J\ Southerner In Europe CLARENCE M.POE y % 6f THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESENTED BY PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID A Southerner in Europe BEING CHIEFLY SOME OLD WORLD LESSONS FOR NEW WORLD NEEDS AS SET FORTH IN FOURTEEN LETTERS OF FOREIGN TRAVEL :: :: :: :: CLARENCE HAMILTON POE Editor of The Progressive Farmer and Southern Farm Gazette, and Joint Author of "Cotton: Its Cultivation, Marketing, Manufacture, Etc' MUTUAL PUBLISHING COMPANY RALEIGH. N. C. COPYRIGHT, DECEMBER, 1908 BY CLARENCE HAMILTON POE FIRST EDITION, DECEMBER. 1908, SECOND EDITION, OCTOBER. 1909. /fof DEDICATION: TO ALL ALERT-MINDED SOUTHERNERS WHO FIND LESSONS FOR OUR TIME IN THE HISTORY OF OTHER TIMES. AND FOR OUR COUNTRY IN THE EXPERIENCE OF OTHER COUNTRIES ANNOUNCEMENT The fourteen newspaper letters which make up this Httle volume were not written with any- thought of publishing them in book form. The demand from partial readers that they be pub- lished in this fashion, however, led to the print- ing of a considerable edition late in December of last year, and this edition having been quickly exhausted, the author and the publishers are glad to show their appreciation of public favor by bringing out this second edition in larger type and handsomer binding. It is not unlikely that the author will later visit Japan, China, India, and South Africa, studying conditions in these countries, (especially the re- lations of the backward and the advanced races), with even more direct reference to Southern con- ditions than was attempted with regard to Eu- rope in the purely journalistic letters of the present volume. A fuller announcement as to this plan will appear later. M310009 TABLE OF CONTENTS. I. BACK TO THE OLD ANCESTRAL HOME: A FOREWORD 13 Europe is not a foreign country; it is our old home — ^And the Europeans are all our kinsfolk — Europe's larger perspective shows that the world is growing better — The truth about "the good old days" — Two big facts to keep in mind. II. NOTES OF PASSAGE ACROSS THE ATLAN- TIC 21 In the fogs off the "Banks" of Newfoundland — "The solitary inhabitants of an ocean-covered planet" — The Atlantic and the Pacific contrasted — ^A prayer for "Our Gracious Sovereign, King Edward." III. ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND: A FAIR LAND LET DOWN OUT OF HEAVEN 27 The spirit of the writer's letters — "Land of brown heath and shaggy wood" — The beauty of Rural Scotland — Scotland vs. Virginia — ^A glimpse of English farming — Among the Haunts of Robbie Burns — Environment and spirit of Scott, Burns and Wordsworth. IV. ENGLAND'S CITIES, PEOPLE, AND POS- TAL SYSTEM 36 A vivid impression of differences in time — Cot- ton "the most barbarously handled commercial product in the world" — Liverpool and the slave trade — How internal improvements saved Glas- gow — Common names more familiar than in New York or Boston — English royalty a lifeless, make-believe formalism — Nearly as many voters as in America — Efficiency of the English Post- office — How the parcels post works in England — The Postal Savings Bank also a success — Gov- ernment insurance. V. GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH LIFE AND CUS- TOMS 47 The inheritance tax — Woman suffrage a live is- sue — ^A temperance demonstration in Hyde Park TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGE. — What the licensing bill provides — ^A cabman's argument — The question of Old Age Pensions — What education has done for Great Britain — An insidious lowering of our standards of liv- ing — "Everybody works, including father" — The neglected H's — Why railway accidents are fewer. VI. AMONG CASTLE WALLS AND PALACES OLD IN STORY 61 Stirling Castle with its thousand years of his- tory — Days of blood and crime no less than of romance and chivalry — The world is getting bet- ter — The majestic figure of Oliver Cromwell — ^A typical letter from Carlyle — The graves of Wes- ley, Watts, and Bunyan — Historic places in Lon- don — Stratford, Oxford, and Chester. VII. "THE PLEASANT LAND OF FRANCE" 72 Land cultivated a thousand years and not "worn out" — Keep some crop on the land all the time — A land of prosperous small farmers — Interesting story of sugar beet culture — How good roads help French industries — ^Artists working on a canvas of earth and acres — No lands wasted or mistreated — ^A story suggested by my pocket- book — How the French people are governed now. VIIL NAPOLEON'S TOMB AND VERSAILLES.. 83 At the tomb of Napoleon — The threefold charac- ter of Napoleon's appeal to us — In the Royal Palace of Versailles — The lesson of the Ancient Court — The relentless rectitude of nature. IX. BELGIUM, HOLLAND, GERMANY: A LAND WHERE EVERYBODY WORKS 92 The kingly horses of Belgium and Holland — "I haven't seen a horse's ribs in Europe" — The two secrets of German and Dutch prosperity — Without intelligent labor no. nation can pros- per — Germany and Spain contrasted — One stu- pendous fallacy we must put forever behind us — Let's learn a lesson from Grermany. X. WISE ECONOMIES AMERICA SHOULD LEARN FROM EUROPE 104 America wasting opportimities for beauty — ^A TABLE OF CONTENTS. FAOB. work for Southern women — No gullied land in Germany — How the forests are cared for — Sav- ing a country's best resources — The Torrens System a working success. XI. SWITZERLAND— TWO WEEKS AMONG LAKES, PEAKS, GLACIERS, CLOUDS, AND SNOWS 114 Majestic Mount Jungfrau and Beautiful Lake Geneva — ^A belated process of creation — Switzer- land the purest Democracy in the world — How direct legislation works — How the initiative and referendum would help America. XII. "THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME". . . . 125 Rome, the Eternal City — The mightiest man who ever trod this earth of ours — The old mem- ories of the Forum — The Colosseum and the martyrs — How the early church degenerated. XIII. WHAT ROME AND POMPEII CAN TEACH US 134 What made the Roman great — How respect for law brought dominion over the lawless — The greatest work of Julius Caesar — How equity and tolerance promoted Roman supremacy — Good roads strengthened the empire — In the buried city of Pompeii — The most striking les- son of Pompeiian life — The moral progress of mankind and its explanation — The coming mas- tery of America and the South's opportunity. XIV. HOW THE SOUTH MAY WIN LEADER- SHIP 150 A glorious sea voyage — The two greatest lessons Europe teaches us — The spiritual factor in racial greatness — "Knowledge is power," and it is read of all men — ^America is too wasteful — Europe ten times as thickly settled as the South — The bottom facts about immigration — My dream of the South's awakening — ^A better agriculture the only foundation upon which we can build. A Southerner in Europe. I. Back to the Old Ancestral Home: A Foreword. New York City, N. Y. Here I am in New York, and to-day our ship will start to take me across the broad Atlantic — morning, noon and night; morning, noon and night; and morning, noon and night again and again for eight days, possibly nine, with all the speed of throbbing and powerful engines, riding on the billows of an unfathomed sea, until the shores of old Scotland at last come into view. Going across the ocean is not a matter of much moment now : accidents by sea are probably fewer in proportion to traffic involved than accidents by land, and the number of Southerners who go abroad is probably increasing three times as rap- idly as the population. But with all the ease of ocean travel now, I wonder how many start across without some thought of those three little barks that set out across the misty and mysterious deep from the little port of Palos in 1492 — ^the first to dare the perils of the unknown? Ever since the dawn of creation, through ages 8 14 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. and ages, aeons and aeons, the great Atlantic had lashed itself with furious storms, had wearied itself with never-resting billows — generations coming and going; empires rising and falling — while no man took up its perpetual challenge to search out the borders of its mighty realm. Cen- turies came and went, and yet it guarded its secret of a Newer World; the Indian on this side not even dreaming that the sun looked down on any other land, and the European held back by super- stition and by dread from attempting to answer the sphinx-like riddle of the mighty waters. Europe is Not a Foreign Country; It is Our Old Home. This is one of the thoughts that come to mind as we join in now with "those that go down to the sea in ships" : that it is only in the last half- hour of human history, as it were, and only in the last minute of time, comparatively speaking, that man has brought the sea under his dominion, making it his servant to carry him from continent to continent. Moreover, it is also only in the last half-hour of human history that there have been any white people in America. Europe isn't really a foreign BACK TO THE OLD ANCESTRAL HOME. 1 5 country; it is our old home. This is the idea I should like especially to impress upon my readers ; and it seems to me that in our educational system we make a mistake in dealing only with what these last three or four generations have done here in America and ignoring the long and weary upward course of civilization through centuries of European history — just as if a son inheriting a princely fortune and an ancient and honorable name should migrate to a new country and yet fail to teach his children anything of the struggles by which his ancestors had developed their sturdy virtues or acquired their broad possessions. Every liberty of which we boast, as Tom Watson points out in his ** Story of France," was cradled in Europe; it was over there that martyrs bled for the rights that we enjoy to-day, and that patient generations slowly wrought out the principles of government which have made us a happy people. And the Europeans Are All Our Kinsfolk. Really, therefore, as I have indicated, I am going back to our old home — much as if the son or grandson of one of your uncles who went out to California in the gold-hunting days of '49 should come back now to see his relatives and the ancestral dwelling place. l6 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. These men and women of Europe to-day are all our kinsfolk, even if we have let the relation- ships become indistinct and uncertain. It was in most cases only some chance, accident or whim or, at most, some change of policy in government that caused our ancestors to come to America; with a slightly different turn of Fortune's wheel you and I to-day would be Europeans, too. And, even as it is, we can not be indifferent to European history, nor find its pages meaningless for our times. Have you ever thought of it, that your ancestors — the men whose blood now courses in your veins — played some part in the whole mighty drama of the ages? When Caesar conquered Gaul, your ancestors and mine, wild, ferocious men, heard somewhere the tramp of the Roman legions. In the struggle between the old gods of mythology and the new and strange religion of the Christ of Galilee, your ancestors and mine were ranged on one side or the other. When the days of the martyrs came, it was our blood that ran in the veins of those who suffered at the stake or of those who applied the burning torch. And as I look back through the dim cen- turies to where Peter the Hermit stands amid those strangely dressed men and women, preach- BACK TO THE OI.D ANCESTRAI. HOME. 1 7 ing a crusade for the rescue of the Holy Se- pulchre, I know that my fathers and yours, either as mailed knights or as hard-featured and hard- living peasants, listened to the orator's fiery words and left home and loved ones to fight the hated Turk. Through the nightmare of the Dark Ages, through the long years of feudal authority, in the bloody and fruitless wars that followed, what part did these kinsmen and kinswomen of ours play? There is the great castle with its towers and battlements — and, alas, with its dungeons too ! Did your kinsfolk and mine know the sun- nier side of life in the days when knighthood was in flower, or did they know only the peasant's bitter toil and dirty hovel, or perhaps torture and imprisonment itself? Europe's Larger Perspective Shows That the World is Growing Better. One thing at least a European trip and a survey of European history should do for a man — they ought forever to cure him of pessimism about the progress of the race. The curtain rises upon a stage of barbarism so fierce that the old Norse warriors on their forays are reported as finding l8 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. especial delight in tossing captive infants from spear's point to spear's point. The boasted glories of "the age of chivalry" become but a mockery when we recall that in its damp dungeons the limbs of innocent prisoners often rotted off, and that even the knightly vow to honor women ap- plied only to those of gentle birth. We have to look back but a few centuries to the time when men thought they did God-service by burning to death all with whom they disagreed about re- ligion. And even existence itself in those days was hard, and unlovely. So crude were the tools in use and so ineffectual the farm methods that even with good government the masses would have been in want such as no class of people in the South knows to-day : a thirteenth century writer, for example, reporting that the average harvest was only threefold the seed. But even this meager product was subject to grievous taxes to support more or less worthless kings and vicious courts until just prior to the French Revolution it is said that one-half of all the peasant earned was paid to the government in actual taxes, and that after paying the additional feudal dues and BACK TO THE OLD ANCESTRAL HOME. IQ church tithes, only one-fifth of his earnings was left him for the support of himself and family. The Truth About "The Good Old Days." The scroll of European history unrolled before one, one looks back, too, to the time when the lives of men and women were at the unquestioned disposal of lord or monarch ; when at the nod of some one in authority your ancestor or mine per- haps was hurried away to wear out his life with cause untried in some loathsome dungeon, and when men thought it the natural thing to die in wars in which no one but the king himself had any interest. Contrasting this picture with that of present- day American freedom, who can doubt the great truth uttered by Bishop Fitzgerald, that "the movement of humanity under the rule of an all- wise, all-gracious, all-loving God is forward, not backward ?" Two Big Facts to Keep in Mind. It is these two or three thoughts, then, that I would have my readers keep in mind in connec- tion with the articles that I shall write : First, that we are ourselves the inheritors of the long years of old European history no less 20 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. than our kinsfolk who now live there: just as the son who moves away, no less than the son who stays at home, is the heir of all the family traditions that preceded his departure. Second, that these English and German and Scotch and Dutch and French are our kinsfolk left at the old home, and that so large a part of the real history of our race has been made within their borders that American history really deals, as I have said, only with the last half-hour of human progress. II. Notes of Passage Across the Atlantic. On Board S. S. Cai.e:donia, , Anchor Line. This is the second day of July, so the menu card in the steamer dining room tells me, and so say all well-regulated calendars, but it doesn't seem right to put a July date-line over a letter when I have spent the morning with my winter coat on, my winter overcoat, and one blanket (steamer rug) securely wrapped around me, while the only thoroughly warm and comfortable moments spent in my steamer chair to-day were after a fellow-passenger had thrown a second blanket over me. It's as cold here now as it is in the South in mid-November with cotton picking in the day- time and 'possum hunting at' night: cold enough for late muscadines to be gone and for persim- mons to be giving promise of the time for making 'simmon and locust beer again. I could hardly believe before I left home — not even when it was established out of the mouths of two or three witnesses — ^that I should need a heavy overcoat in crossing the ocean in July, but I find, in fact, 22 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. that the only thing more comfortable than one overcoat would be two overcoats. In the Fogs Off the "Banks" of Newfoundland. It's colder, of course, the way we have come: the "Northern route," as it is called, landing us in Scotland. After leaving New York we skirt the New England coast and keep to the northeast until we go through the "banks" off Newfound- land. This puts us so far north that the aurora borealis or "northern lights" are plainly visible, as they were here last night and the night before. These "banks," as most readers know, are sub- ject to terrible fogs, fogs so dense that vessels can be seen only a short distance away, so that if our steamer did not sound its fierce and terrible foghorn every four or five minutes for hours at a time sometimes, there would be serious danger of running into some small and unsuspecting fish- ing craft. It has been but a short time since such an accident did really occur here — a great steamer dashing through the mist upon a small fishing boat, with the result that seventeen men were knocked into the water and drowned before they could be rescued. CROSSING THE ATIvANTIC. 2$ For two days now, however, we have seen no signs of life apart from our own boat — not a fish- ing smack nor a steamer nor any living thing ex- cept one or two seabirds. So far as ocular evi- dence goes, we might be the sole and solitary inhabitants of an ocean-covered planet. "The Solitary Inhabitants of an Ocean-covered Planet/' And yet you would not think of this unless you did so deliberately: the steamer carries such a little world in itself that it seems self-sufficient ; and somehow, too, the ocean in its every phase seems to breed a spirit of complacency and satis- faction such as the dry land nowhere knows. "They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters" — do they not seem to have in all cases a certain calm confidence and re- pose such as it would seem more natural to asso- ciate with the immovable majesty of the hills and the mountains? On the ocean, too, time goes by with noiseless tread. We have now been on board five days and nights and have done nothing more exciting than eat and sleep (eating, with its three full and regular meals a day, and two or three other half- 24 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. way meals in the shape of tea, broth, cakes, sand- wiches, etc., thrown in for good measure, is our principal occupation), except to play an occa- sional game of quoits or shuffleboard, walk the deck in the cool October breeze, or joke and prank with fellow-passengers. Still the time has passed all too quickly. Barring the time when seasick- ness holds you in thraldom, you would like a voy- age of a month instead of a week ; and not many of our passengers have been seriously seasick. The Atlantic and the Pacific Contrasted. Such is "life on the ocean wave" as I have found it thus far, my previous experience having been limited to occasional trips between Norfolk and New York, between Norfolk and Boston, and one brief trip on the Pacific between Los Angeles, Cal., and the ineffably beautiful and romantic Catalina Islands — a place where one's castles in Spain seem to shape themselves into reality and where Tennyson's lotus-eaters might well dream their lives away. Somehow the Atlantic, blustery, practical^ commercial, seems to partake of the nature of the busy English, American and Ger- man peoples found on its borders, while the peace- ful Pacific, with a thousand sleepy and easeful CROSSING THE ATLANTIC. 25 islands dotting its sunny bosom, seems indeed to typify the spirit of the Orient with its dreamy re- ligions and its slower and more easy-going nations. Thus far on this trip we have not had a real storm such as the Atlantic in its more restless moods is capable of bringing to pass, but we have had about the usual quota of rough weather : high waves last night and this morning that showed us indeed how it feels to be "rocked in the cradle of the deep," while at other times the sea has been as smooth as a mill-pond. A Prayer for "Our Gracious Sovereign, King Bdward." There are yet two more days before I can mail these notes ; and before that time there will prob- ably be others that I shall wish to add — some, for example, about my fellow-passengers, repre- senting all parts of the United States and the uttermost parts of the earth, as far at least as Lucknow, India. A number of Scotch people are on board, and my first definite and clear-cut im- pression of having really left my home country came last Sunday when, in the Episcopal ser- vice in the music-room, prayer was made not 26 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. only for the President of the United States, but also for "our gracious sovereign, King Edward, Her Majesty Queen Alexandra," and for the Prince of Wales and the nobility of Great Britain. III. England and Scotland: A Fair Land Let Down Out of Heaven. Liverpool, England. I had intended writing more of my ocean trip, but that is ancient history now, and too many other beautiful and wonderful things have crowded upon my sight for me even to revive memories of that rarely beautiful night when the silvery crescent of the new moon in the clear sky above them glorified and seemingly enchanted the long and fancifully shaped cloud-lines ranged above the ocean's far horizon. Old castles seemed to be there with marvelous towers and battlements ; mountain peaks and cathedral spires, too, while the beauty of the northern lights added a singular glory to the outlying edge of the great cloud-masses. But this was seeing in imagination only what I have since seen in reality, some im- pressions of which it is now my purpose to record. The Spirit of the Writer's Letters. And in the very beginning of these letters, let me ask the reader's pardon if what I write shall seem somewhat disjointed and unsymmetrical. A 28 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. traveler here sees so much, and in a hurried trip like mine has scenery and history and art and circumstance thrust upon him in such confusing variety that it is extremely difficult to bring order out of chaos, especially when writing must be done at odd moments and under untoward sur- roundings. Will my readers pardon me, there- fore, if I attempt nothing more ambitious than a series of gossipy friendship letters about the things I see that interest me and that I think will interest them ? And with this understanding I am ready to set out with my impressions of the Old World. '%and of Brown Heath and Shaggy Wood." Scotland, I shall not forget, was the first Euro- pean country to greet my eye ; nor can I believe that I shall find one of which I shall carry away a finer impression. It is no wonder that the Scotchman loves his country; no wonder that it was from Scotland that the lines came : Breathes there a man with soul so dead Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land? With its beautiful mountains, lakes, meadows, and rocky shore-line, it makes in its natural BKAUTIFUI. ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND. 29 r 5^ % scenery alone an irresistible appeal to our fancy and to our admiration; but far more effective is its claim upon our love and our interest when we look back upon the panorama of its thousand mighty years of history until now every tongue and land has been enriched by stories of Scottish romance and Scottish adventure. I can hardly do better perhaps than to outline briefly the course of my travels up to this hour and then follow it up later with such comment as I may wish to make. On Sunday then, let me say, we landed in Glasgow ; Monday we went to Ayr, the home of Robert Bums; Tuesday we went through the Trossachs country made famous in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, traveling partly by coach and partly by rail, ending the day with a visit to Stirling Castle ; Wednesday we spent in Edinburgh ; Thursday we visited Melrose Abbey, Abbottsford (the home of Sir Walter Scott), and went thence by rail to Wordsworth's lake coun- try, a memorable seventeen-mile coaching trip from Keswick to Ambleside bringing us in late afternoon to our boat on Windermere; by its waters we spent last night, and this late Friday evening finds me writing this letter from Liver- pool, England. 30 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. The very first and the most vivid impression made upon the traveler here, I believe, is that of the beauty of the country, the rural districts. Towns here look much like those in America — a little older, streets a little more crooked, more old buildings rich in historic associations. But between the country here and the country in America the difference is much more marked. I remember that Mr. C. S. Wooten said to me last winter, speaking of his trip abroad last summer : "England looks like a country just let down from Paradise. I didn't see a weed nor a gully nor a poor horse, sheep or cow in the whole country." And I am now prepared to vouch for his state- ment. True, I have seen a few weeds and one or two gullies, but in all my travel in Scotland and England thus far I have not seen more weeds or gullies than I have sometimes seen in a single ten-acre lot in America. Scotland vs. Virginia. A Virginia girl who stood beside me as the stone-fenced farm plats on the Scottish coast came into view, exclaimed at the beauty of the scene. "Oh," I replied, "Virginia will look that way a hundred or two years from now when population becomes dense and farming good." BEAUTrFUL ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND. 3 1 But her reply is worth recording and worthy of serious thought : **The trouble is that we are wearing out the land and letting it wash away long before ever the dense population comes." A Glimpse of English Farming. Here in England it is very different. Every foot of land seems to have attention, intelligent attention, the fields being as carefully tended as our gardens, while the Scotch and English gar- dens themselves are models of beauty and excel- lence such as Americans do not even dream of. The fences enclosing the farms are nearly all of stone, or else hedges ; stone walls line every road ; railway tracks are bordered with shrubbery; the public highways are all of macadam and kept in constant' repair, while the meanest houses are so neat and so beautified by lawn, hedge, shrub and flower that you can hardly think of the inmates as being poor at all. A frame house is almost never seen. The stone fences cross hill, meadow, and even climb the mountainsides, and add a touch of picturesqueness to the landscape which nothing else could quite replace. Every home, too, has a wealth of beautiful flowers, and vege- 32 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. tables are cultivated much more extensively and in much greater variety than with us. If I could choose but one of England's points of superiority as a gift for my own country, how- ever, I believe I should take her good roads. With such beautiful highways, innumerable other good things would be added to us. No one could ever think of putting up a ramshackle cabin alongside such roads, and in a thousand ways they would stimulate and hasten the development of our people and of our resources. Among the Haunts of Robbie Burns. I shall never forget how through the fog the rocky coast of Scotland gradually came into view last Sunday morning, and how I thought, "For the first time in my life I gaze upon land which white men knew five hundred years ago!" Nor can I ever forget my first set trip into Scottish territory, this being my visit to Ayr, the birth- place of the poet Bums, on Monday last. Leaving out of consideration its usual Scotch neatness and cleanliness, I doubt whether any reader of mine now lives in a humbler home than that in which the immortal Scotch poet first saw the light of day. A low-roofed stone house thatched BEAUTIFUL KNGI.AND AND SCOTI.AND. 33 with straw, you enter one room and pass into the next, finding it divided into stalls for the cattle and sheep; then the two adjoining rooms — on the same ground floor — were those of the Bums family. " 'Tis but a cot roofed in with straw, A hovel made of clay, One door shuts out the sun and storm. One window greets the day; And yet I stand within this room, And hold all thrones in scorn For here beneath this lowly thatch Love's sweetest bard was born." We rambled by "the banks and braes of bon- nie Doon," we crossed the "auld brig," and we followed the line of Tam O'Shanter's famous ride, looking into the broken walls of Alloway Kirk where he saw the ghostly dance. The "auld Kirk" dates back to the year 1145, and the bell which, still unbroken, surmounts its crumbling walls had stood the storms of nearly four hundred winters. Environment of Scott, Burns and Wordsivorth. It may not be unwise just at this point to an- ticipate my narrative just a little and comment on the homes of two other poets — Scott and 34 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. Wordsworth — which I have seen since visiting Ayr. Scott's beautiful and even lordly home at Abbottsford, overlooking the Tweed, is a treasure- house of Scottish historical relics: coats-of- arms, swords, suits of armor, blunderbusses, etc., etc. About Wordsworth's country I shall always remember most vividly how the clouds wrapped its low mountain peaks in mist, and how more nearly than anywhere else I have observed (ex- cept in our very highest American mountains) heaven and earth seemed there to meet. Having seen the rustic and lowly home of Burns, I shall always better understand how the inspired Scottish ploughman sang songs with the smell of the soil about them ; having seen Scott's home and its numberless illustrations of his tire- less energy in collecting Scotch historical relics, I shall always think of it in connection with his great works of fiction; while I must think that a man bom in Wordsworth's country, as I have seen it, is predestined to be an intense lover of nature. I am especially glad that at sunset last night I saw the ever low-lying clouds envelop the summit of one of the mountains on which Words- BEAUTIFUL ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND. 35 worth loved to gaze; and after such a scene I shall always find greater pleasure in his lines : "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness. But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home." It is easy about Windermere to "look up through Nature to Nature's God," and the "trail- ing clouds of glory" never seem to be very far away. IV. England's Cities, People, and Postal System. Che;ster, EngIvAnd. I wrote last in Liverpool, and before going further it may be well to say a word about that famous English city. It is of most interest to Southerners because of its relation to our cotton industry, and it was fitting therefore that of all places in it we should first visit the Cotton Ex- change. We found it, upon the occasion of our visit, somewhat less tumultuous than we have usually found the New York Cotton Exchange, but at times the English bidding grew quite exciting. January and February futures were selling at fractions above "fivepence" (ten cents) when we were in Liverpool, and cables from New York evidently had an important bearing upon prices offered. A Vivid Impression of Differences in Time. It is of interest to record, by the way, that though we were at the Liverpool Exchange well in the afternoon, it was at that time so early in the day in New York that New York cables were ENGLISH CITIES, PEOPLE, ETC. Z7 just beginning to come in, while it was still later in the afternoon that cablegrams from Niew Or- leans, still further west than New York, began to come in. One section of the Liverpool Ex- change is devoted to trading in Egyptian cotton, cablegrams from Alexandria, Egypt, keeping English buyers informed as to the course of prices in the African market. Of course, this in- terest here, however, is only a side line, as it were, to the dominant interest in the American staple, and even a rumor of "hot winds in Texas," such as was exciting the Liverpool Exchange on the day of our visit, has its effect on the market. Cotton ''the Most Barborously Handled Com- mercial Product in the World." We were also interested in seeing the condition in which American cotton arrives in Liverpool, and no one who once sees the plight in which the great Southern farm product reaches the English spinner can fail to ag^ee with Edward Atkinson in pronouncing cotton "the most barbarously handled commercial product in the world." Not only do the bales look ragged, dirty, beggarlike, and generally disreputable, but the actual loss and waste in handling is nothing less than enor- 38 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. mous and a serious reflection upon the sound sense and business ability of Southern planters. A glance at a wagon-load of American cotton as it is hauled down an English street is enough to make any Southerner an advocate of better bahng methods. Cotton from India or Egypt ar- rives in immeasurably better condition, and I am told that, other things being equal, manufactur- ers here prefer the foreign cotton for this reason. Liverpool and the Slave Trade. Liverpool is also of peculiar interest to South- erners because it was long a center of the slave- trading industry. England did not finally pro- hibit the slave trade until 1807 (America in 1789 had fixed the year 1808 as the time when the nefarious traffic should end with us), and even in 1807 the Liverpool merchants protested hardly less vigorously than they had done a generation before against this interference with their "com- mercial rights." It was England, as John Richard Green points out, that introduced slavery into the West Indies and America — a Pandora's box of unnumbered evils from which even Hope itself sometimes seems to have been excluded. Let it also be mentioned in this connection that ENGUSH CITIES, PEOPLE, ETC. 39 when England came to the abolition of slavery in her West India colonies in the 30's, she paid the owners for their loss. Would God that North and South in America had been wise enough (as Lincoln wished) to settle their slavery trouble in the same way! How Internal Improvements Saved Glasgow. Somewhat larger than Liverpool is Glasgow, Scotland, where we first landed, but of which I have said but little until now. Glasgow is a fine illustration of the fact that the prosperity of a town depends not so much upon its natural re- sources as upon the progressiveness of its people. Fifty years ago the Clyde River at Glasgow was only 180 feet wide and three feet deep. By spending $35,000,000 in deepening and broaden- ing it (it is now 500 feet wide) Glasgow has put itself in the forefront of European seaports and has made itself the greatest British city except London. Our Southern folk would do well to take the example of Glasgow to heart and redouble their energies in behalf of all well-conceived plans for inland waterways and other internal improve- ments. 40 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. There is one thing about these Scotch and English towns that can not fail to impress itself upon any thoughtful visitor, and that is the sim- ilarity of the surnames to those common through- out our Southern country. It is the most strik- ing illustration I have yet found of the oft-re- peated statement that the South is now the most thoroughly Anglo-Saxon part of America. Walk down any business street in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Chester or any other English or Scotch town that I have seen, and on the sig^s you will see in most cases names so common in your own town or county that you can hardly believe your- self in a foreign country, while the surnames you would find displayed in a business street in Boston or New York are strangely foreign and unfamiliar to a Southern traveler. I venture the prediction that any Southerner can walk down the main streets of Glasgow or Liverpool and find five times as many familiar names as he would find in a similar area on Broadway, New York. And it's a good stock of folk with which to claim kin — these English and Scotch. It's very foolish and very harmful for jingoes to try to stir up bad feeling between England and America. We belong to the same great family, our ideals BNGLISH CITIES, PBOPLB, ETC. 4I are mainly the same, and the two nations should work together in furthering those ideals through- out the wide world. English Royalty a Lifeless, Make-Believe Formalism. Too many of our people are given to saying that England is a kingdom and the United States a republic; therefore to praise England's system of government is political heresy. The truth is, that the English system is, in many respects, more democratic than the American, royalty here being nothing more nor less than an emasculated and perfectly harmless piece of "make-believe" formalism which the people, amusing themselves, have chosen to perpetuate since it does no harm and costs no great deal to maintain. Not only is it true that the "King's speech," which comes nominally from him at the opening of each Par- liament, is written for him by the popular min- istry and the King himself can not change a word in it, but the people even show a disposition to have their own way about the social affairs of royalty — the only remaining phase of English life in which the King is really King at all. It was only last week that an incident happened 42 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. vividly illustrating this fact. The Labor and Socialist Party has been gaining strength rapidly here in recent years, and now has thirty members in Parliament. Well, one of these thirty had at- tacked King Edward so bitterly that when the King gave a reception to the House of Commons a few days ago this Socialist member was not invited, and the upshot is that the English press and people criticise the King so vigorously that the discrimination is not likely to be repeated. My recollection is, that President Roosevelt, of our country, some time ago refused to invite Senator Tillman to a similar function without ex- citing half so much ado. Nearly as Many Voters as in America. There are also practically as many voters in proportion to population here in England as in America: here one inhabitant in every six is a voter and in America one in every five. More than this, England has the Australian ballot sys- tem, as every American State should have, both in primary and in regular elections (with special provision for illiterates) ; and bribery in elections, direct or indirect, is checked by well-conceived legislation. America might also well take lessons from ENGI^ISH CITIES, PEOPLE, ETC. 43 England in the matter of civil service reform and municipal government. Public ownership of street railways, waterworks, etc., is common in the cities, and, while I do not know about water rates, I do know that street car fares are only about half as much as in America. Efficiency of the English Post-OMce. Especially useful to the English people is the post-office, which has here reached a degree of efficiency in public service in comparison with which our American post-office system shows to decidedly poor advantage. But as we came abroad ten years ago (at Tom Watson's suggestion) and grafted the European idea of rural mail delivery upon our post-office system, perhaps we shall some time force Congress into giving us the par- cels post and postal savings bank also. Going down the street in Windermere Friday morning, I was struck by the sign : POST-OFFICE FOR MONEY ORDERS, SAVINGS BANK, PARCELS POST, TELEGRAMS, IN- SURANCE, ANNUITY, INTERNAL AND REVENUE STAMPS. Nor does this sign exaggerate the business done by any common English post-offi'ce. The 44 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. government owns the telegraph here and the rate is one cent a word, with a minimum charge of twelve cents, the telegraph offices being run in connection with the post-offices. On press tele- grams the rate is only one-fourth cent a word, and provision is made that rural mail carriers shall handle all prepaid telegrams left in mail boxes. Over the telephone business the govern- ment also exercises supervision and "constructs private telegraph and telephone lines on rental terms," as the official announcement explains. How the Parcels Post Works in Bn gland. The parcels post and the postal savings bank especially interest me, as I believe we should lose no time in adopting these invaluable improve- ments in America. Any package not over eleven pounds in weight, or three feet six inches in length, may be taken to a post-office here and sent by parcels post to any part of Great Britain upon these charges: One pound or less, 6 cents. Between 1 and 2 pounds, 8 cents. Between 2 and 3 pounds, 10 cents. Between 5 and 7 pounds, 14 cents. Between 7 and 8 pounds, 16 cents. Between 8 and 9 pounds, 18 cents. Between 9 and 10 pounds, 20 cents. Between 10 and 11 pounds, 22 cents. ENGLISH CITIES, PEOPLE, ETC. 45 An examination of the official rates would in- dicate, too, that not only may parcels be sent within Great Britain at these rates, but packages may be sent from here to almost any part of the habitable world as cheaply as they may be sent from one county seat to the next in America. And yet our American Congress, session after session, has refused to heed the growing popular demand for the parcels post service. John Wanamaker, when Postmaster-General, wisely declared that the two greatest reasons why we have no parcels post are : ( i ) the Adams Ex- press Company, and (2) the American Express Company. Some time, however, the people are going to bring such pressure to bear upon our Solons at Washington that these giant corpora- tions will no longer be allowed to stand in the way of the needs of the people in this matter ; and our farmers, by vigorous action, may do much to speed the day. The Postal Savings Bank and Government Insurance. Of no less value is the Postal Savings Bank and its allied features. Anybody (even children over seven years of age) can go to any post-office here 46 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. and open up a savings account, depositing twenty- five cents or more at the time, 21-2 per cent in- terest a year being allowed on all deposits, and the government of Great Britain guaranteeing the safety of the funds. Deposits may be made or withdrawn at any post-office, no matter where you are, if you have your deposit book with you. No one may deposit more than $1,000 in this way, but, after the $1,000 mark is passed, the de- positor may invest in interest-bearing govern- ment stock. At each post-office, too, the government calls attention to its life insurance provisions, which are virtually a feature of the postal savings bank department. You may take out insurance that will (i) pay you so much a year until death, or (2) after ten years, or (3) after twenty years from beginning, or (4) at the ages of 55, 60 or 65, or (5) at death. V. Glimpses of English Life and Customs. London, England. My last letter, I believe, ended with some com- ment upon the government of England. One thing that interests foreigners in this connection is how the government maintains itself in a free trade country without imposing excessive prop- erty taxes. Be it remembered, then, that England is not without tariff taxes, but there are few of these, and nearly all these few are levied on luxuries or semi-luxuries. Remembering how notable a part the tea tax played in our early Revolutionary his- tory in America, it is of interest to see that within her own borders England has maintained this heavy tariff until now the government collects $zLO,ooo,ooo to $50,000,000 a year from this source alone, and nearly $75,000,000 a year from the tariff on tobacco and snuff. The excise or whiskey taxes bring in $150,000,000 a year more, and there are also special income and inheritance taxes, and taxes upon the gross earnings of rail- ways, except where the rate is less than two cents a mile. 4S A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. The inheritance tax, it will be recalled, is one which President Roosevelt has recently com- mended to the attention of Americans, Over here an estate exceeding $500 in value pays a govern- ment tax of I per cent ; $2,500, 2 per cent ; $5,000, 3 per cent ; $50,000, 4 per cent ; and so on up to $500,000, which pays 6 per cent, and $5,000,000, which pays 8 per cent. There are also special graduated taxes in case property goes to persons not near of kin, amounting to 10 per cent where the property goes to persons very far removed in kinship, or not of blood relationship at all. There are also special stamp taxes of many kinds, and special Boer War taxes now (similar to our Spanish-American War taxes) which require stamps on checks and upon all receipted bills. Woman Suffrage a Live Issue. There is a considerable party here which favors the establishment of a protective tariff, this senti- ment gaining strength, in part, from the unfair methods of American monopolies competing for British trade. Socialism has also been making marked growth among the working classes for a number of years past. Just at this writing, however, the livest political KNGUSH UFB AND CUSTOMS. 49 issue is woman suffrage. For a long time the women of England who are taxpayers have had the privilege of voting for city and county offi- cers, and they are now fighting earnestly for the privilege of voting for members of Parliament. In a number of cases the woman suffrage advo- cates have grown so riotous in their meetings as to make it necessary for the police to interfere. When indicted, however, the women agitators re- fuse to pay the fines imposed, going to jail in- stead, and then they make a great ado about being "martyrs" to the cause of equal suffrage. If the woman suffrage idea prevail, the privi- lege of voting will be given, of course, only to women who are taxpayers ("ratepayers" they are called here) or householders (that is, widows or others who are heads of houses). A Temperance Demonstration in Hyde Park. Another very live subject is the temperance question, which reminds me that the most power- ful temperance argument I have ever witnessed was in Chester depot the other day when an old gray-haired woman was attacked both by her husband and her own half-drunken son. The officers interfered and drove off the men, while the weeping woman sobbed piteously in broken 50 A southe;rner in europe;. Lancashire dialect: "They makes six pounds ($30) a week, but never a farthing (half-cent) do they give me : it all goes for drink, drink." All parts of Great Britain are liquor-cursed, and whiskey, as I have intimated, is especially the bane of Scotland, where many fear that it is almost hopelessly sapping the strength of one of the finest races of people in the world. But the Scottish Temperance League and other organiza- tions are making a brave fight against the evil, while here in London yesterday I saw a temper- ance procession "terrible as an army with ban- ners," a mile and a half long, marching into Hyde Park where the immense audience (made up chiefly of working people) was addressed from eight different stands by a great variety of speak- ers. For nearly two hours the thousands of spec- tators listened and cheered and laughed, ending by adopting vigorous resolutions in behalf of the "Licensing Bill" which Parliament is now begin- ning to consider. What the Licensing Bill Provides. In explanation of this licensing bill a word or two should be said. In England saloons are called "public houses," and their managers "pub- ENGLISH UFE) AND CUSTOMS. 5 1 licans." Many years ago licenses to conduct these "public houses" were granted rather pro- miscuously, and it has been the custom of the authorities to renew these licenses from year to year without further inquiry. Now, however, it is proposed to limit the number of saloons, and the provisions of the licensing bill would, I be- lieve, decrease the number in London by half — and half means many thousand. The licensing bill also looks (i) to the adop- tion of local option; (2) to prohibiting the sale of liquor to children; (3) to the ultimate prohib- iting of women as bar-maids. There are now nearly 30,000 women employed as bartenders in England, and the most serious phase of the liquor problem is the growth of intemperance among women, especially among working girls. Drink- ing is said to be stationary (or possibly actually decreasing) among the masses of English men, but increasing among English women and among the wealthy and leisure class of both sexes. A friend of mine spoke to me of seeing a great number of apparently respectable women drink- ing in the saloons in Chester a few nights ago, and in Glasgow women are often seen reeling from saloon doors. 52 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. It is high time for England to be doing some- thing to save herself, and the great temperance prcKiession in Hyde Park yesterday was one of the most encouraging things I have seen over here. I was also gratified to find the recent record of the United States held up as an ex- ample and incentive for English action. In all cases the arguments for and against the licensing bill are strikingly like the arguments for and against State prohibition in our Southern States, with which we are all so familiar. There is the same specious appeal to **the poor man," arguing that the bill will leave it easy for the rich to get liquor but make it hard for the poor man; and the same cry of ''confiscation" because the gov- ernment would refuse to continue some licenses. But a big-bodied, keen-witted Irish cabman whom I heard address the Hyde Park meeting yesterday answered both these arguments, and made an especial appeal to working men and women, his hearers, in the declaration that when you buy a farm product 30 per cent of the purchase-money goes for labor; clothing, 25 per cent; iron and steel goods, 23 per cent ; coal, 55 per cent ; while when whiskey is bought, only seven per cent of the purchase price goes to labor. ENGLISH UFE AND CUSTOMS. 53 To-day the House of Commons takes up the licensing bill, and thirty days will be devoted to its discussion. The whiskey interests will make a desperate and conscienceless struggle, and already there is growing evidence of the truth of Lord Roseberry's declaration that "if the State does not soon control the whiskey traffic, the whiskey traffic will control the State." And England is going to control the traffic. The Question of Old Age Pensions. Other notable political measures now up for discussion and action in England are the educa- tion act and the old age pension measure. The bill for old age pensions has already passed the House of Commons, and it is not believed that the House of Lords will dare turn it down. The bill in its present shape provides that the government shall pay to all persons over sixty years of age the sum of five shillings ($1.20) a week, unless such persons have an income of over ten shillings ($2.40) a week from other sources. In such cases the government pension will be only enough to make a total of fifteen shillings, or $3.60. The education act now under consideration is for the purpose of relieving the present discontent among 54 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. non-Episcopalians who are protesting from one end of England to the other against the control of many of the public schools by the Episcopal clergy. What Education Has Done for Great Britain. And, while speaking of schools, let me mention education as the great source of English and Scotch greatness. It has long been a saying that "education has made Scotland," and the support that Scotch Presbyterians have given the cause of education in America is a matter in which they justly take pride. Even the cabmen here read the newspapers almost as carefully as business men in America would do. And I have been impressed by the number of monuments which record the dead man's services to public education as his strong- est claim upon the regard of posterity. Over in the old town of Stirling in Scotland I recall how a tablet in Greyfriars Church records the fact that "Alexander Cuningham, merchant in Stir- ling, to extend the inestimable blessings of edu- cation, bequeathed, A. D. 1809, £4,000 ($20,000) to be expended in maintaining, clothing and edu- cating poor boys" there, while another memorial alongside is "to the memory of John Allen, writer ENGLISH XI^ AND CUSTOMS. 55 in Stirling, mortgaging, A. D. 1735, the sum of 30,000 marks, by which hundreds of young men have been able to advance themselves and to fill situations in life which their lot seemed to for- bid." In Liverpool, too, you find the same idea in the striking monuments to James Nugent, bearing the legend, "Save the boy," while the significant inscription on the monument to Major Lester reads: "Give the child a fair chance." Democratic England to-day understands full well that— "Princess and lords may flourish or may fade: A breath can make them, as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied." An Insidious Lowering of Our Standards of Living. An intelligent laboring class is the backbone of any country, and in this England is strong. There are no negroes here, of course, the entire serving class being white. And their neatness, cleanli- ness, quickness and intelligence are some of the things which impress themselves most deeply upon the Southern traveler. Nowhere in the country districts here have I seen the signs of shiftlessness — broken gates, gullied fields, neg- 56 A southe;rner in europe. lected tools, shackly outhouses, unpainted and ill-kept residences — which mar the landscape in so many country districts in the South. A house here may have only two or three rooms, but its neatness makes it a joy forever, and the fields look like the work of landscape gardeners : all Scotland between Edinburgh and Glasgow seems to be almost as neat as our capitol squares, and England is hardly less beautiful. I bear no ill will toward our negroes, but it is impossible to escape the conclusion that their ig- norance and shiftlessness have not only held back the South in a thousand ways, but their careless- ness has provided a lower level for indifferent white people to fall to. Nowhere else do you find white people content to live in such ugly homes and with such unpromising farms as often meet our vision in the South, and I think it partially explained by the fact that the negro, taken fresh from Africa, has lowered our ideals and standards of living in a certain insidious fashion from which these European countries have fortunately been exempt. "Everybody Works, Including Father." Another way in which the difference between intel.igent white labor and shiftless negro labor ENGLISH U^ AND CUSTOMS. $7 makes itself felt is in the different attitude to- ward work itself. People here in England do not seem to regard any work that comes to hand as being "beneath them." Over in Leamington the other day the man who joined his wife in waiting on our table, and who brought the water to my room, was a man of such intelligence that I should guess him to be a minister ; a man with the bear- ing of a gentleman and a man whose wide knowl- edge of politics and history made it a pleasure to talk with him. It was much the same way in Glasgow, so that at sight of the head man of the house removing plates from the table, one of our party well remarked: "In England everybody works, including father." Most of the smaller hotels seem to be run by women ; women work largely in the fields, and in the stores women, I believe, are even more numerous than in America. The women are less beautiful than in the South, but have fine, rosy complexions and healthy bodies. The young girls seem to be slower in "coming out," wear childish clothes at a later age, and I have seen a number of girls eighteen or twenty years old wearing their hair in plaits. One hideous custom among English women of the more careless sort is that 58 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. of cigarette smoking. Among men generally, on the other hand, I should say that there is not one- third so much smoking as among American men. The "soft drink" habit is not found here at all, and I haven't seen a drug store soda-water foun- tain since I left America. The Neglected H's. Concerning the speech of the people, everybody knows, of course, of the Englishman's predilection for dropping his H's. "It was 'ot, so 'ot," said a fellow-traveler speaking to me yesterday of the weather two weeks ago (though I haven't gone a day without my overcoat since I left America), and your coarser Englishman says " 'ouse," not house, and " 'orse," not horse. Another curious pronunciation is sounding "y" for "a," as "lydy," instead of "lady." "The gyte is right stryte be- fore you," said a man to me Friday, meaning "gate" and "straight." But the people are all wonderfully polite. "Thank you" is always on the tip of the tongue, and I confess to a liking for the English habit of saying frankly, "I'm sorry," where an American would say, "Beg pardon." There is a certain dignity about even the signs in public places. Thus, you do not see at Oxford, ENGLISH LIFE AND CUSTOMS. 59 "Keep Off the Grass," but 'Tlease Not to Walk on the Grass." In a printed hotel notice at Lake- side I read that "The proprietor respectfully inti- mates that" so and so may be done. Another matter of interest to me has been the Scripture motto verses one so often finds in his bedroom, and the taste with which rooms are decorated, especially notable being the excellent taste shown in the selection of pictures. On the old tombstones, moreover, a curious custom is that of giving the occupation of the de- ceased person. Thus in Glasgow you read of merchants, sail-makers, teachers, etc. In the churchyard of Melrose Abbey there are epitaphs of "tenants" and "gardeners," while an inscrip- tion I copied at Ayr, alongside that of Robert Burns's father, reads as follows: "William Croslie, St., Farmer, Died at Brockloch, 2 August, 1882, Aged 91; and Marian Cornochan, His Spouse, Died 5 May 1870, Aet., 70." Why Railway Accidents Are Fewer. And while I am giving this running sketch of miscellaneous matters, I must not fail to say a word about the English railways, which are in 6o A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. many respects radically different from those in America. For one thing the cars are not open lengthwise, but on the side, and all the people in a car do not ride together, but in compartments or divisions, each of which seats six or eight per- sons. There are first, second and third-class rates, third-class rates being, I believe, less than two cents a mile, and accommodations better than on first-class cars in the Southern States. The trains are practically never behind time. But of all differences in favor of the English system, that which most impresses me is the fact that no railroad here can run its track on a level across a public road. Usually the road is built up on either side, a bridge is put up, and the rail- road track runs underneath. This is one reason, no doubt, why accidents are so much rarer on English than on American roads. To the famous towns, castles, battle-fields and other historic spots I have visited in Scotland and England a separate and special article must be devoted, and these will be considered in our next letter. Vl. Among Castle Walls and Palaces Old in Story. London, England. In my last letter I promised to give this time some impressions of the historic and notable places I have visited in Scotland and England. This, therefore, I now set out to do, beginning at Stirling (thirty-six miles from Edinburgh). For it was as I went over the ancient moat-bridge into the gigantic gates of Stirling Castle, and thought of its more than thousand years of check- ered and stirring memories, that I first felt the subtle atmosphere of the Middle Ages and the mystic spell of the long-gone days of knighthood and of chivalry. Stirling Castle With Its Thousand Years of History. Here for the first time I saw a great mediaeval castle with its massive stone walls and frowning battlements and towers, standing out upon its lofty eminence above all the surrounding coun- try : secured in the front by moat and drawbridge (with a trapdoor at the entrance on the titanic 6 62 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. outer walls), and then by two or three inner walls, while from the rear a rugged and pre- cipitous stone ascent of sixty feet guards the ap- proach to the ancient fortress. And Stirling has a history worthy of its lofty eminence and this isolated grandeur. It looks out upon one of the most beautiful and upon one of the most historic views in all Great Britain. The battle-field of Bannockburn is before you here, and Stirling Bridge of course, and yet an- other battle-field — Cambuskenneth — in which Scots and Picts fought each other six hundred and fifty years before Columbus discovered the New World. It is when you come upon facts like these that you begin to realize that the annals of America indeed deal only with the last half-hour of human history. This very Stirling Castle, for example, was taken by Edward I of England in 1304, more than three hundred years before the first white man set foot upon Jamestown soil, and ten years later the famous Scotch chieftain, Bruce, recap- tured it. It was at Stirling that Lord Darnley courted Mary, Queen of Scots, and it was here that James I, who was King of England when the first permanent English settlements were made in SOME CASTLKS OLD IN STORY. 63 America, was christened and crowned, John Knox preaching the coronation sermon. Days of Blood and Crime No Less Than of Ro- mance and Chivalry. Stirling Castle, too, at the very first brings you face to face with the tragedy as well as with the romance of the old, old days. Not only does the terrible dungeon — its opening a mere hole in the ground twelve feet down before you enter the dark grim caverns in which captive enemies or suspects went to the torment of a living death — not only, I say, does this foul dungeon cast a shadow upon the rosy pictures we like to paint of "the age of chivalry," but Stirling and almost every other castle in Great Britain has its story of crime, involving one or more figures well known in history. At Stirling they still show you the room where King James I stabbed and killed the Earl of Douglas five hundred and fifty years ago. In Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh I saw the little room where Rizzio, secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots, was murdered by Darnley and others — and but a few months later Bothwell, having plotted with the Queen for the murder of Darnley, here married her himself. 64 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. In Edinburgh Castle near by I saw the old ban- queting hall where in 1440 the young Douglasses were invited to a great dinner only to see the black bull's head — the symbol of death — put be- fore them on the banquet table, after which they were dragged away and beheaded. Here, too, Oliver Cromwell and others met in 1648 and dis- cussed the necessity for executing Charles I ; and Edinburgh Castle also has a connecting link with the murder of Macbeth in that the St. Margaret's Chapel here was built by the wife of the Malcolm of Shakespeare's play. Kenil worth Castle, of which only picturesque ruins now remain, of course calls to mind the al- leged murder of his wife by Earl Leicester as told in Scott's famous novel. And the Bloody Tower of London, I need not mention, is famous for the horrible crimes of which it has been the scene. At its very portals you pass the spot where the young princes were smothered by Richard III four hundred years ago ; and among those who languished in prison here before finding death from a headsman's axe were Anne Boleyn, wife of Henry VIII and mother of Elizabeth; Lady Jane Grey and her husband (beheaded because of their claims upon the throne), and Sir Walter Raleigh. SOME CASTLES OLD IN STORY. 65 With the memory of these terrible crimes fresh upon me — committed in most cases by Kings and Queens claiming to rule "by the grace of God" — it is easy to see how far we have come from the time when men and women with human blood upon their hands could sit undisturbed upon the world's greatest thrones. And having also stood but a few days ago upon the spot in Oxford where Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley were burned at the stake for conscience' sake (while remem- bering that God has put us of this generation upon a time when the whole world enjoys reli- gious liberty), should I not be a blind pessimist indeed did I not believe that — "through the ages one increasing purpose runs And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns?" This is the best age that the world has ever known, and to-morrow will be better than to-day. It is a good thing to come to Europe and get that historical perspective which makes for faith like this. Not only have public morals improved, but life itself is infinitely richer and nobler now than ever before. The plain Southern farmer to-day may live in greater comfort than the lords and 66 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. ladies of the castle in the so-called "brave days of old.'' There are eddies and cross-currents in the stream of human history, and sometimes the "back waters" of reaction from the furious main current; but always the dominant movement is toward good: of this we may be sure. Here in the British Museum a day or two ago I looked with interest and with reverence upon the original copies of the Magna Charta, that great corner stone of our English liberties, and reflected upon the long, hard-fought, and yet unretreating strug- gle through which the idea of "liberty, equality and fraternity" has since fought its way toward that "one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves." The Majestic Figure of Oliver Cromwell. I was glad to come to England as much as anything else for the privilege of making pil- grimage to the shrines of some of the men whose work in history or literature has evoked my ad- miration. No single incident of the trip thus far, there- fore, has pleased me more than the special privi- lege given me at Warwick Castle of putting on SOME CASTlvES OLD IN STORY. 67 my head the helmet of Oliver Cromwell; and in Westminster Hall it was Cromwell's figure that was most in my mind: Cromwell, with patience exhausted, coming upon England's unprofitable servants, who had dilly-dallied so long about weighty matters, and driving the miscalled Par- liament from its halls. I can hear him now, the stern-visaged and purposeful Puritan and man of iron, speaking in the language of the Bible as he did at Dunbar and as he does in the letter from him which I saw here in London the other day. Defiantly he recounts the follies of the Parliament: resolutely at last he drives them be- fore him. "Your hour is come," he proclaims, "the Lord hath done with you." That day Crom- well was master of England, "Lord Protector of the Commonwealth," ruling with the power of a Caesar even if without a Caesar's ambition or selfishness: and yet it was but a few years later that the returning monarchy had his body rudely torn from the grave and his head put upon the gables of this same Westminster Hall ! But Cromwell's story proves afresh that the sure verdict of history may always be awaited with calm confidence — as true in the long run as that the polar needle, temporarily disturbed by 68 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. some unusual attraction, will yet inevitably re- turn and swing true again to the unchanging north star. Nine years ago a great assemblage met here by Westminster Hall again, and a life- size statue of Cromwell was unveiled — the monu- ment having the additional distinction of being placed within the enclosed court of England's Parliament — and a mighty nation uncovered its head in reverence to Cromwell's memory. Shall not some time our own America itself, grown wiser, pay a like tribute in our Capitol at Washington to Lee and to Jackson, and to others of like grandeur of spirit who fought on the losing side in the other great civil struggle of an English-speaking nation ? The Graves of Wesley, Watts and Bunyan. Sunday morning I was glad to see John Mil- ton's old church ; his grave is in the chancel, and this, by the way, is the same church in which Oliver Cromwell was married. We also went to the Wesley Chapel where John Wesley, the great founder of Methodism, preached in the later years of his life, assisted by his famous poet brother, Charles Wesley, the author of so many familiar hymns. John Wesley died in the little SOME CASTLES OLD IN STORY. 69 house beside the chapel, and his mother, Susan- nah Wesley (mother of seventeen or nineteen children, I have forgotten which number) is buried in the Bunhill burying grounds just across the way, as is also Isaac Watts, no less famous than Charles Wesley as a hymn writer, John Bunyan, author of "Pilgrim's Progress," and Daniel Defoe, whose "Robinson Crusoe" has been the delight of every generation of boys that has grown up since its publication. Carlyle is another one of my heroes, and I was glad to go out to Chelsea and see the house where he died — just as I was glad to see a typical letter of his regretting his then seemingly fruitless search for a publisher for "Sartor Resartus" and referring to some man as provoking his admira- tion "because he is a man, a real man, and not a mere clothes-horse/' Historic Places in London. London is full of just such historic places. Not far from St. James's palace we saw the house where Byron "woke up to find himself famous" ; in Chelsea we saw the homes of George Eliot, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the artist Turner; near Whitehall is the place where Charles I was 70 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. beheaded; the house given to the Duke of Wel- lington by the English people (just as Ameri- cans gave a house to Admiral Dewey) is pointed out; in the crypt of St. Paul's are the tombs of Wellington and Nelson; and in Westminster Abbey those of Chaucer, Dickens, Tennyson, Browning, Thackeray, William Pitt, William E. Gladstone, besides numerous English monarchs, including Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary and the royal Edwards and Henrys. In Westminster Abbey we also saw the coronation chairs in which all the Kings of England have been crowned here snice Edward I; and in the Bloody Tower the crowns of the King and Queen, sparkling masses of the costliest jewels, are shown to the public. Stratford, Oxford and Chester. Writing this much, however, has only served to convince me of the impossibility of giving within the limits of a newspaper article any ade- quate description of the many towns and places here in which mighty men have wrought mighty deeds, blessing not only the little island of Great Britain, but the whole wide world, and especi- ally the great English-speaking peoples of the United States and Canada. There is the beautiful little town of Stratford- SOME CASTLES OLD IN STORY. 7I on-Avon where we saw the humble cottage in which Shakespeare was born, and his burial place in the church, with the famous epitaph, "Curst be he that moves my bones"; there is Oxford with its famous University, and its rich heritage of splendid names — Blackstone, Raleigh, Wesley, Samuel Johnson, Wellington, Peel, Ruskin and many others; there is Chester with its famous Cathedral and its nearly nineteen hundred years of known history, Roman ruins here still telling the story of its beginnings as a Roman camp sixty-one years after the birth of Christ — so short a time after the crucifixion that an historical novelist might imagine as transferred hither some of the very soldiers who represented the imperial Caesar upon Golgotha's hill. Or with the unquestioned historical fact of Charles I watching from Chester walls the defeat of his forces at Marston Moor, the same novelist might wonder if the proud monarch dreamed here of the headsman's ax which was to be his end. My next letter will find me in France. VII. "The Pleasant Land of France." Paris^ France. *'The pleasant land of France" — so it is called, and it is well named. It is indeed a beautiful country, the fields tilled like gardens, the road- sides lined with beautiful and shapely trees, the small areas in forest given almost as much atten- tion as our cultivated fields, the houses neat and well kept, the fields dotted with busy and seem- ingly prosperous workers. The farming districts are a delight to the eye, as well as an unending source of pleasure to any one who delights in in- telligent and well-directed industry. The red- tiled roofs of the stone and brick houses, the gold of the harvest fields (for the wheat is just now being harvested), the dark green of the growing crops cultivated alongside, interspersed with slen- der and stately trees — all this makes a picture whose beauty is entirely unmarred by one gully or galled spot or weedy patch or shackly cabin or "turned out" field. Land Cultivated a Thousand Years and Not 'Worn-out/' This land I see before me here was probably in cultivation for centuries before the first white 73 man alarmed the stolid American Indian on his hunting grounds, and has made crops ever since — and yet no one thinks of saying that this French soil is "worn-out" or "needs resting." With in- telligent labor and prudent handling this land, a thousand years in use, is still highly productive; in our country unintelligent labor and careless handling have ruined wide areas which have not grown crops one-twentieth as long. And the main secret? It is here before me now — these great herds of grazing cattle in the fields alongside the growing crops, and these farmers with three-horse teams preparing the land for a new crop, rolling it and preparing it as thoroughly as an American would do for a garden in order that another crop may start to growing as quickly as one is taken off. I noticed to-day that where the wheat has been harvested a day or two the shocks are piled to- gether on narrow strips here and there and all the land between is already broken for another planting. The land is cultivated in long strips, and there is hardly a foot of soil wasted; the wheat strip adjoins squarely the strip devoted to sugar beets, potatoes, etc., and there is no room for a weed to grow — barely enough for the horses 74 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. to turn round between fields. I recall how the Italian immigrants in Mississippi follow out this same idea, and how the neatly hoed ends of their cotton rows contrast with the ragged weed patches of the negro's fields. Here in France you see no clods, no gullies, no weeds, no poor horses and cattle, no scrub hogs, no disgraceful tenant cabins. A Land of Prosperous Small Farmers. Hardly anywhere in the world do so many farmers own their own farms as in France — small farms, to be sure, but the intelligent small farmer here with five or ten acres lives far more com- fortably than the Southern farmer owning twenty times this area who depends upon shiftless labor or shiftless methods of cultivation. With this letter I am sending an extract from yesterday's Paris edition of the London Mail, telling how some French gardeners, taking up a two-acre patch of tough clay in Essex, had sold ii,ooo (equal to $4,860 American money) worth of products up to July 26th, and expect to sell enough more before the end of the year to bring the total to about £ 1,600 ($8,000) for the twelve months' sales. 75 The farms are so small here that it is expensive to have improved machinery, but this difficulty is obviated by co-operative buying: five or six farmers with adjoining tracts will purchase a reaper together, or a harrow, or thresher. The strong, heavily built horses are a delight to the eye, and some oxen are also used. I saw a reaper in the wheat field yesterday drawn by two yoke of oxen. Women work much in the fields : I saw num- bers of them doing all sorts of work yesterday: not in any half-hearted or humdrum fashion, but healthy, intelligent-looking women who work earnestly and cheerily, simply because on these small acres every one must work if the family is to prosper, and because every member of the family takes pride in having a beautiful home and a beautiful farm, as fertile and productive as in- telligence and skill can make it. The strength of France is its millions of con- tented, prosperous, intelligent small farmers who own their own homes, and who make the entire country a dream of beauty and prosperous ac- tivity. Large areas here are devoted to growing the sugar beet, and its history also illustrates the 76 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. possibilities of scientific agriculture. Originally the beet contained so little sugar that its cultiva- tion was barely profitable, but by long years of careful seed selection and plant breeding, the sugar content has been so largely increased that the industry is now one of very considerable proportions. I should be afraid to quote figures from memory, but my impression is that the farmers now get two or four times as much sugar from a ton of beets as their fathers did from the less highly improved varieties they grew fifty years ago. How Good Roads Help French Industries. And the roads — they, too, add incalculably to the beauty of the country and to the pleasure of country life. National aid to road building and road improvement, as has been much agitated in America in recent years (notably by Latimer, of South Carolina, Brownlow, of Tennessee, and Bankhead, of Alabama), is an actual working fact here in France, the main lines being built and maintained by the national government, the mile- age being 23,656, and $300,000,000 having been spent in this work to date. Even the local roads are kept in superb condition, and some one re- cently pointed out the difference between French and American roads by showing that in France one horse is expected to carry a load of 3,300 pounds twenty miles a day over rolling country, while in America one horse would carry only 1,000 to 1,400 pounds. Artists Working "On a Canvas of Barth and Acres." And not only are the roads themselves in the splendid condition I have indicated, but every highway is made a thing of beauty by the long lines of tall, uniform, symmetrical shade trees on either hand. These have been carefully planted, of course : all of one variety and equi-distant. The common roads are therefore as beautiful as our city parks, and when you look out upon the vary- ing tints of the growing and ripening crops, and the perfect proportions of each field, it seems as if the very peasants here were artists working out some vision on a canvas of earth and acres instead of on one of fabric and inches. Usually there are no fences between one small farm and another: possibly a hedge, but more often one farmer's last row of potatoes, or a trench at most, is the dividing line between him and his neigh- 7 78 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. bors. As one of my friends wrote me from Eng- land two years ago : "There are no loose ends or ragged edges in European farming." No Lands Wasted or Mistreated. No one looking at the farming of France can get away from the impression that just as it is a curse to a growing boy to have a fortune that he may spend recklessly, so it has been a curse to America that land has been so plentiful that the farmer has thought it no economic crime to lay waste one acre and then clear up another to take its place. Neither here nor in England would any land-owner think for a moment of renting a piece of land to an ignorant tenant to butcher or maltreat in such fashion as is common in the South. In France, as I have said, most farms are small and operated by their owners — the ideal condition ; while in England the tenant is encour- aged to improve and beautify his holdings: my recollection is that tenants usually lease for about ten years and are given credit at the end of that time for whatever improvements they have made. And not only have French farmers wrought out these things in their own land, but they have carried these progressive ideas with them whcr- "the pleasant land of i^rance." 79 ever they have gone. If any reader object that they might not do so well in the Cotton States of America, let me remind him of what French colonists and French influence have done in the worn Barbary coast of Africa. It is a matter of casual historical comment that in one or two gen- erations French rule has built up its depleted agri- culture and "has restored the fertility and bloom which belonged to it when it was the garden of the Roman world." A Story Suggested by My Pocketbook. Of the government of France I must also say a word, and then leave my impressions of Paris for another letter. As everybody knows, France from 1789 to 1 87 1 was in a state of almost un- ending turmoil. The year first mentioned opens upon one of the most corrupt, extravagant, stiff- necked and irresponsible courts with which any nation has ever been afflicted. The nightmare of the French Revolution, the dictatorship of Na- poleon, the restored dynasty of the Bourbons forced upon the people by the conquering nations after Waterloo (1815), the Revolution of 1830 that made Louis Philippe King, the "second Re- public" established by the Revolution of 1848, 8o A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. the "second Empire" that followed four years later, and finally the "third Republic," which has now endured for about thirty years — this is a suggestion of the kaleidoscopic changes whose details baffle the memory and leave the average reader in hopeless confusion. I have just no- ticed, for example, that in my purse are three pieces of French money, one bearing the name of "Louis Philippe, King, 1843," another that of "Napoleon III, Emperor, i860," and the third that of the "Republic of France, 1896." In effect France was for a hundred years a sort of political experiment station, but the present republican government now seems firmly established. How the French People Are Governed Now. The President is elected for a term of seven years. The Congress consists of a "House of Deputies" corresponding to our national House of Representatives, chosen by manhood suffrage for four years; the Senators, like ours, hold for six years, and are elected in practically the same manner. But now come some radical differences between our system and the French system. In the first place, the President has no such power as the President of the United States. Like , the "the pleasant land of FRANCE." 8 1 King of England, he is little more than a figure- head, and the real executive work is done through a cabinet or ministry. The President nominates the ministers but they cannot act until the House of Deputies accepts them, and in a crisis the House can force the President to resign by re- fusing to accept his ministers at all. Moreover, the ministry itself must resign when the House of Deputies refuses to support the ministers' measures, so that the real governing power of France is the House elected direct by manhood suffrage. It is much as if our national House of Representatives in America could compel the President or his cabinet to resign by refusing to support their policies. This, of course, means a government more quickly responsive to public opinion: if the United States were governed by the French plan, the election of a Democratic House of Representatives in November would put that party in virtual control of the entire government at once. The dominant party in France now is what is called the Radical-Socialist, though it is by no means so extreme as the name sounds. There is another party (the "Extreme Socialists," I be- lieve they are called) who stand more nearly for 82 A SOUTHERNEIR IN EUROPE). the doctrines of American socialism. The policy of the present government looks only to public ownership of what we call "natural monop- olies" — railways, street car systems, municipal lighting plants, etc. The people already own the telegraph and telephone, and plans are now on foot looking to the purchase of the great Western Railway by the government, as a start in the di- rection of general government ownership. VIII. Napoleon's Tomb and Versailles. Paris, Frances He was not a young man swept off his feet by youthful enthusiasm: he was a man upon whose head were the snows of more than three-score winters but whose mind is as active as ever, and he was talking to me last spring of his trip to Europe, and especially of the magnificent mau- soleum which the French people have erected as the last resting place of Napoleon Bonaparte. "By heaven," he exclaimed, "it was worth the trip across the Atlantic to stand at the tomb of that colossal man !" At the Tomb of Napoleon. I am now almost prepared to agree with him : certainly I have seen nothing more impressive since I left America. The splendid structure, beautiful and airy as a palace, built entirely of white marble and surmounted by a gilded dome, itself challenges interest and admiration; but it is only when we enter the spacious chapel that the sublimity of the builder's conception dawns upon us. Here is solemnity unmarred by any 84 A SOUTHEIRNER IN EUROPE. suggestion of the funereal: the majesty of death without any trace of its gruesomeness. Massive bronze doors guard the entrance to where the body rests in the immense sarcophagus, and by the side of the doors are two kingly statues bear- ing in their hands the symbols of earthly power and dominion, the one the globe and the sword, the other the crown and the sceptre. On either side stained glass windows such as I have seen nowhere else in the world let in the light in a golden flood, suggesting the beauty and the calm of an unending sunset. Above you are the words from Napoleon's will, written in exile in distant St. Helena : "I desire that my body shall rest on the banks of the Seine, and among the French people whom I have loved so well." There is pathos unspeakable about the words and about the tragedy which they call to mind. Once he could have willed kingdoms and crowns; the proudest thrones of Europe had been at his dis- posal, and he had given sceptres to his brothers and his favorites as if crowns were but the baubles of an hour. Now the Napoleon who makes his last testament sees Death, the con- NAPOIvEON^S TOMB AND VEIRSAILLES. 85 queror of conquerors, coming as a welcome re- lief, and the great warrior who — "once trod the ways of glory And sounded all the depths and shoals of honor," can will little but his body itself, and can not know that even this request for a burial place will be granted. Weary and heartsick, broken with the storms of state, how it would have re- joiced his heart could he have known with what honor his ashes would finally be entombed in his loved Paris and how here for ages to come travelers from every corner of the earth would pause to pay tribute to one of the mightiest men who ever walked this globe of ours. The Threefold Character of Napoleon's Appeal to Us. The fame of Napoleon is the surer because of the threefold character of his appeal to human interest — the romance of his rise, the epic of his achievement, the tragedy of his fall: each in it- self sublime. Born of humble parents and upon a narrow island, his imperial mind and will won him place after place until his became the might- iest name in a thousand years of history. Power such as the Caesars had not known was his, and 86 A SOUTHEJRNDR IN EJUROPK. when he walked into the church of St. Denis here to wed the daughter of a king, he might have dreamed, not without warrant, of becoming the master of all Europe. He had great faults, I grant, but in character few of our chiefest warrior-rulers stand above him ; and so long as the minds of men are stirred by mighty deeds wrought in spite of frowning Circumstance, and so long as men's hearts are moved by the tragedy of a great man's fall, just so long will the blood quicken when Napoleon's name is mentioned, and just so long will men make pilgrimage here, as I have done, to Notre Dame where he was crowned, to St. Denis where he married, to the mausoleum where he is buried, and to the Museum of History where so many relics, both of his noonday glory and of his twi- Hght in lonely St. Helena, are shown to interested thousands. Of so much interest is the career of Napoleon, and I have seen so many traces of his footsteps here — some of his letters, his coronation robes, his bedroom and re?:eption rooms at Versailles, the unpromising-looking rooms overlooking the Seine where he lodged before he became famous, his chair and bench and camp bed from St. napouxjn's tomb and vi:rsaii:.i.e;s. 87 Helena, and his sword, saddle, hat and his famous war coat — that it is hard not to give an entire article to this one subject; but I must hurry on, for Paris is full of historic and notable spots, and I am trying to tell in a letter what should be told in a book. In the Royal Palace of Versailles. Our first full day in Paris was spent at Ver- sailles, where the French Kings once lived in shameless extravagance and unconcern, and where a corrupt and profligate court once piled up wrath against the day of wrath, until the storm broke in blood and fury upon them some six-score years ago. For long, long decades had the weary peasants of France toiled from year's end to year's end only to see King and priest and noble seize the lion's share of their hard-won harvests, government and church all the while growing more haughty and corrupt, and the burdened peasant's lot harder and more hopeless. Stolid and spiritless perhaps this peasant seemed to the proud nobles who lived upon his labors and de- spised him, who felt that neither he nor his fam- ily had any rights that they were bound to re- spect; and yet an Edwin Markham would have 88 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. seen in this oppressed and clouted figure the por- tent and prophecy of the coming revolution. "0 masters, lords and rulers in all lands, How will the future reckon with this Man? How answer his brute question in that hour When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world? How will it be with kingdoms and with kings — With those who shaped him to the thing he is — When this dumb Terror shall reply to God After the silence of the centuries?" Let us go, then, to Versailles to-day and see where the French Babylon once reared its lofty head, where women as vile as they were beautiful once ruled the court of France, and where the peasant's hard-earned taxes were wasted in vice and gambling and display. Here before us now is the gorgeous bed upon which Louis XIV, "the Grand Monarch," died in 171 5, and we may well wonder if in death the avenging angel did not whisper to him of the impending doom which his folly had done so much to insure ; or if neither he nor his yet more worthless successor, Louis XV (who died in the room to our left), did not once stumble upon a hearing or reading of that passage wherein we are told that the cries of the defrauded laborer have "entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth," and — "Your riches are corrupted and your garments are napoleon's tomb and VERSAILLItS. 89 moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire." The Lesson of the Ancient Court. We may not know whether or not this fearfuj warning ever came to the ears of the pleasure- loving court that once flitted through the royal palace of Versailles, but the record of these his- toric walls only affords fresh proof that the Apostle's language is sound political as well as religious doctrine. The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The avenging Nemesis of nations never sleeps; the relentless rectitude of Nature never fails. On heedless ears too often falls the phrase, "The wages of sin is death," and yet all human history, even more loudly than the Book of Books itself, proclaims the truth of this everlasting doctrine. To-day "careless seems the Great Avenger" as we look upon Versailles, and with our mind's eye people it again with those lordly figures who "have lived in pleasure on the earth and been wanton, who have condemned and killed the just" ; but yonder in the distance looms the Place la Concorde where with our mind's eye we see the bloody guillotine, and the heads of King and Queen and nobles required in this final settle- 90 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE). ment with long delayed and patient Justice. The debt of the ages is settled. Those who have sown the wind have reaped the whirlwind — or alas! in too many cases, not they themselves, but their children and children's children. The Relentless Rectitude of Nature. This is the tragedy of life — that Nature, itself immortal, reckons not of man's mortality. Your father owed a debt and died having enjoyed but not having settled : and you, standing in his place, must pay. Your father, through sin and crime, made grievous debt to Nature, and his children, with meaner souls and diseased bodies, must pay the price. And even so one generation of citi- zens permits injustice, fosters evil, — whether by indifference or by vicious intent, it matters not — and the next generation must pay the price in war and riot and revolution. Our Revolutionary fathers in America, North and South, tempted of Mammon, permitted and encouraged the sin of human slavery; our fathers a generation ago, from North and South, paid the awful price in peace and blood and treasure. The French nobil- ity for centuries ground the faces of the poor, violated their homes, robbed them of the fruits NAPOI^ieON'S TOMB AND VERSAII^LES. 9 1 of their labor, until the French Revolution, the hideous progeny of their long, long years of evil, came forth in the fullness of time to plague their children and to stand forever as one of the most fearful epochs in human history. Read Dickens's "Tale of Two Cities" and the story of the pris- oner in the Bastille (Dr. Manette, I think, is the name) and you will wonder how any one could have expected any other harvest from such a sowing. For the excesses of the Revolution I have no excuse ; no one is further than I from wishing to palliate its own shameful crimes. But no one who knows history can stand to-day at Versailles and think of its corrupt court, the symbol of wrong and oppression, and then stand to-morrow at the Place la Concorde and think of the hun- dreds of nobles whose lives the infuriated popu- lace here required, and not see that the one fol- lows the other as inevitably as the night the day. With nations as with individuals, it is the weary round of history: to-day you make the debt, to- morrow you must pay the price. Whatsoever man or nation soweth that also shall man or nation reap. IX. A Land Where Everybody Works. Cologne:, Germany. In the letter just preceding my last, I had much to say concerning the excellence of French farming, but I have since seen an even more highly developed system of agriculture than that I found in France. There is perhaps no more careful farming anywhere on earth than in the little countries of Belgium and Holland through which I have now been traveling for some days, while in Germany, which I have just reached, the land appears to be little less fruitful. Neither Belgium nor Holland is more than one- fifth the size of an average Southern State, yet each supports a population three times as large. If either North Carolina or Mississippi were as thickly settled as Belgium, the population would be about 30,000,000, or one-third that of the en- tire United States. Belgium is also remarkable as showing what a high degree of fertility has been developed in what was originally a poor sandy soil — this having been so carefully built up by skillful cultivation that this little kingdom — no larger than a dozen good-sized counties — pro- A I.AND where: everybody works. 93 duced on its small arable area last year more than 15,000,000 bushels of wheat, besides an enormous production of truck, vegetables, and feeding crops. The Kingly Horses of Belgium and Holland. And the horses, the magnificent horses: they are themselves worth coming across the ocean to see! If I had wanted anything else to convince me of the necessity of fighting for better work- horses in the South, this trip to Europe would have supplied it. Do you remember that picture we had on our first page about six weeks ago, "The Sort of Work-Horses Western Farmers Use," showing four big, muscular, magnificent- looking horses ready to hitch to the harrow? The picture must have impressed you, for we don't often see such big, strong fellows in the Cotton Belt. Well, anyhow, it is horses such as these that you see on European farms, and it is with them that the farmers here break and culti- vate the land with such thoroughness as to pro- duce the splendid crops I have seen growing everywhere I have yet been. As for the draft horses in the cities, they have been the admiration of our entire party. Col- 94 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. lege professors, college girls, lawyers — everybody has paid the Dutch and Belgian horses tributes of interest, inspection and praise such as even the masterpieces of art in the great galleries here have not always called forth. "Why, they look as big as Barnum's elephants," was the not un- justifiable declaration of a young lady as the great Percherons passed by us. Kingly horses, bearing themselves as if conscious of royal blood, strong as lions, but thoroughly gentle, beautiful in form, hauling gigantic loads on wagons which when empty would alone make good loads for the miserable looking dray-horses belabored by negro drivers in our Southern towns — and doing it all with such wonderful ease and with such majestic and rhythmical movements that it is a positive pleasure just to watch them for an hour at a time. "I Haven't Seen a Horse's Ribs in Europe!" Over here in Europe the farmers believe in three things: (i)Good stock; (2) plenty of it; (3) good care of it. The only exception I would make to this last statement is the cow. It rather goes against the grain with me to see cows hitched to carts like oxen, as is commonly done in A LAND WHERE EVERYBODY WORKS. 95 many European countries, especially Germany; but even these cows, I must say, seem sleek, well fed and in good spirits. I haven't seen a horse's ribs nor a cow's since I have been in Europe : the European won't have poor stock. Neither have I seen a mule — and this reminds me to say that of course there are no negroes, except a few negro tourists. Before passing to any other question, how- ever, let me correct any impression that the cow is discriminated against over here in that she must often pull carts or plows, and so assist in making and harvesting the crops. In Europe everything works. That is why these countries support ten to twenty times the population sup- ported by similar areas in America. Even the dogs are pressed into service, and little carts drawn by one, two or three big dogs are common sights in Amsterdam, Antwerp and Brussels. The Tzvo Secrets of German and Dutch Pros- perity. The dogs work, the cows work, the wind works — everybody works, including father, and the very breezes that pass across the country are caught, like Kansas tramps in harvest time, g6 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. harnessed to thousands of Dutch wind-mills, and set to work to grind the wheat, cut the wood, and drain the swamps. In Germany even the King and the King's son must learn a trade, and the secret of the prosperity of all these crowded, overflowing countries, in my opinion, lies in two things : (i) An intelligent population, ivith their natural intelligence trained and sharpened by education. (2) No man or woman thinks of any task that comes to hand as being beneath him or her. Time and again on this trip have I seen hotel proprietors or managers, men of education, in- telligence and refinement, come into kitchen or dining room in case of a rush and assist in wait- ing on the table as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And this is but an illustration of the general attitude here toward all work. "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might" was good doctrine in Solomon's time, and it is good doctrine for Europe, the Cotton States, or for any other part of the world to-day. Dr. Walter H. Page never said a truer thing than when he declared, "It is better to make good split-bottom chairs than it is to be an unpro- ductive 'prominent citizen.' " A LAND where; EIVERYBODY WORKS. 97 To do work badly degrades it: that is the trouble with us in the South. Our old slave- holding aristocracy set the ignorant new-caught African savage to doing work for them, and he worked so badly that they began to think it dis- creditable to be a worker at all. What I have seen in Europe thus far has only deepened and confirmed the conviction which travel and obser- vation in the South from Virginia to Texas had already developed in my mind, namely, that lack of intelligence or education on the part of any considerable part of its population is a millstone about the neck of any community. Without Intelligent Labor No Nation Can Prosper. There is no task under heaven which an intel- ligent man can not do better and more cheaply than an unintelligent man ; there is no work under heaven which can not be done better and more cheaply by educated labor than by uneducated. There is no other way given among men whereby a nation can achieve greatness than by training, developing and educating its people, its common people. Every live, forceful nation in Europe to- day bears witness to this truth : in them you see 98 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. even the cab drivers reading the daily papers with the same intelligent interest with which mer- chants and lawyers seem to read them in America, and even the peasants here in their plain clothes go to see the great masterpieces of art, as some of them were doing when I stood with them in Amsterdam to admire Rembrandt's most famous pictures. Take Germany, with her magnificent system of industrial schools, the best in the world, and her industrious and prosperous people who have sent articles with the brand "Made in Germany" into every quarter of the globe, then contrast this strong and powerful nation and her skilled and educated workers with degenerate Spain, where free thought has been stifled for centuries and education neglected. In Spain you find the real "Man With the Hoe" whom Markham depicted in his matchless poem : hopeless workers, "broth- ers to the ox," who cultivate narrow patches without horses, breaking the land by digging it up with short-handled, back-breaking, mattock- like grubbing hoes ; and the land going to waste for lack of intelligent attention. Spain (with more than half her people illiterate) bankrupt, poverty-stricken, despised; Germany (with her A LAND where: everybody WORKS. 99 magnificent trade schools and general system of education) progressing more rapidly this last generation than possibly any other nation in the world, if due allowance be made for the differ- ence in natural resources between Germany and America during this period! Small wonder that when Germany whipped dumbfounded France with such astounding celerity in 1870, France proceeded to make in- quiry as to the secret of Germany's wonderful strength — and at once adopted the German idea of thorough and compulsory public education for all her own people ; the effects of which are now also seen in the unexampled prosperity of France, whose people have become the richest in all Europe. German Education is Practical. Education in Germany has been made to train for actual life and work: that is the secret, and it is a lesson which we in the South can not take too seriously to heart. If German authorities had been in charge of Southern education, we should have had splendidly equipped agricultural high schools in every county or Congressional district long before this, and the elements of agriculture and domestic science would be taught in every lOO A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. rural school, whether elementary school or academy. To me it is positively heart-sickening to go out into the academies in our country districts in the South and see girls who are going to be farmers' wives struggling with the conjugation of Latin verbs while they learn never a thing about the chemistry of bread-making and do not even know under what conditions a meat should be put into the water after it is boiling and under what con- ditions it should be put in while the water is cold. Their husbands and children will have their lives saddened and shortened by indigestion and im- proper nutrition ; but of course it would be undig- nified and therefore unthinkable for sweet college girls to learn anything about cooking! And the boys who are going to be farmers — they are also studying Caesar and "latitude and longitude" and "the metric system of weights and measures" while they learn nothing whatever of how to compound a feeding ration so as to get milk or butter cheapest, and nothing whatever of soil fertility and its management, by which the $60,000,000 a year spent by farmers in Georgia and adjoining States might be largely saved! But of course that, too, would be undignified, A LAND WHERE EVERYBODY WORKS. Id and it might shock your professor if you were to bring the matter to his attention. One Stupendous Fallacy We Must Put Forever Behind Us. The whole tragic system is an outgrowth of our idea that labor is degrading, and this is the fallacy we must put forever behind us before we can ever measure up to our opportunities. When man had once fallen, had once eaten the forbid- den fruit, the only way the Lord Himself could find to keep him from going utterly to the Devil was to put him to work; and it is high time for us to come to see that corn roots and cotton roots are just as honorable and legitimate subjects of interest and mental development as Greek roots and Latin roots. Take my own case now in connection with this very European trip: When I was in a country school I spent considerable time studying about English money, but when I reached Scotland the other week I didn't know the worth of a shilling nor how many pence it takes to make one. I also spent some time as a farm boy studying the metric system of weights and measures, but now that I have reached a metric system country at 102 A SOUTHEJRNER IN EUROPE. last, I have no idea in the world as to how much a kilometer is. All this information perished with the learn- ing — even for me, although I have made a trip to Europe as not one schoolboy in a thousand ever grows up to do. It would have been knowl- edge that would have stayed with me, knowledge that would have been put to interest in all the life around me, if I had learned in the school about the laws of plant and animal life, about how to compound feeding rations and fertilizer formulas, about the breeds and types of horses, hogs and cattle, etc., and this practical and useful knowledge (as no sane man can deny) would have been just as useful to me in mental training as were the miscellaneous masses of foreign, life- less and useless information which were thrust upon me. Let's Learn a Lesson From Germany. It is the same way with the education of our girls. A young woman — and an unusually intel- ligent young woman, too, — who was with me in Paris the other day, had spent four years studying French at one of our Southern colleges, and yet in the five or six years time since then she had forgotten the language so completely that she A LAND WHERE EVERYBODY WORKS. IO3 couldn't even bargain with the cabman about our trip to St. Denis Church. And she studied chem- istry, too, — though to make this practical and apply the principles of chemistry to cooking in our girls' schools is, of course, out of the ques- tion. France was wise enough when Germany licked her, and when she saw Germany beating the world in industrial skill, to wake up and adopt the German idea of education for her own — com- pulsory education, universal education, industrial education. The South, I repeat, should take the same lesson to heart. We are largely of the same stock as the Germans — nothing on my trip has impressed me more forcibly than the striking re- semblance of the men and women in a German crowd to those in an American crowd — and the same policies of practical education and training which have made the German people prosperous and powerful will work a like revolution in the South. Let us set ourselves to the task. X. Wise Economies America Should Learn From Europe. Heidelberg, Germany. There are so many beautiful and notable places in Europe that I could give all my time in these letters to mere descriptions of interesting towns, cathedrals, public buildings, rivers, mountains, etc., if I were so inclined, and if other writers had not already written of them in far more enter- taining fashion than I could hope to do. But until our people come to a greater appreciation of the beautiful that is at our own doors in America, I do not think it worth my while to take up space in extensive descriptions of Europe's far-away glories. Besides, it is the common beauties round about us that are most worthy of our attention anyhow. Every fair day the sunset paints a pic- ture for you more splendid and inspiring than any artist has ever yet been able to put upon canvas. Every night the heavens "declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork" to a greater degree than any other natural scenery in the world. I like that story ECONOMIES AMERICA SHOULD LEARN. IO5 of the old Scotchman who went up the little mountain peak every morning to see the sun rise and "to take off his hat to the glory of the world," as he expressed it. "The meanest flower that blows" has interest and meaning, and for every person who loves the true and the beautiful — "Earth's crammed with Heaven And every common bush afire with God." America Wasting Opportunities for Beauty. If our farms were only as carefully tilled, if our farmhouses were only as tastefully built and painted, if there were the same wealth of shrub and vine and flower about them, and if we could do away with ramshackle cabins and scrubby, ill- fed stock (and put in about five times as much good stock instead) America would be as beauti- ful as Europe. The women of the South can not do better than to join hands, all of them, in a crusade for more beautiful homes, more beautiful school- houses and grounds, more beautiful towns and cities. Wherever villages are starting, let them begin in time to lay off broad streets and parks, and let young trees be set out even on avenues where no one may live for twenty years to come ; I06 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. and on our farms, of course, there is no excuse for not having all the glory that tree, shrub, vine, flower and grasses can bring to a dwelling place. And here there comes to my mind a picture of the beautiful roads in France, lined with tall Lombardy poplars waving in the breeze, and es- pecially the memory of a humble village out of which for a mile runs one long magnificent avenue of such trees — an avenue which strikes the traveler as being little less than a master- piece of art, giving a glory and distinction to the town such as once seen can never be for- gotten. And yet almost any Southern village — any farm roadside for that matter — might have such a vision of beauty within a comparatively short time if the proper trees were planted now. The trouble is that America is wasting oppor- tunities for beauty just as it is wasting its oppor- tunities for a thousand other things. Before I left New York I wrote that I was coming back to "our old home," back to the old homestead from which we Americans went out to seek better for- tunes in a new world ; and in coming back to the ancestral dwelling place nothing has impressed me more than the fact that we, too, are playing the prodigal son and wasting our substance in ECONOMIISS AMERICA SHOULD LEARN. IO7 riotous living. The wastes of America would make Europe rich. It is well indeed that the Governors of all the States and the country's leading thinkers and scientists are at last meeting and planning together in ''Conferences for the Conservation of Our Natural Resources." No Gullied Land in Germany. I saw more gullied, wasted, desolated, heart- sickening land in fifteen minutes time between Birmingham and Memphis last April than I have seen in a thousand miles of European travel up to this time. The steep banks of the river Rhine are as carefully cultivated as a garden. Rock terrace after rock terrace has been built above you to keep the land from washing. I recall counting at one place thirteen distinct rows of stone terraces on one hillside, and on others there were an even larger number. It is on such land that the famous Rhine vineyards are cultivated — on land often so steep that a horse can not walk over it, and all the work must be done by hand. And in Germany, as well as in Belgium, France and Holland, great numbers of cattle are grown, and the land carefully enriched with the manure. Mr. R. H. Battle was telling me only a short I08 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. time before I left home of a German tenant he had some years ago. "The man wanted to put everything back on the land," said Mr. Battle; "his sole idea seemed to be to build it up and en- rich it." And this feeling was so different from the usual land-skinning ideas of Southern tenants that Mr. Battle was naturally amazed. The legumes are largely raised here, too — alfalfa and the clovers ; and almost every field bears evidence of a systematic rotation of crops. How the Forests Are Cared For. Then take the forests. Over here their owners have come to see what we in America have not yet come to understand, namely, that the timber crop is a crop just as surely as corn or cotton, even if it does take years instead of months for it to reach the harvesting stage. And the govern- ment over here, moreover, realized long ago the importance of forest preservation, while our Con- gressmen in Washington continue to kill the bills that would preserve the wealth of our great Ap- palachian and White Mountain timber lands. In Germany such areas are under strict government supervision. Lumbermen are not permitted to waste the timber, but are allowed to cut only so much a year and of trees of the prescribed size; ECONOMIES AMERICA SHOUI.D LEARN. IO9 and there are also strict regulations about re- foresting. And if there are those who object to the expense of maintaining such supervision, let me remind them that it is the experience of Germany that the saving through the prevention of forest fires alone far more than pays every expense incurred in this notable and fruitful work. It is interesting to go through the woods and see how the trees of the right size have been marked, cut, and carried out without one-tenth the damage to other timber an average American lumberman would inflict. Saving a Country's Best Resources. Not only are the resources of land and forest thus carefully conserved, but the greatest re- sources of any nation — the minds of its people — are trained and developed, as I set forth in my last letter, by a splendid scheme of public educa- tion, universal, industrial and even compulsory. More early here than in America, too, was the folly of grinding out the lives and stunting the bodies of children in factory work recognized and remedied. It has been only a few years since the great State of South Carolina officially advertised its own shame by publishing as an inducement for 9 no A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. capital and for immigration that it had no laws regulating hours of labor or ages for employ- ment, while wiser England more than sixty years ago saw the folly of ruining its future citizenship and adopted a general ten-hour policy in her factories — providing, too, for a rigid system of factory inspection, the absence of which has made many a so-called child labor law in the South a snare and a delusion. The actual saving of human life itself also has far more attention here than in America. I should be afraid to quote figures from memory, but I know that in the matter of railroad wrecks, for example, the American lines, in proportion to traffic handled, kill and wound a fearfully and shockingly larger number of passengers and em- ployees. European superiority here is partly due to the use of a better signal and checking service, thereby preventing many collisions ; partly to the general absence of level crossings, the railroad tracks going either under or over the public road, and partly to the tracks being freed from pedes- trians by protecting hedges or fences. One other illustration of the greater care of life and property over here, and I am done with that division of my subject. I refer to the better e:CONOMIES AMERICA SHOUI.D I.EARN. Ill regulations for fire prevention in towns and cities — stricter rules in regard to the erection of buildings, etc., etc. Only this week an English authority has published the exact figures regard- ing comparative fire losses in Europe and America for a series of years, showing the per capita loss in America to be more than nine times as great as here. All these things, together with other facts that I have already given with regard to agriculture, and might give with regard to other things, are enough, 1 submit, to warrant my conclusions, first, that we Americans, going from this old European home to the far, strange land of America, have literally played the part of the prodigal son of the parable; and, second, that Europe would make itself rich on what America wastes. T'he Torrens System a Working Success. And as an afterthought, I think it not out of place to mention here a matter whose importance is too little recognized in America — our wasteful, antiquated, and utterly unscientific method of registering land titles. In Prussia a very much better system prevails and in large parts of the 112 A SOUTHERNER IN EUROPE. British Empire the Torrens System, which is the nearest ideal yet conceived, is widely in force, and greatly to the benefit of everybody and every- thing, except, possibly, a few jack-leg lawyers who must depend upon patronage of this sort for support. With us every time a piece of real estate is transferred, or a loan is made on it, a lawyer must be paid to investigate the title — he going to the court-house and searching through musty rec- ords of wills and deeds for generations back, and every time the land changes hands the same dreary, expensive and increasingly difficult task must be repeated: the same identical work re- peated time after time to no good purpose what- ever. By the Torrens System the State once for all makes a thorough investigation of title, reg- isters it in prescribed fashion, and guarantees the title, a small percentage-fraction tax from each purchaser sufficing to create a fund large enough for the State to reimburse the purchaser in the rare case of a mistake. By this system farmers are enabled to borrow money on land and to make transfers of land as easily as of cotton mill stock, while the saving to persons buying and selling any kind of real estate is enormous. A lawyer told me a short time ago that he knew of ECONOMIES AMERICA SHOUI