1879-1881
In the spring of 1879 I made a Gospel tour of England, Ireland, and
Scotland. On a previous visit I had given a series of private lectures,
under the management of Major Pond, and I had been more or less
criticised for the amount of money charged the people to hear me. As I
had nothing whatever to do with the prices of tickets to my lectures,
which went to the managers who arranged the tour, this was something
beyond my control. My personal arrangement with Major Pond was for a
certain fixed sum. They said in Europe that I charged too much to be
heard, that as a preacher of the Gospel I should have been more
moderate. If the management had been my own I should not have been so
greedy.
Because of this recollection and the regret it gave me, I decided to
make another tour at my own expense, and preach without price in all the
places I had previously visited as a lecturer. It was the most
exhausting, exciting, remarkable demonstration of religious enthusiasm I
have ever witnessed. It was an evangelistic yearning that could not be
repeated in another life-time.
The entire summer was a round of Gospel meetings, overflow meetings,
open-air meetings, a succession of scenes of blessing. From the time I
arrived in Liverpool, where that same night I addressed two large
assemblages, till I got through after a monster gathering at Edinburgh,
I missed but three Gospel appointments, and those because I was too
tired to stand up. I preached ninety-eight times in ninety-three days.
With nothing but Gospel themes I confronted multitudes. A collection was
always taken up at these gatherings for the benefit of local charities,
feeble churches, orphan asylums and other institutions. My services were
gratuitous.
It was the most wonderful summer of evangelical work I was ever
privileged to enjoy. There must have been much praying for me and my
welfare, or no mortal could have got through with the work. In every
city I went to, messages were passed into my ears for families in
America. The collection taken for the benefit of the Y.M.C.A. at Leeds
was about $6,000. During this visit I preached in Scenery Chapel,
London, in the pulpit where such consecrated souls as Rowland Hill and
Newman Hall and James Sherman had preached. I visited the "Red Horse
Hotel," of Stratford-on-Avon, where the chair and table used by
Washington Irving were as interesting to me as anything in Shakespeare's
cottage. The church where the poet is buried is over seven hundred years
old.
The most interesting place around London to me is in Chelsea, where, on
a narrow street, I entered the house of Thomas Carlyle. This great
author was away from London at the time. Entering a narrow hall, on the
left is the literary workshop, where some of the strongest thunderbolts
of the world's literature have been forged. In the room, which has two
front windows shaded from the prying street by two little red calico
curtains, is a lounge that looks as though it had been made by an author
unaccustomed to saw or hammer. On the wall were a few woodcuts in plain
frames or pinned on the wall. Here was a photograph of Carlyle, taken
one day, as a member of his family told me, when he had a violent
toothache and could attend to nothing else, and yet posterity regards it
as a favourite picture. There are only three copies of this photograph
in existence. One was given to Carlyle, the other was kept by the
photographer, and the third belongs to me. In long rough shelves was the
library of the renowned thinker. The books were well worn with reading.
Many of them were books I never heard of. American literature was almost
ignored; they were chiefly books written by Germans. There was an
absence of theological books, excepting those of Thomas Chalmers, whose
genius he worshipped. The carpets were old and worn and faded. He wished
them to be so, as a perpetual protest against the world's sham. It did
not appeal to me as a place of inspiration for a writer.
I returned to America impressed with the over-crowding of the British
Isles, and the unsettled regions of our own country.
"Tell the United States we want to send her five million population this
year, and five million population next year," said a prominent
Englishman to me. I urged a mutual arrangement between the two
governments, to people the West with these populations. Great Britain
was the workshop of the world; we needed workers. The trouble in the
United States at this time was that when there was one garment needed
there were three people anxious to manufacture it, and five people
anxious to sell it. We needed to evoke more harvests and fruits to feed
the populations of the world, and more flax and wool for the clothing.
The cities in England are so close together that there is a cloud from
smokestacks the length and width of the island. The Canon of York
Minster showed me how the stone of that great cathedral was crumbling
under the chemical corrosion of the atmosphere, wafted from neighbouring
factories.
America was not yet discovered then. Those who had gone West twenty
years back, in 1859, were, in 1879, the leading men of Chicago, and
Omaha, and Denver, and Minneapolis, and Dubuque. When I left, England
was still suffering from the effects of the long-continued panic in
America.
Brooklyn had improved; still, we were threatened with a tremendous
influx of people. The new bridge at Fulton Ferry across the East River
would soon be opened. It looked as though there was to be another bridge
at South Ferry, and another at Peck Slip Ferry. Montauk Point was to be
purchased by some enterprising Americans, and a railroad was to connect
it with Brooklyn. Steamers from Europe were to find wharfage in some of
the bays of Long Island, and the passage across the Atlantic reduced to
six days! Passengers six days out of Queenstown would pass into
Brooklyn. This was the Brooklyn to be, as was seen in its prospectus,
its evolution in 1879-80.
Our local elections had resulted in a better local government. With the
exception of an unsuccessful attempt by the Board of Canvassers to
deprive Frederick A. Schroeder of his seat in the Senate, because some
of the voters had left out the middle initial in his name in their
ballots, all was better with us politically than it had been. To the
credit of our local press, the two political rivals, the _Brooklyn
Eagle_ and the _Times_, united in their efforts to support Senator
Schroeder's claim.
There was one man in Brooklyn at this time who was much abused and
caricatured for doing a great work--Professor Bergh, the deliverer of
dumb animals. He was constantly in the courts in defence of a lame horse
or a stray cat. I supported and encouraged him. I always hoped that he
would induce legislation that would give the poor car-horses of Brooklyn
more oats, and fewer passengers to haul in one car. He was one of the
first men to fight earnestly against vivisection--which was a great
work.
Just after we had settled down to a more comfortable and hopeful state
of mind Mr. Thomas Kinsella, one of our prominent citizens, startled us
by showing us, in a published interview, how little we had any right to
feel that way. He told us that our Brooklyn debt was $17,000,000, with a
tax area of only three million and a half acres. It was disturbing. But
we had prospects, energies. We had to depend in this predicament upon
the quickened prosperity of our property holders, upon future examiners
to be scrupulous at the ballot box, on the increase of our population,
which would help to carry our burdens, and on the revenue from our great
bridge. These were local affairs of interest to us all, but in December,
1879, we had a more serious problem of our own to consider. This
concerned the future of the new Tabernacle.
In consequence of perpetual and long-continued outrages committed by
neighbouring clergymen against the peace of our church, the Board of
Trustees of the Tabernacle addressed a letter to the congregation
suggesting our withdrawal from the denomination. I regretted this,
because I felt that the time would soon come when all denominations
should be helpful to each other. There would be enough people in
Brooklyn, I was sure, when all the churches could be crowded. I
positively refused to believe the things that my fellow ministers said
about me, or to notice them. I was perfectly satisfied with the
Christian outlook of our church. I urged the same spirit of calm upon my
church neighbours, by example and precept. It was a long while before
they realised the value of this advice. In the spring of 1879 my friend
Dr. Crosby, pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church at the corner of
Clinton and Fulton Streets, was undergoing an ecclesiastical trial, and
an enterprising newsboy invaded the steps of the church, as the most
interested market for the sale of the last news about the trial. He was
ignominiously pushed off the church steps by the church officers. I was
indignant about it. (I saw it from a distance, as I was coming down the
street.) I thought it was a row between Brooklyn ministers, however, and
turned the corner to avoid such a shocking sight. My suspicions were not
groundless, because there was even then anything but brotherly love
between some of the churches there.
A synodical trial by the Synod of Long Island was finally held at
Jamaica, L.I., to ascertain if there was not some way of inducing church
harmony in Brooklyn. After several days at Jamaica, in which the
ministers of Long Island took us ministers of Brooklyn across their
knees and applied the ecclesiastical slipper, we were sent home with a
benediction. A lot of us went down there looking hungry, and they sent
us back all fed up. Even some of the church elders were hungry and came
back to Brooklyn strengthened.
It looked for awhile after this as though all clerical antagonisms in
Brooklyn would expire. I even foresaw a time coming when Brothers
Speare, Van Dyke, Crosby and Talmage would sing Moody and Sankey hymns
together out of the same hymn-book.
The year 1880 began with an outbreak in Maine, a sort of miniature
revolution, caused by a political appointment of my friend Governor
Garcelon contrary to the opinions of the people of his State. Garcelon I
knew personally, and regarded him as a man of honour and pure political
motives, whether he did his duty or not; whatever he did he believed was
the right and conscientious thing to do. The election had gone against
the Democrats. In a neat address Mr. Lincoln Robinson, Democrat, handed
over the keys of New York State to Mr. Carroll, the Republican Governor.
Antagonists though they had been at the ballot-box, the surrender was
conducted with a dignity that I trust will always surround the
gubernatorial chair of the State of New York, once graced by such men as
DeWitt Clinton, Silas Wright, William H. Seward, and John A. Dix.
In January, 1880, Frank Leslie, the pioneer of pictorial journalism in
America, died. I met him only once, when he took me through his immense
establishment. I was impressed with him then, as a man of much elegance
of manner and suavity of feeling. He was very much beloved by his
employees, which, in those days of discord between capital and labour,
was a distinction.
The arrival of Mr. Parnell in New York was an event of the period. We
knew he was an orator, and we were anxious to hear him. There was some
uncertainty as to whether he came to America to obtain bayonets to stick
the English with, or whether he came for bread for the starving in
Ireland. We did not understand the political problem between England and
Ireland so well--but we did understand the meaning of a loaf of bread.
Mr. Parnell was welcome.
The failure of the harvest crops in Europe made the question of the hour
at the beginning of 1880--bread. The grain speculator appeared, with his
greedy web spun around the world. Europe was short 200,000,000 bushels
of wheat. The American speculator cornered the market, stacked the
warehouses, and demanded fifty cents a bushel. Europe was compelled to
retaliate, by purchasing grain in Russia, British India, New Zealand,
South America, and Australia. In one week the markets of the American
North-west purchased over 15,000,000 bushels, of which only 4,000,000
bushels were exported. Meanwhile the cry of the world's hunger grew
louder, and the bolts on the grain cribs were locked tighter than ever.
American finances could have been straightened out on this one product,
except for the American speculator, who demanded more for it than it was
worth. The United States had a surplus of 18,000,000 bushels of grain
for export, in 1880. But the kings of the wheat market said to Europe,
"Bow down before us, and starve."
Suddenly we in America were surprised to learn that flour in London was
two dollars cheaper a barrel than it was in New York. Our grain blockade
of the world was reacting upon us. Lying idle at the wharves of New York
and Brooklyn were 102 ships, 439 barques, 87 brigs, 178 schooners, and
47 steamers. Six or seven hundred of these vessels were waiting for
cargoes. The gates of our harbour were closed in the grip of the grain
gambler. The thrift of the speculator was the menace of our national
prosperity. The octopus of speculative ugliness was growing to its full
size, and threatened to smother us utterly. There was a "corner" on
everything.
We were busy trying to pick out our next President. There was great
agitation over the Republican candidates: Grant, Blaine, Cameron,
Conkling, Sherman. Greatness in a man is sometimes a hindrance to the
Presidency. Such was the case with Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Thomas H.
Benton, and William C. Preston. We were only on the edge of the
whirlpool of a presidential election. In England the election storm was
just beginning. The first thunderbolt was the sudden dissolution of
Parliament by Lord Beaconsfield. The two mightiest men in England then
were antagonists, Disraeli and Gladstone.
What a magnificent body of men are those Members of Parliament. They
meet and go about without the ostentation of some of our men in
Congress. Men of great position in England are born to it; they are not
so afraid of losing it as our celebrated Republicans and Democrats. Even
the man who comes up into political power from the masses in England is
more likely to hold his position than if he had triumphed in American
politics.
In the spring and summer of 1880 I took a long and exhaustive trip
across our continent, and completely lost the common dread of emigration
that was then being talked about. There was room enough for fifty new
nations between Omaha and Cheyenne, room for more still between Cheyenne
and Ogden, from Salt Lake City to Sacramento.
An unpretentious youth, Carey by name, whom I had known in Philadelphia,
went West in '67. I found him in Cheyenne a leading citizen. He had
been District Attorney, then judge of one of the courts, owned a city
block, a cattle ranch, and was worth about $500,000. There wasn't room
enough for him in Philadelphia. Senator Hill of Colorado told me, while
in Denver, about a man who came out there from the East to be a miner.
He began digging under a tree because it was shady. People passed by and
laughed at him. He kept on digging. After a while he sent a waggon load
of the dust to be assayed, and there was $9,000 worth of metal in it. He
retired with a fortune.
A man with $3,000 and good health could have gone West in 1880, invested
it in cattle, and made a fortune. San Francisco was only forty-five
years old then, Denver thirty-five, Leadville sixteen, Kansas City
thirty-five. They looked a hundred at least. Leadville was then a place
of palatial hotels, elegant churches, boulevards and streets. The West
was just aching to show how fast it could build cities. Leadville was
the most lied about. It was reported that I explored Leadville till long
after midnight, looking at its wickedness. I didn't. All the exploring I
did in Leadville was in about six minutes, from the wide open doors of
the gambling houses on two of the main streets; but the next day it was
telegraphed all over the United States. There were more telephones in
Leadville in 1880 than in any other city in the United States, to its
population. Some of the best people of Brooklyn and New York lived
there. The newspaper correspondents lost money in the gambling houses
there, and so they didn't like Leadville, and told the world it was a
bad place, which was a misrepresentation. It is a well known law of
human nature that a man usually hates a place where he did not behave
well. I found perfect order there, to my surprise. There was a vigilance
committee in Leadville composed of bankers and merchants. It was their
business to give a too cumbrous law a boost. The week before I got to
Leadville this committee hanged two men. The next day eighty scoundrels
took the hint and left Leadville. A great institution was the vigilance
committee of those early Western days. They saved San Francisco, and
Cheyenne, and Leadville. I wish they had been in Brooklyn when I was
there. The West was not slow to assimilate the elegancies of life
either. There were beautiful picture galleries in Omaha, and Denver, and
Sacramento, and San Francisco. There was more elaboration and
advancement of dress in the West than there was in the East in 1880. The
cravats of the young men in Cheyenne were quite as surprising, and the
young ladies of Cheyenne went down the street with the elbow wabble,
then fashionable in New York. San Francisco was Chicago intensified, and
yet then it was a mere boy of a city, living in a garden of Eden, called
California. On my return came Mr. Garfield's election. It was quietly
and peaceably effected, but there followed that exposure of political
outrages concerning his election, the Morey forgeries. I hoped then that
this villainy would split the Republican and Democratic parties into new
fields, that it would spilt the North and the South into a different
sectional feeling. I hoped that there would be a complete upheaval, a
renewed and cleaner political system as a consequence. But the reform
movement is always slower than any other.
I remember the harsh things that were said in our denomination of
Lucretia Mott, the quakeress, the reformer, the world-renowned woman
preacher of the day. She was well nigh as old as the nation,
eighty-eight years old, when she died. Her voice has never died in the
plain meeting-houses of this country and England. I don't know that she
was always right, but she always meant to be right. In Philadelphia,
where she preached, I lived among people for years who could not mention
her name without tears of gratitude for what she had done for them.
There was great opposition to her because she was the first woman
preacher, but all who heard her speak knew she had a divine right of
utterance.
In November, 1880, Disraeli's great novel, "Endymion" was published by
an American firm, Appleton & Co., a London publisher paying the author
the largest cash price ever paid for a manuscript up to that
time--$50,000. Noah Webster made that much in royalties on his spelling
book, but less on one of the greatest works given to the human race, his
dictionary. There was a great literary impulse in American life,
inspired by such American publishing houses as Appleton's, the Harper
Bros., the Dodds, the Randolphs, and the Scribners. It was the brightest
moment in American literature; far brighter than the day Victor Hugo, in
youth, long anxious to enter the French Academy, applied to Callard for
his vote. He pretended never to have heard of him. "Will you accept a
copy of my books?" asked Victor Hugo. "No thank you," replied the other;
"I never read new books." Riley offered to sell his "Universal
Philosophy" for $500. The offer was refused. Great and wise authors have
often been without food and shelter. Sometimes governments helped them,
as when President Pierce appointed Nathaniel Hawthorne to office, and
Locke was made Commissioner of Appeals, and Steele State Commissioner of
Stamps by the British Government. Oliver Goldsmith said: "I have been
years struggling with a wretched being, with all that contempt which
indigence brings with it, with all those strong passions which make
contempt insupportable." Mr. Payne, the author of "Home, Sweet Home,"
had no home, and was inspired to the writing of his immortal song by a
walk through the streets one slushy night, and hearing music and
laughter inside a comfortable dwelling. The world-renowned Sheridan
said: "Mrs. Sheridan and I were often obliged to keep writing for our
daily shoulder of mutton; otherwise we should have had no dinner."
Mitford, while he was writing his most celebrated book, lived in the
fields, making his bed of grass and nettles, while two-pennyworth of
bread and cheese with an onion was his daily food. I know of no more
refreshing reading than the books of William Hazlitt. I take down from
my shelf one of his many volumes, and I know not when to stop reading.
So fresh and yet so old! But through all the volumes there comes a
melancholy, accounted for by the fact that he had an awful struggle for
bread. On his dying couch he had a friend write for him the following
letter to Francis Jeffrey:--
"Dear Sir,--I am at the last gasp. Please send me a hundred
pounds.--Yours truly,
"WILLIAM HAZLITT."
The money arrived the day after his death. Poor fellow! I wish he had
during his lifetime some of the tens of thousands of dollars that have
since been paid in purchase of his books. He said on one occasion to a
friend: "I have carried a volcano in my bosom up and down Paternoster
Row for a good two hours and a half. Can you lend me a shilling? I have
been without food these two days." My readers, to-day the struggle of a
good many literary people goes on. To be editor of a newspaper as I have
been, and see the number of unavailable manuscripts that come in, crying
out for five dollars, or anything to appease hunger and pay rent and get
fuel! Oh, it is heartbreaking! After you have given all the money you
can spare you will come out of your editorial rooms crying.
Disraeli was seventy-five when "Endymion" was published. Disraeli's
"Endymion" came at a time when books in America were greater than they
ever were before or have been since. A flood of magazines came
afterwards, and swamped them. Before this time new books were rarely
made. Rich men began to endow them. It was a glorious way of spending
money. Men sometimes give their money away because they have to give it
up anyhow. Such men rarely give it to book-building.
In January, 1881, Mr. George L. Seavey, a prominent Brooklyn man at that
time, gave $50,000 to the library of the Historical Society of New York.
Attending a reception one night in Brooklyn, I was shown his check, made
out for that purpose. It was a great gift, one of the first given for
the intellectual food of future bookworms.
Most of the rich men of this time were devoting their means to making
Senators. The legislatures were manufacturing a new brand, and turning
them out made to order. Many of us were surprised at how little timber,
and what poor quality, was needed to make a Senator in 1881. The nation
used to make them out of stout, tall oaks. Many of those new ones were
made of willow, and others out of crooked sticks. In most cases the
strong men defeated each other, and weak substitutes were put in. The
forthcoming Congress was to be one of commonplace men. The strong men
had to stay at home, and the accidents took their places in the
government. Still there were leaders, North and South.
My old friend Senator Brown of Georgia was one of the leaders of the
South. He spoke vehemently in Congress in the cause of education. Only a
few months before he had given, out of his private purse, forty thousand
dollars to a Baptist college. He was a man who talked and urged a hearty
union of feeling between the North and the South. He always hoped to
abolish sectional feeling by one grand movement for the financial,
educational, and moral welfare of the Nation. It was my urgent wish that
President Garfield should invite Senator Brown to a place in his
Cabinet, although the Senator would probably have refused the honour,
for there was no better place to serve the American people than in the
American Senate.
During the first week in February, 1881, the world hovered over the
death-bed of Thomas Carlyle. He was the great enemy of all sorts of
cant, philosophical or religious. He was for half a century the great
literary iconoclast. Daily bulletins of the sick-bed were published
world-wide. There was no easy chair in his study, no soft divans. It was
just a place to work, and to stay at work. I once saw a private letter,
written by Carlyle to Thomas Chalmers. The first part of it was devoted
to a eulogy of Chalmers, the latter part descriptive of his own
religious doubts. He never wrote anything finer. It was beautiful,
grand, glorious, melancholy.
Thomas Carlyle started with the idea that the intellect was all, the
body nothing but an adjunct, an appendage. He would spur the intellect
to costly energies, and send the body supperless to bed. After years of
doubts and fears I learned that towards the end he returned to the
simplicities of the Gospel.
While this great thinker of the whole of life was sinking into his last
earthly sleep, the men in the parliament of his nation were squabbling
about future ambitions. Thirty-five Irish members were forcibly ejected.
Neither Beaconsfield nor Gladstone could solve the Irish question. Nor
do I believe it will ever be solved to the satisfaction of Ireland. But
a greater calamity than those came upon us; in the summer of this year
President Garfield was assassinated in Washington.