; his left, on the cascade and deep gulf of Montmorenci ; and thick forests extended along his rear. Opposite Quebec rose the high promontory of Point Lexn ; and the St. Lawrence, contracted to less than a mile in width, flowed between, with deep and powerful current. To a chief of less resolute temper, it might well have seemed that art and nature were in league to thwart his enterprise ; but a mind like that of Wolfe could only have seen in this majestic combina- tion of forest and cataract, mountain and river, a fitting theatre for the great drama about to be enacted there. Vet nature did not seem to have formed the young English general for the conduct of a doubtful and almost desperate enter- prise. His person was slight, and his features by no means of a martial cast. His feeble constitution had been undermined by years of protracted and painful disease. His kind and genial disposition seemed better fitted for the quiet of domestic life than for the stern duties of military command ; but to these gentler traits he joined a high enthusiasm, and an unconquerable spirit of daring and endurance, which made him the idol of his soldiers, and bore his slender frame through every hardship and exp>osure. The work before him demanded all his courage. How to in- CAPTURE OF QUEBEC 463 vest the city, or even bring the army of Montcalm to action, was a problem which might have vexed a Hannibal. A French fleet lay in the river above, and the precipices along the northern bank were guarded at every accessible point by sentinels and out- posts. Wolfe would have crossed the Montmorenci by its upper ford, and attacked the French army on its left and rear ; but the plan was thwarted by the nature of the ground and the vigilance of his adversaries. Thus baffled at every other point, he formed the bold design of storming Montcalm's position in front ; and on the afternoon of the thirty-first of July, a strong body of troops was embarked in boats, and covered by a furious cannonade from the English ships and batteries, landed on the beach just above the mouth of the Montmorenci. The grenadiers and Royal Americans were the first on shore, and their ill-timed impetuosity proved the ruin of the plan. Without waiting to receive their orders or form their ranks, they ran, pell-mell, across the level ground, and with loud shouts began, each man for himself, to scale the heights which rose in front, crested with intrenchments and bristling with hostile arms. The French at the top threw volley after volley among the hot-headed as- sailants. The slopes were soon covered with the fallen ; and at that instant a storm, which had long been threatening, burst with sudden fury, drenched the combatants on both sides with a deluge of rain, extinguished for a moment the fire of the French, and at the same time made the steeps so slippery that the grena- diers fell repeatedly in their vain attempts to climb. Night was coming on with double darkness. The retreat was sounded, and, as the English re-embarked, troops of Indians came whoop- ing down the heights, and hovered about their rear, to murder the stragglers and the wounded; while exulting cries of Vive le Roi, from the crowded summits, proclaimed the triumph of tLe enemy. With bitter agony of mind, Wolfe beheld the headlong folly of his men, and saw more than four hundred of the flower of his arniy fall a useless sacrifice. The anxieties of the siege had told severely upon his slender constitution ; and not long after this disaster, he felt the first symptoms of a fever, which soon confined 464 HISTORIC A L yARKATIVE him to his couch. Still his mind never wavered from its purpose, and it was while lying helpless in the chamber of a Canadian house, where he had fixed his headquarters, that he embraced the plan of the enterprise which robbed him of his life, and gave him immortal fame. The plan had been first proposed during the height of Wolfe's illness, at a council of his subordinate generals, Monckton, Townshend, and Murray. It was resolved to divide the little army ; and, while one portion remained before Quebec to alarm the enemy by false attacks, and distract their attention from the scene of actual operation, the other was to pass above the town, land under cover of darkness on the northern shore, climb the guarded heights, gain the plains above, and force Montcalm to quit his vantage-ground, and perhaps to offer battle. The scheme was daring even to rashness ; but its audacity was the secret of its success. Early in September, a crowd of ships and transports, under Admiral Holmes, passed the city under the hot fire of its batter- ies ; while the troops designed for the expedition, amounting to scarcely five thousand, marched upward along the southern bank, beyond reach of the cannonade. All were then embarked ; and on the evening of the twelfth, Holmes's fleet, with the troops on board, lay safe at anchor in the river, several leagues above the town. These operations had not failed to awaken the sus- picions of Montcalm ; and he had detached M. Bougainville to watch the movements of the English, and prevent their land- ing on the northern shore. The eventful night of the twelfth was clear and calm, with no light but that of the stars. Within two hours before daybreak, thirty boats, crowded with sixteen hundred soldiers, cast off from the vessels, and floated downward, in perfect order, with the current of the ebb tide. To the boundless joy of the army, Wolfe's malady had abated, and he was able to command in person. His ruined health, the gloomy prospects of the siege, and the disaster at Montmorenci had oppressed him with the deepest melancholy, but never impaired for a moment the promptness of his decisions, or the impetuous energy of his action. CAPTURE OF QUEBEC 465 He sat in the stern of one of his boats, pale and weak, but borne up to a calm height of resolution. Every order had been given, every arrangement made, and it only remained to face the issue. The ebbing tide sufficed to bear the boats along, and nothing broke the silence of the night but the gurgling of the river, and the low voice of Wolfe, as he repeated to the ofl&cers about him the stanzas of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," which had recently appeared and which he had just received from England. Perhaps, as he uttered those strangely appropriate words, — " The paths of glory lead but to the grave," the shadows of his own approaching fate stole with mournful prophecy across his mind. " Gentlemen," he said, as he closed his recital, "I would rather have written those lines than take Quebec to-morrow." As they approached the landing-place, the boats edged closer in toward the northern shore, and the woody precipices rose high on their left, like a wall of undistinguished blackness. ''Qui vive?^' shouted a French sentinel, from out the imper- vious gloom. "Za France!^' answered a captain of Eraser's Highlanders, from the foremost boat. " A quel regiment ? " demanded the soldier. '' De la Reiner'' promptly replied the Highland captain, who chanced to know that the regiment so designated formed part of Bougainville's command. As boats were frequently passing down the river with supplies for the garrison, and as a convoy from Bougainville was expected that very night, the sentinel was deceived, and allowed the English to proceed. A few moments after, they were challenged again, and this time they could discern the soldier running close down to the water's edge, as if all his suspicions were aroused ; but the skil- ful replies of the Highlander once more saved the party from discovery. They reached the landing-place in safety — an indentation in the shore, about a league above the city, and now bearing the 4()6 //y^TOAVC.I/, AAKK.irn'E naino of Wolfe's Cove. l\vw a narrow path led up the lacr of llic heights, and a French guartl was posted at the top to defentl the pass. By the force of the current, the foremost boats, in- cluding that which carried Wolfe himself, were borne a little below the spot. The general was one of the first on shore. He looked upwartl at the rugged heights which towered above him in the gloom. "You can try it," he coolly obser\ed to an oflicer near liim ; "but I don't think you'll get up." At the point where the Highlanders landed, one of their cap- tains, Donald MacDonald, apparently the same whose presence of mind had just saved the enterprise from ruin, was climbing in advance of his men, when he was challenged by a sentinel. He replied in French, by declaring that he had been sent to re- lieve the guard, and ordering the soldier to withdraw. Before the latter was undeceived, a crowd of Highlanders were close at hand, while the steeps below were thronged with eager climbers, dragging themselves up by trees, roots, and bushes. The guard turned out, and made a brief though brave resistance. In a moment, they were cut to pieces, dispersed, or made prisoners ; while men after men came swarming up the height, and quickly formed upon the plains above. Meanwhile, the vessels had dropped downward with the current, and anchored opposite the landing-place. The remaining troops were disembarked, and, with the dawn of day, the whole were brought in safety to the shore. The sun rose, and, from the ramparts of Quebec, the astonished people saw the Plains of Abraham glittering with arms, and the dark-red lines of English forming in array of battle. Breathless messengers had borne the evil tidings to Montcalm, and far and near his wide-extended camp resounded with the rolling of alarm drums and the din of startled preparation. He, too, had had his struggles and his sorrows. The civil pov/er had thwarted him ; famine, discontent, and disaffection were rife among his soldiers ; and no small i>ortion of the Canadian militia had dis- persed from sheer starvation. In spite of all, he had trusted to hold out till the winter frosts should drive the invaders from be- fore the town ; when, on that disastrous morning, the news of I CAPTURE OF QUEBEC 467 their successful temerity fell like a cannon-shot upon his ear. Still he assumed a tone of confidence. "They have got to the weak side of us at last," he is reported to have said, "and we must crush them with our numbers." With headlong haste, his troops were pouring over the bridge of the St. Charles, and gathering in heavy masses under the west- ern ramparts of the town. Could numbers give assurance of success, their triumphs would have been secure ; for five French battalions and the armed colonial peasantry amounted in all to more than seven thousand five hundred men. Full in sight be- fore them stretched the long, thin lines of the British forces, — the half-wild Highlanders, the steady soldiery of England, and the hardy levies of the provinces, — less than five thousand in number, but all inured to battle, and strong in the full assurance of success. Yet, could the chiefs of that gallant army have pierced the secrets of the future, could they have foreseen that the victory which they burned to achieve would have robbed England of her proudest boast, that the conquest of Canada would pave the way for the independence of America, their swords would have dropped from their hands, and the heroic fires have gone out within their hearts. It was nine o'clock, and the adverse armies stood motionless, each gazing on the other. The clouds hung low, and, at intervals warm light showers descended, besprinkling both alike. The coppice and corn-fields in front of the British troops were filled with sharpshooters, who kept up a distant, spattering fire. Here and there a soldier fell in the ranks, and the gap was filled in silence. At a little before ten, the British could see that Montcalm was preparing to advance, and, in a few moments, all his troops appeared in rapid motion. They came on in three divisions, shouting after the manner of their nation, and firing hea\dly as soon as they came within range. In the British ranks, not a trigger was pulled, not a soldier stirred ; and their ominous com- posure seemed to damp the spirits of the assailants. It was not till the French were within forty yards that the fatal word was given, and the British muskets blazed forth at once in one 468 HISTORIC A I. .V.l RRA TI V E crashing explosion. Like a ship at full career, arrested with sudden ruin on a sunken rock, the ranks of Montcalm staggered, shi\ered. ami broke before the wasting storm of lead. The smoke, rolling along the field, for a moment shut out the view ; but when the white wreaths were scattered on the wind, a wretched spectacle was disclosed ; men and officers tumbled in heaps, battalions resolved into a mob, order and obedience gone ; and when the British muskets were levelled for a second volley, the masses of the militia were seen to cower and shrink with un- controllable panic. For a few minutes, the French regulars stood their ground, returning a sharp and not inelTectual fire. But now, echoing cheer on cheer, redoubling volley on volle\', trampling the dnng and the dead, and driving the fugitives in crowds, the British troops advanced and swept the fteld before them. The ardor of the men burst all restraint. They broke into a run, and with unsparing slaughter chased the flying mul- titude to the gates of Quebec. Foremost of all, the light-footed Highlanders dashed along in furious pursuit, hewing down the Frenchmen with their broadswords, and slaying many in the very ditch of the fortifications. Never was \'ictory more quick or more decisive. In the short action and pursuit, the French lost fifteen hundred men, killed, wounded, and taken. Of the remainder, some es- caped within the city, and others fled across the St. Charles to rejoin their comrades who had been left to guard the camp. The pursuers were recalled by the sound of trumpet ; the broken ranks were formed afresh, and the English troops withdrawn beyond reach of the cannon of Quebec. BougaiuN-ille, with his corps, arrived from the upper countn,', and, hovering about their rear, threatened an attack ; but when he saw what greeting was prepared for him, he abandoned his purpose and withdrew. TowTishend and Murray, the only general officers who remained unhurt, passed to the head of every regiment in turn, and thanked the soldiers for the bravery they had shown ; yet the triumph of the victors was mingled with sadness, as the tidings went from rank to rank that Wolfe had fallen. In the heat of the action, as he advanced at the head of the CAPTURE OF QUEBEC 469 grenadiers of Louisburg, a bullet shattered his wrist; but he wrapped his handkerchief about the wound, and showed no sign of pain. A moment more, and a ball pierced his side. Still he pressed forward, waving his sword and cheering his soldiers to the attack, when a third shot lodged deep within his breast. He paused, reeled, and, staggering to one side, fell to the earth. Brown, a lieutenant of the grenadiers, Henderson, a volunteer, an ofi&cer of artillery, and a private soldier, raised him together in their arms, and, bearing him to the rear, laid him softly on the grass. They asked if he would have a surgeon ; but he shook his head, and answered that all was over with him. His eyes closed with the torpor of approaching death, and those around sustained his fainting form. Yet they could not withhold their gaze from the wild turmoil before them, and the charging ranks of their companions rushing through fire and smoke. "See how they run," one of the ofl&cers exclaimed, as the French fled in confusion before the levelled bayonets. "Who run?" de- manded Wolfe, opening his eyes like a man aroused from sleep. "The enemy, sir," was the reply ; " they give way everywhere." "Then," said the dying general, "tell Colonel Burton to march Webb's regiment down to Charles River, to cut off their retreat from the bridge. Now, God be praised, I will die in peace," he murmured ; and, turning on his side, he calmly breathed his last. Almost at the same moment fell his great adversary, Montcalm , as he strove, with vain bravery, to rally his shattered ranks. Struck down with a mortal wound, he was placed on a litter and borne to the General Hospital on the banks of the St. Charles. The surgeons told him that he could not recover. "I am glad of it," was his calm reply. He then asked how long he might survive, and was told that he had not many hours remaining. "So much the better," he said; "I am happy that I shall not live to see the surrender of Quebec." Officers from the garrison came to his bedside to ask his orders and instructions. "I will give no more orders," replied the defeated soldier; "I have much business that must be attended to, of greater moment than your ruined garrison and this wretched country. My time is 470 HISTORIC. 1 /. .V. 1 A- AM 77 VE very short; therefore. i>ray leave me." The oflkers withdrew, and none remained in the chamber l)ut his confessor and the Bishop of Quebec. To the last, he expressed his contempt for his own mutinous and half-famished troops, and his admiration for the disciplined valor of his opponents. He died before mid- night, and w'as buried at his own desire in a cavity of the earth formed by the bursting of a bombshell. The victorious army encamped before Quebec, and pushed their preparations for the siege with zealous energy ; but before a single gun was brought to bear, the white l!ag was hung out, and the garrison surrendered. On the eighteenth of September, 1759, the rock-built citadel of Canada passed forever from the hands of its ancient masters. THE BEGGARS' LEAGUE 1 John T^othkop Motley On the morning of the fifth of April, the confederates were assembled at the Culemberg mansion, which stood on the square called the Sabon, within a few minutes' walk of the palace. A straight handsome street led from the house along the summit of the hill, to the splendid residence of the ancient Dukes of Bra- bant, then the abode of Duchess Margaret. At a little before noon, the gentlemen came forth, marching on foot, two by two, to the number of three hundred. Nearly all were young, many of them bore the most ancient historical names of their country, every one was arrayed in magnificent costume. It was regarded as ominous, that the man who led the procession, Philip de Bail- leul, was lame. The line was closed by Brederode and Count Louis, who came last, walking arm in arm. An immense crowd was collected in the square in front of the palace, to welcome the men who were looked upon as the deliverers of the land from Spanish tyranny, from the Cardinalists, and from the inquisi- tion. They were recei\'ed with deafening huzzas and clappings * From The Rise 0/ the Dutch Republic. THE BEGGARS' LEAGUE 47 1 of hands by the assembled populace. As they entered the coun- cil chamber, passing through the great hall, where ten years before the Emperor had given away his crowns, they found the Emperor's daughter seated in the chair of state, and surrounded by the highest personages of the country. The emotion of the Duchess was evident, as the procession somewhat abruptly made its appearance; nor was her agitation diminished as she ob- served among the petitioners many relatives and retainers of the Orange and Egmont houses, and saw friendly glances of rec- ognition exchanged between them and their chiefs. As soon as all had entered the senate room, Brederode ad- vanced, made a low obeisance, and spoke a brief speech. He said that he had come thither with his colleagues to present a humble petition to her Highness. He alluded to the reports which had been rife, that they had contemplated tumult, sedi- tion, foreign conspiracies, and, what was more abominable than all, a change of sovereign. He denounced such statements as calumnies, begged the Duchess to name the men who had thus aspersed an honorable and loyal company, and called upon her to inflict exemplary punishment upon the slanderers. With these prefatory remarks he presented the petition. The famous document was then read aloud. Its tone was sufficiently loyal, particularly in the preamble, which was filled with protestations of devotion to both King and Duchess. After this conventional introduction, however, the petitioners proceeded to state, very plainly, that the recent resolutions of his Majesty, with regard to the ecUcts and the inquisition, were likely to produce a general rebellion. They had hoped, they said, that a movement would be made by the seigniors or by the estates, to remedy the evil by striking at its cause, but they had waited in vain. The dan- ger, on the other hand, was augmenting every day, universal sedition was at the gate, and they had therefore felt obliged to delay no longer, but come forward the first and do their duty. They professed to do this with more freedom, because the danger touched them very nearly. They were the most exposed to the calamities which usually spring from civil commotions, for their houses and lands, situate in the open fields, were exposed to the 472 HISTORICAL XAKRATIVE pillage of all iho world. Mori-over there was not one of them, whatever his condition, who was not liable at any moment to be executed under the edicts, at the false complaint of the first man who wished to obtain his estate, and who chose to denounce him to the inquisitor, at whose mercy were the lives and proj)erty of all. They therefore be<^,c;ed the Duchess Rej^ent to desj)atch an envoy on their behalf, who should humbly implore his Majesty to abolish the edicts. In the meantime they requested her Highness to order a general surcease of the inquisition, and of all executions, until the King's further pleasure was made known, and until new ordinances, made by his Majesty with advice anri consent of the states-general duly assembled, should be estab- lished. The petition terminated as it had commenced, with expressions of extreme respect and devoted loyalty. The agitation of Duchess Margaret increased very perceptibly during the reading of the paper. When it was finished, she re- mained for a few minutes quite silent, with tears rolling down her cheeks. As soon as she could overcome her excitement, she uttered a few words to the effect that she would advise wath her councillors and give the petitioners such answer as should be found suitable. The confederates then passed out from the council chamber into the grand hall ; each individual, as he took his departure, advancing towards the Duchess and making what was called the "caracole," in token of reverence. There was thus ample time to contemplate the whole company, and to count the numbers of the deputation. After this ceremony had been concluded, there was much earnest debate in the council. The Prince of Orange addressed a few words to the Duchess, with the \-iew of calming her irrita- tion. He observed that the confederates were no seditious rebels, but loyal gentlemen, well born, well connected, and of honorable character. They had been influenced, he said, by an honest desire to save their country from impending danger — not by avarice or ambition. Egmont shrugged his shoulders, and observed that it was necessary for him to leave the court for a season, in order to make a visit to the baths of Aix, for an in- flammation which he had in the leg. It was then that Berlay- THE BEGGARS' LEAGUE 473 mont, according to the account which has been sanctioned by nearly every contemporary writer, whether Catholic or Protes- tant, uttered the gibe which was destined to become immortal, and to give a popular name to the confederacy. ' ' What , Madam , ' ' he is reported to have cried in a passion, "is it possible that your Highness can entertain fears of these beggars {gueux) ? Is it not obvious what manner of men they are ? They have not had wisdom enough to manage their own estates, and are they now to teach the King and your Highness how to govern the country ? By the living God, if my advice were taken, their petition should have a cudgel for a commentary, and we would make them go down the steps of the palace a great deal faster than they mounted them." The Count of Meghen was equally violent in his language. Aremberg was for ordering "their reverences, the confederates," to quit Brussels without delay. The conversation, carried on in so violent a key, might not unnaturally have been heard by such of the gentlemen as had not yet left the grand hall adjoining the council chamber. The meeting of the council was then ad- journed for an hour or two, to meet again in the afternoon, for the purpose of deciding deliberately upon the answer to be given to the Request. Meanwhile, many of the confederates were swaggering about the streets, talking very bravely of the scene which had just occurred, and it is probable, boasting not a little of the effect which their demonstration would produce. As they passed by the house of Berlaymont, that nobleman, standing at his window in company with Count Aremberg, is said to have repeated his jest. "There go our fine beggars again," said he. "Look, I pray you, with what bravado they are passing before us!" . . . The next important step in Brederode's eyes was a dinner. He accordingly invited the confederates to a magnificent repast which he had ordered to be prepared in the Culemberg mansion. Three hundred guests sat down, upon the eighth of April, to this luxurious banquet, which was destined to become historical. The board glittered with silver and gold. The wine circulated with more than its usual rapidity among the band of noble 474 HISTORICAL XARKATIVK Hacchanals, who were never weary of drinkinp; the healths of Brcderodc. of Orange, and of Kp;mont. It was thought that the occasion imperiously demanded an extraordinary carouse, and the political events of the j>ast three days lent an additional ex- citement to the wine. There was an earnest discussion as to an appropriate name to be given to their confederacy. Should they call themselves the ''Society of Concord," the restorers of lost liberty, or by what other attractive title should the league be baptized ? Brederode was, however, already prepared to settle the question. He knew the value of a popular and origi- nal name ; he possessed the instinct by which adroit partisans in e\ery age have been accustomed to convert the reproachful epithets of their opponents into watchwords of honor, and he had already made his preparations for a startling theatrical ef- fect. Suddenly, amid the din of voices, he arose, with all his rhetorical powers at command. He recounted to the company the observations which the Seigneur de Bcrlaymont was re- ported to have made to the Duchess, upon the presentation of the Request, and the name which he had thought fit to apply to them collectively. Most of the gentlemen then heard the mem- orable sarcasm for the first time. Great was the indignation of all that the state councillor should have dared to stigmatize as beggars a band of gentlemen with the best blood of the land in their veins. Brederode, on the contrary, smoothing their anger, assured them with good humor that nothing could be more fortunate. "They call us beggars ! " said he ; "let us accept the name. We will contend with the inquisition, but remain loyal to the King, even till compelled to wear the beggar's sack." He then beckoned to one of the pages, who brought him a leathern wallet, such as was worn at that day by professional mendicants, together with a large wooden bowl, which also formed part of their regular appurtenances. Brederode imme- diately hung the wallet around his neck, filled the bowl with wine, and drained it at a draught. "Long live the beggars !" he cried, a'^ he wiped his beard and set the bowl down. "\'ivent les gueulx.'' Then for the first time, from the lips of those reckless nobles rose the famous cry, which was so often to ring over land THE BEGGARS' LEAGUE 475 and sea, amid blazing cities, on blood-stained decks, through the smoke and carnage of many a stricken field. The humor of Brederode was hailed with deafening shouts of applause. The Count then threw the wallet around the neck of his nearest neighbor, and handed him the wooden bowl. Each guest, in turn, donned the mendicant's knapsack. Pushing aside his golden goblet, each filled the beggar's bowl to the brim, and drained it to the beggars' health. Roars of laughter and shouts of "Vivent les guculx^' shook the walls of the stately mansion, as they were doomed never to shake again. The shibboleth was invented. The conjuration which they had been anxiously seeking was found. Their enemies had provided them with a spell, which was to prove, in after days, potent enough to start a spirit from palace or hovel, forest or wave, as the deeds of the "wild beggars," the "wood beggars," and the "beggars of the sea" taught Philip at last to understand the nation which he had driven to madness. rV'. E. ELEMENTS OF STORY WRITING /. Incident JENNY AT THE PUMP i George Borrow "Young gentleman," said the huge fat landlord, "you are come at the right time ; dinner vdl\ be taken up in a few minutes, and such a dinner," he continued, rubbing his hands, "as you will not see every day in these times." "I am hot and dusty," said I, "and should wish to cool my hands and face. ' "Jenny !" said the huge landlord, with the utmost gravity, "show the gentleman into number seven, that he may wash his hands and face." "By no means," said I, "I am a person of primitive habits, and there is nothing like the pump in weather like this." "Jenny ! " said the landlord, mth the same gra\dty as before, "go with the young gentleman to the pump in the back kitchen, and take a clean towel along with you." Thereupon the rosy-faced clean-looking damsel went to a drawer, and producing a large, thick, but snowy- white towel, she nodded to me to follow her; whereupon I followed Jenny through a long passage into the back kitchen. And at the end of the back kitchen there stood a pump ; and going to it I placed my hands beneath the spout, and said, " Pump, Jenny " ; and Jenny incontinently, without laying down the towel, pumped with one hand, and I washed and cooled m\' heated hands. • From Lavengro. 476 DENRY AT THE DANCE 477 And, when my hands were washed and cooled, I took off my neckcloth, and unbuttoning my shirt collar, I placed my head beneath the spout of the pump, and I said unto Jenny, "Now, Jenny, lay down the towel, and pump for your life." Thereupon Jenny, placing the towel on a linen-horse, took the handle of the pump with both hands and pumped over my head as handmaid had never pumped before ; so that the water poured in torrents from my head, my face, and my hair, down upon the brick floor. And after the lapse of somewhat more than a minute, I called out with a half-strangled voice, "Hold, Jenny!" and Jenny desisted. I stood for a few moments to recover my breath, then taking the towel which Jenny proffered, I dried com- posedly my hands and head, my face and hair ; then, returning the cowel to Jenny, I gave a deep sigh and said, "Surely, this is one of the pleasantest moments of life." DENRY AT THE DANCE 1 Arnold Bennett The Countess was late ; some trouble with a horse. Happily the Earl had been in Bursley all day and had dressed at the Conservative Club ; and his lordship had ordered that the programme of dances should be begun. Denry learned this as soon as he emerged, effulgent, from the gentlemen's cloak-room into the broad red-carpeted corridor which runs from end to end of the ground floor of the Town Hall. Many important townspeople were chatting in the corridor — the innumerable Sweetnam family, the Stanways, the great Etches, the Fearnses, Mrs. Clayton Vernon, the Buttons, including Beatrice Sutton. Of course everybody knew him for Duncalf's shorthand clerk and the son of the incomparable flannel-washer ; but universal white kid gloves constitute a democracy, and Sillitoe could put more style into a suit than any other tailor in the Five Towns. ^ From Denry the Audacious. E. P. Button and Company. Reprinted by per- mission of the author. 478 ELEMENTS OF STOKV l\ RITIXG "How do?" iho eldest of the Swcetnam boys nodded care- lessly. "How do, Sweetnam?" said Dcnry with equal carelessness. The thing was accomplished ! That greeting was like a masonic initiation, and henceforward he was the peer of no matter whom. At first he had thought that four hundred eyes would be fastened on him, their glance saving: "This youth is wearing a dress-suit for the first time, and it is not paid for, either I" But it was not so. And the reason was that the entire population of the Town Hall was heartily engaged in pretending that never in its life had it been seen after seven o'clock of a night apart from a dress-suit. Denry observed with joy that, while numerous middle-aged and awkward men wore red or white silk handkerchiefs in their waistcoats, such people as Charles Fearns, the Sweetnams, and Harold Etches did not. He was, then, in the shyness of his handkerchief, on the side of the angels. He passed up the double staircase (decorated with white or pale frocks of unparalleled richness) and so into the grand hall. A scarlet orchestra was on the platform, and many people strolled about the floor in attitudes of expectation. The walls were festooned with flowers. The thrill of being magnificent seized him, and he was drenched in a vast desire to be truly magnificent himself. He dreamt of magnificence ; boot-brushes kept sticking out of this dream Uke black mud out of snow. In his reverie he looked about for Ruth Earp, but she was in- visible. Then he went down-stairs again, idly; gorgeously feigning that he spent six evenings a week in ascending and descending monumental staircases, appropriately clad. He was determined to be as sublime as any one. There was a stir in the corridor, and the sublimest consented to be excited. The Countess was announced to be imminent. Everybody was grouped round the main portal, careless of temperatures. Six times was the Countess announced to be imminent before she actually appeared, expanding from the narrow gloom of her black carriage like a magic vision. Aldermen received her, and DENRY AT THE DANCE 479 they did not do it with any excess of gracefulness. They seemed afraid of her, as though she was recovering from influenza and they feared to catch it. She had precisely the same high voice, and precisely the same efficient smile as she had employed to Denry, and these instruments worked marvels on Aldermen ; they were as melting as salt on snow. The Countess disap- peared upstairs in a cloud of shrill apologies and trailing Alder- men. She seemed to have greeted everybody except Denry. Somehow he was relieved that she had not drawn attention tc him. He lingered, hesitating, and then he saw a being in a long yellow overcoat, with a bit of peacock's feather at the summit of a shiny high hat. This being held a lady's fur mantle. Their eyes met. Denry had to decide instantly. He decided. "Hello, Jock!" he said. "Hello, Denry !" said the other, pleased. "What's been happening?" Denry inquired, friendly. Then Jock told him about the antics of one of the Countess's horses. He went upstairs again, and met Ruth Earp coming down. She was glorious in white. Except that nothing glittered in her hair, she looked the very equal of the Countess, at a little distance, plain though her features were. "What about that waltz ? " Denry began, informally. "That waltz is nearly over," said Ruth Earp, with chilliness. "I suppose you've been staring at her ladyship with all the other men I'm awfully sorry," he said. "I didn't know the waltz was — " "Well, why didn't you look at your programme?" "Haven't got one," he said naively. He had omitted to take a programme. Ninny ! Barbarian ! "Better get one," she said, cuttingly, somewhat in her role of dancing mistress. "Can't we finish the waltz?" he suggested, crestfallen. "No !" she said, and continued her solitary way downwards. She was hurt. He tried to think of something to say that was equal to the situation, and equal to the style of his suit. 48o ELEMENTS OF STORY WRITLXG But he could not. In a moment he heard her, below him greeting some male acciuaintance in the most elTusive way. Vet. it Henry had iu)t committed a wicked crime for her, she could never have come to the (hmce at all ! He got a programme, and with terror grii)ping his heart he asked sundry young and middle-aged women whom he knew by sight and by name for a dance. (Ruth had taught him how to ask.) Not one of them had a dance left. Several looked at him as much as to say : "You must be a goose to suppose that my programme is not filled up in the twinkling of my eye !" Then he joined a group of despisers of dancing near the main door. Harold Etches was there, the wealthiest manufacturer of his years (barely twenty-four) in the Five Towns. Also Sillitoe, cause of another of Denry's wicked crimes. The group was taciturn, critical, and very doggish. The group observed that the Countess was not dancing. The Earl was dancing (need it be said with IMrs. Jos. Curtenly, second wife of the Deputy Mayor?), but the Countess stood resolutely smiling, surrounded by Aldermen. Possibly she was getting her breath ; possibly nobody had had the pluck to ask her. Anyhow she seemed to be stranded there, on a beach of Aldermen. Very wisely she had brought with her no members of a house-party from Sneyd Hall. Members of a house-party, at a municipal ball, invariably operate as a bar between great- ness and democracy; and the Countess desired to participate in the life of the people. "Why don't some of the Johnnies ask her?" Denry burst out. He had hitherto said nothing in the group, and he felt that he must be a man with the rest of them. "Well, you go and do it. It's a free country," said Sillitoe. "So I would, for two pins !" said Denry. Harold Etches glanced at him, apparently resentful of his presence there. Harold Etches was determined to put the extinguisher on him. "I'll bet you a fiver you don't," said Etches, scornfully. "I'll take you," said Denry very quickly, and very quickly walked off. DENRY AT THE DANCE 48 1 "She can't eat me. She can't eat me !" This was what he said to himself as he crossed the floor. People seemed to make a lane for him, divining his incredible intention. If he had not started at once, if his legs had not started of themselves, he would never have started ; and, not being in command of a fiver, he would afterwards have cut a preposterous figure in the group. But started he was, like a piece of clock-work that could not be stopped ! In the grand crisis of his life something not himself, something more powerful than himself, jumped up in him and forced him to do things. Now for the first time he seemed to understand what had oc- curred within him in previous crises. In a second — so it appeared — he had reached the countess. Just behind her was his employer, Mr. Duncalf, whom Denry had not previously noticed there. Denry regretted this, for he had never mentioned to Mr. Duncalf that he was coming to the ball, and he feared Mr. Duncalf. "Could I have this dance with you?" he demanded bluntly, but smiling and showing his teeth. No ceremonial title ! No mention of "pleasure" or "honor." Not a trace of the formula in which Ruth Earp had instructed him ! He forgot all such trivialities. ("I've won that fiver, Mr. Harold Etches," he said to him- self.) The mouths of Aldermen inadvertently opened. Mr. Dun- calf blenched. "It's nearly over, isn't it ?" said the Countess, still efficiently smiUng. She did not recognize Denry. In that suit he might have been a Foreign Office attache. "Oh ! that doesn't matter, I'm sure !" said Denry. She yielded, and he took the paradisiacal creature in his arms. It was her business that evening to be universally and inclusively polite. A refusal might have dried up all other in- vitations whatsoever. Besides, she was young, though a Countess, and adored dancing. Thus they waltzed together, while the flower of Bursley's chivalry gazed in enchantment. The Countess's fan, depend- 21 48 2 ELEMENTS OF STORY WRITING ing from her arm, dangled against Denry's suit in a rather con- tusing fashion which withdrew his attention from his feet. He laid hold of it gingerly between two unemployed lingers. After that he managed fairly well. Once they came perilcjusly near the Earl and his partner ; nothing else. And then the dance ended, exactly when Denry had begun to savor the astounding spectacle of himself enclasping the Countess. The Countess had soon perceived that he was the merest boy. '* Vou waltz cjuite nicely !" she said, like an aunt, but with more than an aunt's smile. "Do I?" he beamed. Then something compelled him to say : " Do you know, it's the first time I've ever waltzed in my life, except in a lesson, you know?" "Really!" she murmured. "You pick things up easily, I suppose?" "Yes," he said. "Do you?" Either the question or the tone sent the Countess off into carillons of amusement. Everybody could see that Denry had made the Countess laugh tremendously. It was on this note that the waltz finished. She was still laughing when he bowed to her (as taught by Ruth Earp). He could not comprehend why she had so laughed, save on the supposition that he was more humorous than he had suspected. Anyhow he laughed too, and they parted laughing. He remembered that he had made a marked effect (though not one of laughter) on the tailor by quickly returning the question, "Are you?" and his unpre- meditated stroke with the Countess was similar. When he had got ten yards on his way towards Harold Etches and a fiver he felt something in his hand. The Countess's fan was sticking between his fingers. It had unhooked itself from her chain. He furtively pocketed it. "Just the same as dancing with any other woman!" — he told this untruth in reply to a question from Sillitoe. It was the least he could do. And any other young man in his place would have said as much or as little. "What was she laughing at ?" somebody else asked. "Ah !" said Denry judiciously, "wouldn't you like to know ? " DENRY AT THE DANCE 483 "Here you are!" said Etches, with an unattentive, pluto- cratic gesture handing over a five-pound note. He was one of those men who never venture out of sight of a bank without a banknote in their pockets — "because you never know what may turn up." Denry accepted the note with a silent nod. In some directions he was gifted with astounding insight. And he could read in the faces of the haughty males surrounding him that in the space of a few minutes he had risen from nonentity into renown. He had become a great man. He did not at once realize how great, how renowned. But he saw enough in those eyes to cause his heart to glow, and to rouse in his brain those am- bitious dreams which stirred him upon occasion. He left the group ; he had need of motion, and also of that mental privacy which one may enjoy while strolling about on a crowded floor in the midst of a considerable noise. He noticed that the Countess was now dancing with an Alderman, and that the Alderman, by an oversight inexcusable in an Alderman, was not wearing gloves. It was he, Denry, who had broken the ice so that the Aldermen might plunge into the water ! He had first danced with the Countess and had rendered her up to the Alder- men with delicious gaiety upon her countenance. By instinct he knew Bursley and he knew that he would be talked of. He knew that, for a time at any rate, he would displace even Jos. Curtenly, that almost professional "card" and amuser of burgesses, in the popular imagination. It would not be : "Have ye heard Jos.'s latest ?" It would be : "Have ye heard about young Machin, Duncalf's clerk?" Then he met Ruth Earp, strolling in the opposite direction with a young girl, one of her pupils, of whom all he knew was that her name was Nellie, and that this was her first ball : a childish little thing with a wistful face. He could not decide whether to look at Ruth or to avoid her glance. She settled the point by smiling at him in a manner that could not be ignored. "Are you going to make it up to me for that waltz you missed?" said Ruth Earp. She pretended to be vexed 484 ELE\fEXTS OF STORY U RITIXG and stern but hi' knew that sin- was not. " Or is vour programme full?" shoachkd. "I should like to," he said simply. "But perhaps you don't care to dance with us poor ordinary people, now you've danced with the Countess !" she said, with a cerUiin lofty and bitter pride. He perceived that his tone had lacked ean;erness. "Don't talk like that," he said, as if hurt. "Well," she said, "you can have the supper dance." "Why I" he said, "there's a name down here for the supper dance. 'Herbert' it looks like." "Oh!" she replied carelessly, "that's nothing. Cross it out." So he crossed Herbert out. "Why don't you ask Nellie here for a dance ? " said RuthEarp. And Nellie blushed. He gathered that the possible honor of dancing with the supremely great man had surpassed Nellie's modest expectations. "Can I have the next one?" he said. "Oh, yes !" Nellie timidly whispered. "It's a polka, and you aren't very good at polking, you know," Ruth warned him. " Still, Nellie will pull you through." Nellie laughed, in silver. The naive child thought that Ruth was trying to joke at Denry's expense. Her very manifest joy and pride in being seen with the unique Mr. Machin, in being the next after the Countess to dance with him, made another mirror in which Denry could discern the reflection of his vast importance At the supper, which was worthy of the hospitable traditions of the Chell family (though served standing-up in the police- court), he learnt all the gossip of the dance from Ruth Earp ; amongst other things that more than one young man had asked the Countess for a dance, and had been refused, though Ruth Earp for her part declined to believe that Aldermen and Coun- cillors had utterly absorbed the Countess's programme. Ruth hinted that the Countess was keeping a second dance open for him, Denry. When she asked him squarely if he meant to DENRY AT THE DANCE 485 request another from the Countess, he said, No, positively. He knew when to let well alone, a knowledge which is more precious than a knowledge of geography. The supper was the summit of Denry's triumph. The best people spoke to him without being introduced. And lovely creatures mysteriously and intoxicatingly discovered that programmes which had been crammed two hours before were not after all quite, quite full. "Do tell us what the Countess was laughing at?" This question was shot at him at least thirty times. He always said he would not tell. And one girl who had danced with Mr. Stanway, who had danced with the Countess, said that Mr. Stanway had said that the Countess would not tell, either. Proof, here, that he was being extensively talked about ! Toward the end of the festivity the rumor floated abroad that the Countess had lost her fan. The rumor reached Denry, who maintained a culpable silence. But when all was over, and the Countess was departing, he rushed down after her, and in a dramatic fashion which demonstrated his genius for the effective, he caught her exactly as she was getting into her carriage. "I've just picked it up," he said, pushing through the crowd of worshippers. "Oh! thank you so much!" she said. And the Earl also thanked Denry. And then the Countess, leaning from the carriage, said with archness in her efficient smile: "You do pick things up easily, don't you?" And both Denry and the Countess laughed without restraint, and the pillars of Bursley society were mystified. Denry winked at Jock as the horses pawed away. And Jock winked back. The envied of all, Denry walked home, thinking violently. At a stroke he had become possessed of more than he could earn from Duncalf in a month. The faces of the Countess, of Ruth Earp, and of the timid Nellie mingled in exquisite hallu- cinations before his tired eyes. He was inexpressibly happy. 486 ELEMEMS OF STOKV WKIJ/Xa THE PURSUIT OF THE OUTLAW ^ Fr.\nk Nokris Dyke thundered acruss ihe railway tracks by the depot at Guadalajara not five minutes ahead of his pursuers. Luck seemed to have deserted him. The station, usually su quiet, was now occupied by the crew of a freight train that lay on the down track ; wliile on the up line, near at hand and headed in the same direction, was a detached locomotive, whose engineer and fireman recognized him, he was sure, as the buckskin leaped across the rails. He had had no time to formulate a plan since that morning, when, tortured with thirst, he had ventured near the spring at the headwaters of Broderson Creek, on Quien Sabe, and had all but fallen into the hands of the posse that had been watch- ing for that very move. It was useless now to regret that he had tried to foil pursuit by turning back on his tracks to regain the mountains east of Bonneville. Now Delaney was almost on him. To distance that posse was the only thing to be thought of now. It was no longer a question of hiding till pur- suit would flag ; they had driven him out from the shelter of the mountains, into this populous countryside, where an enemy might be met with at every turn of the road. Now it was life or death. He would cither escape or be killed. He knew very well that he would never allow himself to be taken alive. But he had no mind to be killed — to turn and fight — till escape was blocked. His one thought was to leave pursuit behind. Weeks of flight had sharpened Dyke's every sense. As he turned into the Upper Road beyond Guadalajara, he saw the three men galloping down from Derrick's stock range, making for the road ahead of him. They would cut him ofiE there. He swung the buckskin about. He must take the Lower Road across Los Muertos from Guadalajara, and he must reach it before Delaney's dogs and posse. Back he galloped, the buckskin measuring her length with every leap. Once more the station 1 From The Octopus. Doubleday, Page, andCompany. Reprinted by permission. THE PURSUIT OF THE OUTLAW 487 came in sight. Rising in his stirrups, he looked across the fields in the direction of the Lower Road. There was a cloud of dust there. From a wagon ? No, horses on the run, and their riders were armed ! He could catch a flash of gun barrels. They were all closing in on him, converging on Guadalajara by every available road. The Upper Road west of Guadalajara led straight to Bonneville. That way was impossible. Was he in a trap ? Had the time for fighting come at last ? But as Dyke neared the depot at Guadalajara, his eye fell upon the detached locomotive that lay quietly steaming on the up line, and with a thrill of exultation, he remembered that he was an engineer born and bred. Delaney's dogs were already to be heard, and the roll of hoofs on the Lower Road was din- ning in his ears, as he leaped from the buckskin before the depot. The train crew scattered like frightened sheep before him, but Dyke ignored them. His pistol was in his hand as, once more on foot, he sprang toward the lone engine. "Out of the cab," he shouted. "Both of you. Quick, or I'll kill you both." The two men tumbled from the iron apron of the tender as Dyke swung himself up, dropping his pistol on the floor of the cab and reaching with the old instinct for the familiar levers. The great compound hissed and trembled as the steam was released, and the huge drivers stirred, turning slowly on the tracks. But there was a shout. Delaney's posse, dogs and men, swung into view at the curve of the road, their figures leaning over as they took the curve at full speed. Dyke threw every- thing wide open and caught up his revolver. From behind came the challenge of a Winchester The party on the Lower Road were even closer than Delaney. They had seen his ma- noeuver, and the first shot of the fight shivered the cab windows above the engineer's head. But spinning futilely at first, the drivers of the engine at last caught the rails. The engine moved, advanced, traveled past the depot and the freight train, and gathering speed, rolled out on the track beyond. Smoke, black and boiling, shot skyward from the stack ; not a joint that did not shudder with the mighty 4S8 ELEMEXTS OF STORY UKITI.XC strain of the steam ; l)Ut llu' great iron brute — one of Baldwin's newest and best — came to call, obedient and docile as soon as ever the great pulsing heart of it felt a master hand ujion its levers. It gathered its speed, bracing its steel muscles, its thews of iron, and roared out upon the open track, filling the air with the rasp of its tempest-breath, blotting the sunshine with the belch of its hot, thick smoke. Already it was lessening in the distance, when Uelaney, Christian, and the sheriff of Visalia dashed up to the station. The posse had seen everything. "Stuck. Curse the luck!" vociferated the cow^-puncher. But the sheriff was already out of the saddle and into the telegraph office. "There's a derailing switch between here and Pi.xley, isn't there?" he cried. "Yes." "Wire ahead to open it. We'll derail him there. Come on," he turned to Delaney and the others. They sprang into the cab of the locomotive that was attached to the freight train. "Name of the State of California," shouted the sheriff to the bewildered engineer. "Cut off from your train." The sheriff was a man to be obeyed without hesitating. Time was not allowed the crew of the freight train for debating as to the right or the wrong of requisitioning the engine, and before any one thought of the safety or danger of the affair, the freight engine was already flying out upon the down line, hot in pursuit of Dyke, now far ahead upon the up track. "I remember perfectly well there's a derailing switch between here and Pi.xley," shouted the sheriff above the roar of the loco- motive. "The}' use it in case they have to derail runaway engines. It runs right off into the country. W'e'll pile him up there. Ready with your guns, boys." "If we should meet another train coming up on this track — " protested the frightened engineer. "Then we'd jump or be smashed. Hi! look! there he is." As the freight engine rounded a curve. Dyke's engine came into THE PURSUIT OF THE OUTLAW 489 view shooting on some quarter of a mile ahead of them, wreathed in whirling smoke. "The switch ain't much further on," clamored the engineer. "You can see Pixley now." Dyke, his hand on the grip of the valve that controlled the steam, his head out of the cab window, thundered on. He was back in his old place again ; once more he was the engineer ; once more he felt the engine quiver under him ; the familiar noises were in his ears ; the familiar buffeting of the wind surged, roaring at his face ; the familiar odors of hot steam and smoke reeked in his nostrils, and on either side of him, parallel pano- ramas, the two halves of the landscape sliced, as it were, in two by the clashing wheels of his engine, streamed by in green and brown blurs. He found himself settling to the old position on the cab seat, leaning on his elbow from the window, one hand on the control- ler. All at once, the instinct of the pursuit that of late had be- come so strong within him, prompted him to shoot a glance behind. He saw the other engine on the down line, plunging after him, rocking from side to side with the fury of its gallop. Not yet had he shaken the trackers from his heels ; not yet was he out of the reach of danger. He set his teeth and, throwing open the fire-door, stoked vigorously for a few moments. The indicator of the steam gauge rose ; his speed increased ; a glance at the telegraph poles told him he was doing his fifty miles an hour. The freight engine behind him was never built for that pace. Barring the terrible risk of accident, his chances were good. But suddenly — the engineer dominating the highwayman — he shut off his steam and threw back his brake to the extreme notch. Directly ahead of him rose a semaphore, placed at a point where evidently a derailing switch branched from the line. The semaphore's arm was dropped over the track, setting the danger signal that showed the switch was open. In an instant, Dyke saw the trick. They had meant to smash him here ; had been clever enough, quick-witted enough to open the switch, but had forgotten the automatic semaphore 490 liLKMK.XTS or STORV URITIXG that worked simultaneously with the movement of the rails. To go forward was certain destruction. Dyke reversed. There was nothinjij for it but to go back. With a wrench and a spasm of all its metal fibers, the great compound braced itself, sliding with rigid wheels along the rails. Then, as Dyke applied the reverse, it drew back from the greater danger, returning toward the less. Inevitably now the two engines, t)ne on the up, the other on the down line, must meet and pass each other. Dyke released the levers, reaching for his revolver. The engineer once more became the highwayman, in peril of his life. Now, beyond all doubt, the time for fighting was at hand. The party in the heavy freight engine, that lumbered after in pursuit, their eyes fixed on the smudge of smoke on ahead that marked the path of the fugitive, suddenly raised a shout. ''He's stopped. He's broke down. Watch, now, and see if he jumps off." ''Broke nothing. He^s coming back. Ready, now, he's got to pass us." The engineer applied the brakes, but the heavy freight loco- motive, far less mobile than Dyke's flyer, was slow to obey. The smudge on the rails ahead grew swiftly larger. "He's coming. He's coming — look out, there's a shot. He's shooting already." A bright, white sliver of wood leaped into the air from the sooty window-sill of the cab. "f'ire on him! Fire on him!" Willie the engines were yet two hundred yards apart, the duel began, shot answering shot, the sharp staccato reports punctuat- ing the thunder of wheels and the clamor of steam. Then the ground trembled and rocked; a roar as of heavy ordnance developed with the abruptness of an explosion. The two engines passed each other, the men firing the while, emptying their revolvers, shattering wood, shivering glass, the bullets clanging against the metal work as they struck and struck and struck. The men leaned from the cabs towards each other, frantic with excitement, shouting curses, the engines rocking, the steam roar- ing ; confusion whirling in the scene like the whirl of a witch's THE PURSUIT OF THE OUTLAW 491 dance, the white clouds of steam, the black eddies from the smoke- stack, the blue wreaths from the hot mouths of the revolvers, swirling together in a blinding maze of vapor, spinning around them, dazing them, dizzying them, while the head rang with hideous clamor and the body twitched and trembled with the leap and jar of the tumult of machinery. Roaring, clamoring, reeking with the smell of powder and oil, spitting death, resistless, huge, furious, an abrupt \dsion of chaos, faces, rage-distorted, peering through the smoke, hands gripping outward from sudden darkness, prehensile, malev- olent ; terrible as thunder, swift as lightning, the two engines met and passed. "He's hit," cried Delaney. "I know I hit him. He can't go far now. After him again. He won't dare go through Bonneville." It was true. Dyke had stood between cab and tender throughout all the duel, exposed, reckless, thinking only of attack and not of defense, and a bullet from one of the pistols had grazed his hip. How serious was the wound he did not know, but he had no thought of giving up. He tore back through the depot at Guadalajara in a storm of bullets, and, clinging to the broken window-ledge of his cab, was carried toward Bonne- ville, on over the Long Trestle and Broderson Creek and through the open country between the two ranches of Los Muertos and Quien Sabe. But to go to Bonneville meant certain death. Before, as well as behind him, the roads were now blocked. Once more he thought of the mountains. He resolved to abandon the en- gine and make another final attempt to get into the shelter of the hills in the northernmost corner of Quien Sabe. He set his teeth. He would not give in. There was one more fight left in him yet. Now to try the final hope. He slowed the engine down, and, reloading his revolver, jumped from the platform to the road. He looked about him, listening. All around him widened an ocean of wheat. There was no one in sight. The released engine, alone, unattended, drew slowly away 402 ELEMENTS OF STORY W KllIXG friMii him. jolting jionderously Dvcr the rail joints. As. he watched it go, a certain indet'initc sense of abandonment, even in that moment, came over Dyke. His last friend, that also had been his first, was leaving him. He remembered that day, long ago, when he had opened the throttle of his first machine. To-day, it was leaving him alone, hi? last friend turning against him. Slowly it was going back towards Bonneville, to the shops of the Railroad, the camp of the enemy, that enemy that had ruined him and wrecked him. For the last time in his life, he had been the engineer. Now, once more, he became the highway- man, the outlaw against whom all hands were raised, the fugi- tive skulking in the mountains, listening for the cry of dogs. But he would not give in. They had not broken him yet. Never, while he could fight, would he allow S. Behrman the triumph of his capture. He found his wound was not bad. He plunged into the wheat on Quien Sabe, making northward for a division house that rose with its surrounding trees out of the wheat like an island. He reached it, the blood squelching in his shoes. But the sight of two men, Portuguese farm-hands, staring at him from an angle of the barn, abruptly roused him to action. He sprang forward with peremptory commands, demanding a horse. At Guadalajara, Delaney and the sherifif descended from the freight engine. " Horses nov.-," declared the sheriff. " He won't go into Bonne- ville, that's certain. He'll leave the engine between here and there, and strike off into the country. We'll follow after him now in the saddle. Soon as he leaves his engine, he''s on foot. We've as good -as got him now." Their horses, including even the buckskin mare that Dyke had ridden, were still at the station. The party swung them- selves up, Delaney exclaiming, "Here's my mount," as he be- strode the buckskin. At Guadalajara, the two bloodhounds were picked up again. Urging the jaded horses to a gallop, the party set oft along the Upper Road, keeping a sharp lookout to right and left for traces of Dyke's abandonment of the engine. THE PURSUIT OF THE OUTLAW 493 Three miles beyond the Long Trestle, they found S. Behrman holding his saddle horse by the bridle, and looking attentively at a trail that had been broken through the standing wheat on Quien Sabe. The party drew rein. "The engine passed me on the tracks further up, and empty," said S. Behrman. "Boys, I think he left her here." But before anyone could answer, the bloodhounds gave tongue again, as they picked up the scent. "That's him," cried S. Behrman. "Get on, boys." They dashed forward, following the hounds. S. Behrman laboriously climbed to his saddle, panting, perspiring, mopping the roll of fat over his coat collar, and turned in after them, trotting along far in the rear, his great stomach and tremulous jowl shaking with the horse's gait. "What a day," he murmured. "What a day." Dyke's trail was fresh, and was followed as easily as if made on new-fallen snow. In a short time, the posse swept into the open space around the division house. The two Portuguese were still there, wide-eyed, terribly excited. Yes, yes. Dyke had been there not half an hour since, had held them up, taken a horse and galloped to the northeast, towards the foothills at the headwaters of Broderson Creek. On again, at full gallop, through the young wheat, trampling it under the flying hoofs ; the hounds hot on the scent, baying continually ; the men, on fresh mounts, secured at the division house, bending forward in their saddles, spurring relentlessly. S. Behrman jolted along far in the rear. And even then, harried through an open country, where there was no place to hide, it was a matter of amazement how long a chase the highwayman led them. Fences were passed ; fences whose barbed wire had been slashed apart by the fugitive's knife. The ground rose under foot ; the hills were at hand ; still the pursuit held on. The sun, long past the meridian, began to turn earthward. Would night come on before they were up with him? "Look ! Look ! There he is ! Quick, there he goes !" High on the bare slope of the nearest hill, all the posse, look- 494 ELEMENTS OF STOKV WRniXG iiii; in the dirccUon of Delaney's gesture, saw the figure of a horseman enier.ue from an arroyo, tilled with chaparral, and struggle at a laboring gallop straight up the s1o[k'. Suddenly, every member of the party shouted aloud. The horse had fallen, pitching the rider from the saddle. The man rose to his feet, caught at the bridle, missed it, and the horse dashed on alone. The man, pausing for a second, looked around, saw the chase drawing nearer, then, turning back, disappeared in the chaparral. Delaney raised a great whoop. "We've got you now." Into the slopes and valleys of the hills dashed the band of horsemen, the trail now so fresh that it could be easily discerned by all. On and on it led them, a furious, wild scramble straight up the slopes. The minutes went by. The dry bed of a rivulet was passed ; then another fence ; then a tangle of manzanita ; a meadow of wild oats, full of agitated cattle ; then an arroyo, thick with chaparral and scrub oaks, and then, without warn- ing, the pistol shots ripped out and ran from rider to rider with the rapidity of a gatling discharge, and one of the deputies bent forward in the saddle, both hands to his face, the blood jetting from between his lingers. Dyke was there, at bay at last, his back against a bank of rock, the roots of a fallen tree serving him as a rampart, his revolver smoking in his hand. "You're under arrest. Dyke," cried the sheriff. "It's not the least use to fight. The whole country is up." Dyke fired again, the shot splintering the foreleg of the horse the sherifif rode. The posse, four men all told — the wounded deputy having crawled out of the fight after Dyke's first shot — fell back after the preliminary fusillade, dismounted, and took shelter behind rocks and trees. On that rugged ground, fighting from the saddle was impracticable. Dyke, in the meanwhile, held his fire, for he knew that, once his pistol was empty, he would never be allowed time to reload. "Dyke," called the sheriff again, "for the last time, I sum- mon you to surrender." THE PURSUIT OF THE OUTLAW 495 Dyke did not reply. The sheriff, Delaney, and the man named Christian conferred together in a low voice. Then Delaney and Christian left the others, making a wide detour up the sides of the arroyo, to gain a position to the left and some- what to the rear of Dyke. But it was at this moment that S. Behrman arrived. It could not be said whether it was courage or carelessness that brought the Railroad's agent within reach of Dyke's revolver. Possibly he was really a brave man ; possibly occupied with keeping an uncertain seat upon the back of his laboring, scram- bling horse, he had not noticed that he was so close upon that scene of battle. He certainly did not observe the posse lying upon the ground between sheltering rocks and trees, and before any one could call a warning, he had ridden out into the open, within thirty paces of Dyke's intrenchment. Dyke saw. There was the arch-enemy ; the man of all men whom he most hated ; the man who had ruined him, who had exasperated him and driven him to crime, and who had insti- gated tireless pursuit through all those past terrible weeks. Suddenly, inviting death, he leaped up and forward ; he had for- gotten all else, all other considerations, at the sight of this man. He would die, gladly, so only that S. Behrman died before him. "I've got you, anyway," he shouted, as he ran forward. The muzzle of the weapon was not ten feet from S. Behrman's huge stomach as Dyke drew the trigger. Had the cartridge exploded, death, certain and swift, would have followed, but at this, of all moments, the revolver missed fire. S. Behrman, with an unexpected agility, leaped from the saddle, and, keeping his horse between him and Dyke, ran, dodg- ing and ducking, from tree to tree. His first shot a failure. Dyke fired again and again at his enemy, emptying his revolver, reck- less of consecjuences. His every shot went wild, and before he could draw his knife, the whole posse was upon him. Without concerted plans, obeying no signal but the prompt- ings of the impulse that snatched, unerring, at opportunity — the men, Delaney and Christian from one side, the sheriff and 4q6 elements of STOKV W KITIXG tlic ikputy from the uUkt, rushed in. Tliey did not fire. It Wiis Dyke alive they wanted. One of them had a riata snatched from a saddle-pommel, and witli this they tried to bind him. The fight was four to one — four men with law on their side to one wounded freebooter, half-starved, exhausted by days and nights of pursuit, worn down with loss of sleep, thirst, i)rivation. and the grinding, nerve- rackingt consciousness of an ever-presenl peril. They swarmed upon him from all sides, gripping at his legs, at his arms, his thn at, his head, striking, clutching, kicking, falling to the ground, rolling over and over, now under, now above, now staggering forward, now toppling back. Still Dyke fought. Through that scrambling, struggling group, through that maze of twisting bodies, twining arms, straining legs, S. Behrman saw him from moment to moment, his face flaming, his eyes bloodshot, his hair matted with sweat. Now he was down, pinned under, two men across his legs, and now half-way up again, struggling to one knee. Then upright again, with half his enemies hanging on his back. His colossal strength seemed doubled ; when his arms were held, he fought bull-like with his head. A score of times, it seemed as if they were about to secure him finally and irrevocably, and then he would free an arm, a leg, a shoulder, and the group that, for the fraction of an instant, had settled, locked and rigid, on its prey, would break up again as he flung a man from him, reeling and bloody, and he himself twisting, squirming, dodging, his great fists working like pistons, backed away, dragging and carrying the others with him. More than once, he loosened almost every grip, and for an instant stood nearly free, panting, rolling his eyes, his clothes torn from his body, bleeding, dripping with sweat, a terrible figure, nearly free. The sheriff, under his breath, uttered an e.xclamation : — "By God, he'll get away yet." S. Behrman watched the fight complacently. "That all may show obstinacy," he commented, "but it don't show common sense." THE PURSUIT OF THE OUTLAW 497 Yet, however Dyke might throw off the clutches and fetter- ing embraces that encircled him, however he might disintegrate and scatter the band of foes that heaped themselves upon him, however he might gain one instant of comparative liberty, some one of his assailants always hung, doggedly, blindly to an arm, a leg, or a foot, and the others, drawing a second's breath, closed in again, implacable, unconquerable, ferocious, like hounds upon a wolf. At length, two of the men managed to bring Dyke's wrists close enough together to allow the sheriff to snap the handcuffs on. Even then. Dyke, clasping his hands, and using the hand- cuffs themselves as a weapon, knocked down Delaney by the crushing impact of the steel bracelets upon the cow-puncher's forehead. But he could no longer protect himself from attacks from behind, and the riata was finally passed around his body, pinioning his arms to his sides. After this it was useless to resist. The wounded deputy sat with his back to a rock, holding his broken jaw in both hands. The sheriff's horse, with its splin- tered foreleg, would have to be shot. Delaney's head was cut from temple to cheekbone. The right wrist of the sheriff was all but dislocated. The other deputy was so exhausted he had to be helped to his horse. But Dyke was taken. He himself had suddenly lapsed into semi-unconsciousness, unable to walk. They set him on the buckskin, S. Behrman supporting him, the sheriff, on foot, leading the horse by the bridle. The little procession formed, and descended from the hills, turning in the direction of Bonneville. A special train, one car and an engine, would be made up there, and the high- wayman would sleep in the Visalia jail that night. Delaney and S. Behrman found themselves in the rear of the cavalcade as it moved off. The cow-puncher turned to his chief : — "Well, captain," he said, still panting, as he bound up his forehead; "well — we go^ him." 2t. 49S ELEAfENTS OF STORV U KITING 2. Description NATURE SPEAKS' George Meredith An oppressive slumber hung about the forest-branches. In the dells and on the heights were the same dead heat. Here where the brook tinkled it was no cool-lipped sound, but metallic, and without the spirit of water. Yonder in a space of moon- light on lush grass, the beams were as white fire to sight and feeling. No haze spread around. The valleys were clear, de- fined to the shadows of their verges ; the distances sharply distinct, and with the colors of day but slightly softened. Richard beheld a roe moving across a slope of sward far out of rifle-mark. The breathless silence was significant, yet the moon shone in a broad blue heaven. Tongue out of mouth trotted the little dog after him; crouched panting when he stopped an instant ; rose weariedly when he started afresh. Now and then a large white night-moth flitted through the dusk of the forest. On a barren corner of the wooded highland, looking inland, stood gray topless ruins set in nettles and grass-blades. Richard mechanically sat down on the crumbling flints to rest, and lis- tened to the panting of the dog. Sprinkled at his feet were emerald lights ; hundreds of glow-worms studded the dark, dry ground. He sat and eyed them, thinking not at all. His energies were expanded in action. He sat as a part of the ruins, and the moon turned his shadow westward from the South. Overhead, as she declined, long ripples of silver cloud were imperceptibly stealing toward her. They were the van of a tempest. He did not ob- ser\'e them or the leaves beginning to chatter. When he again pursued his course, with his face to the Rhine, a huge mountain appeared to rise sheer over him, and he had it in his mind to scale * From The Ordeal of Richard Fevercl. Charles Scribner's Sons. Reprinted by permission. NATURE SPEAKS 499 jt. He got no nearer to the base of it for all his vigorous out- stepping. The ground began to dip ; he lost sight of the sky. Then heavy thunder-drops struck his cheek, the leaves were singing, the earth breathed, it was black before him and behind. All at once the thunder spoke. The mountain he had marked was bursting over him. Up started the whole forest in violet fire. He saw the country at the foot of the hill to the bounding Rhine gleam, quiver, ex- tinguished. Then there were pauses ; and the lightning seemed as the eye of heaven, and the thunder as the tongue of heaven, each alternately addressing him ; filling him with awful rapture. Alone there — sole human creature among the grandeurs and mysteries of storm — he felt the representative of his kind, and his spirit rose, and marched, and exulted, let it be glory, let it be ruin ! Lower down the lighted abysses of air rolled the wrathful crash : then white thrusts of light were darted from the skies, and great curving ferns, seen steadfast in pallor a second, were supernaturally agitated and vanished. Then a shrill song roused in the leaves and the herbage. Prolonged and louder it sounded, as deeper and heavier the deluge pressed. A mighty force of water satisfied the desire of the earth. Even in this, drenched as he was by the first outpouring, Richard had a savage pleasure. Keeping in motion, he was scarcely conscious of the wet, and the grateful breath of the weeds was refreshing. Suddenly he stopped short, lifting a curious nostril. He fancied he smelt meadow-sweet. He had never seen the flower in Rhine-land — never thought of it ; and it would hardly be met with in a forest. He was sure he smelt it fresh in dews. His little companion wagged a miserable wet tail some way in advance. He went on slowly, thinking indistinctly. After two or three steps he stooped and stretched out his hand to feel for the flower, having, he knew not why, a strong wish to verify its growth here. Grop- ing about, his hand encountered something warm that started at his touch, and he, with the instinct we have, seized it, and lifted it to look at it. The creature was very small, evidently quite young. Richard's eyes, now accustomed to the darkness, were able to discern it for what it was, a tinv leveret, and he supposed 500 ELEMENTS OF STORY WRITING ihal Uk- iloLj had i)ri)l)al)ly frightened its dam just I)cfore he found it. He put the little thing on one hand in liis l)reast, and stepped out rapidly as before. The rain was now steady ; from every tree a fountain poured. So cool and easy had his mind become that he was speculating on what kind of shelter the birds could tind, and how the butter- flies and moths saved their colored wings from washing. Folded close, they might hang under a leaf, he thought. Lovingly, he looked into the dripping darkness of the coverts on each side, as one of their children. He was next musing on a strange sensa- tion he experienced. It ran up one arm with an indescribable thrill, but communicated nothing to his heart. It was purely physical, ceased for a time, but recommenced, till he had it all through his blood, wonderfully thrilling. He grew aware that the little thing he carried in his breast was licking his hand there. The small rough tongue going over and over the palm of his hand produced the strange sensation he felt. Now that he knew the cause, the marvel ended ; but now that he knew the cause, his heart was touched and made more of it. The gentle scraping continued without intermission as on he walked. What did it say to him ? Human tongue could not have said so much just then. A pale gray light on the skirts of the flying tempest displayed the dawn. Richard was walking hurriedly. The green drenched weeds lay all about in his path, bent thick, and the forest drooped glimmeringly. Impelled as a man who feels a revelation mount- ing obscurely to his brain, Richard was passing one of those little forest chapels, hung with votive wreaths, where the peasant halts to kneel and pray. Cold, still, in the twilight it stood, rain- drops pattering around it. He looked within, and saw the Virgin holding her child. He moved by. But not many steps had he gone ere his strength went out of him, and he shuddered. What was it ? He asked not. He was in other hands. Vivid as lightning the Spirit of Life illumined him. He felt in his heart the cry of his child, his darling's touch. With shut eyes he saw them both. They drew him from the depths ; they led him a blind and tottering man. And as they NATURE SPEAKS 501 led him he had a sense of purification so sweet he shuddered again and again. When he looked out from his trance on the breathing world, the small birds hopped and chirped ; warm, fresh sunlight was over all the hills. He was on the edge of the forest, entering a plain clothed with ripe corn under a spacious morning sky. LIBRARY STATE TEACHERS COL'EGE SA.,TA BARBARA. CALIFORNIA L5.m. IV. F. SHORT STORIES THE SIRE DE MALETROIT'S DOOR » Robert Louis Stevenson Denis de Beaulieu was not yet two-and-twenty, but he counted himself a grown man, and a very accomplished cavalier into the bargain. Lads were early formed in that rough, war- faring epoch ; and when one has been in a pitched battle and a dozen raids, has killed one's man in an honorable fashion, and knows a thing or two of strategy and mankind, a certain swag- ger in the gait is surely to be pardoned. He had put up his horse with due care, and supped with due deliberation ; and then, in a very agreeable frame of mind, went out to pay a visit in the gray of the evening. It was not a very wise proceeding on the young man's part. He would ha\'e done better to remain beside the fire or go decently to bed. For the town was full of the troops of Burgundy and England under a mLxed command ; and though Denis was there on safe-conduct, his safe-conduct was like to serve him little on a chance encounter. It was September, 1429; the weather had fallen sharp; a flighty piping wind, laden with showers, beat about the town- ship ; and the dead leaves ran riot along the streets. Here and there a window was already lighted up ; and the noise of men- at-arms making merry over supper within, came forth in fits and was swallowed up and carried away by the wind. The night fell swiftly; the flag of England, fluttering on the spire- top, grew ever fainter and fainter against the flying clouds — a black speck like a swallow in the tumultuous, leaden chaos of the sky. As the night fell the wind rose, and began to hoot • From NeK Arabian Nights. Charles Scribner's Sons. Reprinted by permis- sion. 502 THE SIRE DE MALETROITS DOOR 503 under archways and roar amid the tree-tops in the valley below the town. Denis de Beaulieu walked fast and was soon knocking at his friend's door ; but though he promised himself to stay only a little while and make an early return, his welcome was so pleasant, and he found so much to delay him, that it was already long past midnight before he said good-by upon the threshold. The wind had fallen again in the meanwhile ; the night was as black as the grave; not a star, nor a glimmer of moonshine, slipped through the canopy of cloud. Denis was ill-acquainted with the intricate lanes of Chateau Landon; even by daylight he had found some trouble in picking his way; and in this absolute darkness he soon lost it altogether. He was certain of one thing only — to keep mounting the hill ; for his friend's house lay at the lower end, or tail, of Chateau Landon, while the inn was up at the head, under the great church spire. With this clew to go upon he stumbled and groped forward, now breath- ing more freely in open places where there was a good slice of sky overhead, now feeling along the wall in stifling closes. It is an eerie and mysterious position to be thus suljmerged in opaque blackness in an almost unknown town. The silence is terrifying in its possibilities. The touch of cold window bars to the exploring hand startles the man like the touch of a toad ; the inequalities of the pavement shake his heart into his mouth ; a piece of denser darkness threatens an ambuscade or a chasm in the pathway; and where the air is brighter, the houses put on strange and bewildering appearances, as if to lead him farther from his way. For Denis, who had to regain his inn without attracting notice, there was real danger as well as mere discomfort in the walk ; and he went warily and boldly at once, and at every corner paused to make an observation. He had been for some time threading a lane so narrow that he could touch a wall with either hand when it began to open out and go sharply downward. Plainly this lay no longer in the direction of his inn; but the hope of a little more light tempted him forward to reconnoiter. The lane ended in a terrace with a bartizan wall, which gave an outlook between 504 SHORT STORIES high houses, as out of an cniljrasurc, into the valley lyin^ dark and formless several hundred feet below. Denis looked down, and could discern a few tree-tops waving and a single speck of brightness where the river ran across a weir. The weather was clearing up, and the sky had lightened, so as to show the out- line of the heavier clouds and the dark margin of the hills. By the uncertain glimmer, the house on his left hand should be a place of some pretensions; it was surmounted by several pin- nacles and turret-tops; the round stern of a chapel, with a fringe of flying ])uttresses, projected boldly from the main block ; and the door was sheltered under a deep porch carved with figures and overhung by two long gargoyles. The windows of the chapel gleamed through their intricate tracery wath a light as of many tapers, and threw out the buttresses and the peaked roof in a more intense blackness against the sky. It was plainly the hotel of some great family of the neighbor- hood ; and as it reminded Denis of a town house of his own at Bourges, he stood for some time gazing up at it and mentally gauging the skill of the architects and the consideration of the two families. There seemed to be no issue to the terrace but the lane by which he had reached it ; he could only retrace his steps, but he had gained some notion of his whereabouts, and hoped by this means to hit the main thoroughfare and speedily regain the inn. He was reckoning without that chapter of accidents which was to make this night memorable above all others in his career; for he had not gone back above a hundred yards before he saw a light coming to meet him, and heard loud voices speaking together in the echoing narrows of the lane. It was a party of men-at-arms going the night roimd with torches. Denis assured himself that they had all been making free with the wine-bowl, and were in no mood to be particular about safe- conducts or the niceties of chivalrous war. It was as like as not that they would kill him like a dog and leave him where he fell. The situation was inspiriting but nervous. Their own torches would conceal him from sight, he reflected ; and he hoped that they would drown the noise of his footsteps with THE SIRE DE MALETROIT'S DOOR 505 their own empty voices. If he were but fleet and silent, he might evade their notice altogether. Unfortunately, as he turned to beat a retreat, his foot rolled upon a pebble ; he fell against the wall with an ejaculation, and his sword rang loudly on the stones. Two or three voices de- manded who went there — some in French, some in English ; but Denis made no reply, and ran the faster down the lane. Once upon the terrace, he paused to look back. They still kept calling after him, and just then began to double the pace in pursuit, with a considerable clank of armor, and great tossing of the torchlight to and fro in the narrow jaws of the passage. Denis cast a look around and darted into the porch. There he might escape observation, or — if that were too much to expect — was in a capital posture whether for parley or defence. So thinking, he drew his sword and tried to set his back against the door. To his surprise, it yielded behind his weight ; and though he turned in a moment, continued to swing back on oiled and noiseless hinges, until it stood wide open on a black interior. When things fall out opportunely for the person con- cerned, he is not apt to be critical about the how or why, his own immediate personal convenience seeming a sufficient reason for the strangest oddities and revolutions in our sublunary things ; and so Denis, without a moment's hesitation, stepped within and partly closed the door behind him to conceal his place of refuge. Nothing was further from his thoughts than to close it altogether ; but for some inexplicable reason ■ — per- haps by a spring or a weight — the ponderous mass of oak whipped itself out of his fingers and clanked to, with a formid- able rumble and a noise like the falling of an automatic bar. The round, at that very moment, debouched upon the terrace and proceeded to summon him with shouts and curses. He heard them ferreting in the dark corners; the stock of a lance even rattled along the outer surface of the door behind which he stood ; but these gentlemen were in too high a humor to be long delayed, and soon made off down a corkscrew pathway which had escaped Denis's observation, and passed out of sight and hearing along the battlements of the town. 5o6 SHORT STORIES Denis breathed again. He gave them a few minutes' grace for fear of accidents, and then groped about for some means of opening the door and slipping forth again. The inner surface was quite smooth, not a handle, not a moulding, not a projection of any sort. He got his linger nails round the edges and pulled, but the mass was immovable. He shook it, it was as firm as a rock. Denis de Beaulieu frowned and gave vent to a little noise- less whistle. What ailed the door? he wondered. Why was it open ? How came it to shut so easily and so effectually after him ? There was something obscure and underhand about all this, that was little to the young man's fancy. It looked like a snare ; and yet who could suppose a snare in such a quiet by- street and in a house of so prosperous and even noble an e.xterior ? And yet — snare or no snare, intentionally or unintentionally — here he was, prettily trapped ; and for the life of him he could see no way out of it again. The darkness began to weigh upon him. He gave ear; all was silent without, but within and close by he seemed to catch a faint sighing, a faint sobbing rustle, a little stealthy creak — as though many persons were at his side, holding themselves quite still, and governing even their respiration with the extreme of slyness. The idea went to his vitals with a shock, and he faced about suddenly as if to defend his life. Then, for the first time, he became aware of a light about the level of his eyes and at some distance in the interior of the house — a vertical thread of light, ^^ idening towards the bottom, such as might escape between two wings of arras over a doorway. To see anything was a relief to Denis ; it was like a piece of solid ground to a man laboring in a morass ; his mind seized upon it with avidity ; and he stood staring at it and trying to piece together some logical conception of his surroundings. Plainly there was a flight of steps ascending from his own level to that of this illuminated doorway ; and indeed he thought he could make out another thread of light, as fine as a needle and as faint as phosphorescence, which might ver^' well be reflected along the polished wood of a hand-rail. Since he had begun to suspect that he was not alone, his heart had continued to beat with smothering violence, and an intolerable desire for action THE SIRE BE MALETROITS DOOR 507 of any sort had possessed itself of his spirit. He was in deadly peril, he believed. What could be more natural than to mount the staircase, lift the curtain, and confront his difl&culty at once ? At least he would be dealing with something tangible ; at least he would be no longer in the dark. He stepped slowly forward with outstretched hands, until his foot struck the bottom step ; then he rapidly scaled the stairs, stood for a moment to compose his expression, lifted the arras, and went in. He found himself in a large apartment of polished stone. There were three doors ; one on each of three sides ; all simi- larly curtained with tapestry. The fourth side was occupied by two large windows and a great stone chimneypiece, carved with the arms of the Maletroits. Denis recognized the bear- ings, and was gratified to find himself in such good hands. The room was strongly illuminated; but it contained little furniture except a heavy table and a chair or two, the hearth was inno- cent of fire, and the pavement was but sparsely strewn with rushes clearly many days old. On a high chair beside the chimney, and directly facing Denis as he entered, sat a little old gentleman in a fur tippet. He sat with his legs crossed and his hands folded, and a cup of spiced wine stood by his elbow on a bracket on the wall. His coun- tenance had a strongly masculine cast ; not properly human, but such as we see in the bull, the goat, or the domestic boar ; something equivocal and wheedling, something greedy, brutal, and dangerous. The upper lip was inordinately full, as though swollen by a blow or a toothache; and the smile, the peaked eyebrows, and the small, strong eyes were c^uaintly and almost comically evil in expression. Beautiful white hair hung straight all round his head, like a saint's, and fell in a single curl upon the tippet. His beard and moustache were the pink of venerable sweetness. Age, probably in consequence of inordinate pre- cautions, had left no mark upon his hands ; and the Maletroit hand was famous. It would be difficult to imagine anything at once so fleshy and so delicate in design ; the taper, sensual fingers were like those of one of Leonardo's women ; the fork of the thumb made a dimpled protuberance when closed; the 5oS SHORT STORIES nails were perfectly shaped, and of a dead, surprising whiteness. It rendered his aspect tenfold more redoubtable, that a man with hands like these should keep them devoutly folded like a virgin martNT — that a man with so intent and startling an expression of face should sit patiently on his seat and contemplate people with an unwinking stare, like a god, or a god's statue. His quiescence seemed ironical and treacherous, it fitted so poorly with his looks. Such was Alain, Sire de Maletroit. Denis and he looked silently at each other for a second or two. "Pray step in," said the Sire de Maletroit. "I have been expecting you all the evening." He had not risen, but he accompanied his words with a smile and a slight but courteous inclination of the head. Partly from the smile, partly from the strange musical murmur with which the Sire prefaced his observation, Denis felt a strong shudder of disgust go through his marrow. And what with disgust and honest confusion of mind, he could scarcely get words together in reply. "I fear," he said, "that this is a double accident. I am not the person you suppose me. It seems you were looking for a visit ; but for my part, nothing was further from my thoughts — nothing could be more contrary to my wishes — than this intrusion." "Well, well," replied the old gentleman indulgently, "here you are, which is the main point. Seat yourself, my friend, and put yourself entirely at your ease. We shall arrange our little aiTairs presently." Denis perceived that the matter was still complicated with some misconception, and he hastened to continue his explana- tions. "Your door . . ."he began. "About my door?" asked the other, raising his peaked eye- browns. "A little piece of ingenuity." And he shrugged his shoulder. "A hospitable fancy! By your own account, you were not desirous of making my acquaintance. We old people THE SIRE DE MALETROITS DOOR 509 look for such reluctance now and then ; when it touches oui honor, we cast about until we find some way of overcoming it. You arrive uninvited, but, believe me, very welcome." "You persist in error, sir," said Denis. "There can be no question between you and me. I am a stranger in this country- side. My name is Denis, damoiseau de Beaulieu. If you see me in your house, it is only — " "My young friend," interrupted the other, "you will permit me to have my ov.-'n ideas on that subject. They probably differ from yours at the present moment," he added with a leer, "but time will show which of us is in the right." Denis was convinced he had to do with a lunatic. He seated himself with a shrug, content to wait the upshot ; and a pause ensued, during which he thought he could distinguish a hurried gabbling as of prayer from behind the arras immediately oppo- site him. Sometimes there seemed to be but one person engaged, sometimes two ; and the vehemence of the voice, low as it was, seemed to indicate either great haste or an agony of spirit. It occurred to him that this piece of tapestry covered the en- trance to the chapel he had noticed from without. The old gentleman meanwhile surveyed Denis from head to foot with a smile, and from time to time emitted little noises like a bird or a mouse, which seemed to indicate a high degree of satisfaction. This state of matters became rapidly insup- portable ; and Denis, to put an end to it, remarked politely that the wind had gone down. The old gentleman fell into a fit of silent laughter, so pro- longed and violent that he became c^uite red in the face. Denis got upon his feet at once, and put on his hat with a flourish. "Sir," he said, "if you are in your wits, you have affronted me grossly. If you are out of them, I flatter myself I can find better employment for my brains than to talk with lunatics. My conscience is clear ; you have made a fool of me from the first moment ; you have refused to hear my explanations ; and now there is no power under God will make me stay here any longer; and if I cannot make my way out in a more decent fashion, I will hack your door in j)ieces with my sword." 5IO SHORT STORIES The Sire de Maletroit raised his right hand and wagged it at Denis with the fore and httle fingers extended. "My dear nepliew," he said, "sit down." "Nephew!" retorted Denis, "you lie in your throat;" and he snapped his fmgers in his face. " Sit down, you rogue ! " cried the old gentleman, in a sudden harsh voice, like the barking of a dog. "Do you fancy," he went on, "that when I had made ray little contrivance for the door I had stopped short with that ? If you prefer to be bound hand and foot till your bones ache, rise and try to go away. If r-ou choose to remain a free young buck, agreeably conversing with an old gentleman — why, sit where you are in peace, and God be with you." "Do you mean I am a prisoner?" demanded Denis. "I state the facts," replied the other. "I would rather leave the conclusion to yourself." Denis sat down again. Externally he managed to keep pretty calm ; but within, he was now boiling with anger, now chilled with apprehension. He no longer felt convinced that he was deaUng with a madman. And if the old gentleman was sane, what, in God's name, had he to look for? What absurd or tragical adventure had befallen him ? What coimtenance was he to assume ? While he was thus unpleasantly reflecting, the arras that overhung the chapel door was raised, and a tall priest in his robes came forth and, giving a long, keen stare at Denis, said something in an undertone to Sire de Maletroit. "She is in a better frame of spirit ?" asked the latter. "She is more resigned, messire," replied the priest. "Xow the Lord help her, she is hard to please !" sneered the old gentleman. "A likely stripling — not ill-born — and of her own choosing, too? WTiy, what more would the jade have?" "The situation is not usual for a young damsel," said the other, "and somewhat tr>'ing to her blushes." " She should have thought of that before she began the dance ! It was none of my choosing, God knows that : but since she is in it, by our lady, she shall carry it to the end." And then THE SIRE DE MALETROITS DOOR 511 addressing Denis, "Monsieur de Beaulieu," he asked, ''may I present you to my niece? She has been waiting your arrival, I may say, with even greater impatience than myself." Denis had resigned himself with a good grace — all he desired was to know the worst of it as speedily as possible ; so he rose at once, and bowed in acquiescence. The Sire de Maletroit followed his example and Hmped, with the assistance of the chaplain's arm, towards the chapel-door. The priest pulled aside the arras, and all three entered. The building had con- siderable architectural pretensions. A light groining sprang from six stout columns, and hung down in two rich pendants from the centre of the vault. The place terminated behind the altar in a round end, embossed and honeycombed with a superfluity of ornament in relief, and pierced by many little windows shaped like stars, trefoils, or wheels. These windows were imperfectly glazed, so that the night air circulated freely in the chapel. The tapers, of which there must have been half a hundred burning on the altar, were unmercifully blown about ; and the light went through many different phases of brilliancy and semi-eclipse. On the steps in front of the altar knelt a a young girl richly attired as a bride. A chill settled over Denis as he observed her costume ; he fought with desperate energy against the conclusion that was being thrust upon his mind; it could not — it should not — be as he feared. "Blanche," said the Sire, in his most flute-like tones, "I have brought a friend to see you, my little girl ; turn round and give him your pretty hand. It is good to be devout ; but it is necessary to be polite, my niece." The girl rose to her feet and turned toward the newcomers. She moved all of a piece ; and shame and exhaustion were ex- pressed in every line of her fresh young body ; and she held her head down and kept her eyes upon the pavement, as she came slowly forward. In the course of her advance, her eyes fell upon Denis de Beaulieu's feet — feet of which he was justly vain, be it remarked, and wore in the most elegant accoutrement even while travelling. She paused — started, as if his yellow boots had conveyed .some shocking meaning — and glanced 512 SHORT STORIES suddenly up intt) the wearer's countenance. Their eyes met shame gave place to horror and terror in her looks ; the blood left her lips ; with a piercing scream she covered her face with her hands and sank upon the chapel lloor. "That is not the man !" she cried. "My uncle, that is not the man !" The Sire de Maletroit chirped agreeably. "Of course not," he said, "I expected as much. It was so unfortunate you could not remember his name." ■•Indeed," she cried, "indeed, I have never seen this person till tliis moment — I have never so much as set eyes upon him — I never wish to see him again. Sir," she said, turning to Denis, "if you are a gentleman, you will bear me out. Have I ever seen you — have you ever seen me — before this accursed hour?" "To speak for myself, I have never bad that pleasure," an- swered the young man. "This is the first time, messire, that I have met with your engaging niece." The old gentleman shrugged his shoulders. "I am distressed to hear it," he said. "But it is never too late to begin. I had little more acquaintance with my own late lady ere I married her ; which proves," he added, with a grimace, "that these impromptu marriages may often produce an excellent understanding in the long run. As the bridegroom is to have a voice in the matter, I will give him two hours to make up for lost time before we proceed with the ceremony." And he turned toward the door, followed by the clergyman. The girl \Yas on her feet in a moment. "My uncle, you can- not be in earnest," she said. "I declare before God I w-ill stab myself rather than be forced on that young man. The heart rises at it ; God forbids such marriages ; you dishonor your white hair. Oh, my uncle, pity me ! There is not a woman in all the world but would prefer death to such a nuptial. Is it possible," she added, faltering — "is it possible that you do not believe me — that you still think this" — and she pointed at Denis with a tremor of anger and contempt — "that you still think this to be the man?" THE SIRE DE MALETROITS DOOR 513 ** Frankly,'" said the old gentleman, pausing on the threshold, ''I do. But let me explain to you once for all, Blanche de Maletroit, my way of thinking about this affair. When you took it into your head to dishonor my family and the name that I have borne, in peace and war, for more than three-score years, you forfeited, not only the right to question my designs, but that of looking me in the face. If your father had been alive, he would have spat on you and turned you out of doors. His was the hand of iron. You may bless your God you have only to deal with the hand of velvet, mademoiselle. It was my duty to get you married without delay. Out of pure good-will, I have tried to find your own gallant for you. And I believe I have succeeded. But before God and all the holy angels, Blanche de Maletroit, if I have not, I care not one jack-straw. So let me recommend you to be polite to our young friend ; for upon my word, your next groom may be less appetizing." And with that he went out, with the chaplain at his heels; and the arras fell behind the pair. The girl turned upon Denis with flashing eyes. "And what, sir," she demanded, "may be the meaning of all this?" "God knows," returned Denis, gloomily. "I am a prisoner in this house, which seems full of mad people. More I know not ; and nothing do I understand." "And pray how came you here?" she asked. He told her as briefly as he could. " For the rest," he added, "perhaps you will follow my example, and tell me the answer to all these riddles, and what, in God's name, is like to be the end of it." She stood silent for a little, and he could see her lips tremble and her tearless eyes burn with a feverish lustre. Then she pressed her forehead in both hands. "Alas, how my head aches!" she said wearily — "to say nothing of my poor heart ! But it is due to you to know my story, unmaidenly as it must seem. I am called Blanche de Maletroit ; I have been without father or mother for — oh ! for as long as I can recollect, and indeed I have been most un- 514 SHORT STORIES happy all my life. Three months ago a young captain began to stand near me every day in church. I could see that I pleased him ; 1 am much to blame, but I was so glad that anyone should love me ; and when he passed me a letter, I took it home with me and read it with great pleasure. Since that time he has written many. He was so anxious to speak, with me, poor fel- low ! and kept asking me to leave the door open some evening that we might have two words upon the stair. For he knew how much my uncle trusted me." She gave something like a sob at that, and it was a moment before she could go on. '' My uncle is a hard man, but he is very shrewd," she said at last. " He has performed many feats in war, an,d was a great person at court, and much trusted by Queen Isabeau in old days. How he came to suspect me I cannot tell ; but it is hard to keep any- thing from his knowledge ; and this morning, as we came from mass, he took my hand into his, forced it open, and read my Uttle billet, walking by my side all the while. When he finished, he gave it back to me with great politeness. It contained an- other recjuest to have the door left open ; and this has been the ruin of us all. My uncle kept me strictly in my room until evening, and then ordered me to dress myself as you see me — a hard mockery for a young girl, do you not think so? I sup- pose, when he could not prevail with me to tell him the young captain's name, he must have laid a trap for him : into which, alas ! you have fallen in the anger of God. I looked for much confusion ; for how could I tell whether he was willing to take me for his wife on these sharp. terms? He might have been trifling with me from the first; or I might have made myself too cheap in his eyes. But truly I had not looked for such a shameful punishment as this ! I could not think that God would let a girl be so disgraced before a young man. And now I tell you all ; and I can scarcely hope that you will not despise me." Denis made her a respectful inclination. "Madam," he said, "you have honored me by your confi- dence. It remains for me to prove that I am not unworthy of the honor. Is Messire de Maletroit at hand ? " THE SIRE DE MALETROIT'S DOOR 515 "I believe he is writing in the salle without," she answered. "May I lead you thither, madam?" asked Denis, offering his hand with his most courtly bearing. She accepted it; and the pair passed out of the chapel, Blanche in a very drooping and shamefast condition, but Denis strutting and rufiling in the consciousness of a mission, and the boyish certainty of accomplishing it with honor. The Sire de Maletroit rose to meet them with an ironical obeisance. ''Sir," said Denis, with the grandest possible air, "I beheve I am to have some say in the matter of this marriage ; and let me tell you at once, I will be no party to forcing the inclination of this young lady. Had it been freely offered to me, I should have been proud to accept her hand, for I perceive she is as good as she is beautiful ; but as things are, I have now the honor, messire, of refusing." Blanche looked at him with gratitude in her eyes ; but the old gentleman only smiled and smiled, until his smile grew posi- tively sickening to Denis. "I am afraid," he said, "Monsieur de Beaulieu, that you do not perfectly understand the choice I have offered you. Fol- low me, I beseech you, to this window." And he led the way to one of the large windows which stood open on the night. "You observe," he went on, "there is an iron ring in the upper masonry, and reeved through that, a very efficacious rope. Now, mark my words : if you should find your disinclination to my niece's person insurmountable, I shall have you hanged out of this window before sunrise. I shall only proceed to such an extremity with the greatest regret, you may believe me. For it is not at all your death that I desire, but my niece's es- tablishment in life. At the same time, it must come to that if you prove obstinate. Your family. Monsieur de Beaulieu, is very well in its way ; but if you sprang from Charlemagne, you should not refuse the hand of a Maletroit with impunity — not if she had been as common as the Paris road — not if she were as hideous as the gargoyle over my door. Neither my niece nor you, nor my own private feelings, move me at all in this 5l6 SHORT STORIES matter. Tlu- honor of my house has been compromised ; I believe you to be tlie guilty person, at least you are now in the secret ; and you can hardly wonder if I request you to wipe out the stain. If you will not, your blood be on your own head ! It will be no great satisfaction to me to have your interesting relics kicking their heels in the breeze below my windows, but half a loaf is better than no bread, and if I cannot cure the dis- honor, I shall at least stop the scandal." There was a pause. "I believe there are other ways of settling such imbroglios among gentlemen," said Denis. "You wear a sword, and I hear you have used it with distinction." The Sire de Maletroit made a signal to the chaplain, who crossed the room with long silent strides and raised the arras over the third of the three doors. It was only a moment before he let it fall again ; but Denis had time to see a dusky passage full of armed men. "When I was a little younger, I should have been delighted to honor you, Monsieur de Beaulieu," said Sire Alain; "but I am now too old. Faithful retainers are the sinews of age, and I must employ the strength I have. This is one of the hardest things to swallow as a man grows up in years ; but with a little patience, even this becomes habitual. You and the lady seem to prefer the salle for what remains of your two hours ; and as I have no desire to cross your preference, I shall resign it to your use with all the pleasure in the world. No haste !" he added, holding up his hand, as he saw a dangerous look come into Denis de Beaulieu's face. "If your mind revolt against hanging, it will be time enough two hours hence to throw yourself out of the window or upon the pikes of my retainers. Two hours of life are always two hours. A great many things may turn up in even as little a while as that. And, besides, if I understand her appearance, my niece has something to say to you. You will not disfigure your last hours by a want of politeness to a lady?" Denis looked at Blanche, and she made him an imploring gesture. THE SIRE DE MALETROITS DOOR 517 It is likely that the old gentleman was hugely pleased at this symptom of an understanding ; for he smiled on both, and added sweetly: "If you will give me your word of honor, Monsieur de Beaulieu, to await my return at the end of the two hours be- fore attempting anything desperate, I shall withdraw my re- tainers, and let you speak in greater privacy with mademoiselle." Denis again glanced at the girl, who seemed to beseech. him to agree. "I give you my word of honor," he said. Messire de Maletroit bowed, and proceeded to limp about the apartment, clearing his throat the while with that odd musi- cal chirp which had already grown so irritating in the ears of Denis de Beaulieu. He first possessed himself of some papers which lay upon the table; then he went to the mouth of the passage and appeared to give an order to the men behind the arras; and lastly he hobbled out through the door by which Denis had come in, turning upon the threshold to address a last smiling bow to the young couple, and followed by the chap- lain with a hand-lamp. No sooner were they alone than Blanche advanced towards Denis with her hands extended. Her face was flushed and ex- cited, and her eyes shone with tears. "You shall not die !" she cried, "you shall marry me after all." "You seem to think, madam," replied Denis, "that I stand much in fear of death." "Oh, no, no," she said, "I see you are no poltroon. It is for my own sake — I could not bear to have you slain for such a scruple." "I am afraid," returned Denis, "that you underrate the diffi- culty, madam. What you may be too generous to refuse, I may be too proud to accept. In a moment of noble feeling towards me, you forgot what you perhaps owe to others." He had the decency to keep his eyes on the floor as he said this, and after he had finished, so as not to spy upon her con- fusion. She stood silent for a moment, then walked suddenly away, and falUng on her uncle's chair, fairly burst out sobbing. 5i8 SHORT STORIES Denis was in the acme of embarrassment. He looked round, as if to seek for inspiration, and seeing a stool, plumped down upon it for something to do. There he sat, playing with the guard of his rapier, and wishing himself dead a thousand times over, and buried in the nastiest kitchen-heap in France. His eyes wandered round the apartment, but found nothing to arrest them. There were such wide spaces between furniture, the light fell so badly and cheerlessly over all, the dark outside air looked in so coldly through the windows, that he thought he had never seen a church so vast, nor a tomb so melancholy. The regular sobs of Blanche de Maletroit measured out the time like the ticking of a clock. He read the device upon the shield over and over again, until his eyes became obscured ; he stared into shadowy corners until he imagined they were swarming with horrible animals ; and every now and again he awoke vnth a start, to remember that his last two hours were running, and death was on the march. Oftener and oftener, as the time went on, did his glance settle on the girl herself. Her face was bowed forward and covered with her hands, and she was shaken at intervals by the convulsive hiccough of grief. Even thus she was not an unpleasant object to dwell upon, so plump and yet so fine, with a warm brown skin, and the most beautiful hair, Denis thought, in the whole world of womankind. Her hands were like her uncle's ; but they were more in place at the end of her young arms, and looked infinitely soft and caressing. He remembered how her blue eyes had shone upon him, full of anger, pity, and innocence. And the more he dwelt on her perfections, the uglier death looked, and the more deeply was he smitten with penitence at her continued tears. Now he felt that no man could ha\-e the courage to leave a world which contained so beautiful a creature ; and now he would have given forty min- utes of his last hour to have unsaid his cruel speech. Suddenly a hoarse and ragged peal of cockcrow rose to their ears from the dark valley below the windows. And this shat- tering noise in the silence of all around was like a light in a dark place, and shook them both out of their reflections. THE SIRE DE MALETROITS DOOR 519 "Alas, can I do nothing to help you?" she said, looking up. "Madam," replied Denis, with a fine irrelevancy, "if I have said anything to wound you, believe me, it was for your own sake and not for mine." She thanked him with a tearful look. "I feel your position cruelly," he went on. "The world has been bitter hard on you. Your uncle is a disgrace to man- kind. Believe me, madam, there is no young gentleman in all France but would be glad of my opportunity, to die in doing you a momentary service." "I know already that you can be very brave and generous," she answered. "What I want to know is whether I can serve you — now or afterwards," she added, with a quaver. "Most certainly," he answered with a smile. "Let me sit beside you as if I were a friend, instead of a foolish intruder; try to forget how awkwardly we are placed to one another ; make my last moments go pleasantly ; and you will do me the chief service possible." "You are very gallant," she added, with a yet deeper sadness . . . "very gallant . . . and it somehow pains me. But draw nearer, if you please ; and if you find anything to say to me, you will at least make certain of a very friendly listener. Ah ! Monsieur de Beaulieu," she broke forth — "ah ! Monsieur de Beaulieu, how can I look you in the face?" And she fell to weeping again with a renewed effusion. "Madam," said Denis, taking her hand in both of his, "reflect on the little time I have before me, and the great bitterness into which I am cast by the sight of your distress. Spare me, in my last moments, the spectacle of what I cannot cure even with the sacrifice of my life." "I am very selfish," answered Blanche. "I will be braver. Monsieur de Beaulieu, for your sake. But think if I can do you no kindness in the future — if you have no friends to whom I could carry your adieux. Charge me as heavily as you can ; every burden will lighten, by so little, the invaluable gratitude I owe you. Put it in my power to do something more for you than weep." 520 SHORT STORII-IS "My mcUhcr is niarrittl a^ain, and has a young family to care for. My brother Guicharti will inherit my fiefs ; and if I am not in error, that will content him amply for my death. Life is a little vapor that passeth away, as we are told by those in holy orders. When a man is in a fair way and sees all life open in front of him, he seems to himself to make a very im- portant figure in the world. His horse whinnies to him ; the trumpets blow and the girls look out of window as he rides into town before his company ; he receives many assurances of trust and regard — sometimes by express in a letter — sometimes face to face, with persons of great consequence falling on his neck. It is not wonderful if his head is turned for a time. But once he is dead, were he as brave as Hercules or as wise as Solo- mon, he is soon forgotten. It is not ten years since my father fell, with many other knights around him, in a very fierce en- counter, and I do not think that any one of them, nor so much as the name of the fight, is now remembered. No, no, madam, the nearer you come to it, you see that death is a dark and dusty corner, where a man gets into his tomb and has the door shut after him till the judgment day. I have few friends just now, and once I am dead I shall have none." "Ah, Monsieur de Beaulieu!" she exclaimed, "you forget Blanche de Maletroit." "You have a sweet nature, madam, and you are pleased to estimate a little service far beyond its worth." "It is not that," she answered. "You mistake me if you think I am easily touched by my own concerns. I say so, be- cause you are the noblest man I have ever met ; because I recognize in you a spirit that would have made even a common person famous in the land." "And yet here I die in a mousetrap — with no more noise about it than my own squeaking," answered he. A look of pain crossed her face, and she was silent for a little while. Then a light came into her eyes, and with a smile she spoke again. "I cannot have my champion think meanly of himself. Any one who gives his life for another will be met in Paradise by all THE SIRE DE MALETROITS DOOR 52 1 the heralds and angels of the Lord God. And you have no such cause to hang your head. For . . . Pray, do you think me beautiful?" she asked, with a deep flush. "Indeed, madam, I do," he said. "I am glad of that," she answered heartily. "Do you think there are many men in France who have been asked in marriage by a beautiful maiden — with her own lips — and who have refused her to her face? I know you men would half despise such a triumph ; but believe me, we women know more of what is precious in love. There is nothing that should set a person higher in his own esteem ; and we women would prize nothing more dearly." "You are very good," he said; "but you cannot make me forget that I was asked in pity and not for love." "I am not so sure of that," she replied, holding down her head. "Hear me to an end, Monsieur de Beaulieu. I know how you must despise me ; I feel you are right to do so ; I am too poor a creature to occupy one thought of your mind, although, alas ! you must die for me this morning. But when I asked you to marry me, indeed, and indeed, it was because I respected and admired you, and loved you with my whole soul, from the very moment that you took my part against my uncle. If you had seen yourself, and how noble you looked, you would pity rather than despise me. And now," she went on, hurriedly checking him with her hand, "although I have laid aside all reserve and told you so much, remember that I know your sentiments towards me already. I would not, believe me, being nobly born, weary you with importunities into consent. I too have a pride of my own : and I declare before the holy mother of God, if you should now go back from your word already given, I would no more marry you than I would marry my uncle's groom." Denis smiled a little bitterly. "It is a small love," he said, "that shies at a little pride." She made no answer, although she probably had her own thoughts. "Come hither to the window," he said with a sigh. "Here is the dawn." 52 J SHORT STORIES And indeed the flawn was already beginning. The hollow of the sky was full of essential daylight, colorless and clean ; and the valley underneath was flooded with a gray reflection. A few thin vapors clung in the coves of the forest or lay alortg the wnnding course of the river. The scene disengaged a surprising effect of stillness, which was hardly interrupted when the cocks began once more to crow among the steadings. Perhaps the same fellow who had made so horrid a clangor in the darkness not half an hour before, now sent up the merriest cheer to greet the coming day. A httle wind went bustling and edd>ing among the tree-tops underneath the windows. And still the daylight kept llooding insensibly out of the east, which was soon to grow sncandescent and cast up that red-hot caimon-ball, the rising sun. Denis looked out over all this with a bit of a shiver. He had taken her hand, and retained it in his almost unconsciously. "Has the day begun already?" she said; and then, illogi- cally enough: "the night has been so long ! Alas ! what shall we say to my uncle when he returns ? " "What you -udll," said Denis, and he pressed her fingers in his. She was silent. "Blanche," he said, with a swift, uncertain, passionate utter- ance, "you have seen whether I fear death. You must know well enough that I would as gladly leap out of that window into the empty air as to lay a finger on you without your free and full consent. But if you care for me at all do not let me lose my life in a misapprehension ; for I love you better than the whole world ; and though I wall die for you blithely, it would be like all the joys of Paradise to live on and spend my life in your service." As he stopped speaking, a bell began to ring loudly in the interior of the house ; and a clatter of armor in the corridor showed that the retainers were returning to their post, and the two hours were at an end. "After all that you have heard?" she whispered, leaning towards him with her lips and eyes. "I have heard nothing," he replied. A GALA DRESS 523 "The captain's name was Florimond de Champdivers," she said in his ear. '*I did not hear it," he answered, taking her supple body in his arms, and covered her wet face with kisses. A melodious chirping was audible behind, followed by a beautiful chuckle, and the voice of Messire de Maletroit wished his new nephew a good-morning. A GALA DRESS 1 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman "I don't care anything about goin' to that Fourth of July picnic, 'Liz'beth." "I wouldn't say anything more about it, if I was you, Em'ly. I'd get ready an' go." "I don't really feel able to go, 'Liz'beth." "I'd like to know why you ain't able." "It seems to me as if the fire-crackers an' the tootin' on those horns would drive me crazy ; an' Matilda Jennings says they're goin' to have a cannon down there, an' fire it off every half- hour. I don't feel as if I could stan' it. You know my nerves ain't very strong, 'Liz'beth." Elizabeth Babcock uplifted her long, delicate nose with its transparent nostrils and sniffed. Apparently her sister's per- verseness had an unacceptable odor to her. "I wouldn't talk so if I was you, Em'ly. Of course you're goin'. It's your turn to, an' you know it. I went to meetin' last Sabbath. You just put on that dress an' go." Emily eyed her sister. She tried not to look pleased. "I know you went to meetin' last," said she, hesitatingly ; " but — a Fourth of July picnic is — a little more of — a rarity." She fairly jumped, her sister confronted her with such sudden vigor. "Rarity! Well, I hope a Fourth of July picnic ain't quite * From A New England Nun and Other Stories. Copyright by Harper and Brothers, 1890. Reprinted by permission. 524 SHORT STORIES such a treat U) me that I'd ruthcr go to it than meetin' ! I r^hould think you'd be ashamed of yourself speakin' so, Eni'ly Habcock." Emily, a moment before delicately alert and nervous like her sister, shrank limply in her limp black muslin. "I — didn't think how it sounded, 'Liz'beth." "Well, I should say you'd better think. It don't sound very becomin' for a woman of your age, an' professin' what you do. Now you'd better go an' get out that dress, and rip the velvet ofT, an' sew the lace on. There won't be any too much time. They'll start early in the mornin'. I'll stir up a cake for you to carry, when I get tea." "Don't you s'pose I could get along without a cake ?" Emily ventured tremulously. "Well, I shouldn't think you'd want to go, an' be beholden to other folks for your eatin' ; I shouldn't." "I shouldn't want anything to eat." "I guess if you go, you're goin' like other folks. I ain't goin' to have Matilda Jennings peekin' an' pr}dn' an' tellin' things, if I know it. You'd better get out that dress." "Well," said Emily, ^\'ith a long sigh of remorseful satisfac- tion. She arose, showing a height that would have approached the majestic had it not been so wavering. The sisters were about the same height, but Elizabeth usually impressed people as being the taller. She carried herself ^\^th so much decision that she seemed to keep every inch of her stature firm and taut, old woman although she was. "Let's see that dress a minute," she said, when Emily returned. She wiped her spectacles, set them firmly, and began examining the hem of the dress, holding it close to her eyes. "You're gettin' of it all tagged out," she declared, presently. " I thought you was. I thought I see some ravellin's hangin' the other day when I had it on. It's jest because you don't stand up straight. It ain't any longer for you than it is for me, if you didn't go all bent over so. There ain't any need of it." Emily oscillated wearily over her sister and the dress. "I ain't very strong in my back, an' you know I've got a weakness A GALA DRESS 525 in my stomach that henders me from standin' up as straight as you do," she rejoined, rallying herself for a feeble defence. "You can stan' up jest as well as I can, if you're a mind to." "I'll rip that velvet off now, if you'll let me have the dress, 'Liz'beth." Elizabeth passed over the dress, handling it gingerly. " Mind you don't cut it rippin' of it off," said she. Emily sat down, and the dress lay in shiny black billows over her lap. The dress was black silk, and had been in its day very soft and heavy; even now there was considerable wear left in it. The waist and over-skirt were trimmed with black velvet ribbon. Emily ripped off the velvet ; then she sewed on some old-fashioned, straight-edged black lace full of little embroidered sprigs. The sisters sat in their parlor at the right of the front door. The room was very warm, for there were two west win- dows, and a hot afternoon sun was beating upon them. Out in front of the house was a piazza, with a cool uneven brick floor, and a thick lilac growth across the western end. The sisters might have sat there and been comfortable, but they would not. "Set right out in the face an' eyes of all the neighbors!" they would have exclaimed with dismay had the idea been sug- gested. There was about these old women and all their belong- ings a certain gentle and deprecatory reticence. One felt it immediately upon entering their house, or indeed upon coming in sight of it. There were never any heads at the windows ; the blinds were usually closed. Once in a while a passer-by might see an old woman, well shielded by shawl and scooping sun-bonnet, start up like a timid spirit in the yard, and softly disappear through a crack in the front door. Out in the front yard Emily had a little bed of flowers — of balsams and nas- turtiums and portulacas ; she tended them with furtive glances toward the road. Elizabeth came out in the early morning to sweep the brick floor of the piazza, and the front door was left ajar for a hurried flitting should any one appear. This excessive shyness and secrecy had almost the aspect of guilt, but no more guileless and upright persons could have 5^6 SHORT STORIES been imaj!;ined than these two old women. They had over their pador windows full, softly falling old muslin curtains, and they looped them back to leave bare the smallest possible space of glass. The parlor chairs retreated close to the walls, the polish of the j)arlor table lit up a dim corner. There were very few ornaments in sight ; the walls were full of closets and little cupboards, and in them all superfluities were tucked away to protect them from dust and prying eyes. Ne\er a door in the house stood open, e\'ery bureau drawer was squarely shut. A whole family of skeletons might ha\'e been v.ell hidden in these guarded recesses ; but skeletons there were none, except, perhaps, a little innocent bone or two of old-womanly pride and sensitiveness. The Babcock sisters guarded nothing more jealously than the privacy of their meals. The neighbors considered that there was a decided reason for this. "The Babcock girls have so little to eat that they're ashamed to let folks see it," people said. It was certain that the old women regarded intrusion at their meals as an insidt, but it was doubtful if they would not have done so had their table been set out with all the luxuries of the season instead of scanty bread and butter and no sauce. No sauce for tea was regarded as very poor living by the village women. To-night the Babcocks had tea very soon after the lace was sewed on the dress. They always had tea early. They were in the midst of it when the front-door opened, and a voice was heard calling out in the hall. The sisters cast a dismayed and indignant look at each other ; they both arose ; but the door flew open, and their little square tea-table, with its green-and-white china pot of weak tea, its plate of bread and little glass dish of butter, its two china cups, and thin silver teaspoons, was displayed to \-iew. "My !" cried the visitor, with a Httle backward shuffle. "I do hope you'll 'scuse me ! I didn't know you was eatin' supper. I wouldn't ha' come in for the world if I'd known. I'll go right out; it wa'n't anything pertickler, anyhow." All the time her sharp and comprehensive gaze was on the tea-table. She A GALA DRESS 527 counted the slices of bread, she measured the butter, as she talked. The sisters stepped forward with dignity. " Come into the other room," said Elizabeth ; and the visitor, still protesting, with her backward eyes upon the tea-table, gave way before her. But her eyes lighted at seeing something in the parlor more eagerly than they had upon that frugal and exclusive table. The sisters glanced at each other in dismay. The black silk dress lay over a chair. The caller, who was their neighbor Matilda Jennings, edged toward it as she talked. ''I thought I'd jest run over an' see if you wan't goin' to the picnic to-mor- row," she was saying. Then she clutched the dress and diverged. "Oh, you've been fixin' your dress I" she said to Emily, with innocent insinuation. Insinuation did not sit well upon Ma- tilda Jennings ; none of her body lines were adapted to it, and the pretence was quite evident. She was short and stout, with a hard, sallow rotundity of cheek ; her small black eyes were bright-pointed under fleshy brows. "Yes, I have," replied Emily, with a scared glance at Eliza- beth. "Yes," said Elizabeth, stepping firmly into the subject, and confronting Matilda with prim and resolute blue eyes. "She has been fixin' of it. The lace was ripped off, an' she had to mend it." "It's pretty lace, ain't it? I had some of the same kind on a mantilla once when I was a girl. This makes me think of it. The sprigs in mine was set a little closer. Let me see, 'Liz'- beth, your black silk dress is trimmed with velvet, ain't it?" Elizabeth surveyed her calmly. "Yes, I've always worn black velvet on it," said she. Emily sighed faintly. She had feared that Elizabeth could not answer desirably and be truthful. "Let me see," continued Matilda, "how was that velvet put on your waist ? " " It was put on peaked." " In one peak or two ? " "One." :;28 SHORT sroRiKS "Now I wonder if it would he too much troul)le for you jebst to let nic see it a luiiiule. I've been thinkin' of fixin' over my old alpaca a little, and I've got a piece of black velvet ribbon I've steamed over, an' it looks pretty good. I thought mebbe I could put it on like yours." Matilda Jennings, in her chocolate calico, stood as relentlessly as any executioner before the Babcock sisters. They, slim and delicate and pale in their flabby black muslins, leaned toward each other, then Elizabeth straightened herself. "Some time when it's convenient I'd jest as soon show it as not/' said she. "Well, I'd be much obleeged to you if you would," returned Matilda. Her manner was a trifle overawed, but there was a sharper gleam in her eyes. Pretty soon she went home, and ate her solitary and substantial supper of bread and butter, cold potatoes, and pork and beans. Matilda Jennings was as poor as the Babcocks. She had never, like them, known better days. She had never possessed any fine old muslins nor black silks in her life, but she had always eaten more. The Babcocks had always delicately and unobtrusively felt themselves above her. There had been in their lives a faint savor of gentility and aristocracy. Their father had been col- lege-educated and a doctor. Matilda's antecedents had been humble, even in this humble community. She had come of wood-sawyers and garden-laborers. In their youth, when they had gone to school and played together, they had always realized their height above Matilda, and even old age and pov- erty and a certain friendliness could not do away with it. The Babcocks owned their house and a tiny sum in the bank, upon the interest of which they lived. Nobody knew how much it was, nobody would ever know while they lived. They might have had more if they would have sold or mortgaged their house, but they would have died first. They starved daintily and patiently on their little income. They mended their old muslins and Thibets, and wore one dress between them for best, taking turns in going out. It seemed inconsistent, but the sisters were very fond of society, and their rescr\e did not interfere with their pleasure A GALA DRESS 529 in the simple village outings. They were more at ease abroad than at home, perhaps because there were not present so many doors which could be opened into their secrecy. But they had an arbitrary conviction that their claims to respect and consider- ation would be forever forfeited should they appear on state occasions in anything but black silk. To their notions of eti- quette, black silk was as sacred a necessity as feathers at the English court. They could not go abroad and feel any self- respect in those flimsy muslins and rusty woollens, which were very flimsy and rusty. The old persons in the village could hardly remember when the Babcocks had a. new dress. The dainty care with which they had made those tender old fabrics endure so long was wonderful. They held up their skirts primly when they walked; they kept their pointed elbows clear of chairs and tables. The black silk in particular was taken off the minute the wearer entered her own house. It was shaken softly, folded, and laid away in a linen sheet. Emily was dressed in it on the Fourth of July morning when Matilda Jennings called for her. Matilda came in her volumi- nous old alpaca, with her tin lunch-pail on her arm. She looked at Emily in the black silk, and her countenance changed. " My ! you ain't goin' to wear that black silk traiiin' round in the woods, are you?" said she. "I guess she won't trail around much," spoke up Elizabeth. "She's got to go lookin' decent." Matilda's poor old alpaca had many a threadbare streak and mended slit in its rusty folds, the elbows were patched, it was hardly respectable. But she gave the skirt a defiant switch, and jerked the patched elbows. "Well, I allers believed in goin' dressed suitable for the occasion," said she, sturdily, as if that was her special picnic costume out of a large wardrobe. However, her bravado was not deeply seated ; all day long she manoeuvred to keep her patches and darns out of sight, she arranged the skirt nervously every time she changed her posi- tion, she held her elbows close to her sides, and she made many little flings at Emily's black silk. The festivities were nearly over, the dinner had been eaten, 2M 530 SHORT STORIES Matilda had devoured with relish her brown-bread and cheese and cold pork, and Emily had nibbled daintily at her sweet cake, and glanced with inward loathing at her neighbor's grosser fare. The speeches by the local celebrities were deli\'ercd, the cannon had been lired every half-hour, the sun was getting low in the west, and a golden mist was rising among the ferny undergrowth in the grove. "It's gettin' damp; I can see it risin'," said Emily, who was rheumatic ; "I guess we'd better walk 'round a little, an' then go home." "Well," replied Matilda, "I'd jest as soon. You'd better hold up your dress." The two old women adjusted themselves stiffly upon their feet, and began ranging the grove, stepping warily over the slippery pine-needles. The woods were full of merry calls ; the green distances fluttered with light draperies. Every little while came the sharp bang of a fire-cracker, the crash of cannon, or the melancholy hoot of a fish horn. Now and then blue gun- powder smoke curled up with the golden steam from the dewy ground. Emily was near-sighted; she moved on with inno- cently peering eyes, her long neck craned forward. Matilda had been taking the lead, but she suddenly stepped aside. Emily walked on unsuspectingly, holding up her precious black silk. There was a quick puff of smoke, a leap of flame, a volley of vicious little reports, and poor Emily Babcock danced as a martyr at her fiery trial might have done; her gentle dignity completely deserted her. "Oh,, oh, oh!" she shrieked. Matilda Jennings pushed forward ; by that time Emily was standing, pale and quivering, on a little heap of ashes. "You stepped into a nest of fire-crackers," said Matilda ; "a boy jest i"un ; I saw him. What made you stan' there in 'em ? Why didn't you get out ? " "I — couldn't," gasped Emily ; she could hardly speak. "Well, I guess it ain't done much harm ; them boys ought to be prosecuted. You don't feel as if you was burned anywhere, do you, Em'ly ?" "No — I guess not." "Seems to me your dress — Jest let me look at your dress, A GALA DRESS 53 1 Em'ly. My ! ain't that a wicked shame ! Jest look at all them holes, right in the flouncin', where it'll show !" It was too true. The flounce that garnished the bottom of the black skirt was scorched in a number of places. Emily looked at it and felt faint. "I must go right home," she moaned. "Oh, dear!" "Mebbe you can darn it, if you're real pertickler about it," said Matilda, with an uneasy air. Emily said nothing ; she went home. Her dress switched the dust off the wayside weeds, but she paid no attention to it ; she walked so fast that Matilda could hardly keep up with her. When she reached her own gate, she swung it swiftly to before Matilda's face, then she fled into the house. Ehzabeth came to the parlor door with a letter in her hand. She cried out, when she saw her sister's face, "What is the mat- ter, Em'ly, for pity sakes?" "You can't never go out again, 'Liz'beth; you can't! you can't!" "Why can't I go out, I'd like to know ? What do you mean, Em'ly Babcock ? " "You can't, you never can again. I stepped into some fire- crackers, and I've burned some great holes right in the flouncin'. You can't never wear it without folks knowin'. Matilda Jen- nings will tell. Oh, 'Liz'beth, what will you do?" "Do ? " said Elizabeth. " Well, I hope I ain't so set on goin' out at my time of life as all that comes to. Let's see it. H'm, I can mend that." "No, you can't. Matilda would see it if you did. Oh, dear f oh, dear ! " Emily dropped into a corner and put her slim hands over her face. "Do stop actin' so," said her sister. "I've jest had a letter, an' Aunt 'Liz'beth is dead." After a little Emily looked up. "When did she die?" she asked, in a despairing voice. "Last week." "Did they ask us to the funeral ?" "Of course they did ; it was last Friday, at two o'clock in the 532 SnORT STORIES afternoon. They knew the letter couldn't get to us till after the funeral ; but of course they'd ask us." "What did they say the matter was?" ''Old a,2;e, I guess, as much as anything. Aunt 'Liz'beth was a good deal over eighty." Emily sat reflectively; she seemed to be listening while her sister related more at length the contents of the letter. Sud- denlv she interrupted. '"Liz'beth." "Well?" "I was thinkin', 'Liz'beth — you know those crape veils we wore when mother died ! " ''Well, what of 'em?" "I — don't see why — you couldn't — make a flounce of those veils, an' put on this dress when you wore it; then she wouldn't know." "I'd like to know what I'd wear a crape flounce for?" "Why, mournin' for Aunt 'Liz'beth." "Em'ly Babcock, what sense would there be in my wearin' mournin' when you didn't?" "You was named for her, and that's a very diff'rent thing. You can jest tell folks that you was named for your aunt that jest died, an' you felt as if you ought to wear a little crape on your best dress." " It'll be an awful job to put on a different flounce every time we wear it." "I'll do it; I'm perfectly willin' to do it. Oh, 'Liz'beth, I shall die if you ever go out again an' wear that dress." " For pity sakes, don't, Em'ly ! I'll get out those veils after supper an' look at 'em." The next Sunday Elizabeth wore the black silk garnished with a crape flounce to church. Matilda Jennings walked home with her, and eyed the new trimming sharply. " Got a new flounce, ain't you?" said she, finally. "I had word last week that my aunt 'Liz'beth Taylor was dead, an' I thought it wa'n't anything more'n fittin' that I should put on a little crape," replied Elizabeth, with dignity. "Has Em'ly put on mournin' too?" A GALA DRESS 533 "Em'ly ain't any call to. She wa'n't named after her, as I was, an' she never saw her but once, when she was a little girl. It ain't more'n ten year since I saw her. She lived out West. I didn't feel as if Em'ly had any call to wear crape." MatUda said no more, but there was an unquelled suspicion in her eye as they parted at the Babcock gate. The next week a trunk full of Aunt Ehzabeth Taylor's clothes arrived from the West. Her daughter had sent them. There was in the trunk a goodly store of old woman's finery, two black silks among the other gowns. Aunt Elizabeth had been a dressy old lady, although she died in her eighties. It was a great sur- prise to the sisters. They had never dreamed of such a thing. They palpitated with awe and delight as they took out the treasures. Emily clutched Elizabeth, the thin hand closing around the thin arm. '"Liz'beth!" "What is it?" "We — won't say — anything about this to anybody. We'll jest go together to meetin' next Sabbath, an' wear these black silks, an' let Matilda Jennings see." Ehzabeth looked at Emily. A gleam came into her dim blue eyes; she tightened her thin lips. "Well, we will," said she. The following Sunday the sisters wore the black silks to church. During the week they appeared together at a sewing meeting, then at church again. The wonder and curiosity were certainly not confined to Matilda Jennings. The eccentricity which the Babcock sisters displayed in not going into society together had long been a favorite topic in the town. There had been a great deal of speculation over it. Now that they had appeared together three consecutive times, there was much talk. On the Monday following the second Sunday Matilda Jen- nings went down to the Babcock house. Her cape-bonnet was on one-sided, but it was firmly tied. She opened the door softly, when her old muscles were straining to jerk the latch. She sat down gently in the proffered chair, and displayed quite openly a worn place over the knees in her calico gown. "We had a pleasant Sabbath yesterday, didn't we ?" said she. 534 SHORT STORIES "Real pleasant," assented the sisters. " I thought we had a gDod discourse." Tlic Bahcocks assented again. " I hecrd a good many say they thought it was a good dis- course," repeated Matilda, Uke an emphatic chorus. Then she suddenly leaned forward, and her face, in the depths of her awr>' bonnet, twisted into a benevolent smile. "I was real glad to see you out together," she whispered, with meaning emphasis. The sisters smiled stiffly. Matilda paused for a moment ; she drew herself back, as if to gather strength for a thrust; she stopped smiling. "I was glad to see you out together, for I thought it was too bad the way folks was talkin'," she said. Elizabeth looked at her. "How were they talkin'?" ''Well, I don't know as there's any harm in my teUin' you. I've been thinkin' mebbe I ought to for some time. It's been round considerable lately that you and Em'ly didn't get along well, an' that was the reason you didn't go out more together. I told 'em I hadn't no idea 'twas so, though, of course, I couldn't really tell. I was real glad to see you out together, 'cause there's never knowin' how folks do get along, an' I was real glad to see you'd settled it if there had been any trouble." "There ain't been any trouble." " Well, I'm glad if there ain't been any, an' if there has, I'm glad to see it settled, an' I know other folks \xi\\ be too." Elizabeth stood up. "If you want to know the reason why we haven't been out together, I'll tell you," said she. "You've been tr^dn' to find out things every way you could, an' now I'll tell you. You've drove me to it. We had just one decent dress between us, and Em'ly an' me took turns wearin' it, and Em'ly used to wear lace on it, an' I used to rip off the lace and sew on black velvet when I wore it, so folks shouldn't know it was the same dress. Em'ly an' me never had a word in our lives, an' it's a wicked lie for folks to say we have." Emily was softly weeping in her handkerchief, there was not a tear in Elizabeth's eyes ; there were bright sy^ots on her cheeks and her slim height overhung Matilda Jennings imposingly. A GALA DRESS 535 "My aunt 'Liz'beth, that I was named for, died two or three weeks ago," she continued, "an' they sent us a trunk full of her clothes, an' there was two decent dresses among 'em, an' that's the reason why Em'ly an' me have been found out together sence. Now, Matilda Jennings, you have found out the whole story, an' I hope you're satisfied." Now that the detective instinct and the craving inquisitive- ness which were so strong in this old woman were satisfied, she should have been more jubilant than she was. She had sus- pected what nobody else in town had suspected ; she had veri- fied her suspicion, and discovered what the secrecy and pride of the sisters had concealed from the whole village ; still she looked uneasy and subdued. "I sha'n't tell anybody," said she. "You can tell nobody you're a mind to." "I sha'n't tell nobody." Matilda Jennings arose; she had passed the parlor door when she faced about. "I s'pose I kinder begretched you that black silk," said she, "or I shouldn't have cared so much about findin' out. I never had a black silk myself, nor any of my folks that I ever heard of. I ain't got nothin' decent to wear anyway." There was a moment's silence. "We sha'n't lay up anything," said Elizabeth then, and Emily sobbed responsively. Matilda passed on, and opened the outer door. Elizabeth whispered to her sister, and Emily nodded, eagerly. "You tell her," said she. "Matilda," called Elizabeth. Matilda looked back. "I was jest goin' to say that, if you wouldn't resent it, it got burned some, but we mended it nice, that you was perfectly welcome to that — black silk. Em'ly an' me don't really need it, and we'd be glad to have you have it." There were tears in Matilda Jennings's black eyes, but she held them unwinkingly. "Thank ye," she said, in a gruff voice, and stepped along over the piazza, down the steps. She reached Emily's flower garden. The peppery sweetness of the nasturtiums came up in her face ; it was quite early in the day, and the portulacas were still out in a splendid field of crimson and yellow. Matilda turned about, her broad feet just cleared 9, yellow portulaca which had straggled into the path, but she 5-6 SHORT STORIES did not notice it. The homely old figure pushed past the tlowers and into the house again. She stood before Elizabeth and Emily. ''Look here," said she, with a fine light struggling out of her coarse old face, "I want to tell you — / see them fire- crackers a-sizzlin before Ent'ly stepped in 'ew." MAMMON AND THE ARCHER' O. Henry Old Anthony Rockwall, retired manufacturer and proprietor of Rockwall's Eureka Soap, looked out of the library window of his Fifth Avenue mansion and grinned. His neighbour to the right — the aristocratic clubman, G. Van Schuylight Suffolk- Jones — came out to his waiting motor-car, wrinkling a con- tumelious nostril, as usual, at the Italian renaissance sculpture of the soap palace's front elevation. "Stuck-up old statuette of nothing doing!" commented the ex-Soap King. "The Eden Musee'll get that old frozen Nessel- rodc yet, if he don't watch out. I'll have this house painted red wliite and blue next summer, and see if that'll make his Dutch nose turn up any higher." And then Anthony Rockwall, who nev^er cared for bells, went to the door of his library and shouted "Mike!" in the same voice that had once chipped off pieces of the welkin on the Kansas prairies. "Tell my son," said Anthony to the answering menial, "to come in here before he leaves the house." When young Rockwall entered the library the old man laid aside his newspaper, looked at him with a kindly grimness on his big, smooth, ruddy countenance, rumpled his mop of white hair with one hand and rattled the keys in his pocket with the other. "Richard," said Anthony Rockwall, "what do you pay for the soap that you use?" ' From The Pour Million. Doubleciay, Page and Company. Reprinted by per- mission. MAMMON AND THE ARCHER 537 Richard, only six months home from college, was startled a little. He had not yet taken the measure of this sire of his, who was as full of unexpectednesses as a girl at her first party. ''Six dollars a dozen, I tliink, dad." "And your clothes ? " "I suppose about sLxty dollars, as a rule." "You're a gentleman," said Anthony, decidedly. "I've heard of these young bloods spending $24 a dozen for soap, and going over the hundred mark for clothes. You've got as much money to waste as any of 'em, and yet you stick to what's decent and moderate. Now I use the old Eureka — not only for sentiment, but it's the purest soap made. Whenever you pay more than ten cents a cake for soap, you buy bad perfumes and labels. But fifty cents is doing very well for a young man in your generation, position, and condition. As I said, you're a gentleman. They say it takes three generations to make one. They're off. Money'll do it as slick as soap grease. It's madeyou one. By hokey ! it's almost made one of me. I'm nearly as impolite and disagreeable and ill-mannered as these two old Knickerbocker gents on each side of me that can't sleep of nights because I bought in between 'em." "There are some things that money can't accomplish," remarked young Rockwall, rather gloomily. "Now, don't say that," said old Anthony, shocked. "I bet my money on money every time. I've been through the ency- clopaedia down to Y looking for something you can't buy with it; and I expect to have to take up the appendix next week. I'm for money against the field. Tell me something money won't buy." "For one thing," answered Richard, rankling a little, "it won't buy one into the exclusive circles of society." "Oho! won't it?" thundered the champion of the root of evil. "You tell me where your exclusive circles would be if the first Astor hadn't had the money to pay for his steerage passage over ? " Richard sighed. "And that's what I was coming to," said the old man, less 538 SHORT STORJI'lS boisterously. ''That's why I asked you to come in. There's something going wrong with you, boy. I've been noticing it for two weeks. Out with it. I guess I could lay my hands on eleven millions within twenty-four hours, besides the real esta.te. If it's your liver, there's the Rambler down in the bay, coaled, and ready to steam down to the Bahamas in two days." "Not a bad guess, dad ; you haven't missed it far." "Ah," said Anthony, keenly; "what's her name?" Richard began to walk up and down the library floor. There was enough comradeship and s^inpathy in this crude old father of his to draw his confidence. "Why don't you ask her?" demanded old Anthony. "She'll jump at you. You've got the money and the looks, and you're a decent boy. Your hands are clean. You've got no Eureka soap on 'em. You've been to college, but she'll overlook that." "I haven't had a chance," said Richard. "Make one," said Anthony. "Take her for a walk in the park, or a straw ride, or walk home with her from church. Chance! Pshaw!" "You don't know the social mill, dad. She's part of the stream that turns it. Every hour and minute of her time is arranged for days in advance. I must have that girl, dad, or this town is a blackjack swamp for evermore. And I can't write it — I can't do that." "Tut I" said the old man. "Do you mean to tell me that with all the money I've got you can't get an hour or two of a girl's time for yourself?" "I've put it off too late. She's going to sail for Europe at noon day after to-morrow for a two years' stay. I'm to see her alone to-morrow evening for a few minutes. She's at Larch- mont now at her aunt's. I can't go there. But I'm allow'ed to meet her with a cab at the Grand Central Station to-morrow evening at the 8 : 30 train. We drive down Broadway to Wal- lack's at a gallop, where her mother and a box party will be waiting for us in the lobby. Do you think she would listen to a declaration from me during that six or eight minutes under those circumstances ? No. And what chance would I have in MAMMON AND THE ARCHER 539 the theatre or afterward? None. No, dad, this is one tangle that your money can't unravel. We can't buy one minute of time with cash; if we could, rich people would live longer. There's no hope of getting a talk with Miss Lantry before she sails." "All right, Richard, my boy," said old Anthony, cheerfully. "You may run along down to your club now. I'm glad it ain't your liver. But don't forget to burn a few punk sticks in the joss house to the great god Mazuma from time to time. You say money won't buy time? Well, of course, you can't order eternity wrapped up and delivered at your residence for a price, but I've seen Father Time get pretty bad stone bruises on his heels when he walked through the gold diggings." That night came Aunt Ellen, gentle, sentimental, wrinkled, sighing, oppressed by wealth, in to Brother Anthony at his evening paper, and began discourse on the subject of lovers' woes. "He told me all about it," said brother Anthony, yawning. "I told him my bank account was at his service. And then he began to knock money. Said money couldn't help. Said the rules of society couldn't be bucked for a yard by a team of ten- millionaires." "Oh, Anthony," sighed Aunt Ellen, "I wish you would not think so much of money. Wealth is nothing where a true afEection is concerned. Love is all-powerful. If he had only spoken earher ! She could not have refused our Richard. But now I fear it is too late. He will have no opportunity to address her. All your gold cannot bring happiness to your son." At eight o'clock the next evening Aunt Ellen took a quaint old gold ring from a moth-eaten case and gave it to Richard. "Wear it to-night, nephew," she begged. "Your mother gave it to me. Good luck in love she said it brought. She asked me to give it to you when, you had found the one you loved." Young Rockwall took the ring reverently and tried it on his smallest finger. It slipped as far as the second joint and stopped. 540 SHORT STORIES He took it off and stulTod it into his vest pocket, after the man- ner of man. And then he 'phoned for his cab. At the station he captured Miss Lantry out of the gadding mob at ei<;ht thirty-two. "We mustn't keep mamma and the others waiting," said she. "To Wallack's Theatre as fast as you can drive ! " said Richard loyally. They whirled up Forty-second to Broadway, and then down the wliite-starred lane that leads from the soft meadows of sun- set to the rocky hills of morning. At Thirty-fourth Street young Richard quickly thrust up the trap and ordered the cabman to stop. "I've dropped a ring," he apologized, as he chmbed out. "It was my mother's, and I'd hate to lose it. I won't detain you a minute — I saw where it fell." In less than a minute he was back in the cab with the ring. But within that minute a crosstown car had stopped directly in front of the cab. The cabman tried to pass to the left, but a heavy express wagon cut him off. He tried the right, and had to back away from a furniture van that had no business to be there. He tried to back out, but dropped his reins and swore dutifully. He was blockaded in a tangled mess of vehicles and horses. One of those street blockades had occurred that sometimes tie up commerce and movement quite suddenly in the big city. "Whv don't vou drive on?" said Miss Lantry, impatiently. ''We'U'be late." Richard stood up in the cab and looked around. He saw a congested flood of wagons, trucks, cabs, vans, and street cars filling the vast space where Broadway, Sixth Avenue, and Thirty-fourth street cross one another as a twenty-six inch maiden fills her twenty-two inch girdle. And still from all the cross streets they were hurrying and rattling toward the con- verging point at full speed,, and hurUng themselves into the struggling mass, locking wheels and adding their drivers' imprecations to the clamour. The entire traffic of Manhattan seemed to have jammed itself around them. The oldest New MAMMON AND THE ARCHER 541 Yorker among the thousands of spectators that lined the side- walks had not witnessed a street blockade of the proportions of this one. "I'm very sorry," said Richard, as he resumed his seat, "but it looks as if we were stuck. They won't get this jumble loosened up in an hour. It was my fault. If I hadn't dropped the ring we — " "Let me see the ring," said Miss Lantry. "Now that it can't be helped, I don't care. I think theatres are stupid, anyway." At eleven o'clock that night somebody tapped lightly on Anthony Rockwall's door. "Come in," shouted Anthony, who was in a red dressing- gown, reading a book of piratical adventures. Somebody was Aunt Ellen, looking Hke a gray-haired angel that had been left on earth by mistake. "They're engaged, Anthony," she said, softly. "She has promised to marry our Richard. On their way to the theatre there was a street blockade, and it was two hours before their cab could get out of it. And oh, brother Anthony, don't ever boast of the power of money again. A little emblem of true love — a httle ring that symbolized unending and un- mercenary affection — was the cause of our Richard finding his happiness. He dropped it in the street, and got out to recover it. And before they could continue the blockade occurred. He spoke to his love and won her there while the cab was hemmed in. Money is dross compared with true love, Anthony." "All right," said old Anthony. "I'm glad the boy has got what he wanted. I told him I wouldn't spare any expense in the matter if — " "But, brother Anthony, what good could your money have done?" "Sister," said Anthony Rockwall, "I've got my pirate in a devil of a shape. His ship has just been scuttled, and he's too good a judge of the value of money to let drown. I wish you would let me go on with this chapter." 54-^ SHORT STORIES TIk' slory should end here. I wish it would as heartily asyou who read it wish it did. But wc must go to the bottom of the well for truth. The next day a person with red hands and a blue polka-dot necktie, who called himself Kelly, called at Anthony Rockwall's house, and was at once received in the library. "Well," said Anthony, reaching for his cheque-book, "it was a good bilin' of soap. Let's see — you had S5000 in cash." "I paid out S300 more of my own," said Kelly. "I had to go a little above the estimate. I got the express wagons and cabs mostly for S5 ; but the trucks and two-horse teams mostly raised me to Sio. The motormen wanted Sio, and some of the loaded teams S20. The cops struck me hardest — S50 I paid two, and the rest S20 and S25. But didn't it work beautiful, Mr. Rockwall ? I'm glad William A. Brady wasn't on to that little outdoor vehicle mob scene. I wouldn't want William to break his heart with jealousy. And never a rehearsal, either. The boys was on time to the fraction of a second. It was two hours before a snake could get below Greeley's statue." "Thirteen hundred — there you are, Kelly," said Anthony, tearing off a check. "Your thousand, and the S300 you were out. You don't despise money, do you, Kelly?" "Me?" said Kelly. "I can lick the man that invented poverty." Anthony called Kelly when he was at the door. "You didn't notice," said he, "anywhere in the tie-up, a kind of a fat boy without any clothes on shooting arrows around with a bow, did you?" "Why, no," said Kelly, mystified. "I didn't. If he was like you say, maybe the cops pinched him before I got there." "I thought the little rascal wouldn't be on hand," chuckled Anthony. ' ' Good-by , Kelly. " V. LETTERS DEAN SWIFT TO STELLA London, Nov. 15, 171 2. Before this comes to your hands, you will have heard of the most terrible accident that hath almost ever happened. This morning at eight, my man brought me word that Duke Hamil- ton had fought with Lord Mohun, and killed him, and was brought home wounded. I immediately sent him to the Duke's house, in St. James's Square ; but the porter could hardly an- swer for tears, and a great rabble was about the house. In short, they fought at seven this morning. The dog Mohun was killed on the spot ; and, while the duke was over him, Mohun shortened his sword, stabbed him in at the shoulder to the heart. The duke was helped toward the cake-house by the ring in Hyde Park (where they fought), and died on the grass, before he could reach the house ; and was brought home in his coach by eight, while the poor duchess was asleep. Macartney, and one Hamilton, were the seconds, who fought likewise, and are both fled. I am told, that a footman of Lord Mohun's stabbed Duke Hamilton ; and some say Macartney did so too. Mohun gave the affront, and yet sent the challenge. I am infinitely concerned for the poor duke, who was a frank, honest, good-natured man. I loved him very well, and I think he loved me better. He had the greatest mind in the world to have nie go with him to France, but durst not tell it me ; and those he did tell, said I could not be spared, which was true. They have removed the poor duchess to a lodging in the neighborhood, where I have been with her two hours, and am just come away. I never saw so melancholy a scene ; for indeed all reasons for real grief belong to her ; nor is it possible for anybody to be a 543 544 LETTERS greater loser in all regards. She has moved my very soul. The lodging was inconvenient, and they would have removed her to another ; but I would not suffer it, because it had no room back- ward, and she must have been tortured with the noise of the Grub Street screamers mentioning her husband's murder in her ears. SAMUEL JOHNSON TO LORD CHESTERFIELD 7th February, 1755. My Lord — I have been lately informed, by the proprietor of The World, that two papers, in which my Dictionary is recommended to the public, were written ])y your lordship. To be so distinguished is an honor, which, being very little accustomed to favors from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge. When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your lordship. I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the enchantment of your address, and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself Le vainqueur du vainqueur de la terre; — that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending ; but I found my attendance so little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in public, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had done all that I could ; and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little. Seven years, my lord, have now past, since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door ; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favor. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a patron before. The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, ind found him a native of the rocks. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 545 Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help ? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind ; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it ; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it ; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron, which providence has enabled me to do for myself. Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any favorer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exultation. My Lord, Your lordship's most humble, most obedient servant, Sam. Johnson. CHARLES LAMB TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH January 30, 1801. I ought before this to have replied to your very kind invita- tion to Cumberland. With you and your sister I could gang anywhere ; but I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a journey. Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street ; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, wagons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden ; the very women of the Town ; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles ; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night ; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street ; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, 546 LETTERS the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, cofTee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes — London itself a j)antomime and a mas(|uerade — all these things work themselves inlt) my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night- walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you ; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes ? My attachments are all local, purely local. I have no pas- sion (or have had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry and books) for groves and valleys. The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a book-case which has followed me about like a faithful dog (only e.xceeding him in knowledge), wherever I have moved, old chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old school. — these are my mistresses. Have I not enough, wuthout your mountains? I do not envy you. I should pity you, did I not know that the mind will make friends of anything. Your sun, and moon, and skies, and hills, and lakes, affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome \-isible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof beautifully painted, but unable to satisfy my mind : and at last, like the pictures of the apartment of a connoisseur, unable to afford him any longer a pleasure. So fading upon me, from disuse, have been the beauties of Nature, as they have been contlnedly called ; so ever fresh, and green, and warm are all the inventions of men, and assemblies of men in this great city. I should certainly have laughed with dear Joanna. Give my kindest love and my sister's to D. and yourself; and a kiss from me to little Barbara Lewthwaite. Thank you for liking my play. C. L CHARLES DARWIN TO W. D. FOX 547 CHARLES DARWIN TO W. D. FOX ^ Down, March 19th (1855). My dear Fox, — How long it is since we have had any communication, and I really want to hear how the world goes with you ; but my immediate object is to ask you to observe a point for me, and as I know now you are a very busy man with too much to do, I shall have a good chance of your doing what I want, as it would be hopeless to ask a quite idle man. As you have a Noah's Ark, I do not doubt that you have pigeons. (How I wish by any chance they were fantails !) Now what I want to know is, at what age nestling pigeons have their tail feathers sufficiently developed to be counted. I do not think I ever saw a young pigeon. I am hard at work at my notes collecting and com- paring them, in order in some two or three years to write a book with all the facts and arguments, which I can collect, /or and versus, the immutability of species. I want to get the young of our domestic breeds, to see how young, and to what degree, the differences appear. I must either breed myself (which is no amusement but a horrid bore to me) the pigeons or buy their young ; and before I go to a seller, whom I have heard of from Yarrell, I am really anxious to know something about their de- velopment, not to expose my excessive ignorance, and therefore be excessively liable to be cheated and gulled. With respect to the one point of the tail feathers, it is of course in relation to the wonderful development of tail feathers in the adult fan- tail. If you had any breed of poultry pure, I would beg a chicken with exact age stated, about a week or fortnight old ; to be sent in a box by post, if you could have the heart to kill one ; and secondly, would let me pay postage. . . . Indeed, I should be very glad to have a nestling common pigeon sent, for I mean to make skeletons, and have already just begun com])aring wild and tame ducks. And I think the results rather curious, for on weighing the several bones very carefully, when perfectly ' From Letters of Charles Darwin. John Murray, 1887. 548 LETTERS cleaned the proportimuil weiglits of the two liavc greatly varied, the foot of the tame having largely increased. How I wish I coulil get a little wild iluck of a week old, but that I know is almost impossible. With respect to ourselves, I have not much to say ; we have now a terribly noisy house with the whooping cough, but other- wise are all well. Far the greatest fact about myself is that I have at last quite done with the everlasting barnacles. At the end of the year we had two of our little boys very ill with fever and bronchitis, and all sorts of ailments. Partly for amusements, and partly for change of air, we went to London and took a house for a month, but it turned out a great failure, for that dreadful frost just set in when we went, and all our children got unwell, and E. and I had coughs and colds and rheumatism nearly all the time. We had put down first on our list of things to do, to go and see Mrs. Fox, but literally after waiting some time to see whether the weather would not im- prove, we had not a day when we both could go out. I do hope before very long you will be able to manage to pay us a ^^sit. Time is slipping away, and we are getting oldish. Do tell us about yourself and all your large family. I know you will help me if you can with information about the young pigeons ; and anyhow do write before very long. My dear Fox, your sincere old friend, C. Darwin. ABRAHAM LINCOLN TO MRS. BIXBY November 21, 1864. Mrs. Bixby, Boston, Massachusetts. Deak Madam, — I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL TO CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 549 mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. Yours very sincerely and respectfully, Abraham Lincoln. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL TO CHARLES ELIOT NORTON ' Paris, December 4, 1872. . . . Oddly enough when I got your letter about Tennyson's poem I had just finished reading a real Arthurian romance — "Fergus" — not one of the best, certainly, but having that merit of being a genuine blossom for which no triumph of arti- fice can compensate ; having, in short, that woodsy hint and tantalization of perfume which is so infinitely better than any- thing more defined. Emerson had left me Tennyson's book ; so last night I took it to bed with me and finished it at a gulp — reading like a naughty boy till half -past one. The contrast between his pomp and my old rhymer's simpleness was very curious and even instructive. One bit of the latter (which I cannot recollect elsewhere) amused me a good deal as a Yankee. When Fergus comes to Arthur's court and Sir Kay "sarses" him (which, you know, is de rigeur in the old poems). Sir Gawain saunters up whittling a stick as a medicine against ennui. So afterwards, when Arthur is dreadfully bored by hearing no news of Fergus, he reclines at table without any taste for his dinner, and whittles to purge his heart of melancholy. I suppose a modern poet would not dare to come so near Nature as this ' From Letters of James Russell Lowell. Copyright, 1893, by Harper and Brothers. Reprinted by permission. 55© LETTERS lest she should flinj:; up her heels. But I am not yet "afT wi' the auld love," nor quite "on with the new." There are very fine childish things in Tennyson's poem and fine manly things, too, as it seems to me, but I conceive the theory to be wrong. I have the same feeling (I am not wholly sure of its justice) that I have when I see these modern mediaeval pictures. I am defrauded ; I do not see reality, but a masquerade. The costumes are all that is genuine, and the people inside them are shams — which, I take it, is just the reverse of what ought to be. One special criticism I should make on Tennyson's new' Idyls, and that is that the similes are so often dragged in by the hair. They seem to be taken (a la Tom Moore) from note-books, and not suggested by the quickened sense of association in the glow of composition. Sometimes it almost seems as if the verses were made for the similes, instead of being the cresting of a wave that heightens as it rolls. This is analogous to the costume ob- jection and springs perhaps from the same cause — the making of poetry with malice prepense. However, I am not going to forget the lovely things that Tennyson has written, and I think they give him rather hard measure now. However, it is the natural recoil of a too rapid fame. Wordsworth had the true kind — an unpopularity that roused and stimulated while he was strong enough to despise it, and honor, obedience, troops of friends, when the grasshopper would have been a burthen to the drooping shoulders. Tennyson, to be sure, has been child- ishly petulant ; but what have these whipper-snappers, who cry "Go up, baldhead," done that can be named with some things of his ? He has been the greatest artist in words we have had since Gray — and remember how Gray holds his own with little fuel, but real fire. He had the secret of the inconsumable oil, and so, I fancy, has Tennyson. I keep on picking up books here and there, but I shall be forced to stop, for I find I have got beyond my income. Still, I shall try gradually to make my Old French and Provencal collection tolerably complete, for the temptation is great where the field is definitely bounded . . . R. L. S. TO W. E. HENLEY 551 R. L. S. TO W. E. HENLEY 1 Br^mar, August, 1881. My dear Henley, — Of course I am a rogue. Why, Lord, it's known, man ; but you should remember I have had a horrid cold. Now I'm better, I think ; and see here — nobody, not you, nor Lang, nor the devil, will hurry me with our crawlers. They are coming. Four of them are as good as done, and the rest will come when ripe ; but I am now on another lay for the moment, purely ow- ing to Lloyd, this one ; but I believe there's more coin in it than in any amount of crawlers: now, see here, "The Sea-Cook, or Treasure Island: A Story for Boys." If this don't fetch the kids, why, they have gone rotten since my days. Will you be surprised to learn that it is about Buc- caneers, that it begins in the Admiral Benbow public-house on Devon coast, that it's all about a map, and a treasure, and a mutiny, and a derelict ship, and a current, and a fine old Squire Trelawney (the real Tre, purged of literature and sin, to suit the infant mind), and a doctor, and another doctor, and a sea- song with the chorus, "Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum" (at the third Ho you heave at the capstan bars), which is a real buc- caneer's song, only known to the crew of the late Captain Flint (died of rum at Key West, much regretted, friends will please accept this intimation) ; and lastly, would you be surprised to hear, in this connection, the name of Routledge? That's the kind of man I am, blast your eyes. Two chapters are written, and have been tried on Lloyd with great success ; the trouble is to work it off without oaths. Buccaneers without oaths — bricks without straw. But youth and the fond parent have to be consulted. And now look here — this is next day — and three chapters are written and read. (Chapter I. The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow. Chapter II. Black dog appears and dis- ' From Lellers oj Robert Louis Stevenson. Charles Scribner's Sons. Reprinted by permission. :>.^- LETTERS appears. Chapter TIT. The Black Spot.) All now heard by Lloyd. F., and my father and mother, with high approval. It's quite silly and horrid fun, and what I want is the best book about the buccaneers that can be had — the latter B's above all, Blackbeard and sich, and get Xutt or Bain to send it skimmingly by the fastest post. And now I know you'll write to me for "The Sea-Cook's" sake. Your "Admiral Guinea" is curiously near my line, but of course I'm fooling; and your Admiral sounds like a shublime gent. Stick to him like wax — he'll do. !My Trelawney is, as I indicate, several thousand sea-miles off the lie of the original of your Admiral Guinea ; and besides, I have no more about him yet but one mention of his name, and I think it likely he may turn yet farther from the model in the course of handling. A chapter a day I mean to do ; they are short ; and perhaps in a month "The Sea-Cook" may to Routledge go, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum ! My Trelawney has a strong dash of Landor, as I see him from here. No women in the story, Lloyd's orders ; and who so blithe to obey ? It's awful fun, boys' stories ; you just indulge the pleasure of your heart, that's all ; no trouble, no strain. The only stiff thing is to get it ended — that I don't see, but I look to a volcano. O sweet, O generous, human toils ! You would like my blind beggar in Chapter III, I be- lieve; no writing, just drive along as the words come and the pen will scratch I R. L. S. Author of Boys^ Stories. APPENDIX I. STUDENT THEMES I. EXPOSITION OUTLINE: THE MANUFACTURE OF MALLEABLE IRON I. Introduction. A . Malleable iron differs from gray or cast iron 1 . In its physical qualities ; being a. Softer, less brittle, and capable of being beaten out like lead, though in a less degree ; b. Much stronger under tension ; and c. Much better able to resist a jarring shock. 2. In its chemical composition, since a. The free carbon it contains is amorphous, not gra- phitic — i.e. is scattered, minutely divided, through- out the mass, not segregated in flakes as in gray iron, and b. There is less sulphur and phosphorus present. B. Two main processes are involved in the manufacture of malleable iron : 1. The making of white iron, and 2. The conversion of this white iron into malleable iron. II. Details of the manufacture. A. Making the white iron. I. The material used comprises a mixture of a. Pig iron, including (a) Charcoal pig — smelted with charcoal instead of coke as fuel ; (b) Malleable Bessemer pig — an ordinary pig iron containing less sulphur and phosphorus than the "foundry pig" used in the manufacture of gray iron. b. Scrap iron — consisting of (a) Malleable scrap — worn out malleable iron cast- ings, 553 554 APPENDIX. STIDEST THEMES (b) Steel scrap — old steel rails and worn out stce\ castings, and (f) "Sprue" — the waste iron left over from the previous day, etc. 2. The material is melted (7. In a cupola — a vast hollow cylinder in which the fuel (coke) and the material are placed in alternate layers, the material being melted in direct contact with the fuel, or, preferably, b. In an air-furnace which consists of (a) A tire-box, in which a huge fire is kept up with good gas-coal as fuel, and (6) A melting-hearth, containing the material to be melted. This is separated from the fire-box by a low wall, over which the flame from the fire is driven by a forced draught. B. The anneahng process, which converts the white iron into malleable 1. Consists in slowdy heating the white iron product (tightly packed with iron oxide in ovens) to a temperature of about i6oo° F. and letting it gradually cool down, and 2. Causes great changes in the nature of the iron, as regards a. Its chemical composition — the carbon, which in the white iron has been chemically combined with the metal as iron carbide, being separated out and dis- tributed through the mass in a free form, mechani- cally mixed with the iron, and b. Its physical quahties, the hard brittle metal first obtained being converted into the soft, strong, and durable product descriljcd in the beginning. III. Conclusion. A. It is evident that the double process involved is both com- plicated and expensive. B. The superior quality of the metal obtained more than repays the difficulties of its manufacture. THE MANUFACTURE OF MALLEABLE IRON The vast majority of iron castings made to-day are of either mal- leable or gray iron. We intend in this paper to concern ourselves only with the former ; but a brief comparison — or rather contrast i EXPOSITION 555 — of its qualities with those of gray iron will be of great assistance towards the comprehension of the subject. Malleable iron, then, differs from gray iron both in its physical properties and in its chemical composition. It is softer and less brittle, and can be beaten out like lead — though, needless to say, to a very much less degree. It is also stronger under tension and better able to resist a jarring shock. These qualities make it in every way the superior metal ; it is, indeed, kept from supplanting gray iron entirely only by the fact that it is approximately twice as expensive. The constituent elements in the chemical composition of the two irons are identical ; for the analytical chemist a slight difference in the form or proportions of these elements alone distinguishes malleable from gray iron. Each contains about ninety-six per cent of pure iron, mixed or combined with varying proportions of carbon, siUcon, sulphur, phosphorus, and manganese. The soft and pliable nature of malleable iron is chiefly due to the state of the free carbon it con- tains. This is amorphous rather than graphitic ; in other words, it is scattered evenly and minutely divided throughout the mass, not segregated in flakes, as in gray iron. The fact that sulphur and phosphorus are present in far smaller quantities also adds consider- ably to its strength, as those two elements always tend to make the metal more brittle. Such are the qualities of malleable iron. The processes involved in its manufacture are, essentially, two. In the first place, the ma- terial is prepared in the form of white iron — the hardest and most brittle form of iron known ; in the second place, this white iron is converted by a special heat treatment into the finished malleable product. We are first concerned with the making of the white iron. For this, pig iron and scrap iron in almost equal proportions provide the ma- terial. The pig used consists of malleable Bessemer — an ordinary pig iron containing less sulphur and phosphorus than the "foundry pig" used in the manufacture of gray iron — or, preferably, of char- coal pig, which has been melted with charcoal in place of coke as fuel. The superiority of the latter is due to the practically negligible amount of sulphur it contains. Of the scrap iron used, three-fourths consists usually of "sprue," as it is called. This comprises the waste iron left over from the previous day, the metal from the channels in the moulds through which it ran to form the castings, the shop "sweep- ings," etc. The remaining fourth is made up of equal amounts of 55(> APPEXDIX. STL'DEXT THEMFS malleable scrap — worn out malleable iron castings, and steel scrap — oKl steel rails and the like. This material is melted up either in a cupola or an air furnace. The former is a vast hollow cylinder in which the fuel (coke) and the metal are placed in alternate layers. The iron is thus melted in direct contact with the fuel — an arrangement by no means desirable, as the metal invariably absorbs a certain amount of sulphur from the coke. The air furnace is a decidedly better arrangement. It comprises a fire-box, in which a huge fire is kept up with good gas-coal as fuel, and a melting hearth containing the material to be melted. The hearth is separated from the fire-box by a low wall, over which the flame is driven by a forced draught. When the material has been melted down in such a furnace and run out into the moulds, it is in the form of white iron, and the first process in the manufacture of the malleable casting is completed. White iron is almost as hard and brittle as glass, but its nature is entirely changed by the simple heat treatment known as annealing. The castings are tightly packed with iron oxide in cylindrical pots of about tw-o feet in depth and diameter — much as one would pack crockery with straw in a barrel, — the chief object being to keep them from warping at the high temperature to which they are soon to be subjected. They are next placed in huge ovens and slowly heated to about 1600° F., then gradually allowed to cool down. They stay in the ovens altogether between four and five days. The physical alteration which has taken place in the properties of the metal is evident, but the reasons for the chemical change which takes place at the same time have not yet been definitely discovered. That the carbon, which in the w-hite iron had been chemically com- bined with the metal as iron carbide, is separated out and distributed through the mass in a free amorphous form mechanically mixed with it, is an indisputable fact. Chemists, however, are not yet agreed as to why the simple heat treatment should produce such a result. Certain it is that the hard, brittle metal first obtained has been con- verted into the soft, strong, and durable product described in the opening paragraphs. From this brief description it will be evident that the manufacture of malleable iron is an operation both complicated and expensive, owing to the double process involved. At the same time, however, it should be quite clear that the superior quality of the metal obtained more than repays the difficulties of its manufacture. EXPOSITION 557 HOW A ROSEBUD UNCLOSES Did you ever watch a rosebud unclose? If not, you have missed one of nature's wonderful processes. Take a bud of the crimson cochet variety just as it begins to unfold. I warn you beforehand that to watch this transition from bud to rose will require much pa- tience. Nature requires patience first of all from those who would learn her secrets. For three hours you can see no difference in the bud ; seemingly it is absolutely idle. You will perhaps perceive, at the end of that time, that the bud is larger, especially in girth, and that the color is several shades darker. These changes have gone on within the bud. The little inner petals have awakened and are sleepily stretching themselves, and by their quickened life are send- ing through the veins of the delicate outer petals a flood of deeper color. Now, almost imperceptibly at first, the outer leaves begin to unclose. Watch closely. A tremor seems to run through the outermost petal ; then suddenly it falls a little from its fellows. A second or two later another quivers and falls away, and then another, until finally the first four courses are leaning back. Now the move- ment begins again from within. The little petals at the centre begin to push out. The first perfume is exhaled. Those little petals push farther and farther until the petals of the fifth course touch those of the fourth ; then the movement ceases. The bud is a full-blown rose. STRAWBERRY PICKING As the sun rises over the dewy, glistening field, the manager, a short businesslike man with a quick eye and a quicker step, comes out of the shed with the bosses. To these bosses he assigns spaces of about twenty rows each. The duty of this functionary is to watch the pickers in his territory, keep them on their own rows, see that they pick the berries properly and do not mash those on the edges of the rows nor leave any which would be too ripe for the next picking, which occurs the second day after. His place is about as agreeable as that of a baseball umpire. When the bosses are allotted their positions, the signal is given and the pickers, one to each row, merrily set to work. The cool dew wets hande and arms and trousers or skirts as, on their knees, the pickers rapidly turn the leaves this way and that, searching for the luscious low-lying fruit. The girls, their hands and arms covered with, the legs of old stockings, race and talk with their neigh- 558 .l/7'/..\7)/.V. STUD MIT THEMES bors ; old men sloop painfully over Ihcir work; thf women cast frequent anxious glances toward the shed where tlie crying babies have been left. The snap of the berries as they are pulled from the vines keeps up a continuous patter, like rain falling on still water. Soon the carriers of the swifter pickers are filled and they start down between the rows (no boss would let a picker cross a row) for the shed, and the work of the packing department begins. Each picker, as he comes in with his six quarts passes the ticket woman, who gives him his ticket, a cardboard, crediting him with the proper number of quarts. If the boxes are not full she "docks" him, that is, gives him a ticket for only four or live quarts, as the case demands. After he secures his ticket he passes on down the shed, takes the boxes from the carrier and puts them on the bench, refdls with empties and returns to the patch. It is while he is disposing of his berries that he meets the czar of the whole business. This man is the shed boss. It is this same man with the quick eye who sizes up each picker and his berries as they pour in in a constant stream. Here he takes out a green berry, and with a meaning look shows it to the picker ; there he punches off a long stem and tells the culprit to be careful in the future ; he fairly jumps on to the awkw-ard fellow with telltale stains upon his knees, and scolds the girl with like stains upon her lips. He dumps the boxes of a suspicious looking tramp to see that they are honestly filled, and if found otherwise, he points to the fence, telling him to "git, and git quick !" From no one does he brook an answer. Behind the bench upon which the pickers place their berries stand the packers, — women who take the quarts from the bench, place them in the cases and dress the tops. The work requires neatness and despatch, for with four hundred pickers working as fast as possible, a short delay in the shed would cause a confusion entirely demoralizing. From the packers the cases go to the mailers, and from the mailers to the marker, a man who brands each case with its destination and sender. The berries, now ready for the shipment, are hauled away to the train. Since the pay depends entirely on the amount picked, and the work must be stopped and the berries shipped by the middle of the afternoon, dinner is a rather neglected function except with the children about the shed and those worn out with work and heat. When the work is finished or the time is up, the pickers are called in, and the final rush for tickets tests the skill and patience of the woman who dispenses them. Some have boxes partly filled, others EXPOSITION SS9 have picked unripe berries in their efforts to make out even quarts, and all want full pay for the ragged results. The confusion ends at last, the pickers straggle away, talking of their successes and aspirations. The rosy girl in the sunbonnet takes her tickets from the pocket at her breast and compares them with the checks of him in the hickory hat, with the curious result that the gallant youth spends his surplus with her at the ice cream festival that night ; the tired woman, with hair unkempt, lugs home her crying baby and does her household work ; the young men repair to the store for a game of horseshoe ; the tramps to the same place for bread and coffee ; the shed hands, bosses, and owner rattle homeward in the empty wagons, and the day's picking is done. THE COLLEGE GIRL'S VOCABULARY The influence of environment seems to leave nothing untouched ; it sets the direction not only of one's thought and habit of Hfe, but determines in large measure one's manner of speech. Girls that spend several consecutive years in a preparatory school and in college become so accustomed to surrounding conditions that unconsciously they develop a vocabulary typically different from that of other people. To a person who has been away from college for some time and who has mingled with other than college girls, this difference is decidedly noticeable. It is not a question of slang, as one might hastily suggest, but simply of the abuse or misapplication of perfectly good, legitimate words. In our language, as in many other things American, the pre- vailing character is extravagance. Any adjective that makes the trifles of conversation appear interesting or exciting is not only per- missible, but imperative. The most commonplace remark is splashed with the high color of adventure ; and an incident is scarcely worth listening to if it is not "the most exciting thing you ever heard in your life" — the last three words uttered with an inflection gradually rising to a shriek on "Hfe." Naturally, the speaker "nearly died" under the stress of it all. "Exciting" and "killing," however, are mild descriptives. To obtain a ready listener, events must be "thrilling." Girls are "thrilled" at seeing each other after a short absence; they are ''thrilled" at the idea of a cut, of a good mark ; and above all things, they are "thrilled" at a "spread." In regard to a tennis appoint- 560 APPEXDIX. STCDENT THEMES nient 1 overheard a sophomore say to an unsophisticated freshman, •"Oh, I am so thrilled at the idea of playing with you." "I don't know why you should be," said the freshman, "for I'm not at all a good player." "Oh, yes, but don't you see, if / win I should be thrilled with triumph, and if you win I should be thrilled with eager- ness to play better." To keep up an existence of thrills steadily for several years must be very hard on the system. This Ufe surely requires strong nerves ! "Weird" and "ghastly" both are words often dragged from their proper surroundings into broad daylight, but, fortunately, not as yet with such frequency and boldness as the word "wonderful." This adjective is perhaps the most abused in the college vocabulary. Of course when one thinks about it, everything in the universe is really wonderful ; nevertheless some things are incomparably more amazing than others, and if we describe mere nothings as "wonderful," how can we express the really vital somethings? Twenty times a day we hear, "Oh, we had the most wonderful time at Katherine's last night!" and "Really, it was perfectly wonderful ice-cream." Sur- rounded by such intemperate absurdities, is it strange that any at- tempt adequately to express genuine wonder is almost hopeless? It is as balBing as to try drawing music from a useless worn-out instru- ment. The result of all this extravagance is ruin to our vocabulary. Strong words are deliberately stolen from their places and are used to express trifling nonsense. When we need these words, they are no longer at hand, and in our weakness we shrink into silence rather than venture terms that have no meaning. Not only is our expression weakened but our mental poise is threatened. The constant use of highly exciting language tends to keep one in a state of nervous agita- tion, of irritabiUty. During the student period, when perhaps mental composure is most needed, it is least encouraged. FUZZY: THE IDEA MAN Under an obscure "Obituary" yesterday's paper published this notice : — "Lorenzo F. Woodward, 42, single, County Hospital, alcoholic heart failure." Many of the deceased man's friends who glanced ignorantly over ■'Lorenzo F. Woodward" would have gazed through tears at that EXPOSITION 561 announcement had it read "Fuzzy Woodward." And had it stated that Fuzzy was a newspaper man it would have been unnecessary to state that the cause of his death was alcohol ; for his avocation was news-gathering. With his love of liquor, however, this journalist had combined a talent for "the news game" that might have developed into a genius for literature had not alcohol enfeebled his hand and pinched his heart and gnarled his brain. Some years ago there ambled into the "local room" of our daily newspaper a lean, lank, loose-jointed man with greenish gray eyes. Several clean-cut wrinkles creased his face, which bore a look of pre- mature age. The little, old face started out from under a shock of yellow curls. The awkward figure shuffled toward the city editor : "Need a man ? I'm ready for work." The editor, after many procrastinations, finally hired this persistent applicant, one of those many journalistic victims of the wanderlust. And a week later this same Lorenzo Fuzzy Woodward had a regular staff job on the Leader. It was there that I began to know him. He seldom mentioned his early years, of which we knew nothing. Evidently he had been once an omnivorous reader, for he was well versed in learning of various sorts. The Ptolemaic astronomical theories, Xenophon's Anabasis, Euclid's problems were topics intimate and dear to him. I remember one instance in particular which showed his knowledge and luck. It was his night "on the desk," while the city editor was taking a vacation. The reporter assigned to write up a famous mathematician's lecture on "The Theory of Functions" had failed to return to the office. At a late hour — after all hope of his return had fled — Fuzzy began to fabricate a report of the lecture. He audaciously concocted a resounding effusion and hurried it out to the linotypes. He thought no more about it until two days later the editor received a letter from the mathematical lecturer thanking and congratulating the paper for the intelligent and accurate manner in which the Leader had reported his address. It was on account of such marvellous luck and skill that seven months later Fuzzy became the Leader's Idea Man. He would do anything for a "good story." Profligate, reckless, unscrupulous, he never considered the means, but ever the end. He was a successful "yellow journalist" of the deepest dye. And as such he was recog- nized by West, who found in Fuzzy another keen-edged tool to use at his infamous craft of chiselling out morbid details upon which to build the framework of yellow newi. 2C 562 Arrr.xDix. stidext them is Some months after I'u/./.y took up his duties as Idea Man, he had occasion to display this talent for "yellow journalism" in a way char- acteristic of all his work. Basing his story on some unusual event, he had to fill a two-column space on the front page of every morning's paper. Not the slightest spark of news had appeared to kindle his explosive imagination on this particular night. Everything was dry politics. The clock ticked, the printers scurried more and more rapidly, the heavy iron "forms" banged louder and louder. Fuzzy sat down in the corner of the room. Two columns to fill with — what? His eyes stared a ghastly gray at the inkstand, which they did not sec. He gnawed his lower lip. At twenty minutes past the hour, the dull roar of the huge steel presses, grinding out the first feature section, began to throb through the walls. Fuzzy twitched. His greenish eyes swept from ceiling to wall — to floor — to paper — ah, there ! He paused a moment, then eagerly examined a despatch from a country correspondent : " Jonesboro — William Jenkins, prominent Tutt County farmer, killed yesterday by kick from his old mule, while ploughing in field, near town." A clumsy account of details followed. Fuzzy began to write furiously. He was there when I left the oflice. The titanic presses devouring bundles of paper, screaming from below, in muilled groans for "more copy I" ; Fuzzy scribbled speedily over a farmer's death notice. All the way home I wondered what possible interest he could see in that despatch. The next morning I looked to see Fuzz3''s space occupied by an account of some political convention. I was disappointed. His space was filled by his own story. It was his — all his ; no one else could have done it. His headline read : — THE OLD FLAME REKINDLED! Prominent Tutt County Farmer Killed While Ploughing With Former Fire Horse — Animal Ran Wild On Hearing Distant Alarm Bell Below that he had treated the death as a minor incident, despite the fact — perhaps — that he has mercilessly doubled the grief of some bereaved family; but — what of it? — he had "scooped 'em on a good story." For the article Fiozzy received a personal letter EXPOSITION 563 from Mr. West, with a check for twenty-five dollars for "the corre- spondent who knows how to nose out news when he smells it." Every detail of how the old blood in the horse had called him back to the strenuous life was depicted in such a graphic style as to bring every false fact home to the reader's heart. Several nights after this episode occurred, Fuzzy staggered into the office. He was drunk, disgustingly drunk. "Demon Rum" — as he jokingly called it — had him again. He wouldn't stay at his desk that night. And the next morning his chair was empty and his little two-column space was profaned by a pagan hand. Even now, perhaps, a despondent managing editor and a discouraged circulation manager are halfway hoping for Fuzzy's return. But the little obituary notice, brief as it is, will tell an old, old story to the friends who had warned him long ago that some night he would be unable to survive the tremens. A martyr to the nervous strain of Yellow Journalism, Fuzzy has faked his last story. And when yesterday I read the unceremonious announcement of his death, I could not help thinking what a story he could have written about his own obituary notice. THE COLLEGE SPRINGTIME : A "NOW" Now the moment we wake in the morning, though we be John Sluggards all, we feel no other desire than to leap up, seeing our tennis- racquet or a baseball, or through the window a strip of gold-blue sky or a patch of leaves, and feeling the vicinity of books and walls an oppression. Now we hasten to get outdoors, and are impatient of the things necessary and unnecessary that restrain us, objecting on new grounds to the rigor of the early bath, and to fresh linen, and indifferent even to breakfasting upon fruit and the news. Now the day is not too long, nor the morning too fresh, nor the noon too hot, nor the evening too languorous, and we think the man who says merely "Fine Weather" a very fool for doing it no greater justice. Now we feel less like a student than anything else in the world, and more like a young animal, especially in those moments when we consider going barefoot upon the turf. Now we wish to do a score of things at once, and end by doing the best of all, which is nothing. Now a bookstrap is a sore abomination, and the sluggish river of stu- dents that periodically carries us down to classes a torturing stream, though it be full of back-slapping friends ; and now it is nettling to see that current of youth vitiated at entrance to the campus by even 564 APPEXDIX. STUDENT THEMES a thread of bespectacled instructors. Now ivy-covered halls look colli and dark, and their air, as the sun strikes into it, misty, and as you breathe it, unwholesome. But now everything outside llushes with the same Hfc that is in our veins, and warms quickly into activity. Now the engineer's existence, as with surveyor's tai)c he paces the sunny sward beneath literary windows, seems blithe and vigorous. Now between classes you know not what to do and so do nothing but wander, like the argosy clouds above, for all desk occupations are beyond considera- tion. Now the notes from the cavernous music school slip out un- melodiously, as so much of the lugubrious poured upon a world brim- ming with the song of birds. Now the chorus of the physical direc- tor's proteges comes softened from afar. Now the courts are a long vista of scurrying figures and of white spheres flashing over white nets, and the athletes trot past them in squads to the open field, where is the crack of the struck ball and the slow glint of the faUing discus. Now in buildings the entries and halls seem echoingly wooden and dusty ; and the lecturer's voice somnolent ; and our attention wan- ders ; and the question in oral qu'3 comes like lightning out of a cloud at your heart ; and notebooks are as mournful as their black covers, and a pen as hea\'y as the burden of Atlas. Now we all pity the teacher for seeming to take a real interest in his subject ; and we feel as angry in seeing others labor as if a spoken reproach were addressed to ourselves. Now the haunts of the studious are beautiful only at night, with the play of the sparkling arc lights among the fairy green. Now the student thinks with dread of the summer and the hot streets or laborious fields ; and prefers to let his mind wander over the diversions that crowd the college May. Now his steps are drawn as if magnetically to the scene of ball practice. Now the empty bleachers become black in the space of thirty minutes, and mutter thunder for an hour, and disintegrate again. Now the lower classmen, in fiend- ishly designed regimentals, seek out the weather forecasts in hope, and blaspheme among themselves ; but as their gray columns wind over the southern lawns, or come, in long lines, to a glittering present before the Armory as the band plays, the spectator forgets their obvious discomfort. Now the constant interest in sports is broken by ebullitions of political activity, and at the heads of the campus walks gather lobbying groups. Now the dances are over, and social evenings in curtained parlors or on shining waxed floors until midnight seem as distasteful as they were onc^ glamorous ; but the swish of a light skirt on the steps or EXPOSITION 565 the sight of it across the green campus is as irresistible as ever. Now we are amazed on opening our purses to find them full of confectionery rebate checks and nothing else ; and stiU we cannot curb our tastes for ever-new neckwear. Now in the early evening the streets are full of ball-playing men ; now in the after-dinner dusk the fraternity porches are massed solidly and banjos and mandolins are in requisi- tion, and the swings are hung from chains that they may bear the weight of nine men at once. Now songs that contain allusions to the much adjectivized moon are shrilled or bawled everywhere. Now fellows with automobiles are most popular, and appear surrounded by flocks, while those without such friends go strolling with a camera. Now on Sunday afternoons the streets about the University are parading avenues, and the south campus is more and more variegated, and the cemetery stones see wonderful sights. Now the smart- stepping darkies who bear pressed clothes, and the urchins who sell Posts, and the wandering Jews who buy garments multiply and become ubiquitous. Now seniors at times remember, and a shade passes over their brows as they glance slowly at the time-old sights ; and their hands clench, and their step quickens as they seem to catch the music of conflict and the call to arms from the world upon which they are impinging. Now the atmosphere of the college, just fitting about the freshman, gay upon the sophomore, and intoxicating in the breast of the junior, is passing from them. Yet to senior and all alike, the world and the fulness thereof is brightness. Now — Now — Now — it is spring ! THE FEAR OF PEW Why is it that I dread and hate David Pew ? The very name is ghastly. Wickedness, craftiness, bloodiness, power, and the devil himself seem bound up in it. I cannot think of him without a shud- der and whenever I recall his "vice-hke grip" and the "tap-tap-tap- ping of his stick," the blood rushes in Httle whirls through my breast. Stevenson doubles the horridness and supernaturalncss of Pew by making him blind. Blindness itself carries a tragic, fearsome at- mosphere with it. The blind are both pitied and held in awe, because we imagine that they live in a world different from ours, a world of black, heavy shadows and dark, whirling winds, and that they are, to some extent, of this world of phantoms. It is uncanny to see a blind man do a seeing man's work and ghostlike when he hears 566 ArriM)i.\. ^n i)i:.\T Tin:M/is sounil to which \vc arc deaf. To know thai when a blind man touches us a stream of information, which seems out of all [)roi)ortion. rushes up to his brain, to know that he marks every tremor and inflection of our tones is to have for him a respect tinged with fear. But invest a hateful villain with these unusual powers, as Stevenson has invested David Pew with them, and we have an infernal si)irit whose very image makes the feverish sweat burst out at the temples. USE OF DI.\LOGUE IN "THE YOUNG MAN WITH THE CRE.UI TARTS" Ste\^n'SON' makes much use of dialogue in almost all of his stories. In "The Young Man with the Cream Tarts'' he lives up in every way to his established custom. There is much conversation, but it is all pertinent, all useful. He does not bring in conversation because he prefers that method of writing, or because he feels that the story needs some conversation somewhere, but because it is natural. None of the dialogue — a bold statement to make concerning such a long story — is superfluous or irrelevant. He makes the dialogue between Mr. Malthius and Colonel Geraldine the medium through which the methods of the Suicide Club are explained. The Young Man with the Cream Tarts tells the story of his own financial excesses in a few natural words, which give a very much better sense of reahsm to the story than if the facts were simply written down by the author. Almost the entire development of the plot rests in the dialogue, yet the plot moves quickly and without hesitation. It is hard to say whether Stevenson's dialogue is natural in the sense that it is the dialogue of real flcsh-and-blood people. To me there is that same inherent beauty and nobility of style in Stevenson that there is in Scott, a beauty and nobility which cannot alike be given to Prince Florizcl and the President of the Suicide Club. With- out a question the conversation of the Prince is entirely in character. The sentences are noble and contain that certain sense of quiet royally and power which it is so difficult to command. Prince Florizel's character is told completely by his dialogue. We know, admire, love, and respect him immediately. But the dialogue of Mr. Malthius and the President — is it not a bit too fine, too noble, too carefully conceived ? Whatever may be the effect of these baser characters, it is entirely due to Stevenson's wonderful descriptions (how skilful they are !) rather than to their conversations. Little of the character is unfolded in the style and structure, though, of course, much in the literal mean- EXPOSITION 567 ing of the sentence. However, I still maintain that we remember the President not from any especial points in his conversation, but because of "his mouth, which embraced a large cigar, which he constantly kept screwing round and round and from side to side," and because of many like pictorial descriptions. It is so with Mr. Malthius, and so on down the list, with the exception of the Prince. Yet I would rather have the story as it is than lose any of these superb sentences to gain what after all would prove but a trifling benefit. JOHN MASEFIELD During the past dozen years John Masefield has been supple- menting an earlier career in maritime vagabondia by an intensely busy and varied literary life. He has written review upon review, edited volume upon volume ; has gone back with characteristic zest to live in sixteenth and seventeenth century England, that land of salt sea gods and rich discoveries ; has turned out dashing prose tales of the sea ; has written epigrammatically upon Shakespeare ; and has made four books of poetry. Always he has written too swiftly. Like his poetic contemporaries he has composed with a silly rapidity that has not been gauged "for all time," and strikes you best at its first reading. He rarely is eminently quotable ; he has attended less to the single line or to the single stanza than to the breathing spirit, the force and motion and necessity of the theme as a whole. But for all that he emerges from his activity the most suc- cessful, as the North American Review would have it, of all English poets since Stephen Phillips in his prime. It is to be feared that a great proportion of this success has to be inferred from the popular exclamations over the least unobjectionable traits in Masefield's poetry. Thirteen years ago Stopford A. Brooke wrote this : — "What we want for the sake of a noble literature, and especially for the sake of a lasting school of poetry, is a great social conception, carrying with it strong and enduring emotions, appealing to the uni- versal heart of man and Avoman." And the fact is inescapable that to-day, when social needs are re- ceiving warmer attention than in any previous period of civiHzation, we are seeing the best poetry brought close to common life, to the common individual. There is no way out of understanding that a new note of mysticism is hghting up our philosophy and our litera- ture — a mysticism that seeks to make its wonted leap away from 568 APPFSDIX. STUDENT THEMES reason and experiment, and establish a socialistic, rapt communion hctwifn eavh man and all his fellow-men. It is true that poetry has been relieved of its shrinking, subjective, aesthetic character, and is no longer of mere back-water beauty. And it is Masciield himself who has done much to render English poetic language bold and modern and free from false dignity or languorous case. So far Mr. Brooke's idea has been borne out. But Mr. Brooke was pleading for none of the "red meat," none of the "'rolling in the mud," none of the unbalanced frenzy that Mr. Mascfield in his notorious long narrative poems has seemed to deem essential to this social conception. lie did not propose that the public should hail with awe such a declaration of poetic duty as this : — Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth, The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth ; — Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth I Theirs be the music, the color, the glory, the gold ; Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould. Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold — Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told. Amen. Or such a defence of sottishness as this : — 1 heard a drunken fiddler, in Billy Lee's saloon, I brooked an empty belly with thinking of the tune : I swung the doors disgusted as drunkards rose to dance, And now 1 know the music was life and life's romance. Or such a low-browed pugilist reminiscence as this : — Time I There w-as Bill as grim as death, He rushed, I clinched, to get more breath, And breath I got, though Billy bats Some stinging short-arms in my slats. And when we broke, as I foresaw, He swung his right in for the jaw. I stopped it on my shoulder bone, And at the shock I heard Bill groan — A little groan or moan or grunt As though I'd hit his wind a bunt. EXPOSITION 569 We cannot follow the poet here, where the calmness and the bal- ance of a great philosophy are wanting. Masefield has spoken too often of "red blood," has appealed too often to the primitive, has cautioned us too often not to forget that we are animals. If this were all that he had done, it would be a simple matter to class him with the decadents. But this is not his representative work. He has done better. Mr. Masefield is important, probably the most important of living English poets, because of the new beauty that he feels. Throughout the nineteenth century, beauty in poetry meant something over- refined, something seeking retreat, something too finely tinted for the strong sunlight, something held at arm's length upon an appro- priate background. Masefield's beauty is of a different order. It leaps up at him and envelops him ; it bears down on him and intoxicates him ; it is ever present and tangible. It is an exulta- tion he is never without feeling. True, it has little of the spiritual in it, is oftenest physical; in his description he reports rather than interprets. But he is the prophet and not the Jehovah of this beauty. The beauty of the sea holds most for our poet. The waves, ships at anchor and ships full-sailed, sailors rude and sailors tender, every sentiment known upon the waters — all these he worships unre- servedly. "The ships," he says, "made me." In one of his prose tales he reveals this fascination in a peculiarly penetrating fashion. "The ship was like a thing carved out of pearl. The sailors, as they lay sleeping in the shadows, were Hke august things of bronze. And the skies seemed so near me, I felt as though we were sailing under a roof of dim branches that bore the moon and the stars like shining fruits. Gradually, however, the peace in my heart gave way to an eating melancholy, and I felt a sadness, such as has come to me but twice in my life. With the sadness there came a horror of the water and the skies, till my presence in that ship, under the ghastly corpse-light of the moon, among that sea, was a terror to me past power of words to tell. I went to the ship's rail, and shut my eyes for a moment, and then opened them to look down at the water rushing past. I had shut my eyes upon the sea, but when I opened them I looked upon the forms of the sea spirits. The water was indeed there, hurrying aft as the ship cut through ; but in -the bright foam far about the ship I saw multitudes of beautiful, inviting faces that had an eagerness and a swiftness in them unlike the speed or 570 APrrxPfx. stcdext tiif.mes thf intensity of human beings. I remember that I had never seen anything of such i>assit)nate beauty as those faces, and as I looked at them my melancholy fell away like a rag." Running water sounils always musically in his ears : - Spanish waters, Spanish waters, you are ringing in my ears, Like a slow sweet piece of music from the gray forgotten years; Telling tales, and beating tunes, and bringing weary thoughts to me Of tho sandy beach at Muertos, where I would that I could be. There is the beauty of leaping vigor, of restless enthusiasm, in his best and most characteristic lines. They run on swiftly and nimbly, carrj'ing us on by the mere force of their spirit. The man himself loves motion and abandonment : — It is good to be out on the road, and going one knows not where, f Toing through meadow and village, one knows not whither nor why ; Through the gray light drift of the dust, in the keen cool rush of the air. Under the llying white clouds, and the broad blue lift of the sky ; And to halt at the chattering brook, in the tall green fern at the brink WTiere the harebell grows, and the gorse, and the fox-gloves purple and white ; WTiere the shy-eyed delicate deer troop down to the pools to drink, When the stars are mellow and large at the coming on of the night. O I to feel the warmth of the rain, and the homely smell of the earth, Is a tune for the blood to jig to, a joy past power of words ; And the blessed green comely meadows seem all aripple with mirth At the lilt of the shifting feet, and the dear wild cry of the birds. He slashes his way through such a passage as that matchless de- scription of the rounding of Cape Horn in "Dauber," delighting in the rush of the seas, dipping his head in the stormy beauty of it all. His best work has been done in that description ; especially in the following stanza : — EXPOSITION 571 All through the windless night the clipper rolled In a great swell with oily gradual heaves Which rolled her down until her time-bells tolled Clang, and the weltering water moaned like beeves. The thundering rattle of slatting shook the sheaves, Startles of water made the swing ports gush. The sea was moaning and sighing and saying "Hush !" This could well be a touchstone of poetry along with the King's soliloquy in Henry IV, part II. Masefield knows no restraint ; holds no power in reserve ; writes always at white heat. For this reason — for his haste and his diffuse- ness — he cannot for the present be called better than a minor poet. Only when his art is less headlong ; only when that high strung, luxuriant sympathy for common humanity is less maudlin and more universal in the appeal of its philosophy ; only then will Masefield be more than a passing flame. MR. ROOSEVELT IN PALESTINE When Mr. Roosevelt popularized the phrase, "the psychological moment," it became at once evident that he, above all others, real- ized the apt significance of the expression. Mr. Roosevelt's psycho- logical moments have been many. He seems to appear or disappear, invent, discover, create, at times and places, in manner and degree, anything he wishes which will cause him to occupy a prominent place on the public horizon. Life has never been for him a humdrum exist- ence. He makes it spicy, attractive, of tremendous interest and importance both to himself and to those that watch him. Out in Palestine natives still remember him as an unusual speci- men of boyhood. He was too frail to accompany his father and mother through the country by carriage. He was not too frail, however, as soon as their respective backs were turned upon his safe, sheltered, and refined housing with a professor's family in Beirut to appropriate the native cook's red goatskin slippers and an obsti- nate little donkey and ride madly from morning until night over the sands of the long stretch of beach. He conquered the donkey and proved his ability to ride in Palestine. He managed to interest him- self in everything he saw and left the mark of his personality on tea- party and street fight alike. There are those who still remember his stopping things just that he might see how to start them up again. 572 irrr.xnrx. stldext themes The iH>lter ;U his wheel, the spinner at the loom, the weaver of the carpet, the teller of the talc in the coffee-house — none escaped. Only after the jar was shaped, the bit of silk woven, the pattern in the carpet made clear, and the Arab story that had interested him because of the laugh it had created had been translated, was he content. This fillinji of his life with specific knowledge of things as they are has helped him to a dearer interpretation of possibilities, to attach signiticance to trivial details, to see everything and every act with an appraising eye. His following a trail to find at the end an undis- covered river is only another example of his boyhood's ambition to know the why of everything, that he might taste the joy of the con- queror — and that the world might taste it with him. OUR MILITARY UNPREPAREDNESS If the Mexican situation has done nothing more, it has. at least, shown our militar>' weakness and opened our eyes to the necessity of increasing our military forces. There is little probability that this Mexican fracas will develop into a great war, but nevertheless military commanders are in a quandary as to what they would do if war should be declared. They have under their command only 18,000 trained United States army men. As at least 250,000 volunteers would be needed in any struggle large enough to be called a war, we can to some extent re- alize the great problem of drilling these men in the simple military movements in a short space of lime. Undrilled men arc almost worth- less in a battle field. In substance, we do not have a sufficient stand- ing army to defend ourselves or uphold the dignity and honor of the United States. Increasing the state militia or National Guards would alleviate conditions. \s long as there are separate nations, so long will there be need of force, need of armies to enforce peace. David Starr Jordan, in advocating disarmament, has made the assumption that the spirit of struggle and warfare has disappeared in this twentieth century. .\lthough tempered by the study of the humanistic and sociological sides of life, this spirit of war is yet burning in the breasts of men to-day. Therefore, to reiterate, it is our duty as one of the foremost nations of the world to represent a bulwark of military strength to enforce peace, especially on this side of the Atlantic. EXPOSITION THE UNDERWOOD TARIFF BILL 573 The passage of the Underwood tariff marks the beginning of a new freedom in trade and industry. If it be the first step in a continuous policy that Vv-ill ultimately unfetter, our economic processes, the year 1913 will rank in our history as 1846 ranks in the history of England. In that year began the series of tarifif reductions which finally made England a free-trade country and gave it its lead in the world's com- merce. In politics and economics this bill is perhaps the greatest change we have made, and the quiet with which it is accepted, when compared with the way such fundamental changes are met in Europe, is good evidence of the inherent political ability of the American people. The ability to change politics not only peaceably but with confidence is one of the great tests of a nation's stability. OF THE IMPORTANCE ATTACHED TO ATHLETIC SPORTS Among the deplorable failings of the present day, none is more astonishing than the rapidly increasing tendency to set hopelessly false values upon the institutions and customs peculiar to the period. The absurd importance attached to athletic sports forms one of the most striking instances of this modern hallucination. The original object of athletic sports, and the only excuse for their existence to-day, is found in the undoubted necessity for supplement- ing mental exertion with physical exercise. At the present time, however, the intellect seems to be generally subordinated to physical strength. There is an alarmingly large number of men who conde- scend to recognize intellect only as a useful assistant in bodily recrea- tion — as a means of devising clever plays in foot-ball and base-ball, or as a profitable adjunct to muscular proficiency in the running of races. The athlete, again, is the recipient of a lamentable amount of popu- lar favor. The individuals of a college athletic team are known by ';ight to almost every member of the undergraduate body. Yet how many of the most brilliant scholars in the institution are simi- larly recognized ? The result is that athletic distinction has become infinitely more highly prized than scholastic distinction — a state of afTairs that would be laughable were it not so woefully serious. 574 ArrixD/w sTcnr.xT themes \';ist sums of monov thai might do inlinitc good arc annually stjuan- dorod on "spectacular sport" — a phrase, by the way, in its essence amusingly paradoxical. Rome in her most decadent days cannot have lavished more on trivial amusement than is now spent on the unedifying exhibitions daily thronged by the patrons of so-called sport. Intellectual refinement is everywhere neglected, and sport cultivated with idolatrous reverence. By the average citizen of the United Stales, the name Wagner is instantly associated with the person of a popular baseball player. Another man, of widely ditTer- ent fame, may have borne the name before, but the thoughts of the' modern concern themselves with the field of sport alone. Such is the state of affairs to-day; very similar was it at Rome fifteen centuries ago. The fall of Rome is a matter of history. — What will be the result here ? II. ARGUMENT BRIEF Should the Nation allow San Francisco to use the Hetch-Hetchy Valley as a Municipal Reservoir ? In'troduction I. The question as to whether San Francisco should be allowed to utilize the Hetch-Hetchy valley as a reservoir has aroused the interest of the whole nation. II. The following explanation will facilitate the intelligent under- standing of the facts and the developments to date : — A. The area of the Hetch-Hetchy valley is five hundred square miles, or one-half that of the Yosemite National Park which embraces it. 1. The Yosemite National Park was established under an act of 1890 intended to preserve and retain the "natural curiosities and wonders of the park in their natural conditions." 2. San Francisco gained, under an act of 1 901, which allows grants of revocable rights of way "which are not in- compatible with public interest," a revocable permit to utilize the Hetch-Hetchy. ARGUMENT 575 B. The following description of the National Park aims to pre- sent its particular features : — 1. The Hetch-Hetchy and the Yosemite valleys are both four thousand feet above the sea, occupy the same relative position on the flank of the Sierras, and have similar waterfalls, sculpture, and vegetation. 2. As the Merced passes from the Sierras through the Yosemite, so flows the Tuolomne River through canons of unsurpassed scenic beauty, and on through the Hetch-Hetchy. 3. The Hetch-Hetchy lies at a distance of eighteen miles from the Yosemite and is now easily accessible by trail and wagon-road from the Big Oak Flat Road at Sequoia. C. The official action to date as regards the flooding of the Hetch-Hetchy is as follows : — - 1. On February 15, 1901, an act of Congress authorized revocable permits to power plants, water-supply works, pole lines, conduits, etc., when not deemed "incompatible with the public interest." 2. On October 15, 1901, Mayor Phelan filed a request for reservoir rights in Yosemite Park under the above act. 3. On Janviary 20, 1903, Secretary Hitchcock of the Depart- ment of the Interior denied the petition on the ground that the grant would be incompatible with the public interest. 4. On a rehearing of the petition, December 22, 1903, it was again rejected by Secretary Hitchcock. . 5. An act enabling the Secretary of the Interior to declare that the grant was compatible with the public interest was introduced into Congress at this juncture, but received no standing. 6. On October 28, 1905, the Assistant Attorney-General of the United States rendered an opinion to the President that the Secretary of the Interior had full discretionary power to grant these rights under the act of February 15, 1901. This was in reply to the city's petiti6n to the President to interfere in its behalf. Mr. Hitch- cock stood firmly upon the ground that the grant 576 .irfi:.\D/.\. student themes woulil 1)0 inconipalihlo with the puhlir interest, and was supported by the Secretary of Commerce and Labor. Victor H. Metcalf, a Californian. 7. When Mr. Garlicld became Secretary of the Interior the city asked to have the case reopened. At Presi- dent Roosevelt's desire Secretary Garfield held a hearing in San Francisco on July 24, 1Q07. 8. On May 11, iqoS, Secretary (iarfield granted flowage rights to San Francisco in the Lake Eleanor basin and the Hctch-Hetchy, the latter to be used only after the former had been fully utilized and found insuflicient. 9. In December. 190S, San Francisco introduced a bill in Congress to authorize the Secretary of the Interior to exchange the remaining public lands in the Hetch- Hetchy valley, giving fee simple title for certain other private claims belonging to the city but lying in other parts of the park and in the adjoining Stan- islaus National Park. This would enable the city to proceed at once with the Hctch-Hetchy work, re- gardless of the restriction in the grant that Lake Eleanor must be used lirst. 10. In December, 1908. and in January, 1909, the House Com- mittee on Public Lands held hearings on the above bill but refused to report it to the House. 11. On February 10, 1910, Secretary of the Interior Ballinger ordered San Francisco to show cause why he should not eliminate the Hetch-Hetchy from the Garfield grant. This order was based on a report by the Director of the United States Geological Survey, made upon the order of Secretary' Ballinger after the latter had personally visited Hctch-Hetchy in August, 1909. The report of the Director was based upon the exam- ination by two engineers of the reclamation survey, who reported that Lake Eleanor was suflficient for the present and prospective needs of the city. This investigation had been ordered by Secretary Ballinger in response to a petition by the opponents of the Hetch-Hetchy scheme. 12. On May 25, 1910, the City appeared in Washington to show cause as directed. The case was heard by Secrc ARGUMENT 577 tary Ballinger and a board of army engineers appointed by the President at the request of Secretary BaUinger. The hearing adjourned to June i, 191 1, on which date the city and army engineers were to report on other available sources of supply for the city. 1$. In the spring of 191 1 agents of the city sounded mem- bers of Congress to see if the old land-trading bill of 1908 had a chance to pass at the special session of Congress then sitting. Discouraged in this, they applied to Secretary Ballinger for an extension of the date on which the report was to be returned from June I, 191 1, to June i, 191 2. An extension of six months was granted to December i, 191 1. The army engineers were then ready to report. 14. In November, 191 1, the city applied for another exten- sion of time, and it was granted till March i, 191 2. III. It is agreed that San Francisco needs a larger water supply. IV. The conflicting arguments in the case are as follows : — A. Those in favor of utilizing the Hetch-Hetchy as a reservoir believe 1. That the present water supply is impure. 2. That the Hetch-Hetchy is the cheapest and only avail- able source of supply. 3. That the hydro-electric power derived from it would relieve taxes now imposed for the lighting of streets and public buildings. 4. That the act of 1901, which allows grants of revocable rights of way "which are not incompatible with the pubHc interest" is meant to provide for such needs as that of San Francisco for a water supply. B. Those opposed to allowing San Francisco to utilize the Hetch-Hetchy valley believe 1. That the present supply is potable. 2. That there are other sources, as easily available for a supply as Hetch-Hetchy. 3. That it would materially injure the natural beauty of the valley. 4. That the act of 1901 was intended for the preservation of the natural curiosities and wonders in their natural condition. 578 A pp i:\nix. stidf.m themes $. That San Francisco has no legal or moral right to the use of a tract of land set aside for the benefit of the whole country. V. From these conllicling opinions it appears Ihat the points to be determined are : A . Is I he present supply unpotable ? B. Is the Hetch-Hetchy valley the only available source of water for San Francisco ? C. Would the natural beauty of the Iletch-Iiclchy be injured by its being converted into a lake ? D. Has San Francisco a legal or a moral right to utilize the Hetch-Hetchy as a reservoir ? BRIEF PROPER The Nation should not allow San Francisco to use the Hetch-Hetchy valley as a municipal reservoir, for 1. The present supply is potable, for A. It has been analyzed by many experts of the best repute and found pure. II. The Hetch-Hetchy valley is not the only source of water avail- able, for A. A study of the map of California makes it seem doulitful whether there is any other city in the world of the size of San Francisco which has so many available water sup- phes, for 1. San Francisco is situated near the confluence of the two great streams of the state, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. 2. Several large rivers (among them the Tuolomne), any one of which will furnish ample w-ater for the city, flow dov/n the Sierras west toward San Francisco. 3. North and south of San Francisco, along the coast, many streams waste their waters in the ocean. B. Eminent engineers indicate the existence of other sources, for I. C. E. Grunsky, former city engineer of San Francisco and sometimes referred to as the "father of the Hetch- Hetchy system," says: "In the case of San Francisco, there is no single source of supply so preeminently ARGUMENT 579 available that it could without question rule out otiiers from comparison." (See "Reports on Water Supplies of San Francisco," 1908, p. 15; House Committee Hearings, Jan. 21, 1909, p. 385.) 2. Professor C. D. Marx, a hydraulic expert for the city, has stated that " It can be readily shown that the drain- age area needed for a water supply furnishing two hun- dred million gallons per day can be had on a number of Sierra streams. . . . That the drainage areas of streams north of the Tuolomne give better promise of meeting these requirements cannot be denied. ... It cannot be said that the physical data now available are such as to admit of a reliable comparison of the relative values of the various sources of water supply for San Francisco from the Sierras." (See "Transactions of the Commonwealth Club," June, 1907.) 3. Marsden Manson, City Engineer of San Francisco, has stated that "when you consider the matter of money alone, there are available quite a number of sites and a number of sources, probably more than a dozen." 4. James D. Schuyler, hydraulic engineer of Los Angeles, says that there are " a number of other available sources of water supply for San Francisco." (House Com- mittee Hearings, January 20, 1908, p. 307.) 5. F. P. Stearns, Chief Engineer of the Metropohtan Water Board that supplies Boston and, with Mr. Schuyler, consulting engineer on the Panama Canal, says: "It is feasible to provide an ample supply of pure water for San Francisco from nearer sources [than the Hetch- Hetchy] by works which would be much more econom- ical, eflicient, and reliable. . . . They can be devel- oped to supply all the water required for the next forty years or more." (See Journal of the Association oj Engineering Societies, December, 1908, pp. 308, 311.) 6. Colonel W. H. Heuer, U. S. A. Engineer and Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Federated Water Committee of San Francisco, states that the present near-by sources "can be increased by additional dams and by raising some existing dams, so as to supply considerably more than a hundred million gallons per 580 APPENDIX. STIDENT TIIEMIi^ day, or more than enough to supply the wants of San Francisco during the next forty years, and at reason- able cost. . . . Engineers who made sur\'eys of Lake Eleanor and Hetch-Hetchy inform me tl.at there are other Sierra supplies that can he brought here at much less cost than the Hetch-Hetchy.'' (See San Francisco Merchants^ Association Kn'icu>, July, 1908.) C. There are a dozen sources of water supply available to San Francisco, for 1. The Stanislaus River offers many advantages as a source of supply, for a. It has a collecting basin "adequate in area, with pure waters." (Marsden IManson.) b. The river rises in high granite mountains, like the Tuolomne, and not in a national park. c. There is no danger of contamination from increasing tourist travel, for (a) There is no scenery comparable to that in the Hetch-Hetchy. d. There is a heavy rainfall and a watershed protected by the forest reserve. e. The pipe line to the city is shorter than to the Tuol- omne water supply. /. There is ample storage at Donald's Flat, Relief, and Kennedy reservoir sites. g. Dams are already constructed and more are to be con- structed by the Stanislaus Power Company to in- sure a uniform maximum flow of water. h. The p>ower company will sell ample power to pump water over the coast range practically at cost. i. The saving from having dams and power plants already built will offset the comparatively small cost in- volved in purchasing the full rights to water. j. The company has guaranteed water rights and a supply of water equal to all of the city's require- ments. 2. The Eel River offers many advantages as a source of supply, for a. It rises in an uninhabited mountain watershed in the forest reserve. ARGUMENT 581 I. Its water rights are guaranteed perfect. c. It has an average annual rainfall of fifty inches and a reservoir capacity, with a 150-foot dam, of seventy million gallons, or twice the capacity of Hetch- Hetchy. d. The distance of the distributing reservoirs is less than that of the Tuolomne. e. The gravity system follows the Cahfornia and North- western Railroad grade, thus saving excessive cost of transportation and heavy piping. /. The water could be taken through Berkeley and Oak- land, thus supplying all bay cities at the smallest expense, g. A. M. Hunt, an engineer famiUar with the water prob- lems of San Francisco, reports that this water supply is ample and can be brought to the city for one-half the expense of bringing in an equal amount from the Tuolomne system. The Feather River offers good opportunities, for o. It contains the Big Meadows reservoir site of about twenty thousand acres. h. At the outlet of the Meadows the topography is such that by the construction of a comparatively small dam a storage reservoir may be created which will be one of the largest artificial bodies of water in the world, having a capacity of over two hundred and eighty million gallons, or four times the greatest capacity of the Hetch-Hetchy. c. This water can be brought to San Francisco if neces- sary. . Pumping from the San Joaquin River affords some advan- tages as a source of supply, for a. When near-by sources are exhausted, the city can secure all the additional water she wants,^ free of cost, by pumping from the San Joaquin River, for (a) Its water can be filtered to any degree of purity. h. The cost of filtration would be more than offset by the saving in head-works, length of pipe-line, rights of way, power plants, etc. ;. There are i number of other available sources, viz. the 582 APPESDIX. STUDENT THEMES Sacramento River, Lake Tahoc, the Vuba River, the American River, the Mokelumne River, the Cosumnes River. Clear Lake, and the Bay Shore (iravels. III. The conversion of the Hetch-Hetchy valley into a lake would disfigure the natural beauty of the scene, for A. It is self-evident that to bury a great landscape garden is not the way to increase its beauty. B. The newly formed lake would be a dismal blot on the land- scape, like many another to be seen in the Sierras, for 1. It would be full only for a month or two in the spring. 2. WTien drained, the slimy sides of the basin and the slial- lower parts of the bottom would be exposed with all the gathered drift and waste, death and decay of the upper basin. IV. It is neither legally nor morally just for the nation to allow the city of San Francisco to flood the Hetch-Hetchy, for A. The act of 1890 creating the Yosemite National Park was a special act having for its object the preservation of the Hetch-Hetchy valley and other w-onders of the park in their natural condition, and none of its terms could have been repealed by the general law of 1901 authorizing the granting of rights of way, etc., by the Secretary of the Interior, unless that intention were expressly declared in the general act. B. No intention to repeal the special act of i8go is declared in the general act of 1901, for I. This is the opinion expressed by the Hon. H. E. Hitch- cock in a letter to the President (February 20, 1905) and confirmed by V. H. Metcalf, Secretary of Com- merce and Labor. C. It is entirely against the spirit in which the park was dedi- cated to flood and destroy a tract of ground which bids fair to rival the great Yosemite itself as a resort for tourists and campers, for 1. Immediately above the valley itself and extending to the very source of the Tuolomne River, which flows through the Hetch-Hetchy, is the most wonderful scenery in the park. 2. Five hundred square miles of the park drain directly into the proposed municipal system. ARGUMENT 583 3. Travel to all this region will be restricted if a municipal water system is allowed to store water which drains directly from it, for a. There is enormous danger of pollution, according to the statement of Horace McFarland, President of the American Civic Association, who has given care- ful consideration to the subject of sanitation of municipal water supplies. He says: "Not only in the reservoir itself would danger from pollution exist, but a greater danger would arise through the possible pollution of the watershed feeding the reservoir proposed, for (a) A single case of 'walking typhoid' on the borders of the lake proposed to be established as a reservoir could start an epidemic of typhoid fever in the city to be supposedly benefited, causing the loss of hundreds of innocent lives, for (i) As an example, the city of Reading, Penn- sylvania, has had eight hundred cases of typhoid fever within less than eight weeks through the pollution of a supposedly guarded water supply. (2) The epidemics at Plymouth, at Ithaca, and elsewhere are well known to have resulted from exactly the conditions which might be expected in respect to the city of San Francisco. (b) One case of 'walking typhoid,' again, affecting a camper or stroller, or ordinary visitor, who had acquired typhoid on his way into the park, could make the proposed water supply a source of desperate danger to the city supposed to be benefited. (c) Nothing is better established in the modern sani- tary science than that the watershed of any domestic water supply must be jealously guarded and kept free from human occupancy at all times if that water is to result in other than the dissemination of disease, and the bringing about of untimely death." 584 APPENDIX. STUDENT THEMES D. It is unreasonable to destroy a unique national treasure for the sjike of enabling the city of San Francisco to effect a saving in money, for I. The chief advantage of the Iletch-Hetchy plan is that it will enable the city to save the dilTcrencc between the cost and the market price of water power for light- ing its streets and public buildings and for operating, possibly, a municipal street railway, for a. Marsden Manson says {California Wakly, June 18, iqoq) : "It is the possibility of a power supply that makes this proposition preeminently attractive." Conclusion I. Since it is scientifically shown that the present source is potable, II. Since there are many other practicable sources of water-supply for San Francisco, III. Since the Hetch-Hctchy dam-lake would be only a rough imita- tion of a natural lake for a few of the spring months, an "open mountain sepulchre" during the rest of the year, and IV. Since it is legally questionable and morally unjust for the nation to give away a public treasure for the special economic profit of the city of San Francisco, Therefore : The nation should not allow the city of San Francisco to utilize the Hetch-Hetchy valley as a municipal reservoir. THE VALUE OF INTERCOLLEGIATE DEBATING A GENXRATiox ago educational institutions paid so little attention to debating that it was difficult, if not impossible, to find a university •ffering systematic courses in argumentation and debate. To-day most of our larger universities and many of the smaller colleges ofTer an opportunity for training of this kind. Yet of all the forms of public speaking which have been used for intercollegiate contests, the debate is the most recent in development. It was preceded by the declama- tion and the oration, both of which are still in vogue. Each of these three forms has a distinct purpose of its own. The declaimcr con- fines himself absolutely to the interpretation of the thought and expression of others. The orator interprets a composition of his own, a composition formal in nature and structure, and written for a particular time and place. The debate may be looked upon as a ARGUMENT 585 kind of oration in which the speaker must adjust his words to fit the immediate occasion and to refute the argument of an opponent. It is probably this extempore nature of debating that has made it so popular for intercollegiate contests. Yet, regardless of its popularity, there are many who doubt the value of debating. Some claim that the debate is too formal, too rigid in rule, too artificial in aim, loo unlike the contests in which the debater will find himself placed after graduation. Some doubt the value of the study given to the questions debated, on the ground that the propositions are often so vague and so cleverly phrased, that the time which should be spent on vital issues is wasted in quibbling over the meaning of terms. Others condemn the intercollegiate debate upon ethical grounds, arguing that the desire to win often tempts the debater to use dishonest methods, and that, at the best, the de- bater must often act the part of a hypocrite in supporting opinions in which he does not believe. But should not the department of public speaking in the university be provided with some adequate means of showing to the public what it can turn out in the way of finished public speakers ? The success of the debater depends upon the same elements which make for the success of all public speakers ; he must be able to reason logically and to express his thoughts orally in a clear, convincing, and persuasive manner. In order to do this, a careful analysis and an unprejudiced investigation of the subject are indispensable. Such habits of analy- sis, once formed, will be of inestimable value to the debater in later life. They contend also that the questions debated are usually great pubhc issues, and that the study of such questions prepares the stu- dent for the most intelligent citizenship. Those who believe that debating has a positive moral value defend their position by arguing that the debater is put upon his honor ; that he is taught self-control and respect for the opinions of others ; and that he does not act the part of the hypocrite by defending either side of a question, because of the fact that the public knows that this is only a necessary require- ment of the game. The secondary school succeeds in training the memories of students, but often fails to instill correct methods of thinking. It is to be greatly regretted that the opinions of most men are largely the result of per- sonal interests, popular opinion, or other forms of prejudice. One of the highest aims of debating is to cultivate in the student such an attitude of mind that he will base his opinions upon sound reasoning 586 APPESDIX. STUDENT THEMES rat hiT than upon desire or capriie. Successful argumentation depends upon systematic thinking, which in its turn is based upon a strict adherence to the rules of logic. The debater soon learns to analyze questions carefully and to hold only those opinions which he has reached logically. The success of the individual depends to a great extent upon his ability to pick the essential things from those which are not essential. On choosing a vocation there are many who have not the power to analyze properly their own ability and to select the, thing they are best fitted to do. The debater must examine his questions critically, he must learn to determine with precision just what the question involves, what is irrelevant and what essential. WTien he has once acquired this ability to analyze a situation, he carries it with him throughout his life. Debating, then, teaches the power of sound and independent thinking. The logical thinker is often placed in an awkward position if he cannot readily and fluently express his thoughts. Argumentation aims not only to produce logical methods of thinking, but also to train the student to express his thoughts orally in a straightforward and effective manner. He learns to adapt what he has to say to the immediate occasion and to a particular audience. He must not only convince but he must per- suade; he must move his hearers into action. All of this depends upon a mastery of the art of speaking, an art which when once learned by the debater, will ever remain a valuable asset. The educational value of the study of the question itself must not be overlooked. In making a thorough analysis of the propositions ordinarily used for intercollegiate debates, the student is preparing himself for useful citizenship. The questions used are usually public issues, problems which the student will be called upon to help solve in later life. A careful and consistent study of such public problems means simply that some day the debater will bring to the solution of these problems a well trained-mind and a knowledge sufficient to produce good results. The objection that the questions debated are not of the kind which interest the public might easily have been sustained a few years past, but to-day the cry of vague and unfair questions cannot be consist- ently raised. The Round Robin system of debating leagues elimi- nates all intentional unfairness in the phrasing of questions. What could be the object in trj-ing to phrase a proposition so as to favor one side or the other, when by the Round Robin method each uni- versity sends out both an affirmative and a negative team ? And as ARGUMENT 587 to the use of vague terms in the question, terms which might result in a quibble over their meaning, the debaters realize that to waste much time in this way means that less time will be left for the discussion of vital issues. They know that the use of any questionable methods only serves to antagonize both audience and judges. It must be admitted that the debater may have to argue for a cause in which he does not believe, but so far as the intellectual appeal is concerned, if a man has a thorough knowledge of the subject and if he is fair minded, he should be able to present the arguments of one side quite as well as those of the other. The lawyer must be willing to plead a case whether he is sure of the absolute truth of his position or not. There is some truth on both sides of nearly every question, and in the case of the lawyer at least, the value of discovering and presenting the truth of either side of a proposition cannot be over- estimated. It is only in the matter of persuasion that the questions of belief and morality assume any definite relation, and even from this standpoint there is nothing in debating that can really be considered immoral, for the public realizes that the speaker may be forced by circumstances to argue against his convictions. He is not practicing deception, but merely playing the game. Would it be consistent to argue that the villain in the tragedy is a bad man simply because he plays his part to perfection ? It is just as inconsistent to accuse the debater of hypocrisy when both he himself and the public know that he is merely playing his part. The debater wants the practice in sound thinking and effective presentation of his thought ; all that the public wants is a thorough discussion of both sides of a live ques- tion. Just as the football and baseball game represent the finished prod- uct of athletic training, so the intercollegiate debate represents the finished product of forensic training. Just as the athletic contest arouses enthusiasm for manly sports and inspires loyalty both in the athlete and in the onlooker, so the intercollegiate debate arouses a general interest in debating and other forms of public speaking, and at the same time instills a deeper loyalty into the hearts both of the debaters and of those who hear the debate. Both the athlete and the debater may be tempted to win by unfair methods, but both realize that they have at stake not only their own honor but also the honor of the institution which they represent. In the same way that the gridiron star learns to accept an occasional blow which he feels he has not deserved, and yet maintains his sportsmanlike bear- 588 APrr.XDix. stvdrnt them lis inp, so the (Ichatrr learns and practices that, admirable self-control which makes the intercollegiate debate a fair contest between men. The football game may be won or lost in a few seconds of keen play- ing, and in the same manner the debater may win or lose by the skill- ful turning of a single argument. So far they arc alike, the athletic contest and the debate; where do they difTer? Let us answ^er that question and conclude our discussion with the words of George P. Baker, for many years professor of argumentation at Harvard, and the first man to develop systematic courses in argumentation and debate. Professor Baker says: "The great superiority of debating lies in the fact that it adds to many of the elements of the present absorbing interest in athletics those educational values which con- tribute directly to the highest type of citizenship." III. DESCRIPTION PITTSBURGH BY NIGHT It was on a balmy evening in April that we climbed a steep hill in the outskirts of Pittsburgh to view the lights of the city. The moon hung low, red-faced, and dull through the all-enveloping veil of smoke. Down below-, away in all directions, were the lights, — steady yellow lights, winking green and red ones, millions of them. They pierced the dark surface of the stately Alleghany as it wove its course among them. Brightly illumined steamers, gliding up and down the river, shattered these placid reflections, leaving golden or parti-colored ripples in their wake. Now and then a dark tug swept the valley with its great search-light or shot its white shaft into the smoky starless sky, while from over the hills to the south, where the great blast furnaces stood, a lurid light leapt quivering o\'er the horizon and cast a livid glow over all the sky. The flame rose high for a moment, then died quickly away, leaving murky darkness save for the smoldering embers low in the south. Soon it rose again, more ominous than before, till it seemed to merge all in a vast glowing crucible of light. THE SONG OF THE VACUUM-CLEANER The song of the river is peaceful and soothing; the song of the bird is cheering and inspiring ; but the song of the vacuum-cleaner can scarcely be described in such specific terms. House-cleaning DESCRIPTION 589 time ! What visions of rugs strewing the dusty grass ; furniture promiscuously littering the front porch, the back porch, and, indeed, the entire yard ; women scuttling back and forth, frantically waving dusters and mops in all directions ; and, above all these sounds, the steady drone of the untiring vacuum-cleaner buzzing in the ear like a determined monster bee, bent on subordinating all other sounds in nature to its own disturbance. It groans, as if discouraged at the amount of work before it, yet labors on, stopping now and again with an asthmatic wheeze to get its breath, and then once more tak- ing up its persistent buzzing. There is a brief interval of silence while it is being moved from one room to another. But just as the grate- ful hush begins to be noticed, the demon of cleanliness starts again on his old theme — buzz, buzz, groan, wheeze ; buzz, buzz, groan, wheeze. And so the monotonous song drones on through the day until the last bit of work is done. Then the machine abruptly emits a final wheeze, buzzes an instant, and stops. THE DESERT Stretching to the east of Calcha, the heaped sands of the desert gleam red in the sun. The trail, a faint mark in the sand, crawls along painfully, here and there turning aside to avoid a cactus and finally disappearing among the sand wastes, away, away in the dis- tance. At the base of the rounded hills, so far away that they seem a part of the sky, there floats a cloud of white dust slowly moving. Here and there the dust devils dance their mystic dance to the music of the drifting sand. To the right a clump of yuccas flanked by grease- wood and mesquit, flaunt their spikes of white bells. Wonderful colors, from deep purple to lilac and gold, as the light shines on the sands, gleam and disappear and gleam again. And always the sun shines burning out of an empty sky. SUMMER The country road lay black and muddy before me, but beyond the bordering hedge the fields stretched away inviting in their greenness. Somehow it reminded me of the similar situation in "Pilgrim's Prog- ress." The pilgrims had grown weary of the narrow way, and yield- ing to temptation they strayed into the forbidden meadows, the mead- ows where the grass lay soft beneath their feet. There appeared, however, to be no giant awaiting me beyond the hedge ; so forgetting 50O APPENDIX. STUDENT THEMES the terrible fate of the pilgrims. 1 jumped the thorny shrubs. But when I jumped 1 left ambit ion behind. The warm sunlight cast a ragged shadow where the hedge stretehed away, followed by its mottled border of shade. The soft greenness of the grass enticed me. And so heaving a sigh of contentment, I lay down and looked dreamily away to where the blue of the sky dipped to meet the dis- tant horizon. The untainted freshness of the meadow swept back, the gentle slope soft in its sun-basked color. Where the slope rose to touch the sky, a little white farm-house peeped from among the encircling evergreens. A big red barn rose lazily against the sky, and the windmill, delicate and white in the distance, blended hazily with the soft blue background. jNIy eyes closed wearily, and as I sank into slumber I still saw, or dreamt I saw, the meadow and the sky. IN A CHURCH The afternoon sunlight shone golden through the stained richness of the high-paned church windows. The cheerful light only made the great vaulted ceiling of the deserted church seem more vast and coldly dark. In the dim overhead spaces shadowy rows of carved dragon heads glared down and showed their teeth ir. gloomy helplessness. Great leaded candelabra hung heavily from the supporting chains that disappeared in the shadows above. The polished backs of the pews, the carved aisle posts, as they marched in solemn state up to the wide pulpit, basked in the golden brown of the mellowed light. The heavy grandeur of the pulpit blended with the massiveness of its background of carved oak panelling. The pastor's chair reared the scrollwork of its back in twisted contrast to the solemn simplicity of its surroundings. The choir loft was dark beneath the sombre brown of the high reaching organ pipes. Slowly the afternoon sunlight faded and the shadows crept down from the vaulted darkness above. The ranks of pews grew dim and indistinct till only the rich color of the high arched windows mirrored the last faint rays of day. MADEMOISELLE FIFI Hastily scanning all the faces, dear old Mrs. Rogers glanced about the cozy parlor. WTien she finally saw Mademoiselle Fifi, as the men called her, her eyes lit w-ith interest, and she leaned forward the more closely to examine the girl. Fifi's eyes held her attention : a hazel green they seemed (though some insisted that they were black), with DESCRIPTION 591 ^neer, dancing lights ; large, but shallow withal, their beauty strangely marred by the curiously scant lashes, and eyebrows of a light brown color. Her eyes narrowed — maliciously, Mrs. Rogers thought — as she smilingly greeted another girl, then slowly dilated as she turned again to her companion and listened gravely to his inane chatter. Her nose was small and flippantly tilted. Her skin, just tinged with pink, was marvellously clear and smooth, save where a few, faint lines of discontent crossed the low, broad forehead. Her hair was auburn, silken rather than heavy, and fell loosely about her tiny ears. "But," thought Mrs. Rogers, "the girl's mouth will show her real character." The lips were thin and tightly compressed, and of a vivid scarlet. Danger and malice lurked at the corners and in the sharp chin. "A coquette," Mrs. Rogers said to herself, and sighed. MY GRANDFATHER My grandfather, as I knew him, was a retired doctor more than sixty years old. He was a tall, strong man, wearing a full beard grizzled to an indifferent color, the lighter parts having a yellowish tinge. His hair in earlier years had been sandy, but now was almost entirely white, and worn "roached" straight back from the forehead. This " roach," combined with a prominent aquiline nose and keen gray eyes, gave him a rather bold and determined appearance. He always wore a white vest, a habit which, it seemed to me, was unfortunate, since the garment usually bore evidence to his fondness for tobacco. Over this vest, in winter, he wore an ample Prince Albert coat, while a carefully brushed silk hat added dignity to his tall straight figure. In summer this hat was replaced by a brown tall-crowned straw, while the Prince Albert coat gave way to a long black alpaca, which rested on his shoulders, but seldom anywhere else. He always car- ried a cane. On week days it was a well-worn brown stick of hickory, but on Sundays, election days, and in honor of Masonic banquets, he swung an ebony staff curiously dotted its entire length with ivory. With the possible exception of his pipe, there was nothing among his personal possessions more sacred to him than this cane. This pipe, however, so far as I am able to recollect, had no peculiarly valuable quality, unless strength be counted such ; in that case it was cer- tainly beyond price. My impressions of my grandfather as a man consist, as one's im- pressions of several years' standing usually do, of the memory of dis- ^93 APPENDIX. STUDENT TIIEMEi> connccttHl occasions. He htid, as I said, discontinued the practice of mciiicinc because of his age; but people occasionally came for him. 1 rtimMnbor once, as he sat under the great cottonwood behind the house, that a man came to ask him to visit a sick person. ".\re you able to pay for my services ?" the doctor asked. "Yes, sir." the man answered a little testily. "Then you can secure the attention of any practicing physician in the city. You had better see Dr. Mcl-'arland." was my grand- father's reply. Had the man been without means, as was often the case with those who came to him, he would have given his services gladly. Under this cottonwood he could usually be found, when the weather permitted. After his morning trip down town, and again after his short after-dinner nap. he would tilt his chair back against the huge rough trunk, light his pipe, and sit for hours. Here he read his news- papers and his letters, and entertained his friends. Here, too, in the long summer evenings, he would move his cane-bottomed chair out from under the rustling canopy and gaze at the stars. An old bachelor friend who lived not far away used to come, sometimes, to talk of the stars with him. It was a great treat for me when, in the twilight, old Robert Quincy would come with his wonderful old star maps under his arm, and sit with my grandfather amid a thin blue cloud of tobacco smoke. These old maps had all the constellations curiously pictured with beings, very queer, but very real to me. Unable, as I was then, to understand much of their scientific discus- sions. I learned from them only the ancient mythical ideas of the stellar population. Even yet, when I think of these two old while- haired men, of neither of whom I ever heard a word of unfriendly criticism, they seem connected, in some way, with that mysterious world of which I heard them talk so much. Sometimes as he sat looking into the southern sky, he seemed to read in it the stories he told me of his life in the south before the Civil War ; of his troubles, as the only outspoken Union man among his Texan neighbors; of the Sfiuads of Union men that he smuggled through the rebel lines ; of his escapes from the nooses these neighbors prepared for him ; and of his ultimate flight, for his family's sake, to the north. Once, when I had followed him down to the orchard for apples, he put his hand on my head, as was his custom, and told me that in future years, when he was no more, I would remember that very day in the orchard, and perhaps other incidents connected with him, NARRATIVE 593 " and," he continued, "I hope that you will ; but remember more than that. Remember to be an honest man, independent of pubHc opinion, to do what you believe to be right, and when you approach death you can feel, as I do, no fear but that your life has been as it was in- tended, and that whatever there is beyond this life, if there is anything, will be peaceful." ANGER His feeling was one of anger only. He had been so confident of the election. Without much conceit he had told himself that he was one of the most prominent men in his class. He had taken an active part in almost every line of student endeavor, and belonged to several well-known organizations. He had gone up to the list posted on the traditional tree that morning, more as a matter of course, to see who else had been elected to the senior society. He failed to find his name among the elected ones. At first he was surprised, hardly realizing that it could have been left off. This feeling was followed by a feeling of keen disappointment, that the highest honor of the college had been denied him. Almost immediately, however, he became angry, angry at those men whose names were there, angry at two men who he was certain had kept him out, angry at every- one and everything. He was so angry that he refused to speak to a group of his intimate friends who were standing there, but walked off sullenly towards his classroom. IV. NARRATIVE TONY For more than an hour Tony had perched saucily on the Major's big roll-top desk, waiting for that officer to finish his government report. It was far past time for their afternoon froUc, but Tony was patient, for the Major's feats with pen, paper, and ink had never ceased to be fascinating to the little gray monkey. It was an absurdly intricate thing, this monthly report to headquarters, for governing this small island in the tropics was very much of a problem. But at last the accounts were all balanced, and the hundredth disquieting symptom duly tabulated. Tony blinked owlishly as the Major neatly f Idcd the closely written sheets and placed them under a weight ; and his little eyes eagerly followed his master's every movement as he carefully destroyed the loose copies lying about. Then the hist 5Q4 APPENDIX. STiDEST THEMES shool was torn in pitvcs and lonsigncd to the wasle-hasket. Tony loapinl from his porch and the frolic began. For a time the hall tlew merrily to and fro. 'I'ony dashed madly about, his shrill chatter and staccato bark mingling strangely with the Major's laughing banter. They were indeed good chums. Then, just when the game was at its height, some thoughtless person called the Major away. Tony plainly resented such desertion. Five minutes he beguiled by rather aimlessly rolling the ball about, and then climbed to his perch on top of the desk and sulked. That is how he happened to spy the open inkwell. Fifteen minutes later the ]\Iajor burst into the room. He had suddenly remembered Tony — and the report lying loose on his desk. With inky paws the little gray monkey was slowly and de- lightedly tearing the tenth sheet in long strips, which he dropped one by one into the waste-basket below. "Tony, you rascal !" yelled the Major in a fury. The little fellow^ had never heard that voice before. Like a flash he leaped to the low partition and turned bewildered eyes to the angry officer just as he hurled the inkwell. It struck the partition near the top. The dark contents showering Tony set him aquiver with rage and fright. With a shrill scream he leaped through the window, scuttled shrieking across the clearing, and disappeared in the jungle. Many months later one of the lieutenants returned from a' scouting expedition with the story of a strangely spotted ape which had fol- lowed him several miles through the jungle, scolding shrilly and shy- ing sticks and stones. But no one else at the Post ever again saw Tony. THE FIREMAN On the payroU ol the M. C. Railroad he was plain Charles Gannet, Fireman, but he was destined to get a great opportunity to "make good." This is how it came about. The two termini of the road had grown to be "sixth" cities and demanded ten-hour trains instead of the twelve-hour expresses that had previously l^cen their pride. Five new Pacific typ>e locomotives of superb dimensions had been purchased and delivered for service on the "Limited " trains. The new engines were put on local service for two weeks to limber them up, and then they were to be given fast rurrs. Number 31 15, however, was placed in Limited service in a week's time, because of the w-recking of the old engine which hauled the "Autocrat," as the Limited train was called. NARRATIVE 595 On the night of 3iis's third trip at the head of six shining Pull- mans, the elements seemed to have conspired to make her task a Herculean one. A roaring northwest gale swept in over the prairies and the great lake, driving angry needles of sleet in spluttering volleys against the cab windows. The great electric arc-lights under the train shed which sheltered the Pidlmans, swayed and blinked in the swirling ice storm which tore up the platforms and lost itself among the strings of darkened coaches waiting on deserted tracks. Ten o'clock ! — with the first stroke of the great station clock two sharp hisses sounded in the darkened cab of 31 15, and Frank O'Neil and Charles Gannet, engineer and fireman, straightened their backs and concentrated themselves for a seven hours' run. The great engine barked twice, and then came a furious snorting and shower of sparks as the drivers spun around on the sleety rails. O'Neil's mas- ter-hand quickly eased the head of steam in the cylinders, and 31 15 crept cautiously over the switches and frogs, past winking green and red lights toward the throat of the yard. Six toasted Pullmans with dusted chairs and pohshed brass gUded quietly out into the roaring storm. The barks of the locomotive grew louder and then dropped to a mufSed throb as G'NeU hooked her back on the reverse lever. The last switch chcked bj^, and the green and red lights whisked past as O'Neil settled back on his wooden shelf and pulled open the throttle another notch. The wind roared back along the great black boiler and drove clouds of steam and smoke scudding past the window that was half closed to keep the sleet from bruising O'Neil's face and body. Above the throb of the exhaust, the roll of the sleet driving against the cab made all but the shrillest shrieks of the wind inaudible. Gannet, in thin overalls and jumper, was pulling open the chains of the furnace door, and shoveling great scoops of coal into the white- hot ^urnace. Each time the furnace doors opened, the light turned the sleet to a golden shower, and the smoke and steam clouds to great pink banners in the sky. The little gauge lamp bobbed and bhnked at the two silent figures, one motionless in his seat, gazing, searching the outer darkness, the other, bending and swinging like a piece of machinery. Ten tons of coal were there to be fed into the bottom- less furnace. No child's play that, on a lurching, jumping express engine ! A curve, and the right side of the cab rises suddenly and shakes and quivers as if to tear itself from some terrific force. Back in the Pullmans, men with cigars in their mouths converse in 596 Ari'j:.\ni.\. student themes languid tones, and yawn. In the car behind, two children stampei down the carpeted aisle to }:;et a lup uf water, and come trudging back to their fond mother with a l)rimming cup in their small hands. A man across the aisle has had the porter set a table upon which he is playing chess, with occasional interruptions as the children bump the tables, or the black knight loses his balance and falls down, bring- ing similar disaster to two pawns and a queen. The while beam of the electric headlight sways along the reeling track, and greets each bridge or culvert with a fleeting w-ink. The glass on O'Neil's window is now glazed with ice, and after tugging his cap tighter over his ears and turning the visor lower over his eyes, he slides the protecting shield aside, and faces the jagged bolts of ice that shriek around the boiler head and burst to fragments w-hen they hit the window-frame. Gannet has been trying the injectors and wipes the sweat froiti his face so that he may get a look at the quivering needle on the steam gauge. One hundred and ninety-six pounds of steam ; not enough, — 210 is what she should carry. He swings open the furnace doors and piles scoopful upon scoopful of coal into the flames. The doors are clanged shut, and as he straightens his back once more, he sees O'Neil's nostrils dilate as he draws his head in from the pelting outside. O'Neil's left hand swings the long lever forward and his right "feels" the air. ''Whr — ^\^lr — " he shouts above the roar to Gannet. Gannet jumps to the gangway on his side of the cab and looks back. "Trr — whr — r" he shouts back. The engine stiffens forward in the grasp of the air brakes and the Pullmans grrrrrr-rr as the big bogy trucks feel the grip. Before the train has come to a full stop, Gannet has disappeared through the gangway on his side of the cab. O'Neil follows with a monkey-wrench. The wind rips open his coat and his hat is switched off his head. The wrench in his hand becomes slippery with ice. A tender truck-wheel has a hot box, because it was not run in long enough in local service. Gannet has pulled the flaming waste and grease out of the journal box and is busy repacking it. A hose is screwed into one side of the box so that water from the tender can keep it cool. The conductor comes staggering up in a rubber coat and curses audibly. Back in the Pullmans, a passenger suddenly takes his feet from the window-sill, and leans forward to peer out into the dark. "WTiy, the train has stopped," he exclaims in amazement. "I wonder how long we have been here?" "Where are we?" are the NARRATIVE 597 remarks that are forthcoming upon this discovery. Then impartial criticism is leveled at the road for "rotten service" and delays. Outside, two drenched, sleet-covered figures toil over a bent hose- coupling. After twenty minutes of finger skinning and bruising with the frozen wrench, the coupling is screwed in and two sharp blasts from the deep-throated engine-whistle call back the reluctant brakeman, who has been leaning against the platform of the last car, sheltered from the sleet, and valiantly holding a red lantern. O'Neil, stiff and all but frozen, sits propped up on the right side of the cab, his bleeding face peering out into the driving ice, as 31 15, steaming to her limit through Gannet's superb efforts, is making up lost time. A roar, a dull rumble, and the clicking of switches startles Gannet as he is reaching for the "injector choke valve." He looks quickly at O'Neil, who is still leaning out of the window. Gannet knows that they should never take the D — t viaduct at any such speed as they are going now. He pulls O'Neil's arm ; it falls limp by his side, and O'Neil's head nods forward on the window- seat. Quick as a flash, Gannet snaps the throttle shut and gives her a pinch of air to steady the train. As the engine rolls smoothly at reduced speed, he pulls O'Neil down to the cab floor. Unconscious, pummeled and slashed by the ice, frozen clothes on his body, O'Neil falls stiflily to the floor. Gannet, oblivious to the sorry condition of his engineer, gazes intently ahead through the swirling sleet at the ever changing signal lights. Soon the yard is past , and as the last switch clicks under wheel and its green light sweeps by, Gannet steps down on the cab floor, and tenderly lifts O'Neil's limp form over to the left side of the cab, and there, wrapped in the great canvas storm curtain which Gannet has torn from its hooks over the cab arch, O'Neil rests in a heap against the asbestos boiler lagging. As soon as Gannet sees that there is no danger of O'Neil's tumbling to the floor through the sudden lurching of the engine, he again goes over to the right side. Peering ahead for a moment to get his bearings and seeing a signal light go by, Gannet shovels in frenzied haste some coal into the now half empty firebox. Then he opens the try-cocks and after running the injectors until the water is at the top cock, he pulls the throttle open to the last notch and 3115 paws over the steel in a way to make many a passenger engineer blanch with fear. How Gannet acted engineer and fireman on the "Autocrat" that 59S APPENDIX. STUDENT THEMES night is a golden page in railroad history. Now raking and feeding tlie fire, now trying the injectors, now peering out of the cab window intt) the murderous rain and sleet, and then glancing at the steam and air gauges. Gannet acted like a man possessed, jumping, staggering in the cab of the roaring, lurching engine. Twice in his fleeting glances out of the cab window he saw the "red" showing ahead. Firmly he checked her mile-a-minute gait and let the air ease off so that the Pullmans rolled quietly over the cross-over, and then with a nervous jerk he opened the throttle so that the couplings hiid no time to slack up and snap the Pullmans as the engine jumped forward. For five hours, the soHtary figure spurred the 1 500 horse-power steed on into the teeth of the storm. The great steel sides of the tank were white with ice, and the olive green of the Pullmans had blended to a lead-gray color. Great icicles hung under the running board and steps of the cab. .\s dawn tinged the blackness of the storm with gray, the long train slowed down for the terminal yards with a spluttering of locked wheels on the "whiskered" frosty rails. Slowly 31 15 nosed her way past day coaches and ''diners" in the storage yards, and just as the station clock pointed to ten minutes past eight, the gray streaked locomotive came to a stop in front of the bumper of track i. Ten minutes late! — The ''Autocrat" was ten minutes late! How those business men back in the Pullmans jostled and squeezed each other as they lined up in the aisles of the cars, suit cases in hand, waiting for the imperturbable darkey porter to lift the trap door and let them down the steps to the platform. Nor did their sneering remarks cease as they walked past the great gray dripping engine, panting softly in the heavy air of the train shed. They glanced cas- ually up at the cab and saw a coal-blackened face with bloodshot eyes, looking listlessly down at them. Even the icicles on the running board and the cr>'stals on the cab windows failed to excite any com- ment. Three days later, O'Neil, lying in a white cot at the hospital with a bad case of pneumonia, received a gold watch from the company, together with a note saying that he would receive full pay until his recovery was complete. As for Gannet, the following Monday when he reported at the round house for work, he found another fireman on number 3115. When he interviewed the round house superintendent, and asked hun what engine he had been transferred to, the "super" turned on NARRATIVE 599 his heel and said, "31 15 will haul the 'Autocrat ' to-day; back her down at 9.45." In other v/ords, 31 15 was his engine. He had been promoted to the right side ! THE BLOOD TIE When Bannister's regiment was ordered home from the Philip- pines some six months after Aguinaldo's surrender, because the lazy, shiftless life of the East had gotten into his blood, and also because the home-call, which seemed to reach across half a world of blue ocean, bidding the other men to await impatiently the command to embark in the stuffy little collier which was to carry them back to God's Country was, in his case, missing, Bannister took counsel with him- self and decided to act. And so it happened that when the first sergeant called the roll the next morning, he placed a little cross mark opposite one of the B's and when he turned in his report to the Captain, it contained a memo- randum, "Private Bannister absent from roll-call." And when two more roll-calls had passed and two more cross marks were registered opposite Bannister's name, the Captain reported a deserter from his company and Bannister's description was scattered through the army with orders to take him and hold him for court- martial. Then Bannister's company, including his own bunk-mate, promptly forgot the incident in the excitement of embarkation and Bannister became only a memory to his comrades, a profitable sub- ject of discussion, beginning with, "I wonder what struck Banty," and ending likewise. In the meantime. Bannister, literally speaking, had allowed no grass to grow under his feet. Manila was not a safe place for an Amer- ican deserter and Bannister had no relish for close confinement. With the assistance of a betel-chewing Aguinaldo sympathizer, he smuggled himself out of the town and the next morning found him- self on the road which leads to Morong. His idea was to reach the hill country of Nueva Ecija, where his new-found friend had assured him there were still nimierous villages where no Americanos were ever seen and where he could lose himself with small danger of ever being picked up by a stray foraging party of his countrymen. So he made a detour around Morong, and sleeping in the rice fields by day. and traveling by night, made his way northward. For two weeks he travelled in this manner, using his smattering of 6oo APP/.SDix. sjii)K.\T 'iiH:.\n:s Spanish and his hhimoviiiR j^rin to the best advantage, and then, one morning at sunrise, having, three days previously, skirled around the last American garrison, he entered the dirty little village of Manito. And here it was that Way of the American Export Company found him six months later. Those six months had made many changes in Bannister. His army boots were worn out, his khaki suit had been discarded in favor of the more comfortable native dress of a shirt and breeches, his beard had grown, and the spots on him which were not covered by hair, had been tanned to nearly the color of his companions ; but still, with all this. Way had recognized a countryman in him immediately, for neither time nor a tropical sun could shrink his stature to the size of the little, spindle-legged black men, nor flatten his nose, nor give his countenance that peculiar hideous expression of half fierceness and half cunning. "Hullo!" he called, as Way, followed by a luggage -bearing mn- chacho, came up the same path which he had trod six months earlier. Way paused. Bannister lazily rolled a cigarette, took a whifT, and eyed Way questioningly. "A little otT the regular beat, ain't you?" he finally remarked. "Yes," Way admitted. "]\Iy people sent me up here to introduce some .American farming implements." Bannister laughed. "More money in tobacco or cutlery," he said. "Only you may git one of your own knives between the ribs if you ain't careful." "The Governor-General assured me that this country was as safe as Fifth Avenue," Way replied. "Things happen up in the hills that the Governor don't ever hear of. For instance, I've been up here six months, and he's still got his johnnies keeping an eye on some gin shop down ^Manila way, 'specting me to walk out some day." "You seem safe enough," Way argued. "Oh, yes, I'm safe enough," Bannister admitted. "You see, they think I'm an Aguinaldo man, though I says to myself, to hell with Aggie and all the rest of 'em. I'm up here 'cause it suits me. Dow'n there, I was Private Bannister, up here I'm Senor Bannister, as good a man as any in this dinky little luego, an' a darned sight better than most. 'Sides I've married and settled down. I've got a mujer inside here." NARRATIVE 6oi Way glanced at the group of ugly little black men who had crowded around, eying him suspiciously, and shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, she's a little different from the common run of these little devils," Bannister assured him. "Fact is, she's more Spanish than anything else, I reckon. Still, she's got a strain of something else in her. You can see her in a minute. Ven aca, querida mia,^' he called over his shoulder. Presently a woman came out of the hut. She glanced at Bannis- ter and then turned her eyes on Way and regarded him steadily, though without speaking. She was dressed much as Bannister, the only difference being that the native saya took the place of breeches. Way's first impression was that she was Spanish, tanned a shade darker than usual by the tropical sun, and he could not suppress a momentary gleam of admiration for her splendid physical develop- ment. Then he noted the yellowness of her palm, which showed Tagal blood, and in spite of her comeliness of face and the unques- tioned beauty of her large, brown eyes, he cast a glance, half of pity, half of condemnation, at Bannister. There were unnumbered cen- turies of Caucasian purity of race behind the glance, and Bannister, without understanding why, stirred uneasily under it. The woman turned and looked at Bannister anxiously, and Way noted the flash of passionate solicitude which gleamed from her eyes. "Amigo,^' said Bannister quietly, and she turned and re-entered the hut. During the next two months. Way and Bannister saw much of each other. Way, with his muchacho as man of all work, established him- self in a deserted, rice-straw bungalow and Bannister soon got into the custom of dropping in on him in the cool of the evening, to sit, rolling cigarettes and talking. Way never visited Bannister in his hut, though he occasionally passed his mujer in the various paths which ran out from the village, and he soon became vaguely conscious that she regarded him with both distrust and dislike. He had no means of knowing that the one was caused by the girl's native distrust of Americans, which even her relations with Bannister had not entirely removed, or rather, had caused her to view all Americans as Bannister's natural enemies, since they were the only ones whom he seemed to fear, and the other, by her jealousy of the time Bannister spent in his company. One day, a squad of American soldiers appeared suddenly in the village and Bannister barely had time to escape by one of the footpaths LIBRARY STATE TEACHERS Cf^L'EGE SA.iTA BARBARA. CALiFCRNIA /..o./..*.Y^ 6o2 APP/:.\DIX. STIDEXT THEMES which led farther up into the mountains. Way said nothing of Ban- nister's presence, not considering it any of his affair, and the squad soon departed, not. however, before the sergeant had given V\'ay a piece of advice. " Better pack your things and come along with us," he said. '■'J'here's no telling what these niggers may do at any time, and it ain't safe for one white man to be too far away from another in these hills." "Oh, I guess I'm safe enough," Way replied. "You can't tell," the sergeant insisted. "If they get you at all, it'll be when you least expect it. Look at that wench out there, now." he added, pointing to where a woman stood eying them from the opposite side of the street. "She's up to some devilment, I'll bet my head. See that look in her eyes." Way glanced across the street, and saw Bannister's viujcr gazing at them with a mingled expression of such fear and hatred that he was half inclined to take the sergeant's advice. Instead, he laughed at himself for a fool, and that iiight. Bannister not having returned, he put on his hat and started out for a stroll. He had gone probably half a mile, and was just rounding a large boulder, which lay by the side of liis path, when suddenly there was a swish, and something flew past him, sticking into a lawaan tree at his side. He stooped and picked it up. It was a large, native knife, or dagger, which he remembered having seen Bannister using on sev- eral occasions. "The treacherous little devil," he muttered. The next day Bannister returned, and Way for the first time called around to see him at his hut. "I w'ish you would assure that woman of yours that I'm your very best friend." he said. "VMiy?" Bannister asked. In reply. Way handed him the knife. " She threw it," he explained. Bannister whistled. "She thought you peached on me," he said. "I'll see that it doesn't happen again. So she was ready to scrap for me?-"" he mused. "Well, I reckon it was a good thing after all that we hitched up." "It may be a good thing for you, all right," W^ay remarked, "but it would have been deucedly uncomfortable for me, if her aim had been a little better." And after that, in spite of the fact that there were no further signs of hostility. Way took his afternoon exercises before dark. NARRATIVE 603 Way and Bannister were sitting in front of Way's bungalow one night a week later, smoking. The night was dark. The moon had not yet risen, it had rained earher in the afternoon, and, contrary to the usual order of things, the clouds had not disappeared at sunset, but still hung on, seemingly playing a game of hide and seek with the bright, southern stars, which would otherwise have relieved the gloom. Way was whistling softly to himself between puffs ; Bannis- ter was busily rolling cigarettes, lighting them, and throwing them away. "Bannister," Way suddenly asked, "were you ever homesick?" Bannister shook his head. "Never had a home," he replied. "I sold papers at five, was a bootblack until I was fifteen, and then I worked in a factory until two and a half years ago, when I joined the army." "Don't you ever expect to go back to the States ? " Way continued. Again Bannister shook his head. "What's the use?" he asked. "There's nobody there that gives a continental for me. Out here there's a woman who — well, you know how she feels, and I reckon I think just about as much of her as I ever will of anybody. I'm a shiftless sort of cuss and this lazy life suits me to a showdown. What's the use of going back?" "I wouldn't like this sort of thing long," Way said. "'Tain't everybody that's suited for it," Bannister replied. "There's a fellow named Goodman about fifteen miles over on the other side of the mountain that ought to be back in the States bossing a section gang. He's by his lonesome, like you, trying to establish a market among these niggers for something God Almighty never intended them to have, and he's going about it in a mighty risky way. He beat his muchacho not long ago because he found 'im taking a siesta in the evening. And he's done other things they don't under- stand out here. Some day he'll git a knife in his back, or something worse." Way arose and stretched himself, preparatory to going inside. "I suppose you'd play a hands-off game in case of any trouble up here," he remarked curiously. Bannister nodded. "Only thing I could do," he said. "I can't go back there," pointing out towards the coast, "so I've got to stay here, and the only safe way to stay up here is not to get mixed up with any monkey business." Way turned, and as he did so, his muchacho came out of the house, 6o4 APPENDIX. STUDENT THEMES gesticulating excitedly. A bloody Americano had just slipped into the bungalow by the back way and wished to speak to the Senor at once. The boy was trembling. Way had picked him up in Manila, and it had only been after much hesitation that he had consented to follow him up among the hillsmen, of whom he lived in daily terror. Way turned and entered the bungalow. The man who awaited him was Cioodman and he had traveled fifteen miles through the broken country- in three hours. His clothes were torn almost to shreds by the undergrowth, his feet were bleeding where the sharp rocks had cut through his shoes, and his right shoulder had been slit half way across with a knife. There had been trouble. Goodman could not tell just how it had happened. He only knew that he had been returning from a short trip up in the mountains and had got into a narrow ravine, \vhen a stone had dropped from overhead, crushing his horse and almost pinning him under it. By the time he had got on his feet, he had seen a horde of little black imps advancing on him from one end of the ravine, and had turned and fled. One of them had got near enough to stick a knife into his shoulder, but a shot from his revolver had sent him hurtling down the mountain side, and he had made his escape. Since then, he had traveled as fast as terror and his own legs could carry him, hoping to gain protection at Manito until he could get through to an American garrison. He was still panting and told his story between huge draughts of water, which Way had motioned his muchacho to bring him. "Do you think the hillsmen know which way you were headed?" Way asked. "They'll track 'im down," said Bannister, who had followed Way in. "The httle devils know their business and they ain't going to let him git away if they can help it, after going as far as they have." As though in confirmation of this, there was a patter of bare feet outside, and a brown figure appeared in the doorway. Way reached for a revolver which lay on the table before him, but Bannister seized his arm. ''Qtierida miaj' he said, and Way sat down. The woman entered, glanced at the three men and burst into an excited flow of dialect Spanish, which neither Way nor Goodman could follow. However, her gestures were sufficient. Seizing Ban- nister by the arm, and motioning the others away with a shower of maledictions, she started towards the door, pleading and pulling. NARRATIVE 605 Presently Bannister paused and turned to Way. "The niggers know where he is," he said, pointing to Goodman, "and they'll be here after 'im mighty quick. Maybe if you'll leave 'im they'll be satisfied with fixing him, and I can smuggle you out in a day or two. I'll risk that much." Way shook his head. We'll fight it out together," he said. "Come on, then," said Bannister to the woman, and they started towards the door. Just then, there was a crash of broken glass at their backs, a black, flat-nosed face appeared for a moment in the window frame, and Way wheeled in time to receive a bolo thrust in the thigh. At the same time, another figure appeared in the doorway, with uplifted bolo, aimed at the fallen man. Bannister roughly shook his arm free from the clinging woman and his right fist shot out. With a squeak of rage, the figure fell back and disappeared into the night. "You black-hearted little devils," Bannister shouted, slamming the door shut and barricading it, "I'll show you how to fight a white man's fight." Way had already recovered himself sufficiently to blow out the light and hobble to one of the windows ; Goodman, barricaded behind an old chest, covered the other. Way's muchacho lay on the floor, in an agony of terror. The woman had staggered into a corner and sat gazing straight to the front with unseeing eyes. She knew what awaited them. Everything became suddenly quiet, but Bannister knew that some- where out in the blackness a hundred cunning little eyes were watch- ing the bungalow for a chance to strike. It came soon. Goodman, hearing a noise under his window, raised up to fire, and received a thrust in the breast. Bannister sprang to the window and emptied his gun at a scurrying mass of black figures. Way's gun spoke for a few minutes, when it likewise ceased, and Ban- nister turned to find himself surrounded by a score of twisting, squirm- ing little men. First with the butt of his revolver, and when that was broken, with his bare fist, he struck out until a pair of scrawny brown arms clasped him around the legs, and he went down. "Adioso, querida mia," he muttered, as the knives flashed over him. APPENDIX II: EXPOSITION AND ARGUMENT (Classified as to Topics) I. Agriculture. Middle and Lower Classes in England under the Stuarts The Realm of the Commonplace Is Agriculture Declining? . Organization of Farmers II. Economics. The Esthetic Value of Efficiency The Case against the Single Tax Speech on Old-Age Pensions Popular Control of National Wealth Is Agriculture Declining ? . Organization of Farmers The Organization of Labor III. Education. The Aim of a University Education Self-Cultivation in English . The Social Value of the College-Bred The Intellectual Powers of Woman IV. Engineering. Mine Helmets A Mechanical Dishwasher . How the Panama Locks are Operated The iF^sthetic Value of Efficiency Wireless in Railroad Service The Mathematician and the Engineer V. History. Beginning of Cabinet Government The Middle and Lower Classes in England under the Stuarts ..... Lincoln as More than an American Francis Parkman Goldwin Smith .... The Monroe Doctrine 607 99 i6s 324 327 58 239 257 296 324 327 330 15 130 137 276 43 46 47 S8 228 291 55 99 113 145 149 306 6o8 APPEXDIX II: EX POSIT lOX AND ARGUMENT \'I. Literature. Slang Familiar Style .... Self-Cultivation in English . Francis Parkman Goldwin Smith .... Jane Austen's "Emma" On the Taller .... The \\'averley Novels . Mark Twain .... \T1. Politics and Government. Socialism ..... House of Representatives . Beginning of Cabinet Government Inaugural Address A \'icious Proposal The Nation's Pledge . Absorption of the Indian Nationalism and Peace The Case Against the Single Tax Council Government vs. Mayor Government Speech on Old-Age Pensions A Defence of the House of Lords Popular Control of National Wealth The Monroe Doctrine . State Control and the Individual Direct Presidential Nominations VIII. Science. What is Thought ? Feeding Brown Pelicans The Formation of Vowels . Mine Helmets The Honey Bee . On the Physical Basis of Life Wireless in Railroad Service Three Hypotheses respecting the History of Nature The Mathematician and the Engineer IX. Social Forces. The .'Esthetic Value of Efficiency Social \'alue of the College-Bred . Mark Twain .... APPENDIX II: DESCRIPTION 609 X. Absorption of the Indian Nationalism and Peace Intellectual Powers of Woman Address at Swarthmore College Address at Gettysburg Sports and Recreation. On Making Camp English and American Sportsmanship The Realm of the Commonplace An Apology for Idlers 228 230 276 301 304 18 124 165 173 APPENDIX II: DESCRIPTION {Classified as to Technical Elements) A. Fundamental Image. Cape Cod . . . . . Scenery of the Lakes B. Dominant Tone or Characteristic. Sunrise at Port-of-Spain In the Sahel .... In Front of the Royal Exchange An Accountant Dickens Portraits C. Point of View. {A) Fixed. Cloud Effects Scenery of the Lakes An Indian Village . Landor's Cottage . - . ' (B) Moving. Valparaiso A Doctor's Home . " . St. Mark's . . . ' (C) Abstract. The Upper Mississippi . D. Subjective Element Dominant. The Spirit of the Garden In Front of the Royal Exchange Kusa-Hibari 352 361 340 354 369 405 408 342 361 368 379 366 377 383 353 360 369 394 6io APPENDIX II: DESCRIPTION BudTildcn . . . . PAGE . 4IJ Ou the Wind at Night . . . - . 420 Narrative Method. In the Sahel • 354 The Ancient Palace of Jeypore . . 381 Expository Element Dominant. Cape Cod • 352 English Cottages .... . 372 Exposition Hall and Bridge-Shop . 375 Second-Story Bungalow Apartments . • 376 NOTES EXPOSITION DEFINITIONS Definition is not an independent form of writing, but is a fundamental element in exposition. On the precision with which we use our words depends our success in conveying our ideas. Students will do well to follow the advice of Professor Palmer (see p. 132), and attempt definitions even of the common words they use, because " inaccuracy will not stand up against the habit of definition." A striking illustration of the need of such practice may be found in the confusion, pomted out by Godkin, resulting from the loose employment of the familiar word " truth " (see p. 251). Slang. Consult the definition of this word in the dictionary. The present paragraph is an attempt to set forth the meaning with greater ful- ness and accuracy. This is done by pointing out distinctions and making comparisons with similar ideas. Compare Hazlitt's remarks on slang (p. 16), where the explanation is aided by an example. Analysis of the paragraph : — The opening sentence is purely introductory and is followed by the topic sentence, which mentions two characteristics of slang. The first of these characteristics is discussed in the next two sen- tences, while to the analysis of the other the rest of the paragraph is devoted up to the last sentence. It should be observed that the concluding sentence, while it sums up the two elements which have been discussed, at the same time contributes to the progressive development of the idea. The para- graph is notable for the extremely close cohesion of its parts. Each sentence develops so directly out of the one preceding that there is no need of transi- tional conjunctions, the connection being efTected by the carrying over of some word or phrase from one sentence to another. Only in one instance is it necessary to form a bridge over an intervening sentence, and that is contrived by the use of the balancing pronouns " the first " and " the other." Define Metabolism, Soil fertility, Voltage, Evolution, Lyric poetry, Loyalty, Tact, Religion, Success. What is Thought? Professor Dewey wishes to prepare his readers for a discussion of the thinking process ; his first aim, therefore, is to arrive at a strict definition of the word " thought." He docs so by clearing away the looser senses in which the word is commonly employed, progressing from the general to the more and more restricted meanings. The mode of amplifica- 611 6i2 NOTES tion is more ilabonite llian in tlie clcfinilion of slang, being distinguished by more leisurely repetition, illustration, and even anecdote. What is the relation oi the first [mragraph to the rest of the composition? Notice the use of pointing sentences, of topic sentences, and of transitions from section to section. What is the force of the last sentence? Can the individual sections be treated as separate paragrajjlis? 3. consequence. Note the force with which this word is used in relation to the following " consecutive." 4. credence — credit. Are these words happily contrasted? 5. prejudices, that is, prejudgments. Are these words really equivalent? Classify the uses of think in the following sentences : " And I must think, do all I can, that there is pleasure there." " We gaze — nor grieve to think that we must die." " Why tloink of anything but present good? " " How far dost thou excel? — No thought can think nor tongue of mortals tell." " I should not see the sandy hour-glass run, but I should think of shallows and of flats." " Those that think must govern those that toil." " He that is giddy thinks the world turns round." " I verily did think that her old gloves were on, but 'twas her hands." " Of many good I think hhn best. ... I have no reason but a woman's reason ; I think him so because I think him so." " What joy is joy if Silvia be not by? Unless it be to think that she is by." " I did never think to marry." " What his heart thinks his tongue speaks." " Which makes me think that this Antonio, being the boon lover of vay lord, must needs be like my lord." Distinguish the looser and the stricter uses of words like judge, fear, sensa- tion, notion, idea, taste, nature. Socialism. There are many groups of words and ideas which have some element in common, though in their total significance they may be sharply distinct or even opposed. People are prone to seize upon the feature which particularly interests themselves to the utter neglect of the other elements. Thus to John Bull every visitor from the continent is a " for- eigner " rather than a Turk or a Spaniard, and for the Catholic every person outside the pale of his church is a non-believer, be he Protestant, Jew, or infidel. Similarly, the word " sociahsm " is popularly confused with a number of other " isms " which have the characteristic in common of being revolutionary and quite repugnant to the Anglo-Saxon sense of the practical. In such a case, the direct explanation of the term, which Professor Cross supplies in his first two paragraphs, would not serve to produce a sufficiently emphatic impression, and it is therefore necessary to discriminate the ideals of socialism from other reforming and revolutionary' schemes. 8. laissez-faire. This word refers to the principle that government should not interfere with the action of individuals, especially in industrial affairs. 9. claim. Do you approve this use of the word? 11. " he " towns and " she " towns. The condition referred to in this phrase is the result of the westward migration of the men, which left the women to their own economic resources in the East. NOTES 613 12. Bellamy or Nationalist movement. Edward Bellamy' (1850-1898) was the author of a famous novel " Looking Backward, 2000-1887," Jn which he set forth his dream of a communistic state. For the purpose of propagating his ideas a Nationalist party was organized, which, however, gained no political hold. 13. Single Tax. Compare the statement on this point on p. 239. Does the passage come to an effective conclusion? Distinguish among the members of the following series : atheism, agnosticism, infidelity, paganism, idolatry, heathenism ; savage, barbarous, primitive ; queer, strange, odd, funny, peculiar; familiar, homely, common, commonplace, ordinary, simple, plain ; education, culture, enlightenment, humanism ; real, actual, natural ; character and personality ; truth and fact ; news and gossip ; learning and knowledge ; happiness and contentment. On Familiar Style. This is an example of informal definition which aims not merely to explain the meaning of a term but to interpret it with an individual coloring. The information may be suffused in an emotional glow or subordinated to some purpose of deeper instruction. Compare Hazlitt's precepts with those given by Professor Palmer in " Self-Cultivation in English " (pp. 130-31). Analyze the diction in this passage for its agree- ment with the theory. Is this a weU-constructed paragraph ? Do the ideas develop in regular progression? 15. Dr. Johnson's Style. Samuel Johnson (i 709-1 784), the great critic and essayist and author of the first important English dictionary, employed an excessive number of many-syllabled words of Latin derivation. " tall, opaque words " taken from the "first row of the rubric." This passage illustrates Hazlitt's eccentric habits in the use of quotations. In the first phrase, it has been conjectured, he is borrowing from an earlier paper of his own in which he speaks of critics who have a knack " of putting a parcel of tall opaque words before them, to blind the eyes of their readers, and hoodwink their own understanding." (See Hazlitt's Collected Works, cd. Glover and Waller, VHI, 257.) The second quotation is probably adapted from " Hamlet," Act ii. Scene 2 : " The first row of the pious chanson will show you more." For quotation as an element of style see note to p. 183. 16. cum grano salts. Is this a violation of Hazlitt's own advice about the use of foreign circumlocutions? Examine a news narrative, the account of a baseball game or other athletic event, a speech in the Congressional Record, a sermon, an article in a tech- nical journal, one in the Saturday Evening Post, and apply to them Hazhtt's tests for style. Apply the test also to Stewart Edward White's " On Making Camp," p. 18, and to " Popular Control of National Wealth," p. 296. The Aim of a University Education. This may be called an informal definition because Newman explains what the word " practical " as apjilied to education means to him. Compare the substance of this with William James's essay, " The Social Value of the College Bred " (p. 85) and with President Wilson's Swarthmore Address (p. 301). Do you find them in 6 14 NOTES harmony or at variance ? How is your own course adapted to the aim here indicated? The structure of this paragraph and the composition of its sentences will repay the most careful analysis. It opens with an emphatic topic sentence and it closes on the same note, admiral)ly illustrating Professor Barrett Wendell's formula for testing mass or emphasis, viz. : " The chief parts of ever^- composition should be so placed as readily to catch the eye. . . . Broadly speaking, the most readily visible parts of a composition are the beginning and end." {English Composilion, pp. 32-33.) The chief device for obtaining unity is parallelism. Note how imperceptibly one series of parallel sentences fades into another series having a dilTerent subject. The passiige should be studied for the rhythmic cadence of its sentences. The rhythm of prose does not fall under any mechanical rules. Its harmony is more subtle than that of poetry and is produced by the proportioning of stress groups in the members of the sentence. Some attempts have re- cently been made to formulate rules governing prose rhythm, notably in Professor Oliver Elton's essay on English Prose Numbers (" Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association," \'ol. IV), and in Pro- fessor Saintsbur\''s " History of English Prose Rhythm." Stevenson's re- marks on this subject are quoted in a note to p. 173. All the sentences in the present passage, except the first and last, are balanced or have some internal balance. But note how monotony is avoided by varying the number of members in the sentence, by balancing with members of un- equal length, by inversion of corresponding phrases, or by the attaching of a loose clause to interrupt uniformity of cadence. A variety of rhythmic eflFects is represented in the passages of Hazlitt, Ruskin, Stevenson, and Woodberry which will be noticed in the appropriate places. Topics: Scholarship, The practical politician, Heroism, College life, Pub- lic spirit, The self-made man, A good fellow. EXPLANATIONS OF MECHANISMS AND PROCESSES To write an explanation of a mechanism or a process may be one of the simplest tasks in expository, if not in all, composition. In telling how to do or make something, if one knows how the thing is done, one need but set forth in orderly fashion the several steps in the actual process. But the matter is not quite simple, either; for the steps may perhaps better be taken in one order than in another; the number of details may be complex and require careful arranging and grouping ; the hearer or reader is likeh' to be less conversant with such operations than the one who is explaining them and may therefore make necessary a skilful adaptation to his comprehension. Sometimes the nature of the subjects or the powers of the reader — or even of the writer — will make it desirable to give ex- plicit directions how to do a thing, rather than to tell how it is done ; in other cases it is advisable to take the reader by the hand, as if he were present NOTES 615 in person, and lead him through the subject, pointing out the details and relating them to each other. Again, it may be best to use the narrative form. Stewart Edward White, in " On Making Camp," shows that the narrative method of explanation is not confined to kindergarten instruction. It will often prove the best means of introducing liveliness and interest in such com- jjosition. On Making Camp. Study the plan of this specimen. Are the details v/ell arranged? well grouped? Notice that Dick is introduced both to add an element of interest and to give purpose to the detailed explanation. How, in detail, is interest maintained and heightened ? Is the paragraphing appropriate? Characterize the tone. What can you say of the diction? There are few things so dreary as the usual student theme on camp expe- rience. Consider carefully aU the ways by which such dreariness is avoided in this account. 19. Rustle sufficient dry wood; gathered entomological specimens; sit up and pay attention. Would Hazlitt have approved these expressions? (see pp. 14 ff.). 22. You'd better. Why, if at all, are this and similar contractions per- missible ? 23. They should converge, etc. What would be the effect of such con- vergence on the size of utensils ? If your vicinity, etc. Does the writer say what he means? Rewrite the sentence. Concept. Is this word aptly used? Why? 24. Only in the woods, etc. Comment on the use of only. Explain the construction of shelter your match all yon know how. Storybooks, etc. — some of the " Leatherstocking Tales," for instance. fS5. Petering out; do the anathema. Find other ways to express the ideas. Sort of a spot. Is this expression in accordance with good use ? Topics: How to handle a canoe, How to play second base, How to prepare a field for planting corn, How to grow tobacco, How to make ice-cream. How to make bread. How to run the half-mile. How to manage a picnic. How to break a horse, How to care for an automobile. How to sail a boat. How to lay out a vegetable garden. How to catch trout. Breeding Brown Pelicans. Notice the easy, informal tone of this selection. How is it produced? What might be its purpose, considering the subject matter? Notice the use made of the spectator. 28. In place of helpkss quiescence, etc. Is this an idiomatic sentence ? Topics: Breeding game chickens, Raising squabs, The feeding habits of squirrels. How Vowels are Formed. Notice the effective use of analogy, and the touches of style that lend warmth and interest to the explanation. 31. Is the use of etc. advisable here? Explain the function of modifying. Topics: The action of the lungs. How we sec, The operation of the nervous system. 6l6 NOTES Outline. This analytical outline or brief has been supplied by the editors to indicate the best way to understand and set forth the arrange- ment and importiince of tlie parts of any piece of expository writing, and the relations of those parts to each other. Outlines may be of various degrees of fulness, according to the nature of the exposition and the purpose to be served. The simplest or topical outline includes a topic sentence which briefl\- states the central idea, followed by words or phrases each setting forth the more important subordinate ideas which taken together sum up the substance of the topic sentence. The outline of T/ie Manufacture of Mal- leable Iron (p. 553) is an example of this type. Another kind is made by writing a succession of topic sentences, each equivalent to a paragraph, without regard to the logical relations of the ideas to one another. The fullest and best form, whether for studying the structure of a piece of writing or for guiding the writer in developing his subject, is the analytical outline, or brief. The advantages of this kind are that it not only puts the writer's ideas in cogent, explicit, and accurate form, but also indicates clearly the importance of each idea and its relation to ever\- other idea in the composi- tion. This is fully illustrated in the outline beginning on p. 31. The prin- cipal divisions are indicated by the numerals and letters placed in the essay itself, beginning on p. 34. For t>'pographical reasons they have been placed at the beginnings of the paragraphs in which they fall. The House of Representatives. This specimen lucidly explains the organization and operation of an exceedingly complex mechanism. Begin- ning with the purpose of the House, the author next proceeds to make clear by contrast and definition the general character of its functions, then the main features of its organization, and so on to an orderly and detailed analysis of its operation, .\lthough the subject is not notably entertaining, and the treatment is somewhat formal, the style is nevertheless attractive. Notice the structure of the paragraphs^ the use of topic sentences, and of connectives, and the way in which the jjial paragraph returns to the idea e.xpressed at the beginning. Write a short exposition on the same topic from the point of view of an inexperienced congressman who does not realize that the House is not " a deHberative body." 34. Mr. Reed. Thomas Brackett Reed (1839-1902), was Speaker of the House during the 51st, 54th, and 55th Congresses. His autocratic and vigorous administration of the duties of the office won him the title of " Czar." 36. the committees being some fifty-seven in number. In 1910 there were sixty-two. 36. But in the House of Representatives there is only the very slender chance of getting the rules suspended, etc. The rules were modified in 1910 to permit members to call forth bills from committee after the "Unani- mous Consent Calendar " on any Monday. 36. The Government. The ministry, which presents all bills to the House of Commons. NOTES 617 36. entrusts every appointment to the Speaker. In March 1910, the House modified the power of the Speaker. Committees are now appointed by the Ways and Means Committee, of which the floor leader is chairman. This fact modifies many statements in succeeding pages of this dis- cussion. 39. consists of five members, etc. Now ten, and the Speaker is excluded. 41. Air. Carlyle. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), essayist and historian, of whom it has been said that he preached silence in twenty-five volumes. Topics : Organization and duties of a city council, How a president is elected, Organization of the American consular service. Organization of a state legislature, The Red Cross, The Salvation Army, Organization of a factory, a bank, a railroad system, a newspaper staff, The Associated Press. Mine Helmets. An example of the best tj^ie of untechnical explana- tion of a mechanism. Taken from a longer narrative, it is not a finished unit, but the coherence, rapidity, and correctness of the style will repay study. Notice expecially the well-packed sentences. Topics: The fountain pen. The vacuum cleaner. The adding machine, The cash register, The fireless cooker, A typewriter, A camera. A Mechanical Dishwasher. A brief but clear explanation such as a student should write in twenty minutes. Are any unnecessary words used? Compare the method of presentation with that in " Mine Helmets," or " On Making Camp." Topics : Write single paragraphs on the topics listed under the preceding selection. How the Panama Locks are Operated. This specimen is a semi- technical explanation of an extensive and complicated piece of machinery. The writer has made an orderly presentation of numerous and scattered mechanical details in a relatively brief article with such clearness as to make drawings and illustrations not essential. To brevity and clearness practi- cally all other qualities of style have been subordinated almost to the point of exclusion. Compare the style with that of " The ^Esthetic Value of Efficiencj^," " Mine Helmets," and " House of Representatives " ; also with Mr. Bryce's article on " The Panama Canal." To understand the problem of organizing this kind of material, make an analytical brief of the whole. 47. Before we can understand, etc. Could the awkward repetitions in this paragraph be avoided without sacrificing clearness or brevity? 50. The control boards for each lock, etc. Is this paragraph well ar- ranged? Rearrange for greater clearness and ease. 51. Aluminium. Why not aluminum, as on p. 46? 52. In order to make it necessary, etc. Test this paragraph as suggested for that on p. 47. Additional explanation of mechanisms and mechanical processes may be found in " The ^Esthetic Value of Efficiency," pp. 62 and 63, and Students' Themes, p. 534. Topics: Construction of a skyscraper. Building a suspension bridge, 6iS NOTES Laying a railrixid track, 0]>eratini; a wireless station, Operating a terminal system, Constructing a river dam. How a refrigerating plant is operated, How a tliresliing macliine works, The " Soo " locks. DISCUSSIONS OF FACTS AND IDEAS The Beginning of Cabinet Government. This is an illustration of com- pactly organized historical exposition. Study the close coherence. Observe the transitional sentences and the pithy quality of the closing sentence in every paragrapli, and the way in which the entire passage is concluded. 56. Triennial Bill, one providing that a Parliament shall continue for three years. Five years is the present duration of a Parliament. 57. Clarendon. Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon (1609-1674). He supported Charles I during the great Rebellion, and after the Restoration became the most influential minister of Charles II. Topics: The Development of the .\merican Cabinet, The Growth of civil ser\'ice reform. The rise of the Republican party, The history of the Granger movement, The development of the anti-saloon movement, The territorial growth of the United States, The history of Irish home rule. The .Esthetic Value of Efficiency. This is an attempt to interpret in its ideal significance a familiar factor in modern life by showing its operation in a typical community. In order that there should be no doubt as to her purpose, the writer armounces what may lie called the intellectual point of view in a prefatory paragraph. The article proper begins with the second paragraph in which the point of view becomes physical and makes the treat- ment concrete and familiar. Observe the abundance of material details concerning the industrial, the social, and the mental life which the writer describes before she ventures to make the moral application for which she has prepared us. 63. "short, sharp shock." A phrase from Gilbert and Sullivan's "Mikado." Topics: The influence of state support on higher education. The influ- ence of government experiment stations upon agriculture. The influence of woman suffrage on government. The influence of forests on water storage. The influence (social, moral, or aesthetic) of the moving picture on small towns. The effect of the credit system upon Southern agriculture, The influence of the automobile on farm life. The influence of high school fraternities upon scholarship. The Honey Bee. This article is especially interesting as an example of the adaptation of material to a special audience. The wxiter is a man of science who is addressing an educated, perhaps even a literarj-, but pre- sumably non-scientific audience. Though he takes nothing for granted, he never seems to write down to the reader. The style has a familiar charm, enlivened with touches of subdued humor and an appropriate flavor of literary allusion. Unity is attained very simply by taking up the activities of the bee in a complete cycle from one swarming to the next. NOTES 619 70. " All is the stale's." Virgil's Fourth Georgic, Dryden's translation, line 229. 73. " Swept and garnished," " St. Mattliew," xii, 44. 74. " And with their stores," etc., lines 55-58. 78. " cumbered about much serving," " St. Luke," x, 40. 81. " Their friends attend," line 374. 84. " Vesprit dc la ruche," the spirit of the hive. Topic: The life and habits of any animal with which you are acquainted or which you have studied. The Panama Canal. This passage offers a problem in the arrangement of an assortment of miscellaneous facts of different kinds of interest. First we have some statistics appl^dng to the Canal as a whole, then an account of its geographical and engineering features aside from the Gatun Dam and Culebra Cut, which because of their greater interest are reserved for separate treatment. A description of the Canal landscape is interpolated, and a short paragraph of comment brings the whole to a smooth conclusion. Is any other arrangement of these divisions possible or preferable? 88. The locks will be worked. For the manner of operating the locks, see p. 47. Topics : An atliletic field, A college campus, A visit to Niagara, A trip through the stock yards — through a factory — over a large farm. On the Physical Basis of Life. Like " The Honey Bee," this essay illus- trates the art of adapting material to an audience. But in the former case the writer dealt with facts which would be accepted without challenge, so that he had only to see that his presentation was lucid and intelligible, whereas in the present instance the writer has the problem of counteracting a strongly ingrained popular prejudice and his treatment therefore requires something of the method of argument. Professor Shipley begins his exposi- tion without a word of preliminary, but Huxley takes two pages to focus the attention of his reader on the startling nature of his new truth. Having pried his reader's mind wide open, he proceeds to pour in his information. Analyze the six introductory paragraphs in their relation to the struc- ture of the entire essay. What are the literary (as distinguished from the structural) qualities of the style? Observe the imaginative strokes by which Huxley gives vividness and significance to his facts. Is the effect of Huxley's exposition to lower our conception of human life or to enhance the dignity of all life? How is the effect produced? 91. hugest of beasts that live. This is a reminiscence of the Miltonic " that sea-beast Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that swim the ocean stream." — Paradise Lost, I, 200-2. Schoolmen, the speculative theologians of the mcditTeval church. 92. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1749-1832), the greatest of German poets. 620 NOTES " Warnni Ireibt sicli," etc. " Wherefore do tlic mortals thus jostle eacli other and clamor? They wish to feed, to bring fortii children and nourish them as well as they can. . . . Further no man attains, strive how he may. " 94. could our cars cak/t the murmurs. See " The Sound of Summer," P- 347- Mil no- Edwards Henr>- (1800-1885), French zoologist. 97. Dc Bary. Hcinrich Anton (1831-1888), German botanist. 99. Kiihnc, Willy (1837-1900), German physiologist. Topics : The solar spectrum. Hypnotism, Mcndelism, The origin of language, The survival of the fittest, The nebular hypothesis. The wave theory of light, Spiritualism. The Middle and Lower Classes in England. This is an example of generalization based on a multitude of particular facts. Mr. Trevelj'an attempts here what his distinguished uncle ^lacaulay has done for a later period in the famous third chapter of his " History of England " — to represent the complex life of a period in a broad view. Macaulay is often charged with making his generalizations without sufficiently weighing the facts. Observe how Mr. Trcvelyan supports his statements by specific statistics and careful reference to authorities. Observe how point of \iew- is obtained by means of the opening paragraph on England of the present time. Notice the effect of the closing sentence in definitely unifying the passage. What is the dominant interest in the exposition? The passage offers an excellent opportunity for the analysis of structure and for a study in the condensation of material. 100. The Tudors. Their line began with Henry \TI in 1485 and ended when Elizabeth was succeeded in 1603 by the first of the Stuarts, James I. Ihe habilalions of man. Compare Ruskin's description of " English Cottages," p. 372. 101. Wat Tyler, the leader of a peasant revolt in the reign of Richard W. He was killed during the outbreak (1381). 103. Fuller, Thomas (1608-1661), an English divine and man of letters. 104. Charleses cause, the struggle of Charles I against Parliament during the Great Rebellion which broke out in 1641. CobbcU, William (1766-1835), a prolific journalist and a violent political agitator. Commonwealth, the government of England between the beheading of Charles I and the Restoration. 105. House of Bourbon, the dynasty which ruled France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from Henry IV to Louis X\T. the Jacquerie, a peasant outbreak against the nobility of France in 1358. wars of Froissart. Jean Froissart (1338-1410) wrote the chronicles of the Hundred Years' War, most of which was waged during his lifetime. 108. Prince Charles of Madrid, a reference to the visit which Charles 1, before he became king, made to Spain in 1623. NOTES 621 Topics: The present status of the American laborer, Social and economic condition of the American farmer, American commerce before the Civil War, The life of the slave in the South, The people of Mexico — the reasons for their political unrest, The legal and economic position of woman in the United States. Inaugural Address. The aim of the speaker in this address is not directly to present facts but to explain their significance to an audience supposedly familiar with them. An interpretation of this sort has value in proportion to the authority' of the speaker. It is the same type of composi- tion which, on a lower level, is to be found in the editorial. Analyze the substance and style of this address in its suitableness to the occasion. Does the President talk down to " the people "? Lincoln as More than an American. This also is interpretation, but of a different kind of material. An idea is set forth by means of a single example. Could this passage be appropriately classified as biography? Compare with this the analysis of Americanism in the essay on " Mark Twain," p. 208. 114. Douglas, Stephen (1813-1861), Lincoln's celebrated political rival, frequently successful against him. 115. St. Francis of Assist (1181— 1226), perhaps the most saintly of all Christian priests, the founder of the Franciscan order of monks. 120. William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), leader of the radical Aboli- tionists before the Civil War. 121. Stanton, Edwin M. (1814-1869), had bitterly opposed and de- nounced Lincoln before the Civil War, but nevertheless Lincoln appointed him Secretary of War in 1862. Chase, Salmon P. (1808-1873), Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury from 1861 to 1864. Though he was guilty of flagrant ingratitude during his term of office, Lincoln appointed him to the Supreme Court. 122. the plaintive little verses, from " Songs of Israel " by William Knox (i 789-1825) : " Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud? " etc. Topics: What is an American? The Western American, Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson as types of the American, Jane Addams as a t_\'pe of American womanhood, American political ideals, American ideals of conduct. English and American Sportsmanship. The difference in the atti- tude of the Englishman and the American toward his athletics is one of the commonplaces of observation among those interested in sport. What makes Mr. Corbin's treatment of this subject worth reading? Are his opinions warped by prejudice in favor of cither side? In whose favor does the balance finally seem to rest? Topics: The purpose of college sport. Ethics of the college athlete. The value of intercollegiate athletics, Interclass contests. The training table. On supporting the team. The faculty control of athletics. Self-cultivation in English. Like Hazlitt's remarks on " Familiar Style " 62 2 NOTES (p. 14), this selection is primarily interesting for its excellent advice on the choice of words and for the way in which its example gives point to the precepts. Of the three qualiliLS recommended, which is the most notably illustrated in tlie practice ? Comment on the following expressions: " Nig- gardly and angul:ir speakers," " a vague and undetermined meaning," "articulate his thought," "pungent . . . impression," "embroidery or superposed ornament," " purgation of superfluities," " unpermittedly pass the portal of the leetli." Do you disappnne of any of these? The structure of this paper as a whole and in its details should be care- fully observed — the introduction, the arrangement of the points in simple enumerative order, the composition of each paragraph, the transitions, and the concluding paragraph. Notice the short, crisp sentences. Are they appropriate in view of the fact that they were composed for oral deliver>- ? Do they become monotonous ? 131. George Herbert (1503-1633), an English religious poet of the so- called " metaphysical " school. Ben Jonson's description. See " Timber," Schelling's edition, p. 30. 132. Dante (i 265-1321), the great Italian poet, author of the " Divina Commedia." 134. Hobbis, Thomas (1588-1679), the English philosopher, author of '■ The Leviathan." The Social Value of the College-bred. This belongs to the same class of writing as the Inaugural Address. It is the setting forth of an idea. In so far as the idea suggests translation into practice the writing will partake of the manner of argument or persuasion. It is indeed hard to draw a precise line between an essay like this and the Inaugural Address, on the one hand, and President Wilson's Swartlimore Address and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which are included in this book under Persuasion, on the other. Perhaps the fact that the application of the idea is implied rather than- expressed justifies placing the article in this position. Is there any analogy in aim between this essay and Mr. Croly's on " Lincoln as more than an American "? Compare the substance of this essay with Newman's on " The Aim of a University Education " and President Wilson's Swarth- more Address. Like " Self-cultivation in English," this article was composed for oral delivery. Compare the diction of the two. Which is the more natural, the racier, the more spontaneous? Which is the bolder, the more picturesque, the more brilliant? Compare the two in figurativeness. Does metaphor or simile strike you as being more effective in prose? Why? Compare the figure of the glove Cp. 130) or the simile of the cook (p. 135) with " you may remain a crude and smoky kind of petroleum, incapable of giving light " (p. 137), or " currents of self-interest, and gales of passion are the forces that keep the human ship moving " (p. 142). Compare the sentence struc- ture of the two. Which is the more emphatic? Which the more graceful? Which has more variety? NOTES 623 142. tJic Anti-Dreyfus craze. Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French army, of Jewish parentage, was convicted in 1894 on a charge of seUing army secrets, and after spending twelve years on Devil's Island was given a new trial in 1906 and completely vindicated in spite of violent Anti-Semitic agitation. Topics: The value of a technical education. The value of liberal courses for the engineer — for the farmer — - for the lawj-er, What the engineer should read, The recreations of the college man. The college man in politics, A college training for a business career, The newspaper for college men. Student organizations as a training for leadership. EXPOSITORY BIOGRAPHY This section includes biographical writing which aims to give not a narrative of vital facts, but a character and a personality to its subject. It does not, merely, or primarily, " repeat the familiar formulas," in the words of Leslie Stephen, '" about the man who was born on such a day, was educated at the grammar school of his native town, graduated in such a year, became a fellow of his college, took a living, married, pubHshed a volume of sermons which nobody has read for a century or two, and has been during all that time in his churchyard." It offers such facts, perchance, but only incidentally to explaining what manner of man the subject was, and to making him alive by analyzing his thoughts and revealing his pecuHarities of action, by bringing out his characteristic features — physical, mentiil, and moral, as disclosed in his contact with his fellow men. Francis Parkman. The purpose of the writer, announced in the first sentence, at once limits the material to such as will emphasize the heroism of Parkman. When a biographer has with full knowledge fixed upon what he conceives to be the traits dominant in the person of whom he is writing he will quite properly emphasize such details as will keep those traits before the reader. The dangers of this practice are those that come from over- emphasis or undue subordination, resulting in an inaccurate, distorted, or false portrait. What can be said of this biography from that standpoint? 148. A still greater gift to the literature of this country. Parkman's style is illustrated on pp. 461 ff. and, still better, in the book from which the selec- tion is taken. 148. Wolfe, James (1727-1759), major-general in the British army. See pp. 461 ff. Topics: Write a biographical sketch of any relative or acquaintance for the sake of eraphasiaing his most characteristic qualities, those usually over- looked, those that most dcliglit his enemies. Write an obituary notice of such a person in a way to satisfy his relatives an<'l friends, as well as his more critical acquaintances, without excess of praise or of feeling. Goldwin Smith. An example of chiiracter portrayal of the best kind, termed by the author " some i)ersonal impressions formed in a friend- 624 NOTES ship which extended over more than forty-five years," this sketch of Goldwin Smith "conveys an adequate picture of him as he was in his best years." Hvcry element of character drawing may be found in it — biographical facts, sympathetic and discerning interpretation, discriminating criticism, illuminating anecdote, and, in the closing sentence, by way of summary, a most telling use of the effect made by Goldwin Smitii upon those among whom he lived. Observe the estimate the writer must have not only of his subject, but of the whole nature and history of the country and the time in order to write such an article. Is any side of the man's nature obviously neglected? What is the value of the anecdote of King John? Point out the ways in which the personal characteristics and the appearance of the man are made clear. Characterize the style, the tone. Explain the organization of the whole. Is the ending effective? How is it related to the beginning? 149. Nestor, a Grecian hero, said to have ruled over three generations of men. 149. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), English poet, critic, and philosopher. A philosophical democrat, he once planned to emigrate to America and found a Utopian republic. 149. Reform Bill. Enacted into law in 1832, it altered the basis of repre- sentation in the House of Commons, brought the House closer to the people, made it more sensitive to their demands, and in many ways changed the course of British politics. 149. Budget Bill. Passed by the Commons in 190Q, its veto by the House of Lords brought about the great constitutional change which deprived the Lords of the veto power. 149. Peelites, adherents of Sir Robert Peel, prime minister 1841-1846. 149. Gladstone, Wi\l\a.Tn Ewart (1809-1898), great English Liberal states- man, four times prime minister. 149. Herbert, Cardwell, members of Peel's ministry. « 149. Palmer, Rounsell (181 2-1895), attorney general of England 1863-1866, twice lord chancellor. Counsel for Great Britain in the trial of the Alabama claims. 149. Duke of Newcastle. Henry Pelham Clinton (1811-1864), secretary of war at the beginning of the Crimean War. 151. Mansel, Henry Longueville (1820-1871), writer on logic, theology, and metaphysics. 151. Maurice, John Frederick Denison (1805-1872), a leader of the " Broad church " party. 153. Cobden, Richard (1804-1865), English Liberal statesman, leader in the movement to repeal the Corn Laws. 153. Bright, John (1811-1899), Radical statesman, friend ot Cobden; leader in Corn Law and suffrage reform movements. Both he and Cobden were leaders in tlie " Manchester school " of politics, to which Goldwin Smith belonged. NOTES 625 154. Louis Napoleon (1808-1873), nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. Elected president of France in 1848, he became emperor by the coup d'etat of Dec. 2, 1851, and assumed the title of Napoleon III. 155. Tweed, William Marcy (1823-1878), colossal and notorious political grafter of New York, who differed from most of his successors in that he died in prison. 155. Jim Fiskc, Judge Barnard, disreputable participants in a great financial scandal and crisis in 1867. 155. Pym, Sir Henry Vane the younger, Algernon Sidney, three great statesmen and leaders in the struggle for English liberty in the seventeenth century. Consult any history of England, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Dictionary of National Biography. 155. Disraeli, Benjamin (1805-1881), English statesman and author. 158. Bagehot, Walter (1826-1877), writer on economics, politics, and history. 159. Mazzini, Giuseppe (1805-1872), an Italian patriot and republican leader. 161. Erasmus (i465?-i536), a celebrated Dutch scholar; a leader in the revival of learning. 161. Bacon, Francis (1561-1626), English philosopher, statesman, and author. 161. Meyers, Frederic William Henry (1843-1901), English poet and essayist. 161. Froude, James Anthony (1818-1894), English historian. 162. Freeman, Edward A. (1823-1892), EngHsh historian, appointed Regius professor of history at O.xford in 1884. 164. Bodleian, an Oxford library founded by Sir Thomas Bodley (1544-1612). INFORMAL ESSAY The informal essay aims at imparting the fruits of observation and reflection in an easy strain. (See Hazlitt's remarks on " The Tatler," p. 201.) On account of the tone of intimate communication between the writer and his reader it is often called the " familiar " essay, and from its being in most cases a revelation of the personality of the writer it is also referred to as the " personal " essay. Its themes are as diverse as the tastes and interests of its writers, from the impressions of a rainy day to a reflection on immor- tality. Its aim may be to describe a sensation, to create a mood, or to establish a highly speculative theory. The informal essay does not require the same closeness of structure as other forms of exposition. Unity of a kind it must have, but it is not of the kind that depends upon the systematic arrangement of a plan and a regular progression from point to point. Its unity is one of feeling. It permits digressions and excursions, provided they fuse with the tone and temper of the discourse. A large discursiveness, a freedom in allusion and iilus- 626 NOTES tration. may even be a distinguishing \irluc of the informal essay. Because of its emotional coloring, the essay displays more than common figurativeness in its language and is careful of its rhythmic articulation. The Realm of the Commonplace. Is the preaching in this essaj- relieved in any way? What personal traits can you discern in the writer? Does he adhere strictly to the realm of the commonplace? What is the purpose of the long description near the end ? Does it fuse with the rest of the essay? 168. " Look into tJic heavens," etc., " Job," xxxv, 5. 170. '■ Hast thou entered," etc., " Job," .x.vxviii, 22. Apology for Idlers. Hardly any writer of English prose devoted a more conscious care to his style than did Robert Louis Stevenson. Steven- son has also written an essay, " On Some Tccluiical Elements of Style in Literature," abounding in interesting suggestions. He describes literature as a web or pattern : " The true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself. In every properly constructed sentence there should be observed this knot or hitch ; so that (however delicately) we are led to foresee, to expect, and then to welcome the successive phrases. The pleasure may be heightened by an element of surprise, as, very grossly, in the common figure of the antithesis, or, with much greater subtlety, where an antithesis is first suggested and then deftly evaded. I^ach phrase, besides, is to be comely in itself; and between the implication and the evolution of the sentence there should be a satisfying equipoise of sound ; for nothing more often disappoints the ear than a sentence solemnly and sonorously prepared, and hastily and weakly finished. Nor should the balance be too striking and exact, for the one rule is to be infinitely various ; to interest, to disappoint, to surprise, and yet still to gratifj- ; to be ever changing, as it were, the stitch, and yet still to give the effect of an ingenious neatness." A little later he explains what he means by " the comely phrase " : " Each phrase of each sentence, like an air or a recitative in music, should be so artfully compounded out of long and short, out of accented and unaccented, as to gratify the sensual ear. And of this the ear is the sole judge. It is impossible to lay down laws. Even in our accentual and rhythmic language no analysis can find tlie secret of the beauty of a verse; how much less, then, of those phnises, such as prose is built of, which obey no law but to be lawless and yet to please? " In summing up he again emphasizes the prose- writer's task " of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical ... of artfully combining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth, of weaving his argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods." And this is his heartening conclusion : " We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage ; how many faculties, whether I NOTES 627 of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it ; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasiu-e. From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised. We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer." Applying the figure of the web to the present essay, examine it for uni- formity of texture and harmony of design. Are there any " purple patches- " in this essay or " superposed ornament "? Characterize the dominant tone. Note the sentences which illustrate " expectedness," "surprise," evasion of the obvious, " satisfjdng equipoise of sound." Which of these qualities would you attribute to the first and last sentences of the first paragraph? to the sentences in the second paragraph? to the last four sentences of the essay ? This paper illustrates not only Stevenson's care for " the comely phrase " but his regard for the value of the single word. In all writing that is not coldly expository the success of a word depends as much on its associations, whether of sound or sense, as on its common meaning. It is this associative power which Stevenson has in mind when he writes, in the essay on Style already quoted, that " the first merit which attracts in the pages of a good writer, or the talk of a brilliant conversationalist, is the apt choice and contrast of the words employed. It is, indeed, a strange art to take these blocks, rudely conceived for the purpose of the market or the bar, and by tact of application touch them to the finest meanings and distinctions, restore to them their primal energy, wittily shift them to another issue, or make of them a driun to rouse the passions." Pick out a number of common words and phrases which seem to be transformed in significance by Stevenson's appliaition of them. Does Stevenson's phrasing ever fall into the commonplace, the rhetorical, the stilted? 173. lese-respectability, formed by Stevenson on the model of lese- majeste. 174. glory of having taken Rome. An aUusion to the invasion of Rome by the Gauls in 398 B.C. Johnson, see p. 15 and note. Lady of Shalott. See Tennyson's poem of that name. 175. between sleep and waking. Cf. "King Lear," Act i, Scene 2- " Got 'tween asleep and wake." Emphyteusis and Stillicidc, terms of Roman law. The first means the legal renting of groimd, the second a continual dropping of water. Balzac, Honore de (i 799-1850), the great French realistic novelist. 176. Sainle-Beuve, Charles Augustin (1804- 1869), the greatest of French critics. 177. old shepherd telling his talc, a recollection of Milton's " L'AUegro." 179. Colonel Newcomc, Fred Bayham, Mr. Barnes, characters in Thack- eray's novel, " The Ncwcomes." 6:8 NOTES Falsliijf. the famous comic character in " Henry TV " and " Merry Wives of W indsor." J-iiiniblHis, the leadiriR character in Marlowe's " Jew of Malta." llazlitl . . . Kortluok. James Northcotc (i 746-1831) was a painter whose talk Hazlitt has recorded in a book, the last one he publislied, " The Convers;\tions of James Northcote." 180. quality of nirrcy, etc., a reference to the famous speech of Portia ill " 'ihe Merchant of Venice." 181. When they told Joan of Arc, etc. See page 437. "so careless of the single life." Tennj-son's " In Memoriam," LV. Shakespeare . . . Sir Thomas Lucy. An allusion to a legend of a deer-stealing exploit bj- Shakespeare. Topics: On writing about one's self, The pleasure of traveling, On campus nuisances. The magazine habit, An apology for the Saturday Ev< niiig Post, The recreations of a student. On being good. On the decay of hazing. On going to church. On studying a classic. On college heroes, On polite lying. Reflections in a library, On cultivating a garden. On campus customs. On barber shops. On the feeling of consciousness in freshmen. On the speech of college men. On the seriousness of sport, On letter writing. On dormitories. On the uses of leisure. Thoughts on a college course. On mother's flower garden. On fishing. On being " intro- duced," On household pets. The first college holiday. On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth. The two forms of Hazlitt's essay reproduced in the text give point to many a saying on the importance of the right word. The essay first appeared, in the form printed at the bottom of the page, in the Monthly Magazine (March, 1827) and was re- published, with omissions and variations, after Hazlitt's death in the " Lit- erar>^ Remains " (1836). The variations have been printed in italics, and ex]:)re5sions in each text having no correspondence in the other have been set in brackets. Are the expressions in the original version ever incorrect or improper? Has Hazlitt substituted " finer " or less usual words? What has been the result of his verbal changes in respect to associative value, sound coloring, in the effect on " equipoise of sound "? Does the result give the impression of being labored? Compare this essay with the " Apology for Idlers " in its general structure and its " web." What are the distinctive stylistic merits of each essay? 183. " The vast," etc. An adaptation from Addison's " Cato," Act v Scene i, " The wide, the unbounded prospect, lies before me." The use of quotation is in many writers, and in none more conspicuously than in Hazlitt, a prominent feature of style. When the mind is saturated in the stream of poetic reminiscence, the phrases of the poets will invade the natural utterance and impart to the expression something of tlieir own tone. It is a rich source of suggestiveness in style, but is a most dangerous snare for the unpracticed. The slightest approach to impropriety or ostentation converts NOTES 629 the charm to a poison. The writer must be absolutely at ease with the phrases he handles, must make them fit as naturally and as closely into his context as any familiar word of his vocabulary, so naturally that quotation marks look like an impertinent intrusion. He may then be indulged in the licence which Hazlitt often permits himself of slightly altering and adapting the words of others to bring them into harmony with his own thought. So integral a part of Hazlitt's expression do these phrases become that when the marks are omitted it is often difficult to distinguish them from their surroundings. Other instances of this practice are pointed out in " The Physical Basis of Life," " An Apology for Idlers," " Mark Twain," " Tur- ner's Slave Ship," " An Accountant," and elsewhere. " bear a charmed life." " Macbeth," Act v. Scene 8. " Bidding the lovely scene," etc. Collins's Ode, " The Passions," 32. 184. " this sensible, warm motion," etc. " Measure for Measure," Act iii. Scene i. 185. " wine of life." " Macbeth," Act ii, Scene 3. " as in a glass darkly." " I Corinthians," xiii, 12. the foolish fat scullion. See Sterne's " Tristram Shandy," Volume 5, Chapter 7. 186. " Life, thou strange thing," etc. From " The Art of War," a poem by Joseph Fawcett, Hazlitt's friend. 187. " the feast of reason," etc. Pope's " Imitations of Horace," Satire I, line 128. " brave, sublunary things." Cf. " Those brave translunary things." Michael Drayton; " To Henry Reynolds." 188. the mighty world of eye and ear. Wordsworth's " Tintern Abbey," line 105. " the stockdovc^s notes," etc. Thomson's " Castle of Indolence " Book I, Stanza 4. The quotation is given more exactly in the original version. 189. Rembrandt, the great Dutch painter of the seventeenth century. It was in despair of attaining an art like Rembrandt's, Hazlitt tells us else- where, that he abandoned the career of a painter which he had undertaken before turning to literature. 190. / started in life, etc. Hazlitt was one of the stanchest English supporters of the French Revolution and all its effects. He defied British sentiment in his enthusiasm for Napoleon and appeared heartbroken at the news of Waterloo. This was one of the reasons for his unpopu- larity. 192. " E en from the tomb," etc. Gray's " Elegy in a Country Church- yard." " all the life of life." Burns's " Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn." 193. " From the last dregs," etc. Dryden's " Aurengzebe," Act iv, Scene i. 194. " treason domestic," etc. " Macbeth," Act iii, Scene 2. " reverbs its own hollowness." " King Lear," Act i, Scene i. 630 NOTES REVIEWS AND CRITICISMS Jane Austens Emma. Reviewing is the branch of crilicism vvhicli aims til Kinvcy an idea of a work of art to persons having no acquaintance with it. Tlie duty of the reviewer is more to translate than it is to judge. He must Kive a just impression of the content and the general spirit of the work. To do this implies a certain degree of judgment, for it is impossible for any person to speak in so colorless a way about any work of art as to leave no trace of his attitude toward it. But the success of a review depends on the writer's capacity for reproducing, even with a remote resemblance, the impression of the original in its body and spirit. In the case of a novel or a play the simplest manner of doing this is by means of a summary which indicates the kind of action and persons with which the story is concerned. Such is the method employed by Scott in his essay on Jane Austen. A paragraph of generalization is followed by a series of summaries and a brief conclusion. Note the difference in the length of the summaries. Is the shortest any less complete than the longest? Which most effectively con- tributes to the writer's aim ? Jane Austen (1775-1817), wrote her masterpieces of observation and portrayal of quiet country life amid complete popular indifference. Scott was the first prominent person to call attention, in the year before her death, to her work. She has since taken her place with the classics. 195. Bayes, a character in Buckingham's " Rehearsal." Miss Edgcworlh, ^Maria (i 767-1849), a writer of novels of fashionable life and of Irish character, for whom Scott had great admiration. Her reputation was high in her own day, but has since suffered an eclipse. Only her Irish stories, like " Castle Rackrent," now sustain her fame. Topics: Write a review of a recent novel, a play, or poem by some writer of repute, such as W. J. Locke, Joseph Conrad, William De Morgan, .\rnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, Alfred Noyes, John Masefield, Edith Wharton, Eden Philpotts, J. M. Barrie, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Wing Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones. The Tatler. Hazlitt's object in this passage is to reproduce the impression which he has received from a set of miscellaneous essays, and he does so without e.'qjressing a judgment, unless we call a judgment the general compliment contained in the first sentence. The method is to suggest the subjects, the atmosphere, the observation, the humor, the reflection of " The Tatler," not bj- means of general remarks on each topic, but by a series of concrete details, each contributing a telling touch and all combining to create the very feeling trf the original. This is called impressionistic criticism, and in the hands of a skilful writer, of a writer with restraint as well as apprecia- tion, it may produce effects as fine as the work of which it treats. The Tatler was the first of the famous eighteenth-century essay-periodi- cals. Richard Steele, its founder, and Joseph Addison were the chief con- tributors. It ran from April 12, 1709, to Jan. 2, 1711, and was succeeded by " The Spectator." NOTES 63 1 201. Montaigne, Michel de (1533-1592), is not only the first, but the greatest of all essayists. Isaac BickerstaJJ, Esq. This name had just been made notorious by Swift and was assumed by Steele in connection with " The Tatler." the disastrous strokes, etc. Compare " Othello," Act i. Scene 3: " Some distressful stroke that my youth suffered." He dwells with a secret satisfaction. " The Tatler," No. 107. the club at the Trumpet. " The Tatler," No. 132. the cavalcade, etc. " The Tatler," No. 86. 202. the upholsterer and his companions. " The Tatler," Nos. 155, 160, 178. burlesque copy of verses. " The Tatler," No. 238. These verses were written by Swift. Plutarch [c. 46-120), a prolific Greek writer, whose most famous work is a series of Parallel Lives of the Greeks and Romans, of which there are several well-known English translations. Betterton, Mrs. Oldfield, Penkethman, Bullock, are all actors of that day. Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill (1650-1722), was probabh^ the greatest of all British generals. Marshal Turenne (1611-1675), a great French general. Vanbrugh, Sir John (?i664-i726), one of the chief writers of Restoration comedies. Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), the greatest of the classical school in English poetry. Write an appreciation of " The Essays of Elia," a volume of Hazlitt's essays, the novels of Dickens, the poetry of Scott, the tales of Poe, a story of Cooper's, Mark Twain's " Huckleberry Finn " and " Tom Sawyer," Steven- son's stories of adventure, Tennyson's " Idylls of the King," the poetry of Burns. The Waverley Novels. In this passage we have an illustration of criticism exercising its supreme function, that of judging the qualities which entitle a writer to a rank among the great ones in the art. In distinction from the creative process involved in Hazhtt's remarks on " The Tatler," the process here may be called analytic, the object being to indicate the elements underljnng the great effects which Scott's novels produce, to trace the sources of their power and thereby to estimate their importance in art and their duration. Would Mr. Woodberry's criticism be of any value to persons who did not know Scott's novels? What value does it have for persons familiar with Scott? The Waverley Novels were the outstanding literary feature, rivalled only by Byron's poetry, of the period during which they were produced, 1814- 1832. Although the more romantic novels of tlie series, such as " Ivanhoe " and " Quentin Durward," are the most popular, the greatest without doubt are those which came before and dealt with the more familiar Scottish environment. It is the latter class that chiefly forms the basis of Professor Woodberry's analysis. 6 1,2 NOTES 203. George Constable. In a note to his Autobiography (see Loclthart'j " Lite of Scott." Chapter i), Scott refers to CJeorgc Constiibie as an old friend of his father's. " He had many of the peculiarities of temper which long afterwards I tried to develop in the character of Jonathan Oldbuck." John Clerk of Eldin (i 728-181 2). " Many traits of the elder Clerk were, his son has no doubt, embroidered on the character of George Constable in the composition of Jonathan Oldbuck." Lockhart's " Life of Scott," Chapter 5. The Antiquary (1816) was the third in the series of Waverley Novels and had a contemporary setting. Laidlaw, William (1780-1845), who in 1817 became Scott's steward at .\l)botsford and subsequently his amanuensis. Referring to Laidlaw in this connection, Lockhart says (Chapter 7) : "I have the best reason to believe that the kind and manly character of Dandie, the gentle and delicious one of his wife, and some at least of the most picturesque peculiarities of the menage at Charlieshopc, were filled up from Scott's observation of a family with one of whose members he had, through the best part of his life, a close and affectionate connection." CasUc Dangerous, the last of the Waverley Novels. To refresh his memory of the scenes in which the action of this novel is set, Scott paid a visit to Douglas Castle before he began to compose. 204. Buncc. a character in " The Pirate." Sir Percie Shafton, a character in " The Legend of IMontrose." Count Robert of Paris, the last but one of Scott's novels, deals with the court of Alexius I, Emperor of the East at the end of the eleventh century. Qucnlin Durward, the hero of a romance set in the France of Louis XL Richard Lionheart. Richard I figures prominently in both " Ivanhoe " and " The Talisman." 205. A Jacobite, a supporter of the exiled Stuarts. The last uprising in favor of the descendants of James II, in 1745, forms the basis of " Wa- verley," which gave its name to the whole series of Scott's romances. Ravnswood, the hero in " The Bride of Lammermoor." 207. the old fisherman. See p. 415. 208. ''forms more real," etc. Shelley's " Prometheus Unbound," Act i, line 748. the form and pressure. Cf. " Hamlet," Act iii. Scene 2. Topics: Dickens's treatment of character compared with Thackeray's, George Eliot's portraiture of rural life, Wordsworth's mountaineers, The treatment of nature in Hardy's novels, Conan Doyle as a maker of plots, The satiric power of Swift, " The .\ncient Mariner " as a work of art, \ perfect sonnet. The imagery in " Paradise Lost." Mark Twain. This passage illustrates an aspect of scientific criticism, — the interpretation of literature in relation to its environment. Mark Twain's writings are not here viewed in their conformity to the rules of art, but as an expression of fundamental national traits, as an " assertion NOTES 633 of the ordinary self of the ordinary American." What is the critic's attitude toward the Americanism of Mark Twain? How is the attitude expressed? Compare it with Mr. Croly's " Lincoln as more than an Ameri- can." 209. Like the story. This is an allusion to something that has gone before in this essay. " divine average." Walt Whitman, " Starting from Paumanok," line Wandering through exhumed Pompeii, etc. These references to Mark Twain's foreign impressions are all to be found in " Innocents Abroad," where they are easily located. 210. Corporal Nym, a character in " Henry V." For his use of this favorite phrase see Act ii. Scene i. the glory that was Greece, etc. Poe, " To Helen " (1831). Lord Chesterfield (1694— 1773), noted for the elegance of his manners. His " Letters to his Son " constitute a code of worldly conduct in which the social graces assume great importance. Count D'Orsay (1801— 1852), a noted wit and dandy. Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864). His poetry and prose is character- ized by classical elegance of form. 211. Fear grace, etc. See Walt Whitman, " As I Sat Alone by Blue Ontario's Shore," line 47: "Fear grace — Fear elegance, civilization, delicatesse." Tom Paine (i 737-1809). His writing was a prominent force during both the American and the French Revolutions. 212. Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899), a celebrated American freethinker. 813. The level of the address at Gettysburg. See p. 304. " Beautiful ! my Country I " Lowell, " Commemoration Ode." in the dead vast, etc. Cf. " Handet," Act i. Scene 2 : "In the dead vast and middle of the night." the firing of a national joke, etc. Cf. Emerson's " Hymn Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument " : " Here once the embattled farmers stood And fired the shot heard round the world." Topics: Mediaeval knighthood as seen in Scott's romances, Shakespeare's " Henry V " as an expression of British patriotism, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Puritanism, Rudyard Kipling and Imperialism, Socialistic ideals in the novels of H. G. Wells, An analysis of the sectional flavor in some Ameri- can story writer — O. Henry, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Thomas Nelson Page, George W. Cable, Hamlin Garland. Turner's " Slave Ship." The description of Turner's " Slave Ship " by Ruskin corresponds to the review of a literary work. The critic aims to convey an idea of the design, the composition, the color and the total impression of the painting. Note the extent to which preci.sc detail is 6^4 NOTES cniplo> ed and how this dt-tail is transformed by means of the highly poetic vocabulary. Examine the rhythm of the sentences and see if they con- form to Stevenson's requirement (p. 626) of avoiding metrical regularity. / / / Observe the endings of the two paragraphs : " The desolate heave of the / / / / / / / / / sepulchral waves,! I incarnadines the multitudinous sea"; " the open, deep / / / illimitable sea." The poetic effect is here emphasized by the mingling of Shakespeare's language, and perhaps Milton's, with Ruskin's ov.n glowing phrases. One of the e.\-prossions is a bold transcription from " Macbeth," Act ii. Scene 2 : " the multitudinous seas incarnadine " ; another may have been suggested by " Paradise Lost," II, 892 : " a dark, illimitable ocean without bound." Turner, J. M. W. (1775-1851), the greatest of English landscape painters. Ruskin wrote his first important book, " Modern Painters," for the purpose of vindicating the greatness of Turner's art in comparison with the classical French and Italian painters. The Classical Landscapes of Claude. This is a coldly analytical ac- count of an artist to whom Ruskin apparently tries to do justice though he does not admire him. Compare the detailed descriptions of Claude's two canvases with the description of " The Slave Ship." Compare the accompanying illustration to determine the truthfulness of Ruskin in detail and in the general spirit. Criticise the paragraphing of the entire selection. Claude Gelee, also called Claude of Lorraine, 1600-1682. 216. Sahalor Rosa (1615-1673), noted as a painter of wild and rugged landscapes. EDITORD^LS The editorial is a kind of essay; it is usually a paragraph or more of comment based upon current events or conditions. The term is so loosely used, however, that what is called an editorial may be any one of many kinds of writing, including among others : (i) a summary of news with brief com- ment, (2) a statement of facts with explanation, (3) a statement of fact with interpretation, (4) a generalization from apparently unrelated matters, (5) a character sketch or biographical notice, (6) an analysis, for purposes of argument, of opinions or arguments presented in current discussion, (7) a deductive application of fundamental principles to current events or prob- lems, (8) a short, informal argument, (g) a brief essay on any topic, social, political, or literary, which is timely and likely to interest the readers. Its aim is to give instruction, to form or direct public opinion, or to induce action based on conviction or feeling, or on both. In general, then, the editorial aims to make clear the significance of cur- rent events or conditions and to create or direct opinion based upon the NOTES 635 realization of that significance. The writer of editorials has the advantage of abundant and varied topics and of potential interest on the part of the reader. He must, though, carefully consider liis purpose and his readers and adapt his remarks to both. He must write clearly and reasonably, and must be sure not only that he understands fully both facts and principles involved, but also that his opinion is not merely individual, but such as to offer to the generality of readers some common ground of agreement. To which class mentioned does each editorial in this book belong? Are the following selections in other parts of the book editorials? " Mark Twain," " The Case Against the Single Tax," " Professor Huxley's Lec- tures," " The Mathematician and the Engineer," " Is Agriculture Declin- ing? " " Direct Presidential Nominations." Select from newspapers or magazines two or three specimens to illustrate each kind mentioned. ARGUMENT A formal argument consists theoretically of Introduction, Body, and Conclusion. The introduction is expository in tone and should contain (i) a statement of the significance of the question, (2) a presentation of whatever facts and explanations may be needful for an intelligent under- standing of the discussion, (3) a statement of the opposing views which give the occasion for a debate. (4) Possibly in such a statement some differences of opinion will turn out to be only apparent, or it may be worth while, in any case, to point out what is held in common by both sides ; but the cul- mination of the introduction should be (5) the resolution of the conflicting opinions into a few precisely phrased questions, which are called Special Issues. The Body of the argument then takes up the Special Issues one by one and adduces evidence either in support or refutation, while the Con- clusion may sum up the argument, particularly if the discussion has been a long one, or again emphasize the importance of the issue. .'\n illustration of an argument according to the plan just outlined may be seen in the student Brief on the Hetch-Hetchy question in Appendix I. But it will be found in practice that argument very rarely conforms precisely to such a rigid scheme, and often departs from it very widely. The argument proper may, for example, invade the introduction when a statement of facts carries with it an implied weight of proof, or the reverse process may be followed, as when certain explanations of fact are withheld till they can serve effectively to support a contention. A brief, like the model mentioned, is always desirable, but in writing out the argument one may gain in naturalness, in grace, and in persuasive effectiveness by concealing the stiff skeleton. It is not the happiest method of expanding briefs which merely rewrites the original statements in longer lines. 636 NOTES INTRODUCTION The Three Hypotheses. Huxley's object in the scries of lectures in- troduccil by this i)assage is to set up a theory of the world which is hostile to popular religious prejudice. The introduction, it will be observed, consists of a statement of the significance of the question, an c.xi)lanation of the conflicting theories concerning it, and the putting of the question. Is Huxley's statement of the opposing views colored by his own convictions? How does he minimize the shock tP the prejudices of his audience? See in this connection " Professor Huxley's Lectures," p. 248. Make nn outline of the introduction in Brief form. 232. Pascal, Blaise (1623-1662), French mathematician and philosopher. 235. Hiitton. James (i 726-1 797), Scottish geologist. Lycll. Sir Charles (1797-1875), British geologist. 236. llie English Divina Commcdla. See note on Dante, p. 622. 238. undifferentiated protoplasmic matter. See " On the Physical Basis of Life," p. 90. Letter to General McClellan. Notice that this brief series of naked sentences contains a statement of the situation, the opposing opinions, and the questions at issue ; that the five questions form the pegs for a com- plete argument. The Case against the Single Tax. What elements of an introduction does this passage contain? Obser\e that the writer states only the opinions of those who favor the Single Tax. Is there any advantage in withholding at this point the opposing set of \-iews? Do you think that the fourth para- graph betrays the writer's bias? For another definition of the Single Tax see p. 13. For an introduction with full definitions and elaborate historical material see Taft's " The Monroe Doctrine " and the accompanying outline. Topics: The encouragement of a United States merchant marine. The conservation of natural resources. The national ownership of public utili- ties, The Federal control of trade-unions, The Initiative, Referendum and Recall, The recall of judicial decisions, The value of municipal markets, The control of immigration, The regulation of the tarifl, An international court of arbitration. The indeterminate sentence. The commission form of government. The reh tive value of the horse and automobile for army transportation, National prohibition. The checking of private incomes, Simplified spelling. Coeducation, Evidence of life in Mars, Our policy in the Philippines, Capital punishment. The case for feminism. The value of Syndicalism, Physical and moral influences of war. EVIDENCE Council Government. This is a section of an argument which should be studied for the use of evidence. The first part is instructive as show- NOTES 637 mg the necessity of being on one's guard against hasty conclusions. It is the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc which the writer uncovers. Because certain improvements have followed on certain changes it does not follow necessarily that the improvements are due to the changes. The writer refutes the assumption in a general way and then proceeds to adduce detailed evidence to confirm the doubts which he has raised in tlie first part of the article. Observe the method of substantiating statements of fact by refer- ence to sources and authorities. Professor Huxley's Lectures. See " The Three Hypotheses," p. 232. This article is important for its lesson in the use of the argument from authority. Young writers are especially prone to attribute weight to opin- ions without regard to a particular person's qualification for holding an opinion. Mr. Godkin advances his principle in the fourth paragraph, but it is his thorough and unflinching application of the test to an educated and highly respected class of persons that affords the happiest possible illustra- tion of the necessity for examining the credentials of a witness before he is admitted into court. Study the use of authorities in the " Defence of the House of Lords " (p. 271), " The Intellectual Powers of Woman " (p. 276), "The Nation's Pledge" (p. 223), and in the student Brief in Appendix I. 249. Moody, D. L. (1837-1899), a popular Evangelical preacher. 250. Professor Tyndall, John (1820-1893), the eminent naturalist who ranks close to Darwin and Huxley among the propagators of evolutionary doctrine. 257. Principal Dawson, Sir John William (1820-1899), Principal at McGill University in Montreal, was by profession a geologist but occasion- ally wrote on the relation of geology to theology. St. George Mivart (1827-1900), a distinguished biologist who attempted to reconcile the theory of evolution with his Catholic faith. BODY Speech on Old-Age Pensions. This is a speech delivered in the course of a Parliamentary debate. The introduction here is not of the usual kind, being intended only to link on to the preceding speech. The speaker, how- ever, takes care to state what seem to him to be the important questions involved. Are the objections to the various features of the measure sufficiently substantiated? Find out something about the speaker by which you may test his fitness for expressing such opinions as he advances. Examine the speech as an example of oral English. Notice its graceful fluency, its tone of easy but dignified conversation, its refined moderation unalloyed with any rhetorical flourishes. Look up some of the speeches in the Congressional Record for comparison. Examine the structure of the speech in connection with the outline of the editors. Notice the ease of the logical transitions. 638 NOTES Defence of the House of Lords. This, like the prcccdinR speech, is addressed to an audience rcciuiring no preliminary explanation of the question. The argument is based on e.xample, on authority, and on direct e.xperience. Analyze the structure and make a Brief of the argument. Compare the tone and style with Mr. Balfour's speech. 272. ^fr. Brycc, James, statesman and scholar, and one-time British Ambassador to the United States. Selections from a numl)cr of his writings appear in this volume. His chief work is " The .American Commonwealth." REFUTATION Refutation consists in pointing out the errors of statement or fallacies of reasoning in the arguments of an opponent. Sometimes the process is purely destructive, as in the beginning of " Council Government versus Mayor Government '' or in " Professor Hu.xley's Lectures " or in " The Intellectual Powers of Woman." Sometimes it is hard to distinguish from direct argument, as the disproof of an opponent's statement may involve the introduction of evidence in support of one's own contention. The latter is true of " The Mathematician and the Engineer " in which the writer, while he is denying the contention that the engineer is dependent on the mathe- matician, supplies e\-idence to show that the engineer is /wdependent of the mathematician. The same can be said of e.x-President Taft's argument on the Monroe Doctrine which, in the course of overthrowing a series of objec- tions, establishes the positive value of the Doctrine. The Intellectual Powers of Woman. The writer of this article undertakes no more than to establish that the common assumption of wo- man's natural and necessary intellectual inferiority is founded on prejudice and fallacy. He does not attempt to assert the intellectual equality of wo- man with man because his purpose is strictly refutation. After an intro- ducton.' e.xplanation of the \'iew which he wishes to combat, he examines the argument that women are incapable of the highest intellectual attain- ments because they have never yet displaj-ed them. He tries to reduce this argument to an absurdity by a series of analogies from history and by emphasizing some neglected factors in the situation. He then points out how, by a perversion of reason, the idea has gained currency of woman's inability to attain even the middle heights, and this prejudice he opposes by an appeal to facts. Note the means by which the threads of the argument are held together. How is the conclusion of the first part of the discussion marked? Observe the frequent reiteration of the central idea and the use of summarj' in the final stages of the argument. What is gained by the repetition? Is it ever excessive ? What are the chief stylistic virtues of the essay ? 278. Disquisitioiies Arithmetics (1801), a work which first attracted attention to Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) who later became eminent as a mathematician. NOTES 639 283. Fenelon, Francois (1651-1715), French bishop, author of a famous educational novel, " Telemaque." Mrs. Somerville, Mary (1780-1872), held a dignified position among British mathematicians. Mine. Kovalewski, Sonia (1850-1891), a Russian woman, was professor of mathematics at the University of Stockholm and attained the highest honors of her profession. 284. LeibfiUz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716), the great German phi- losopher and mathematician. 285. ex vi termini, from the very meaning of the expression. 289. Kant, Immanuel (i 724-1804), probably the greatest philosopher of modern times. 290. Mr. Gosse, Edmund, a distinguished living English critic. Mary Cassatt, a painter of American birth residing in Paris. She exhibited in New York in 1898. Mine. Demont-Brcton, Virginie, whose paintings have won high prizes and are to be found in many European galleries. 291. Hermann Grimm (1828-iqoi), a well-known German critic. The Mathematician and the Engineer. In both this and the next selection a certain view is combated by an attempt to establish the opposite view, so that it is not easy to distinguish these from direct argument. Criticise the argument that the services of the mathematician are becoming of less importance to the engineer because the engineer is acquiring mastery of mathematical methods. Are any of the points too hastily dismissed? Is the chief contention satisfactorily supported ? 294. Lord Kelvin, William Thomson (1824-1907), the great physicist. Popular Control of National Wealth. This illustrates a method of sum- marizing the points of an argument and then refuting objections. Do you approve of the style of this article in respect both to diction and sentence- form? PERSUASION Persuasion is not to be regarded as a special section in an argument, but as a quality which pervades its entire fabric. It is nothing but the art of so han- dling the material, so adapting it to the audience as most readily to secure the desired effect. Persuasive skill is not, as is sometimes imagined, merely a matter of emotional appeal. It is dependent on all the factors which are termed p.sychological, on a knowledge of the prejudices and interests of the audience, of the motives by which they can be influenced, and of the ideals to which they will respond. A knowledge of these factors determines the entire conduct of an argument — the arrangement of its parts, the throwing of the emphasis, and even the kind of evidence that shall be used. The test of persuasiveness should be applicable to practically any argument. See the notes on " The Organization of Farmers " and on " The Social Value of the College-Bred." 640 NOTES The two addresses given under Persuasion represent tlic appeal to an audience in the simplest form. Notice the manner in which the speaker gets into touch with his hearers and how, once their attention is gained, he carries them up to the higher moral levels. Both these addresses arc excel- lent examples of how elevation of tone may be attained by a careful selection of common words. ELEMENTS IN COMBINATION The Monroe Doctrine. This is the first of a series of lectures delivered by e.x-President Taft on the subject, " The United States and Peace." How does the argument presented in this article relate itself to the general sulj- ject? To what extent is the structure of the article reducible to the conventional form of an argument? Does the historical review with which the Introduction opens have a direct bearing on the argument? Reduce the four questions involved in the discussion to a single dominant issue. Observe that Mr. Taft defines the limits of the Monroe Doctrine after stating the objections of its opponents. What is the advantage of this arrangement? E.xamine the argument against our cooperating with the A. B. C. powers in the light of events of 19 14. 308. 27/e Holy Alliance was formed by the countries mentioned, in 1815, immediately after the downfall of Napoleon, for the purpose of counter- acting the movement against the established or so-called Legitimate mou- archs to which the career of Napoleon had given a strong impetus. 309. the policy was insisted on, etc. This dispute arose in 1895, during Cleveland's second term, and was settled in November, 1896. Mr. Olncy was then Secretary of State. 310. Canning, George (1770-1827), an influential statesman, at various times Foreign Secretary in the British Cabinet. His interest in establishing the Monroe Doctrine is clearly and forcibly expressed by a sentence in one of his speeches (December 12, 1826) in which he explains his reason for recognizing the independence of the Spanish- American republics: "I resolved that if France had Spain, it should not be Spain with the Indies. I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old." INFORMAL ARGUMENT The distinction between formal and informal argument is somewhat arbitrary and no sharp line between the two can be drawn. But an analysis of the selections under each head will reveal a considerable difTerence in spirit and method. Formal argument is commonly concerned with ques- tions capable of direct proof or refutation and requires that its contentions shall be supported by material evidence, while informal argument, being usually the expression of an opinion or a conviction, needs to be justified only by a process of general or theoretical reasoning. The latter is the form NOTES 641 of argument which people are most commonly called upon to employ and its most familiar illustration is to be found in newspaper editorials. Is Agriculture Declining? In this passage Mr. Butterfield states his reasons for doubting the frequent assertions about the decline of rural popu- lation. He does not attempt to prove that the population is not declining, but only presents a series of considerations which make his supposition highly plausible. — — Study the structure of the paragraph. What is the effect of the first and last sentences? Does the beginning seem too abrupt? 324. Josiah Strong states, etc. It is desirable in expository and argu- mentative writing to make the references more specific. This writer com- mits the same fault in the passage on p. 327. State Control and the Individual. N^ote the use of concrete and lively illustration in aiding an abstract argument. The Organization of Farmers and The Organization of Labor. The first of these arguments is addressed to an audience of farmers, the second not to trade-unions, but to students of government. Compare the two for the kind of argument employed and the kind of motives appealed to. Observe the thoroughgoing logic of the second, the fearless facing of all the facts, the acceptance of every condition that the defence of trade-unions implies, and how the writer turns his concessions to the advantage of his argument. See the note on Persuasion, p. 639. Direct Presidential Nominations. Tlie paragraphing and the sentence structure of this article should be subjected to careful criticism. DESCRIPTION The elements that chiefly contribute to the value of a description are minute and accurate observation of detail and the unification of details to form a total impression. Unity in a word picture depends on the same prin- ciples as it does in any work of art — the selection of salient features and their arrangement in a harmonious composition around some feature of central interest. A definite order of procedure, which is termed point of view, will assure the coherence of the parts. One of the obvious means is successive arrangement in time or space, but sometimes an instantaneous view is desirable and may be presented by means of what is called the dominant or fundamental image. But unity in description generally requires more than an orderly plan. Being directed toward an aesthetic end, it depends on the creation and the preservation of a mood. The attainment of a unified emo- tional effect is characterized as dominant tone. SENSES Sunrise at Port-of-Spain and A Tropical Sunset. Both these subjects are sufficiently hackneyed. How does the writer give them reality and individuality? What is the general impression produced by each ? What 642 NOTES are the means by wliich the effects of unity and totality are attained? Study the vocabulary for avoidance of monotony and the expression of fine distinctions. Does the expression ever seem overwrought? Cloud Effects. Ruskin is here describing a number of different effects. Does he unify them all in a single impression? How? Does he have unity of structure? See how the point of view is indicated and maintained, how the transitions are marked. What is the effect of the conclusion? Compare the style of the sentences here with those in Lafcadio Hearn. What do they contribute to the emotional effect? Notice the phrase " foun- / / / / / dationless and inaccessible " and compare the notes on pp. 626and634. What is the effect of beginning successive sentences with and or and then? 342. Atlantis, a fabled island among the Greeks lying in the ocean out- side the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar). The Yellow-breasted Chat. The interest of this passage is in its attempt to suggest a sound by imitation. In " Kusa-Hibari " (p. 394) a sound is described by its effect on the mood. See also " The Sound of the Vacuum- cleaner " in the AppendLx. 344. skimmcrton, a mock ceremony once common in parts of England in which mock music was a prominent feature. Odors of Vegetation. In this description observe the selection of one dominant element to characterize the odor of each season. 346. " balm of a thousand flowers." Cf. " Merry Wives of Windsor," Act v, Scene 5, line 56, " With Juice of balm and every precious flower." The Sound of Summer. This is an example of the most acutely sensitive description. Does it impress you as being fanciful? See " The Physical Basis of Life," p. 94. The Ploughing. This is an analysis of a complex of sensations. LANDSCAPES Cape Cod. This is striking for the boldness of the fundamental image and the detail with which it is carried out. The Upper Mississippi. The description of a vast panorama is here generalized by means of a series of rapid strokes. 353. Hennepin, Louis ic. 1640-c. 1701), the companion of La Salle in his explorations of Illinois and the Mississippi River. He made a voyage him- self from the mouth of the Illinois River up to the site of Minneapolis. In the Sahel. This is a panorama done in greater detail than the preced- ing, but here also the generalizing method is important. Observe how the writer conceives his description in terms of the painter's art — his ref- erences to color, design, and composition. What elements of technique in this description are outside the scope of the painter ? What is the dominant tone of this description? How is its prominence sustained? What is the force of the opening sentence in relation to the dominant tone? What is NOTES 643 the effect of the historical allusions to the ancient life of the region ? What is the effect of the last sen>.ence? Study the movement of the periods in rela- tion to the mood of tbe description. Contrast it with the movement of Ruskin's periods. 356. Where Marius found hiding. Gaius Marius (155-86 B.C.), the Roman general who conquered Jugurtha, was defeated in a civil war by Sulla and escaped to Carthage. A Pine Forest. Notice here the use of point of view to suggest the magni- tude of the trees. A Grove of Sequoias. Here magnitude is suggested by a different device. Is the dominant tone consistently maintained in the last two para- graphs ? The Spirit of the Garden. The interest here is in the interpretation, in the attributijn of an emotional signilicance to the elements of nature. Is the fanciful phrasing permitted to obsciu-e or distort the scientific truth? Compare in this respect with " The Sound of Summer," p. 347. What is the effect of the personal note ? The Scenery of the Lakes. Notice the skilful manner in which point of view and fundamental image are managed. What is the character of the progression in the successive paragraphs? Does Wordsworth enhance the impression of the scenery he is describing by the coloring of his vocabu- lary or the movement of his sentences ? Compare the passage in this respect with the descriptions of Ruskin, Lafcadio Hearn, and Mr. Woodberry. CITIES Valparaiso. The description of the physical outlines of a city is not dif- ferent from that of any other landscape. In " Valparaiso " notice the variety of points of view and the progression from the colorless to the pic- turesque effect. In Front of the Royal Exchange. This is a description of the life and motion of a city. Notice the uniformity of effect produced in the treatment of movement, of color, and of sound — the manner in which these elements blend with the description of the spirit of the multitude in the third para- graph and the transition to the reflective strain of the fourth. BUILDINGS English Cottages and The Keeper's House are descriptions of a simple and homely exterior and interior. Observe the manner in which character and individuality is given to each. The dominant note is expressed in the first sentence by Ruskin. What is the dominant note in Hardy's description? Does the precision of detail enhance the effect ? Exposition Hall and Second-Story Bungalow Apartments. These are specimens of purely mechanical description such as is common in technical 644 NOTES journals. The virtues required are those of exposition — clearness and accuracy. In both these descriptions the order of the details should be studied. The Doctor's Home. .\ house is here described to harmonize with and to suggest the character of its occupant. Note the use of contrasting details. The st>le is somewhat loose, but should be considered in its dramatic application as the tone of familiar speech. Lander's Cottage. Though Poe notes the picturesqucsness of the effect, this description is rather to be studied for the precision with which a great number of arciiitectural details are presented from a fixed point of \iew. Do the details combine in a homogeneous impression ? Is the effect of pic- turesquencss produced b}- the description itself? The Ancient Palace at Jeypore. This description is intended to suggest the spirit of the place. It is done in part by allusions to the ancient life contrasting with the visible signs of decay. Observe the opening phrase and the concluding sentence in relation to the tone of the whole de- scription. 382. Kali, a Hindu goddess of death and destruction. Viollel-le-Duc, Eugene Emanuel (1814-1879), a French architect, noted chiefly for his wTitings on architectural art. St. Mark's. This is the most famous piece of architectural description in English prose. Although the passage is long, the cathedral itself is not described in great detail. Do 3'ou think the approach to St. Mark's is given with too much elaboration? Does Ruskin succeed in making the reader forget that he is going to view a splendid cathedral? Ruskin wishes to describe the exterior and two interiors of St. Mark's. A natural progres- sion would lead him from the exterior into the church itself, after which the Baptistery would come as an anticlimax. Notice his artifice for avoiding this difficulty. Do you think it is too transparent? Notice the manner in which Ruskin conveys an instantaneous total impression of both exterior and interior. Study the imagery to see how Ruskin's expressions at the same time that they describe convey a rich poetic suggestion, as, for example, " the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the skj- in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray." Observe also how the splendor of the effect is sustained by the elaborate rhythm of the sen- tences. 385. Vendita Frittole e Liquori, a shop in which cakes and light beverages are sold. 387. " their bluest veins to kiss." " Antony and Cleopatra," Act ii, Scene 5. 388. "of them that sell doves." " St. Matthew," xxi, 12. the Austrian bands, etc. It should be remembered that at this time Italy was under subjection to Austria. 389. Andrea Datulolo (1307-1354), the last of a family of great Venetian Doges. He wrote "The Annals of Venice to 1280." NOTES 645 390. " Thrones, Dominations,^' etc. " Paradise Lost," V, 601. " Every tree that bringeth not forth," etc. " St. Matthew," vii, 19. ANIMALS The Walrus. Each aspect in the description of the walrus gains in empha- sis by contrast with the other. — Both the paragraphs are notably well massed and the transition between them clearly marked. This is intended for a scientific description. Should you call the vocabulary cold or severe? Kusa-Hibari. Wherein does the chief interest of this description consist? What is the purpose of the first paragraph ? of the last ? The Hen Hawks. How are the descriptions of the various movements of the bird unified? The suggestion of motion, more obviously than of any other quality, invites the assistance of sentence-rhythm. Does Mr. Bur- roughs avail himself of such help ? A Trout. Would the omission of any feature in this description promote unity ? PERSONS In descriptions of persons the physical features are presented in a manner to suggest the character of the subject. It is therefore necessary that the details chosen shall be characteristic. The unifying force which is repre- sented in sense-description and landscape by dominant tone or fundamental image is supplied in a portrait by the dominant trait or feature. Sir Richard Grenville (1541-1591), famous for his fight in The Revenge against fifteen Spanish galleons (see Tennyson's ballad, " The Revenge "). This is an example of a portrait drawn in complete repose. The order of analysis is from the more prominent to the less. Notice the manner of subordinating the less important features. Is the paragraph well massed ? 399. Spctiser, Edmund (1552-1599), author of the " Faerie Queene." Alva, Duke of (i 508-1 583), the great Spanish general, notorious for the harshness of his campaigns against Holland. Parma. Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma (1545-1592), also played a prominent part in the subjugation of the Netherlands under Philij) II. Francis Drake (c. 1 545-1 595), the hero of the battle against the Spanish Armada (1588) and of many other naval exploits. This is an example of a likeness suggested by a succession of sharp strokes. Examine carefully all the details in the first two sentences to see whetlicr they justify the characterization of the last. John Sterling (1806-1844), a writer whose present reputation is due entirely to the admirable biography which Carlyle wrote of him This and the three following portraits are examples of character description and analysis in the service of biography. In Carlyle's description of Sterling the physical and mental features arc inseparably blended. Noteworthy is the degree of fineness to which the analysis is carried, the richness of vocabu- 646 NOTES lary employed lo fix the traits of a cliaracter essentially simple b.\- showing tlieni in a \ariety of aspects. Percy Bysshe Shelley (i 792-1822), the English lyric poet and Father Prout, Trancis Sylvester Mahony (1804-1866), the humorist. Notice that the features are presented in exactly the opposite order in these two sketches. Does citlier arrangement seem the more natural or the more effective ? Edward I (i 239-1307). This is an example of the purel}- anal^^tic delinea- licn of character. An Accountant. This sketch suggests a class of writing which was much in vogue in the seventeenth century, known as the Character. A character was intended to represent an entire class of persons, to embody all the traits which distinguished his class. What traits in this character are tj-pical of an accountant? What traits are individual? What is the effect of the last sentence? Observe that the passage is written in a vein of playful solemnity and quaintness. Is the style suited to the subject? 405. "thought an accountant," etc. Fielding in his novel of ''Joseph .Andrews" (Book III, Chapter 5) says of Parson Adams: "He thought a schoolmaster the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest of all schoolmasters." 'with other notes than /-o the Orphean lyre. " Paradise Lost," III, 17. 406. " sweet breasts," suggested by an epithet in Middleton's play, " More Dissemblers besides Women " : "as sweet-breasted a page as ever lay at his master's feet." like lord Midas, whose ears were changed to those of an ass for saj^ing that Pan played better than Apollo. 407. " greatly find a quarrel in a straw." " Hamlet," Act iv, Scene 4, line 55. A Portrait. The style of this portrait suggests very careful and exquisite chiselling. It seems quite without any striving for effect, but an effect of dignity and nobility is attained by the natural simplicity of the manner. Charles Cheeryble, Harold Skimpole, Mr. George. When the dominant trait in a character is so heavily emphasized as to obscure all other qualities, the result is caricature. The term is also applied to any distortion of char- acter beyond nature. The object of caricature is either humorous or satiric, and the greatest master of this kind of characterization in English is Dickens. Does the dominant trait in any of these three portraits pass over into caricature? Note the touches by which Dickens's persons are made vivid. Aunt Clara. This is an interesting example of description almost entirely by means of dress and ornament. Is the character of the person kept clearly in view in the course of the description ? Bud Tilden. The chief interest of this description lies in the effectiveness with which point of view is employed for a dramatic purpose. What ar« the details which reveal the painter's interest in portraiture? Is the phrasing of the last sentence entirely clear? NOTES 647 A Group of Mourners. This is not properly a description of persons, but has the interest of a picture, as is suggested in the introductory sentence, and is likewise an analysis of mental states as represented in the conduct of the chief actors. Notice what might be called the lights and shadows of the picture. Is there anything in the composition that corresponds to pictorial balance? Compare the criticism of "The Waverley Novels," p. 203. 415. Wilkic, Sir David (i 785-1841), Scottish painter. "Rent Day" is probaby his best-known character picture. For character represented by action or dialogue see Narratives. MENTAL STATES In the Hurricane. A mental state is here indicated by a faithful reproduc- tion, particularly in the first and last paragraphs, of the train of images and ideas exactly as they pass through the person's mind. Does the analysis and comment of the intervening paragraphs heighten the effect or diminish it? Does this description have unity? On the Wind at Night. This is the analysis of an unusual emotional state, blending with a description of the physical aspects of a scene. Do the physical and emotional elements fuse naturally into a unified description ? 422. We found it next day, etc. Compare this sentence with the last one in the description. Are both necessary? Which is the more effective? NARRATIVE The interest of a narrative depends hardly more on the intrinsic impor- tance of the event than on the manner in which it is narrated. The most significant occurrence may in the hands of the unskilled writer become colorless and insipid, while the veriest trifle maj' be endowed with sig- nificance or impressiveness by a master of the art. The art of narration or story- telling is essentially the same whether it is applied to everyday occurrences, to important historical events, or to the inventions of the artist's brain. In all a single definite effect must be aimed at by means of which the narrati\'c attains unity. This is as true of the big novel with the elaborate plot or of the history with the complicated mass of events as it is of the shortest short story or the simplest incident. The historian cannot compose his account of Napoleon's wars until he has discovered some principle underlying and explaining them — Napoleon's insatiable lust of power or the revolt against the established monarchs of Europe or the undying rivalry of France and England. The point of view which he selects forms his unifying theme and determines the selection of details and their proportion. What is true of the historian of Napoleon should be true also of the boy who wishes to give an account of a day spent in fishing. There must be a motive to give consistency and form to the account. His 648 NOTES fishing was pleasant or it was unpleasant, successful or disappointing, or its iieynotc might even be its absolute uneventfulncss. The emphasis of .iny of these ideas would provide a point of view in the light of which the narrative could be followed as something single and consistent. Certain details would then naturallj' be given prominence as contributing most stroagly to illuminate the theme, while other details would be touched lightly or omitted altogether as having little or no bearing on it. This process of subordinating the less important and eliminating the irrelevant is what brings about coherence. Another important feature of narrative writing is the arrangement of the events in progressive importance to some kind of culmination, which in stories with a plot is called climax. The interest in a narrative must rise and be sustained till the story is completely told, till the theme or idea is fidly revealed. In the case of a story with a plot we say that suspense should be maintained till the climax, but anti- climax is as fatal in a common narrative as it is in a plot-story. Great care is required in managing the ending, the typical faults in student composi- tions being flatness or suspension in mid-air. The narrative should end with some point, some significant touch, or with a reference to the keynote, something, at any rate, that will make the conclusion impressive and lend emphasis to the dominant tone of the composition. ANECDOTE AND INCIDENT Anecdote and incident are defined as practically identical terms in the dictionary. Both refer to an event or occurrence having an independent interest, as distinguished from an episode, which has interest only in rela- tion to a series of events of which it forms a single link. But anecdote has in common use a different coloring from incident, carrying with it a sug- gestion of personality, a flavor of gossip. .\n anecdote ought to be charac- teristic, an incident need not be. Irish Patriots. This anecdote shows how a small incident can be so treated that it gains a kind of dramatic interest. Reduced to its barest substance it tells how a young man, dining at an Irish restaurant without a cent in his pocket, is happily mistaken for an Irish patriot and saved from the humiliation of parting with his overcoat. The incident gains relief in the light of the circumstances which lead up to the climax. Not only is the situation prepared but the action is made plausible by the preceding conduct of the principal, and the humor of the scene is heightened by the character of his mission in Boston. The elements are woven into an ironic little drama illuminating the character of Irish patriots and of Labouchere. The Tragedy of the Mine. This is an excellent example of interest sus- tained at a high pitch. Though a note of tense anticipation is struck in the opening paragraph, the narrative continues to ascend with really breath- less interest from one point to another. The horror of the catastrophe is first suggested, then realized in a succession of details each more appalling NOTES 649 than the one before. Notice the admirable unifying force of the last sen- tence. Are there any details which detract from or fail to contribute to the main effect? What qualities of style heighten the vividness of the effect? 426. helmets. For an explanation of these helmets see p. 43. An Elephant Hunt. Observe that the objective point of the narrative is announced in the first paragraph. How do the descriptive details that follow bear on the objective point? Does the interest increase with the progress of the narrative? Where does the action culminate? Is the last paragraph necessary? Is it effective? Compare the pointed conclusion in " The Tragedy of the Mine " with the elaborate one of this narrative and the appropriateness of each to their respective narratives. Compare the openings of the two narratives in the same light. BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY Jeanne D'Arc. Whereas in expository biography character is analyzed and traits are e.xplained by reference to particular actions, in the biographical narrative the action is given prominence and the events are arranged chrono- logically, the character being inferred from the action. But in both there must be the same unity of effect, the same singleness of conception, the same selectiveness of detail in relation to the single efi'ect. From the great mass of details which are available concerning the career of Joan of Arc, the his- torian has chosen a few which combine into a single and consistent impres- sion. All the important passages in her life are recounted and her conduct in every crisis is made to appear as a revelation of her spirit. Going into Business. The events recounted in this autobiographical chapter are various in kind and not in themselves very dramatic. How has the writer unified them? How has he given them interest? Is the action significant of character? What is there in the action and character that is t>'pical of more than the individual experience of the writer? Judg- ing by this chapter, would you say that " The Making of an American " is a good title for the book from whicli it is drawn? Is the manner of narration suited to the action? Is it equally characteristic of the narrator? What virtues of journalistic writing do you observe in the style? Does it have any characteristic defects? Is the conclusion effective? HISTORICAL NARRATIVE The three historical passages here given represent different sorts of material, the circumstances attending the death of an individual, a pic- turesque battle, and a scene of state significance. In all three the aim is to present the occurrence in as impressive a light as possible, to create the effect on the reader's mind which the importance of the event entitles it to have. One should not fall into the mistake of sui>i)osing that because the events are related as they actually happened, the narrative is therefore 650 NOTES ready-made to the historian's pen. The historian, like the novelist, must exercise his imagination to visualize the event if his presentation is to have the appearance of reality and, as has been repeatedly pointed out in these notes, he must concentrate his imagination on the telling features if his narrative is to have vividness. Study in each case the selection of details and their proportion, the preservation of a dominant tone, the progress of the action to a culminating point, and the significant sentences with which all the passages terminate. Observe tliat the diction and the sentence structure have a kind of stateliness and formality which is entirely in keep- ing with the dignity of the subject. Compare their language with that of the preceding narratives. 468. Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop of Salisbury, author of a " History of My Own Time." Tcnison, Thomas. .Vrchbishop of Canterbury. 460. Sir John Knight, " the j^ounger," a member of Parliament from Bristol and an ardent supporter of James II. WagstaJ'e, Thomas, a leader of the non-jurors, members of the clergy who refused to swear allegiance to William and Marj' when those mon- archs displaced James II after the revolution of 1688. The Beggars' League. In the sixteenth century the Netherlands, com- prising the present Holland and Belgium, had come under the control of Spain. When Philip II, in his zeal for the Catholic faith, issued an order to enforce the decrees of the Council of Trent and redoubled the activity of the Inquisition, the resistance of the Protestant population was aroused. Their most respected leaders, such as William of Orange and Count Egmont, for a time took no active part, the first protest being made by a " Con- federation " of lesser nobles headed by Henrj', Count of Brederode and Louis of Nassau, a brother of William of Orange. The presentation of the " Re- quest," as it is recounted in this passage, was made to the regent, Margaret, Duchess of Parma, in her palace at Brussels on April 5, 1566. 471. The Emperor had given away his crowns. This refers to the abdication of the Emperor Charles V in fa\or of his son Philip in 1555. ELEMENTS OF STORY-WRITING Jenny at the Pump. To all outward appearance this passage only tells how a guest at an inn washed himself while a girl pumped the water. But out of this trifling material Borrow has created a charming bit of narrative b\' clothing it in a style of humorous pomp and circumstance. The mock gravity with which the slightest details are recounted is deliciously accen- tuated by the Homeric epithets and the simple amplitude of the Homeric sjTitax. The relish of the passage is derived altogether from the style. Denry at the Dance. The situation here is of interest altogether in rela- tion to character. The subordination of the action to the character is apparent in the structure from the fact that though the most striking NOTES 651 situation appears in the first part of the narrative, the interest in the hero's conduct and feeling nevertheless continues to increase. What is the effect of having the most striking part of the action at the beginning? Observe the touches by which the subordinate persons are characterized in a brief space, and the use of dialogue to suggest character. The Pursuit of the Outlaw. Dyke was an engineer who had been dis- missed and ruined by the railroad and in revenge had held up a train and killed one of the crew. In what does the interest of this episode consist? Indicate the rise and fall of the action by means of a curve ; does it show a general rise to the end ? Observe the rapidity of movement and the manage- ment of suspense and surprise. Do you approve of the repeated shifting of the point of view from Dyke to his pursuers? Could the action have been managed more successfully from a single point of view ? Does the in- terest flag at any point? Would the action gain in effectiveness by con- centration? With whom does the reader sympathize in the struggle? What bearing does the last sentence have on the reader's sympathy? Nature Speaks. This is an example of description used neither as orna- mentation nor setting, but as an integral part of the action. At the begin- ning the manifestation of nature symbolizes in its hardness the insensible mood of the hero, then in its successive changes it stirs and moidds and softens liis spirit till his heart is opened to its customary feelings and sym- pathies, and again his mood is symbolized by the hopping and chirping of the birds, and the warm, fresh sunlight on all the hills. The passage may be conceived as a drama in which Nature is the principal actor. What is the function of the leveret in tiic development of the drama? What is the significance of the chapel? Study carefully the force of the epithets in the entire passage. THE SHORT STORY The three elements that go to the making of a short story are plot, char- acter, and setting. A plot is a series of events arranged in the order of climax, each event determining and being determined by the character involved. The most effective arrangement of the events is the same in the short story as in the drama. The opening division or movement of the story brings in the setting, the chief characters, and the circumstances which will produce the complication; this is followed by the complication and the reaction of the characters to it, leading up to the climax which contains the crucial situation after which the complication is resolved by means of the denouement. To present character it is necessary to show how a person feels, thinks, and acts in a given crisis. The emphasis should be decidedly on how he acts, for the essence of drama, whether in play or story, is the conduct of a character in a crisis. Seeing how a person be- haves, we may be able to infer liis feelings and his thoughts. The purpose of setting is to limit the events and characters in time and place. The setting may be given at the beginning of the narrative or it may be sug- 05 J NOTES geslcd by allusive touches throughout the story. Local color and atmosphere arc aspects of setting. Plot, character, and setting need not appear in every story, certainly not with equal prominence. When all three do appear, some one element generally predominates to such an extent that it is pos- sible to speak of the plot story, the character story, and the local color or atmosphere story. The Sire de Maletroit's Door is one of the best examples in English of the plot story. Does the introduction arouse the reader's interest? Does it suggest the kind of action which is to follow ? Note the point at which the complication begins, the repeated introduction of surprise to stimulate interest and the maintenance of suspense. What is the nature of the interest during the crucial scene? What is the justification for withholding from the reader the knowledge of the events which preceded the opening of the story? Could the stor^^ be told with equal effect from the point of view of Blanche or of the Sire de ilaletroit? .\re the characters conven- tional figures of romance? Are there any touches by which the persons in the story are hiunanized? Is the mediaeval atmosphere kept vividly before the reader throughout the story? Are action, character, and setting well suited to one another? Would a plot like this fit well into a modern setting? A Gala Dress. This is a stor>' of character and New England atmos- phere, of the small adventures which constitute the great ordeals in the lives of two old women. Observe that the introduction contains all the materials which are going to be developed in the storv' — the contrasting characters of the two sisters, their mode of life, the social atmosphere of their community, the character of the neighbor by whose instrumentality the plot is complicated, the dress, and the fire-crackers. The trifling char- acter of the incidents of which the action is composed in a storj- like this is compensated by the delicate precision and faithful elaboration of detail. Observe how character and setting are indistinguishably blended, and how these two elements are brought into relief by the unimportance of the events. The instantaneous presentation of character by means of dialogue, the use of dialect, and the communication of a slight shock in the ending are features which should be studied. Mammon and the Archer. This story represents a ty^pe in which the action is used to illustrate an idea. Its procedure is necessarily somewhat different from that of other stories. The action does not progress steadily to a climax, but is introduced incidentally. Analyze the theme of the story and note the appropriateness of the ending. Is the action fitted skilfully into the story? Could the point of view have been better preserved by a different handling of the action ? Is the principal character in the story especially suited to the theme? Which of his traits are more prominent, the t\T)ical or the individual? What is the function in the story of .\unt Ellen? Is the scant presentation of Richard and Miss Lantry in keeping with the purpose of the story? NOTES 653 LETTERS Concerning the writing of letters no rules can be definitely set down. The tone to be adopted and the style depend entirely on the subject matter, the occasion, and the person addressed. Of course letters should be written in a natural vein, as should all other types of composition, but the natural- ness may range between the informality of personal chat and the lofty solemnity of Abraham Lincoln's letter to the mother whom the Civil War had bereaved of her five sons. Under no circumstances should the natural- ness of a letter be confused with negligence, even when the personal utter- ance is freest and fullest. It is even unsafe to say that a letter should not aim at an artistic effect, although there should be no apparent striving after effect. In letters as elsewhere, what is worth communicating at all is worth communicating properly, and in a broad way the principles that apply to other kinds of composition apply also to the art of letter-writing. All the letters should be examined for the adaptation of the manner to the substance and the person addressed. 543. It is worth noticing that the incident here narrated by Swift was utilized by Thackeray in " Henry Esmond." 544. Johnson. See note to p. 15. Chesterfield. See note to p. 210. 545. Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth. This is the second half of a letter the first half of which is composed of observations on the second volume of Wordsworth's " Lyrical Ballads " (1800). 546. laughed with dear Joanna. This is Joanna Hutchinson, the sister of Wordswor»,th's wife. Joanna and her laugh form the subject of the second of the " Poems on the Naming of Places " in the 1800 volume. D., the poet's sister Doroth}^ Barbara Lewthwaite. " Little Barbara Lewthwaite, a child of beauty rare," is the heroine of Wordsworth's " The Pet Lamb." my play, Lamb's tragedy of " John Woodvill." 550. Tom Moore, the poet of "Lalla Rookh" and Irish sentimental songs. Gray, Thomas (1716-1771), the author of the " Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," holds a high place among English poets, though the volume of his verse is very scant. 551. Lloyd. Lloyd Osborne , Stevenson's step-son. Trelawney, Edward John (1792-1881), the friend of Byron and Shelley, and a sailor with an adventurous career. F., Stevenson's wife. Printed in the United States of America. I 3 1205 03058 5168 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A A 001 403 020 9