1886-1887
The balance of power in Brooklyn and New York during my lifetime had
always been with the pulpit. I was in my fifty-fourth year, and had
shared honours with the most devout and fearless ministers of the Gospel
so long that when two monster receptions were proposed, in celebration
of the services of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and Rev. R.S. Storrs, D.D., I
became almost wickedly proud of the privileges of my associations. These
two eminent men were in the seventies. Dr. Storrs had been installed
pastor of the Church of Pilgrims in 1846; Mr. Beecher pastor of Plymouth
Church in 1847. They were both stalwart in body then, both New
Englanders, both Congregationalists, mighty men, genial as a morning in
June. Both world-renowned, but different. Different in stature, in
temperament, in theology. They had reached the fortieth year of pastoral
service. No movement for the welfare of Brooklyn in all these years was
without the benediction of their names.
The pulpit had accomplished wonders. In Brooklyn alone look at the
pulpit-builders. There were Rev. George W. Bethune of the Dutch Reformed
Church, Rev. Dr. Samuel H. Cox, Rev. W. Ichabod Spencer, Rev. Dr. Samuel
Thayer Speer of the Presbyterian Church, Dr. John Summerfield and Dr.
Kennedy of the Methodist Church, Rev. Dr. Stone and Rev. Dr. Vinton of
the Episcopal Church--all denominations pouring their elements of divine
splendour upon the community. Who can estimate the power which emanated
from the pulpits of Dr. McElroy, or Dr. DeWitt, or Dr. Spring, or Dr.
Krebs? Their work will go on in New York though their churches be
demolished. Large-hearted men were these pulpit apostles, apart from the
clerical obligations of their denominations. No proverb in the world is
so abused as the one which declares that the children of ministers never
turn out well. They hold the highest places in the nation. Grover
Cleveland was the son of a Presbyterian clergyman, Governor Pattison of
Pennsylvania, Governor Taylor of Tennessee, were sons of Methodist
preachers. In congressional and legislative halls they are scattered
everywhere.
Of all the metaphysical discourses that Mr. Beecher delivered, none are
so well remembered as those giving his illustrations of life, his
anecdotes. Much of his pulpit utterance was devoted to telling what
things were like. So the Sermon on the Mount was written, full of
similitudes. Like a man who built his house on a rock, like a candle in
a candle-stick, like a hen gathering her chickens under her wing, like a
net, like salt, like a city on a hill. And you hear the song birds, and
you smell the flowers. Mr. Beecher's grandest effects were wrought by
his illustrations, and he ransacked the universe for them. We need in
our pulpits just such irresistible illustrations, just such holy
vivacity. His was a victory of similitudes.
Towards the end of November, 1886, one of the most distinguished sons of
a Baptist preacher, Chester A. Arthur, died. He had arisen to the
highest point of national honour, and preserved the simplicities of true
character. When I was lecturing in Lexington, Kentucky, one summer, I
remember with what cordiality he accosted me in a crowd.
"Are you here?" he said; "why, it makes me feel very much at home."
Mr. Arthur aged fifteen years in the brief span of his administration.
He was very tired. Almost his last words were, "Life is not worth
living." Our public men need sympathy, not criticism. Macaulay, after
all his brilliant career in Parliament, after being world-renowned among
all who could admire fine writing, wrote this:
"Every friendship which a man may have becomes precarious as soon as he
engages in politics."
Political life is a graveyard of broken hearts. Daniel Webster died of a
broken heart at Marshfield. Under the highest monument in Kentucky lies
Henry Clay, dead of a broken heart. So died Henry Wilson, at Natick,
Mass.; William H. Seward at Auburn, N.Y.; Salmon P. Chase, in
Cincinnati. So died Chester A. Arthur, honoured, but worried.
The election of Abram S. Hewitt as mayor of New York in 1886 restored
the confidence of the best people. Behind him was a record absolutely
beyond criticism, before him a great Christian opportunity. We made the
mistake, however, of ignoring the great influence upon our civic
prosperity of the business impulse of the West. We in New York and
Brooklyn were a self-satisfied community, unmindful of our dependence
upon the rest of the American continent. My Western trips were my
recreation. An occasional lecture tour accomplished for me what
yachting or baseball does for others. My congregation understood this,
and never complained of my absence. They realised that all things for me
turned into sermons. No man sufficiently appreciates his home unless
sometimes he goes away from it. It made me realise what a number of
splendid men and women there were in the world Man as a whole is a great
success; woman, taking her all in all, is a great achievement, and the
reason children die is because they are too lovely to stay out of
paradise.
Three weeks in the West brought me back to Brooklyn supremely
optimistic. There was more business in the markets than men could attend
to. Times had changed. In Cincinnati once I was perplexed by the
difference in clock time. They have city time and railroad time there. I
asked a gentleman about it.
"Tell me, how many kinds of time have you here?" I asked. "Three kinds,"
he replied, "city time, railroad time, and hard time."
There was no "hard time" at the close of 1886. The small rate of
interest we had been compelled to take for money had been a good thing.
It had enlivened investments in building factories and starting great
enterprises. The 2 per cent. per month interest was dead. The fact that
a few small fish dared to swim through Wall Street, only to be gobbled
up, did not stop the rising tide of national welfare. We were going
ahead, gaining, profiting even by the lives of those who were leaving us
behind.
The loss of the Rev. J. Hyatt Smith restored the symbol and triumph of
self-sacrifice. In the most exact sense of the word he was a genius. He
wasted no time in his study that he could devote to others, he was
always busy raising money to pay house rent for some poor woman,
exhausting his energies in trying to keep people out of trouble,
answering the call of every school, of every reformatory, every
philanthropic institution. Had he given more time to study, he would
hardly have had an equal in the American pulpit. He depended always upon
the inspiration of the moment. Sometimes he failed on this account. I
have heard him when he had the pathos of a Summerfield, the wit of a
Sidney Smith, and the wondrous thundering phraseology of a Thomas
Carlyle. He had been everywhere, seen everything, experienced great
variety of gladness, grief, and betrayal. If you had lost a child, he
was the first man at your side to console you. If you had a great joy,
his was the first telegram to congratulate you. For two years he was in
Congress. His Sundays in Washington were spent preaching in pulpits of
all denominations. The first time I ever saw him was when he came to my
house in Philadelphia, ringing the door bell, that he might assuage a
great sorrow that had come to me. He was always in the shadowed home.
How much the world owes to such a nature is beyond the world's gift to
return. His wit was of the kind that, like the dew, refreshes. He never
laughed at anything but that which ought to be laughed at. He never
dealt in innuendoes that tipped both ways. We were old friends of many
vicissitudes. Together we wept and laughed and planned. He had such
subtle ways of encouragement--as when he told me that he had read a
lecture of mine to his dying daughter, and described how it had
comforted her. His was a life of profound self-sacrifice, but "weeping
may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning."
The new year of 1887 began with a controversy that filled the air with
unpleasant confusion. A small river of ink was poured upon it, a vast
amount of talk was made about it. A priest in the Roman Catholic Church,
Father McGlynn, was arraigned by Archbishop Corrigan for putting his
hand in the hot water of politics. In various ways I was asked my
opinion of it all. My most decided opinion was that outsiders had better
keep their hands out of the trouble. The interference of people outside
of a church with its internal affairs only makes things worse. The
policy of any church is best known by its own members. The controversy
was not a matter into which I could consistently enter.
The earth began its new year in hard luck. The earthquake in
Constantinople, in February, was only one of a series of similar shakes
elsewhere. The scientists were always giving us a lot of trouble.
Electric showers in the sun disturbed our climate. Comets had been
shooting about the sky with enough fire in their tails to obliterate us.
Caracas was shaken, Lisbon buried, Java very badly cracked. It is a
shaky, rheumatic, epileptic old world, and in one of its stupendous
convulsions it will die. It's a poor place in which to make permanent
investments. It was quite as insecure in its human standards as in its
scientific incompetence.
Our laws were moral earthquakes that destroyed our standards. We were
opposed to sneak thieves, but we admired the two million dollar rascals.
Why not a tax of five or ten thousand dollars to license the business of
theft, so that we might put an end to the small scoundrels who had
genius enough only to steal door mats, or postage stamps, or chocolate
drops, and confine the business to genteel robbery? A robber paying a
privilege of ten thousand dollars would then be able legally to abscond
with fifty thousand dollars from a bank; or, by watering the stock of a
railroad, he would be entitled to steal two hundred thousand dollars at
a clip. The thief's licence ought to be high, because he would so soon
make it up.
A licence on blasphemy might have been equally advantageous. It could be
made high enough so that we could sweep aside all those who swear on a
small scale, those who never get beyond "By George!" "My stars!" or
"Darn it!" Then, again, the only way to put an end to murder in America
is by high licenced murderers. Put a few men in to manage the business
of murder. The common assassins who do their work with car hooks, dull
knives or Paris green, should be abolished by law. Let the few experts
do it who can accomplish murder without pain: by chloroform or bulldog
revolvers. Give these men all the business. The licence in these cases
should be twenty thousand dollars, because the perquisites in gold
watches, money safes, and plethoric pocket-books would soon offset the
licence.
High licences in rum-selling had always been urged, and always resulted
in dead failures; therefore the whole method of legal restraint in crime
can be dismissed with irony. The overcrowding in the East was crushing
our ethical and practical ambition. That is why the trains going
westward were so crowded that there was hardly room enough to stand in
them. We were restoring ourselves in Kansas and Missouri. After
lecturing, in the spring of 1887, in fifteen Western cities, including
Chicago, St. Louis, and westward to the extreme boundaries of Kansas, I
returned a Westerner to convert the Easterner. In the West they called
this prosperity a boom, but I never liked the word, for a boom having
swung one way is sure to swing the other. It was a revival of
enterprise which, starting in Birmingham, Ala., advanced through
Tennessee, and spread to Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri. My forecast at this
time was that the men who went West then would be the successes in the
next twenty years. The centre of American population, which two years
before had been a little west of Cincinnati, had moved to Kansas, the
heart of the continent. The national Capital should have been midway
between the Atlantic and the Pacific, in which case the great white
buildings in Washington could have been turned into art academies, and
museums and libraries.
Prohibition in Kansas and Iowa was making honest men. I did not see an
intoxicated man in either of these States. All the young men in Kansas
and Iowa were either prohibitionists or loafers. The West had lost the
song plaintive and adopted the song jubilant.
In the spring of this year, 1887, Brooklyn was examined by an
investigating committee. Even when Mayor Low was in power, three years
before, the city was denounced by Democratic critics, so Mayor Whitney,
of course, was the victim of Republican critics. The whole thing was
mere partisan hypocrisy. If anyone asked me whether I was a Republican
or a Democrat, I told them that I had tried both, and got out of them
both. I hope always to vote, but the title of the ticket at the top will
not influence me. Outside of heaven Brooklyn was the quietest place on
Sunday. The Packer and the Polytechnic institutes took care of our boys
and girls. Our judiciary at this time included remarkable men: Judge
Neilson, Judge Gilbert, and Judge Reynolds. We had enough surplus
doctors to endow a medical college for fifty other cities.
It looked as though our grandchildren would be very happy. We were only
in the early morning of development. The cities would be multiplied a
hundredfold, and yet we were groaning because a few politicians were
conducting an investigation for lack of something better to do. From
time immemorial we had prayed for the President and Congress, but I
never heard of any prayers for the State Legislatures, and they needed
them most of all. They brought about the groans of the nation, and we
were constantly in complaint of them. I remember a great mass meeting in
the Academy of Music in Brooklyn, at which I was present, to protest
against the passage of the Gambling Pool Bill, as it was called. I was
accused of being over-confident because I said the State Senate would
not pass it without a public hearing. A public hearing was given,
however, and my faith in the legislators of the State increased. We
ministers of Brooklyn had to do a good deal of work outside of our
pulpits, outside of our churches, on the street and in the crowds.
When the Ives Gambling Pool Bill was passed I urged that the Legislature
should adjourn. The race track men went to Albany and triumphed.
Brooklyn was disgraced before the world by our race tracks at Coney
Island, which were a public shame!
All the money in the world, however, was not abused. Philanthropists
were helping the Church. Miss Wolfe bequeathed a million dollars to
evangelisation in New York; Mr. Depau, of Illinois, bequeathed five
million dollars to religion, and the remaining three million of his
fortune only to his family. There were others--Cyrus McCormick, James
Lenox, Mr. Slater, Asa D. Packer. They, with others, were men of great
deeds. We were just about ready to appreciate these progressive events.
In the summer of 1887 I urged a great World's Fair, because I thought
it was due in our country, to the inventors, the artists, the industries
of America. How to set the idea of a World's Fair agoing? It only needed
enthusiasm among the prominent merchants and the rich men. All great
things first start in one brain, in one heart. I proposed that a World's
Fair should be held in the great acreage between Prospect Park and the
sea.
In 1853 there was a World's Fair in New York. In the same year the
dismemberment of the Republic was expected, and a book of several
volumes was advertised in London, entitled "History of the Federal
Government from the Foundation to the Dissipation of the United States."
Only one volume was ever published. The other volumes were never
printed. What a difference in New York city then, when it opened its
Crystal Palace, and thirty-four years later--in 1887! That Crystal
Palace was the beginning of World's Fairs in this country.
In the presence of the epauleted representatives of foreign nations,
before a vast multitude, Franklin Pierce, President of the United
States, declared it open, and as he did so Julien, the inspired musical
leader of his day, raised his baton for an orchestra of three thousand
instruments, while thousands of trained voices sang "God Save the
Queen," "The Marseillaise," "Bonnie Doon," "The Harp that once through
Tara's Halls," and "Hail Columbia." What that Crystal Palace, opened in
New York in 1853, did for art, for science, for civilisation, is beyond
record. The generation that built it has for the most part vanished but
future generations will be inspired by them.
The summer of 1887 opened the baseball season of America, and I
deplored an element of roughness and loaferism that attached itself to
the greatest game of our country. One of the national events of this
season of that year was a proposal to remove the battle-flag of the late
war. Good sense prevailed, and the controversy was satisfactorily
settled; otherwise the whole country would have been aflame. It was not
merely an agitation over a few bits of bunting. The most arousing,
thrilling, blood-stirring thing on earth is a battle-flag. Better let
the old battle-flags of our three wars hang where they are. Only one
circumstance could disturb them, and that would be the invasion of a
foreign power and the downfall of the Republic. The strongest passions
of men are those of patriotism.
The best things that a man does in the world usually take a lifetime to
make. A career is a life job, and no one is sure whether it was worthy
or not till it is over. I except doctors from this rule, of whom Homer
says:--
A wise physician skilled our wounds to heal
Is more than armies to the public weal.
Some may remember the stalwart figure of Dr. Joseph Hutchinson, one of
the best American surgeons. For some years, in the streets of Brooklyn,
he was a familiar and impressive figure on horseback. He rode superbly,
and it was his custom to make his calls in that way. He died in this
year. Daniel Curry was another significant, superior man of a different
sort, who also died in the summer of 1887. He was an editor and writer
of the Methodist Church. At his death he told one thing that will go
into the classics of the Church; and five hundred years beyond, when
evangelists quote the last words of this inspired man, they will recall
the dying vision that came to Daniel Curry. He saw himself in the final
judgment before the throne, and knew not what to do on account of his
sins. He felt that he was lost, when suddenly Christ saw him and said,
"I will answer for Daniel Curry." In this world of vast population it is
wonderful to find only a few men who have helped to carry the burden of
others with distinction for themselves. Most of us are driven.
In the two years and a half that our Democratic party had been in power,
our taxes had paid in a surplus to the United States treasury of
$125,000,000. The whole country was groaning under an infamous taxation.
Most of it was spent by the Republican party, three or four years
before, to improve navigation on rivers with about two feet of water in
them in the winter, and dry in summer. In the State of Virginia I saw
one of these dry creeks that was to be improved. Taxation caused the war
of the Revolution. It had become a grinding wheel of government that
rolled over all our public interests. Politicians were afraid to touch
the subject for fear they might offend their party. I touch upon it here
because those who live after me may understand, by their own experience,
the infamy of political piracy practised in the name of government
taxation.
We had our school for scandal in America over-developed. A certain
amount of exposure is good for the soul, but our newspaper headlines
over-reached this ideal purpose. They cultivated liars and encouraged
their lies. The peculiarity of lies is their great longevity. They are a
productive species and would have overwhelmed the country and destroyed
George Washington except for his hatchet. Once born, the lie may live
twenty, thirty, or forty years. At the end of a man's life sometimes it
is healthier than he ever was. Lies have attacked every occupant of the
White House, have irritated every man since Adam, and every good woman
since Eve. Today the lie is after your neighbour; to-morrow it is after
you. It travels so fast that a million people can see it the next
morning. It listens at keyholes, it can hear whispers: it has one ear to
the East, the other to the West. An old-fashioned tea-table is its
jubilee, and a political campaign is its heaven. Avoid it you may not,
but meet it with calmness and without fear. It is always an outrage, a
persecution.
Nothing more offensive to public sentiment could have occurred than the
attempt made in New York in the autumn of 1887 to hinder the appointment
of a new pastor of Trinity Church, on the plea that he came from a
foreign country, and therefore was an ally to foreign labour. It was an
outrage on religion, on the Church, on common sense. As a nation,
however, we were safe. There was not another place in the world where
its chief ruler could travel five thousand miles, for three weeks,
unprotected by bayonets, as Mr. Cleveland did on his Presidential tour
of the country. It was a universal huzzah, from Mugwumps, Republicans,
and Democrats. We were a safe nation because we destroyed Communism.
The execution of the anarchists in Chicago, in November, 1887, was a
disgusting exhibition of the gallows. It took ten minutes for some of
them to die by strangulation. Nothing could have been more barbaric than
this method of hanging human life. I was among the first to publicly
propose execution by electricity. Mr. Edison, upon a request from the
government, could easily have arranged it. I was particularly horrified
with the blunders of the hangman's methods, because I was in a friend's
office in New York, when the telegraph wires gave instantaneous reports
of the executions in Chicago. I made notes of these flashes of death.
"Now the prisoners leave the cells," said the wire; "now they are
ascending the stairs"; "now the rope is being adjusted"; "now the cap is
being drawn"; "now they fall." Had I been there I would probably have
felt thankful that I was brought up to obey the law, and could
understand the majesty of restraining powers. One of these men was
naturally kind and generous, I was told, but was embittered by one who
had robbed him of everything; and so he became an enemy to all mankind.
One of them got his antipathy for all prosperous people from the fact
that his father was a profligate nobleman, and his mother a poor,
maltreated, peasant woman. The impulse of anarchy starts high up in
society. Chief among our blessings was an American instinct for
lawfulness in the midst of lawless temptation. We were often reminded of
this supreme advantage as we saw passing into shadowland the robed
figure of an upright man.
The death of Judge Greenwood of Brooklyn, in November, 1887, was a
reminder of such matters. He had seen the nineteenth century in its
youth and in its old age. From first to last, he had been on the right
side of all its questions of public welfare. We could, appropriately,
hang his portrait in our court rooms and city halls. The artist's brush
would be tame indeed compared with the living, glowing, beaming face of
dear old Judge Greenwood in the portrait gallery of my recollections.
The national event of this autumn was President Cleveland's message to
Congress, which put squarely before us the matter of our having a
protective tariff. It was the great question of our national problem,
and called for oratory and statesmanship to answer it. The whole of
Europe was interested in the subject. I advocated free trade as the best
understanding of international trading, because I had talked with the
leaders of political thought in Europe, and I understood both sides, as
far as my capacity could compass them. In America we were frequently
compared to the citizens of the French Republic because of our nervous
force, our restlessness, but we were more patient. In 1887, the
resignation of President Grévy in France re-established this fact.
Though an American President becomes offensive to the people, we wait
patiently till his four years are out, even if we are not very quiet
about it. We are safest when we keep our hands off the Constitution. The
demonstration in Paris emphasised our Republican wisdom. Public service
is an altar of sacrifice for all who worship there.
The death of Daniel Manning, ex-Secretary of the Treasury, in December,
1887, was another proof of this. He fell prostrate on the steps of his
office, in a sickness that no medical aid could relieve. Four years
before no one realised the strength that was in him. He threw body and
soul into the whirlpool of his work, and was left in the rapids of
celebrity. In the closing notes of 1887, I find recorded the death of
Mrs. William Astor. What a sublime lifetime of charity and kindness was
hers! Mrs. Astor's will read like a poem. It had a beauty and a pathos,
and a power entirely independent of rhythmical cadence. The document was
published to the world on a cold December morning, with its bequests of
hundreds of thousands of dollars to the poor and needy, the invalids and
the churches. It put a warm glow over the tired and grizzled face of the
old year. It was a benediction upon the coming years.