\\\E UNIVERSE *3 x, %M r^- OC ? WAR OF THE METALS. WASHINGTONIANA. MEXICO, HAWAII AND JAPAN By THEODORE W. MOVES, PRESIDENT OF THE WASHINGTON BOARD OF TRADE. WASHINGTON, D. C. : THOS. W. CADICK, PRINTER. 1899. N27W CONTENTS CURIOUS PHASES OF THE WAR OF METALS. P 8Ke . Free Coinage Magic 2 Curiosities of Repudiation 6 Demonetization of Wampurn, or the Crime of 1661 11 Shy lock Workmen and True National Greatness lt> WASHINGTON1ANA. Speech at Board of Trade Reception, February 20, 1894 21 Speech as President of the Washington Board of Trade, at the Board's Annual Reception, at the Arlington, February 24, 1898 24 Speech as President of the Washington Board of Trade, at the Board's Annual Shad Bake, at Marsnall Hall, May 21, 1898 29 Speech as President of the Washington Board of Trade, at the Annual Reception, February 23, 1899 34 Speech as Prefcident of the Washington Board of Trade, at the Annual Shad Bake, May 6, 1899 39 Report as Chairman of the Committee on Public Library, of the AVasbington Board of Trade, March 27, 1894, and brief sketch of the origin and development of the Washington Public Library 44 NOTES OF TRAVEL IN MEXICO, HAWAII, AND JAPAN. Mexico's Wonders 56 Aztec and Spaniard 65 Modern Mexico 73 A King Among Trec-s 82 Mitla's Ruins 91 Nikko's Great Day 101 Japanese Jingoism 115 Japan and Hawaii 126 Hawaii's Crisis 142 A PPEN DIX. FINANCES OF THE NATIONAL CAPITAL PARTNERSHIP. Annual Report as President of the Washington Board of Trade. 1898. CURIOUS PHASES OF THE WAR OF METALS. The free-silver oracle speaks through a double headed idol like (he god .lainis of Roman mythology. One head fares the mining camps of the Kocky .Mountains: the other over looks the farms of the Middle West and South. Through its I wo sets of lips the oracle speaks with contradictory ton-ues. To the silver owner in the Kockies, directly and spiM-iti.-ally. and indirectly to frightened creditors every- where, it proclaims: "Independent free coinage at ID to 1 will double ih" market price of silver over all the world and enrich the bullion owner without cheating anyone else!" To farmers and to debtors it declares: "Free coinage will not double the world price of silver, but by substituting for the gold dollar a depreciated and depreciating silver dollar, it will raise prices for the benefit of the farmer, and by cheap- ening money it will render easier the payment of debts!" Through one head the oracle predicts an impossibility to deceive and conciliate the honest, and through the other it proclaims the truth in a shape to tempt the dishonest. The end is held to justify the means in making converts to the religion of free silver and in swelling the throng of worship- i-rs before the double-headed idol. If the declaration that free coinage here would raise the price of silver to $1.29 per ounce over all the world were taken seriously and generally believed, the silver shrine would be promptly abandoned by the great mass of its de- voters. Such belief might prevent honest men from utterly destroying in righteous indignation the abhorrent image, but. on the oiher hand, it would rob the idol of attractive- ness, except for the silver owner, and leave him almost a solitary worshiper at a deserted altar. FREE-COINAGE MAGIC. Jugglery by Which Silver Is to Be Doubled in Value- The Midas Touch of Uncle Sam Why Confine the Wonder -Working Power to the White Metal? Some Suggestive Questions. [The Washington Star, Oct. 2S, 1SSM>.] If independent free coinage at 10 to 1 will, as Mr. Bryan insists, permanently double the value of silver over all the world, a single legislative act, performed on Capitol Hill, will cause instantaneously the Mexican dollar to buy twice as much as it now does, not only in this country, but in London and Paris also. The Indian rupee will buy twice as much as at present, not only in Bombay and London, but in St. Petersburg. The vast deposits of silver in the mines of Mex- ico will be instantly doubled in value. The national debt of Mexico, payable in gold, will be in effect cut in half be- cause the Mexican silver in which it is to be paid has ap- proached by that much nearer to the value of gold. "NVithout inconvenience to ourselves we will have caused the hoarded si her of the Mexicans, the Hindoos and 400,000,000 China- men, though buried in the earth, to know 100 per cent, of in-, crease. Every piece of silver in the world, in ore, bullion, ornament or coin, will feel the magic influence of our value- expanding edict, and at the Midas touch of Uncle Sam will assume a double share of the characteristics of gold. If we thus have power to work miracles and to spread comparative opulence among the humble homes of more than half the people of the world, the question arises, why should we limit our beneficence to the extent of merely doubling the wealth of the silver Hindoo, Chinaman or Mexi- can, by fixing the coinage ratio at 16 to 1? If we can double the world's market value of silver, we can quadruple it, or multiply it by eight or by sixteen. There is no reason why \vc should be wedded to the ratio of 16 to 1. It does not appear that precisely this coinage ratio ever prevailed in any country in any age of the world. The "money of the Consti- tution" is sometimes misleadingly referred to, but the first coinage ratio under the Constitution was 15 to 1, and it was also the carefully estimated commercial ratio, on which basis the constitutional ratio would be about 31 to 1 at the present day. We are told that in early Bible times sil- ver was treated as equal in value to gold, the ratio being 1 to 1. Why not restore the money and ratio and parity of the Bible rather than the alleged ratio of the Constitution, thus giving to silver its scriptural value before even the most ancient of the European gold bugs began their fiendish work of appreciating gold at the expense of silver, and thus bless- ing the silver owner, small or great, of Mexico, India, China and all the world by increasing sixteen fold his metal's pur- chasing and debt-paying power? TURNING SILVER INTO GOLD. If Uncle Sana is to play King Midas he will appropriately enact the part in a truly royal style. He will certainly not be content with a beggarly appreciation of silver to the ratio of 16 to 1, and will undoubtedly at the very least convert all the silver outright into gold at the ratio of 1 to 1, even if he finds himself able to confine his magic touch to silver and to refrain from changing our wheat, corn and potatoes into gold. There are still other ratios which might find advocates. There is the Columbian ratio of 10 to 1, which prevailed at the time of the discovery of America, and which may per- haps be entitled to consideration as the original American ratio. Outside of this sentimental consideration it is to be urged in favor of this ratio that the resulting dollar will be most convenient in size and weight for use. The 16 to 1 dol- lar is too bulky for popular use. A 31 to 1 dollar at the present commercial ratio would be unendurable. A 1 to 1 dollar, of the size and weight of the gold dollar, would be too small, though it is probably selfish to take into account this detail, when the blessings are considered which we are to shower under this ratio upon the world at large. A lOJ to 1 dollar, the true Columbian dollar, would be a little larger than the present half dollar, making a very convenient coin for popular use. If we can raise the value of silver over all the world to any increased price for it that we announce as to be paid at our mints, then most assuredly we should adopt for the world the Bible ratio of 1 to 1 with all the powerful arguments in iis favor, or the Columbian ratio of 10| to 1 with sentimental considerations and a convenient coinage size and weight to plead for it. The question arises, however, when we find that we can wirh impunity disregard scornfully the world price of silver and by legislative act fasten a new price for silver upon all the nations of a tributary earth, why should we confine our price-fixing power to silver? Why should we not ex- tend it to some commodity of which individual Americans produce more and which they more generally possess? If by an act of legislation we can double the world price of sil- ver, why not likewise, by Congressional enactment, double tin- world value of wheat, corn and cotton? If the world price of silver is increased by free coinage to $1.1*1) per ounce, as Mr. Bryan promises, the mine owner will pocket an additional profit of 04 cents on every ounce mined, an annual minimum gain to existing American mine opera- tors alone of over $::r>.imo,0<)0. DOUBLING SILVER'S PRICK ox 01 I;>KI.VES. *i The theory advanced by Mr. Bryan, which maintains that by free coinage here silver will be doubled in price over all the world, treats free coinage as a purchase of the silver by the (Jovernment for a fixed price at the mints. You and I and all the other taxpayers of the United States supply the money which is to be thus expended, and the question arises, why should we who produce and own no silver double the price of silver upon ourselves when we wish to buy? How does it benefit us who do not sell silver to have it cost more? \Vliy should we take this $.'i5,000,000 from our national tax money already insufficient to supply our current needs and hand it over voluntarily and unnecessarily to the silver owners, who make a handsome profit now in selling their silver for one-half of what we insist upon paying them here- after? Under the Sherman act we bought silver to be coined into money. How did that business operation differ from Mr. Bryan's proposed purchase? We paid under the former only the commercial value of the silver: under the latter it is proposed that we double the price, ("nder the former the coinage was limited with the purpose of confining it to American silver or to an amount which could be maintained at a parity with gold: under the latter coinage would be unlimited. Under the former the coinage was on the < Jovernment's account, all taxpayers profiling by the difference between the commercial and the coinage value of the silver; under the latter the coinaire 5 would be on individual account and the profit or seigniorage goes lo the silver owner instead of to the nation, (he aggre- gated taxpayers. If \ve are no! satisfied with our experiments under the JMand and Sherman acts, and wish to add more silver dollars to our currency than can be supplied from the millions of silver bullion already bought and lying in the Treasury vaults, why not buy (he bullion for ourselves and earn for ourselves the seigniorage? Why insist upon enriching the silver-owning class at the expense of the masses, the taxpay- ers of the United States? Is American shrewdness at striking a bargain totally lost? If we are going to offer to buy the four billions of silver of the world, why do we offer to pay twice what we can now get it for in the world's markets, and defend ourselves solely by saying that it will be worth the double price just as soon as we offer to pay that amount for it? For Uncle Sam to make an extravagant guess at the price which silver will bring after he has "reraonetized" it, and then insist upon paying that double price for it now, and to offer to buy all there is in the \vorld at that price, when he can get all he wants for half of that price, is to entitle him- self to a dunce's cap of the very largest size. I>ut the role which Uncle Sam is really expected to fill is not that of fool, but knave. Independent free coinage will array him not in the cap and bells, but in the striped suit of a convict in the court of nations. For the overwhelming majority of the 1.6 to 1 advocates accept the truth that free coinage will not double permanently the world price of sil- ver, but by depreciating the dollar will raise prices and ren- der easier the paj'ment of debts. All financial experience suggests that under free coinage there would be enough temporary rise in the price of silver to bring great gains to silver owners, especially to' specula- tors, to the money handlers and money changers, to "a class at the expense of the masses,'' and a sufficiently speedy de- cline to cheat creditors for the benefit of debtors and to ex- pose the nation to all the evils of a depreciated and depre- ciating currencj 7 . THE DEBTORS' CHANCE. Curious Phases of the Problem of Repudiation Effect of Changing Ratios Taking Revenge in 1896 for the "Crime of 1873" The Wolf and the Lamb. [The Washington Star, Oct. 29, 1896.] Independent free coinage at 16 to 1 would benefit debtors only by swindling creditors. Every man to w r hom a dollar is now due would be compelled to accept for it one-half of that amount. American debtors, including the nation itself,, would go into fraudulent bankruptcy at fifty cents on the dollar or thereabouts, indelibly staining the credit of the nation and that of every debtor in it. The charge of dishonesty in free coinage at 16 to 1 is met by the allegation that the gold' standard dollar has appre- ciated since 1873 until it is now a 200-cent dollar and needs depreciation itself by one-half to be rendered honest. The theory of gold appreciation has been thoroughly dis- cussed in the campaign, and in the opinion of the sound- money men has been exploded. But there is another branch of the discussion on this point which has not been so fully or so satisfactorily explored. If it were possible to demonstrate that gold had appre- ciated, as alleged, this demonstration would not suffice to prove that the half-value silver dollar under unlimited free coinage at 16 to 1 would be an honest coin. If debtors have been gradually robbed for more than twenty years by a dollar appreciating slightly though with fluctuations from year to year, the evil and crime are not to be remedied by wholesale robbery of the creditors of to-day, by a sudden and large depreciation of that dollar. One crime does not justify another. There is no retributive jus- tice in the crime, since the persons to be robbed to-day are not the robbers of the last twenty years. Because A, a debtor of fifteen or ten years ago, was swin- dled to an almost inappreciable amount through gradually appreciating money, therefore B, a creditor of to-day, should be swindled out of 47 per cent, of his due by a sudden depre- ciation of the money in which he is paid. This is the silver view of compensation. All creditors are grouped together and all debtors are grouped together without regard to the years in which they lived and are arrayed against each other like the Indians and white men of old times on the frontier. If a white man killed an Indian, the Indians would, in retail at ion, kill the tirst white man whom they met. The creditors of to-day are to be robbed 47 per rent, because the debtors of i he '"(is and '80s may have been robbed 2 or 3 per cent., though the debtors of the '70s who suffered this small rob- bery are in many instances the creditors of the '90s whom it is proposed to plunder of half their due in retaliation for the previous robbery committed in part upon themselves. They are thus plundered both going and coming. A debtor vendetta is declared against all creditors, lasting from generation to generation, without regard to individual < hanges in the composition of the two classes, or even of changes in the course of years from one lass to the other. THE Of UK FOR AlMMIKt : I ATION. The cure for the evils of a fluctuating, appreciating money is not to substitute a depreciated fluctuating money, but a steady, unfluctuating currency, neither appreciating nor de- preciating. Any swindle perpetrated upon the debtors of 1873 is not satisfied by swindling the creditors of 1896. The statute of limitations has probably run against the previous swindle. In any event, we cannot show r our abhorrence of an old rascality by resorting to a new one. The dubious and infinitesimal crime of 1873 does not justify the vast proposed crime of 1896. Xor would the one justify the other if that of 1873 w r ere the greater. To cure the alleged evils of an appreciating money of twent}* years' development we are asked to endure the cer- tain evils of a depreciated and depreciating money to-day. Discarding as unreliable a constantly lengthening financial yard-stick, shall we substitute instead of a stable measure, one that is constantly shortening? The evil of a changing money standard is not to be remedied on the homeopathic principle 4 that like cures like. It is only in the nursery rhymes dedicated to Mother Goose and other members of the Goose family that the wise man who has scratched out his eyes by jumping into a bramble bush conceives the brilliant idea of jumping into another bush in order to scratch them in again. If on account of the imagined mysterious affinity between the price of silver and all of the commodities except gold the s apparent depreciation of silver is really an appreciation of gold, and the gold dollar has been appreciating in value since 1S73 until now it is a 200-cent dollar and needs to be cut in two in order to enable a debtor to pay equitably a debt con- tracted in 1S73, it is evident that this depreciation of tin- dollar is just only in the case of the creditor of 187:5. The debtor of no other year has had each dollar of his debt doubled upon him. The number of debts still existing which \\cre contracted in 1873 or in the adjacent years, when on the silverites' theory our dollar was worth approximately 100 rents, is infinitesimal, and they are nearly all corporation indebtednesses, railroad, governmental and municipal, due from wealthy and powerful debtors, whose credit was strong enough to maintain long-sustained indebtedness, and who made such profitable use of the borrowed money that they might be supposed able to pay the extra interest or bonus represented by the alleged appreciation of the dollar of pay- ment. Against the debtors of 1873 and thereabouts (not one per cent, of the entire number of debtors) who will be justly treated by depreciation of the dollar to fifty cents, if gold has really done all the fluctuating, are to be placed all other creditors than those who loaned in 1873 or thereabouts, who will be swindled in a constantly increasing amount as the date of their loans approaches the present day. Statistics show that the bulk of existing debts not yet due were con- tracted within the year, and that only the most insignificant fraction is older than five years, which is the maximum limit of western real estate mortgages. RESULT OF FLUCTUATING RATIOS. The assumption that silver has remained uniform in value, and that our gold dollar has done all. the fluctuating, works out some curious results, if accepted. It is not always the debtors who have been defrauded even on this theory. The depreciation of silver or the appreciation of gold has not been continuous. Debtors who obtained loans in '80, '87, 'ss and 'S9 and paid in 1890, for instance, paid in cheaper dollars than they gave, and defrauded their creditors, in stead of being defrauded. The ratio of silver to gold in 188G was 20.78 to 1; in 'S7. 21.13; in '88, 21.99; in '89, 22.10, and in 1890. I'l.TC. The depreciation of silver in the silver dollar represents the alleged appreciation of the gold dollar. The silver dol- 9 lar has not depreciated nor the gold dollar appreciated con linnously since 1ST.'!. Debtors who I tori-owed in 1X7(5 paid in 1877 in a cheaper dollar than they received. Silver appreciated or gold de- preciated in those years. Commercial ratio of silver I '.nil ion value of silver to gold. dollar. 1X7i 517.88 to 1 .894 1S77 17.22 to 1 .929 Those who borrowed in 1879 and paid in 1880 paid back a cheaper dollar than they received. Commercial ratio. Bullion value of silver dollar. 187918.40 to 1 .868 1880 1S.O.-) to 1 .880 Those who borrowed in iss:> and paid in 1884 paid back a cheaper dollar than they received. Commercial ratio. Bullion value of silver dolla r. is,x:;-is.r.4 to 1 .858 1884-18.." to 1 .8(11 Those who borrowed in '*<;. 'S7, 'SS or '89 and paid in 1890 paid in a cheaper dollar than they borrowed. Commercial ratio. Bullion value of silver dollar. 188020.78 to 1 .769 188721.13 to 1 .758 18S8 21 ..)!> to 1 .727 1SS9 22.10 to 1 .724 1890 19.70 to 1 .810 Those who borrowed in '87, ? 88 and 'S! and paid in '91 paid in a cheaper dollar. Commercial ratio. Bullion value of silver dollar. 188721.1.", to 1 .758 188821.99 to 1 .727 1SS! 22.10 to 1 .724 1 s; 1-20.92 to 1 .764 Those who borrowed in '94 and paid in '!>">, or the first six months of '!)('. and those who borrowed in '!."> and paid in the 10 ,: first six months of '96, paid in cheaper money than they bor- rowed. Commercial ratio. Bullion value of silver dollar. 189432.56 to 1 .491 1895-31.60 to 1 .505 1896 (six months) 30.32 to 1 .528 All but a small fraction of the indebtedness of 1896 was, according to the authorities, contracted in 1895 and 1S94. In those years the creditor loaned to the debtor, on the sii- verite theory, 200-cent dollars; in the natural course "f events, if he received payment in the first six months of !*!><; he would receive dollars somewhat less than those he had loaned, but what else than swindling is it to compel him to receive for the 200-cent dollars which he loaned 100-cent dol lars, on the ground that dollars were worth only 100 cenls in 1873? Half of the great bulk of existing debts would, on the silverites' own theory, be stolen from the creditors for, the benefit of debtors under the forms of law. THE WOLF AND THE LAMB. The creditors who have loaned w r ithin the last five years, including 99 per cent, of the class, when threatened with a depreciation of their dollar by half, in vain call attention to the fact that if the dollar of their debts has appreciated at all, the amount is infinitesimal and justifies in no event a greater reduction than that amount. It seems paradoxical to liken a debtor to a wolf and a cred- itor to a lamb, but the situation strongly suggests the fable in which the lamb was accused by the wolf first of disturbing his drinking water, though the lamb was downstream, and, secondly, of insulting the wolf at a date which the lamb showed was prior to his birth ; on the strength of which pre- natal insult the lamb was torn to pieces and devoured. The free-coinage debtor of '96 says to his recently con- tracted debt: "You committed against me the crime of 1873. By that crime you have fattened at my expense to twice your original size. I will now justly proceed to tear you in two." "Alas," vainly pleads the youthful debt; "at the date you speak of I was not yet born." THE CRIME OF \ 661. A Plea for the Remonetization of Wampum Two Centuries of Debtors Wronged Real Independence of European Financial Domination Proposed Depreciation of Sea Shells. [The Washington .Star, Oct. 30, 1896.] Hear the new American free coinage declaration of inde- pendence! A great and powerful nation of 70,000,000 peo- ple, with all our wonderful resources, is capable of having a financial policy and a distinctive money of its own; should not submit to remain in financial subjection to England or to all Europe; is able single-handed to double the price of silver or anything else in the markets of the world, and he who is so unpatriotic as to assert the contrary is a pusillani- mous, crawling, traitorous creature, whom it would be flat- tery to characterize as a nineteenth century Benedict Ar- nold! The first point of the declaration is that the gold standard, which has been the American standard in fact since 1834, and formally since 1873, is still European, foreign, alien; that in order to demonstrate our Americanism we must abandon the gold standard, which, unlike other Europeans, has not, it is alleged, become naturalized here, even after a sixty years' residence, and in establishing a new standard we must declare our independence of the world's commercial ratio of silver and gold and force upon all other nations a radically differing ratio of our own devising. Those w r ho thus scorn European co-operation or advice in legislating concerning the civilized world's medium of ex- change derive great comfort from the opinions and sugges- tions of Prince Bismarck, the representative of a gold-bug despotism and the land of the Rothschilds, whose views, curiously enough, these Europe-haters themselves solicited. Bismarck, the man of gold, as well as of blood and inwi, cynically replies in effect: "I was a gold bug while in con- trol of Germany, in fact, demonetized silver, yielding to ex- pert opinion, but while I believe in gold for Germany, I have had a predilection for bimetallism, especially for America, 12 which is freer to make dangerous experiments than Ger- many. I approve heartily of a test of free coinage in the United States if not incompatible with your interests. If you succeed Germany may imitate you if she likes, and if you fail, nobody will suffer especially but yourself, and Ger- many may use you as a warning: and horrible example/' We are to dose ourselves experimentally as apothecary's cat for Europe: we arc to pull chestnuts out of the fire for the bene- fit of European bimetallists. and in the very performance of these humiliating roles we are called upon to please our- selves with the idea that we are proclaiming and demon- strating our independence of Europe. The silverites' bogus declaration of independence appeals to our characteristic and dominating national pride, and at- tempts to pervert and abuse ( per cent. cheaper than it is paid out here, and the good, polished wain puni, commonly called Manhattan wampum, is wholly put out of sight or exported, which tends to the express ruin and destruction of this country (note that (!rcx1i: cent dol- lars might increase our foreign trade by placing our manufac- turers on an equal footing with competitors mainly in silver countries who have the advantage of employing cheap labor. American manufacturers would not dare to propose directly to American workmen this cut. in wages; but if the workmen themselves clamor to be paid in depreciated money and the same result of a reduction in wages can be reached through compliance with the workingman's own demand, the thoughtless manufacturer who overlooks the disastrous ef- fect upon his future market of national repudiation and the adoption of a depreciated currency might be well pleased to take the workmen at their word. The necessity of paying high wages in this country in order to keep our people up to the mark of a higher order of life, development and culture than that prevailing in Japan. China and .Mexico, has been the most serious drawback in American competition with many foreign manufacturers. Perhaps a temporary seeming business prosperity might fol- low if our workingmen would declare of their own accord 17 that they are overpaid, that our money is too good for them, and that they wish to be paid in the kind of money, with the same reduced purchasing power, that satisfies foreign cheap labor. But if any American workingmen are prepared for this act of self-sacrifice, why go at it in a roundabout way by debasing the national currency a procedure which will swindle thousands of innocent third persons who are so un- fortunate as to be creditors, and work general panic and dis- aster? Why not move directly to the point and announce a willingness to have their wages reduced one-half without any tampering with the nation's money and the national honor? CUTTING OFF THE NOSE TO SPITE THE FACE. The individual who cut off his nose to spite his face is as Solomon in wisdom in comparison with the workman who, in response to the demagogue's appeal to spite the moneyed classes, cuts the purchasing power of his wages in two and leaves himself merely with the privilege of fighting for a pro- portionate increase to make matters even again. As the farmer is invited to raise at his own expense as tax- payer the price of silver, which he does not produce, in the hope that in some way he will thereby also raise the prices of what he does produce, so the laborer is invited to legalize half wages for himself now in the hope that his employer, whom Mr. Bryan is teaching him to hate as his natural enemy, will philanthropically double wages in the future in order to make him as prosperous as he was before. DEFRAUDING THE EEPUBLIC'S PRESERVERS. Another group of creditors who are to be swindled out of one-half of their dues by a 50-cent dollar are pensioners and holders of certain government bonds, the obligations to whom on fhe part of this republic are based upon bloodshed, danger incurred, sufferings endured and money advanced in order to save the Union. It is now proposed that a grateful nation shall show its appreciation of these services by dis- honorable repudiation of one-half of the obligations incurred in the struggle to preserve the nation's life. We are invited to revive in 1896 the spirit of 1776 and to declare our independence of the financial tyranny of Eng- land. The vital facts of the proposed independence are sil- ver monometallism, like that of Mexico, as our national 18 financial system, and the payment of 100-cent debts in 50- cent dollars. We are invited to declare not self-respecting independ- ence, but Chinese or Mexican isolation. We do not want to be isolated. We wish to be in touch with the rest of the world. The American spirit is a conquering, absorbing, dominating spirit, not that of the surly hermit who shrinks from everybody in the recesses of his cave. We can hold our own with all the world. We want the best of every- thing in the world. We want to profit by the world's experi- ence in all respects and build to higher levels of civilization upon that experience as a foundation. We want the best language, English, the coming -language of the globe. Who cares that it came to us from England, and who proposes that we declare a new independence of Great Britain, dis- card the English language and restore Choctaw as a dis- tinctively American tongue to the proud position which it occupied on this continent prior to the time when it was struck down by European immigration. We want the best money in all the world in order to make domestic and foreign exchanges, and we will not, merely because England uses it, discard gold, the world's money, and substitute either the Asiatic and South American money, silver, or our own North American wampum. INDEPENDENCE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. Our proposed isolation will be that of the outcast, for it will flow from repudiation of part of our national debt. We declare our independence not of the decrees of Lombard and Wall streets, but of the Ten Commandments. Our defiance is leveled not at British financial tyranny and the Roths- childs, but at the God of nations, who declares to govern- ments as to individuals, "Thou shalt not steal." The free-coinage pronunciamento is not a declaration of independence, but with its associated issues in this cam- paign is rather a proclamation of civil strife. The Chicago and St. Louis coalitionists run up the banner of repudiation, sectionalism and internal dissension. Their campaign ar- rays class against class, section against section, and appeals to the basest passions of the individual. The American republic, toward which depressed but aspir- ing humanity in every quarter of the globe has turned for in- spinu'nm, is in this struggle subjected to a test of its right to live. Has the national conscience become corrupted? 19 Are the people, rent by passion and faction, class hatreds, sectional rancor and individual envy, greed and malice, to confess themselves unfit to govern themselves? The lessons which America has taught mankind are the capacity of the people for self-government, the dignity of labor and the true greatness of nations, not merely in "pro- claiming peace and good will within its boundaries and to all men everywhere, but in diffusing the blessings of justice, of Christian beneficence and of the good faith which de- velops naturally and inevitably from a sensitive national conscience over its own people and the whole world. The spectacle of the masses of a vast population, the mas- ters of a new world, governing themselves with sound judg- ment, toiling industriously and with success for their own material, intellectual and moral advancement, toward whose progress the law, the government and all the national insti- tutions are tributary, has given life and strength to the spirit of liberty everywhere. The growth of the power of the peo- ple in this favored land and their advance in numbers and in physical conditions, in intelligent skill, in self-reliant readi- ness to grapple with emergencies, in fertility of resource, in broadening enterprise and in loftiness of ideals, have not only blessed America, but all of marveling mankind. The old world knew well only government by the few; America taught the possibility and the blessing of wise and righteous government by the many. The old world had degraded labor, till the workman was as the cattle of the field; America has magnified and glori- fied labor, as a Divine command, through obedience to which a whole nation of toilers have reaped the reward of un- equaled power and prosperity for themselves, and have pro- claimed human brotherhood and hopeful, helpful, Christian sympathy to the oppressed of all the world. ' Shall we abdicate this noble leadership of nations? Shall we taint the stream of our world influence and change it from a blessing to a curse? Shall we destroy our lesson of the dignity and worth of labor and of the capacity of the common people for self-government by so using the forms of that government as in the name of that labor to strike down the national honor and to brand the republic ns a swindler, filching from his coin of payment and shirking honest debts? The sweating of coin and the sweating of labor by employ- ers are alike infamous. It is proposed that Uncle Sam shall criminally apply the sweating system to the coin and the wages of the land and rob each of half its substance. 20 The very greatness in population and resources which is cited as a demonstration of our ability to declare our inde- pendence of the Ten Commandments furnishes a sufficient reason for adhering to the principles which have made us great, and for moving steadily forward in the path which we have trodden. To preserve liberty and union as one and inseparable, and to increase our domestic blessings and our wholesome in- fluence upon the world as the leader among nations in thw- arts of peace and civilized progress, it will be necessary for the great middle class, Lincoln's common people, the real rulers of America, to guard vigilantly against the encroach- ments of aggregated wealth on the one hand, and the threat- ening demonstrations of the lawless mob on the other; to steer the ship of state between the rocks of plutocracy and the whirlpool of repudiation and anarchy. But let no one in the name of the people preach the doctrine of sectional- ism and class prejudice, pointing to disunion, and the de- struction of the government by and for the people. Let no one in the name of labor degrade labor from its high estate. Let no one in the name of national pride stain the national credit and make the republic, once so honored, a hissing and a by-word among the nations of the earth. We are told by the free-coinage advocates that this nation is great enough, single-handed, to double the price of silver over all the globe; great enough to make fifty cents one hun- dred cents by act of Congress; great enough to bear, Atlas- like, a world's weight of silver on its shoulders; great enough, by its own voluntary act, to double with impunity the pressure of this crushing load. But the nation is not great enough in folly to attempt unnecessarily and with no promise of reward this impossible task, and is not great enough in knavery to brazen out the swindle which will result from its inevitable failure to raise the burden of the silver of the world to twice its pres- ent level. The nation is too great to be ungrateful to the pensioners and bondholders who risked life and treasure in the repub- lic's defense in its mortal struggle; too great to stifle the warning whispers of the national conscience against dishon- orable repudiation of just obligations; too great to place upon America and Americans the stigma of fraudulent bankruptcy; too great for isolation and disgraceful exile from the family of civilized nations; in short, too great to be dishonest, too great to be nailed to a silver cross after the fashion and as a legitimate successor of the impenitent thief. WASHINGTONIANA. Speech at Board of Trade Reception, February 2Oth, 1894. It is seldom that the people of Washington enjoy the privi- lege of meeting their Congressional partners in the work of capital making, and the occasions are still rarer when the Washingtonians, the silent partners of the firm, have the opportunity of speaking their minds. The phrase-makers have coined an expressive designation, "the unspeakable Turk." But the Washingtonian is better entitled to this ad- jective. For in his public affairs it must be admitted that the unspeakable Washingtonian is even less speakable than the unspeakable Turk. The meetings of silent and active partners are often scenes of recrimination, and it is easy to imagine the partners as- sembled to-night as indulging in this reprehensible practice. Washington, the silent partner, might be conceived as say- ing to Congress: "I contributed to you as the active part- ner in the capital-making firm five-sevenths of the site of the city and my rights and privileges of American citizenship. I supplied the fund from which the firm's original public buildings were erected. The pledges which you made at that time on the strength of these contributions have been repeatedly violated. For three-fourths of a century you tried to freeze me out of participation in the benefits of the part- nership. You have pocketed my contributed capital, neg- lected the business of the firm, and forced it on at least one occasion into bankruptcy. Even now, when a quickening of conscience and an accession of national and patriotic pride have made you comparatively faithful to your trust, you are repeatedly levying upon me unjust assessments in violation of the spirit of our agreement, and having long cruelly wronged me, you now treat my requests and complaints with contempt." And Congress might be imagined as replying: "You are the noisiest silent partner that the mind of man can con- 22 ceive. You are a chronic grumbler and kicker, growling at everything I do or leave undone in conducting the firm's business. I cannot be bothered with your petty affairs when important national concerns demand my attention. Your people wrangle among themselves and make contradic- tory suggestions. If you don't know what you want your- self, how am I to heed your requests and your advice?" But no such recrimination as that suggested is in the slightest degree threatened to-night. The members of the Board of Trade are not the sort of individuals to invite un- suspecting Congressmen to break the bread and taste the salt of their hospitality, and then take advantage of the oc- casion to pound them for the shortcomings of other Con- gresses and other Congressmen. Neither the citizens nor the legislators who deserve to be scolded are here to receive their punishment. The faithful and able friends who have shown their interest in the Capital and its welfare by as- sembling in this hall to-night are not the men w r ho need to be lectured on constitutional duty, patriotic pride or public spirit. On neither side of the partnership shall we fall into the clergyman's error of scolding the congregation present for the absence of those not on hand to receive merited re- proof. Many a time in noting how one section of the city has stood coldly aloof or has actively obstructed when another section was striving for some public improvement or the re- moval of some public evil from its confines, I have been re- minded of Aesop's fable of the father and the quarreling sons, who were unable to break the fagots when collected in a bundle, but easily broke them one by one when the bundle was unclosed and the sticks were handled separately. And I can imagine Forefather Washington, like the father in the table, saying in spirit to his sons, the men of his namesake city: "My sons, if you are of one mind and unite to assist one another, you will be as this bundle, uninjured by all the attempts of your enemies; and if you are divided among yourselves you will be broken as easily as these sticks." When we of Washington have removed the obstacle to the city's highest development which our own lack of hearty and organized co-operniion supplies, there is strong reason to be- lieve that Congressional inertia and indifference may be over- come, that th<> District's legislature will perform faithfully its constitutional function and that our brightest dreams of the future of Washington will be fully realized. Let the Board of Trade collect the scattered sticks of 23 Washington's resources for aggression and resistance, and the resulting combination will be unbreakable and irresisti- ble. In spite of the drawbacks suggested, the capital making partnership has of late years labored satisfactorily upon its task. An ugly, straggling village has been converted into a beautiful city. But the great results in certain respects which have been accomplished serve to render conspicuous by contrast the lack of a corresponding development in other i lungs, like a few pieces of furniture of inharmonious rich- ness in the municipal house. The city must live up to the in-west and best of its furniture. It must be supplied with all the fittings and belongings of a great modern capital. The city's rapid growth has been recent; the new Wash- ington is still in its infancy; and this fact significantly sug- gests to the ambitious and public-spirited that the opportuni- ties are not by any means exhausted of conspicuous identifi- cation with the upbuilding of the Capital. In many cities the grooves have long ago been formed in which municipal affairs and achievements must run. The founders and crea- tors of the greatness of these cities are historic names and the list is closed. In the case of Washington, the city in which tin' whole republic takes pride is building upon a city in which for three-fourths of a century no one took pride. It is now building and its founders and builders are of the liv- ing present. A vast deal remains to be accomplished. There is room for every notable contributor to the welfare of the expanding capital to erect for himself a conspicuous and en- during monument as a creator of the new Washington. Ther is room for a L'Enfant and a Washington in planning and perfecting a second city, larger in area than the first, which is springing up outside the present urban boundaries. Who will give it a model street system without oppressing and impoverishing the city; a model sewer system: a model rapid transit system? Xot only is there this recent city to offer a field of munici- pal achievement, but the old city has tasted the elixir of lifr and is itself a new Washington. Who will successfully champion its requests for current maintenance and develop- in. 'in before the appropriations committees? Who will bless it with a code of modern laws? Who will give it a safe, sat- isfactory and reasonably attractive system of railroad termi- nals? Who will secure for it a creditable municipal build- ing? Who will revolutionize its whole bridge system and . especially, the national disgrace of the pr.-s.-nt Long 24 Brill-it-? Who will mend its ways, especially its footways, its dilapidated and discreditable sidewalks? Who will cure the hundred ills which afflict and hamper the growing city? Who will identify himself with the making of the world's modern capital that is to be and build to himself still living an historic monument? In the name of the people of the National Capital, I invite all present to-night, guests and hosts, young and old alike, to enroll their names and act vigorously their parts among the patriarchs of the infant and prospective city in the re- nowned and patriotic order of founders of the new and greater Washington. Speech as President of the Washington Board of Trade, at the Board's Annual Reception at the Arlington, February 24th, 1898. Once a year, at the invitation of their Washington con- stituents of the Board of Trade, the constitutionally ap- pointed municipal legislators of the District of Columbia hold an evening session at the Arlington, instead of at the Capitol, in which these local constituents are permitted to participate. On these occasions newcomers among our distinguished aldermen and common councilmen have an opportunity to catch something of the drift of public sentiment among the quarter million of people whose legislative needs are en- trusted exclusively to their tender mercies, and they are also enabled to inspect samples of their Capital constituents and to ascertain whether the Washingtonian really has horns, hoofs and a forked tail, as some allege. On their part the Washing! onians, having for this occasion only the privileges of the floor, may corner the evasive Congressmen, hem them in with chairs, and compel attention to a year's accumula- tion of suppressed utterances just as I am doing at the ju-icnt moment. In welcoming our guests to this joint session the tempta- tion to a loyal Washingtonian is almost irresistible to dilate copiously upon the beauties of the developing Capital, like a doting mother with her only child as a text. And there is something inspiring in the reflection that we residents of or legislators for the nation's city are finishing the work which the fathers began, and are building up to-day a new, en larged and constantly expanding Washington on more ex tensive lines and with a finer inunii -ipal equipment than the most optimistic forefather ever pictured in his rosiest dreams. But Washington does more than appeal to the national pride; it is a distinct factor in developing and strengthening patriotic sentiment. Like anti-Tammany in a recent election, the nation needs very much a unifying force. American national sentiment hidden under modern cynicism, unsentimental and selfish business interests and sectional prejudices is wrapped in as many coverings as the Egyptian mummy, and frequently has no more apparent life than the remains of the great Rameses; but the electric shock not only of threatened na- tional danger, but merely of the unexpected sight of the flag or sound of some national air in foreign lands will pierce and consume the obstructive coverings and revivify in an instant the latent patriotism. A stroke of lightning should not, however, be required to give active life to the spirit of American nationality. Espe- cially should not miserable sectional prejudices, jealousies and misunderstandings be fostered at the expense of a broad Americanism, and be permitted to weaken and destroy the patriotic national sentiment. I lived for four years in South Dakota just before that hustling community became a State. As a full-fledged, en- thusiastic Dakotan, I vigorously resented many a time Eastern misconceptions of that community's spirit and tend- ency; Eastern sneers at a people of unbounded energy and intelligent progressiveness. in whose miniature cities the school house was ever the conspicuous public building; Eastern denunciations of them .as unfit for statehood, and as suitable material only for a rotten borough in the Ameri- can system. Then there were not merely conscious and avowed caricatures, but serious references, based on honest ignorance, which represented I his people as being fittingly typified by the whooping cowboy, full of bad whisky and puncturing the atmosphere with bullets, or by the jay farmer with abnormal goatee and a potato side to his head. Worse still were the malicious libels imputing universal knavery to the community, picturing the citizens as chased from the East by criminal records, as robbing the Government by vast and systematic land frauds, as combining in a body to swindle innocent Easterners by salted mines, bogus town sites and worthless mortgage securities. But I soon found 20 thai there \va> reciprocity in sectional misconceptions, and that many Westerners evened up matters by classifying; Easterners who remained in the East either as brainless dudes, boasting inherited money and nothing else, or as sharpers using unscrupulous brains in the pursuit of money, from (lie Shylocks of Wall street to the gold-brick bunco man. I also discovered that as an ex-Washingtouian I was compelled to resent Western misconceptions of the people of the Capital as frequently as Eastern misconceptions of the community of which I was an adopted member. And I call upon every Western man within sound of my voice to remember that the representation of Washington- ians as untaxed mendicants, dependent upon the national bounty, is denounced by them as a lying and insulting cari- cature, as atrocious as any emanating from the ignorant East under whose injustice the Westerner himself may have smarted. As I frequently pointed out to my fellow South Dakotans, the District of Columbia has not been a notable nat ioual beneficiary even as compared w r ith the new Western States like South Dakota itself. The owners of the soil of Washington were here before the Government came, before the nation and Government were even created. They gave up their own property to the Government that, the nation might practically own and exclusively control a national city. They donated to the nation five-sevenths of the area of Washington. The greater part of the soil of most of the Western States was, on the other hand, at first the territory of the nation, acquired by purchase, conquest or treaty, including treaties witli the Indians, and passed by gift to individual settlers under the homestead and timber culture laws, and by nom- inal sale, but actual gift under the pre-emption laws. The nation wisely donated land to the people who would live upon it and cultivate it. Later, when these communities of settlers became States, the nation gave back to them the proceeds of I he sales under the pre-emption law in the shape of grants of money for educational purposes, and added thereto vast land grants direct, including over one hundred millions of acres for schools and colleges. Thus, in the case of Washington, private individuals were the donors and the nation was the beneficiary; in the case of my adopted State and others, for instance, in the Louisi- ana purchase, the nation was the donor and the individuals and communities the beneficiaries. But this, some one may say, is ancient history. L.-i it be conceded that Washingtonians many years ago aided a poverty-stricken national government, put up with its broken pledges, and performed almost unassisted, for three-quarters of a century, the work of capital-making, nominally a> sumed by the nation, Are you not untaxed beggars now ? The nation which at first owned five-sevenths of Wash ington, still owns one-half, and its percentage now inrre;i-, - every year. It still holds and exercises exclusive control over that city. The taxes which Washington pays an- de- termined by Congress alone. If they are too light the reproach attaches not to Washington but to Congress; but they are not too light. Tlit- census records of 1890 show that the per capita mu- nicipal tax levy of Washington is greater than that of the vast majority of American municipalities exceeding 4,000 in population. It exceeds that of Omaha, Allegheny City and Indianapolis, and is only slightly exceeded by that of Cleve- land, Newark and Milwaukee, all cities approximating it in si/c. The per capita indebtedness of Washington far . \ ceeds that of any of the enumerated cities. It is nearly twice as great as the next largest, and seven times the small- est. Not one of these cities has so large a floating non-tax- paying population as Washington, with its one-third negro population and its thousands of temporary residents ami Government employes. This non-taxpaying element re- duces the nominal per capita tax levy without reducing it in fact by money subscriptions. Not one of the enumerated i-ities has so few money-making resources in commerce, trade and manufactures in proportion to population with which to meet this drain of taxation. A like showing is made in national taxation. The only present national taxes which fall directly, and unmistakably and in ascertainable amounts upon Americans, are the in- ternal revenue taxes. In 1895 the District, in spite of the comparative smallness of its area and population, contrib- uted to this fund more than any one of sixteen States and live territories. It contributed more than the combined contributions of Maine, Vermont, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota. Idaho and Wyoming. It has no representation in the na- tional legislature which is paid from, and which disburses this fund, while the States whose combined contributions are exceeded by its own alone have 14 votes in the Senate and IS in the House. 28 The Washingtonian's per capita contribution to that fund exceeded in 1895 that of the citizens of twenty-two States and five territories. For instance, we paid into the fund from which are drawn the salaries of the South Dakota Senators and Representa- tives nearly six times as much as the South Dakotan; toward the salary of the Kansas Congressman five times as much as the Kansan; for the Texas Congressman five times as much as the Texan; for the Vermont Congressman over ten times as much as the Vermonter; for the Congressman from South Carolina or Arkansas, twelve times as much as the Arkansan or South Carolinian; and for the Mississippi Congressman one hundred and twenty times as much as the Mississippian. This mistaken idea concerning the people of the capital, indeed, sectional misconceptions and prejudices of all sorts, great or small, whether entertained in North, South, East or West, should be gradually modified and finally eliminated to the end that a broad, loyal, genuine Americanism may pervade the whole land. We are to recognize that our country in its physical as- pects with seacoasts and ports, its manufacturing, agricult- ural and mining sections, all interdependent and necessary to one another's prosperous existence, is the pre-ordained home of a single people; that this is the American people, "one from many," wonderfully homogeneous in spite of di- versity of origin, one in ideas, associations, sympathies and national objects. We Americans of 1898 are to say with the fullness of conviction and the quadrupled emphasis of a hundred years of experience what Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina said almost prophetically in 1765, at the Colonial Congress in New York: "There ought to be no New Englandman, no New Yorker known on the Continent, but all Americans." In accomplishing this result there is a distinct field of usefulness for the capital with its unifying, nationalizing, patriotic influence. Washington was brought into being as peculiarly and ex- clusively the home and abiding place of the Nation as dis- tinguished from the State. It is the crystallization of the national idea, the substantial embodiment of the abstract Union. Here, literally, there is no New Englandman, no New Yorker, but all Americans. The city of the whole nation has planted deeply in every portion of the republic the roots of its existence. It is an 29 object of pride and affection to all Americans. Here all come together on equal terms, upon land in which they have a common interest, governed exclusively by the Union of which they are a part. The West learns the East, the North the South, and vice versa. All sections are bound more closely together. Prejudices are softened and gradually removed. National sentiment dominates, the American spirit is developed, and patriotism is strengthened. George Washington foresaw this unifying, nationalizing function of the capital, and for that reason proposed to locate in it the national university, which he projected. Here, he said, the susceptible youth of the land, in the at- mosphere of the nation's city, and reviewing the workings of the General Government, would be impressed with a love of our national institutions, counteracting both foreign influences and sectional sentiments. The university of which he dreamed was never born, but, carrying out his idea on a grander scale, the capital has itself become a national university, in which a whole people are students, for the promotion of liberal, enlarged and patriotic Ameri- canism, teaching enthusiastic love of country, and making of all of us better citizens. Speech as President of the Washington Board of Trade at the Board's Annual Shad-bake at Mar- shall Hall, May 21st, 1898. In greeting our guests of to-day in the name of the Board of Trade a few words touching the nature of this gathering may be appropriate. Our annual shad-bake is a Potomac Valley substitute for the barbecue in the opportunity which it offers to legisla- tors to mingle out-of-doors in a democratic go-as-you-please fashion, with their constituents. Since the Constitution and not our own votes selects for us our exclusive legis- lators, who are to-day among our guests, we are not per- haps entitled to any ante-election explanations or assurances, and the political fence-mending customary at the barbecue or camp-meeting, is here perhaps superfluous. It is well, however, for Washingtonians and their Con- gressional aldermen and common councilmen to come to- gether frequently in open, manly fashion for the inter- 30 change of opinion and information. Unless in some mysteri- ous way it is conducive to wise law-making that legislators should be total strangers to the constituents whose legisla- livc needs are to be learned and supplied, this partial in- troduction of aldermen and common councilmen to local taxpayers is most advisable, both for the welfare of the Federal District, and for the benefit of the conscientious legislator, entrusted by the Constitution with the duty of assisting to shape the destinies of the National Capital and a resident community of nearly 300,000 people. This duty cannot be well and faithfully performed by a hermit who keeps himself persistently ignorant concerning local conditions, and who shrinks from contact with the people for whom he is to legislate. A wholesome tendency of these shad-bakes is to bring about a closer acquaintance between the national legisla- tors and their local constituents under the Constitution, and a better Congressional understanding of genuine local needs, and in spite of certain picnic crudenesses in entertainment, and unavoidable individual discomforts from annoying sun or pelting rain or an over-enthusiastic reception by resident red ants, our hope has been that occasions like the present, so characteristic of this section of the world, would prove interesting and enjoyable. Our trip down the Potomac and the spectacle after ar- rival here of the planking and absorption of innumerable shad turn our thoughts naturally to the river and its in- habitants; and serve to remind the local historians that the first white man who ever sailed over the river's surface commented with astonishment upon the abundance of fish in the Potomac, whose appropriate Indian name signifies: ''Where fishes spawn in shoals." This man, Captain John Smith, of that famous and ubi- quitous family, well known everywhere even in those early days, who sailed up the river in 1607, many years before the Puritan forefathers landed at Plymouth Rock, has proved himself as a teller of fish stories the worthy forerunner of the most gifted imaginations of our local fishing clubs. What member of any of these organizations can fail to take a professional interest and pride in Smith's description of the solid mass of Potomac fish, "laying," he said, "so thick, with heads above the water," that for want of nets he attempted to catch them with a frying pan. Moreover, the first white man who ever lived on the banks 31 of the Potomac. Henry Fleet, who was captured by Xacoa- taii Indians jn Hii'l, and dwelt a captive for several years on or near the present site of Washington, hears cumulative testimony to the a ma /ing numbers of Potomac fish. Fleet also discovered that the Xacostan Indians not only planked i heir shad, but also their human captives, fastening them in a stake or tree, and roasting them by means of surround- ing tires. Indeed, Fleet narrowly escaped being thus planked'' himself. From these beginnings all through our records the Poto- mac is rich in historic associations. With the home of George Washington on the Virginia bank opposite to where I now stand, and with George Washington's and the nation's city not many miles from here on the Maryland shore, the Poto- mac cut a notable figure in revolutionary and early repub- lican annals. A meeting at Alexandria and informally at Mr. Yernon of Maryland and Virginia commissioners to dis- cuss interstate arrangements concerning the Potomac be- came the nucleus of the Constitutional Convention and the movement for the formation of "a more perfect union." From the creation of the Capital upon the banks of the Poto- mac the nation's city and its river are identified with na- tional history, through the war of 1812, and the Civil War, and through the various stages of peaceful development down to the present day. I feel like apologizing for the present appearance of our river, which has evidently been on a high old tear up in .Maryland and Virginia, and now moves sluggishly to the Capital and Mt. Vernon, with purity defiled, and with a next morning's biliousness coffee-coloring every lineament. But I hope that our legislators, pardoning the Potomac's misbehavior, will be inspired as the result of their inspec- tion of its relations to the capital to utilize our great and historic river to its full capacity for the benefit of the health, trade and general welfare of Washington. An unlimited and wholesome water supply is tendered the Capital if our legislature will only make wise and adequate provision of aqueducts, reservoirs, settling basins and filter beds. The river will also serve as an effective transporting agent to sweep the capital's sewage harmlessly into the sea, if Con- gress will only provide the comprehensive system. which is to convey the sewage to a safe point below the city and commit it to the Potomac's current. When the malarious marshes of the Anacostia, as well as of the Potomac, have 32 been banished, the quickened waters will cut large slices from the District's death rate. Public baths and a bathing beach may be made to contribute further to the city's health. We of Washington must master the Potomac, harness it and put it to work. It must no longer be permitted, in the absence of a s<-n wall and through the presence of Long Bridge, to threaten the city with flood; or unsettled and un- filtered, to permeate with the historic soil of Virginia the physical systems of those of us who are accustomed to drink water; or to disseminate malaria from marshy flats; or being practically bridgeless, so far as modern structures are concerned, to obstruct communication with Virginia and the South. We must make of it the city's faithful ser- vant, as a cleansing and purifying agent fanning the capital with cool and healthful breezes, bringing pure cold water to every home, quickly removing the gas-generating sewage, serving through its recreated fisheries as a source of cheap and abundant food supply, fostering light manufactures and furnishing force for illuminating and transportation pur- poses by means of the Great and Little Falls water power, and finally in its dredged and deepened channels reviving the ancient commercial glories of this region w 7 hen George- town, Alexandria and Bladensburg contended for the su- premacy. While thus developing the usefulness of the Potomac in all directions for the purposes of peace, the National Gov- ernment will not neglect the precautions which prevent the river from being an easy means of hostile access to the Capital in time of war. The great guns which sweep the Potomac not many miles from here, and the mines which lurk under its waters give assurances on this point. When Washington was threatened by the British in 1814 our Secretary of War scoffed at the idea that the enemy would really attack what he sneeringly designated as the "sheep-walk," and the capital was left practically unpro- tected. The national sentiment toward Washington is now far different from that which then prevailed. Affectionate pride has taken the place of contemptuous neglect. The nation's city has nothing to fear from either the direct or indirect effects of war, unless the nation itself is overthrown, in which event the capital will share its fate. The truth is that the national patriotic sentiment upon which the prosperity of both the Union and the city of the Union is based, weakens from disuse and neglect in times of busy, peaceful money-making, and grows strong in times of national danger, when Americans appreciate most pro- foundly that the Union is not u mere abstraction, but some- thing to love, to live for, and if need be, to die for. Herein is found one of the compensations of war to counterbal- ance some of its evil, a revival and new birth of patriotism, a. lepndiaiion of sectional prejudices, a discarding of th<- ol. strnctive coverings of undue love of money and of cynical dislike of sentimentalism with which the American is too <;fien accustomed to cover and conceal the national pa- triotic sentiment. In ('liiua there is domestic worship of the god of wealth. In Japan, while the seven gods of wealth are not neglected, the essence of the national religion Shintoism is patrio- tism, reverence of the Emperor, love of country. Let us observe in our devotions to the Almighty Dollar a Japanese subordination of that worship to patriotic reverence of na- tive land, placing above love of money both love of country and love of God. The city of the Union, created, largely owned and exclu- sively controlled by the nation, is identified in its fortunes with the Union itself. Washington typifies the vitality, con- tinued prosperity and grand destiny of the republic, which it shows forth in miniature and which it is destined forever to reflect. From the bloodshed of the revolution the nation and its capital arose. The civil war, which in its ultimate effects tightened the bonds of union, quickened and strength- ened a wholesome love of country, and made the republic a unit, strong and great, developed in proportion the nation's city. A grander and more perfect capital, as well as a grander and more perfect union sprang from the smoke of battle. And so our foreign war of to-day causes the men of every State and section to feel that first of all they are Americans, and that in modern as in ancient times iv is sweet even to die for one's county. This struggle stirs the patriot blood of the nation, of late grown somewhat sluggish, dissipates narrow sectionalism, solidifies the Union, and broadens and strengthens the foundations of patriotic sentiment upon which both the nation and the nation's city rest. In war and peace, in prosperity and adversity, in life and death, the republic and its capital are one and inseparable. 34 Speech as President of the Washington Board of Trade at the Annual Reception, February 23, 1899. At this yt -JIT'S joint session in the Arlington assembled of Congress, the Capital's only legislature, and the Washington Board of Trade, representing the people of the District, there are two topics which demand and must receive immediate and special attention: 1. Washington is about to ask Congress to accept largely on faith and to enact without prolonged debate a codification of the District laws, prepared by Judge Cox, and now under- going revision and approval by the Bar Association, the Dis- trict Commissioners, the Board of Trade, and the citizens general^'. The foundation of the law of the District is the common law, as modified by old British statutes "found applicable to local and other circumstances" in Maryland at the time of the first English emigration to that colony, and as further modified by old Maryland statutes enacted prior to the session of the present District to the United States. These ancient enactments have not been sufficiently altered by Congress or construed out of existence by our courts. The local statutes have been aptly compared to those of the Medes and Persians, which change not. Thus it happens that many of our basic laws date from a time when American colonies were fining men in tobacco for staying home from church, or boring the tongues of those who swore as many as three times, or punishing scolding women with the duck- ing stool. The Capital's statutory clothing with its variegated ma- terials displays a Joseph's coat of many colors, and in dam- aged condition and antique cut it suggests Rip Van Winkle's costume just after his awakening. On the basic material of the common law now consider- ably moth-eaten, torn, worn threadbare, hanging in tatters luive been fastened patches of old British and Maryland stat- utes, and the later patches of occasional acts of Congress. There has been some scientific patching of comparatively recent date, and the courts in pursuance of their power of construing the statutes, have constructed a lining for the suit, which, without materially altering its antique outward appearance, renders it in some respects much more com- fortable. But the greater part of the occasional patches, 35 the suit was first fitted, have been sewn in at random, experimentally, by amateur legislative tailors, adjusted t<> no want, remedying nothing, and only adding to its pictur- esque inutility as a practical covering of municipal naked- ness. When Maryland ceded the land now constituting the Dis- trict that State was protected by the same statutory clothing with which the Capital was blessed. But since then Mary- land has been periodically and at frequent intervals supplied with successive suits of modern legislation in conformity with the progress and fashion of the times. The District's suit of the end of the last century has never received a com- preliensive overhauling, repairing and renovating. \\ e need a new suit of laws, following in a general \va\ for comfort's sake the lines to which we have grown accus- tomed, but reproducing in sound, substantial and modern material the old and approved pattern. In ridding the mu- nicipality of mildewed and decayed garments, displaying rents and shreds and tatters, some improvements in modern cut may appropriately be secured in the new well-fitting suit. We desire the change, even though the proposed gar- ments may be thought to show obvious defects. At their \\orst they will respond more readily to mending and patch- ing than the hopelessly antiquated costume which now pre- tends to protect the community from municipal hot winds and ic}" blasts. So let our legislators bless the Capital with the suit ready- made by Judge Cox, and approved as to its general pattern by the whole community. Do not insist that it shall be of the precise legislative cut to which you are accustomed in your home State. The pattern of all the States cannot be followed. Contention over the matter means delay and de- nial. Give to the Capital its new suit of statutory clothing and give it ungrudgingly and promptly. '2. Washington proposes and the President of the United States heartily endorses the proposition that the Nation and the National Capital co-operate to celebrate worthily in 1!MK) the hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the Republic's permanent seat of government in the District of Columbia. The changes wrought by the nineteenth century in both Nation and Capital, have been striking, even marvelous. In 1800 more than two-thirds of the Republic's r>.:iOO.OOO population lived within fifty miles of Atlantic tidewater, scattered through a thousand miles of forest, or collected in 36 u few seaport towns. Five hundred thousand had pene- trated the Alleghaiiies and were swallowed up in an inac- cessible wilderness, separated everywhere from the sea-board population by at least a hundred miles of mountainous country. Thus the Union was not a physical unity. Diffi- culties of land transit kept even the Americans of the long, narrow Atlantic fringe of settlement isolated as compara- tive strangers. The trans-Alleghany settlers had even less in common with the seaboard population, and rather looked forward to independent development with an outlet, not east- ward, but southward, through the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. Not even the idea of the unity of the Union was strongly and generally developed in the American mind. There was no great confidence of the quick growth of a homogeneous nation. In the opinion of Thomas Jefferson, a statesman accused of being a visionary enthusiast, the full settlement of the western country between the Alle- ghanies and the Mississippi would not be accomplished for thousands of years. In his first inaugural, Jefferson spoke of our country as furnishing "room for our descendants, to the hundredth and the thousandth generation." The same Jefferson, usually sanguine, lacked unwavering confidence in the continued unity of the Republic, and spoke at times with strange indifference concerning its possible disintegra- tion. "Whether we remain in one confederacy," he wrote in 1804, "or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confedera- tions, I consider not very important to the happiness of either part." In the century now closing the republic has developed into the Union, physically and in spirit. Territorial acquisitions have expanded the national domain from ocean to ocean r and the nation has grow r n into a symmetrical giant, with mountain backbone, veins and arteries of rivers and lakes, sinews of steel rails, nerves of electric wires, intersecting, communicating and giving unity to the most widely-separa- ted portions of the nation's body. The Union is also one of spirit. The growth of national sentiment has been continu- ous. That principle prevailed in the Civil War. Since that war we have all been nominally Unionists and Nationalists. Jn the war with Spain, with its unification of reunited sec- tions, the nominal has become the real. The Union is one in fact. In 1800 the Republic dominated nothing, not even with certainty itself. In 1900 it will dominate one hemisphere and a slice of another; it will control an isthmian canal, a 37 new trans-continental connection between the A thin tie and Pacific States; and will command the West Indian ;mt ward an arm, a hand and outstretched fingers, ami grasp- ing tlic Mississippi setth ments held them Hrmly to the I'uion. As it was thus in the beginning a bond between the Kast and the West, so the Potomac should now be a bond be tween the North and South, connecting, instead of separai ii'- iliem. While the latter sections were at sword's point, in sentiment or in fact, a practically bridgeless Potomar. holding them apart, might as a symbol have been natural and defensible. But now in the reunion of the States the Potomac should re-enact its historic part as a unifier and bind together through adequate connecting bridges the once hostile sections. The grandest and most fitting memorial with which to commemorate the centennial of the National Capital and the greater America, which a miracle-working century has developed, would be a memorial bridge across the Potomac to Arlington, whose national patriotic function it should be to connect the Union's capital with the State of the late Con federacy's capital, to bridge the watery chasm between the sections, to unite the nation's city of the living with the city of the nation's dead; a cemetery now truly national since, with the bones of those who died to save the Union in Civil War have been laid the remains of men from South and North, and East and West, who died for the whole great and re-united Republic. Let the memorial bridge symbolize this reunion, this national expansion and development. As the Potomac, rising in the original West and connect- ing the northern and southern colonies, through the numer- ous tributaries to its waters combined these national ele- ments in a majestic stream and broadened and deepened in its course until it poured a vast volume into the outside ocean, so moves with ever-expanding and beneficent flow the great river of American national spirit and influ- ence developed in the mingling of North. South. Kast and West in the nation's, city on the banks of the Potomac: ijiiickened by the memory of the great man, who. living though dead, influences the world from Mt.Vernon: strength- ened by the sacrifices of the patriots who died for the Union in the sixties and the nineties, who still speak to America though buried at Arlington: combining into one stream the ever increasing influences of the nation's city of the living and of its cities of the dead, and pouring this vast whole- 44 some and vitalizing volume into the thought and tendencies to action of the outside world. The man who lies at Mt. \Yrnon died as a creator of the Union. Those resting at Arlington died for the sake of that Union. At the confluence of the Anacostia and the Potomac live representative Americans who are developing the Union of to-day the greater America into the dominant force in one hemisphere and a power for good in all the world. Let the men of the nation's city so live and so act that the Union, for which the men of Arlington and Mt. Vernon died, shall strengthen and expand, and more and more from year to year shall perform the grand functions and fulfill the divine purposes for which it was created. Report as Chairman of the Committee on Public Library of the Washington Board of Trade, March 27, 1894. "Why is there not a majesty's library in every county town? There is a majesty's jail and gallows in every one." The reproach of Carlyle's question of more than half a cen- tury ago has been in large measure removed in England through the series of public libraries acts; and in New Eng- land, also, and in many States of other sections of the Re- public, majesty's libraries libraries of the American maj- esty, the people are far more numerous and conspicuous than the jails. The school and the library, twin agencies of education, lessen the need for the prison, and push it into the background. AN EDUCATING AND CIVILIZING AGENT. To-day there is general recognition of the important edu- cational position of the free circulating library and reading- room, accessible at hours when their treasures can be uti- lized by students, both from schools and colleges, and from among the working people, whose daylight hours are largely occupied in bread-winning. Especially are such libraries ap- preciated in this land of free schools. In State after State, responding to the popular demand for these educating and civilizing agencies, has legislation been enacted to supply each little municipal subdivision at the taxpayer's expense. So notable has been this movement that it has been reason- 45 ably predicted that the last quarter of the nineteenth century will go down in history as the age of electricity and free libraries. The progressive community needs the public library as it does the telegraph and telephone. It is on the same footing with the common school; it is the free uni- versity of the people. In the public school a liking for books, a desire and thirst for knowledge, may naturally be acquired. The library develops this liking and meets and gratifies this desire. The school imparts the ability to educate one's self by the intelligent use of books. The library supplements this instruction by providing the means and opportunity for such self-education. As Commissioner W. T. Harris, of the I'.nreau of Education, has aptly stated: "The school teaches how to read how to use the printed page to get out of it all that it contains. The library furnishes what to read: it opens the storehouse of all human learning. These two are complementary functions in the great work of education." The library is, then, a true university, both for the grad- uates of the public schools and for the whole people, without regard to class, or sex, or age, or wealth, or previous condi- tion of servitude to ignorance. The people eagerly avail themselves of the educational opportunities offered by the public library. It raises the whole community to a higher intellectual plane. It is also not without its beneficent in- tiuence as a moral agent. In some of the small New Eng- land towns the record shows that as many as one out of every five inhabitants, counting men, women, and children, is registered as a borrower of library books. More persons. have there registered to read than have registered to vote. The statistics also show that, at first, fiction was most largely drawn upon by such readers, but that, as the taste for read ing was developed, stronger food for the mind was demanded, and the ratio of serious reading steadily increased. The reading-room has proved and will prove a strong rival to all demoralizing resorts in claims upon the evenings of many, especially the young, and has served and will serve more and more as a satisfactory substitute for nightly idleness in dreary lodgings or on the streets. WASHINGTON HAS NO FREE TEOPLE'S LIBRARY. What rarlyle sought for each English county town. :ind what many English and American villages now enjoy, the National < 'apital lacks and seeks to obtain. It is fast becom- ing the Republic's educational center. Universities are 46 founded in rapid succession within its limits. But the great free library university, for those whom Lincoln lovingly called the common people, is yet to be created. According to the statistics there are much more than a million books in the semi-public libraries of Washington about a twentieth of all in the Republic; and when these have been apportioned among the citizens after the methods of statisticians it ap- pears that the District workingman has fourteen times as many public books as the average American. And the only difficulty is that he cannot possibly make any use of them whatsoever. The resident in the more elevated sections of Washington who could get no water on the upper floors of his house, and \i-ry little on any floor, saw countless gallons wasted in the departments, in fountains and otherwise, and learned from statistics that he and the other citizens were, in per capita average of gallons daily used, among the largest con- sumers of water in the country. The population of the Capital, credited with fourteen times their due proportion of books, and without a single available lending library with i cuding-roooms open at night, without even the command of books enjoyed by the working people of little Northern and Western towns, detect a similar mockery in the library statistics. No satisfactory substitute either for actual water or actual books is furnished by complimentary statistics. WANT AMIDST PLENTY. The departmental libraries at the Capital contain nearly three hundred thousand volumes, accessible only to a few employees of the Government, and closed to them early in the afternoon. The vast wealth of reading matter in the Congressional Library is practically out of reach of the \\ orkinginen and school children, owing to the hours of open- ing and closing and the conditions placed upon the enjoy- ment of its privileges. Not one of the great Government collections is open in the evening, when alone the great mass of the people can use the books. There are fifty-two libraries in the District, each containing over one thousand volumes, and not one of them is a free lending library, with a reading- room open at night for the benefit of the general public. Such an institution is the most urgent need of the National Capital. Viewing this ocean of more than a million books, spread tantalizingly before them, the workingmen, the school children, the Government clerks, the great mass of the citi- 47 '/ens of Washington, thirsty for tin- knowledge which comi-s from reading, may well exclaim with the Am-ii-ni .Mariner: "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink!" A great national reference library for the world's scholars does not prevent in other capitals the existence of nuineron- popular libraries, and should not in Washington. "In I .on don, where the British Museum, with its vast library of over two million volumes, is still sacred to scholars, there an- thirty local libraries, in addition to many special libraries, open to various classes of students. In Paris, win-re tin- great national library is only open to readers well armed with credentials, there are sixty-four popular libraries, while I.erlin has twenty-five." THIRTY-THREE THOUSAND CHILDREN DEMAND A FREE LIBRARY. To meet the absolute necessity of books as working ad- juncts in the public schools, small libraries have been formed in connection with some of the buildings, and the High School has a very creditable collection. But to complete and perfect its educational system, already so admirable, by adding the people's free university to the free school. Wash ington absolutely needs the proposed public library, as an aid to the development of intelligent men and women, the good Americans of the future, the pillars of the Republic. Its creation is demanded in the name of the 63,000 children of school age in the District, and especially in the name of the 33,000 of this number who are over twelve years of age. TWENTY THOUSAND GOVERNMENT EMPLOYERS DEMAND A FREE LIBRARY. Investigation of the departmental libraries shows that a very large percentage of their three hundred thousand vol- umes is composed of technical books and books of refereiu ... which have a direct bearing on the work of the department which possesses them; that there are only between twenty thousand and thirty thousand volumes suitable for a general circulating library, and these are confined mainly to three departments. The Interior Department, with 10,000 vol- umes, and the War and Treasury Departments, with r>.oou volumes each, possess nearly all these books. The clerks in the departments which have no libraries need and demand them, and the favored departments need a wider range of 48 reading material than the small collection at the disposal of each provides. There are, in round numbers, about twenty thousand persons residing in Washington who draw salaries from the Government. Many of these represent families, and The number of readers in this Government constituency can therefore be estimated only by the customary multiplica- tion of the number of Government employees. In the name, also, of this numerous and book-loving element of the popu- lation the creation of the proposed local library is demanded. TWENTY-THREE THOUSAND WORKINGMEN DEMAND A FREE LIBRARY. Last, but not least, comes a powerful appeal from the Dis- trict workingman. Sometimes, in view of the notable ab- sence from the Capital of dirty, noisy factories, which would tend to reduce the city's attractiveness as a place of resi- dence, the question is raised, "Is there any such individual as the District workingman?" The census of 1890 discloses the fact that, while it is the policy of the Capital to encour- age only light and clean manufacturing, like that of Paris, over twenty-three thousand adults were engaged in the Dis- trict in lines of work which are classed as manufactures, omitting from consideration entirely all the other numerous forms of labor. Nineteen thousand of these are engaged in purely local industries. Over four thousand are discovered to be in Government employ, mainly in the Government Printing Office and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. It appears from this report that there were in 1890 in the District twenty-three hundred manufacturing establish- ments with a capital of $28,876,258, paying in wages $14,- 638,790, using materials costing $17,187,752, and with pro- ducts of the value of $39,296,259. To the census figures must be added the thousands of workingmen engaged in other lines of work not classed as manufactures, and then this number must be multiplied, since many are the heads of families, to ascertain the num- ber of readers, and, in behalf of this great multitude of peo- ple, a free lending library and night reading-room are now demanded. ALL WASHINGTON APPEALS FOR A FREE LIBRARY. While attention has been called to certain elements of the population as standing in special need of library facilities, it 49 is to be remembered that only a small fraction of all the peo- ple in Washington have the leisure to utilize and fiijuv ;l public library during daylight hours, so that practically ;i whole city of 250,000 inhabitants makes this appeal. HOW THE BOOKS MAY BE OBTAINED. The first need of the free library books can easily be supplied. The librarian of Congress states that there are many thousands of duplicates in the Congressional Library suitable for the purposes of this circulating library, which can be spared for such use if Congress will consent, and he has formally approved the granting of such consent by Con- gress. The existing departmental circulating libraries might be added to these books from the Library of Congress and made into a general departmental library, to which the people of the District not employed by the Government might also have access. The circulating books, numbering between twenty thousand and thirty thousand, accessible in the main only to the clerks in three of the Departments and acces- sible to them only so far as the fraction contained in their own library is concerned, would, if col- lected in a general departmental library, be opened to all the clerks in all the Departments. A great body of Government employees would enjoy privileges of which they are now entirely deprived. Those now having a depart- mental circulating library at hand, instead of being limited to its five thousand or ten thousand volumes, would have access to more than twenty thousand in the general library, augmented by large additions from the Congressional Li- brary and by private contributions, which, if the library were once started, would undoubtedly be considerable. The clerks in the particular buildings in which the circulating departmental libraries are now accommodated might suffer a trifling inconvenience from the removal of the books for a short distance, but catalogues of the library should be in all the Departments, and delivery branches established in dif- ferent parts of the city. This inconvenience would thus be re- duced to a minimum, and as an offset to it would be the finer library to which these clerks would have access and the pub- lic benefit of a great expansion of the number of readers to whom the accumulated books would be available. Other De- partments and bureaus than those which now have circulat- 50 ing libraries have applied in some instances and intend to apply in others for like privileges. The establishment of a general departmental library, open also to the public, would save the Government the expensive duplication of books in numerous small collections, and would also economize in the room space devoted to departmental library purposes. Ap- parently the Government and the clerks would profit by the project, as well as the population in general of the city. When the nucleus of a library properly housed is once ob- tained, the collection will certainly grow rapidly through private donations of books and money, and when it has dem- onstrated its usefulness and the fact that it is appreciated by the public some one of Washington's wealthy men may be moved by local pride or other good motive to endow it and attach to it his name. No citizen could erect to himself a nobler memorial. WHERE SHALL THE LIBKAKY BE HOUSED ? It is evident that the books can readily be obtained; the difficulty is in securing a habitation for the library. A loca- tion in the new City Post-Office has been warmly urged. In Senate debate it has been stated that all the space in this building will be needed by the General Government; but, notwithstanding this announcement, the amount of available space in this vast structure will be so great, its location is so central, and there is such fitness in housing the library in a Government building which is primarily devoted, in name at least, to local uses, that your committee recommend that the first effort on the city's part be to obtain this location for its library. If the library can be enabled with certainty to preserve its distinct existence while housed under the same roof with the great national library, contingencies might arise which would render a location in some unused portion of the new building for the Library of Congress extremely desirable. There will be abundant room in that structure for at least a quarter of a century. An extensive reading-room and every library facility will be available. The disadvantages of a location not sufficiently central may be overcome by the establish- ment of branches in different parts of the city, like those of the Boston public library. Then the advantages of space in the proposed new munici- pal building, or in a structure to be donated by some public- 51 spirited benefactor yet unknown, have been considered. Your committee have thought the wisest course to be to make every effort at first to obtain a location in a building already authorized or in course of erection, whose construction is as- sured. A municipal building, worthy of the city, when it is legislated into existence and actually erected, would be nat- urally the permanent home of a city library; but we must not wait for this event to occur, or for the wealthy benefactor aforesaid to appear or be discovered. Delays in securing the suggested nucleus of books are dangerous, and every month of the people's deprivation of needed library facilities is in- jurious. The free library of Washington should speedily come into being. It is, therefore, considered wise neither to commit the Board to an unchangeable opinion concerning the library site nor to suggest postponement of action by seeking quarters at this time in some prospective building, whose existence is as yet only in our hopes. LEGISLATION KECOMMEISTDED. Your committee ask authority to urge upon Congress leg- islation which shall create a library of the kind described as necessary in this report, with the suggested nucleus of books, and in that location which shall appear, after conference with the appropriate committees of Congress, to be most available. Your committee submit the draft of a bill as a suggestion of the general lines of the proposed legislation. If only a small fraction of the books in Washington can be made accessible to the mass of its people, the city will be well supplied. It will no longer starve in an overflowing granary. The project of a public and departmental circulat- ing library and reading-room, open in the evening, is worthy of the strongest and most enthusiastic labors in its behalf. It will doubtless receive the hearty support of the Board of Trade, of every public-spirited citizen, and of all friends of the Capital and its people, who appreciate the fact that a city of a quarter million of inhabitants contains men to be con- sidered and not merely streets, buildings, trees, statues and monuments. The campaign for a tax-supported library on the lines of the foregoing report was vigorously pushed, and by Act of Congress, approved June 3, 1896, the library was established on the basis desired. The act reads as follows: 52 "AN ACT To establish and provide for the maintenance of a free public library and reading room in the District of Columbia. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That a free public library and reading room is hereby established and shall be maintained in the District of Columbia, which shall be the property of the said District and a supplement of the public educational system of said District. All actions relating to such library, or for the recovery of any penalties lawfully established in relation thereto, shall be brought in the name of the District of Columbia, and the Commission- ers of the said District are authorized on behalf of said Dis- trict to accept and take title to all gifts, bequests and devises for the purpose of aiding in the maintenance or endowment of said library; and the Commissioners of said District are further authorized to receive, as component parts of said library, collections of books and other publications that may be transferred to them. SEC. 2. That all persons who are permanent or temporary residents of the District of Columbia shall be entitled to the privileges of said library, including the use of the books con- tained therein, as a lending or circulating library, subject to such rules and regulations as may be lawfully established in relation thereto. SEC. 3. That the said library shall be in charge of a Board of Library Trustees, who shall purchase the books, magazines and newspapers, and procure the necessary appendages for such library. The said Board of Trustees shall be composed of nine members, each of whom shall be a taxpayer in the District of Columbia, and shall serve without compensation. They shall be appointed by the Commissioners of the Dis- trict of Columbia, and shall hold office for six years: Pro- vided, That at the first meeting of the said Board the mem- bers shall be divided by lot into three classes. The first class, composed of three members, shall hold office for two years; the second class, composed of three members, shall hold office for four years; the third class, composed of three members, shall hold office for six years. Any vacancy oc- curring in said Board shall be filled by the District Commis- sioners. Said Board shall have power to provide such regu- lations for its own organization and government as it may deem necessary. SEC. 4. That the said Board shall have power to provide for the proper care and preservation of said library, to pre- 53 scribe rules for taking and returning books, to fix, assess, and collect fines and penalties for the loss of or injury to books, and to establish all other needful rules and regula- lions for the management of the library as the said Board shall deem proper. The said Board of Trustees shall appoint a librarian to have the care and superintendence of said li- brary, who shall be responsible to the Board of Trustees for i he impartial enforcement of all rules and regulations law- fully established in relation to said library. The said libra- rian shall appoint such assistants as the Board shall deem necessary to the proper conduct of the library. The said Hoard of Library Trustees shall make an annual report to the Commissioners of the District of Columbia relative to i he management of the said library. Si:< . r>. That said library shall be located in some conven- ient place in the city of Washington, to be designated by the Commissioners of the District of Columbia upon the recom- mendation of the Trustees of said library: Provided, That in any municipal building to be hereafter erected in said Dis- ti-ici suitable provision shall be made for said library and reading room, sufficient to accommodate not less than one hundred thousand volumes." This act carried no appropriation, and the first mainte- nance provision for the library appeared in the act making appropriations for the District of Columbia, approved June 30, 18!)8, as follows: Free Public Library. For librarian, one thousand six hun- dred dollars; first assistant librarian, nine hundred dollars; second assistant librarian, seven hundred and twenty dol- lars; and for rent, fuel, light, fitting up rooms, and other contingent expenses, three thousand five hundred dollars; in all, six thousand seven hundred and twenty dollars. In pursuance of the law of June 3, 1896, the Commission- ers appointed the Board of Trustees therein described, and i he nusiees organized, electing Theodore W. Noyes Presi- dent and B. H. Warner Vice-President, first passing the fol- lowing resolution: -Whereas the municipal library of Washington owes the act of incorporation, which is its life, to the unwearied ef- forts, great tact and good judgment of Mr. Theodore W. Noyes; therefore, be it "Resolved, That we enter on the first page of our records and before all other acts this acknowledgment of our obliga- tions to Mr. Noyes." 54 On January 12, 1899, in response to the suggestion of Mr. B. H. Warner, Vice-President of the Board of Trustees. Mr. Andrew Carnegie offered to donate $250,000 for the erection of a building for the library, if Congress would provide a site and suitable maintenance. On March 3, 1899, Congress passed an act to provide a site for a building for the Washington Public Library, as follows : "Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representative* of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That au- thority is hereby conferred upon a commission, to consist of the Commissioners of the District of Columbia, the officer in charge of public buildings and grounds, and the President of the Board of Trustees of the Washington Public Library, to cause to be erected upon Mount Vernon Square, in the city of Washington, in the Distric f of Columbia, a building for the use of the Washington Public Library, with funds to be contributed by Andrew Carnegie: Provided, That such building shall be commenced within twelve months and com- pleted within three years from the passage of this act: Ami provided further. That no liability shall be incurred by the rnited States or the District of Columbia for the cost of the erection of said building. SEC. 2. That said commission shall invite ten architects or firms of architects, of conspicuous ability and experience, to submit competitive designs for the said building, upon a carefully drawn programme, said competition to be adjudged by said commission acting with two other persons to be se- lected by the competing architects. The architect, or firm of architects, whose design shall thus be adjudged most accept- able shall be employed as architect of the building, to act under the direction of the office of construction hereinafter provided for, and to furnish all designs and drawings re- quired for the construction of the building and personal services requisite for their artistic execution. Said archi- tect shall receive as full compensation for the said designs, drawings, and personal services the sum of three per centum of the total cost of said building, to be paid from time to time us the work progresses; and all designs and drawings fur- nished by him for the said building shall become the prop- erty of the District of Columbia. SKC. :<. That the construction of said building shall be placed in charge of an officer of the Government especially qualified for the duty, to be appointed by the aforesaid com- mission. wh< shall receive for his additional services an in- crease of forty per centum of his present salary, to be paid out of any available funds, and he shall disburse the funds under rules to be prescribed by the said commission, make all contracts, and employ all necessary personal serrices not herein otherwise provided for." Mr. Carnegie subsequently increased his donation to |300,- 000, and the commission created by the foregoing act is pro- ceeding with the arrangements for the erection of the build- ing. NOTES OF TRAVEL IN MEXICO, HAWAII, AND JAPAN. MEXICO'S WONDERS. Extraordinary Diversity of Sights for the Curious The Kaleidoscope of Aztec Land An American Combination of Spain and Egypt Discomforts and Charms. ( Editorial Correspondence of the Evening Star, Dec. 7, 1895. ) When the curious but ease-loving traveler wishes to in- dulge in polar exploration without risk of freezing or starva- tion, of eating or being eaten by his fellow-explorers, of smashing aluminum boats or of falling from a pole-bound balloon, he follows, in a comfortable steamer, the warm, ice- inelting gulf stream to the North Cape of Norway and to Spitzbergen. When the same traveler wishes to penetrate the tropics without exposing himself to sunstroke, to fever, to savage cannibalistic tribes, to dwarfs shooting poisoned missiles, or even to the horrors of seasickness, he now glides down the mountain backbone of the continent in a railroad car to southern Mexico, far into the torrid zone, at an alti- tude which saves him from equatorial dangers and renders it possible, through rapid descents in short excursions to the right and left, to taste, with impunity, the full delights of the tropics. 1 have recently enjoyed a rapid tour of this sort in Mex- ico, visiting the principal cities and the notable sights of the great central plateau, at an average height above the level of the sea exceeding that of the summit of Mount Washington, diverging to the left as far as picturesque and semi-tropical Orizaba, only eighty miles from the Gulf (N of Mexico, with iis Swiss mountains, mountain torrents and picturesque buildings, and its .Javanese entree, palms unl bananas, diverging to the right as far as attractive and prosperous Guadalajara oft the Pacific slope of Mexico, with its lake, its waterfall, "the Niagara of Mexico," and its canon that boasts the temperate zone at its top and the torrid zone at its bottom; and pushing southward as far as Oajaca and tlie famous ruins of Mitla, also in the vicinity of the Pacific, and many miles nearer to the equator than is the second cataract of the Nile. WONDERFUL DIVERSITY OF SK, IITSKEING. The principal plateau city is of course Mexico, a great modern capital of nearly 400,000 population, the center in succession of Aztec, Spanish-American and Mexican civili- zation, and wonderfully interesting, both from what it is and from what has been preserved of the striking evidences concerning what it has been. But there are on the plateau a half-dozen other distinct types of city, as, for instance, beau- tiful Puebla, the cathedral city; unique Guanajuato, a typ- ical mining town, and Aguas Calientes, the Arkansas Hot Springs of Mexico. I doubt whether anywhere else in the world so short a distance of travel can display a more strik- ing diversity of sightseeing. There are exhibited the char- acteristic spectacles of the torrid, temperate and frigid zones; here the tropical jungle, the palm, the bamboo and the banana; there the coffee, or the maguey, Indian corn and beans; then the cactus of the arid wastes of the Mexi- can desert, and, finally, the ice-plant of the glaciers of Ori- xaba or Popocatepetl, volcanoes crowned with perpetual snow. In historic associations and relics of the past there is the same diversity. There are reminders of Diaz, of .Inarez and Maximilian, of General Scott and Santa Ana, of Spanish viceroys and Hidalgo, of Cortes and Montezuma, and of the unknown builders of pyramids and palaces,, that antedate the beginnings of recorded history in America. Among the men of the Mexico of today there is in appear- ance and customs a similar diversity. There are a few hundred men of vast wealth and millions of paupers; there are feudal lords and vassals, and there are types represent- ing or suggesting the proud Spaniard and the pliable Egyptian, the Ethiopian and the Mongolian. 58 MOKE FOREIGN THAN EUROPE. Mexico is more foreign in appearance than nine-tenths of Europe, the thoroughfares of which are well trodden by the tourist myriads, and which has few by-ways remaining to gratify curiosity with the new and strange. Mexico's twelve millions of natives are, speaking generally, either pure In- dian, direct and unadulterated descendants of the Aztecs and other Indian tribes, or mixed Indian and Spanish, or (much the smallest class) pure Spanish. Four-fifths of the people have some Indian blood, two-fifths are pure Indian, and about one-third can neither speak nor understand Span- ish, and use their original Indian dialects. In the outward appearance of the men, women and children and in their habitations, costumes and habits it suggests in its different sections and among its varied peoples now Europe in Moor- ish Spain, now Asia in Palestine, now Africa in Egypt. SPANISH SUGGESTIONS IX MEXICO. The large cities are Spanish, with low, flat-roofed homes of the Moorish type, bare and forbidding without, but built around courts often rendered attractive by fountains, flow- ers, statuary and singing birds. Iron gratings at the bal- conies shut out the lover from the dark-eyed Mexican seuo- rita, as they do in the case of her Spanish sister, and both young women are, unhappily, discarding the picturesque mantilla for the latest Paris fashion and spoiling their com- plexions with Parisian rouge. The Mexican horseman is even more dashing and pic- turesque than his Old World counterpart. As in Spain, the city's heart is often a plaza, a promenade park, with a stand for Sunday band music, with the cathedral facing the plaza on one side and the palace or other Government building on the other. In both countries no city is complete without a j ascd, the Sunday afternoon driveway, where all the world displays itself in its best bib and tucker, and a bull ring, where also on Sunday the national sport attracts the multi- tude. Mexico's churches, like Spain's, are notable for size and beauty; for masterpieces of painting and treasures of gold, silver and precious stones within, and for beggars at their doors. Whim the Spanish conquered this country its surface was dotted with countless Az/tec temples. The order given was to tear down every one of these structures and to erect in its place a Christian church. 59 Thus it results that there are churches today in the moel inaccessible spots, on the summits even of the pyramids, tin- vast artificial mounds, which formed the favorite founda tion of temples of Aztec sun- worshipers; and thus it also re- sults that the church edifices are numerous beyond concep- tion, though many of the old buildings have long ago l> -n disused and have fallen into ruin. The City ut Mexico has even now sixty churches, and Puebla, the sacred riiy. with less than a hundred thousand population, has quite as many. Not only are these religious structures notable for their number, but many of them are impressive in size and archi- tecture and rich in adornment. They were founded by Span- iards in a cathedral-building age, and were constructed ac- cording to the plans of Spanish architects, at a time when .Mexico was pouring countless millions into the lap of Spain, and when there was no deterrent in lack of money tu (In- most extravagant building projects. When church property \\as nationalized by Juarez, and monasteries and nunneries were suppressed, it was found that three-fourths of the re- public's entire property was in the hands of the church. The wealth, and, to some extent, the rich adornment of the churches were affected by Juarez's reform, but still today -hese structures are, as in Spain, the country of notable ca- thedrals, the sights most proudly displayed to the tourist. AMERICA'S BIGGEST CATHEDRAL. The cathedral of the City of Mexico is to be compared in size with the vast cathedral of Seville, and that of I'm-lila in beauty of interior adornment with the best of Spain. Tin- only church in the world that unmistakably and notably ex ceeds in size the Mexican cathedral is St. Peter's at Rome. The Seville cathedral is 398 feet by 291 feet, and the nav- N 134 feet high. Baedeker gives the Mexican cathedral's di- mensions at 425 feet by 200 feet; height. 185 feet : towers. 218 feet high. The Mexican cathedral is thus higher and longer than that of Seville, but not so wide. The Seville structure occupies a larger ground area, but a part of that vast building has fallen in, and is practically a ruin, in the hands of repairing workmen, who will be engaged upon ir for years and perhaps centuries. Meanwhile this portion of the cathedral is inaccessible and spoils the effect of an in- lerior view of the structure. According to Baedeker's fig- ures, the Mexican cathedral ranks in size in the class of Seville and Milan, surpassed only by St. Peter's, and sur 60 passing not only all the other Spanish cathedrals, but every other in the world, including St. Paul's, London; St. Sophia, Constantinople, and the Cathedral of Cologne. The Mex- ican cathedral, which was nearly a hundred years in build- ing, is also notable as having once boasted the richest altar in the world, and as being now unique in possessing a choir railing said to have cost a million and a half dollars, and a wooden floor which certainly did not cost as many cents. The Puebla cathedral, with its floor of colored marbles, its rich and artistically attractive high altar of different va- rieties of Puebla onyx, and the beautiful ironwork and wood carving about the choir, boasts an interior which equals that of the cathedral of Toledo, or Burgos, or Leon, or any other of the structures of which Spain is justly proud. The music at Puebla was also pleasing. An organ, a piano, a violoncello and other stringed instruments, and men's and boys' voices (choir in vestments and director with baton), combined with excellent results. These boy choirs in scarlet and white vestments were also found in Oajaca's and Tla- colulu's cathedrals in the far south. There is a magnificent display of silver in remote Tlacolula's church: Tlaxcala has the oldest church in North America, with its cedar beams brought from Spain, Cortes' church of San Francisco, con- structed in 1521; there is artistic wood carving by Indian artists of power and taste in the Church of Ocotlan, perched upon a hill in the same city of Tlaxcala, and almost every leading church of almost every considerable town has a treasure of some sort, a Murillo, an alleged Titian, or some other exhibit to interest the sightseer. COUNTERPARTS OF SPANISH CITIES. Not only have many individual Spanish sights their coun- terparts in Mexico, but even the cities may be grouped and compared. The City of Mexico is nearly as large as Madrid or Barcelona, and far surpasses both in novelty and interest. Outside of its w r onderful picture gallery the finest in the world Madrid is only an imitation Paris. Barcelona is a bright, attractive modern business city. Mexicot is all of this, and in addition interests with Oriental scenes and sug- gestions. It has many of the sightseeing attractions of Madrid, Barcelona and gay Seville, with touches of scenes from the streets of Cairo. Guadalajara and Puebla are nearer the size of Seville, and each has manifold attractions. < Guanajuato is the Mexican reminder of Toledo and Granada, 61 perched on the rocky hillsides, terraced, quaint and pic- turesque. You hear the same language spoken as in Spain ; you pay separately so much for each act at a theatrical performance in both countries; the male citizens (and some of the citi- zenesses) smoke constantly and everywhere, as in Spain, but the Mexican does not stare quite so hard at the ladies as the Spaniard does, nor does he make such ostentatious and juicy use of a toothpick between courses at table d'hote. In some of the Mexican homes there are reminders in architectural effects and in stucco work in horseshoe arches and graceful columns of the Moorish influence upon the Spaniards during the period of Moorish occupation of Spain, but Mexico has nothing to compare with the delicately beau- tiful relics left by the Moors in the Alhambra at Granada, and in the Alcazar at Seville, which, with the wonderful Moorish mosque at Cordova, constitute the chief attractions of Southern Spain. If, however, Mexico has not relics of the work of North Africa, it has in its Indian dark-skinned peo- ple reminders of the Africans and Asiatics themselves. In the small villages and country sections where the millions of Indians dwell, Oriental scenes are plentiful. I do not now refer to observed analogies in traditions and religious rites, in chronological systems and zodiacal signs, or in so- cial usages and manners upon which the argument for be- lief in the common origin of early Mexican and Old World civilization is based, but to the surface resemblances which impress themselves upon and interest the ordinary unscien- tific observer. HINTS OF THE ORIENT IN MEXICO. The dark-skinned men, with bright eyes and white teeth, dressed first in white cotton and then draped in a scrape, a shawl by day and a blanket by night, are distinctively Oriental, and the effect is not destroyed either by the im- mense sugar-loaf sombreros which they wear upon their heads or the sandals which, when not barefooted, they fasten apon their feet. The women, often in gay colors, and draped in a dark-col- ored shawl, called reboso, which half conceals the face, also suggest Asia or Africa rather than America or Europe. The Egyptian shaduf finds its counterpart in the well sweep of Irapuato, where strawberries are grown and sold every day in the year, and where irrigation is resorted to as in Egypt, 62 svstrmaiically and on a large scale. In the absence of trees and rocks the Egyptian shaduf is small, is composed of pre- pared timbers, and the counterpoise to the well bucket is an immense hunk of dried, hardened Nile mud. The Mexican shaduf generally utilizes a forked tree, and swings across it a long tapering tree trunk or branch, and the counter- poise consists of a large single stone or a mass of stones fastened together. Though Mexico stretches farther south than Egypt, the two countries lie, speaking generally, be- tween the same parallels of latitude, but the altitude of Irapuato is over 5,000 feet above the sea level or the level of the Nile, so that the same degree of undress is not ex- pected or found in the Mexican as in the Egyptian shaduf worker. I saw, however, in the neighborhood of Irapuato two Indians .at well sweeps working side by side, who were dressed only in white cotton loin cloths, and who looked like the twin brothers of shaduf workers whom I have seen and photographed on the Nile. In the tropical altitudes of Mexico, and in the hot springs sections, as at Aguas Ca- lientes, without regard to altitude, there is at least an Egyptian disregard of the conventionalities in attire, and a disposition is noted to take a daily fashion hint from the Garden of Eden instead of from Paris, the children discard- ing even the fig leaf. The water-carrier of Cairo is much like his brother of Guanajuato, where a long leathern jar is used. The groups about the fountains all over the re- public, with jars of rounded pottery borne on the woman's head on a protecting turban-like ring, or balanced on the man's shoulders, are also Oriental. Corn is ground between two stones in Asiatic fashion. THE EGYPT OF THE 1S T EW AYORLD. Egyptian sand spouts are common; also Egyptian types of domestic utensils of pottery. The Mexican woman, with her baby at her back, securely fastened in the reboso, which throws the infant's weight on the mother's shoulders, is to be compared with the Egyptian woman, whose "reboso" covers her face while the child straddles her shoulders, holding to her head, and leaving her hands as unfettered as in the Mexican fashion. There are no Egyptian camels, but even more numerous donkeys, the patient burros. The In- dian villages, whether of adobe or of bamboo, with thatched roofs and organ cactus fences, and whether alive with goats, donkeys or snarling curs, are African in effect. There are 63 Aztec picture writings resembling the Egyptian, the paper being made from the maguey instead of papyrus. The Aztecs employed captives on great public works, as in Egypt. Mexico thus has pyramids much broader based than those of K^ypt, though not nearly so high, and idols quite as ugly. Gold ornaments, beads, masks and other highly-prized an- tiquities are found in the tombs as in Egypt. WHEREIN MEXICO FALLS SHORT. There are disadvantages and annoyances on the Mexican trip. After crossing the Rio Grande an arid desert w;isti- annoys the traveler with heat and dust for many miles. The railroad trip to the City of Mexico is, however, not so far as io San Francisco, four days and nineteen hours from New York, and is quite as comfortable. As in southern Europe, the houses and people are, speaking generally, unprepared for the cold, and in case of a cold wave both visitors and na- tives often suffer. The hotels are, with a few exceptions, poor, but they are very much better than the reports con- cerning them prevalent in the United States lead one to expect. One can fare as well as in Spain. The foreign lan- guage is an annoyance to the American who has done little European travel. But Americans ought to learn Spanish. Next to English it is the language of the Americas, and in view of present growing commercial relations and manifest destiny Spanish should have the preference over every other modern language in our public schools and colleges. The worst nuisances that the tourist encounters in Mexico will also remind him of southern Europe and the Mediter- ranean countries in general in the ubiquity and the excessive energy of the insect kingdom. There is not the slightest trace of the proverbial Mexican procrastination in the opera- tions of the bedbugs, fleas and lice. Whatever they have to do, they do promptly and with all their might. The bulk of the Mexicans need public schools and soap and water; varied industries and insect powder. But today I am con- sidering them not in the more serious phases of their condi- tions and needs, but exclusively from the sightseeing point of view, which discovers picturesqueness in rags and dirt. MEXICAN "BIGGEST THINGS ON EARTH." Mexico boasts the richest and most productive silver mines in the world; the cradle of civilization in this conti- 64 nent; the ruins and romance of historic and prehistoric America; the Garden of Eden, if it was situated on this continent, and in the Cholula pyramid the Tower of Babel of Indian tradition; the spot where the first known Europ- ean set foot on this continent to which he gave his name the place, the coast near Tampico; the man, Americus Ves- pucci; the largest meteorite in the world; in the statue of < 'liarles IV., on the Paseo, in the City of Mexico, the first and according to some authorities the largest bronze ever cast in America, and according to Humboldt the finest eques- trian statue in the world next to that of Marcus Aurelius at Rome; the stoutest tree on the continent and perhaps in :lic \vorld at Tule, 154 feet two inches in circumference, six feet from the ground; according to the latest figures, which reduce Mount St. Elias and exalt Orizaba, the highest moun- tain on the continent; the largest American church build- ing in the Mexican Cathedral and the most beautiful in that of Puebla; the first pulpit and first church structure in the New World at Tlaxcala; the largest bell in America and one of the largest in the world in the Mexican Cathedral. It is said to be nineteen feet high. The "Monarch of Bells" in the Kremlim at Moscow is tw y enty feet high and w r eighs 444,000 pounds, but it is cracked and useless, while Mex- ico's bell is sound and serviceable. Finally, Mexico boasts the most pretentious theater on the continent. That of Guadalajara is an immense structure, with an imposing front of numerous columns of the Greek style of architec- ture, but it is now excelled by that of Guanajuato, which is one of the showiest and most elaborate buildings of the kind in the world. It is the sight of Guanajuato. It is un- der Government control, and official permit to visit it is issued by the Governor of the State. It has been a dozen years in building, at great expense, as if it were a European cathedral or an American State capitol or the Washington postoffice. They do not hurry things in Mexico. It is the land of "manana" tomorrow. The national coat of arms repre- sents an eagle standing on a cactus, with a serpent in its mouth. It is popularly known as the bird and the worm, and it has been hastily inferred therefrom that the national motto reads: "It is the early bird that catches the worm." But only a few days of Mexican experience demonstrate the fallacy of this interpretation, and suggest that the real national motto is either "More haste, less speed," "Some lay, some day," or "In the sweet bye and bye." AZTEC AND SPANIARD. In the Footsteps of the Conquering Cortes Vestiges of America's Venice Unique and Interesting Street Scenes in Mexican Cities Bargain Sales Every Day. ( Editorial Correspondence of the Evening Star, Dec. 14, 1895. ) The American in Spain naturally takes a deep interest in the reminders of Columbus. He finds not even the Alham- bra more thought-inspiring than the bridge of Finos near Granada, win-re Queen Isabella's courier, sent by her from the recently conquered Moorish city, overtook Columbus, who was abput to quit Spain in despair, and turned him back to give "to Castile and Leon a new world." The Amer- ican also develops a spontaneous Columbian enthusiasm in Palos, with its convent of La Rabida, so intimately asso- ciated with the turning point in the career of Columbus, and its port, whence the great discoverer sailed; and in Bar- celona, from which the most imposing of the many monu- ments erected in his honor looks out upon the Mediterra- nean, where he was royally welcomed by Ferdinand and Isa- bella on the return from his first voyage. A similar interest attaches to Mexican reminders of Cortes, the first Old World conqueror of the New, and this interest is not diminished by the fact that the associations connected with Cortes, who took possession for Spain of what Columbus found, are in the land where his fame was won, and not in the mother country, where both discoverer and conqueror died neglected and humiliated. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF CORTES. \\ V can trace every stage of the wonderful march of Cortes and his handful of followers from the coast near Vei-a Crux, to the City of Mexico. Here, at Tlaxcala, a moun- tain town, not far from the present city of Ptiebla, the Span- iards fought with a fierce and warlike mountain tribe which soon became the faithful ally of Cortes, saving him more than once in times of imminent danger, and sharing the military honors of the conquest. In this city, which at the time of the conquest was compared favorably by Cortes with Granada, but which is now the mere shadow of its former self a half-deserted, decaying village are found the most interesting collection of Cortes' relics in all Mex- ico. One sees here the banner which accompanied Cortes in his memorable march, the standard which Cortes pre- sented to the Tlaxcalan chiefs who befriended him, portraits in oil of the latter, the robes which they wore at their bap- tism and the font in which they were baptized, a silken embroidery on which is pictured the first battle between the Spaniards and Tlaxcalans; and one can visit the palace occupied by Cortes. After turning aside with some of the Spaniards to ascend Popocatepetl for sulphur to be used in gunpowder, we enter the valley of Mexico by way of Amecameca, as Cortes did, and gaze with him in astonished and speechless admiration upon the magnificent prospect spread before us. "In the center of the great basin were beheld the lakes, occupying then a much larger portion of the surface than at present; their borders thickly studded with towns and hamlets, and, in the midst like some Indian empress with her coronal of pearls the fair City of Mexico, with her white towers and pyramidal temples, reposing as it were on the bosom of the waters." We descend in Cortes' footsteps, and, after a brief halt at Ixtapalapa, where, in the palace of Cuitlahua, Montezu- ma's brother, the Spaniards were royally entertained, we follow Cortes upon the great causeway across Lake Tezcuco straight into the City of Mexico. HISTORIC POINTS IN THE AZTEC CAPITAL. Where the Hospital of Jesus now stands Montezuma welcomed the Spaniards, and thence they marched to their quarters near the present Plaza Major and cathedral. We can rebuild in imagination the vast pile of Montezuma's palace, on the site of the present national palace, and the suburban castle of Chapultepec, which rose high above all other structures, displaying upon the heights which it crowned the same venerable cypresses which are admired there today. We can imagine the audacious capture of Mon- tezuma in his own city and castle, and finally after many vicissitudes of fortune the attempt of the Spaniards to es- cape from the city on Noche Triste, the sorrowful night, by way of the western causeway. We can recreate the terrible 7 struggle along the dike, aided by structures which mark historic points of this exodus. The movable bridge, built by the Spaniards as a substitute for draw-bridges, destroyed by the Aztecs, stuck fast in the first intersecting canal of the causeway, and the second canal could be crossed only upon a bridge of dead bodies. At this point now stands the ancient church of San Hipolito, upon whose wall is carved this inscription: "So great was the slaughter of Spaniards l>y i he Aztecs in this place on the night of July 1, 1520, named for this reason the Dismal Night, that after having in the following year re-entered the city triumphantly, the conquerors resolved to build here a chapel to be called the Chapel of the Martyrs, and which should be dedicated to San Hipolito, because the capture of the city occurred upon that saint's day." The point in the causeway is also indi- cated where Alvarado is said to have made his famous leap across a bridgeless canal, using his spear as a pole, and breaking all the records for pole-vaulting. Farther out, at Fopotla, is the Noche Triste tree, under which Cortes is said to have wept on the Dismal Night, a tree jealously guarded by the Government. The only notable Spanish public me- morials preserved in Indian-ruled Mexico thus commem- morate a famous slaughter of the Spaniards and the spot where the Spanish leader shed tears of mortification and grief. Having seen Cortes ignominiously chased out of Mexico we must imagine him recuperating at Tlaxcala, collecting and disciplining a new army, building brigantines to serve as his navy on Lake Tezcuco, and finally engaging in a fierce struggle with the soldiers of Guatemozin, the new Aztec emperor, a heroic figure in the war, and cutting his way over the Iztapalapan causeway, back to his old quarters near the pyramidal Aztec temple, and to the mastery of the city. The story of the conquest of Mexico is the most exciting romance ever written. It has not been neglected either by the historian or the novelist. As the average tourist in Egypt finds an entertaining guide in "Uarda" and "The Egyptian Princess," and the visitor to Italy's resurrected city delights more in the descriptions found in "The Last Days of Pompeii" than in those of Baedeker, so in Mexico "The Fair God" and "Montezuma's Daughter" give to many buildings and historic spots still visible and to many views which may still be enjoyed a vivid interest which they would otherwise lack. It is a fascinating occupation to visit the scenes described in fiction and history, and to trace remind- ers of an ancient city in the modern successor upon its site. 68 THE OLD CAPITAL AND THE NEW. The Aztec city of Mexico Tenochtitlan was more ex- tensive and populous than the present great capital. It was the Venice of the New World. It was built originally on some islands in the western part of Lake Tezcuco. It stretched its habitations on piles out into the shallow lake. Canals traversed it in every direction. Canoes as the New World gondolas were the ordinary Tenochtitlan vehicles. Great causeways of liine and stone, broad enough for a dozen horsemen to ride abreast, connected the city on the south, the west and the north with the mainland. Canals intersected these causeways and were crossed by draw- bridges which could be raised in case of danger, thus cut- ting off all communication with the inland city. Tenochtit- lan resembled in location and means of defense the ancient lake dwellings of Europe. It made a Chinese or Cantonese use of the surface of the water to sustain human habita- tions, not merely in houses on piles, or in house boats, but in the famous chinampas or floating islands, which were for the most part immense rafts of reeds and rushes, bearing several feet of a rich soil from the bottom of the lake. Some of these artificial movable islands were two or three hundred feet long, sustaining the residence hut of a gardener who grew flowers and vegetables in the greatest profusion. Modern Mexico is no longer a Venice. The waters of Lake Tezcuco have withdrawn until the center of the pres- ent city is several miles from its shore. Only a few feeble reminders remain to suggest its Venetian days, its cause- ways, its canals and its floating islands. VESTIGES OF THE AZTEC VENICE. One of the most interesting of Mexico's suburban excur- sions is to the south to Ixtapalapa and along the Viga canal, including Santa Anita and its alleged chinampas. The great causeway to Ixtopalapa was that by which Cortes i wire entered the city across the waters of Tezcuco, the first time hailed with demonstrations of welcome by myriads 'f Aztecs, the second the occasion of Tenochtitlan's final conquest, greeted by the fiercest and most desperate resist- ance. The modern trip to Txtapalapa begins prosaically in a little street car pulled by a single mule. We enter this car at Mexico's great plaza in full view of the vast cathedral, 69 which takes the place of the pyramid and surmounting temple of the Aztec war god. \Ve leave the I Ma /.a Major and go southward down the main street of Tenochtitlan, which, when Cortes first entered it, was lined on both sides with beautiful palaces of red stone, belonging to the A/t< nobility, and exciting by their magnificence astonishment and unbounded admiration in the Spaniards. But in the second entrance that of the conquest every one of these fortified palaces was leveled to the ground. Near the city's limits our street car turns to the left and we are soon paral- leling the Viga canal, the last notable vestige of Tenochtit- lan's waterways. After a long but interesting ride along its banks, over a fine, well shaded road, passing through the Indian villages of Santa Anita and Ixtacalco, we turn sharply to the left at Mexicalcingo, and are soon in Ixta- palapa. Here were the famous gardens of Cuitlahua, Mon- tezuiua's brother, where he feasted the visiting Spaniards. Here also was the home of Guatemozin, the last great Aztec emperor. Now gardens and palaces have disappeared, and only a miserable, dusty, scantily populated village remains. FLOATING ISLANDS AND THE VIGA. On the return trip to Mexico we left our street car at Santa Anita and took a scow ride in among the chinampas all that remains of the floating islands. If any of these islands ever did float it is evident that they are now fastened immovably. Workmen were engaged in raising rich soil by dredging the bottoms of the intersecting canals and in spreading it over the "floating islands," which thus as- sumed an artificial appearance and might easily be sup- posed, on superficial examination, to rest upon rafts. The soil of these artificial gardens is very fertile and grows im- mense crops of vegetables and flowers, which form part of the lading of the Viga flat boats that supply the Mexican markets. Returning to the canal we embark in a Mexican gondola for a trip down the Viga to Mexico. Our gondola is not even an Aztec canoe, but unequivocally and flagrantly a flat boat, constructed on the graceful lines of the mud scow. We sit under a low awning, which protects us from the sun, and our barefooted gondolier, dressed in white cotton and a sombrero, poles us slowly down the equally sluggish canal. Here we see a picturesque, scantily clad, dark-skinned In- 70 dian propelling a small boat laden with fagots. We pass hundreds of flat boats on their way to market, piled high with vegetables, flowers, wood, hay, fruit and stone. Some of the scows are house-boats, ami whole families, from the infant to the grandfather, live in them. Domestic opera- tions are performed in the open air, with a Neapolitan abandon and lack of reserve. Here we pass under a low stone bridge, and are compelled to throw ourselves flat in our boat, with our awning spread upon us. The scenes on the populated banks of the canal are as interesting as those on its surface. We see women and children in various stages of undress washing their clothes or performing their personal ablutions. The Viga laundry consists of an equip- ment of stones conveniently located on the river bank. Oc- casionally we can look up some small intersecting canal and see gardening operations upon the modern floating islands and small boats filled with natives navigating the ditches around them. Decidedly, there is now no suggestion of Venice in the scene. If several thousand windmills and as many fat cows were scattered over the flat landscape the canals might, however, enable the scene to recall recollections of Holland. OTHEK OLD WOKLD SUGGESTIONS. Though Mexico no longer reposes as an island capital on the bosom of the waters and present resemblances to Italy's beautiful city of palaces and canals are remote and far- fetched, there are many obvious suggestions of the Old World in Mexican scenes, a few of which may be noted. An Old World superfluity of beggars, for instance, is con- spicuously in evidence. The Mexican beggars are not to be compared in deform- ity with those of Constantinople, or in persistency with those of Killarney, but they maintain a fair European ave- rage in both respects and suffice to cause the American vis- itor who has been "so long abroad" to feel perfectly at home in Mexico. Cortes, distinguishing Cholula from other Aztec cities, wrote that he saw there "multitudes of beg- gars such as are to be found in the enlightened capitals of Europe." Since the conquest all the other Mexican cities seem to have attained Cholula's distinction and now proudly display these evidences of European enlightenment. 71 .Ml 1 MM IKS AM) TIIK I. IKK. In several different places, including Guanajuato, Mexico has a display of comparatively modern mummies and of cat- acombs. The practice prevails as in Barcelona and some other European communities. of renting tomb space for the use of a corpse. In Mexico, if, at the expiration of the orig- inal term there is no renewal of the lease, the corpse is evicted and dumped into an extensive underground dum- ber. If in the dry air the evicted mummifies he stands against the wall; if he tumbles to pieces his bones join the vast miscellaneous heap. The Guanajuato catacomb is ghastly enough to satisfy the most exacting connoisseur of the gruesome. UNIQUE STREET SCENES. Then there are street scenes of a strange and foreign as- pect to the American, as, for instance, black street car hearses and street car funeral hacks, utilized in the burial of the most distinguished men, like the late Romero Rubio, Diaz's father-in-law, and at his death a Cabinet officer in the present administration. There are also curious street signs, rude but vigorous and highly colored pictures depict- ing scenes suggestive of the business conducted within, and inappropriate names in staring letters as trade-marks, so to speak, of the different stores. Imagine, for instance, "The Last Days of Pompeii" as a business sign, or "The Sacred Heart of Jesus," which is the name of a score of es- tablishments, ranging from a saloon to a flour mill. Then one enjoys in the streets the spectacle of men embracing, each patting the other's back with the hand of the embrac- ing arm, the whole performance constituting the national form of greeting, as handshaking is with us. The delicate patting of this salute has no justification on utilitarian grounds. If, instead of patting, the Mexicans were to scratch one another's backs, in the self-inaccessible spot be- tween the shoulderblades, one could understand the signifi- cance of the performance and with good reason commend it. Countless porters at the railroad stations ready to carry anything from a hand satchel to a Saratoga trunk for the smallest of small fees suggest Europe; also the vendors who crowd about the windows of the cars at every stopping point to sell their wares. The variety of the articles thus offered is extraordinary. In addition to the edibles and 72 drinkables, the pulque and the strange fruits, nearly every place has some specialty to offer. Thus at Salamanca the peddlers have buckskin gloves, at Aguas Calientes linen drawn work of a fineness and cheapness to turn the heads of lady tourists, at Irapuato strawberries every day in the year, at Queretaro opals by the peck, at Celaya famous dulces, confections of milk and sugar; at Guadalajara pot- tery, at Puebla onyx ornaments, and at Apizaco canes of coffee wood curiously and sometimes artistically carved by the Indians. BARGAIN SALES EVERY DAY. These things can not only be bought at the places where the}' are made or grown or found, but at the metropolis, and there also can be had cheaply old silver, filigree work, beau- tiful straw work, wood carving, feather work keeping alive some of the ancient Aztec art, figures in wax and clay, and countless other Mexican products, in addition to direct im- portations from Europe which have paid little or no duty, and American goods, which to meet the vigorous European competition are in many lines sold more cheaply than in the United States. When it is. considered that the depreciation of the Mexican silver causes every transaction to appear to the American as a bargain sale, with a discount of nearly 50 per cent., the attractions of Mexico as a shopping place at once become notably apparent. What lady can. resist the opportunity for foreign cheap shopping, when she remembers that she may also experience the unholy joy (a returning European traveler's emotion) of smuggling her purchases across the border and of getting ahead of the customs officers and of Uncle Sam? While the ladies are shopping the men can, if they please, <-linib Orizaba or Popocatepetl snow-clad volcanoes, 2,000 feet higher than Mount Blanc. It is not necessary, how- ever, to rule out the ladies in the mountain-climbing trips. 1 see that a part} r of men and women have recently ascended Popocatepetl, and that they went from the City of Mexico as far as the first stage of the ascent wonderful to relate on bicycles. As further evidence that Mexico is in many respects fully abreast of the times attention may be called to the recent newspaper announcement of a projected cable road to the very top of lofty Popocatepetl. MODERN MEXICO. The New North American Invasion Across the Rio Grande One of the World's Great Men Porfirio Diaz, Spanish - Indian President and Uncrowned King Future of the Americas. (Editorial Correspondence of the Evening Star, Jan. 4, 1896.) The Americans, i. e., the United Statesers, are invading Mexico. This invasion differs from its predecessor of half a century ago in that it is peaceful and beneficial in the high est degree to the invaded. American enterprise and the far- seeing wisdom of Mexico's political leaders have combined to develop a comprehensive railroad system in our neighbor- ing republic, practically an extension of certain great trunk lines of the United States, already covering well the most important points and pushing toward the country's re- motest corners. Mexico's contribution to the pan-American route, which is to convey through passengers from Maine or Oregon to Patagonia, and which is to knit together the Three Americas, is now near the Mexican southern border. The railroads with which the northern invaders have blessed this land are developing the rich natural resources of hith- erto inaccessible sections, stimulating trade, and bringing into the republic an annually increasing host of tourists to enjoy the magnificent scenery, the prehistoric ruins and the unique scenes illustrating the life of the people, and also with ideas of expenditure on a gold basis to scatter depre- ciated silver among appreciative recipients. With its twin agent of civilization, the telegraph, the railroad has also ren- dered revolutions all but impossible. No revolt can make much headway before the news is flashed to Diaz, and through the aid of the facilities furnished by the railroads troops may be massed and the rebellion crushed in its inrip iency. Mexico's railroads, with a single exception, arc owned and run by Americans, in accordance with American methods of equipment and management. The army of rail- road men constitute the first and most important branch of the northern invaders, and associated with them are the drummers, representing business America, and the tourist host. Then come the Americans who, either for themselves or as superintendents for Mexican owners, have so wonder- fully developed the republic's mineral resources in recent years. The coffee lands have also attracted numerous Amer- ican investors, some of whom have done well for themselves and all of whom have contributed something to the pros- perity of Mexico. THE UBIQUITOUS AMERICAN. Everywhere in the younger republic one meets Ameri- cans, here in trade, here in the hotel business, here as tour- ists, here introducing some northern invention, as an elec- tric plant, into a progressive Mexican city; here in mining, here in coffee planting, here in charge of railroad, express or telegraph business. But compared with the entire popu- lation they are, of course, a mere handful. Their influence in Mexico is out of proportion to their number, for the rea- son that they have so strong a hold upon the sources of na- tional development and prosperity. They are not more numerous, because Mexico is not really attractive to those colonists who must struggle individually with the soil, the class which constitutes the great bulk of home-seeking and home-making immigrants. On the plateau the soil is often thin and poor; in the hot lands fevers and the competition of Indian cheap labor at a maximum rate of 25 cents a day in our money discourage immigration. There is mo-re room here for the capitalist than for the laborer. It is not a good place for the young man to come "to make his fortune," without well-defined and reasonable plans of immediate employment. Intoxicants are temptingly cheap and the moral atmosphere is unwholesome for the voluntary or in- voluntary loafer. Mexico has not merely railroad ties with the United States, but is bound fast by newspaper ties as well. The capital city has two good daily newspapers printed in Eng- lish, one of which, the Mexican Herald, an enterprising, newsy, up-to-date paper, presents to its readers the full As- sociated Press reports. The republic is thus in the system of American newspapers as well as that of American rail- roads, and, no longer isolated, is in touch with the thought and action of the North American Continent. rr, THE ItEIGN OF LAW AND OF DIAX. There was a time wheii heavy iii vestments of American capital in Mexico would have been viewed as impossibilities, rendered such by local hostility toward foreigners, and es- pecially Americans, and by the lack of a settled, organized government to repress lawlessness and to guarantee semriiy to invested capital. That stage in the country's history is happily passed. Diaz, one of the world's great men, rules the republic with a strong, yet tactful hand. He is at once a soldier and diplomatist. He welcomes the foreigner with- out losing his hold upon his countrymen. He has checked the revolutionary tendencies of Mexico, formerly a sort of Ferris wheel among nations, notable for the magnificent impressiveness of its periodical revolutions. The army is liark of him, and through the railroad and accompanying telegraph which his policy has sent everywhere in Mexico he can, as I have already suggested, drop soldiers upon the backs of conspirators as soon as they have fairly begun to conspire. He has, to a great extent, broken up the elements which threaten revolt, conciliating or crushing possible conspirators. Many restless, lawless spirits, including the surviving remnant of bandits, have been converted into "Rurales," the efficient mounted protectors of the public peace. Other disturbers have been quieted and rendered conservative by appointment to higher offices, or have been exiled, or imprisoned, and, in some cases, perhaps, shot ''while attempting to escape." In one way and another Diaz, who was an old revolutionist himself, and who approached his task of rendering revolutions impossible with the ac- quired knowledge of an expert, has long ago steadied the republic and caused his reign, if such it must be termed, to be an era of peace and good order and security to life and property. While in the City of Mexico I had an interview with Pres- ident Diaz in the National Palace, the vast building which occupies a part of the site of the still vaster structure of Montezuma's world-famous palace. My sponsor and inter- preter was Mr. Butler, the able and genial secretary of the American legation in Mexico. The stranger from Wash- ington is at once made to feel at home here by the repre- sentatives of his Government. Minister Ransom, the courtly ex-Senator from North Carolina, and his son Robert vie with each other in their tender of hospitable attentions, and no one could be apparently on a better footing at the Mex- 76 lean White House, or secure for a visitor an interview with President Diaz under more favorable conditions. The Mex- ican President understands much that is said in English and can speak it to some extent, but he protects the Presi- dential dignity in these interviews (as is natural) by speak- ing only Spanish, and, when necessary, utilizing an inter- preter. In conversation with him, however, there is not the unavoidable stiffness of the ordinary interview through an interpreter. You speak to him and not to the interpreter, for you feel that he understands nearly everything that you say, and that so far, at least, as your own remarks are con- cerned, your Spanish-speaking friend is a commentator rather than an interpreter. AN INTERVIEW WITH PRESIDENT DIAZ. \\V found the President in a reception room hung with the famous Maximilian tapestries, and he sat down and chatted sociably with us for half an hour, apparently obliv- ious or careless of the fact that a crowd, including a high Government official, cooled their heels in the ante-chamber. The interview was not a formal, pre-arranged affair to furnish the basis of a newspaper publication, but the Presi- dent talked interestingly on many subjects in the course of the desultory conversation. He evidently appreciates fully the value of the right sort of American in developing the material resources of the country which he governs. The man who builds and man- ages Mexican railroads and the man who develops the re- public's mineral wealth are to him the model Americans. In this connection he spoke in warm terms of ex-Governor Alexander R. Shepherd, who has spent great sums of money in making highly profitable the mines of Batopilas in north- ern Mexico. President Diaz inquired particularly as to Mr. Shepherd's whereabouts (he was then in Europe), and said that he had at least two American friends in whom he could place at all times the fullest and most unquestioning reli- ance. One of them, he said, was Shepherd, and the other Huntington, the railroad magnate. Admiration was expressed of the wonderful view from the residence White House of Mexico, lofty Chapultepec, and of the Paseo or driveway leading to it, with its mag- nificent statues of Guatemozin, Columbus and Charles IV. Diaz did not display any special enthusiasm on the subject of natural scenery. He intimated that so far as these par- 77 lirular scenes were concerned, they were so familiar to him that he had come to take them much as a matter of course. In response to a complimentary reference to the good order prevailing today in Mexico, Diaz spoke freely upon the subject. He was evidently pleased and proud at what he had already accomplished in this direction, but in view of the comparatively recent date of the full supremacy of the law he deprecated an expectation of precisely the sa un- settled conditions everywhere in that republic which he assumed to exist everywhere in the United States. Questioning as to the possibility of a visit by him to the- United States, I asked whether he was prohibited from go- ing outside of the republic's jurisdiction during his trim of office. He replied that the rule on that subject had been even more stringent than at present; that when he first be- came President the law made of that official a prisoner within the federal district, forbidden to step foot outside its limits; and that he finally succeeded in securing the amendment of this law, so that now he can visit any part of Mexico, though he may not go beyond its borders. He added dryly that the Mexican Presidents were not inclined at any time to view this confinement, so to speak, as a pun- ishment, and intimated that anyone in the past who was so fortunate as to hold the Presidency was apt to prefer to stay close to the seat of Government in order to be sure of retaining it. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PRESIDENT. I Ma/, is an older man, a smaller man physically, though strongly built, and a much darker man than photographs and paintings of him had caused me to expect to meet. He is sixty-five years of age, though he looks considerably younger, and the Indian blood in his veins, of which he is proud, imparts a decided shade to his complexion. He gives the impression of a man of great force, but with powers under perfect restraint. He seems what he is generally con- ceded to be, "The right man in the right place." He has been the power either on the throne or behind the throne since 1877, and he will reign, all elements of the people en- thusiastically assenting, as long as he lives. It is also ex- pected that he will exercise the kingly prerogative of select- ing his successor; indeed, the name of the man supposed to have been chosen for this honor is already whispered in the inner circles. 78 Diaz is of the mixed Spanish and Indian race which con- trols Mexico. The oppressions by the mother country ap- parently soured the Spanish blood in Mexican veins. De- scendants of the Spanish conquerors fought by the side of descendants of the conquered Aztecs against Spain as a common enemy. Irrespective of ancestry they merged into the Mexican-American. It is curious how the see-saw of time and fate has sent the murdered Guatemozin up and the conquering Cortes down in Aztec-Spanish land. Guatemo- zin's bones have moldered undiscovered somewhere in the vast forests of Central America, where Cortes hanged him, or they would occupy the place of honor in Mexico's Pan- theon. The most impressive statue in the Mexican capital is the magnificent representation of Guatemozin on the Paseo, reverenced by the Indians, and erected and admired by men with the blood of the Spanish conquerors in their veins. The companion piece to Guatemozin's statue on the Paseo is not Cortes, the conqueror, but Columbus, the dis- coverer, who is apropriately honored in this part of the New Worlft. As for Cortes, not only is he uncommemorated in tablet or monument, but rancorous hatred did not even per- mit his bones to rest undisturbed in their Mexican tomb. "In 1823," says Prescott, "the patriot mob of the capital in their zeal to commemorate the era of the national independ- ence and their detestation of the 'old Spaniards,' prepared to break open the tomb which held the ashes of Cortes and to scatter them to the winds! Friends of the family, as is commonly reported, entered the vault by night, and, secretly removing the relics, prevented the commission of the sacri- lege." A WELCOME TO HOSPITABLE GEAVES. This treatment of Cortes is a curious exception to the general amnesty and the policy of toleration which Mexico seems to have declared in respect to the dead who in life figured conspicuously in her history. She has apparently been content to welcome even the most hated to a hospitable grave. Under the Altar of the Kings in the Cathedral of Mexico molder together the bones of certain Spanish vice- roys, and the heads of certain patriot Mexicans, including Hidalgo, struck off by the Spanish as the heads of traitors. Close at hand in the Chapel of San Felipe lie the remains of Iturbide, who destroyed Spanish rule in Mexico, made himself emperor, was finally shot by the patriot Mexicans 70 ;is a traitor, and, being dead, reposes in tin- cathedral under a monument inscribed "The Liberator." In Mexico's Westminster, the Pantheon of San Fernando, lies .Juarez, the famous Indian President, under a tomb which is a masterpiece of sculpture, and only a few feet away are the monuments which mark the last resting places of .Hiramon and Mejia, the generals of Maximilian, who were executed with him at Juarez's order. At the foot of ( 'hapultepec rises a monument to the Mexican cadets killed in the assault by the North American invaders. In the for- eign cemetery at its end toward Chapultepec lie the bones of the American soldiers killed in the invasion, and on their monumental shaft is inscribed their victories: "Contreras, ( Imrubusco, Molino del Eey, Chapultepec, Mexico." No one, it seems, is begrudged a hospitable grave but Cortes! In this land of revolutions first one race has been on top and then another. For three hundred years the Spanish blood was in the ascendancy; now the Indian prevails. The Mexican Madonna is the Indian Virgin of Guadalupe, who, inspiring the patriot armies, overthrew and superseded as the national patron saint, the Spanish Virgin, de Los Reme- dies, in whose name the Spaniards went to battle. It is the Virgin pictured as an Indian who was recently crowned at Guadalupe, some of our American bishops participating in the elaborate ceremonies. Juarez, "the Washington of Mex- ico," was a full-blooded Zapotec, and he ruled, and Diaz now rules, asserting the supremacy of the Indian through their Zapotec blood. IS MEXICO'S AUTONOMY IN DANGER? Has Mexico reason to fear the invading Americans, even though they bear gifts? Not at present, and probably never. Asa race we are a land-hungry people, but a belt of desert and forbidding territory separates us from the desirable portions of Mexico. Our colonists do not go there as settlers upon the land in dangerously large numbers. Not labor, but capital, is needed, and supplied. The United States must and will control the successful competitor among the canal and railroad routes to connect Atlantic and Pacific across the narrow end of the continent, but this control does not render necessary annexation either of Mexico or of the country traversed by the interoceanic highway. 80 Millions of the Mexicans are not in condition to be assim- ilated in a real republic like the United States. The Gov- ernment, though admirable and the one best adapted to ex- isting circumstances, is not of and by the people. The elec- tions have often been mere forms. The national legislature, of which the lower house meets in the old Iturbide Theater, with the reporters in a private box and the spectators in the galleries, passes entirely too many measures by a unanimous vote. Four million people, who speak and understand only some Indian dialect, and whose needs are so barbarously limited that twenty cents a day of our money will satisfy them, would be an indigestible lump even for the ostrich stomach of the American Republic. In many parts of the rural districts the conditions of the feudal system prevail. The Mexican hacienda is a vast estate, sometimes contain- ing hundreds of thousands of acres, with its castle, the fort- like central building or house, around which the feudal village clusters, with its lord, generally an absentee, enjoy- ing himself in Paris, and with its vassals in thousands of peons, who are kept chronically in debt to the lord, and who, under the laws and customs, are as tightly bound to the soil as if slavery and serfdom had not been abolished by law in Mexico. From the feudal system of the Middle Ages to modern self-government is too sudden a transition. Neither the people to the north nor to the south of us are now knocking at our doors for admission, and there is no tendency toward or present prospect of forcible annexation. Canada, outside of the French province, would be readily assimilated, and is anxious for commercial but not political union. Mexico would not be easily absorbed. Many of her people, especially those near the border, are suspicious and apprehensive of us. Secretary Seward, who drove out the French for them, does not entirely banish from their mem- ory General Scott, with his army of North American in- vaders. The process of Americanizing both neighbors goes on, however, steadily. Canada is likely to secure first com- mercial and then political independence of Great Britain before there can be peaceable annexation to the United States, if that event is ever to occur. With Canada and Mex- ico self-governed as republics, and closely bound to the United States by commercial ties and common interests, and with the institutions and influence of the great Republic dominating the American continent, manifest destiny will sufficient gratification, no matter how long the repre- 81 sentation of Canada and Mexico in the government at Wash- ington may be delayed. With a pan-American railroad fastening together the American continents with bands of steel; with reciprocity devices to foster and encourage trade; with legislation to develop American shipping and American commerce; with consular reports and such publications as those of the Bureau of American Republics to guide the manufacturers wise enough to utilize them, and with an enlarged and vig- orous American doctrine, the modern application and logical development of the Monroe doctrine, to unify the hem- isphere, the three Americas will advance rapidly together, shoulder to shoulder, into a common and unexampled pros- peri ty. A KING AMONG TREES. Mexico's Giant at Tule Perhaps the Stoutest in the World A Typical Zapotec Village Scenes in a Timbuctoo of the North American Continent On the Way to Mitla's Ruins. (Editorial Correspondence of the Evening Star, Jan. 18, 1896.) Though spelled Oaxaca and pronounced Warhacker, the word sounded tunefully as Eldorado in the ears of Cortes, for it was the name of the most fruitful valley and the richest gold-producing province in Aztec land. And when the Spaniard kidnaped Montezuma in his own palace, and ruled through the royal captive, one of the first gifts ex- torted from him was the grant to Cortes of a vast tract of land in Oaxaca. So after the conquest, when a Spanish emperor occupied Montezuma's shoes, this grant was re- newed and confirmed, and Cortes was made Marquis of the Vallej 7 of Oaxaca. The modern Indian-peopled city of this name is famous not only as the spot favored by Cortes, but as the birthplace of Juarez and of Diaz, as the present ter- minus of the Mexican Southern Railroad, and the most southern point yet reached in Mexico by the Pan-Ameri- can route, and finally as the starting point for a drive to the Big Tree of Tule and the ruins of Mitla. In front of the worse of the two Oaxaca hotels any one who has been in either of them will at once decide that I stayed where he did there stood on a balmy day in last November two vehicles bound for the ruins of Mitla. In entire harmony with their uses and their destination they were themselves ruins, as unmistakable as any left by the Aztecs, Toltecs or Zapotecs. First came a dilapidated car- riage, once perhaps the showy turnout of a Spanish viceroy, now a sad relic of departed worth, broken, scratched, cracked, tattered and torn, worn paintless and threadbare, whose doors, held in place by dirty bits of string, clung tenaciously when requested to open, and in yielding gener- ally splintered the wood work in a fresh spot. The second vehicle was even less promising. It was a double-seated wagon with springless springs, and in the last stages of decay. Each conveyance had as motive power five mules, with three leaders abreast, and was driven by a bandit in sombrero and serape. THE START FOR TULE AND MITLA. The little group at the hotel entrance, consisting of Dr. Leopoldo Batres, conservator of ancient monuments of Mex- ico; his son. a bright youngster; the English engineer; Madame and myself, stared at the Mitla procession with dubious eyes. Finally Madame, after a critical examina- tion and some hesitation, marks the carriage as her choice of evils. The English engineer seats himself with our driver, Madame and I take the back seat, our driver's whip cracks savagely, and off we go for Tule and Mitla. The other vehicle containing Dr. Batres and his son, and creak- ing ominously under the burden of the conservators portly Idi in. quickly follows. Dr. Batres is to stop at the palace of the governor of Oaxaca to get papers from that official addressed to the municipal authorities of Tlacolula, and to overtake us at the Big Tree. The conservator of ancient monuments had a double mission on this trip. He w;is en- gaged in an inspection of the ruins in his charge, in order to see that they were in readiness for examination by the Con- gress of Americanistas, a society composed largely of Euro- peans, w T hich devotes itself to the study of American anti- quities, and which was soon to meet for the first time in its history in the new world, and in the City of Mexico. Dr. Batres was also enlisted in a man hunt, a search for typical Zapotecs, to be displayed as ethnological exhibits before the same Congress of Americanistas. Inasmuch as he spoke the Indian dialects, Spanish and French, and had an intimate knowledge from his official position of the ruins visited, he proved, as might be expected, a valuable companion on our travels. Oaxaca has reached that stage of municipal development in which the streets are paved with rough cobble-stones, and the only unpleasant bits of travel in our excursion were within Oaxaca's limits, before the hard, well-beaten dirt road of the country was reached. Upon this thoroughfare our vehicle moved along smoothly and rapidly, and the pro- cession of Indian vehicles and pedestrians which we passed on their way to town kept us constantly pleased and in- 84 terested. The Oaxaca typical vehicle is an ox-cart, the oxen burdened and adorned with rude yokes, fastened to the horns and extending backward over the top of the head and neck, and the cart lumbering along on clumsy wooden wheels, with massive, far-projecting hubs. Sometimes the wheel is in a single piece, the section of a tree trunk, and always in the rural districts it closely approximates this primitive form. A GIANT AMONG TREES. Seven or eight miles from Oaxaca we turned from the main road into a lane running through a grove of trees, one of the streets of Tule village, and in less than a half mile from this point we came to the church of Santa Maria del Tule and the monster tree in the churchyard. As one passes through the gateway which pierces the high adobe wall sur- rounding the church enclosure, he comes face to face with the mighty ahuehuete or Mexican cypress, and the sight takes his breath away. The vast bulk of its trunk and branches dwarfs into insignificance the church standing close by. It seems impossible that this area of vegetable growth should come from a single shoot, and the fact that the surface of the trunk is not smooth and regular, but is deeply indented, with huge ribs standing out at intervals like the sails of a giant windmill, tends to strengthen the impression that the tree is a composite, a case of vegetable Siamese twins, or perhaps the Tule triplets among trees. One M. Anza is quoted as saying concerning it in the last century that "three united trunks form the famous sabino of Santa Maria del Tule." But later travelers do not coin- cide with M. Anza, and M. Charnay, the French savant, who visited this province when engaged in his world-famous investigations in Chiapas and Yucatan, expressly negatives this view. With this preface, let us plunge at once into fig tires and announce that according to the latest measure- ments (those made by Campbell and given in his Mexican guide), the circumference of the trunk six feet from the ground, is 154 feet and 2 inches. Some of its branches spread out a hundred feet from the trunk, and the height of the tree IF? about 160 feet. In one side of the trunk is pointed out a wooden tablet, over which the bark has grown until it has become almost a part of the tree, and a nearly illegible inscription appears upon it, said to have been signed and placed there by the 85 great Humboldt, who is alleged to have declared that there is no other tree to surpass this in the whole world, save a certain one which he saw in Africa. The stranger knock- ing about in Mexico is apt after a time to find the German savant and great American traveler something of a bore. Everywhere you run up against some reminder of the ubi- quity of the man. If you wax enthusiastic over the view from Chapultepec or the Cathedral towers, you soon dis- cover that Humboldt has seen it all, and said whatever it was most appropriate to say. You admire the statue of Charles IV. on the Paseo, and are told that Humboldt, too, thought it was fine, surpassed only by that of Marcus Au- relius in Rome. And when the ordinary traveler thinks that he has found something new and surprising in compara- tively untrodden wilds, Humboldt is thrown in his face in a most discouraging fashion. After a while one gets the impression that this very comprehensive wanderer and in- vestigator of over ninety years ago saw everything Mexican that there was to see, walked and rode everywhere, armed with barometer, thermometer and other scientific weapons, climbed all the heights, measured and pictured and philoso- phized upon all the ruins, compared everything with some- thing somewhere and some time else, and spared not even the Big Tree from his objectionable omnipresence. When Walter Wellman finally discovers the North Pole he will undoubtedly find Humboldt's name carved upon it, together with an inscription stating that the North Pole is unsur- passed in its way by anything that Humboldt had ever seen except the South Pole, which is loftier, and from which th<> prospect is notably finer and more extensive. AS TO TULE, HUMBOLDT NEVER IN IT. These reflections under Tule tree, which were reasonable certainly at that time and place, were modified somewhat when I found later that Humboldt did not compare the Mexican tree unfavorably with one that he saw in Africa; that (1) his writings do not contain this displeasing com- parison; that (2) he had never been in Africa, and that (3) according to an intimation of H. H. Bancroft he did not visit the Mitla neighborhood during his Mexican perambu- lations. ran it be that the great Humboldt is a great Humbug the forerunner and model of the modern fake-fabricating 86 foreign correspondent? Perish the thought. Humboldt visited President Jefferson and Washington city in 1804 and was warm in his praises of the beauty of the city's site. A man who gives such pleasing evidence of good judgment and discerning taste cannot be a fakir. Humboldt's statements in his Political Essay on the King- dom of New Spain concerning the Tule tree, seen or unseen, which are made as if of his own knowledge, without refer- ence to another as authority, are as follows: "At the village of Santa Maria del Tule, three leagues east from the capital, between Santa Lucia and Tlacoche- guaya, there is an enormous trunc of cupressus disticha isabino) of thirty-six metres (118 feet) in circumference. This ancient tree is consequently larger than the cypress of Atlixco, of which we have already spoken, the dragonnier of the Canary Islands and all the baobabs of Africa." This tree is as worthy of admiring study as any of the ruins which are so thick in Oaxaca, the site of hundreds of forgotten cities of the past. Jt is a Mexican antiquity which, instead of crumbling gradually to dust, adds yearly to its vast girth and stature, and promises to live and grow for centuries to come. In ages past it was, and it still is, an object of wonder and veneration to the Indians. It is said that Cortes camped under it in his historic march to Hon duras. If he did, however, he left, to his credit, be it said, no commemorative tablet a la Humboldt. In brief, the Tule cypress is possibly the oldest and stoutest tree in the world. I have seen the Mariposa group of big trees in California, which are world famous for their girth, but no one of the redwoods begins to be as impressive a spectacle as the Mexi- can ahuehuete. The latter is not of a height to correspond to the area covered by its trunk and spreading branches, and is much shorter than a number of the redwoods, both of the Mariposa and Calaveras groups. The cypress is not, however, of a squatty appearance. The smooth-surfaced trunk of the redwood shoots upward in a graceful column KomriiiiH s t\\o hundred feet before it is broken by branches, and no great expanse of foliage adds to its spectacular ef- fectiveness. The Tule cypress, on the contrary, sends up its vast, gnarled, deeply indented, venerable-looking trunk only about t\\-iiiy feet before it shoots out branches in every di- rection, as thick as large trees at the junction with " the trunk, iiiid stn-trhing between fifty and a hundred feet from 87 it. The diameter of the circle of the ground space under- neaih the tree's spreading branches is 141 feet. From the point where the foliage begins to the tree top is about 140 feet. The impressiveness of this vast area of foliage may be imagined. THE BIGNESS OF THE TULE TREE. Successive A'isitors to the Tule tree who have measured it and printed the resulting figures have varied considerably in their reports. It has, of course, increased in size every year. The absorption of the so-called Humboldt tablet into the bod} 7 of the tree gives an indication of this growth. FOF convenience, I will put in tabular shape some of the succes- sive measurements of the Tule cypress, and the correspond- ing figures concerning the California redwoods. THE TULE TREE. Circumference. Height. Humboldt (1803) ..................... 118 feet. Von Tempsky (1853) .................. 135 feet. Ober (1883).'. ........................ 146 feet. 160 (5 ft. from ground.) Campbell (recent) .................. 154 ft. 2 in. (6 ft. from ground.) 1 1; i ires Expedicion (recent. .66 metres 216.3 ft. CALIFORNIA BIG TREES. Circumference. Height. ' i i i/xly Giant (Mariposa) ............... !>4 (250) Highest Mariposa tree ................. - 272 Keystone State (Calaveras) ............ 45 325 Batres measurement asserting a circumference of over 200 feet is printed upon the only photograph of the iree which now seems to be sold in the Mexican shops. It probably gives the girth of the trunk close to the ground. where the great ribs of the tree swell outward as they enter the soil, and it is difficult to decide with precision where the beribbed trunk ends and the roots begin. Other variations of measurement are probably due largely to the different degrees in which the measurers followed the irregularities in the deeply indented trunk. 88 AN OAXACAN CATASTROPHE. While we were still trying to grasp an adequate concep- tion of the magnitude of the Big Tree, and were puzzling ourselves as to whether it was twins, triplets, quadruplets or a single individual, the Batres equipage crawled slowly into view, displaying a broken back, spliced with splints and rope. "It is well, Madame," said Dr. Batres, "that you chose the other coach. My own has broken in two and tumbled me upon the ground." It often happened that Dr. Batres, who was educated in Paris, spoke such un-American French that we had difficulty in comprehending him, but the meaning of his words on this occasion, supplemented as they were by appropriate accompanying gestures, full of animation, was on the instant perfectly and painfully evi- dent. Soon our procession moved again through the streets of Tule. Our reception in this Indian village and in others through which we passed, as like it as peas in a pod, was African, and many of the sights were African also. We were greeted at the beginning of the long main street by outposts of barking, snarling dogs, whose numbers increased and the volume of whose chorus enlarged as we penetrated the village. The fences on either side of the street were hedges of organ cactus, the gates were cane, sugar cane or bamboo. As in a new Western mining camp there is a gradual development in man's habitations, beginning with the tent, then passing to the chimneyless hut of rough logs of uneven lengths, then to the cabin of smoothed, planed logs or even lumber, equipped with windows and a chim- ney, so there is a similar evolution in Oaxaca's villages. The aristocrats live in adobe structures with tiled roofs. The plebeians build themselves primitive dwellings of wat- tled cane work plastered with clay, windowless, chimney- less, thatched either with palmetto or maguey leaves, ac- cording to the altitude and temperature of the village. There are palms in abundance in tropical Mexico, but on the higher levels the maguey takes its place, the general utility plant of the Mexican, who eats its sprouts, thatches his roof and feeds his fires with its dried leaves, makes pins and needles of its thorns, twine, rope and paper from its fiber, and pulque (beer) and mescal (whiskey) from its juice. With us the maguey is called the century plant, because it is supposed, erroneously, to blossom only once in a hundred years. In Mexico it may be properly called the century plant, because it has at least a hundred uses. 89 AN AMERICAN TIMBUCTOO. It is not surprising that in habitations and living occu- pants of the streets, from snarling dogs and patient donkeys to dark-skinned, lightty-clad natives, there should be sug- gestions of Africa. These villages are in the same latitude with Senegal in Senegambia, with Timbuctoo, and with the sixth cataract of the Nile, with Bombay in India and Ma- nila in the Philippine Islands. The most interesting Indian village which we visited lies between Tule and Tlacolula on a by-way diverging from the main road, and boasts the euphonious name of Tlacoxa- liuaja. In the old times all of fruitful Oaxaca was densely populated with a series of magnificent cities, now dead and buried and crumbled into dust. "And millions in these solitudes, Since first the flight of years began, Have laid them down to their last sleep." The natives of the present, living over the remains of the myriads of the past, are constantly unearthing antiquities, treasures of the buried dead, which they sell cheaply to semi- occasional visitors. Dr. Batres and the English engineer were ardent pursuers of bargains in these antiquities. And thereby hangs a tale, the Tlacoxahuaja episode. As we drove slowly up the main street of the Zapotec town, ac fompanied by our customary reception committee of yelping curs, there issued, it seemed, from every other house Tla- coxahuajans of both sexes and all ages, offering antiquities for our inspection, heads of jade, idols of stone or clay of varying sizes and degrees of dilapidation, but of unvarying ugliness. Finally Dr. Batres' broken-backed wagon, which led the way, stopped, the procession came to a halt and Dr. Batres disappeared in one of Tlacoxahuaja's lanes. He was on the track of a rare treasure, his driver said, and would return quickly. Meanwhile the crowd of curio-venders took possession of us. When half an hour had passed without any indication of Dr. Batres' return the English engineer, evidently yearning to discover behind the cactus hedges and in the thatched huts some priceless antiquity, recently unearthed, could no longer restrain his uneasiness concerning the missing con- servator of ancient monuments, and though he himself could speak not a word of Zapotec valiantly volunteered to 90 go upon a tour of discovery in search of the lost one with the additional idea, possibly, of conserving some ancient monuments himself. So he disappeared also. Within an- other half hour the peddlers of antiquities discovered that we green hands made no purchases except upon the advice of our missing experts, so they arranged themselves in the shadow of the hedge and patiently waited, with the excep- tion of one hideous hag, who became insulted at our lack of appreciation of her offered idol, anathematized us vigorous- ly and hid herself in her hut. SCENES IN AN INDIAN VILLAGE. In another half hour I had photographed numerous Tla- coxahuajans and their dwellings, the patient group of curio vendors, the shifting scenes on the village street. Here, in front of a low hut, of which a section of the thatched roof was broken away, so that its foundation framework of light poles protruded skeleton-like, was a group of Zapotecs at home, cunning moon-faced babies on the backs of only slightly-bigger brother and sister, full-grown men dressed in white cotton, with sombrero, serape and sandals. Here a half-naked Zapotec with fine muscular development of the arms and chest labors along the main street under an im- mense, filled, cylindrical basket, much larger and heavier than himself. Here come riding by a Zapotec maiden, mounted on a donkey, with basket panniers on either side, tin- damsel's eyes shaded from the sun by her reboso con- verted into an impromptu hood. While we were curiously inspecting a procession of horsemen, followed by numerous heavily laden mules, which we were told, were bull fighters and their paraphernalia on their way to perform in a neigh- boring village, Dr. Batres appeared, eager to take his de- parture, and impatient and disturbed at the absence of the English engineer, who was supposed to be searching for him. After another period of shouting and waiting and fretting, the Englishman came in sight, and as he ap- proached we saw that his face was radiant with the joyful enthusiasm of one who has unearthed a long-lost treasure. As to whether he was in fact laden with one or more pre- cious antiquities deponent sayeth not. Presumably not, for it is unlawful to remove such finds from Mexico, and I do not believe that the .Mexican National Museum was in any respect richer for our trip. As darkness gathered at the end of our first day's expe- rience we drove into Tlacolula. where we were to spend the night. MITLA'S RUINS. Palaces, Pyramids, and Tombs of Zapotec Kings An Ancient City of the New World Mosaics, Columns, and Fresco Paintings of a Vanished Civilization The Hidden Treasure City. [Editorial correspondence of the Evening Star, February 8, 1896.] \\ "c were awakened at a very early hour in the morning by the shrill voices of the choir boys in Tlacol ilia's Church, close to the window of our improvised hotel in this Mexican Indian village. The church to which our attention was thus attracted proved interesting, not merely from its youthful choristers, but from its magnificent display of antique solid silver, which in some miraculous way escaped confiscation in the struggles between church and state during the reform era. And we captured the best of our typical Zapotecs while he was cleaning some of this very silver in front of the old church building. A MAN-HUNT. I have mentioned that Dr. Batres was collecting Zapotec types to exhibit in connection with his proposed address he fore the Congress of Americanistas, then soon to meet in the City of Mexico. Dr. Batres had very definite and fixed ideas of the facial and physical characteristics of the differ- ent Indian tribes of early Mexico. Indeed, he had unalter- ably formulated in lectures and publications his theories on this subject. He had previously caught and confined in his house iii .Mexico some Tarascans who looked as Tarascans ought; A/tecs and Toltecs were readily to be captured in the valley of Mexico or thereabouts; but his hunting ground of genuine /apotecs was limited to the section of country \\hich we were then visiting. A hooked nose projecting like a beak from a long face was the most conspicuous charac- teristic of Dr. Batres' typical Zapotec. So our party made a specialty of carefully inspecting Indian noses on every occasion. The Jefe Politico or Mayor of Tlacolula, a keen. 92 soldierly-looking old man, to whom Dr. Batres had letters from the Governor of Oaxaca, entered heartily into the spirit of the man-hunt. He brought up group after group of Za- potecs, typical or otherwise, to shake hands with our party in turn and to submit their noses to a competitive examina- tion. Nearly all of them found difficulty in believing that anybody would be so foolishly extravagant as to pay their expenses to Mexico, enabling them to enjoy the luxury of being in that city during the world-famous coronation of the Virgin of Guadalupe, merely out of interest in the shape of their noses, and the most effective work of the Jefe Po- litico consisted in restoring confidence in the rectitude of Dr. Batres' intentions concerning them. As a rule they were as suspicious and timorous as a Washington colored boy would be if offered his expenses and something in ad- dition to go over and exhibit himself at night to a Baltimore medical college. The group of young men, however, who were polishing up silver in front of Tlacolula Church showed no uneasiness whatsoever. They were eager to avail them- selves of so good an opportunity to behold the coronation of the Virgin, and they vigorously impressed upon the party of inspection the merits of their respective noses. One se- lected from this group became the leader of the three typical Zapotecs finally chosen, and at intervals on our journey from Mitla until we saw them for the last time in Dr. Batres' house in Mexico, these Indian exhibits would file solemnly into our presence and shake hands ceremoniously all around, amusingly suggestive of the delegation from Cambodia, which haunted Wang in the comic opera. MITLA'S FAMOUS RUINS. When our procession left Tlacolula for Mitla, eight miles away, the Jefe Politico accompanied us, and in our visits to the ruins served as our guide, companion and familiar friend. At Mitla we found another hacienda converted into a hotel, where we were comfortably accommodated. Mitla is one of the famous ancient cities of Central Amer- ica, and as a new world ruin it is in the same class in point of interest with Palenque in Chiapas, TJxmal in Yucatan, and Copan in Honduras. Where a vast city once stretched its streets and raised its temple-crowned pyramids and wonderful palaces now all is solitude and desolation save for a miserable Indian village of thatched huts, and the fast disappearing remnants of three or four palaces and a few 93 of the countless pyramids of ages ago. Unlike the other notable ruins of Mexico which are overgrown and hidden by luxuriant tropical vegetation, Mitla is exposed to the sun and wind of a desolate barren sandy valley, in its site resembling more the Egyptian ruins along the Nile than its new world neighbors. Whether Mitla was built by Za- potecs or Toltecs or a race of men preceding both, whether it is 700, 1,700 or 2,700 years old, whether the ancestors of its builders came from China or Cambodia or Egypt or West Africa, or were of American origin are questions over which the archaeologists may be permitted to quarrel undisturbed. No inscriptions are found here to give a clue, and the hiero- glyphics discovered in the other Central American cities have never yet been deciphered, but await still their Rosettn Stone. Leaving the cool court yard of our adobe "hotel," with its orange and pomegranate trees and it surprisingly harmo- nious monkey and parrots, we soon reached the outskirts of the modern Indian village, and began to run the gauntlet of antiquity vendors, composed largely of girls and boys with ugly idols, masks and beads, collected from palaces and tombs. Some of the children had the sweet and plain- tive voices of the water girls of the Nile. The babies were more attractive than the Egyptian, since their teeth were just as white, while their eyes were not sore and fly-infested like those of the race upon the Nile, which is cursed with ophthalmia as with an epidemic. After threading our way among numerous cane-built huts and spreading consterna- tion among the Zapotec children of tender years we came to the first of ancient Mitla's exhibits, a recently excavated tomb of plain stone, without ornamentation or inscription. Near by numerous pyramidal mounds were scattered among the houses. We examined one which had been cut entirely through, and thoroughly excavated. Like many other of the Mexican pyramids, these mounds, through the action of the elements, have assumed the appearance of natural conical hills, and it is only when one is pierced by the inves- tigator that its artificial character is made plain. These small mounds are pronounced by Dr. Batres to be in ma- terial and method of construction miniatures of the great pyramids of the sun and moon at Teotihuacan, twenty-seven miles from the city of Mexico. The latter pyramids have interiors of clay and volcanic pebbles, incrusted on the sur- face with a light porous stone, over which there was origin ally a coating of white stucco, such as was used for dwell- 94 ings. The largest of Mitla's pyramids is one which stands to the west of the main palace group, which we soon ap- proach. It bears upon its summit a small chapel, the in- variable Spanish substitute for the Indian temple which surmounted the pyramid in this part of the world. MEXICAN AND EGYPTIAN PYRAMIDS. All of these structures in Mexico bear a strong family re- semblance, whether they are tiny, as at Mitla, or monstrous, covering forty-five acres, as at Cholula, near Puebla. In every case they are the foundations of a temple or palace; whereas the Egyptian pyramid is a tomb and nothing else. The latter rose to an apex; the former was truncated and bore a structure upon it which was accessible by a stairway. Height was the conspicuous feature of the Egyptian pyra- mid; area covered was that of the Mexican pyramid. The former was, as a rule, made of stone ; the latter generally of sun-dried bricks. But there are brick pyramids in the old world, including one near Sakhara, Egypt. Humboldt, who did see the pyramid of Cholula, whatever may have been the case in respect to Tule tree and the ruins of Mitla, compares it with the other great pyramids of the world. The dimen- sions are given in French feet, each of which equals 1.066 English feet. STONE PYRAMIDS. Length Height. of base. riu-ops, Egypt 448 728 Cephren, Egypt 398 655 Myrerinus, Egypt : 162 280 BRICK PYRAMIDS. Length Height. of base. Sakhara, Egypt 150 210 Teotihuacan, Mexico 171 645 Cholula, Mexico. 172 1,355 ID Cholula pyramid the length of the base is to the per- pendicular height as 8 to 1, while in the stone pyramids of (Ihi/rh the corresponding proportion is 8 to 5. The former was to be climbed to a surmounting structure like an artifi- cial capitol hill, hence its grades were rendered easy by cov- 95 rring ;m immense area with ;i comparatively l\v mound. Tin- latter was no more to be scaled than the exterior of any other monumental shaft, and it was pushed high in the air regardless of the steepness of grade. Cholula pyramid is consequently more than twice as large at the base as Cheops, the biggest of the Ghizeh pyramids, while it is considerably less than half as high as Cheops, and very little higher than Myrerinus, the smallest of the Ghizeh group. A short distance to the east from the chapel-crowned pyra- mid of Mitla we came upon the best preserved of the ruins, the main or royal palace. Here many years ago four struc- tures, built on oblong mounds of stone and earth about six feel high, faced a central court. The north and south build- ings were about 130 feet long; the east and west mounds 120 feet. Only the northern structure, the one whose south front faces the court, is reasonably well preserved. Frag- ments of the east buildings are standing, traces of that on the west are visible, but nothing whatsoever remains of the .sou ih structure. The facing of the front wall of the worth building, containing the three entrances to the palace, is of large stone blocks of different forms and si/t-s, so arranged, without the use of mortar, that the surface is broken into panels of varying dimensions, -filled with a so-called mosaic of small blocks of stone, so set with relation to one another as to form a great variety of pat- terns, twenty-two different figures having been counted on this single wall. In ordinary mosaic tiny pieces of glass, marble or other material are cemented on stucco in various designs. Here the design, which is always rectangular or diagonal in character, is formed by the pro- jecting heads of oblong-shaped pieces of soft sandstone, cut with the greatest accuracy and nicety, so as to fit for their whole length close together. The lintels of the doorways are immense blocks of stone, two of them being over nine- teen feet long. The wall is about eighteen feet high and 130 feet long. The three doorways give entrance to what may be called THE HALL OF COLUMNS, a room extending in length the full 130 feet of the palace's width and about 66 feet wide. In a row in the center of the hall stand six stone columns, about fourteen feet high, each cut from a single block. Humboldt says of them: "What distinguishes the ruins of Mitla -from all the other ruins of Mexican architecture is six por- phyry columns, which are placed in the midst of a vast hall and support the ceiling. These columns, almost the only ones found in the new continent, bear strong marks of the infancy of the art. They have neither base nor capitals. A simple contraction of the upper part is only to be remarked.'* John L. Stephens, the American who did so much to enter- tain and enlighten the world in respect to the buried cities of Central America, did not visit Mitla, and generalizing from what he had seen and failed to see in the other ruins he concludes that the Mexican architecture could not have been derived from the Egyptian because among many reasons columns are absent from the new continent. He says : "Again: Columns are a distinguishing feature of Egyptian architecture. There is not a temple on the Nile without them; and the reader will bear in mind that among the whole of these ruins not one column has been found. If this ar- chitecture had been derived from the Egyptian so striking and important a feature would never have been thrown aside." But this reasoning fails, for there are columns in Mitla, though they are contemptibly insignificant in size compared, let us say, with the stupendous columns at Kar- nak. Adjoining the Mitla Hall of Columns is a wing, con- stituting the remainder of the palace, 61 feet square. It has a central court and four apartments, and is ornamented throughout with mosaic work of the kind described as seen on the facade. MITLA MOSAICS. The mosaics resemble the arabesque designs, and are per- haps the most striking peculiarity of Mitla. There is noth- ing like them in any other of the ancient cities of the new world, and a note in Humboldt's New Spain quotes M. Zo- ega, "the most profound connoisseur in Egyptian antiqui- ties," as making "the curious observation that the Egyp- tians have never employed this species of ornament." Du- paix, who visited Mitla in 1806, pays tribute to the mosaics as follows: "But what is most remarkable, interesting and striking in these monuments, and which alone would be suf- ficient to give them the first rank among all known orders of architecture, is the execution of their mosaic relievos very different from plain mosaic and consequently requiring more ingenious combination and greater art and labor. They are inlaid on the surface of the wall, and their duration is 97. owing to the method of fixing the pn-pai.-il stones into the stone surface, which made their union with it perfect." I quote from Dupaix with a great deal of pleasure, because Hubert Howe Bancroft, who confesses that he was never here himself, and who, in his "Native Races of the Pacific States," almost demonstrates that nobody else in his full senses was ever here, freely admits that Dupaix visited Mil la. yet refrains from intimating that he was impossibly far- sighted, short-sighted or color-blind. South of the palace which has been described, and close at hand, is another similarly constructed in four buildings about a central court. Fragments only of the buildings re- main. The most interesting feature of this group is an un- derground gallery in the shape of a cross. The walls are panels of mosaic work and show traces of red paint. At the entrance is a 'circular supporting pillar with a square base, called by the Indians, "the pillar of death,'' in the be- lief that whoever embraces it must die shortly or some time. The Indians also take a deep additional interest in the subterranean gallery, because it is thought to lead to buried treasure. FRAGMENTS OF FRESCO PAINTINGS. To the north of the main palace, and farther removed from it than the palace with the subterranean passage, is a third group of buildings, three in number, 284 feet long and 108 feet wide. A church has been built adjacent to or trenching upon the site of the palace, and the central of the ruined structures now serves, being repaired, as the curate's house. The portion of this ruin used as a stable is notable as con- taining some fragments of rude red and black paintings, representing processions, and viewed as hieroglyphical and ecclesiastical and as indicating that this palace was devoted to the uses of the priests, while the first palace was the re- tiring place in seasons of sadness of the king, built above royal tombs. The most elaborate reproductions and expla- nations of these extremely unsatisfactory fragments of paint- ings are those just published by Dr. Edward Seler, who is at the head of the American department of the Ethnologic Mus