P. S.--I am grateful for the kindly way in which the press of the land
have taken notice of my irruption into regular journalistic life,
telegraphically or editorially, and am happy in this place to express
the feeling.
II
A TRIBUTE TO ANSON BURLINGAME
(February, 1870)
On Wednesday, in St. Petersburg, Mr. Burlingame died after a short
illness. It is not easy to comprehend, at an instant’s warning, the
exceeding magnitude of the loss which mankind sustains in this
death--the loss which all nations and all peoples sustain in it. For he
had outgrown the narrow citizenship of a state and become a citizen of
the world; and his charity was large enough and his great heart warm
enough to feel for all its races and to labor for them. He was a true
man, a brave man, an earnest man, a liberal man, a just man, a generous
man, in all his ways and by all his instincts a noble man; he was a man
of education and culture, a finished conversationalist, a ready, able,
and graceful speaker, a man of great brain, a broad and deep and weighty
thinker. He was a great man--a very, very great man. He was imperially
endowed by nature; he was faithfully befriended by circumstances, and he
wrought gallantly always, in whatever station he found himself.
He was a large, handsome man, with such a face as children instinctively
trust in, and homeless and friendless creatures appeal to without fear.
He was courteous at all times and to all people, and he had the rare and
winning faculty of being always _interested_ in whatever a man had to
say--a faculty which he possessed simply because nothing was trivial to
him which any man or woman or child had at heart. When others said harsh
things about even unconscionable and intrusive bores after they had
retired from his presence, Mr. Burlingame often said a generous word in
their favor, but never an unkind one.
A chivalrous generosity was his most marked characteristic--a large
charity, a noble kindliness that could not comprehend narrowness or
meanness. It is this that shows out in his fervent abolitionism,
manifested at a time when it was neither very creditable nor very safe
to hold such a creed; it was this that prompted him to hurl his famous
Brooks-and-Sumner speech in the face of an astonished South at a time
when all the North was smarting under the sneers and taunts and material
aggressions of admired and applauded Southerners. It was this that made
him so warmly espouse the cause of Italian liberty--an espousal so
pointed and so vigorous as to attract the attention of Austria, which
empire afterward declined to receive him when he was appointed Austrian
envoy by Mr. Lincoln. It was this trait which prompted him to punish
Americans in China when they imposed upon the Chinese. It was this trait
which moved him, in framing treaties, to frame them in the broad
interest of the world, instead of selfishly seeking to acquire
advantages for his own country alone and at the expense of the other
party to the treaty, as had always before been the recognized
“diplomacy.” It was this trait which was and is the soul of the crowning
achievements of his career, the treaties with America and England in
behalf of China. In every labor of this man’s life there was present a
good and noble motive; and in nothing that he ever did or said was there
anything small or base. In real greatness, ability, grandeur of
character, and achievement, he stood head and shoulders above all the
Americans of to-day, save one or two.
Without any noise, or any show, or any flourish, Mr. Burlingame did a
score of things of shining mark during his official residence in China.
They were hardly heard of away here in America. When he first went to
China, he found that with all their kingly powers, American envoys were
still not of much consequence in the eyes of their countrymen of either
civil or official position. But he was a man who was always “posted.” He
knew all about the state of things he would find in China before he
sailed from America. And so he took care to demand and receive
additional powers before he turned his back upon Washington. When the
customary consular irregularities placidly continued and he notified
those officials that such irregularities must instantly cease, and they
inquired with insolent flippancy what the consequence might be in case
they did not cease, he answered blandly that he would _dismiss_ them,
from the highest to the lowest! (He had quietly come armed with absolute
authority over their official lives.) The consular irregularities
ceased. A far healthier condition of American commercial interests
ensued there.
To punish a foreigner in China was an unheard-of thing. There was no way
of accomplishing it. Each Embassy had its own private district or
grounds, forced from the imperial government, and into that sacred
district Chinese law officers could not intrude. All foreigners guilty
of offenses against Chinamen were tried by their own countrymen, in
these holy places, and as no Chinese testimony was admitted, the culprit
almost always went free. One of the very first things Mr. Burlingame did
was to make a Chinaman’s oath as good as a foreigner’s; and in his
ministerial court, through Chinese and American testimony combined, he
very shortly convicted a noted American ruffian of murdering a Chinaman.
And now a community accustomed to light sentences were naturally
startled when, under Mr. Burlingame’s hand, and bearing the broad seal
of the American Embassy, came an order to take him out and hang him!
Mr. Burlingame broke up the “extra-territorial” privileges (as they were
called), as far as our country was concerned, and made justice as free
to all and as untrammeled in the metes and bounds of its jurisdiction,
in China, as ever it was in any land.
Mr. Burlingame was the leading spirit in the co-operative policy. He got
the Imperial College established. He procured permission for an American
to open the coal mines of China. Through his efforts China was the first
country to close her ports against the war vessels of the Southern
Confederacy; and Prince Kung’s order, in this matter, was singularly
energetic, comprehensive, and in earnest. The ports were closed then,
and never opened to a Southern warship afterward.
Mr. Burlingame “construed” the treaties existing between China and the
other nations. For many years the ablest diplomatists had vainly tried
to come to a satisfactory understanding of certain obscure clauses of
these treaties, and more than once powder had been burned in
consequences of failure to come to such understandings. But the clear
and comprehensive intellect of the American envoy reduced the wordy
tangle of diplomatic phrases to a plain and honest handful of
paragraphs, and these were unanimously and thankfully accepted by the
other foreign envoys, and officially declared by them to be a thorough
and satisfactory elucidation of all the uncertain clauses in the
treaties.
Mr. Burlingame did a mighty work, and made official intercourse with
China lucid, simple, and systematic, thenceforth for all time, when he
persuaded that government to adopt and accept the code of international
law by which the civilized nations of the earth are guided and
controlled.
It is not possible to specify all the acts by which Mr. Burlingame made
himself largely useful to the world during his official residence in
China. At least it would not be possible to do it without making this
sketch too lengthy and pretentious for a newspaper article.
Mr. Burlingame’s short history--for he was only forty-seven--reads like
a fairy tale. Its successes, its surprises, its happy situations, occur
all along, and each new episode is always an improvement upon the one
which went before it.
He begins life an assistant in a surveying party away out on the Western
frontier; then enters a branch of a Western college; then passes through
Harvard with the honors; becomes a Boston lawyer and looks back
complacently from his high perch upon the old days when he was a
surveyor nobody in the woods; becomes a state senator, and makes laws;
still advancing, goes to the Constitutional Convention and makes
regulations wherewith to rule the makers of laws; enters Congress and
smiles back upon the Legislature and the Boston lawyer, and from these
smiles still back upon the country surveyor, recognizes that he is known
to fame in Massachusetts; challenges Brooks and is known to the nation;
next, with a long stride upward, he is clothed with ministerial dignity
and journeys to the under side of the world to represent the youngest in
the court of the oldest of the nations; and finally, after years go by,
we see him moving serenely among the crowned heads of the Old World, a
magnate with secretaries and undersecretaries about him, a retinue of
quaint, outlandish Orientals in his wake, and a long following of
servants--and the world is aware that his salary is unbelievably
enormous, not to say imperial, and likewise knows that he is invested
with power to make treaties with all the chief nations of the earth, and
that he bears the stately title of Ambassador, and in his person
represents the mysterious and awful grandeur of that vague colossus, the
Emperor of China, his mighty empire and his four hundred millions of
subjects! Down what a dreamy vista his backward glance must stretch,
now, to reach the insignificant surveyor in the Western woods!
He was a good man, and a very, very great man. America lost a son, and
all the world a servant, when he died.
THE TEMPERANCE CRUSADE AND
WOMAN’S RIGHTS
(1873)
The women’s crusade against the rum sellers continues. It began in an
Ohio village early in the new year, and has now extended itself
eastwardly to the Atlantic seaboard, 600 miles, and westwardly (at a
bound, without stopping by the way,) to San Francisco, about 2,500
miles. It has also scattered itself along down the Ohio and Mississippi
rivers southwardly some ten or twelve hundred miles. Indeed, it promises
to sweep, eventually, the whole United States, with the exception of the
little cluster of commonwealths which we call New England. Puritan New
England is sedate, reflective, conservative, and very hard to inflame.
The method of the crusaders is singular. They contemn the use of force
in the breaking up of the whisky traffic. They only assemble before a
drinking shop, or within it, and sing hymns and pray, hour after
hour--and day after day, if necessary--until the publican’s business is
broken up and he surrenders. This is not force, at least they do not
consider it so. After the surrender the crusaders march back to
headquarters and proclaim the victory, and ascribe it to the powers
above. They rejoice together awhile, and then go forth again in their
strength and conquer another whisky shop with their prayers and hymns
and their staying capacity (pardon the rudeness), and spread _that_
victory upon the battle flag of the powers above. In this generous way
the crusaders have parted with the credit of not less than three
thousand splendid triumphs, which some carping people say they gained
their own selves, without assistance from any quarter. If I am one of
these, I am the humblest. If I seem to doubt that prayer is the agent
that conquers these rum sellers, I do it honestly, and not in a flippant
spirit. If the crusaders were to stay at home and pray for the rum
seller and for his adoption of a better way of life, or if the crusaders
even assembled together in a church and offered up such a prayer with a
united voice, and it accomplished a victory, I would then feel that it
was the praying that moved Heaven to do the miracle; for I believe that
if the prayer is the agent that brings about the desired result, it
cannot be necessary to pray the prayer in any particular place in order
to get the ear, or move the grace, of the Deity. When the crusaders go
and invest a whisky shop and fall to praying, one suspects that they are
praying rather less to the Deity than _at_ the rum man. So I cannot help
feeling (after carefully reading the details of the rum sieges) that as
much as nine tenths of the credit of each of the 3,000 victories
achieved thus far belongs of right to the crusaders themselves, and it
grieves me to see them give it away with such spendthrift generosity.
I will not afflict you with statistics, but I desire to say just a word
or two about the character of this crusade. The crusaders are young
girls and women--not the inferior sort, but the very best in the village
communities. The telegraph keeps the newspapers supplied with the
progress of the war, and thus the praying infection spreads from town to
town, day after day, week after week. When it attacks a community it
seems to seize upon almost everybody in it at once. There is a meeting
in a church, speeches are made, resolutions are passed, a purse for
expenses is made up, a “praying band” is appointed; if it be a large
town, half a dozen praying bands, each numbering as many as a hundred
women, are appointed, and the working district of each band marked out.
Then comes a grand assault in force, all along the line. Every
stronghold of rum is invested; first one and then another champion
ranges up before the proprietor and offers up a special petition for
him; he has to stand meekly there behind his bar, under the eyes of a
great concourse of ladies who are better than he is and are aware of it,
and hear all the secret iniquities of his business divulged to the
angels above, accompanied by the sharp sting of wishes for his
regeneration, which imply an amount of need for it which is in the last
degree uncomfortable to him. If he holds out bravely, the crusaders hold
out more bravely still--or at least more persistently; though I doubt if
the grandeur of the performance would not be considerably heightened if
one solitary crusader were to try praying at a hundred rum sellers in a
body for a while, and see how it felt to have everybody against her
instead of for her. If the man holds out the crusaders camp before his
place and keep up the siege till they wear him out. In one case they
besieged a rum shop two whole weeks. They built a shed before it and
kept up the praying all night and all day long every day of the
fortnight, and this in the bitterest winter weather, too. They
conquered.
You may ask if such an investment and such interference with a man’s
business (in cases where he is “protected” by a license) is lawful? By
no means. But the whole community being with the crusaders, the
authorities have usually been overawed and afraid to execute the laws,
the authorities being, in too many cases, mere little politicians, and
more given to looking to chances of re-election than fearlessly
discharging their duty according to the terms of their official oaths.
Would you consider the conduct of these crusaders justifiable? I
do--thoroughly justifiable. They find themselves voiceless in the making
of laws and the election of officers to execute them. Born with brains,
born in the country, educated, having large interests at stake, they
find their tongues tied and their hands fettered, while every ignorant
whisky-drinking foreign-born savage in the land may hold office, help to
make the laws, degrade the dignity of the former and break the latter at
his own sweet will. They see their fathers, husbands, and brothers sit
inanely at home and allow the scum of the country to assemble at the
“primaries,” name the candidates for office from their own vile ranks,
and, unrebuked, elect them. They live in the midst of a country where
there is no end to the laws and no beginning to the execution of them.
And when the laws intended to protect their sons from destruction by
intemperance lie torpid and without sign of life year after year, they
recognize that here is a matter which interests them personally--a
matter which comes straight home to them. And since they are allowed to
lift no legal voice against the outrageous state of things they suffer
under in this regard, I think it is no wonder that their patience has
broken down at last, and they have contrived to persuade themselves that
they are justifiable in breaking the law of trespass when the laws that
should make the trespass needless are allowed by the voters to lie dead
and inoperative.
I cannot help glorying in the pluck of these women, sad as it is to see
them displaying themselves in these unwomanly ways; sad as it is to see
them carrying their grace and their purity into places which should
never know their presence; and sadder still as it is to see them trying
to save a set of men who, it seems to me, there can be no reasonable
object in saving. It does not become us to scoff at the crusaders,
remembering what it is they have borne all these years, but it does
become us to admire their heroism--a heroism that boldly faces jeers,
curses, ribald language, obloquy of every kind and degree--in a word,
every manner of thing that pure-hearted, pure-minded women such as these
are naturally dread and shrink from, and remains steadfast through it
all, undismayed, patient, hopeful, giving no quarter, asking none,
determined to conquer and succeeding. It is the same old superb spirit
that animated that other devoted, magnificent, mistaken crusade of six
hundred years ago. The sons of such women as these must surely be worth
saving from the destroying power of rum.
The present crusade will doubtless do but little work against
intemperance that will be really permanent, but it will do what is as
much, or even more, to the purpose, I think. I think it will suggest to
more than one man that if women could vote they would vote on the side
of morality, even if they did vote and speak rather frantically and
furiously; and it will also suggest that when the women once made up
their minds that it was not good to leave the all-powerful “primaries”
in the hands of loafers, thieves, and pernicious little politicians,
they would not sit indolently at home as their husbands and brothers do
now, but would hoist their praying banners, take the field in force,
pray the assembled political scum back to the holes and slums where they
belong, and set up some candidates fit for decent human beings to vote
for.
I dearly want the women to be raised to the political altitude of the
negro, the imported savage, and the pardoned thief, and allowed to vote.
It is our last chance, I think. The women will be voting before long,
and then if a B. F. Butler can still continue to lord it in Congress; if
the highest offices in the land can still continue to be occupied by
perjurers and robbers; if another Congress (like the forty-second)
consisting of 15 honest men and 296 of the other kind can once more be
created, it will at last be time, I fear, to give over trying to save
the country by human means, and appeal to Providence. Both the great
parties have failed. I wish we might have a woman’s party now, and see
how that would work. I feel persuaded that in extending the suffrage to
women this country could lose absolutely nothing and might gain a great
deal. For thirty centuries history has been iterating and reiterating
that in a moral fight woman is simply dauntless, and we all know, even
with our eyes shut upon Congress and our voters, that from the day that
Adam ate of the apple and told on Eve down to the present day, man, in a
moral fight, has pretty uniformly shown himself to be an arrant coward.
I will mention casually that while I cannot bring myself to find fault
with the women whom we call the crusaders, since I feel that they, being
politically fettered, have the natural right of the oppressed to rebel,
I have a very different opinion about the clergymen who have in a
multitude of instances attached themselves to the movement, and by voice
and act have countenanced and upheld the women in unlawfully trespassing
upon whisky mills and interrupting the rum sellers’ business. It seems
to me that it would better become clergymen to teach their flocks to
respect the laws of the land, and urge them to refrain from breaking
them. But it is not a new thing for a thoroughly good and well-meaning
preacher’s soft heart to run away with his soft head.