When Reuben found that to be a witness of Jerrem's death Joan must take
her stand among the lawless mob who made holiday of such sad scenes as
this, his decision was that the idea was untenable. Jerrem too had a
strong desire that Joan should not see him die; and although his
avoidance of anything that directly touched upon that dreaded moment had
kept him from openly naming his wishes, the hints dropped satisfied
Reuben that the knowledge of her absence would be a matter of relief to
him. But how get Joan to listen to his scruples when her whole mind was
set on keeping by Jerrem's side until hope was past and life was over?
"Couldn't 'ee get her to take sommat that her wouldn't sleep off till
'twas late?" Jerrem had said after Reuben had told him that the next
morning he must come alone; and the suggestion made was seized on at
once by Reuben, who, under pretence of getting something to steady her
shaken nerves, procured from the apothecary near a simple draught, which
Joan in good faith swallowed. And then, Reuben having promised in case
she fell asleep to awaken her at the appointed hour, the poor soul, worn
out by sorrow and fatigue, threw herself down, dressed as she was, upon
the bed, and soon was in a heavy sleep, from which she did not rouse
until well into the following day, when some one moving in the room made
her start up. For a moment she seemed dazed: then, rubbing her eyes as
if to clear away those happy visions which had come to her in sleep, she
gazed about until Reuben, who had at first drawn back, came forward to
speak to her. "Why, Reuben," she cried, "how's this? Have I been
dreamin', or what? The daylight's come, and, see, the sun!"
And here she stopped, her parched mouth half unclosed, as fears came
crowding thick upon her mind, choking her further utterance. One look at
Reuben's face had told the tale; and though she did not speak again, the
ashen hue that overspread and drove all color from her cheeks proclaimed
to him that she had guessed the truth.
"'Twas best, my dear," he said, "that you should sleep while he went to
his rest."
But the unlooked-for shock had been too great a strain on body and mind,
alike overtaxed and weak, and, falling back, Joan lay for hours as one
unconscious and devoid of life. And Reuben sat silent by her side,
paying no heed as hour by hour went by, till night had come and all
around was dark: then some one came softly up the stairs and crept into
the room, and Eve's whispered "Reuben!" broke the spell.
Yes, all had gone well. The body, rescued and safe, was now placed
within a house near to the churchyard in which Eve's mother lay: there
it was to be buried. And there, the next day, the commonplace event of
one among many funerals being over, the four thus linked by fate were
brought together, and Adam and Joan again stood face to face. Heightened
by the disguise which in order to avoid detection he was obliged to
adopt, the alteration in Adam was so complete that Joan stood aghast
before this seeming stranger, while a fresh smart came into Adam's open
wounds as he gazed upon the changed face of the once comely Joan.
A terrible barrier--such as, until felt, they had never dreaded--seemed
to have sprung up to separate and divide these two. Involuntarily they
shrank at each other's touch and quailed beneath each other's gaze,
while each turned with a feeling of relief to him and to her who now
constituted their individual refuge and support. Yes, strange as it
seemed to Adam and unaccountable to Joan, _she_ clung to Reuben, _he_ to
Eve, before whom each could be natural and unrestrained, while between
their present selves a great gulf had opened out which naught but time
or distance could bridge over.
So Adam went back to his hiding-place, Reuben to his shop, and Joan and
Eve to the old home in Knight's Passage, as much lost amid the crowd of
thronged London as if they had already taken refuge in that far-off land
which had now become the goal of Adam's thoughts and keen desires. Eve,
too, fearing some fresh disaster, was equally anxious for their
departure, and most of Reuben's spare time was swallowed up in making
the necessary arrangements. A passage in his name for himself and his
wife was secured in a ship about to start. At the last moment this
passage was to be transferred to Adam and Eve, whose marriage would take
place a day or two before the vessel sailed. The transactions on which
the successful fulfilment of these various events depended were mostly
conducted by Reuben, aided by the counsels of Mr. Osborne and the
assistance of Captain Triggs, whose good-fellowship, no longer withheld,
made him a valuable coadjutor.
Fortunately, Triggs's vessel, through some detention of its cargo, had
remained in London for an unusually long time, and now, when it did
sail, Joan was to take passage in it back to Polperro.
"Awh, Reuben, my dear," sighed Joan one evening as, Eve having gone to
see Adam, the two walked out toward the little spot where Jerrem lay,
and as they went discussed Joan's near departure, "I wish to goodness
you'd pack up yer alls and come 'longs to Polperro home with me: 't 'ud
be ever so much better than stayin' to this gashly London, where there
ain't a blow o' air that's fresh to draw your breath in."
"Why, nonsense!" said Reuben: "you wouldn't have me if I'd come."
"How not have 'ee?" exclaimed Joan. "Why, if so be I thought you'd come
I'd never stir from where I be until I got the promise of it."
"But there wouldn't be nothin' for me to do," said Reuben.
"Why, iss there would--oceans," returned Joan. "Laws! I knaws clocks by
scores as hasn't gone for twenty year and more. Us has got two
ourselves, that wan won't strike and t' other you can't make tick."
Reuben smiled: then, growing more serious, he said, "But do you know,
Joan, that yours isn't the first head it's entered into about going down
home with you? I've had a mind toward it myself many times of late."
"Why, then, do come to wance," said Joan excitedly; "for so long as they
leaves me the house there'll be a home with me and Uncle Zebedee, and
I'll go bail for the welcome you'll get gived 'ee there."
Reuben was silent, and Joan, attributing this to some hesitation over
the plan, threw further weight into her argument by saying, "There's the
chapel too, Reuben. Only to think o' the sight o' good you could do
praichin' to 'em and that! for, though it didn't seem to make no odds
before, I reckons there's not a few that wants, like me, to be told o'
some place where they treats folks better than they does down here
below."
"Joan," said Reuben after a pause, speaking out of his own thoughts and
paying no heed to the words she had been saying, "you know all about Eve
and me, don't you?"
Joan nodded her head.
"How I've felt about her, so that I believe the hold she's got on me no
one on earth will ever push her off from."
"Awh, poor sawl!" sighed Joan compassionately: "I've often had a feelin'
for what you'd to bear, and for this reason too--that I knaws myself
what 'tis to be ousted from the heart you'm cravin' to call yer own."
"Why, yes, of course," said Reuben briskly: "you were set down for Adam
once, weren't you?"
"Awh, and there's they to Polperro--mother amongst 'em, too--who'll tell
'ee now that if Eve had never shawed her face inside the place Adam 'ud
ha' had me, after all. But there! all that's past and gone long ago."
There was another pause, which Reuben broke by saying suddenly, "Joan,
should you take it very out of place if I was to ask you whether after a
bit you could marry me? I dare say now such a thought never entered
your head before."
"Well, iss it has," said Joan; 'and o' late, ever since that blessed
dear spoke they words he did, I've often fell to wonderin' if so be 't
'ud ever come to pass. Not, mind, that I should ha' bin put out if 't
had so happened that you'd never axed me, like, but still I thought
sometimes as how you might, and then agen I says, 'Why should he,
though?'"
"There's many a reason why _I_ should ask _you_, Joan," said Reuben,
smiling at her unconscious frankness, "though very few why you should
consent to take a man whose love another woman has flung away."
"Awh, so far as that goes, the both of us is takin' what's another's
orts, you knaw," smiled Joan.
"Then is it agreed?" asked Reuben, stretching out his hand.
"Iss, so far as I goes 'tis, with all my heart." Then as she took his
hand a change came to her April face, and looking at him through her
swimming eyes she said, "And very grateful too I'm to 'ee, Reuben, for I
don't knaw by neither another wan who'd take up with a poor heart-broke
maid like me, and they she's looked to all her life disgraced by others
and theyselves."
Reuben pressed the hand that Joan had given to him, and drawing it
through his arm the two walked on in silence, pondering over the
unlooked-for ending to the strange events they both had lately passed
through. Joan's heart was full of a contentment which made her think,
"How pleased Adam will be! and won't mother be glad! and Uncle Zebedee
'ull have somebody to look to now and keep poor Jonathan straight and
put things a bit in order;" while Reuben, bewildered by the thoughts
which crowded to his mind, semed unable to disentangle them. Could it be
possible that he, Reuben May, was going down to live at Polperro, a
place whose very name he had once taught himself to abominate?--that he
could be willingly casting his lot amid a people whom he had but lately
branded as thieves, outcasts, reprobates? Involuntarily his eyes turned
toward Joan, and a nimbus in which perfect charity was intertwined with
great love and singleness of heart seemed to float about her head and
shed its radiance on her face; and its sight was to Reuben as the first
touch of love, for he was smitten with a sense of his own unworthiness,
and, though he did not speak, he asked that a like spirit to that which
filled Joan might rest upon himself.
That evening Eve was told the news which Joan and Reuben had to tell,
and as she listened the mixed emotions which swelled within her
perplexed her not a little, for even while feeling that the two wishes
she most desired--Joan cared for and Reuben made happy--were thus
fulfilled, her heart seemed weighted with a fresh disaster: another
wrench had come to part her from that life soon to be nothing but a
lesson and a memory. And Adam, when he was told, although the words he
said were honest words and true, and truly he did rejoice, there yet
within him lay a sadness born of regret at rendering up that love so
freely given to him, now to be garnered for another's use; and
henceforth every word that Reuben spoke, each promise that he gave,
though all drawn forth by Adam's own requests, stuck every one a
separate thorn within his heart, sore with the thought of being an
outcast from the birthplace that he loved and cut off from those whose
faces now he yearned to look upon.
No vision opened up to Adam's view the prosperous life the future held
in store--no still small voice then whispered in his ear that out of
this sorrow was to come the grace which made success sit well on him and
Eve; and though, as years went by and intercourse became more rare,
their now keen interest in Polperro and its people was swallowed up amid
the many claims a busy life laid on them both, each noble action done,
each good deed wrought, by Adam, and by Eve too, bore on it the unseen
impress of that sore chastening through which they now were passing.
Out of the savings which from time to time Adam had placed with Mr.
Macey enough was found to pay the passage-money out and keep them from
being pushed by any pressing want on landing.
Already, at the nearest church, Adam and Eve had been married, and
nothing now remained but to get on board the vessel, which had already
dropped down the river and was to sail the following morning, Triggs had
volunteered to put them and their possessions safely on board, and
Reuben and Joan, with Eve's small personal belongings, were to meet them
at the steps, close by which the Mary Jane's boat would be found
waiting. The time had come when Adam could lay aside his disguise and
appear in much the same trim he usually did when at Polperro.
Joan was the first to spy him drawing near, and holding out both her
hands to greet the welcome change she cried, "Thank the Lord for lettin'
me see un his ownself wance more!--Awh, Adam! awh, my dear! 't seems as
if I could spake to 'ee now and know 'ee for the same agen.--Look to un,
Reuben! you don't wonder now what made us all so proud of un at home."
Reuben smiled, but Adam shook his head: the desolation of this sad
farewell robbed him of every other power but that of draining to the
dregs its bitterness. During the whole of that long day Eve and he had
hardly said one word, each racked with thoughts to which no speech gave
utterance. Mechanically each asked about the things the other one had
brought, and seemed to find relief in feigning much anxiety about their
safety, until Triggs, fearing they might outstay their time, gave them a
hint it would not do to linger long; and, with a view to their
leavetaking being unconstrained, he volunteered to take the few
remaining things down to the boat and stow them safely away, adding that
when they should hear his whistle given it would be the signal that they
must start without delay.
The spot they had fixed on for the starting-place was one but little
used and well removed from all the bustle of a more frequented landing.
A waterman lounged here and there, but seeing the party was another's
fare vouchsafed to them no further interest. The ragged mud-imps stayed
their noisy pranks to scrutinize the country build of Triggs's boat,
leaving the four, unnoticed, to stand apart and see each in the other's
face the reflection of that misery which filled his own.
Parting for ever! no hopes, no expectations, no looking forward, nothing
to whisper "We shall meet again"! "Good-bye for ever" was written on
each face and echoed in each heart. Words could not soothe that
suffering which turned this common sorrow into an individual torture,
which each must bear unaided and alone; and so they stood silent and
with outward calm, knowing that on that brink of woe the quiver of an
eye might overthrow their all but lost control.
The sun was sinking fast; the gathering mists of eventide were rising to
shadow all around; the toil of day was drawing to its close; labor was
past, repose was near at hand; its spirit seemed to hover around and
breathe its calm upon those worn, tried souls. Suddenly a shrill whistle
sounds upon their ears and breaks the spell: the women start and throw
their arms around each other's necks. Adam stretches his hand out, and
Reuben grasps it in his own.
"Reuben, good-bye. God deal with you as you shall deal with those you're
going among!"
"Adam, be true to her, and I'll be true to those you leave behind."
"Joan!" and Adam's voice sounds hard and strained, and then a choking
comes into his throat, and, though he wants to tell her what he feels,
to ask her to forgive all he has made her suffer, he cannot speak a
word. Vainly he strives, but not a sound will come; and these two, whose
lives, so grown together, are now to be rent asunder, stand stricken and
dumb, looking from out their eyes that last farewell which their poor
quivering lips refuse to utter.
"God bless and keep you, Eve!" Reuben's voice is saying as, taking her
hands within his own, he holds them to his heart and for a moment lets
them rest there.--"Oh, friends," he says, "there is a land where
partings never come: upon that shore may we four meet again!"
Then for a moment all their hands are clasped and held as in a vice, and
then they turn, and two are gone and two are left behind.
And now the two on land stand with their eyes strained on the boat,
which slowly fades away into the vapory mist which lies beyond: then
Reuben turns and takes Joan by the hand, and silently the two go back
together, while Adam and Eve draw near the ship which is to take them
to that far-off shore to which Hope's torch, rekindled, now is pointing.
Good-bye is said to Triggs, the boat pushes off, and the two left
standing side by side watch it away until it seems a speck, which
suddenly is swallowed up and disappears from sight. Then Adam puts his
arm round Eve, and as they draw closer together from out their lips come
sighing forth the whispered words, "Fare-well! farewell!"
_The Author of "Dorothy Fox"_.
OUR GRANDFATHERS' TEMPLES.
If on the fourteenth day of May, 1607, when the Rev. Robert Hunt
celebrated the first sacramental service of the Church of England on
American soil, there had suddenly sprung up at Jamestown the pillars and
arches of a fully-equipped cathedral, whose stones had remained to tell
us of the days when they first enshrined the worship of the earliest
colonists, our most ancient Christian church would still be less than
three hundred years old--a hopelessly modern structure in comparison
with many an abbey and cathedral of England and the Continent.
[Illustration: THE OLD SOUTH, BOSTON.]
In a comparative sense, we look in vain for old churches in a new
country, for in our architecture, if nowhere else, we are still a land
of yesterday, where age seems venerable only when we refuse to look
beyond the ocean, and where even a short two hundred years have taken
away the larger share of such perishable ecclesiastical monuments as we
once had. Our grandfathers' temples, whether they stood on the banks of
the James River or on the colder shores of Massachusetts Bay, were built
cheaply for a scanty population: their material was usually wood,
sometimes unshapen logs, and their sites, chosen before the people and
the country had become fitted to each other, were afterward often needed
for other uses. So long as London tears down historic churches, even in
the present days of fashionable devotion to the old and the quaint, and
so long as the Rome of 1880 is still in danger from vandal hands, we
need only be surprised that the list of existing American churches of
former days is so long and so honorable as it is. If we have no York
Minster or St. Alban's Abbey or Canterbury Cathedral, we may still turn
to an Old South, a St. Paul's and a Christ Church. It is something,
after all, to be able to count our most famous old churches on the
fingers of both hands, and then to enumerate by tens those other temples
whose legacy from bygone times is scarcely less rich.
[Illustration: KING'S CHAPEL, BOSTON, IN 1872.]
The American churches of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were
plain structures, unpretending without and unadorned within; and this
for other reasons than the poverty of the community, the lack of the
best building-materials, and the absence both of architects and of
artistic tastes. It was a simple ritual which most of them were to
house, and the absence of an ornate service demanded the absence of
ornamentation, which would be meaningless because it would symbolize
nothing. The influence of the Puritans in Massachusetts, the Baptists in
Rhode Island, the Dutch Reformed in New York, the Lutherans and
Presbyterians in the Middle and Southern colonies, and the Friends in
Pennsylvania, whatever their denominational differences, was a unit in
favor of the utmost simplicity consistent with decency and order; and
though there was a difference between Congregational churches like the
Old South in Boston and the Friends' meeting-houses in Philadelphia, the
difference was far less marked than that existing between the new and
old buildings of the Old South society, which the modern tourist may
compare at his leisure in the Boston of to-day. Even the Episcopalians
shared, or deferred to, the prevailing spirit of the time: they put no
cross upon their Christ Church in Cambridge, nearly a hundred and thirty
years after the settlement of the place, lest they should offend the
tastes of their neighbors. The Methodists, the "Christians," the
Swedenborgians, the Unitarians and the Universalists were not yet, and
the Moravians were a small and little-understood body in Eastern
Pennsylvania.
[Illustration: KING'S CHAPEL BOSTON, IN 1872.]
Nearly all the colonists, of whatever name, brought from Europe a
conscientious love of religious simplicity and unpretentiousness: for
the most part, the English-speaking settlers were dissenters from the
Church which owned all the splendid architectural monuments of the
country whence they came; and it was not strange that out of their
religious thought grew churches that symbolized the sturdy qualities of
a faith which, right or wrong, had to endure exile and poverty and
privation--privation not only from social wealth, but from the rich
store of ecclesiastical traditions which had accumulated for centuries
in cathedral choirs and abbey cloisters.
[Illustration: CHRIST CHURCH, BOSTON.]
Therefore, the typical New England meeting-house of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries may perhaps be taken as the best original example
of what America has to show in the way of church-building. To be sure,
its cost was modest, its material was perishable wood, its architectural
design was often a curious medley of old ideas and new uses, and even
its few ornaments were likely to be devoid of the beauty their designers
fancied that they possessed. But it was, at any rate, an honest
embodiment of a sincere idea--the idea of "freedom to worship God;" and
it was adapted to the uses which it was designed to serve. It stood upon
a hill, a square box with square windows cut in its sides--grim without
and grim within, save as the mellowing seasons toned down its ruder
aspects, and green grass and waving boughs framed it as if it were a
picture. Within, the high pulpit, surmounted by a sounding-board,
towered over the square-backed pews, facing a congregation kept orderly
by stern tithing-man and sterner tradition. There was at first neither
organ nor stove nor clock. The shivering congregation warmed itself as
best it might by the aid of foot-stoves; the parson timed his sermon by
an hour-glass; and in the singing-seats the fiddle and the bass--viol
formed the sole link (and an unconscious one) between the simple
song-service of the Puritan meeting-house and the orchestral
accompaniments to the high masses of European cathedrals. The men still
sat at the end of the pew--a custom which had grown up in the days when
they went to the meeting-house gun in hand, not knowing when they should
be hastily summoned forth to fight the Indians. In the earliest days the
drum was the martial summons to worship, but soon European bells sent
forth their milder call. Behind the meeting-houses were the horse-sheds
for the use of distant comers--a species of ecclesiastical edifice still
adorning the greater number of American country churches, and not likely
to disappear for many a year to come.
In the elder day there was no such difference as now between city and
country churches, for the limitations of money and material bore upon
both more evenly. But with growing wealth and the choice of permanent
locations for building came brick and stone; English architects received
orders; and the prevailing revival led by Sir Christopher Wren and his
followers dotted the Northern colonies with more pretentious churches,
boasting spires not wholly unlike those which were then piercing London
skies. With costlier churches of permanent material there came also the
English fashion of burial in churchyards and chancel-vaults, and mural
tablets and horizontal tombstones were laid into the mortar which has
been permitted, in not a few cases, to preserve them for our own eyes.
[Illustration: ST. MICHAEL'S, MARBLEHEAD, MASSACHUSETTS.]
But our oldest churches, as a rule, have been made more notable by the
political events with which they have been associated than by the
honorable interments that have taken place beneath their shadow. Their
connection with the living has endeared them to our memories more than
their relations to the dead. Not because it is Boston's Westminster
Abbey or Temple Church has the Old South been permitted to come down to
us as the best example of the Congregational meeting-houses of the
eighteenth century, but because of the Revolutionary episodes of which
it was the scene, and which are commemorated in the stone tablet upon
its front. The Old South Church, built in 1729, belonged to the common
class of brick structures which replaced wooden ones; for, like
Solomon's temple, its predecessor had been built of cedar sixty years
before. The convenient location of the Old South and the capaciousness
of its interior brought to it the colonial meetings which preceded the
Revolution, and especially that famous gathering of December 13, 1773,
whence marched the disguised patriots to destroy the taxed tea in Boston
harbor. The convenient access and spacious audience-room of the old
church also led to its occupancy as a riding-school for British cavalry
in 1775. Even now, in the quiet days following the recent excitement
attending its escape from fire and from sale and demolition, the ancient
church still finds occasional use as a place for lectures and public
gatherings. Its chequered days within the past decade have at least
served to make its appearance and its part in colonial history more
familiar to us, and have done something to save other churches from the
destruction which might have overtaken them.
As the Old South stands as the brick-and-mortar enshrinement of the best
Puritan thought of the eighteenth century, so King's Chapel in Boston,
built twenty-five years later, represents the statelier social customs
and the more conservative political opinions of the early New England
Episcopalians. Its predecessor, of wood, was the first building of the
Church of England in New England. The present King's Chapel, with its
sombre granite walls and its gently-lighted interior, suggests to the
mind an impression of independence of time rather than of age. One reads
on the walls, to be sure, such high-sounding old names as Vassall and
Shirley and Abthorp, and on a tomb in the old graveyard near by one sees
the inscriptions commemorating Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts
and his son John, governor of Connecticut. But King's Chapel seems the
home of churchly peace and gracious content; so that, as we sit within
its quaint three-sided pews, it is hard to remember the stormy scenes in
which it has had part. Its Tory congregation, almost to a man, fled from
its walls when the British general, Gage, evacuated Boston; the sterner
worshippers of the Old South occupied its Anglican pews for a time; and
later it was the scene of a theological movement which caused, in 1785,
the first Episcopal church in New England--or rather its remnant--to
become the first Unitarian society in America.
In Salem street, Boston, left almost alone at the extreme north end of
the city, is Christ Church, built in 1723. Its tower contains the oldest
chime of bells in America, and from it, according to some antiquarians,
was hung the lantern which on April 18, 1775, announced to the waiting
Paul Revere, and through him to the Middlesex patriots in all the
surrounding country, that General Gage had despatched eight hundred men
to seize and destroy the military stores gathered at Concord by the
Massachusetts Committees of Safety and Supplies. Thus opened the
Revolutionary war, for the battles at Lexington and Concord took place
only the next day.
The white-spired building at the corner of Park and Tremont streets,
Boston, known as the Park Street Church, is hardly so old as its
extended fame would lead one to suppose, for it dates no farther back
than the first quarter of the present century. Its position as the
central point of the great theological controversies of 1820 in the
Congregational churches of Eastern Massachusetts has made it almost as
familiar as the "Saybrook Platform." The meeting-house was built at the
time when the greater part of the Boston churches were modifying their
creeds, and when the Old South itself would have changed its
denominational relations but for the vote of a State official, cast to
break a tie. Its inelegance and rawness are excused in part by its
evident solidity and sincerity of appearance. In its shadow rest
Faneuil, Revere, Samuel Adams and John Hancock.
Boston has other churches which, like the Park Street, are neither
ancient nor modern, the Hollis Street Church and the First Church in
Roxbury being good examples. New England has hardly a better specimen of
the old-fashioned meeting-house on a hill than this old weather-beaten
wooden First Church in Roxbury, the home of a parish to which John
Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, once ministered. Another quaint
memorial of the old colonial days survives in the current name,
"Meeting-house Hill," of a part of the annexed Dorchester district of
Boston.
[Ilustration: ST. PAUL'S CHAPEL, NEW YORK.]
St. Paul's Church, on Boston Common, was the first attempt of the
Episcopalians of the city, after the loss of King's Chapel,
to build a temple of imposing appearance. Controversies theological and
architectural rose with its walls, and young Edward Everett, if report
is to be credited, was the author of a tract, still in circulation, in
which its design and its principles formed the text for a criticism on
the religion to whose furtherance it was devoted. Standing as it does
next the United States court-house, the uses of the two buildings seem
to have been confused in the builders' minds; for there is something
ecclesiastical in the appearance of the hall of justice, which was
originally a Masonic temple, and something judicial in the face of the
church.
In Cambridge, three miles from Boston, the eighteenth-century
Episcopalians not only possessed a church, but also displayed to
unwilling eyes a veritable "Bishop's Palace"--the stately house of the
Rev. East Apthorp, "missionary to New England" and reputed candidate for
the bishopric of that region. Mr. Apthorp was rich and influential, but
his social and ecclesiastical lot was not an easy one, and he soon
returned to England discouraged, leaving his "palace" to come down to
the view of our own eyes, which find in it nothing more dangerous to
republican institutions than is to be discovered in a hundred other of
the three-story wooden houses which used so to abound in Massachusetts.
Christ Church, Cambridge, in which the bishop _in posse_ used to
minister, and which stands opposite Harvard College, was designed by the
architect of King's Chapel, and has always been praised for a certain
shapely beauty of proportion. For the last twenty years it has boasted
the only chime of bells in Cambridge, whose quiet shades of a Sunday
evening have been sweetly stirred by the music struck from them by the
hands of a worthy successor of the mediæval bell-ringers, to whom bells
are books, and who can tell the story of every ounce of bell-metal
within twenty miles of his tower. It was of this church, with its
Unitarian neighbor just across the ancient churchyard where so many old
Harvard and colonial worthies sleep, that Holmes wrote:
Like sentinel and nun, they keep
Their vigil on the green:
One seems to guard, and one to weep,
The dead that lie between.
The suburbs of Boston are not poor in churches of the eighteenth, or
even of the seventeenth, century. The oldest church in New England--the
oldest, indeed, in the Northern States--still standing in Salem, was
built in 1634, and its low walls and tiny-paned windows have shaken
under the eloquence of Roger Williams. It has not been used for
religious purposes since 1672. In Newburyport is one of the American
churches, once many but now few, in which George Whitefield preached,
and beneath it the great preacher lies buried. A curious little reminder
of St. Paul's, London, is found here in the shape of a whispering
gallery. Another landmark is the venerable meeting-house of the
Unitarian society in Hingham, popularly known as the "Old Ship." Built
in 1681, it was a Congregational place of worship for nearly a century
and a half. Its sturdiness and rude beauty form a striking illustration
of the lasting quality of good, sound wooden beams as material for the
sanctuary. Preparations have already been undertaken for celebrating the
second centennial of the ancient building. Nearly as old, and still more
picturesque with its quaint roof, its venerable hanging chandelier of
brass, its sober old reredos and its age-hallowed communion-service, is
St. Michael's, Marblehead, built in 1714, where faithful rectors have
endeavored to reach six generations of the fishermen and aristocracy of
the rocky old port. The antiquarian who has seen these old temples and
asks for others on the New England coast will turn with scarcely less
interest to St. John's, Portsmouth; the forsaken Trinity Church,
Wickford, Rhode Island, built in 1706; or Trinity, Newport, where Bishop
Berkeley used to preach. In Newport, indeed, one may also speculate
beneath the Old Mill on the fanciful theory that the curious little
structure was a baptistery long before the days of Columbus--the most
ancient Christian temple on this side the sea.
It is not uncommon to find comparatively new American churches to which
their surroundings or their sober material or their quiet architecture
have given a somewhat exaggerated appearance of age. Such is the case
with the curious row of three churches--the North and Centre
Congregational and Trinity Episcopalstanding side by side on the New
Haven green in a fashion unknown elsewhere in our own country. Any one
of these three churches looks quite as old as that shapely memorial of
pre-Revolutionary days, St. Paul's Chapel, New York, built in 1766 in
the prevailing fashion of the London churches. As with St. Paul's, there
was also no marked appearance of antiquity in the North Dutch Church,
New York, removed in recent years. The poor old Middle Dutch Church in
the same city, with its ignoble modern additions and its swarm of busy
tenants, would have looked old if it could have done so, but for modern
New Yorkers it has no more venerable memory, in its disfigurement and
disguise, than that furnished by its use, for a time, as the city
post-office.
[Illustration: OLD SWEDES' CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA.]
New York is poor in old buildings, and especially poor in old churches.
Besides St. Paul's, the comparatively modern St. John's Chapel and the
John Street Methodist Church, it really has nothing to show to the
tourist in search of ancient places of worship. The vicinity can boast a
few colonial temples--the quaint old Dutch church at Tarrytown, dear to
the readers of Irving; the Tennent Church on the battle-ground of
Monmouth, New Jersey, with its blood-stains of wounded British soldiers;
and a charmingly plain little Friends' meeting-house, no bigger than a
small parlor, near Squan, New Jersey, being the most strikingly
attractive. In Newark one notes the deep-set windows and solid stone
walls of the old First Presbyterian Church, and the quiet plainness of
Trinity Episcopal Church, which looks like Boston's King's Chapel, with
the addition of a white wooden spire.
Philadelphia is richer than any other American city in buildings of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the older streets it is a
frequent sight to see quaint little houses of imported English brick
modestly laid in alternate red and black, curiously like the latest
modern fashion. The ample room for growth possessed by this
widespreading city has saved many an ancient house for present use as
dwelling or store. One is not surprised, therefore, to find on the old
streets near the Delaware three churches of weather-stained brick which
seem trying to make the piety of an elder age useful to the worshippers
of to-day. All three of these churches--Gloria Dei, Christ and St.
Peter's--now have their chief work among the poor people whom one always
finds in a business quarter near the river-front, but each attracts, by
its old-time associations and its modern missionary spirit, a goodly
circle of attendants from the western parts of the city. Gloria Dei
Church, the oldest of the three, was built in 1700 by Swedish Lutherans
on the spot where the Swedish predecessors of the Friends had located
their fortified log church twenty-three years earlier. Its bell and
communion-service and some of its ornamental woodwork were presented by
the king of Sweden. It is surrounded by the usual graveyard, in which
lies Alexander Wilson, the lover and biographer of birds, who asked to
be buried here, in a "silent, shady place, where the birds will be apt
to come and sing over my grave." The Old Swedes' Church retained its
Lutheran connection until recent years, when it became an Episcopal
parish.
Christ Church and St. Peter's were formerly united in one parochial
government, and to the two parishes ministered William White, the first
Church-of-England minister in Pennsylvania, the friend and pastor of
Washington, the chaplain of Congress and one of the first two bishops of
the American Church. The present structure of Christ Church was begun in
1727, but not finished for some years. The parish is older, dating from
1695. Queen Anne gave it a communion-service in 1708. In 1754 came from
England its still-used chime of bells, which were laboriously
transferred during the Revolution to Allentown, Pennsylvania, lest they
should fall into British hands and be melted up for cannon. At Christ
Church a pew was regularly occupied by Washington during his frequent
residence in Philadelphia; and here have been seated Patrick Henry,
Benjamin Franklin, James Madison and many another patriot, besides
Cornwallis, Howe, André and others on the English side. Around and
beneath the church are many graves covered by weather-worn stones, and
on the walls of the interior there are a number of mural tablets.
St. Peter's Church was begun in 1758, and completed three years later.
In quiet graciousness of appearance it is like another Christ Church,
and its interior arrangements are still more quaint, the chancel being
at the eastern end of the church, while the pulpit and lectern are at
the western. In the adjoining churchyard is a monument to Commodore
Decatur.
One cannot find in all America sweeter and quainter memorials of a
gentle past--memorials still consecrated to the gracious work of the
present--than the churches and other denominational houses in the old
Moravian towns of Pennsylvania. At Bethlehem, as one stands in the
little three-sided court on Church street and looks up at the heavy
walls, the tiny dormer windows and the odd-shaped belfry which mark the
"Single Sisters' House" and its wings, one may well fancy one's self, as
a travelled visitor has said, in Quebec or Upper Austria. Still more
quaint and quiet is Willow Square, behind this curious house, where,
beneath drooping willow-boughs, one finds one's self beside the door of
the old German chapel, with the little dead-house, the boys' school and
the great and comparatively modern Moravian church near by. Through
Willow Square leads the path to the burying-ground, where lie, beneath
tall trees, long rows of neatly-kept graves, each covered with a plain
flat stone, the men and the women lying on either side of the broad
central path. Several of the ancient Moravian buildings date from the
middle of the last century. The Widows' House stands, opposite the
Single Sisters' Range, and across the street from the large church is
the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies, established in 1749, and by far
the oldest girls' school in the United States.
It was in 1778 that the Single Sisters gave to Pulaski that banner of
crimson, silk which is commemorated in Longfellow's well-known "Hymn of
the Moravian Nuns at Bethlehem." The poem, however, written in the
author's early youth, and preserved for its rare beauty of language and
fine choice of subject, rather than for its historical accuracy, has
done much to perpetuate a wrong idea of the Moravian spirit and ritual.
Mr. Longfellow writes in his first stanza
When the dying flame of day
Through the chancel shot its ray,
Far the glimmering tapers shed
Faint light on the cowled head,
And the censer burning swung,
When before the altar hung
That proud banner, which, with care,
Had been consecrated there;
And the nuns' sweet hymn was heard the while,
Sung low in the dim, mysterious aisle.
But the Moravians know nothing of chancels, tapers, cowled heads,
censers, altars or nuns. Their faith has always been the simplest
Protestantism, their churches are precisely such as Methodists or
Baptists use, and their ritual is plainer than that of the most
"evangelical" Episcopal parish. Their "single sisters' houses," "widows'
houses" and "single brethren's houses"--the last long disused--are
simply arrangements for social convenience or co-operative housekeeping.
Mr. Longfellow's poetic description applies to the Moravian ceremonial
no more accurately than to a Congregational prayer-meeting or a
Methodist "love-feast."
[Illustration: THE MORAVIAN CEMETERY, BETHLEHEM, PENNSYLVANIA.]
Beside the deep and silent waters of the James River in Virginia,
undisturbed by any sound save the flight of birds and the rustle of
leaves, stands all that is left of the first church building erected by
Englishmen in America. A good part of the tower remains, the arched
doorways being still intact, and it seems a pitiable misfortune that the
honestly-laid bricks of the venerable building could not have come down
to our day. But, as it is, this ancient square block of brick forms our
one pre-eminent American ruin. Nothing could be a more solemn monument
of the past than the lonely tower, surrounded by thick branches and
underbrush and looking down upon the few crumbling gravestones still
left at its base. Jamestown, long abandoned as a village, has now become
an island, the action of the waters having at last denied it the
remaining solace of connection with the mainland of the Old Dominion,
of whose broad acres it was once the chief town and the seat of
government--the forerunner of all that came to America at the hands of
English settlers.
In the slumberous old city of Williamsburg, three miles from Jamestown,
stands the Bruton parish church, two hundred and two years old, and
still the home of a parish of sixty communicants. Built of brick, with
small-paned windows and wooden tower, its walls have listened to the
eloquence of the learned presidents of the neighboring William and Mary
College, and its floor has been honored by the stately tread of many a
colonial governor, member of the legislature or Revolutionary patriot;
for Williamsburg was the capital and centre of Virginia until the end of
the eighteenth century, and shared whatever Virginia possessed of
political or personal renown. Washington, of course, was more than once
an attendant at Bruton Church, and so were Jefferson and Patrick Henry
and an honorable host. In the church and in the chapel of William and
Mary College--which the ambitious colonists used to think a little
Westminster Abbey--was the religious home of a good share of what was
stateliest or most honorable in the early colonial life of the South.
Other old churches still dot the Virginia soil--St. John's, Richmond;
Pohick Church, Westmoreland county; Christ Church, Lancaster county; St.
Anne's, Isle of Wight county. Their antiquities, and those of other
ancient sanctuaries of the Old Dominion, have been painstakingly set
forth by Bishop Meade and other zealous chroniclers, and their
attractiveness is increased, in most cases--as at Jamestown--by the
loneliness of their surroundings. Another old church, left in the midst
of sweet country sights and gentle country sounds, is St. James's, Goose
Creek, South Carolina. St. Michael's and St. Philip's at Charleston in
the same State have heard the roar of hostile cannon, but have come
forth unscathed. The demolished Brattle Street Church in Boston was not
the only one of our sacred edifices to be wounded by cannonballs, for
the exigences of the fight more than once, during the Revolution and
the civil war, brought flame and destruction within the altar-rails of
churches North and South.
The growth of the Roman Catholic Church in America has been so recent
that it can show but few historical landmarks. The time-honored
cathedral at St. Augustine, Florida, and the magnificent ruin of the San
José Mission near San Antonio, Texas, and one or two weather-stained
little chapels in the North-west, are nearly all the churches that bring
to us the story of the priestly work of the Roman ecclesiastics during
the colonial days.
We have no State Church, and the different Presidents have made a wide
variety of choice in selecting their places of worship in Washington.
St. John's, just opposite the White House, has been the convenient
Sunday home of some of them: others have followed their convictions in
Methodist, Presbyterian, Unitarian and other churches. But the city of
Washington is itself too young to be able to boast any very ancient
associations in its churches, and few of its temples have been permitted
to record the names of famous occupants during a series of years. Our
whole country, indeed, is a land of many denominations and a somewhat
wandering population; and older cities than Washington have found one
church famous for one event in its history, and another for another,
rather than, in any single building, a series of notable occurrences
running through the centuries. The nearest approach to the record of a
succession of worthies occupying the same church-seats year after year
is to be found in the chronicles of our oldest college-chapels, as, for
instance, at Dartmouth, where the building containing the still-used
chapel dates from 1786. But though poverty and custom unite in making
our colleges conservative, their growth in numbers demands, from time to
time, new and more generous accommodations for public worship; and so
the little buildings of an earlier day are either torn down or kept for
other and more ignoble uses, like Holden Chapel at Harvard. This quaint
little structure was built in 1744, and is now used for
recitation-rooms, but at one period in its career it served as the
workshop of the college carpenter.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE OLD CHURCH-TOWER, JAMESTOWN, VIRGINIA.]
In the years since our grandfathers built their places of worship we
have seen strange changes in American church buildings--changes in
material, location and adaptation to ritual uses. We have had a revival
of pagan temple-building in wood and stucco; we have seen Gothic
cathedrals copied for the simplest Protestant uses, until humorists have
suggested that congregations might find it cheaper to change their
religion than their unsuitable new churches; we have ranged from four
plain brick walls to vast and costly piles of marble or greenstone; we
have constructed great audience-rooms for Sunday school uses alone, and
have equipped the sanctuary with all culinary attachments; we have built
parish-houses whose comfort the best-kept mediæval monk might envy, and
we have put up evangelistic tabernacles only to find the most noted
evangelists preferring to work in regular church edifices rather than in
places of easy resort by the thoughtless crowd of wonder-seekers. But
not all these doings have been foolish or mistaken: some of them have
been most hopeful signs, and the next century will find excellent work
in the church-building of our day. The Gothic and Queen Anne revivals,
at their best, have promoted even more than the old-time honesty in the
use of sound and sincere building-material; and not a few of our newer
churches prove that our ecclesiastical architects have something more to
show than experiments in fanciful "revivals" that are such only in name.
We shall continue to do well so long as we worthily perpetuate the best
material lesson taught by our grandfathers' temples--the lesson of
downright honesty of construction and of a union between the spirit of
worship and its local habitation.
CHARLES F. RICHARDSON.
WILL DEMOCRACY TOLERATE A PERMANENT CLASS OF NATIONAL OFFICE-HOLDERS?
It is no doubt a public misfortune that so much of that thoughtful
patriotism which, both on account of its culture and its independence,
must always be valuable to the country, should have been wasted, for
some time past, upon what are apparently narrow and unpractical, if not
radically unsound, propositions of reform in the civil service. There is
unquestionably need of reform in that direction: it would be too much to
presume that in the generally imperfect state of man his methods of
civil government would attain perfection; but it must be questioned
whether the subject has been approached from the right direction and
upon the side of the popular sympathy and understanding. At this time
propositions of civil-service reform have not even the recognition, much
less the comprehension, of the mass of the people. Their importance,
their limitations, their possibilities, have never been demonstrated: no
commanding intellectual authority has ever taken up the subject and
worked it out before the eyes of the people as a problem of our national
politics. It remains a question of the closet, a merely speculative
proposition as to the science of government.
What, then, are the metes and bounds of this reform? How much is
demanded? How much is practicable?
Not attempting a full answer to all of these questions, and intending no
dogmatic treatment of any, let us give them a brief consideration from
the point of view afforded by the democratic system upon which the whole
political fabric of the United States is established. We are to look at
_our_ civil-service reform from that side. Whatever in it may be
feasible, that much must be a work in accord with the popular feeling.
It may be set down at the outset, as the first principle of the problem,
that any practicable plan of organizing the public service of the United
States must not only be founded upon the general consent of the people,
but must also have, in its actual operation, their continual, easy and
direct participation. Any scheme, no matter by what thoughtful patriot
suggested, no matter upon what model shaped, no matter from what
experience of other countries deduced, which does not possess these
essential features can never be worth the serious attention of any one
who expects to accomplish practical and enduring results.
(Possibly this may seem dogmatic, to begin with; but if we agree to
treat the question as one in democratic politics, the principle stated
becomes perfectly apparent.)
It must be fair, then, and for the purposes of this article not
premature, to point out that the measure which is especially known as
"civil-service reform," and which has been occasionally recognized in
the party platforms along with other generalities, is one whose essence
is _the creation of a permanent office-holding class_. Substantially,
this is what it amounts to. A man looking forward to a place in the
public service is to regard it as a life occupation, the same as if he
should study for a professional career or learn a mechanical trade. Once
in office, after a "competitive examination" or otherwise, he will
expect to stay in: he will hold, as the Federal judges do, by a
life-tenure, "during good behavior." This is now substantially the
system of Great Britain, which, in the judgment of Mr. Dorman B. Eaton,
is so much better than our own as to actually reduce the rate of
criminality in that country, and which, he declares, only political
baseness can prevent us from imitating. A change of administration
there, Mr. Eaton adds, only affects a few scores of persons occupying
the highest positions: the great mass of the officials live and die in
their places, indifferent to the fluctuation of parliamentary
majorities or the rise and fall of ministries.
We must ask ourselves does this system accord with American democracy?
A little more than half a century has passed since John Quincy Adams,
unquestionably the best trained and most experienced American
administrator who ever sat in the Presidency, undertook to establish in
the United States almost precisely the same system as that which Great
Britain now has. Admission to the places was not, it is true, by means
of competitive examination, but the feature--the essential feature--of
permanent tenure was present in his plan. Mr. Adams took the government
from Mr. Monroe without considering any change needful: his Cabinet
advisers even included three of those who had been in the Cabinet of his
predecessor, and these he retained to the end, though at least one of
the three, he thought, had ceased to be either friendly or faithful to
him. Retaining the old officers, and reappointing them if their
commissions expired, selecting new ones, in the comparatively rare cases
of death, resignation or ascertained delinquency, upon considerations
chiefly relating to their personal capabilities for the vacant places,
Mr. Adams was patiently and faithfully engaged during the four years of
his Presidency in establishing almost the precise reform of the national
service which has been in recent times so strenuously urged upon us as
the one great need of the nation--the administrative purification which,
if effectually performed, would prove that our system of government was
fit to continue in existence. Mr. Adams's plan did, indeed, seem
excellent. It commanded the respect of honest but busy citizens absorbed
in their private affairs and desirous that the government might be
fixed, once for all, in settled grooves, so that its functions would
proceed like the steady progress of the seasons. It was an attempt to
run the government, as has been sometimes said, "on business
principles." The President was to proceed, and did proceed, as if he had
in charge some great estate which he was to manage and direct as a
faithful and exact trustee. This, no one can deny, had the superficial
look of most admirable administration.
But President Adams had left out of account largely what we are
compelled to sedulously consider--public opinion. He had acquired most
of his experience abroad, and his principal service at home, as
Secretary of State, had been in a remarkably quiet time, when party
movements were neither ebbing nor flowing, so that he had forgotten how
strong and vigorous the democratic feeling was amongst the population of
these States. This is a forgetfulness to which all men are liable who
long occupy official position, and who seldom have to submit themselves
to that severe and rude competitive examination which the plan of
popular elections establishes. Unfortunately for him, he was not
responsible to a court of chancery for the management of his trust, but
to a tribunal composed of a multitude of judges. His accounts were to be
passed upon not by one learned and conservative auditor guided by
familiar precedents and rules of law, but a great, tumultuous popular
assembly, which would approve or disapprove by a majority vote. When,
therefore, it appeared to the people that he was forming a body of
permanent office-holders--was recruiting a civil army to occupy in
perpetuity the offices which they, the mass, had created and were taxed
to pay for--the fierce, and in many respects scandalous, partisan
assault which Jackson represented, if he did not direct, gathered
overwhelming force. It seemed to the popular view that a narrow, an
exclusive, an aristocratic system was being formed. The President
appeared to be, while honestly and carefully preserving their trust from
waste or loss, committing it to a control independent of them--an
official body which, having a permanent tenure, would be altogether
indifferent to their varying desires. Such a scheme of government was
therefore no more than an attempt to stand the pyramid on its apex: Mr.
Adams's administration, supported chiefly by those whose aspirations
were for an honest and capable bureaucracy, and who could not or would
not face the rude questionings of democracy, ended with his first four
years, and went out in such a whirlwind of partisan opposition as
brought in, by reaction, the infamous "spoils system" that at the end of
half a century we are but partially recovered from.
To designate more particularly the great fact which had been disregarded
in this notable experiment of fifty years ago, and which is apparently
not sufficiently considered in the measures of reform that have been
more recently pressed upon us, we may declare that the government of the
United States is, as yet, the direct outcome of what may be called _the
political activity of the people_. Whether or not, having read history,
we must anticipate a time here when the many, weary of preserving their
own liberties, will resign their power to a few, it is certain that no
such inclination yet appears. The government is the product of the
public mind and will when these are moved with reference to the subject.
It is created freshly at short intervals, and the manner of the creation
is seldom languid or careless, but usually earnest, intense and heated.
Upon this point there has no doubt been much misapprehension. As it has
happened--perhaps rather oddly--that those of our thoughtful patriots
whose warnings and appeals have reached public notice have had their
experiences mostly in city life, surrounded by the peculiar conditions
which exist there, the conclusions they have drawn in some respects are
applicable only to their own surroundings. They have discovered persons
who had forgotten or did not believe that liberty could be bought only
with the one currency of eternal vigilance, and coupled with these
others who were too busy to attend to the active processes by which the
government is from time to time renewed; and they have concluded, with
fatal inaccuracy of judgment, that this exceptional disposition of a
small number of persons was a type of the whole population. Nothing
could be more absurdly untrue. Outside of a very limited circle no such
political fatigue exists. The people generally are deeply interested in
public affairs and willing to attend to their own public duties. Their
concern in regard to measures, methods and candidates is seldom laid
aside. The _political activity_ to which we have called attention thus
at some length is earnest, persistent and exacting.
It will be useful for the reformer of the civil service to give some
study to the manifestations of this activity. He will find it one of the
most marked and characteristic features in the life of the American
people. If he will take the pains to examine the civil organization of
the country, he will find that its roots run to every stratum of
society. The number of persons interested in politics, not as a
speculative subject, but as a practical and personal one, is wonderfully
great. Thus, in most of the States there exists that modification of the
ancient Saxon system of local action by "hundreds"--the township
organization. This alone carries a healthy political movement into the
farthest nook and corner of the body politic: every citizen of common
sense may well be consulted in this primary activity, and every
household may be interested in the question whether its results are good
or bad. But besides this, simple and slightly compensated as are the
positions belonging to the township, there are in every community many
willing to fill them. To be a supervisor of the roads,[1] to be township
constable and collector of the taxes, to audit the township accounts, to
be a member of the school board, to be a justice of the peace, is an
inclination--it may be a desire--entertained by many citizens; and if
the ambition may seem to be a narrow one, its modesty does not make it
unworthy or discreditable. But these men alone, active in the politics
of townships, form a surprising array. If we consider that in
Pennsylvania there are sixty-seven counties, with an average of say
forty townships in each, here are twenty-six hundred and eighty
townships, having each not less than ten officials, and making nearly
twenty-seven thousand persons actually on duty at one time in a single
State in this fundamental branch of the service. And if we estimate that
besides those who are in office at least two persons are inclined and
willing, if not actually desirous, to occupy the place now filled by
each one--a very moderate calculation--we multiply twenty-six thousand
eight hundred by three, and have over eighty thousand persons whose minds
are quick and active in local politics on this one account. But we may
proceed further. There are the cities and boroughs, their official
business more complex and laborious, and in most cases receiving much
higher compensation. The competition for these is in many instances very
great: in the case of large cities we need not waste words in
elaborating the fact. It is difficult to estimate the number of persons
to whom the municipal corporations give place and pay compensation in
the State of Pennsylvania, but five thousand is not an extravagant
surmise, while it would be equally reasonable to presume that for each
place occupied at least three others would be willing to fill it, so
that on this account we may make a total of twenty thousand. But there
are also the county offices. Besides the judicial positions, altogether
honorable, held by long terms of election and receiving liberal
compensation, there are in each county an average of fifteen other
officials, making in the State, in round numbers, one thousand. These,
again, may be multiplied by four: there are certainly three waiting
aspirants for each place. But ascend now to the State system, with its
several executive departments, the legislature, the charitable and penal
institutions and the appointments in the gift of the governor. Great and
small, these may reach one thousand (the Legislature alone, with its
officers and employés, accounts for over three hundred), and certainly
there are at least five persons looking toward each of the several
places.
Upon such an estimate, then, of the political activities of one State we
have such a showing as this:
Citizens politically active as to townships, 80,000
Citizens politically active as to cities and boroughs, 20,000
Citizens politically active as to counties, 4,000
Citizens politically active as to the State, 5,000
Making a total of 109,000
Some allowance should be made, no doubt, for persons whose inclinations
for position cover all the different fields--who may be said to be
watching several holes. But we have not considered how many citizens of
Pennsylvania are inclined to national positions--the Presidency, seats
in Congress or some of the numerous places in the general service of the
Federal government. These two classes, it is probable, would offset each
other.
Subtracting, however, the odd thousands from the total stated, we may
fix at one hundred thousand the number of citizens in the one State who,
by reason of occupying some position of public duty or of being inclined
to fill one, are actively interested in the subject of politics. This is
almost exactly one-seventh of the whole number of voters in the State:
it presents the fact that in every group of seven citizens there is one,
presumably of more than the average in capacity and intelligence, whose
mind is quick and sensitive to every question affecting political
organization. We are brought thus to the same point which we reached by
an observation of the township system--the fact that every part of
society is permeated by the general political circulation. It is like
the human organism: nerves and blood-vessels extend, with size and
capacity proportioned for their work, to the most remote extremity, and
the whole is alive.
Let us, however, guard strictly, at this point, against a possible
misconception. It is not to be understood that these one hundred
thousand citizens are simply "office-seekers," using the ordinary and
offensive sense of the term. The activity in affairs which we describe
is distinct from a sordid desire to grab the emoluments of office. The
vast majority of the places, including all those in the
townships--which, with the aspirants to them, make four-fifths of the
whole--are either without any pay at all or have an amount so small as
to be beneath our consideration. But a small part of the offices which
we have enumerated carry emoluments sufficient to furnish a living for
the most economical incumbent. The inspiration of the political
interest evidenced by this one-seventh part of the citizenship is not an
unworthy one at all: on the contrary, it is that essential democratic
inclination without which our form of government must quickly stagnate.
It would be foolish to say that no selfish motive enters into this
tremendous manifestation of energy and effort (until humanity assumes a
higher form the moving power of the mercenary principle must be very
great), but it is fair and it is accurate to ascribe to the men in
affairs a much loftier and more honorable impulse--the aspiration to
share in the conduct of their own government, the unwillingness to be
ignored or excluded in the administration of what is universally
denominated a common trust. That they enjoy, if they do not covet, such
pecuniary advantage as their places bring is reasonable, but it is true,
to their credit, that they do appreciate more than this the honor that
attaches to the public station and the pleasure which may be experienced
in the discharge of its conspicuous duties.
Let us presume that even this imperfect study of the political
activities of a single State may present some conception of the
tremendous force and energy that go to the making, year by year, of the
various branches of our government. Certainly, any student of this field
may accept with respect the admonition that there is no languor, no
fatigue, no feeling of genteel disgust with politics, in what has thus
been presented him. If, then, his plan of reorganization for the civil
service is intended to be set up without consulting the popular
inclination, or possibly even in opposition to it, he may well stand
hesitant as to his likelihood of success. The question may confront him
at once: Is the organization of a permanent official class in the
administration of the general government likely to accord with the
desires of the people? And we may add, Is it consistent with the general
character of our form of government? Is it not attended by conclusive
objections?
It is not the purpose of this article to attempt answering these
questions fully. We do not propose to throw ourselves across the path
of those undoubtedly sincere, and probably wise, students of this
subject who have arrived at the positive conclusion that to establish a
permanent tenure for the great body of the national office-holders, and
to appoint to vacancies among them upon the tests of a competitive or
other examination, is the panacea for all our public disorders, the
regenerative process which will lift our whole system into a higher and
purer atmosphere. We do not say that these gentlemen may not be right,
but we are willing to examine the subject.
Upon viewing, then, the tremendous popular activity in local and State
affairs--and we must reflect that there is "more politics to the square
foot" in some of the newer States than there is in Pennsylvania--the
inquiry is natural whether this stops short of all national politics.
Certainly it does not. The offices in the general government, though
their importance and their influence are usually overestimated, are a
great object of attention with the whole country. The vehement
democratic movement toward them that marked the time of Jackson is still
apparent, though it proceeds with diminished force and is regulated and
tempered by the strong protest which has been made against the scandals
of the "spoils system," and against the theory that government by
parties must be a continual struggle for plunder. It is noticeable that
no administration has ever really attempted the formation of an
irremovable body of officials. No party has ever yet explicitly declared
itself in favor of such a policy. No actual leader of any party, bearing
the responsibility of its success or failure in the elections, has ever
yet sincerely and persistently advocated the measure. None wish to
undertake so tremendous a task. He would indeed be a powerful orator who
could carry a popular gathering with him in favor of the proposition
that hereafter the holding of office was to be made more exclusive--that
the people were to put away from themselves, by a renunciation of their
own powers, the expectancy of occupying a great part of the public
places. Rare as may be the persuasive ability of the true stump-orator,
and serene as his confidence may be in his powers, there would be but
few volunteers to enter a campaign upon such a platform as that. It
would be a forlorn hope indeed.
The view of the people undoubtedly is (1) that the public places are
common property; (2) that any one may aspire to fill them; and (3) that
the elevation to them is properly the direct or nearly direct result of
election. The elective principle is democratic. It has been, since the
beginning of the government, steadily consuming all other methods of
making public officers. In most States the appointing power of the
governor, which years ago was usually large, has been stripped to the
uttermost. It is thirty years in Pennsylvania since even the judiciary
became elective by the people. And in those States--of which Delaware
furnishes an example--where most of the county officers are still the
appointees of the governor, the tendency to control his action by a
display of the popular wish--such an array of petitions, etc. as amounts
to a polling of votes--is unmistakable. The governor is moved,
obviously, by the people. And if to some this general tendency toward
the elective idea seems dangerous, it must be answered that it is not
really so if the people are in fact capable of self-government.
Conceding this as the foundation of our system, we cannot, at this point
and that, expect to interpose a guardianship over their expression.
To the permanency of tenure it is that we have given, and expect will
generally be given, most attention. This is the essence of the proposed
"reform." The manner of selecting new appointees is of no great
consequence if the vacancies are to occur so seldom as must be the case
where incumbents hold for life. Whether the new recruits come in upon
the certificates of a board of examiners, such as the British
Civil-Service Commission, or upon the scrutiny of the Executive and his
advisers, as now, is a consideration of minor importance. It is the idea
of an official class, an order of office-holders, which appears to throw
itself across the path of the democratic activity which we have
attempted to describe. This is the point of conflict--if any. We might,
it is true, take many measures to ensure the colorless and harmless
character of the system. Up to a recent time the government clerks in
England were deprived of the suffrage, in order that they might be
perfectly indifferent to politics. It is probable that in time our own
officials would lose the ordinary instincts of a democratic citizenship,
and would regard with coldness, if not contempt, the activities that
lead to a renewal of the government. But however smoothly they might
move in the pursuance of their clerical routine, however faultless they
might become in their round of prescribed duties, would they not still
obstruct the public purpose? Would not even this emasculate order of
placemen, standing apart a sacrificed though favored class, still
present themselves as unpardonable offenders? When it should be
discovered that they claimed the possession in perpetuity of the offices
in the national government, and had organized themselves as a standing
army of placemen, can it be believed that they would not be swept aside
by the same iconoclastic onset which ended the Adams administration?
We do not pause here to represent the apparent inconsistency of desiring
to de-citizenize a large number of intelligent members of the community,
or the risk of creating a class in the republic forbidden to take any
active interest in the renewals of its organization, or the impolicy of
diminishing the force and courage of the popular will in its grapple
with the problem of self-government; but all these comments may suggest
themselves.
Popular expectancy, it may fairly be declared, follows all the stations
of public life with a jealous if not an eager eye. There is abundant
evidence of this in the county and township systems. Taking, for
example, the administration of county affairs in any of the States, it
will be found that the officers, by a rule that seems generally
satisfactory, hold during short terms, and are seldom re-elected
immediately to the same place. The rule is rotation--giving a large
number of persons their "turn"--and changes are regularly made. A man
disappointed this year for a particular place waits until the time comes
to fill it again, and in many counties, other things being about equal,
the fact that he has waited patiently and now presents the oldest claim
governs the selection. The antipathy to one who seeks to hold on to his
place beyond the ordinary term--the dislike for a grabber who desires
more than is usually assigned--is a perfectly well-known feature in
politics. The county system of Pennsylvania will afford abundant proof
of the statements here made: the terms of the officers, who are all
elective, do not average more than four years, even including such
court-officials as the clerks and prothonotaries, whose duties are in
some particulars technical and difficult, requiring an acquaintance with
the forms of legal procedure. But it is further true that in the States
where county officers are appointed by the governor no protracted tenure
results. On the contrary, the pressure upon him of the public
expectation seldom permits the reappointment of an officer whose
commission is expiring.
With this rule of change, primary as its application is, and within the
direct comprehension and control of the people, there does not appear to
be any general discontent. It is accepted, so far as we can discover, as
a just and proper system by which an equality of claims upon the common
favor is maintained. It is reasonable to presume, therefore, that
amongst a people fairly acquainted with their own business, and
possessing a fair education both of the schools and of experience in
life, many persons in every community are competent to serve as its
officials. At any rate, in the midst of these usages we discover no
demand that the terms of office be made permanent, and that the
place-holders be put beyond the reach of a removal. There is no apparent
realization that such a "reform" is demanded; and if it be difficult, as
has been stated, to awaken popular enthusiasm in behalf of a permanent
tenure in the national civil service, there seems to be nothing in the
rules of primary politics to help smooth the way.
It may be asked now whether it is not almost certainly true that some
sound principle lies in the methods which an intelligent community,
unrestrained by ancient conventional ideas or repressive systems of law,
applies to its own political organization. Is not this instinctive
democratic plan an essential principle of a government founded upon
equal rights? _Is it not a law of Change which characterizes the civil
service of a democracy, and not a law of Permanence?_
We can hardly doubt that the facts which have been stated concerning the
disposition of the people toward the offices in their government are
capable of a philosophical explanation; and as they proceed with evident
freedom and naturalness from the very bosom of communities accustomed to
independent thought and action, the conclusion is irresistible that this
is the temper and the tendency of a free government. Startling as it may
be to propose change rather than permanency in the civil service, that
may prove to be best adapted to our wants. Consciously or not, such a
rule has been established by the people themselves; and while it has
scarcely found a formal presentation, much less had careful examination
and argument, there can be little doubt that such a principle,
substantially as we have described, lies close to the hearts of the
people. The right of election, the idea that public officers should be
elective, and the expectation that there will be a rotation of duties
and honors, are popular principles which are unmistakable.
Apart from the consideration that whatever is fundamental in popular
government, whatever tends to the preservation of individual freedom and
equality of rights, must be a safe principle, there could be much said
from the most practical stand-point in favor of rotation in office. All
human experience proves the usefulness of change. Rest is the next thing
to rust. In physics things without motion are usually things without
life; and in government it is the bureaus least disturbed by change that
are most stagnated and most circumlocutory. The apparent misfortune of
having men experienced in public affairs make way, at intervals, for
others of less experience is itself greatly exaggerated. There are facts
so important in compensation that the assumed evil becomes one of very
moderate proportions. For it will be seen upon careful observation that
no important function of the government, not even in the national
service, calls for a character or qualification--sometimes, but rarely,
for any sort of special or technical skill--which is not being
continually formed and trained either in the movements of private life
and business experience or in the political schools which are furnished
by the State, the county and the township. The functions of the
government are substantially the guardianship of the same interests for
which the State, the county, the township and the individual exercise
concern. Government has lost its mystery: even diplomacy has somewhat
changed from lying and chicanery to common-sense dealing. The qualities
that are required in the government--industry, economy, integrity,
knowledge of men and affairs--are precisely those which are of value to
every individual citizen, and which are taught day by day everywhere--to
the lads in school and college and to the men in their occupations of
life. Such qualities a community fit to govern itself must abundantly
possess. There is nothing occult in the science of government. The
administration in behalf of the people of the organization which they
have ordered is nothing foreign to their own knowledge. They have ceased
to consider themselves unfit for self-rule: they no longer think of
calling in from other worlds a different order of beings to govern them.
We may accept without fear principles which seem startling, but which
are proved to be rooted in democratic ground, so long as we have faith
in the democratic system itself. There is no road open for the doubter
and questioner of popular rights but that which leads back to abandoned
ground. We may proceed, then, with an attempt to explain the philosophy
of the rule of Change. Shall it not be stated thus:
_That, due regard being had to the preservation of simplicity and
economy--forbidding thus the needless increase of offices and
expenses--it is then true that the active participation by the largest
number of persons in the practical administration of their own
government is an object highly to be desired in every democratic
republic._
The government must be the highest school of affairs. Shall it be
declared that to study there and to have its diploma is not desirable
for all? Is it not perfectly evident that the more who can learn to
actually discharge the duties belonging to their own social
organization, the better for them and the better for it?
All these propositions necessarily imply the existence of an intelligent
and patriotic people, at least of such a majority. So always does every
plan of popular government. Whatever of disappointment presents itself
to the author of any scheme of "reform," upon finding that he has
constructed a system which is ridden down by the political activity of
the people, he must blame the plan upon which our fabric is built. If he
is chagrined to find that his _imperium in imperio_ is not practicable,
and that nothing can make here a power stronger than the source of
power, he must solace his hurt feelings with the reflection that the
system was never adapted to his contrivance, and that our fathers, when
in the beginning they resolved to establish a government by the people,
gave consent thereby to all the apparent risks and inconveniences of
having the people continually minding their own affairs.
With a just comprehension of the democratic forces that give motion and
life to the governmental system of the United States, and of the manner
in which they affect the public service in all its departments, the wise
advocate of reform must approach his work. His patriotism and
thoughtfulness are both necessary. To proceed against the democratic law
is not practicable: to establish a new system which is inconsistent with
the abundant vitality and conscious strength of that already established
is a futile proposition indeed.
THE PRICE OF SAFETY.
Thirty-three years ago--that is, shortly before Christmas, 1847--I went
over to Paris to pass a few weeks with my family. The great railway
schemes of the two previous years in England had broken down a good many
men in our office--draughtsmen, surveyors and so on. I wonder if the
present public recollects those days, when the _Times_ brought out
double supplements to accommodate the advertisements of railroads, when
King Hudson was as much a potentate as Queen Victoria, when Brunel and
Stephenson were autocrats, and when everybody saw a sudden chance of
getting rich by shares or damages? Those days were the beginning of that
period of prosperity of which the recent "hard times" were the reaction.
_Then_ twenty guineas a night for office-work was sometimes paid to
youngsters not yet out of their teens. In the great offices the young
men worked all day and the alternate nights to get plans ready for
Parliament, sustained by strong coffee always on the tap, till some of
them went mad with the excitement and the strain.
I had worked hard both in the field and office during the closing months
of 1847, but I broke down at last, and was sent to recover my health
under the care of my family. That family consisted of my father--a
half-pay English officer--my mother and three sisters, then living _au
troisième_ in the Rue Neuve de Berri, not far from the newly-erected
Russian church, and the windows of the _appartement_ commanded a side
view down the Champs Élysées. I only needed rest and recreation, both of
which my adoring family eagerly provided me. My sisters were three
lively, simple-hearted, honest English girls, who had a large
acquaintance in Paris, and took great pride and pleasure in introducing
to it their only brother. We were not only invited to our embassy and on
visiting terms with all the English Colony (that colony whose annals at
that period are written in _The Adventures of Philip_, and to which
Thackeray's mother and nearest relatives, like ourselves, belonged), but
we were, in virtue of some American connections, admitted to the
American embassy on the footing of semi-Americans.
We enjoyed our American friends greatly. I formed the opinion then,
which I retain now, that cultivated Americans, the top-skimming of the
social cream, are some of the most charming people to be met with in
cultivated society. To all that constitutes "nice people" everywhere
they join a _soupçon_ of wild flavor which gives them individuality.
They are to society what their own wild turkeys and canvasbacks are to
the _menu_.
One of my sisters, Amy, the eldest, had been ill that winter, and was
not equal to joining in the gayeties that the others enjoyed. Her
principal amusement was walking in the Gardens of Monceaux, a private
domain of King Louis Philippe in the Batignolles, a quiet, humdrum spot,
where she could set her foot upon green turf and gravel. The streets of
Paris, the Boulevards, and the Champs Élysées were too attractive to a
pleasure-seeker like myself to allow me to content myself with the pale
attractions of Monceaux, but I went there with my sister once or twice,
because French etiquette forbade her walking even in these quiet
garden-paths alone.
One day it was proposed by her that we should go again. I could not, in
common humanity, refuse, and so consented. Poor Amy "put on her things,"
as our girls called it, and we descended to the porte-cochère, intending
to engage the first passing citadine. As we stepped into the street,
however, a gay carriage with high-stepping gray horses, a chasseur with
knife and feathers, and a coachman in a modest livery on a hammer-cloth
resplendent with yellow fringes and embroideries, drew up at our door: a
pretty hand was laid upon the portière and a voice cried, "Amy! Amy! I
was coming for you."
"My brother--Miss Leare," said Amy.
Miss Leare bowed to me gracefully and motioned to her chasseur to open
the carriage-door. "Get in," she said. "_I_ have the carriage for two
hours: what shall we do with it? Mamma is at the dentist's.--Amy, I
thought you would enjoy a drive, and so I came for you."
I helped Amy in, and was making my bow when Miss Leare stopped me. "Come
too," she said cordially: "Amy's brother surely need not be taboo. Shall
we drive to the Bois?"
"I was going to Monceaux," said Amy. "Would it be quite the thing for us
to drive alone to the Bois?"
"Oh-h-h!" said Miss Leare, prolonging her breath upon the
vocative.--"You see," she added, turning to me, "I am so unprepared by
previous training that I shall never become _au fait_ in French
proprieties. Indeed, I hold them in great reverence, but they seem to be
for ever hedging me in; nor can I understand the meaning of half of
them. In America I was guided by plain right and wrong.--Why shall we
not outrage etiquette, Amy, by 'going alone,' as you call it, to
Monceaux? Is it that the place is so stiff and solemn and out of the way
that we may walk there without a chaperon? I should have thought
seclusion made a place more dangerous, allowing that there be any danger
at all.--In America, Mr. Farquhar, your escort would be enough for us,
and the fact that Amy is your sister would give a sort of double
security to your protection."
"Oh, dear Miss Leare--" began Amy.
"Hermie, Amy--Hermione, which is English and American for Tasso's
Erminia.--Do you like my name, Mr. Farquhar? We have strange names in
America, English people are pleased to say.--Victor!" she went on,
calling to the chasseur without pausing for any reply, "stop at some
place where they sell candy. Mr. Farquhar will get out and buy us some."
Obediently to her order, we stopped at a confectioner's. I was directed
to put my hand into the carriage-pocket, where I should find some
"loose change," kept there for candy and the hurdy-gurdy boys. Then I
was directed to go into the "store" and choose a pound of all sorts of
"mixed candy."
I had not more than made myself intelligible to a young person behind
the counter when the carriage-door was opened and both the girls came
in, Miss Hermione declaring that she knew I should be embarrassed by the
multitude of "sweeties," and that I should need their experience to know
what I was about.
With dawdling, laughing and good-comradeship we chose our bonbons, and
getting back into the barouche we proceeded to crunch them as we drove
on to Monceaux. It was like being children over again, with a slight
sense of being out of bounds. I had never seen confectionery eaten
wholesale in that fashion. Such bonbons were expensive, too. Trained in
the personal economy of English middle-class life, it would never have
occurred to me to buy several francs' worth of sugar-plums and to eat
them by the handful. But as the fair American sat before me, smiling,
laughing, petting Amy and saying fascinating impertinences to myself, I
thought I had never seen so bewitching a creature. Her frame, though
_svelte_ and admirably proportioned, gave me an idea of vigor and
strength not commonly associated at that time with the girls of America.
Her complexion, too, was healthy: she was not so highly colored as an
English country girl, but her skin was bright and clear. Her face was a
perfect oval, her hair glossy and dark, her eyes expressive hazel. Her
points were all good: her ears, her hands, her feet, her upper lip and
nostrils showed blood, and the daintiness and taste of her rich dress
seemed to denote her good taste and fine breeding. My sisters, could not
tie their bonnet-strings as she tied hers, nor were their dresses
anything like hers in freshness, fit or daintiness of trimming.
We alighted at last at old Monceaux, and walked about its solemn alleys.
Sometimes Miss Leare talked sense, and talked it well. Those were
exciting days in Paris. It was February, 1848, and a great crisis was
nearer at hand in politics than we suspected; besides which there had
been several events in private life which had increased the general
excitement of the period--notably the murder of Marshal Sebastiani's
daughter, the poor duchesse de Praslin. Hermione could talk of these
things with great spirit, but sometimes relapsed into her grown-up
childishness. She talked, too, with animation of the freedom and
happiness of her American girlhood. My sister Amy had always taken life
_au grand sérieux_; Ellen was a little too prompt to flirt with officers
and gay young men, and needed repression; Lætitia went in for
book-learning, and measured every one by what she called their
"educational opportunities." My sisters were as different as possible
from this butterfly creature, who seemed to sip interest and amusement
out of everything.
At the end of two hours we drove back to Mrs. Leare's hôtel, which was
opposite our own apartment in the Rue Neuve de Berri, the hôtel that a
few weeks later was occupied by Prince Jerome. Here Hermione insisted
upon our coming in while the carriage drove to the dentist's for her
mother.
The reception-rooms in Mrs. Leare's hôtel were very showy. They were
filled with buhl and knick-knacks gathered on all parts of the
Continent, and lavishly displayed, not always in good keeping. A little
sister, Claribel, came running up to us when we entered, and clung
fondly to Hermione, who sat down at the Erard grand piano and sang to
us, without suggestion, a gay little French song. She was taking
lessons, Amy afterward told me, of the master most in vogue in Paris and
of all others the most expensive. Amy, who could sing well herself,
disparaged Hermione's voice to me, and sighed as she thought of the
waste of those inestimable lessons.
Then Miss Hermione lifted the top of an ormolu box on the chimney-piece
of a boudoir and showed Amy and me, under the rose as it were, some
cigarettes, with a laugh. "Mamma's," she said: "she has a _faiblesse_
that way."
"Oh, Hermione! you don't?" cried Amy.
"No, _I_ don't," said Hermione more gravely.
I was so amused by her, so fascinated, so completely at my ease with
her, that I could have stayed on without taking note of time had not Amy
remembered that it was our dinner-hour. We took our leave, and met Mrs.
Leare on the staircase ascending to her apartment. She greeted Amy with
as much effusion as was compatible with her ideas of fashion, and said
she was "right glad" to hear we had been passing the morning with
Hermione.
"I wish you would come very often. I like her to see English girls: you
do her so much good, Amy.--Mr. Farquhar, we shall hope to see you often
too. I have a little reception here every Sunday evening."
With that she continued her course up stairs, and we descended to the
porte-cochère.
She was a faded woman, "dressed to death," as Amy phrased it, and none
of my people had a good word for her.
"The Leares are rolling in riches, I believe," remarked my father, "and
an American who is rich has no hereditary obligations to absorb his
wealth, so that it becomes all 'spending-money,' as Miss Hermione says.
The head of the family--King Leare I call him--stays at home in some
sort of a counting-room in New York and makes money, giving Mrs. Leare
and Miss Hermione _carte blanche_ to spend it on any follies they
please. I never heard anything exactly wrong concerning Mrs. Leare, but
she does not seem to me the woman to be trusted with that very nice
young daughter. I feel great pity for Miss Leare."
"Miss Leare has plenty of sense and character," said my mother: "I do
not think her mother's queer surroundings seem to affect her in any way.
She moves among the Frenchmen, Poles and Italians of her mother's court
like that lady Shakespeare--or was it Spenser?--wrote about among the
fauns and satyrs. With all her American freedom she avoids improprieties
by instinct. I have no fears for her future if she marries the right
man."
"Indeed, mamma," said Amy, "I wish she would keep more strictly within
the limit of the proprieties. She makes me nervous all the time we are
together."
"My dear, you never heard her breathe a really unbecoming word or saw
her do an immodest thing?" said my mother interrogatively.
"Oh no, of course not," said Amy.
"They say Mrs. Leare wants to marry her to that Neapolitan marquis who
is so often there," put in Ellen. "_On dit_, she will have a _dot_ of
two millions of francs, or, as they call it, half a million of dollars."
"Such a rumor," I broke in, rather annoyed by this turn in the
conversation, "may well buy her the right to be a marchioness if she
will."
"Indeed it won't, then," said Ellen sharply, "for she thinks Americans
should not 'fix' themselves permanently abroad. She says she means to
marry one of her own folks, as she calls her countrymen."
"She knows an infinite variety of things, and has had all kinds of
masters," sighed Lætitia: "she speaks all the languages in Europe. I
believe Americans have a peculiar facility for pronunciation, like the
Russians, and she learned at her school in America philosophy, rhetoric,
logic, Latin, algebra, chemistry."
"I wonder she should be so sweet a woman," said my father. "She seems a
good girl--I never took her for a learned one--but her mother is a fool,
and I should think her father must be that or worse. I wonder what he
can be like? It seems to an Englishman so strange that a man should stay
at home alone for years, and suffer his wife and family to travel all
over the Continent without protection."
Though my father, mother and sisters declined the Sunday invitation of
Mrs. Leare, I went to her reception. The guests were nearly all
Italians, Poles, Spaniards or Frenchmen. There was no Englishman
present, but myself, and only one or two Americans. I felt at once how
out of place my mother, the country matron, and my father, _ce
respectable viellard,_ would have been in such a circle. But Mrs.
Leare's guests were not the _jeunesse dorée_ nor the dubious nobility I
had expected to meet in her _salon_. The Frenchmen among them were all
men whose names were familiar in French political circles--men of
revolutionary tendencies and of advanced opinions. I afterward
discovered they had taken advantage of Mrs. Leare's desire to be the
head of a salon to use her rooms as a convenient rendezvous. It was safe
ground on which to simmer their revolutionary cauldron. It was seething
and bubbling that night, although neither the Leares nor myself were
aware of what was brewing. The talk was all about the Banquets,
especially the impending reform banquet in the Rue Chaillot. The
gentlemen present were not exactly conspirators: they were for the most
part political reformers, who, being cut off from the usual modes of
expressing themselves through a recognized parliamentary opposition or
by the medium of petition, had devised a system of political banquets,
some fifty of which had already been held in the departments, and they
were now engaged in getting one up in Paris in the Twelfth
arrondissement.
At that time, in a population of thirty-five millions, there were but a
quarter of a million of French voters, and as in France all places (from
that of a railroad guard to a seat on the bench) were disposed of by the
government, it was very easy for ministers to control the legislature. A
reform, really needed in the franchise, was the object proposed to
themselves by the original heads of the Revolution of 1848, though when
they had set their ball in motion they could neither control it nor keep
up with it as it rolled downward.
The prevalent idea in Mrs. Leare's salon was that the banquet of the Rue
Chaillot would go off quietly, that the prefect of police would protest,
and that the affair would then pass into the law-courts, where it would
remain until all interest in the subject had passed away. One was
sensible, however, that there was a general feeling of excitement in the
atmosphere. Paris swarmed with troops, evidently under stricter
discipline than usual. People looked into each other's faces
interrogatively and read the daily papers with an anxious air.
Though I did not at the time fully appreciate what I saw, I was struck
by the business-like character of the men about me. The guests, I
thought, took very little notice of the lady of the house. I did not
then suspect that they were using her hospitality for their own
purposes, and that they felt secure in her total incapacity to
understand what they were doing. She, meantime, intent on filling her
reception-rooms with celebrities and titled persons, was charmed to have
collected so many distinguished men around her.
Hermione appeared bewildered, uncomfortable and restless, like a
spectator on the edge of a great crowd. "There are too many strangers
here to-night," she said: "mamma and I do not know one half of them.
They have been brought here by their friends. To have a salon is mamma's
ambition, but this is not my idea of it. I feel as if we were out of
place among these men, who talk to each other and hardly notice us at
all."
We sat together and exchanged our thoughts in whispers. It was one of
those crowds that create a solitude for lovers. Not that we talked
sentiment or that we were lovers. We conversed about the excitements of
the day--of the Leste affair, in which the king and the king's ministry
were accused of protecting dishonesty; of the Beauvallon and
D'Equivilley duel and the Praslin murder, in connection with both of
which the royal family and the ministry were popularly accused of
protecting criminals--and at last the conversation strayed away from
France to Hermione's own girlhood. She told me of her happy country home
in Maryland with her grandmother, and sighed. I asked her if she was
going to the English ball to be given on Wednesday night at the
beautiful Jardin d'Hiver in the Champs Élysées.
"I suppose so," she replied, "but I don't care for large assemblies: I
feel afraid of the men I meet. I wish your mother could chaperon me: it
would be much nicer to be with her than with my own. Mamma understands
nothing about looking after me; she wants to have a good time herself,
and I am only in her way. Do you know, Mr. Farquhar, I have a theory
that when women have missed anything they ought to have enjoyed in early
life, they always want to go back and pick it up. Mamma had no pleasures
in her youth, no attentions, no gayety. If I am to be chaperoned, I like
the real thing. If I were at home in Maryland, where my father came
from, I should need no one to protect me: _you_ could take me to the
ball."
"I, Miss Hermione?"
"Yes, you. You would call for me, and wait till I was ready to come
down. Then you and I would go _alone_," she added, enjoying my look of
incredulity. "It is the custom: no harm could come of it," she added.
"We would walk to our ball."
"No harm in the case that you have supposed, but in some other cases--"
"You suppose a good deal," she interrupted. "You suppose a girl without
self-respect or good sense, and perhaps a man without honor. Here, of
course, things cannot be like that. Society seems founded upon different
ideas from those prevalent with us about men and women. _Here_, I admit,
a girl finds comfort and protection and ease of mind in a good chaperon.
Yet it seemed strange to me to put on leading-strings when I came out
here: I had been used to take care of myself for so many years."
"Why, Miss Leare," I said, laughing, "you cannot have been many years in
society."
"I am twenty," she said frankly, "and we came to Europe about three
years ago. But before that time I had been in company a good deal. Not
in the city, for I was not 'out,' but in the hotels at Newport, at the
Springs and in the country. In America one has but to do what one knows
is kind and right, and no one will think evil: here one may do, without
suspecting it, so many compromising things."
"Does the instinct that you speak of to be kind and right always guide
the young American lady?"
"I suppose so--so far as I know. It _must_. She walks by it, and sets
her feet down firmly. Here I feel all the time as if I were walking
among traps blindfolded."
The ball of the Jardin d'Hiver in the Champs Élysées was a superb
success. The immense glass-house was fitted up for dancing, and all went
merry as a marriage-bell, with a crater about to open under our feet, as
at the duchess of Richmond's ball at Brussels.
Miss Leare was there, but quiet and dignified. There was not the
smallest touch of vulgarity about her. The coarse readiness to accept
publicity which distinguishes the underbred woman, whether in England or
America, the desire to show off a foreign emancipation from what appear
ridiculous French rules, were not in her.
Yet she might have amused herself as she liked with complete impunity,
for Mrs. Leare appeared to leave her entirely alone. I danced with her
as often as she would permit me, and my heart was no longer in my own
possession when I put-her into her carriage about dawn.