since March 12, 1879, was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on February
10, 1827, and died in Boston on December 11, 1905. He was descended on
his father’s side from the patriot minute-man, Lieutenant Amos Atkinson,
and on the maternal side from Stephen Greenleaf, a well-known fighter of
Indians in the colonial period; thus honestly inheriting on both sides
that combative spirit in good causes which marked his life. Owing to
the business reverses of his father, he was prevented from receiving,
as his elder brother, William Parsons Atkinson, had received, a Harvard
College education, a training which was also extended to all of Edward
Atkinson’s sons, at a later day. At fifteen he entered the employment
of Read and Chadwick, Commission Merchants, Boston, in the capacity of
office boy; but he rapidly rose to the position of book-keeper, and
subsequently became connected with several cotton manufacturing companies
in Lewiston, Maine, and elsewhere. He was for many years the treasurer
of a number of such corporations, and in 1878 became President of the
Boston Manufacturers’ Mutual Insurance Company. Such business was in a
somewhat chaotic state when he took hold of it, but he remained in its
charge until his death, having during this time organized, enlarged, and
perfected the mutual insurance of industrial concerns. In 1855 he married
Miss Mary Caroline Heath, of Brookline, who died in December, 1907. He is
survived by seven children,—Mrs. Ernest Winsor, E. W. Atkinson, Charles
H. Atkinson, William Atkinson, Robert W. Atkinson, Miss C. P. Atkinson,
and Mrs. R. G. Wadsworth.
This gives the mere outline of a life of extraordinary activity and
usefulness which well merits a further delineation in detail. Mr.
Atkinson’s interest in public life began with a vote for Horace Mann in
1848. Twenty years after, speaking at Salem, he described himself as
never having been anything else than a Republican; but he was one of
those who supported Cleveland for President in 1884, and whose general
affinities were with the Democratic party. He opposed with especial vigor
what is often called “the imperial policy,” which followed the Cuban War,
and he conducted a periodical of his own from time to time, making the
most elaborate single battery which the war-party had to encounter.
From an early period of life he was a profuse and vigorous pamphleteer,
his first pamphlet being published during the Civil War and entitled
“Cheap Cotton by Free Labor,” and this publication led to his
acquaintance with David R. Wells and Charles Nordhoff, thenceforth his
life-long friends. His early pamphlets were on the cotton question in
different forms (1863-76); he wrote on blockade-running (1865); on the
Pacific Railway (1871); and on mutual fire insurance (1885), this last
being based on personal experience as the head of a mutual company. He
was also, during his whole life, in print and otherwise, a strong and
effective fighter for sound currency.
A large part of his attention from 1889 onward was occupied by
experiments in cooking and diet, culminating in an invention of his
own called “The Aladdin Oven.” This led him into investigations as
to the cost of nutrition in different countries, on which subject he
also wrote pamphlets. He soon was led into experiments so daring that
he claimed to have proved it possible to cook with it, in open air, a
five-course dinner for ten persons, and gave illustrations of this at
outdoor entertainments. He claimed that good nutrition could be had
for $1 per week, and that a family of five, by moderate management,
could be comfortably supported on $180 per year (Boston “Herald,”
October 8, 1891). These surprising figures unfortunately created among
the laboring-class a good deal of sharp criticism, culminating in the
mistaken inquiry, why he did not feed his own family at $180 a year, if
it was so easy? I can only say for one, that if the meals at that price
were like a dinner of which I partook at his own house with an invited
party, and at which I went through the promised five courses after seeing
them all prepared in the garden, I think that his standard of poverty
came very near to luxury.
Mingled with these things in later years was introduced another valuable
department of instruction. He was more and more called upon to give
addresses, especially on manufactures, before Southern audiences, and
there was no disposition to criticise him for his anti-slavery record.
Another man could hardly be found whose knowledge of manufacturing and of
insurance combined made him so fit to give counsel in the new business
impulse showing itself at the South. He wrote much (1877) on cotton
goods, called for an international cotton exposition, and gave an address
at Atlanta, Georgia, which was printed in Boston in 1881.
Looking now at Atkinson’s career with the eyes of a literary man, it
seems clear to me that no college training could possibly have added to
his power of accumulating knowledge or his wealth in the expression of
it. But the academic tradition might have best added to these general
statements in each case some simple address or essay which would bring
out clearly to the minds of an untrained audience the essential points of
each single theme. Almost everything he left is the talk of a specially
trained man to a limited audience, also well trained,—at least in the
particular department to which he addresses himself. The men to whom he
talks may not know how to read or write, but they are all practically
versed in the subjects of which he treats. He talks as a miner to miners,
a farmer to farmers, a cook to cooks; but among all of his papers which I
have examined, that in which he appears to the greatest advantage to the
general reader is his “Address before the Alumni of Andover Theological
Seminary” on June 9, 1886. Here he speaks as one representing a wholly
different pursuit from that of his auditors; a layman to clergymen, or
those aiming to become so. He says to them frankly at the outset, “I have
often thought [at church] that if a member of the congregation could
sometimes occupy the pulpit while the minister took his place in the pew,
it might be a benefit to both. The duty has been assigned to me to-day to
trace out the connection between morality and a true system of political
or industrial economy.”
He goes on to remind them that the book which is said to rank next to the
Bible toward the benefit of the human race is Adam Smith’s “Wealth of
Nations,” and that the same Adam Smith wrote a book on moral philosophy,
which is now but little read. He therefore takes the former of Smith’s
books, not the latter, as his theme, and thus proceeds:—
“I wonder how many among your number ever recall the fact that
it has been the richest manufacturers who have clothed the
naked at the least cost to them; that it is the great bonanza
farmer who now feeds the hungry at the lowest price; that
Vanderbilt achieved his great fortune by reducing the cost of
moving a barrel of flour a thousand miles,—from three dollars
and fifty cents to less than seventy cents. This was the great
work assigned to him, whether he knew it or not. His fortune
was but an incident,—the main object, doubtless, to himself,
but a trifling incident compared to what he saved others.”[18]
He then goes on to show that whatever may be the tricks or wrongs of
commerce, they lie on the surface, and that every great success is based
upon very simple facts.
“The great manufacturer [he says] who guides the operations
of a factory of a hundred thousand spindles, in which fifteen
hundred men, women, and children earn their daily bread,
himself works on a narrow margin of one fourth of a cent on
each yard of cloth. If he shall not have applied truth to every
branch of construction and of the operation of that factory, it
will fail and become worthless; and then with toilsome labor a
hundred and fifty thousand women might try to clothe themselves
and you, who are now clothed by the service of fifteen hundred
only.
“Such is the disparity in the use of time, brought into
beneficent action by modern manufacturing processes.
“The banker who deals in credit by millions upon millions
must possess truth of insight, truth of judgment, truth of
character. Probity and integrity constitute his capital, for
the very reason that the little margin which he seeks to gain
for his own service is but the smallest fraction of a per cent
upon each transaction. I supervise directly or indirectly the
insurance upon four hundred million dollars’ worth of factory
property. The products of these factories, machine-shops, and
other works must be worth six hundred million dollars a year.
It isn’t worth fifty cents on each hundred dollars to guarantee
their notes or obligations, while ninety-nine and one half per
cent of all the sales they make will be promptly paid when
due.”[19]
He elsewhere turns from viewing the factory system with business eyes
alone to the consideration of it from the point of view of the laborer.
There is no want of sympathy, we soon find, in this man of inventions and
statistics. He thus goes on:—
“The very manner in which this great seething, toiling, crowded
mass of laboring men and women bear the hardships of life leads
one to faith in humanity and itself gives confidence in the
future. If it were not that there is a Divine order even in
the hardships which seem so severe, and that even the least
religious, in the technical sense, have faith in each other,
the anarchist and nihilist might be a cause of dread.
“As I walk through the great factories which are insured in the
company of which I am president, trying to find out what more
can be done to save them from destruction by fire, I wonder if
I myself should not strike, just for the sake of variety, if I
were a mule-spinner, obliged to bend over the machine, mending
the ends of the thread, while I walked ten or fifteen miles a
day without raising my eyes to the great light above. I wonder
how men and women bear the monotony of the workshop and of
the factory, in which the division of labor is carried to its
utmost, and in which they must work year in and year out, only
on some small part of a fabric or an implement, never becoming
capable of making the whole fabric or of constructing the whole
machine.”[20]
We thus find him quite ready to turn his varied knowledge and his
executive power towards schemes for the relief of the operative, schemes
of which he left many.
Mr. Atkinson, a year or two later (1890), wrote a similarly popularized
statement of social science for an address on “Religion and Life” before
the American Unitarian Association. In his usual matter-of-fact way,
he had prepared himself by inquiring at the headquarters of different
religious denominations for a printed creed of each. He first bought
an Episcopal creed at the Old Corner Bookstore for two cents, an
Orthodox creed at the Congregational Building for the same amount, then
a Methodist two-cent creed also, a Baptist creed for five cents, and
a Presbyterian one for ten, Unitarian and Universalist creeds being
furnished him for nothing; and then he proceeds to give some extracts
whose bigotry makes one shudder, and not wonder much that he expressed
sympathy mainly with the Catholics and the Jews, rather than with the
severer schools among Protestants. And it is already to be noticed how
much the tendency of liberal thought, during the last twenty years, has
been in the direction whither his sympathies went.
As time went on, he had to undergo the test which awaits all Northern
public men visiting the Southern States, but not met by all in so simple
and straightforward a way as he. Those who doubt the capacity of the
mass of men in our former slave states to listen to plainness of speech
should turn with interest to Atkinson’s plain talk to the leading men of
Atlanta, Georgia, in October, 1880. He says, almost at the beginning:
“Now, gentlemen of the South, I am going to use free speech for a
purpose and to speak some plain words of truth and soberness to you....
I speak, then, to you here and now as a Republican of Republicans, as an
Abolitionist of early time, a Free-Soiler of later date, and a Republican
of to-day.” And the record is that he was received with applause. He goes
on to say as frankly: “When slavery ended, not only were blacks made free
from the bondage imposed by others, but whites as well were redeemed by
the bondage they had imposed upon themselves.... When you study the past
system of slave labor with the present system of free labor, irrespective
of all personal considerations, you will be mad down to the soles of your
boots to think that you ever tolerated it; and when you have come to this
wholesome condition of mind, you will wonder how the devil you could have
been so slow in seeing it. [Laughter.]”
Then he suddenly drops down to the solid fact and says: “Are you not
asking Northern men to come here, and do you not seek Northern capital?
If you suppose either will come here unless every man can say what he
pleases, as I do now, you are mistaken.” Then he goes on with his speech,
rather long as he was apt to make them, but addressing a community much
more leisurely than that which he had left at home; filling their minds
with statistics, directions, and methods, till at last, recurring to the
question of caste and color, he closes fearlessly: “As you convert the
darkness of oppression and slavery to liberty and justice, so shall you
be judged by men, and by Him who created all the nations of the earth.”
After tracing the course and training of an eminent American at home,
it is often interesting to follow him into the new experiences of the
foreign traveler. In that very amusing book, “Notes from a Diary,” by
Grant Duff (later Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff), the author
writes that he came unexpectedly upon a breakfast (June, 1887), the
guests being “Atkinson, the New England Free Trader, Colonel Hay, and
Frederic Harrison, all of whom were well brought out by our host and
talked admirably.” I quote some extracts from the talk:—
“Mr. Atkinson said that quite the best after-dinner speech he had ever
heard was from Mr. Samuel Longfellow, brother of the poet. An excellent
speech had been made by Mr. Longworth, and the proceedings should have
closed, when Mr. Longfellow was very tactlessly asked to address the
meeting, which he did in the words: ‘It is, I think, well known that
worth makes the man, but want of it the fellow,’ and sat down.” After
this mild beginning we have records of good talk.
“Other subjects [Grant Duff says] were the hostility of the
Socialists in London to the Positivists and to the Trades
Unions; the great American fortunes and their causes, the rapid
melting away of some of them, the hindrance which they are to
political success; and servants in the United States, of whom
Atkinson spoke relatively, Colonel Hay absolutely, well, saying
that he usually kept his from six to eight years....
“Atkinson said that all the young thought and ability in
America is in favor of free trade, but that free trade has
not begun to make any way politically. Harrison remarked that
he was unwillingly, but ever more and more, being driven
to believe that the residuum was almost entirely composed
of people who would not work. Atkinson took the same view,
observing that during the war much was said about the misery
of the working-women of Boston. He offered admirable terms
if they would only go a little way into the country to work
in his factory. Forty were at last got together to have the
conditions explained—ten agreed to go next morning, of whom one
arrived at the station, and she would not go alone!”
On another occasion we read in the “Diary”:
“We talked of Father Taylor, and he [Atkinson] told us that the
great orator once began a sermon by leaning over the pulpit,
with his arms folded, and saying, ‘You people ought to be very
good, if you’re not, for you live in Paradise already.’
“The conversation, in which Sir Louis Malet took part, turned
to Mill’s economical heresies, especially that which relates to
the fostering of infant industries. Atkinson drew a striking
picture of the highly primitive economic condition of the
South before the war, and said that now factories of all kinds
are springing up throughout the country in spite of the keen
competition of the North. He cited a piece of advice given to
his brother by Theodore Parker, ‘Never try to lecture down to
your audience.’ This maxim is in strict accordance with an
opinion expressed by Hugh Miller, whom, having to address on
the other side of the Firth just the same sort of people as
those amongst whom he lived at Cromarty, I took as my guide in
this matter during the long period in which I was connected
with the Elgin Burghs.
“Atkinson went on to relate that at the time of Mr. Hayes’s
election to the presidency there was great danger of an
outbreak, and he sat in council with General Taylor and Abraham
Hewitt, doing his best to prevent it. At length he exclaimed:
‘Now I think we may fairly say that the war is over. Here are
we three acting together for a common object, and who are we?
You, Mr. Hewitt, are the leader of the Democratic party in New
York; I am an old Abolitionist who subscribed to furnish John
Brown and his companions with rifles; you, General Taylor, are
the last Confederate officer who surrendered an army, and you
surrendered it not because you were willing to do so, but, as
you yourself admit, because you couldn’t help it.’”
The publication which will perhaps be much consulted in coming years as
the best periodical organ of that party in the nation which was most
opposed to the Philippine war will doubtless be the work issued by Mr.
Atkinson on his own responsibility and by his own editing, from June 3,
1899, to September, 1900, under the name of “The Anti-Imperialist.” It
makes a solid volume of about 400 octavo pages, and was conducted wholly
on Atkinson’s own responsibility, financially and otherwise, though a
large part of the expense was paid him by volunteers, to the extent of
$5,657.87 or more, covering an outlay of $5,870.62, this amount being
largely received in sums of one dollar, obtained under what is known as
the chain method. For this amount were printed more than 100,000 copies
of a series of pamphlets, of which the first two were withdrawn from
the mail as seditious under President McKinley’s administration. A more
complete triumph of personal independence was perhaps never seen in our
literature, and it is easy to recognize the triumph it achieved for a
high-minded and courageous as well as constitutionally self-willed man.
The periodical exerted an influence which lasts to this day, although the
rapidity of political change has now thrown it into the background for
all except the systematic student of history. It seemed to Mr. Atkinson,
at any rate, his crowning work.
The books published by Edward Atkinson were the following: “The
Distribution of Profits,” 1885; “The Industrial Progress of the Nation,”
1889; “The Margin of Profit,” 1890; “Taxation and Work,” 1892; “Facts
and Figures the Basis of Economic Science,” 1894. This last was printed
at the Riverside Press, the others being issued by Putnam & Co., New
York. He wrote also the following papers in leading periodicals: “Is
Cotton our King?” (“Continental Monthly,” March, 1862); “Revenue Reform”
(“Atlantic,” October, 1871); “An American View of American Competition”
(“Fortnightly,” London, March, 1879); “The Unlearned Professions”
(“Atlantic,” June, 1880); “What makes the Rate of Interest” (“Forum,”
1880); “Elementary Instruction in the Mechanics Arts” (“Century,” May,
1881); “Leguminous Plants suggested for Ensilage” (“Agricultural,” 1882);
“Economy in Domestic Cookery” (“American Architect,” May, 1887); “Must
Humanity starve at Last?” “How can Wages be increased?” “The Struggle for
Subsistence,” “The Price of Life” (all in “Forum” for 1888); “How Society
reforms Itself,” and “The Problem of Poverty” (both in “Forum” for 1889);
“A Single Tax on Land” (“Century,” 1890); and many others. When the
amount of useful labor performed by the men of this generation comes to
be reviewed a century hence, it is doubtful whether a more substantial
and varied list will be found credited to the memory of any one in
America than that which attaches to the memory of Edward Atkinson.
XVIII
JAMES ELLIOT CABOT
JAMES ELLIOT CABOT
Our late associate, Elliot Cabot, of whom I have been appointed to
write a sketch, was to me, from my college days, an object of peculiar
interest, on a variety of grounds. He was distantly related to me, in
more than one way, through the endless intermarriages of the old Essex
County families. Though two years and a half older, he was but one year
in advance of me in Harvard College. He and his chum, Henry Bryant, who
had been my schoolmate, were among the early founders of the Harvard
Natural History Society, then lately established, of which I was an
ardent member; and I have never had such a sensation of earthly glory
as when I succeeded Bryant in the responsible function of Curator of
Entomology in that august body. I used sometimes in summer to encounter
Cabot in the Fresh Pond marshes, then undrained, which he afterwards
described so delightfully in the “Atlantic Monthly” in his paper entitled
“Sedge Birds” (xxiii, 384). On these occasions he bore his gun, and I
only the humbler weapon of a butterfly net. After we had left college, I
looked upon him with envy as one of the early and successful aspirants
to that German post-collegiate education which was already earnestly
desired, but rarely attained, by the more studious among Harvard
graduates. After his return, I was brought more or less in contact with
him, at the close of the “Dial” period, and in the following years of
Transcendentalism; and, later still, I was actively associated with him
for a time in that group of men who have always dreamed of accomplishing
something through the Harvard Visiting Committee, and have retired from
it with hopes unaccomplished. Apart from his labors as Emerson’s scribe
and editor, he seemed to withdraw himself more and more from active
life as time went on, and to accept gracefully the attitude which many
men find so hard,—that of being, in a manner, superseded by the rising
generation. This he could do more easily, since he left a family of sons
to represent in various forms the tastes and gifts that were combined
in him; and he also left a manuscript autobiography, terse, simple, and
modest, like himself, to represent what was in its way a quite unique
career. Of this sketch I have been allowed to avail myself through the
courtesy of his sons.
James Elliot Cabot was born in Boston June 18, 1821, his birthplace
being in Quincy Place, upon the slope of Fort Hill, in a house which
had belonged to his grandfather, Samuel Cabot, brother of George Cabot,
the well-known leader of the Federalists in his day. These brothers
belonged to a family originating in the Island of Jersey and coming early
to Salem, Massachusetts. Elliot Cabot’s father was also named Samuel,
while his mother was the eldest child of Thomas Handasyd Perkins and
Sarah Elliot; the former being best known as Colonel Perkins, who gave
his house and grounds on Pearl Street toward the foundation of the Blind
Asylum bearing his name, and also gave profuse gifts to other Boston
institutions; deriving meanwhile his military title from having held
command of the Boston Cadets. Elliot Cabot was, therefore, born and bred
in the most influential circle of the little city of that date, and he
dwelt in what was then the most attractive part of Boston, though long
since transformed into a business centre.