IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICA.
Alfred Cridge, who reminded me so much of my brother David that I felt
at home with him immediately, had prepared the way for my lectures on
effective voting in San Francisco. He was an even greater enthusiast
than I. "America needs the reform more than Australia," he used to say.
But if America needs effective voting to check corruption, Australia
needs it just as much to prevent the degradation of political life in
the Commonwealth and States to the level of American politics. My
lectures in San Francisco, as elsewhere in America, were well attended,
and even better received. Party politics had crushed out the best
elements of political life, and to be independent of either party gave
a candidate, as an agent told Judge Lindsay when he was contesting the
governorship of Colorado, "as much chance as a snowball would have in
hell." So that reformers everywhere were eager to hear of a system of
voting that would free the electors from the tyranny of parties, and at
the same time render a candidate independent of the votes of heckling
minorities, and dependent only on the votes of the men who believed in
him and his politics. I met men and women interested in public
affairs--some of them well known, others most worthy to be known, and
all willing to lend the weight of their character and intelligence to
the betterment of human conditions at home and abroad. Among these were
Judge Maguire, a leader of the Bar in San Francisco and a member of the
State Legislature, who had fought trusts, "grafters," and "boodlers"
through the whole of his public career, and Mr. James Barry, proprietor
of The Star.
"You come from Australia, the home of the secret ballot?" was the
greeting I often received, and that really was my passport to the
hearts of reformers all over America. From all sides I heard that it
was to the energy and zeal of the Singletaxers in the various States--a
well-organized and compact body--that the adoption of the secret ballot
was due. To that celebrated journalist, poetess, and economic writer,
Charlotte Perkins Stetson, who was a cultured Bostonian, living in San
Francisco, I owed one of the best women's meetings I ever addressed.
The subject was "State children and the compulsory clauses in our
Education Act," and everywhere in the States people were interested in
the splendid work of our State Children's Department and educational
methods. Intelligence and not wealth I found to be the passport to
social life among the Americans I met. At a social evening ladies as
well as their escorts were expected to remove bonnets and mantles in
the hall, instead of being invited into a private room as in
Australia--a custom I thought curious until usage made it familiar. The
homeliness and unostentatiousness of the middle class American were
captivating. My interests have always been in people and in the things
that make for human happiness or misery rather than in the beauties of
Nature, art, or architecture. I want to know how the people live, what
wages are, what the amount of comfort they can buy; how the people are
fed, taught, and amused; how the burden of taxation falls; how justice
is executed; how much or how little liberty the people enjoy. And these
things I learned to a great extent from my social intercourse with
those cultured reformers of America. Among these people I had not the
depressing feeling of immensity and hugeness which marred my enjoyment
when I arrived at New York. My literary lectures on the Brownings and
George Eliot were much appreciated, especially in the East, where I
found paying audiences in the fall or autumn of the year. These
lectures have been delivered many times in Australia; and, as the
result of the Browning lecture given in the Unitarian Schoolroom in
Wakefield street, Adelaide, I received from the pen of Mr. J. B. Mather
a clever epigram. The room was large and sparsely filled, and to the
modest back seat taken by my friend my voice scarcely penetrated. So he
amused himself and me by writing:
I have no doubt that words of sense
Are falling from the lips of Spence.
Alas! that Echo should be drowning
Both words of Spence and sense of Browning.
I found the Brownings far better appreciated in America than in
England, especially by American women. In spite of the fact that The
San Francisco Chronicle had interviewed me favourably on my arrival,
and that I knew personally some of the leading people on The Examiner,
neither paper would report my lectures on effective voting. The Star,
however, quite made up for the deficiencies of the other papers, and
did all it could to help me and the cause. While in San Francisco I
wrote an essay on "Electoral Reform" for a Toronto competition, in
which the first prize was $500. Mr. Cridge was also a competitor; but,
although many essays were sent in, for some reason the prize was never
awarded, and we had our trouble for nothing. On my way to Chicago I
stayed at a mining town to lecture on effective voting. I found the
hostess of the tiny hotel a brilliant pianist and a perfect linguist,
and she quoted poetry--her own and other people's--by the yard. A lady
I journeyed with told me that she had been travelling for seven years
with her husband and "Chambers's Encyclopedia." I thought they used the
encyclopaedia as a guide book until, in a sort of postscript to our
conversation, I discovered the husband to be a book agent, better known
in America as a "book fiend."
Nobody had ever seen anything like the World's Fair. My friend Dr.
Bayard Holmes of Chigago, whose acquaintance I made through missing a
suburban train, expressed a common feeling when he said he could weep
at the thought that it was all to be destroyed--that the creation
evolved from the best brains of America should be dissolved. Much of
our human toil is lost and wasted, and much of our work is more
ephemeral than we think; but this was a conscious creation of hundreds
of beautiful buildings for a six months' existence. Nowhere else except
in America could the thing have been done, and nowhere else in America
but in Chicago. At the Congress of Charity and correction I found every
one interested in Australia's work for destitute children. It was
difficult for Miss Windeyer, of Sydney, and myself--the only
Australians present--to put ourselves in the place of many who believed
in institutions where children of low physique, low morals, and low
intelligence are massed together, fed, washed, drilled, taught by rule,
never individualized, and never mothered. I spoke from pulpits in
Chicago and Indianapolis on the subject, and was urged to plead with
the Governor of the latter State to use his influence to have at least
tiny mites of six years of age removed from the reformatory, which was
under the very walls of the gaol. But he was obdurate to my pleadings
and arguments, as he had been to those of the State workers. He
maintained that these tiny waifs of six were incorrigible, and were
better in institutions than in homes. The most interesting woman I met
at the conference was the Rev. Mrs. Anna Garlin Spencer, pastor of Bell
Street Chapel, Providence. I visited her at home, in that retreat of
Baptists, Quakers, and others from the hard persecution of the New
England Orthodoxy, the founders of which had left England in search of
freedom to worship God. Her husband was the Unitarian minister of
another congregation in the same town. At the meetings arranged by Mrs.
Spencer, Professor Andrews, one of the Behring Sea arbitrators, and
Professor Wilson were present; and they invited me to speak on
effective voting at the Brunn University.
In Philadelphia I addressed seven meetings on the same subject. At six
of them an editor of a little reform paper was present. For two years
he had lived on brown bread and dried apples, in order that he could
save enough to buy a newspaper plant for the advocacy of reforms. In
his little paper he replied to the critics, who assured me that it was
no use worrying, as everything would come right in time. "Time only
brings wonders," he wrote, "when good and great men and women rise up
to move the world along. Time itself brings only decay and death. The
truth is 'Nothing will come right unless those who feel they have the
truth speak, and Work, and strain as if on them alone rested the
destinies of the world.'" I went to see a celebrated man, George W.
Childs, who had made a fortune out of The Philadelphia Ledger, and who
was one of the best employers in the States. He knew everybody, not
only in America but in Europe; and his room was a museum of gifts from
great folks all over the world. But, best of all, he, with his devoted
friend Anthony Drexel, had founded the Drexel Institute, which was
their magnificent educational legacy to the historic town. I saw the
Liberty Bell in Chicago--the bell that rang out the Declaration of
Independence, and cracked soon after--which is cherished by all good
Americans. It had had a triumphant progress to and from the World's
Fair, and I was present when once again it was safely landed in
Independence Hall, Philadelphia. I think the Americans liked me,
because I thought their traditions reputably old, and did not, like
European visitors, call everything crude and new. The great war in
America strengthened the Federal bond, while it loosened the attachment
to the special Satte in which the United States citizen lives.
Railroads and telegraphs have done much to make Americans homogeneous,
and the school system grapples bravely with the greater task of
Americanizing the children of foreigners, who arrive in such vast
numbers. Canada allowed the inhabitants of lower Canada to keep their
language, their laws, and their denominational schools; and the
consequence is that these Canadian-British subjects are more French
than the French, more conservative than the Tories, and more Catholic
than Irish or Italians. Education is absolutely free in America up to
the age of 18; but I never heard an American complain of being taxed to
educate other people's children. In Auburn I met Harriet Tribman,
called the "Moses of her people"--an old black woman who could neither
read nor write, but who had escaped from slavery when young, and had
made 19 journeys south, and been instrumental in the escape of 300
slaves. To listen to her was to be transferred to the pages of "Uncle
Tom's Cabin." Her language was just that of Tom and old Jeff. A pious
Christian, she was full of good works still. Her shanty was a refuge
for the sick, blind, and maimed of her own people. I went all over
Harvard University under the guidance of Professor Ashley, to whom our
Chief Justice had given me a letter of introduction. He got up a
drawing-room meeting for me, at which I met Dr. Gordon Ames, pastor of
the Unitarian Church of the Disciples. He invited me to preach his
thanksgiving service for him on the following Thursday, which I was
delighted to do. Mrs. Ames was the factory inspector of women and
children in Massachusetts, and was probably the wisest woman I met in
my travels. She spoke to me of the evils of stimulating the religious
sentiment too young, and said that the hushed awe with which most
people spoke of God and His constant presence filled a child's mind
with fear.
She related an experience with her own child, who on going to bed had
asked if God was in the room. The child was told that God was always
besides us. After being left in darkness the child was heard sobbing,
and a return to the nursery elicited the confession, "Oh, mamma, I
can't bear to be left with no one but God." Better the simple
anthropomorphism which makes God like the good father, the generous
uncle, the indulgent grandfather, or the strong elder brother.
Such ideas as these of God were held by the heroines of the following
stories:--A little girl, a niece of the beloved Bishop Brooks, had done
wrong, and was told to confess her sin to God before she slept, and to
beg His forgiveness. When asked next day whether she had obeyed the
command, she said--"Oh, yes! I told God all about it, and God said,
'Don't mention it, Miss Brooks.'" A similar injunction was laid upon a
child brought up by a very severe and rather unjust aunt. Her reply
when asked if she had confessed her sin was "I told God what I had
done, and what you thought about it, and I just left it to Him." The
response of a third American girl (who was somewhat of a "pickle" and
had been reared among a number of boys) to the enquiry whether she had
asked forgiveness for a wrong done was--"Oh, yes; I told God exactly
what I had done, and He said, 'Great Scot, Elsie Murray, I know 500
little girls worse than you.'" To me this was a much healthier state of
mind than setting children weeping for their sins, as I have done
myself.
On my second visit to Boston I spent three weeks with the family of
William, Lloyd Garrison, son of the famous Abolitionist. The Chief
Justice had given me a letter of introduction to him, and I found him a
true-hearted humanitarian, as devoted to the gospel of single tax as
his father had been to that of anti-slavery. They lived in a beautiful
house in Brookline, on a terrace built by an enterprising man who had
made his money in New South Wales. Forty-two houses were perfectly and
equally warmed by one great furnace, and all the public rooms of the
ground floor, dining, and drawing rooms, library, and hall were
connected by folding doors, nearly always open, which gave a feeling of
space I never experienced elsewhere. Electric lighting and bells all
over the house, hot and cold baths, lifts, the most complete laundry
arrangements, and cupboards everywhere ensured the maximum of comfort
with the minimum of labour. But in this house I began to be a little
ashamed of being so narrow in my views on the coloured question. Mr.
Garrison, animated with the spirit of the true brotherhood of man, was
an advocate of the heathen Chinee, and was continually speaking of the
goodness of the negro and coloured and yellow races, and of the
injustice and rapacity of the white Caucasians. I saw the files of his
father's paper, The Liberator, from its beginning in 1831 till its
close, when the victory was won in 1865. Of the time spent in the
Lloyd-Garrison household "nothing now is left but a majestic memory,"
which has been kept green by the periodical letters received from this
noble man up till the time of his death last year. He showed me the
monument erected to the memory of his father in Boston in the town
where years before the great abolitionist had been stoned by the mob.
Only recently it rejoiced my heart to know that a memorial to Lloyd
Garrison the younger had been unveiled in Boston, his native city; at
the same time that a similar honour was paid to his venerated leader,
"the prophet of San Francisco."
I account it one of the greatest privileges of my visit to America that
Mrs. Garrison introduced me to Oliver Wendell Holmes, and by
appointment I had an hour and a half's chat with him in the last year
of his long life. He was the only survivor of a famous band of New
England writers, Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorn, Bryant, Lowell,
Whittier, and Whitman were dead. His memory was failing, and he forgot
some of his own characters; but Elsie Venner he remembered perfectly
and he woke to full animation when I objected to the fatalism of
heredity as being about as paralysing to effort as the fatalism of
Calvinism. As a medical man (and we are apt to forget the physician in
the author) he took strong views of heredity. As a worker among our
destitute children, I considered environment the greater factor of the
two, and spoke of children of the most worth less parents who had
turned out well when placed early in respectable and kindly homes.
Before I left, the author presented me with an autograph copy of one of
his books--a much-prized gift. He was reading Cotton Mather's
"Memorabilia," not for theology, but for gossip. It was the only
chronicle of the small beer of current events in the days of the witch
persecutions, and the expulsion of the Quakers, Baptists, and other
schismatics. I have often felt proud that of all the famous men I have
mentioned in this connection there was only one not a Unitarian, and
that was Whittier, the Quaker poet of abolition; and his theology was
of the mildest.
Another notable man with whom I had three hours' talk was Charles
Dudley Warner, the humorous writer. I am not partial to American
humorists generally, but the delicate and subtle humour of Dudley
Warner I always appreciated. In our talk I saw his serious side, for he
was keen on introducing the indeterminate sentence into his own State,
on the lines of the Elmira and Concord Reformatories. He told me that
he never talked in train: but during the three hours' journey to New
York neither of us opened the books with which we had provided
ourselves, and we each talked of our separate interests, and enjoyed
the talk right through. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe I saw, but her
memory was completely gone. With Julia Ward Howe, the writer of "The
Battle Hymn of the Republic" I spent a happy time. She had been the
President of the New England Women's Club for 25 years, and was a
charming and interesting woman. I was said to be very like her, and,
indeed was often accosted by her name; but I think probably the reason
was partly my cap, for Howe always wears one, and few other American
ladies do. Whenever I was with her I was haunted by the beautiful lines
from the closing verse of the "Battle Hymn"--
In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born, across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me;
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
At her house I met many distinguished women. Mrs. J. F. Fields, the
widow of the well-known author-publisher; Madame Blaine Bentzam, a
writer for French reviews; Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, one of the most
charming of New England write is, and others.
My best work in Canada was the conversion to effective voting of my
good friend Robert Tyson. For years now he has done yeoman service in
the cause, and has corresponded with workers all over the world on the
question of electoral reform. I visited Toronto, at the invitation of
Mr. William Howland, with whom I had corresponded for years. I was
invited to dinner with his father, Sir William Howland, who was the
first Lieutenant-Governor of Toronto after the federation of the
Dominion. I found it very difficult to remember the names of the many
interesting people I met there, although I could recollect the things
they spoke about. Mr. Howland took me on with him to an evening garden
party--quite a novel form of entertainment for me--where there were
other interesting people. One of these, a lady artist who had travelled
all round the world, took me on the next afternoon to an at-home at
Professor Goldwin Smith's. In a talk I had with this notable man he
spoke of his strong desire that Canada should become absorbed in the
States; but the feeling in Canada was adverse to such a change. Still,
you found Canadians everywhere, for many more men were educated than
could find careers in the Dominion. Sir Sandford Fleming, the most
ardent proportionalist in Canada, left Toronto on his trip to New
Zealand and Australia shortly after I arrived there. I spent a few
hours with him, and owed a great deal of my success in the Dominion to
his influence. I felt that I had done much good in Canada, and my time
was so occupied that the only thing I missed was leisure.
Much of the time in New York was spent in interviews with the various
papers. I had a delightful few days at the house of Henry George, and
both he and his wife did everything in their power to make my visit
pleasant. Indeed, everywhere in America I received the greatest
kindness and consideration. I had been 11 months in the States and
Canada, and lived the strenuous life to the utmost. I had delivered
over 100 lectures, travelled thousands of miles, and met the most
interesting people in the world. I felt many regrets on parting with
friends, comrades, sympathizers, and fellow-workers. When I reflected
that on my arrival in San Francisco I knew only two persons in America
in the flesh, and only two more through correspondence, and was able to
look back on the hundreds of people who had personally interested me,
it seemed as if there was some animal magnetism in the world, and that
affinities were drawn together as if by magic.