In those days of May, when the leaflets were unfolding, and when the

downy bluebells were lifting their clustered blossoms filled with a

mysterious fragrance, like the breath of young babes, Adèle loved to

linger in the study of the parsonage; more than ever the good Doctor

seemed a "New Papa,"--more than ever his eye dwelt upon her with a

parental smile. It was not that she loved Rose less, that she lingered

here so long; but she could not shake off the conviction that some day

soon Rose might shrink from her. The good Doctor never would. Nor can it

be counted strange if there, in the study so familiar to her childhood,

she should recall the days when she had frolicked down the orchard,

when Reuben had gathered flowers for her, when life seemed enchanting.

Was it enchanting now?

The Doctor was always gravely kind. "Have courage, Adaly, have courage!"

he was wont to say, "God orders all things right."

And somehow, when she hears him say it, she believes it more than ever.

Ten days, a fortnight, and a month pass, and there is no acknowledgment

from Reuben of her grateful letter. He does not count it worth his

while, apparently, to break his long silence; or, possibly, he is too

much engrossed with livelier interests to give a thought to this episode

of his old life in Ashfield. Adèle is disturbed by it; but the very

disturbance gives her new courage to combat faithfully the difficulties

of her position. "One cheering word I would have thought he might have

given me," said she.

The appeal to her father, too, has no answer. Before it reaches its

destination, Maverick has taken ship for America; and, singularly

enough, it is fated that the letter of Adèle should be first opened and

read--by her mother.

LVII.

Some time in mid-May of this year Maverick writes:--

"My dear Johns,--I shall again greet you, God willing, in your own home,

some forty days hence, and I shall come as a repentant Benedick; for I

now wear the dignities of a married man. Your kind letter counted for a

great deal toward my determination; but I will not affect to conceal

from you, that my tender interest in the future of Adèle counted for a

great deal more. As I had supposed, the communication to Julie (which I

effected through her brother) that her child was still living, and

living motherless, woke all the tenderness of her nature. I cannot say

that the sudden change in her inclinations was any way flattering to me;

but knowing her recent religious austerities, I was prepared for this. I

shall not undertake to describe to you our first interview, which I can

never forget. It belongs to those heart-secrets which cannot be spoken

of; but this much I may tell you,--that, if there was no kindling of the

old and wayward love, there grew out of it a respect for her present

severity and elevation of character that I had never anticipated. At our

age, indeed, (though, when I think of it, I must be many years your

junior,) a respect for womanly character most legitimately takes the

place of that disorderly sentiment which twenty years ago blazed out in

passion.

"We have been married according to the rites of the Romish Church. If I

had proposed other ceremony, more agreeable to your views, I am

confident that she would not have listened to me. She is wrapped as

steadfastly in her creed as ever you in yours. To do otherwise in so

sacred a matter--and with her it wore solely that aspect--than as her

Church commands, would have been to do foully and vainly. I had prepared

you, I think, for her perversity in this matter; nor do I think that all

your zeal and powers of persuasion could make her recreant to the faith

for which she has immolated all the womanly vanities which certainly

once belonged to her. Indeed, the only trace of worldliness which I see

in her is her intense yearning toward our dear Adèle, and her passionate

longing to clasp her child once more to her heart. Nor will I conceal

from you that she hopes, with all the fervor of a mother's hope, to wean

her from what she counts the heretical opinions under which she has been

reared, and to bring her into the fold of the faithful.

"You will naturally ask, my dear Johns, why I do not combat this; but I

am too old and too far spent for a fight about creeds. I should have

made a lame fight on that score at any day; but now my main concern, it

would seem, should be to look out personally for the creed which has

most of mercy in it. If I seem to speak triflingly, my dear Johns, I

pray you excuse me; it is only my business way of stating the actual

facts in the case. As for Madame Maverick, I am sure you will find no

trifling in her (if you ever meet her); she is terribly in earnest. I

tell her she would have made a magnificent lady prioress, whereat she

thumbs her beads and whispers a Latin distich, as if she were exorcising

a demon. Yet I should do wrong if I were to represent her as always

severe, even upon such a theme; there certainly belongs to her a tender,

appealing manner (reminding of Adèle in a way that brings tears to my

eyes); but it is always bounded by allegiance to her sworn faith. You

will think it an exaggeration, but she reminds me at times of those

women of the New Testament (which I have not altogether forgotten) who

gave up all for the following of the Master. If I were in your study, my

dear Johns, you might ask me who those women were? And for my soul I

could not tell you. Yet I have a vague recollection that there were

those who showed a beautiful devotion to the Christian faith, that

somehow sublimated their lives and memories. Again, I feel constrained

to put before you another feature in her character, which I am confident

will make you feel kindly toward her; my home near to Marseilles, which

has been but a gypsy home for so many years, she has taken under her

hand, and by its new appointments and order has convicted me of the

losses I have felt so long. True, you might object to the _oratoire_;

but in all else I am confident you would approve, and in all else

felicitate Adèle upon the home which was preparing for her.

"Madame Maverick will not sail with me for America; although the

marriage, under French law, may have admitted Adèle to all rights and

even social immunities, yet I have represented that another law and

custom rules with you. Whatever opprobrium might attach to the mother,

Julie, with her exalted religious sentiment, would not weigh for a

moment; but as regards Adèle, she manifests a strange tenderness. To

spare her any pang, or possible pangs, she is content to wait. I have

feared, too, I must confess, that any undue expression of condemnation

or distrust might work revulsion of her own feeling. But while she

assents,--with some reluctance, I must admit,--to this plan of deferring

her meeting with Adèle, on whom all her affections seem to centre, she

insists, in a way that I find it difficult to combat, upon her child's

speedy return. That her passionate love will insure entire devotion on

the part of Adèle, I cannot doubt. And how the anti-Romish faith which

must have been instilled in the dear girl by your teachings, as well as

by her associations, may withstand the earnest attack of Madame

Maverick, I cannot tell. I have a fear it may lead to some dismal

complications. You know what the earnestness of your own faith is; but I

don't think you yet know the earnestness of an opposing faith, with a

Frenchwoman to back it. Even as I write, she comes to cast a glance at

my work, and says, 'Monsieur Maverick,' (she called me Frank once,)

'what are you saying there to the heretical Doctor?'

"Whereupon I translate for her ear a sentence or two. 'Tell him,' says

she, 'that I thank him for his kindness; tell him besides, that I can in

no way better atone for the guiltiness of the past, than by bringing

back this wandering lamb into the true fold. Only when we kneel before

the same altar, her hand in mine, can I feel that she is truly my

child.'

"I fear greatly this zeal may prove infectious.

"And now, my dear Johns, in regard to the revelation to Adèle of what is

written here,--of the whole truth, in short, for it must come out,--I

haven't the heart or the courage to make it myself. I must throw myself

on your charity. For Heaven's sake, tell the story as kindly as you can.

Don't let her think too harshly of me. See to it, I pray, that my name

don't become a bugbear in the village. I have pretty broad shoulders,

and could bear it, if I only were to be sufferer; but I am sure 't would

react fearfully on the sensibilities of poor Adèle. _That_ sin is past

cure and past preachment; no good can come from trumpeting wrath against

it. Do me this favor, Johns, and you will find me a more willing

listener in what is to come. I can't promise, indeed, to accept all your

dogmas; there is a thick crust of the world on me, and I doubt if you

could force them through it; but, for Adèle's sake, I think I could

become a very orderly and presentable person, even for a New England

meeting-house. I will make a beginning now by turning over the little

property which you hold for Adèle, in trust, for disbursement in your

parish charities. The dear child won't need it, and the parish may."

The Doctor was happy to be relieved of the worst part of the revelation;

but he had yet to communicate the fact that the mother was still alive,

and (what was to him worst of all) that she was imbruted with the

delusions of the Romish Church. He chose his hour, and, meeting her upon

the village street, asked her into his study.

"Adaly, your father is coming. He will be here within a month."

"At last! at last!" said she, with a cry of joy.

"But, Adaly," continued he, with great gravity, "I have perhaps led you

into error. Your mother, Adaly,--your mother is still living."

"Living!" and an expression almost of radiance shot over the fair face.

But in an instant it was gone. Was not the poor lady she had so

religiously mourned over her mother? That death embrace and the tomb

were, then, only solemn mockeries! With a frightful alertness her

thought ran to them,--weighed them. "New Papa," said she, approaching

him with a gravity that matched his own, "is this some new delusion? Is

it true? Has he written me?"

"He has not written you, my child; but I have a letter, informing me of

his marriage, and begging me to make the revelation to you as kindly as

I might."

"Marriage! Marriage to whom?" says Adèle, her eyes flashing fire, and

her lips showing a tempest of scarce controllable feeling.

"Marriage to your mother, Adaly. He would be just at last."

"O my God!" exclaimed Adèle, with a burst of tears. "It's false! I shall

never see my mother again in this world. I know it! I know it!"

"But, Adaly, my child, consider!" said the old gentleman.

Adèle did not heed him. She was lost in her own griefs. She could only

exclaim, "O my father! my father!"

The old Doctor was greatly moved; he laid down his spectacles, and paced

up and down the room. The earnestness of her doubt made him almost

believe that he was himself deceived.

"Can it be? can it be?" he muttered, half under breath, while Adèle sat

drooping in her chair. "May be the instinct of the poor girl is right,

after all," thought he,--"sin is so full of disguises."

At this moment there is a sharp tap at the door, and Miss Eliza steps

in, the bearer of a letter from Reuben.

KILLED AT THE FORD

He is dead, the beautiful youth,

The heart of honor, the tongue of truth,--

He, the life and light of us all,

Whose voice was blithe as a bugle call,

Whom all eyes followed with one consent,

The cheer of whose laugh, and whose pleasant word,

Hushed all murmurs of discontent.

Only last night, as we rode along

Down the dark of the mountain gap,

To visit the picket-guard at the ford,

Little dreaming of any mishap,

He was humming the words of some old song:

"Two red roses he had on his cap

And another he bore at the point of his sword."

Sudden and swift a whistling ball

Came out of a wood, and the voice was still;

Something I heard in the darkness fall,

And for a moment my blood grew chill;

I spake in a whisper, as he who speaks

In a room where some one is lying dead;

But he made no answer to what I said.

We lifted him up on his saddle again,

And through the mire and the mist and the rain

Carried him back to the silent camp,

And laid him as if asleep on his bed;

And I saw by the light of the surgeon's lamp

Two white roses upon his cheeks,

And one just over his heart blood-red!

And I saw in a vision how far and fleet

That fatal bullet went speeding forth,

Till it reached a town in the distant North,

Till it reached a house in a sunny street,

Till it reached a heart that ceased to beat

Without a murmur, without a cry;

And a bell was tolled in that far-off town,

For one who had passed from cross to crown,--

And the neighbors wondered that she should die.

THE LATE INSURRECTION IN JAMAICA.

If Cuba be the Queen of the Antilles, then fairest of the sisterhood

which adorn her regal state is Jamaica. A land of streams and mountains,

from the one it derives almost inexhaustible fertility of valleys and

plains; from the other, enchanting prospects, which challenge comparison

with the scenery even of Tyrol and Switzerland. Tropical along its

shores, temperate up its steep hills, the sun of Africa on its plains,

the frosts of New England in its mountains, there is scarcely a luxury

of the South or a comfort of the North which may not be cultivated to

advantage somewhere within its borders. Here is the natural home of the

sugar-cane; and it is scarcely a figure of speech to say that the sugar

supply of the world might come from the teeming bosom of this little

island. Here too are slopes of hills, and broad savannas, where "the

grass may almost be _seen_ growing," and where may be bred cattle fit to

compete with the far-famed herds of England. The forests are full of

mahogany and logwood. The surrounding waters swarm with fish of every

variety, and of the finest flavor. Nominally, at least, the people are

free and self-governed; and if, under propitious skies, the burdens

either of the private home or of the state are heavy and crushing, it is

because of mismanagement and not of necessity. To a casual observer,

therefore, it would seem as if nowhere in the same space were gathered

more elements of wealth, prosperity, and happiness than in Jamaica.

* * * * *

Yet Jamaica is poor and discontented, and from year to year is growing

more miserable and more full of complaints. While on the little island

of Barbadoes, which is flat and comparatively destitute of natural

beauty, the inhabitant is proud to the verge of the ludicrous of his

home, the Jamaican, dwelling amid scenes of perpetual loveliness,

despises his native soil. And not without reason. For Jamaica presents

that saddest and least flattering sight, a land sinking into hopeless

ruin. Her plantations are left uncultivated. Her cities look time-worn

and crumbling. Her fields, which once blossomed like the rose, are

relapsing into the wilderness. She does not feed her people. She does

not clothe them. She does not furnish them shelter. With three hundred

and fifty thousand negroes she has not sufficient labor. With twenty

thousand whites she has not employers enough who are capable of managing

wisely and paying honestly what labor she has. With a soil which Nature

has made one broad pasture, she does not raise the half of her own beef

and pork. With plains which ought to be waving with luxuriant harvests

of wheat and corn, her children are fed from our overflowing granaries.

With woods filled with trees fit for building, she sends all the way to

the Provinces for shingles, joist, and boards. On her two hundred swift,

sparkling rivers there was not, in 1850, a single saw-mill. In an age of

invention and labor-saving machines, the plough is to her a modern

innovation; and her laborers still scratch the soil which they seek to

till with tools of the Middle Ages. Even the production of sugar, to

which she has sacrificed every other industrial interest, has sunk from

the boasted hundred and fifty thousand hogsheads of the last century, to

a meagre yearly crop of thirty thousand. Nine tenths of her proprietors

are absentees. More than that proportion of her great estates are

ruinously mortgaged. A tourist gives as the final evidence of

exhaustion, that Jamaica has no amusements, no circus, no theatre, no

opera, none of the pleasant trifles which surplus wealth creates.

Nor are the moral aspects any more encouraging. Slavery, dying, cursed

the soil with its fatal bequest, contempt for labor; and the years which

have elapsed since emancipation have done little or nothing to give to

the toiler conscious dignity and worth. The bondsman, scarcely yet freed

from all his chains, naturally enough thinks that, "if Massa will not

work," it is the highest gentility in him not to work either, and sighs

for a few acres whereon he may live in sluggish content. And his quondam

master, left to his own resources, will not any more than before put his

shoulder to the work; and, though sunk himself in sloth, ceases not to

complain of another's indolence. The spirit of caste is still

relentless. The white man despises the black man, and, if he can, cheats

him and tramples upon him. The black man, in return, suspects and fears

his old oppressor, and sometimes, goaded to desperation, turns upon him.

A perpetual discontent has always brooded over Jamaica; and it is

recorded that no less than thirty bloody rebellions have left their

crimson stains on her ignoble annals.

It is in vain to inquire for the causes of this physical and moral

decay. For every class has its special complaint, every traveller his

favorite theory, and every political economist his sufficient

explanation. But let the cause be what it may, the fact stands out black

and repulsive. Jamaica, which came from the hand of the Creator a fair

and well-watered garden, has presented for more than half a century that

melancholy spectacle, too common in Equatorial America, of a land rich

in every natural advantage, and yet through the misfortune or folly of

its people plunged in poverty and misery.

* * * * *

The world at large had become tired of the griefs of Jamaica, and

reconciled itself to her wretchedness as a foregone conclusion, when the

events of last October lent a fresh and terrible interest to her

history. An insurrection, including in its purpose the murder of every

white man on the island, has been quenched in the blood of its leaders,

say the Governor of Jamaica and his defenders. An insignificant riot has

been followed by a wholesale and indiscriminate massacre, sparing not

even the women and children, reply their opponents.

Admitting for a moment the whole planter theory of a general

insurrection, the question inevitably arises, What are the causes which

would prompt such a rebellion, and which, while they do not justify

violence, furnish reasons why every humane mind should desire to treat

with leniency the errors, and even the crimes, of an ignorant and

oppressed race? The ordinary burden of the Jamaica negro is far from a

light one. The yearly expense of his government is not less than a

million dollars, or about three dollars for every man, woman, and child

on the island. The executive and judicial departments are on a scale of

expense which would befit a continent. The Governor receives a salary of

forty thousand dollars, the Chief Justice fifteen thousand dollars, the

Associate Justices ten thousand dollars. The ecclesiastical

establishment, which ministers little or nothing to the religious wants

of the colored race, absorbs another huge portion of the public revenue.

And all this magnificence of expenditure in a population of twenty

thousand bankrupt whites and three hundred and fifty thousand half-naked

blacks. If, now, the negro believed that this burden was distributed

evenly, he might bear it with patience. But he does not believe so. He

is sure, on the contrary, that the white man, who controls legislation,

so assesses the revenue that it shall relieve the rich and burden the

poor. He tells you that the luxuries of the planter are admitted at a

nominal duty, while the coarse fabrics with which he must clothe himself

and family pay forty per cent; that while the planter's huge hogshead of

seventeen hundred pounds' weight pays only an excise of three shillings,

the hard-raised barrel of his home produce of two hundred pounds must

pay two shillings; that every miserable mule-cart of the petty

land-owner is subjected to eighteen shillings license, while the great

ox-carts of the thousand-acre plantation go untaxed,--a law under which

the number of little carts in one district sunk from five hundred to

less than two hundred, and with it sunk who shall tell how much growing

enterprise. These complaints may be unjust, but the negro believes in

them, and they chafe and exasperate him.

Another important question is, What is the ability of the negro to bear

these burdens? A defender of the planters gravely asserts "that the

negro demands a price for his labor which would be exorbitant in any

part of the world." What is that exorbitant price? An able-bodied

agricultural laborer in Jamaica receives from eighteen to thirty cents a

day; and, if he is both fortunate and industrious, may net for a year's

work the fabulous sum of from fifty to eighty dollars. And this in a

country which is one of the dearest in the world; where the necessaries

of life are always at war prices; where flour is now twenty dollars a

barrel, and eggs are fifty cents a dozen, and butter is forty cents a

pound, and ham twenty-five, and beef and mutton still higher.

Did the laborer actually receive his pittance, his lot might be more

tolerable. But it is the almost universal complaint, that, either from

inability or disinclination, the planter does not keep his agreements.

Sometimes the overseer, when the work has been done, and well done,

arbitrarily retains a quarter, or even a half, of the stipulated wages.

The negro says he has no chance for redress; that even a written

agreement is worth no more than a blank paper, for the magistrates are

either all planters, or their dependents, and have no ears to hear the

cry of the lowly. Add now to all this the fact, that the last few

seasons have been unfavorable to agriculture; that planters and peasants

alike are even more than usually poor; that in whole districts the

blacks are destitute, their children up to the age of ten or twelve

years from absolute necessity going about stark naked, and their men and

women wearing only rags and streamers, which do not preserve even the

show of decency;--and is there not sufficient reason, not indeed to

justify murder and arson, but why a whole race of suffering and

excitable people should not be stamped as fiends in human shape for the

outrages of a few of their number?

* * * * *

Turn now to the actual scene of conflict. In a little triangular tract

of country on the east shore of Jamaica, hemmed in between the sea and

the Blue Mountains, twenty-five miles long and two thirds as wide,

occurred in October last what Governor Eyre has seen fit to dignify with

the name of an insurrection. The first act of violence was committed at

Morant Bay,--a town where it is said that no missionary to the blacks

has been permitted to live for thirty-five years,--in the parish of St.

Thomas in the East,--that very St. Thomas, possibly, whose court-house

was called forty years ago the "hell of Jamaica," and where is preserved

as a pleasant relic of the past a record book wherein the curious

traveller reads the prices paid in the palmy days of slavery for cutting

off the ears and legs, and slitting the noses, of runaway negroes. Had

these negroes of Morant Bay any special causes of exasperation? They

had. Their complaint was threefold. First, that the only magistrate who

protected their interests had been arbitrarily removed. Second, that a

plantation claimed by them to be deserted was as arbitrarily adjudged to

be the rightful property of a white man. Third, that the plucking of

fruit by the wayside, which had been a custom from time immemorial, and

which resembled the plucking of ears of corn under the Jewish law, was

by new regulations made a crime. Thus matters stood on the day of the

outbreak; a general condition of poverty and discontent throughout the

island; a special condition of exasperation in the parish of St. Thomas

in the East, and particularly at Morant Bay.

* * * * *

On the 7th of last October, a negro was arrested for picking two

cocoanuts, value threepence. This arrest had every exasperating

condition. The fruit was taken from a plantation whose title was

disputed, and upon which the negroes had squatted. The law which made

the plucking of fruit a crime was itself peculiarly obnoxious. The

magistrate before whom the offence was to be tried, rightly or wrongly,

was accused by the blacks of gross partiality and injustice. The accused

man was followed to the court by a crowd of his friends, armed, it is

said, with clubs, though this latter statement seems to be doubtful.

When a sentence of four shillings' fine, or, in default of payment,

thirty days' imprisonment, was imposed, the award was received in

silence. But when the costs were adjudged to be twelve shillings and

sixpence, there were murmurs. Some tumultuously advised the man not to

pay. Some, believing the case involved the title to the land, told him

to appeal to a higher court. The magistrate ordered the arrest of all

noisy persons. But these fled to the street, and, shielded by the

citizens, escaped. The next day but one, six constables armed with a

warrant proceeded to Stony Gut, the scene of the original arrest, to

take into custody twenty-eight persons accused of riot. But they were

forcibly resisted, handcuffed with their own irons, and forced

ignominiously to take their way back. Some of the arrests, however, were

made quietly a little time after.

On the 11th of October dawned an eventful day. The magistrates were

assembled in the court-house at Morant Bay for the purpose of examining

the prisoners. The court-house was guarded by twenty armed volunteers, a

body apparently of local militia. Some four or five hundred excited

blacks surrounded the court-house, armed with bludgeons, grasping

stones. What led to a collision can never be known. Very probably

missiles were thrown at the guard. At any rate the officer in command

ordered them to fire upon the crowd, and fifteen of the rioters fell

dead or wounded. Then all restraint was at an end. The negroes threw

themselves with incredible fury upon the guard, drove them into the

court-house, summoned them to surrender at discretion, then set fire to

the building, and murdered, with many circumstances of atrocity, the

unhappy inmates, as they sought to flee. Sixteen were killed, and

eighteen wounded, while a few escaped unharmed, by the help of the

negroes themselves. This was the beginning and the end of the famous

armed insurrection, so far as it ever was armed insurrection. The

rioters dispersed. The spirit of insubordination spread to the

plantations. There was general confusion, some destruction of property,

some robbery. The whites were filled with alarm. Many left all and fled.

The most exaggerated reports obtained credence. But if we except a Mr.

Hine, who had rendered himself especially unpopular, and who was

murdered on his plantation, not one white man appears to have been

killed in cold blood, and not one white woman or child suffered from

violence of any sort. Facts to the contrary may yet come to light.

Official reports may reveal some secret chapter of bloodshed. But the

chances of such a revelation are small enough. Three months have elapsed

since the first tidings of the outbreak reached the mother country.

There has been a great excitement; investigation has been demanded;

facts have been called for; the defenders of the planters have been

defied to produce facts. Meanwhile the Governor of Jamaica has written

home repeated despatches; the commander of the military forces which

crushed the rebellion has visited England; the planters' journals have

come laden with vulgar abuse of the negro, and with all sorts of evil

surmises as to his motives and purposes; letters have been received from

Jamaica from persons in every position in life; and still no new

facts,--not so much as one clear accusation of any further fatal

violence. The conclusion is irresistible, that this was a riot, and not

an insurrection; and that it began and ended, so far as armed force was

concerned, at Morant Bay, on that unhappy day, the 11th of last October.

It cannot be denied that the occurrences of that day were marked by

some circumstances of painful ferocity. Men were literally hacked to

pieces, crying for mercy. One man's tongue was cut from his mouth even

while he lived. Another, escaping, was thrown back into the burning

building, and roasted to death. The joints of the hand of the dead chief

magistrate were dissevered by the blacks, who cried out exultingly,

"This hand will write no more lying despatches to the Queen." But the

events of that day were marked also by instances of humanity. The clerk

of the court was rescued by his negro servant, who thrust him beneath

the floor, and, watching his opportunity, conveyed him to the shelter of

the woods next morning. A child, who happened to be with his father in

the court-house, was snatched up by a negro woman, who, at the risk of

her own life, carried him to a place of safety. But admitting the worst

charges, any one who remembers the New York riot of 1863 will be slow to

assert that this black mob exhibited any barbarity which has not been

more than emulated by white mobs. Shocking enough the details are; but

human action always and with every race is ferocious, when once the

restraints of self-control and the law are thrown off.

* * * * *

With a people so excitable as the blacks of Jamaica, and among whom

there existed so many causes of disaffection, the greatest promptitude

of action was a virtue. Had Governor Eyre marched with a military force

into the district, had he crushed out every vestige of armed resistance,

had he brought before proper tribunals and punished with severity all

persons who were convicted of any complicity in these outrages, he would

have merited the praise of every good man. What he did was to let loose

upon a little district, unmuzzled, the dogs of war. What he did was to

gather from all quarters an armed force, a motley crew, regulars and

militia, sailors and landsmen, black and white, and permit them to hold

for fourteen long days a saturnalia of blood. What he did was to summon

the savage Maroon tribes to the feast of death, that by their barbaric

warfare they might add yet one more shade of gloom to the picture. The

official accounts are enough to blanch the cheek with horror. In two

days after the riot martial law was declared. In four, the outbreak was

hemmed into narrow quarters. In a week, it ceased to exist in any shape.

Yet the work of death went on. Bands of maddened soldiers pierced the

country in every direction. Men were arrested upon the slightest

suspicion. Every petty officer constituted himself a judge; every

private soldier became an executioner. If the black man fled, he was

shot as a rebel; if he surrendered, he was hung on the same pretext,

after the most summary trial. If the number of prisoners became

inconveniently large, they were shot, or else whipped and let go,

apparently according to the whim of the officer in command. Women were

seized, stripped half naked, and thrown among the vulgar soldiery to be

scourged. The estimate is that five hundred and fifty were hung by order

of drum-head court-martials, five hundred destroyed by the Maroons, two

thousand shot by the soldiery, and that three hundred women were catted,

and how many men nobody presumes even to guess. One asks, At what

expense of life to the victors was all this slaughter accomplished? And

he reads, that not one soldier was killed, that not one soldier was

wounded, that not one soldier received so much as a scratch, unless from

the bushes through which he pursued his human prey. It was not war: it

was a massacre. These poor people fled like panic-struck sheep, and the

soldiery tracked them like wolves. The human heart could wish to take

refuge in incredulity, but alas! the worst testimony of all is found in

the official reports of the actors themselves.

A few terrible anecdotes will give reality to the picture. George

Marshall, a mulatto, was taken up with others as a straggler, and

ordered to receive fifty lashes. With each lash the unfortunate man

gritted his teeth and turned his head, whether from pain or anger is

uncertain. The provost-marshal construed this into a threatening look,

and ordered him to be hung, which was done. There was no proof whatever

that Marshall had any connection with the riot. A company of Maroons

discovered a body of blacks, men, women, and children, who had taken

refuge up in the trees, and stood and deliberately shot them, one by

one, until they had all fallen, and the ground beneath was thickly

strewn with their dead bodies. On a plantation between Morant Bay and

Port Antonio the people were led by evil example into some acts of riot

and pillage. But even in the midst of their license they sent word to

the English gentleman who had charge of the plantation, that, if he and

his family remained quiet, they should be protected. So rapidly did the

spirit of rioting burn itself out, that on the next Sunday, only four

days after the first outbreak at Morant Bay, he rode down to the estate,

conducted a religious service as usual, speaking boldly to the people of

the folly and sin of their course, and counselling them to return

quietly to their work. His words were so well received, that on Monday

morning he started for the plantation, purposing to appoint for the

workmen their tasks, as the best possible way of keeping them out of

mischief. As he drew near, he heard firing, and the first sight which

greeted him was a negro shot down. The village was in possession of a

small company of soldiers, without even a subaltern to control them.

Without pretence of a trial, they were shooting the people one by one,

as they were pointed out to them by a petty constable. On their march,

these very soldiers had been ordered to fire upon every one who ran

away, and they fired at every bush at random, never stopping to count

the slain.

Nothing can exceed the horrible frankness of the reports of the

officers. Here is Lieutenant Aldcock's language: "On returning to Golden

Grove in the evening, sixty-seven prisoners were sent in by the Maroons.

I disposed of as many as possible, but was too tired to continue after

dark. On the morning of the 24th, I started for Morant Bay, having first

flogged four, and hung six rebels." Here is a gem from Captain Ford:

"The black troops are more successful than ours in catching horses;

nearly all of them are mounted. They shot about one hundred and sixty

people in their march from Port Antonio to Manchioneal, hanged seven in

Manchioneal, and shot three on their way here. This is a picture of

martial law. The soldiers enjoy it." Now consider a moment this killing

of one hundred and sixty people on the way from Port Antonio. The

distance traversed in a direct line was about twelve miles. There are no

large towns on the line of march; and if you suppose that the rural

population had here the average density of the island, there could not

have been, in a belt of country one mile wide and the twelve miles long,

over five hundred people; and we are forced to the conclusion, that

these restorers of peace cleaned a strip a mile wide of every man and

every well-grown boy. "And the soldiers enjoy it!" And the officers

glory in it! Nothing was permitted to stop or clog the death mills. At

Morant Bay, "to save time," two court-martials were formed. No time was

lost in proceeding to business. "Each five minutes condemned rebels were

taken down under escort awaiting their doom." Only three brought before

these terrible tribunals escaped death. The court, composed exclusively

of military and naval officers, spared none; every one brought before it

was hanged. How many other such courts were at work does not appear; but

it is evident not less than ten or a dozen. And subalterns, who ought

not to have been intrusted with the charge of a score of men, assumed

the dread power of life and death over poor wretches snatched from their

homes, and given neither time nor opportunity for defence. Yet all this

does not satisfy the remorseless planter. When, in a parish of thirty

thousand people, two or three thousand sleep in bloody graves, and at

least as many more have been pitilessly scourged, he calls "the clemency

of the authorities extraordinary," and says, "that it comes too soon."

No wonder that such a record as this stirred to its depth the popular

heart of England. And it is the only relieving feature, that the

indignation thus aroused has overridden all opposition, silenced all

paltry excuses, and forced the government to appoint a Commission of

Inquiry, and pending that inquiry to suspend Governor Eyre from his

office.

One case, that of the judicial murder of Mr. Gordon, has properly

awakened great attention. Mr. Gordon was the very magistrate whose

removal from office created so much discontent in the whole parish of

St. Thomas in the East. He was a colored man with a very slight infusion

of black blood. His father was an Englishman, and he himself was bred in

England and married an English lady. He was wealthy, and the owner of a

great plantation. A bitter and fearless opponent of what he considered

to be the oppression of the planters, they in turn concentrated upon him

all their anger and malice, while the negroes looked up to him as their

hope and defence. The mere statement of the facts indicates that, if Mr.

Gordon was to be tried at all, the investigation should have been

patient, open, and thorough, granting to the accused every opportunity

of defence. What did take place was this. Mr. Gordon was at Kingston,

forty miles away from the scene of action. As soon as he learned that a

warrant was out for his arrest, he surrendered himself, and was hurried

away from the place where civil law was supreme to the scene of martial

law at Morant Bay. Without a friend to defend him, with no opportunity

to procure rebutting evidence, he was brought before a court of three

subalterns, and, after what was called "a very patient trial" of four or

five hours, sentenced to be hanged. Not one insult was spared. When he

was marched up from the wharf, the sailors were permitted to heap upon

him every opprobrious epithet. Before his execution "his black coat and

vest were taken from him as a prize by one soldier, his spectacles by

another; so," as an officer boasts, "he was treated not differently from

the common herd." The accusation was, that he had plotted a wide-spread

and diabolical rebellion. The only evidence which has been submitted

proves him guilty of intemperate language, and an abounding sympathy for

the poor and oppressed.[G] In his last letter to his wife, written just

before his execution, he uses language which has the stamp of truth upon

it. "I do not deserve my sentence, for I never advised or took part in

the insurrection. All I ever did was to recommend the people who

complained to seek redress in a legitimate way. It is, however, the will

of God that I should thus suffer in obeying his command to relieve the

poor and needy, and so far as I was able to protect the oppressed. And

glory be to His name, and I thank Him that I suffer in such a cause."

But it matters not of what Mr. Gordon was guilty; the method of the

proceedings, the dragging him from civil protection, the deprivation of

all proper opportunity for defence, the putting him to death as it were

in a corner, were all subversive of personal rights and safety. The

highest authority in England has declared the whole trial an illegality.

And the circumstances of the hour, when every vestige, ever pretence, of

armed resistance had been swept away, left no excuse for over-stepping

the bounds of legal authority.

It is proper that full weight should be given to the alleged

justification of these enormities. A diabolical plot existed, whose

meshes included the whole island, and whose purpose was to put to death

every white man and to outrage every white woman. This is what the

Governor asserts. This is what the Assembly reiterates. This is the

charge upon which every appeal of the Jamaican journals turns. The whole

truth we probably never shall know. The men who could best reveal it are

silent in the graves which lawless violence has dug for them, and will

bear no testimony except at the bar or Eternal Justice. The report of

the Committee of Inquiry will no doubt shed some light. Pending that

inquiry there are considerations which strike every one. If for two

years a bloody insurrection had been plotted, and the outbreak at Morant

Bay was the first stroke to toward its accomplishment, is it credible

that these truculent rebels should submit themselves as sheep to the

slaughter,--that not one band should be found to strike a manly blow for

life and liberty? If such an insurrection had its roots in every part of

the island, is it credible, that, while the whole military and naval

force, and no small part of the white inhabitants, were engaged in

putting down the thirty thousand of their brethren in St. Thomas and

Portland parishes, the three hundred thousand blacks all over the island

should remain peaceable and law-abiding? And it is to be noticed that,

since the reign of terror has subsided a little, those who know the

negroes best, the missionaries who labor among them, express the most

hearty contempt for these charges. But suppose that the negro had

plotted insurrection, diabolical, satanic, would that be any excuse for

wholesale slaughter, without forms of law, when all resistance was at an

end? We know that the South plotted and consummated rebellion; that her

people have slain three hundred thousand of our sons on the

battle-field; that more than thirty thousand have wasted and died of

slow torture in her prisons; that whenever the secrets of that

charnel-house, Southern life, are disclosed, they will tell of thousands

of Unionists who were hung, who were shot, who were burned at the stake,

who were hunted by dogs, who were scourged to death with whips, and all

because they were faithful to their country. And knowing all this, is

there a man of the North who, when military resistance has ceased, would

march our armies southward, hang every tenth man, shoot every fourth,

scourge as many more, and suffer a wild soldiery to strip half naked and

score with cruel whips thousands of the women? And does it alter the

moral aspect of the case, that these things are transacted on a little

island of the sea, and not on a continent,--or that the skin of the

sufferer is black instead of white?

* * * * *

The use men seek to make of events reveals often the motives which they

carried into the transaction of these events. Never was this more true

of any body of people than of the planters of Jamaica. The Kingston

Journal, an opposition, but not radical paper, boldly asserts, that the

press has been gagged because it urged upon government the necessity of

reform; that it has not dared to comment upon current facts, lest it

should come under grave suspicion; that "now, when the greatest order

prevails, and there is not the remotest probability of another outbreak,

we _dare_ not comment upon events, which, for the good of all classes,

ought to be calmly and fully discussed." A significant commentary upon

these statements is the fact that Mr. Levien, the editor of a Jamaica

paper, was arrested, because in an editorial he boldly condemned the

trial and execution of Mr. Gordon. And it is probable that he escaped

paying dearly for his courage, only because the Chief Justice of Jamaica

declared the whole law under which he was arrested unconstitutional, and

dismissed the case. A still more significant commentary upon these

statements is that other fact, that, in the midst of what they averred

were the throes of a great rebellion, the members of the Assembly

proceeded to destroy the very foundations of civil and religious

liberty and of the freedom of the press. They proposed to give the

Governor almost despotic authority, by surrendering the franchise of the

Assembly, and vesting its power in a council of twenty-four, half of

whom should be appointed by the Governor himself, and half elected by

the people from the list only of those who had estates worth more than

fifteen hundred dollars a year, or a salary of more than twenty-five

hundred dollars. All social worship, all conference and prayer meetings,

and even family prayers, if more than two strangers were present, were

to be interdicted, unless, indeed, they were conducted by a minister of

a favored sect. The denominations who had chiefly ministered to the

blacks were to be placed under such disabilities as should greatly

limit, or else destroy, their usefulness. And to round out and complete

the circle of despotism, this proposition, was introduced,--"that if

anything is contained in any printed paper which may be considered

seditious, or that may be adjudged so by any court which the Governor

may appoint, the writer shall be sentenced to hard labor in the

penitentiary for seven years." It is idle to suppose that these measures

will be sanctioned by the Queen; but they show what feelings burn in the

breasts of the planters, and admonish us to receive with caution any

statements which they may make concerning other classes of the

community.

* * * * *

This Jamaica "insurrection," whose origin, growth, and extinguishment in

blood have now been traced, has been the cause of we know not how many

oracular warnings from the lips of those who have not been distinguished

by any hearty attachment to the rights of the black. "See now," they

say, "what is the peril of emancipating these blacks." "Behold what

comes of educating this people up to the capacity of mischief."

"Acknowledge now that not even the gift of universal suffrage will

elevate and soften a race at once fickle and ferocious. There is no

safety but in keeping them under. Stop in your perilous experiments

while you can."

So long as the accounts of this outbreak are at once so conflicting and

so colored by party feeling, it may not be easy to say what are its

positive lessons. But it is easy to tell some things which it does not

teach.

In the _first_ place, it does not teach the danger of conferring the

right to vote upon the negro, for the negro of Jamaica has never

attained to that privilege. His traducers cry out, "What a race! The

best fed, the best clothed, the best sheltered, the least worked

peasantry on the face of the earth! Free! Free to make their own laws,

to choose their own rulers, to govern themselves! And yet they are

discontented!" Turn now and inquire what are the facts about their

governing themselves. True, no law says the negro shall not vote, but

the qualification is made so high that it is impossible that he should

vote. In a country where wages are scarcely a quarter of a dollar a day,

he is required to have an estate worth thirty dollars a year, or an

income of one hundred and forty dollars a year, or to pay taxes of

fifteen dollars a year. Suppose now that in New England a law were

passed that no man should vote who had not an estate worth two hundred

dollars a year, or an income of one thousand dollars, or who did not pay

one hundred dollars yearly tax,--and this, considering the difference of

wages, is scarcely as high a qualification as that of Jamaica,--and how

large a proportion of our people would obtain the privileges of a voter?

In fact, in Jamaica only three thousand vote, or about one twenty-fifth

of the adult males. Is it not just possible that the discontent there

may grow out of aspirations for self-government, and for the dignity and

privileges, as well as the name, of freemen? May not the outbreak teach

the danger of not allowing the negro to vote?

In the _second_ place, this rebellion does not teach the danger of

educating the negro; for the negro of Jamaica never has been educated.

While the government has wrung from his scanty wages a million dollars,

it pays the Governor alone more than three times the sum it appropriates

to education. It doles out for the education of seventy-five thousand

children the pittance of twelve thousand five hundred dollars. Did not

the negro himself eke out this bounty from his own little savings, not

one in a dozen of the children would ever enter a school-room or see a

book. As it is, only one sixth part of the children are, or ever were,

under instruction. And the instruction they receive is too often from

persons themselves illiterate and full of superstition, but who are the

best teachers who can be obtained with limited means. Consider, then,

the real condition of affairs,--three hundred and fifty thousand blacks,

a large share of them children or grandchildren of those who were

brought from Africa, with the wild blood of their fathers scarcely

diluted in their veins, with all the old traditions of Fetichism and Obi

worship fresh in their minds, altogether uneducated, or at best half

educated; consider what virgin soil is here for every vile superstition,

what a field for the demagogue to cultivate, and then decide whether it

might not be safer, after all, to educate the negro in Jamaica.

This insurrection does not teach, in the _third_ place, the danger of

obliterating the lines of caste, for in Jamaica those lines have never

been obliterated, or even made faint. It may be doubted whether there

was ever a moment when the ill-dissembled contempt of the whites, and

the distrust of the blacks, were more profound then now. An intelligent

observer declared, in 1850, that the gap between the blacks and whites

had been steadily increasing ever since emancipation. And ten years

later the Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society records, "that, as

a general statement, there is no generous feeling in the relations

between employer and employed. The negro can expect nothing but barest

justice, and is happy if he gets that." Can there be any safety for the

minority, when the majority, which numbers fifteen to one, has such a

sense of injustice rankling in its breast? One wades through the late

reprints of the Jamaica journals, column after column, page after page,

filled with coarse invective, with bitter denunciation, with injurious

suspicion; sees with what terrible relish the sufferings of these

deluded people are recorded; marks how the heroism which goes to the

scaffold without a tremor, and looks undeserved death in the face

without a fear, is travestied; shudders to hear the planters, after

thousands have been slain, yet cry for more blood; and then he puts the

paper down and says, "Here in this language is material enough out of

which to create a dozen bloody rebellions." How any race with the blood

of the tropics boiling in their veins, with the traditions of old

oppressions burning in their memory, can ever forget or forgive this

language and these unbridled outrages is inconceivable. He is mad who

does not see that the gulf of caste, too wide before, has widened and

deepened almost unfathomably by the influence of the events of the last

few months. He is mad, too, who thinks that Morant Bay, or the parish of

St. Thomas in the East, with their unshrived dead, is a safer place for

a white man to dwell in than it was six months ago.

It is too early to gather up all the lessons of this last of the almost

innumerable outbreaks in Jamaica. They may never be gathered up. But one

lesson stands out prominently, and that is, the safety of justice. We

cannot bring perfect equality upon the earth. It is not desirable

perhaps that we should. To the end of time, probably, there will be rich

and poor, high and low, weak and strong, black and white. But we can be

just. We can recognize every man as a child of God. We can grant to him

all the rights, all the privileges, and all the opportunities which

belong to a man. That is a lesson which Jamaica has never learned, and

therefore she sits under the shadow of her mountains, by the side of the

restless sea, clothed in garments of wretchedness.

FOOTNOTES:

[G] Since the above was written, despatches and explanations have been

received from Governor Eyre, and published; also an unofficial account

of the trial of Mr. Gordon, from the pen of a reporter who was present.

It is to be regretted that these papers do not relieve the authorities

from the charge of atrocious and illegal cruelty in the slightest

degree. Neither does the evidence in any way justify the legal or

illegal murder of Mr. Gordon. While in November there was an evident

desire to boast of the number and severity of the punishments which had

been inflicted upon the unfortunate blacks, there is as evident a desire

in January to show that the number of those who perished has been

greatly exaggerated. But it is difficult to see how the actors propose

to refute statements for which they themselves furnished the materials.

One agreeable fact comes out in these papers, that the British home

authorities never committed themselves to a support of the conduct of

the Jamaican officials. On the contrary, it now appears that Mr.

Cardwell, the British Colonial Secretary, from the beginning intimated

very clearly his doubt on the propriety of the proceedings, especially

in the case of Mr. Gordon.

THE CHIMNEY-CORNER FOR 1866.

IV.

DRESS, OR WHO MAKES THE FASHIONS.

The door of my study being open, I heard in the distant parlor a sort of

flutter of silken wings, and chatter of bird-like voices, which told me

that a covey of Jennie's pretty young street birds had just alighted

there. I could not forbear a peep at the rosy faces that glanced out

under pheasants' tails, doves' wings, and nodding hummingbirds, and made

one or two errands in that direction only that I might gratify my eyes

with a look at them.

Your nice young girl, of good family and good breeding, is always a

pretty object, and, for my part, I regularly lose my heart (in a sort of

figurative way) to every fresh, charming creature that trips across my

path. All their mysterious rattle-traps and whirligigs,--their curls and

networks and crimples and rimples and crisping-pins,--their little

absurdities, if you will,--have to me a sort of charm, like the tricks

and stammerings of a curly-headed child. I should have made a very poor

censor if I had been put in Cato's place: the witches would have thrown

all my wisdom into some private chip-basket of their own, and walked off

with it in triumph. Never a girl bows to me that I do not see in her eye

a twinkle of confidence that she could, if she chose, make an old fool

of me. I surrender at discretion on first sight.

Jennie's friends are nice girls,--the flowers of good, staid, sensible

families,--not heathen blossoms nursed in the hot-bed heat of wild,

high-flying, fashionable society. They have been duly and truly taught

and brought up, by good mothers and painstaking aunties, to understand

in their infancy that handsome is that handsome does; that little girls

must not be vain of their pretty red shoes and nice curls, and must

remember that it is better to be good than to be handsome; with all

other wholesome truisms of the kind. They have been to school, and had

their minds improved in all modern ways,--have calculated eclipses, and

read Virgil, Schiller, and La Fontaine, and understand all about the

geological strata, and the different systems of metaphysics,--so that a

person reading the list of their acquirements might be a little appalled

at the prospect of entering into conversation with them. For all these

reasons I listened quite indulgently to the animated conversation that

was going on about--Well!

What _do_ girls generally talk about, when a knot of them get together?

Not, I believe, about the sources of the Nile, or the precession of the

equinoxes, or the nature of the human understanding, or Dante, or

Shakespeare, or Milton, although they have learned all about them in

school; but upon a theme much nearer and dearer,--the one all-pervading

feminine topic ever since Eve started the first toilet of fig-leaves;

and as I caught now and then a phrase of their chatter, I jotted it down

in pure amusement, giving to each charming speaker the name of the bird

under whose colors she was sailing.

"For my part," said little Humming-Bird, "I'm quite worn out with

sewing; the fashions are all _so_ different from what they were last

year, that everything has to be made over."

"Isn't it dreadful!" said Pheasant. "There's my new mauve silk dress! it

was a very expensive silk, and I haven't worn it more than three or four

times, and it really looks quite dowdy; and I can't get Patterson to do

it over for me for this party. Well, really, I shall have to give up

company because I have nothing to wear."

"Who _does_ set the fashions, I wonder," said Humming-Bird; "they seem

now-a-days to whirl faster and faster, till really they don't leave one

time for anything."

"Yes," said Dove, "I haven't a moment for reading, or drawing, or

keeping up my music. The fact is, now-a-days, to keep one's self

properly dressed is all one can do. If I were _grande dame_ now, and had

only to send an order to my milliner and dressmaker, I might be

beautifully dressed all the time without giving much thought to it

myself; and that is what I should like. But this constant planning about

one's toilet, changing your buttons and your fringes and your

bonnet-trimmings and your hats every other day, and then being

behindhand! It is really too fatiguing.

"Well," said Jennie, "I never pretend to keep up. I never expect to be

in the front rank of fashion, but no girl wants to be behind every one;

nobody wants to have people say, 'Do see what an old-times,

rubbishy-looking creature _that_ is.' And now, with my small means and

conscience, (for I have a conscience in this matter, and don't wish to

spend any more time and money than is needed to keep one's self fresh

and tasteful,) I find my dress quite a fatiguing care."

"Well, now, girls," said Humming-Bird, "do you really know, I have

sometimes thought I should like to be a nun, just to get rid of all this

labor. If I once gave up dress altogether, and knew I was to have

nothing but one plain robe tied round my waist with a cord, it does seem

to me as if it would be a perfect repose,--only one is a Protestant, you

know."

Now, as Humming-Bird was the most notoriously dressy individual in the

little circle, this suggestion was received with quite a laugh. But Dove

took it up.

"Well, really," she said, "when dear Mr. S---- preaches those saintly

sermons to us about our baptismal vows, and the nobleness of an

unworldly life, and calls on us to live for something purer and higher

than we are living for, I confess that sometimes all my life seems to me

a mere sham,--that I am going to church, and saying solemn words, and

being wrought up by solemn music, and uttering most solemn vows and

prayers, all to no purpose; and then I come away and look at my life,

all resolving itself into a fritter about dress, and sewing-silk, cord,

braid, and buttons,--the next fashion of bonnets,--how to make my old

dresses answer instead of new,--how to keep the air of the world, while

in my heart I am cherishing something higher and better. If there's

anything I detest it is hypocrisy; and sometimes the life I lead looks

like it. But how to get out of it? what to do?"

"I'm sure," said Humming-Bird, "that taking care of my clothes and going

into company is, frankly, _all_ I do. If I go to parties, as other girls

do, and make calls, and keep dressed,--you know papa is not rich, and

one must do these things economically,--it really does take all the time

I have. When I was confirmed the Bishop talked to us so sweetly, and I

really meant sincerely to be a good girl,--to be as good as I knew how;

but now, when they talk about fighting the good fight and running the

Christian race, I feel very mean and little, for I am sure this isn't

doing it. But what is,--and who is?"

"Aunt Betsey Titcomb is doing it, I suppose," said Pheasant.

"Aunt Betsey!" said Humming-Bird, "well, she is. She spends _all_ her

money in doing good. She goes around visiting the poor all the time. She

is a perfect saint;--but O girls, how she looks! Well, now, I confess,

when I think I must look like Aunt Betsey, my courage gives out. _Is_ it

necessary to go without hoops, and look like a dipped candle, in order

to be unworldly? Must one wear such a fright of a bonnet?"

"No," said Jennie, "I think not. I think Miss Betsey Titcomb, good as

she is, injures the cause of goodness by making it outwardly repulsive.

I really think, if she would take some pains with her dress, and spend

upon her own wardrobe a little of the money she gives away, that she

might have influence in leading others to higher aims; now all her

influence is against it. Her _outré_ and repulsive exterior arrays our

natural and innocent feelings against goodness; for surely it is natural

and innocent to wish to look well, and I am really afraid a great many

of us are more afraid of being thought ridiculous than of being wicked."

"And after all," said Pheasant, "you know Mr. St. Clair says, 'Dress is

one of the fine arts,' and if it is, why of course we ought to cultivate

it. Certainly, well-dressed men and women are more agreeable objects

than rude and unkempt ones. There must be somebody whose mission it is

to preside over the agreeable arts of life; and I suppose it falls to

'us girls.' That's the way I comfort myself, at all events. Then I must

confess that I do like dress; I'm not cultivated enough to be a painter

or a poet, and I have all my artistic nature, such as it is, in dress. I

love harmonies of color, exact shades and matches; I love to see a

uniform idea carried all through a woman's toilet,--her dress, her

bonnet, her gloves, her shoes, her pocket-handkerchief and cuffs, her

very parasol, all in correspondence."

"But, my dear," said Jennie, "anything of this kind must take a

fortune!"

"And if I had a fortune, I'm pretty sure I should spend a good deal of

it in this way," said Pheasant. "I can imagine such completeness of

toilet as I have never seen. How I would like the means to show what I

could do! My life, now, is perpetual disquiet. I always feel shabby. My

things must all be bought at hap-hazard, as they can be got out of my

poor little allowance,--and things are getting so horridly dear! Only

think of it, girls! gloves at two and a quarter! and boots at seven,

eight, and ten dollars! and then, as you say, the fashions changing so!

Why, I bought a sack last fall and gave forty dollars for it, and this

winter I'm wearing it, to be sure, but it has no style at all,--looks

quite antiquated!"

"Now I say," said Jennie, "that you are really morbid on the subject of

dress; you are fastidious and particular and exacting in your ideas in a

way that really ought to be put down. There is not a girl of our set

that dresses as nicely as you do, except Emma Seyton, and her father,

you know, has no end of income."

"Nonsense, Jennie," said Pheasant. "I think I really look like a beggar;

but then, I bear it as well as I can, because, you see, I know papa does

all for us he can, and I won't be extravagant. But I do think, as

Humming-Bird says, that it would be a great relief to give it up

altogether and retire from the world; or, as Cousin John says, climb a

tree and pull it up after you, and so be in peace."

"Well," said Jennie, "all this seems to have come on since the war. It

seems to me that not only has everything doubled in price, but all the

habits of the world seem to require that you shall have double the

quantity of everything. Two or three years ago a good balmoral skirt was

a fixed fact; it was a convenient thing for sloppy, unpleasant weather.

But now, dear me! there is no end to them. They cost fifteen and twenty

dollars; and girls that I know have one or two every season, besides all

sorts of quilled and embroidered and ruffled and tucked and flounced

ones. Then, in dressing one's hair, what a perfect overflow there is of

all manner of waterfalls, and braids, and rats and mice, and curls, and

combs; when three or four years ago we combed our own hair innocently

behind our ears, and put flowers in it, and thought we looked nicely at

our evening parties! I don't believe we look any better now, when we are

dressed, than we did then,--so what's the use?"

"Well, did you ever see such a tyranny as this of fashion?" said

Humming-Bird. "We know it's silly, but we all bow down before it; we are

afraid of our lives before it; and who makes all this and sets it going?

The Paris milliners, the Empress, or who?"

"The question where fashions come from is like the question where pins

go to," said Pheasant. "Think of the thousands and millions of pins

that are being used every year, and not one of them worn out. Where do

they all go to? One would expect to find a pin mine somewhere."

"Victor Hugo says they go into the sewers in Paris," said Jennie.

"And the fashions come from a source about as pure," said I, from the

next room.

"Bless me, Jennie, do tell us if your father has been listening to us

all this time!" was the next exclamation; and forthwith there was a whir

and rustle of the silken wings, as the whole troop fluttered into my

study.

"Now, Mr. Crowfield, you are too bad!" said Humming-Bird, as she perched

upon a corner of my study-table, and put her little feet upon an old

"Froissart" which filled the arm-chair.

"To be listening to our nonsense!" said Pheasant.

"Lying in wait for us!" said Dove.

"Well, now, you have brought us all down on you," said Humming-Bird,

"and you won't find it so easy to be rid of us. You will have to answer

all our questions."

"My dears, I am at your service, as far as mortal man may be," said I.

"Well, then," said Humming-Bird, "tell us all about everything,--how

things come to be as they are. Who makes the fashions?"

"I believe it is universally admitted that, in the matter of feminine

toilet, France rules the world," said I.

"But who rules France?" said Pheasant. "Who decides what the fashions

shall be there?"

"It is the great misfortune of the civilized world, at the present

hour," said I, "that the state of morals in France is apparently at the

very lowest ebb, and consequently the leadership of fashion is entirely

in the hands of a class of women who could not be admitted into good

society, in any country. Women who can never have the name of wife,--who

know none of the ties of family,--these are the dictators whose dress

and equipage and appointments give the law, first to France, and through

France to the civilized world. Such was the confession of Monsieur

Dupin, made in a late speech before the French Senate, and acknowledged,

with murmurs of assent on all sides, to be the truth. This is the reason

why the fashions have such an utter disregard of all those laws of

prudence and economy which regulate the expenditures of families. They

are made by women whose sole and only hold on life is personal

attractiveness, and with whom to keep this up, at any cost, is a

desperate necessity. No moral quality, no association of purity, truth,

modesty, self-denial, or family love, comes in to hallow the atmosphere

about them, and create a sphere of loveliness which brightens as mere

physical beauty fades. The ravages of time and dissipation must be made

up by an unceasing study of the arts of the toilet. Artists of all

sorts, moving in their train, rack all the stores of ancient and modern

art for the picturesque, the dazzling, the grotesque; and so, lest these

Circes of society should carry all before them, and enchant every

husband, brother, and lover, the staid and lawful Penelopes leave the

hearth and home to follow in their triumphal march and imitate their

arts. Thus it goes in France; and in England, virtuous and domestic

princesses and peeresses must take obediently what has been decreed by

their rulers in the _demi-monde_ of France; and we in America have

leaders of fashion, who make it their pride and glory to turn New York

into Paris, and to keep even step with everything that is going on

there. So the whole world of womankind is marching under the command of

these leaders. The love of dress and glitter and fashion is getting to

be a morbid, unhealthy epidemic, which really eats away the nobleness

and purity of women.

"In France, as Monsieur Dupin, Edmond About, and Michelet tell us, the

extravagant demands of love for dress lead women to contract debts

unknown to their husbands, and sign obligations which are paid by the

sacrifice of honor, and thus the purity of the family is continually

undermined. In England there is a voice of complaint, sounding from the

leading periodicals, that the extravagant demands of female fashion are

bringing distress into families, and making marriages impossible; and

something of the same sort seems to have begun here. We are across the

Atlantic, to be sure; but we feel the swirl and drift of the great

whirlpool; only, fortunately, we are far enough off to be able to see

whither things are tending, and to stop ourselves if we will.

"We have just come through a great struggle, in which our women have

borne an heroic part,--have shown themselves capable of any kind of

endurance and self-sacrifice; and now we are in that reconstructive

state which makes it of the greatest consequence to ourselves and the

world that we understand our own institutions and position, and learn

that, instead of following the corrupt and worn-out ways of the Old

World, we are called on to set the example of a new state of

society,--noble, simple, pure, and religious; and women can do more

towards this even than men, for women are the real architects of

society.

"Viewed in this light, even the small, frittering cares of woman's

life--the attention to buttons, trimmings, thread, and sewing-silk--may

be an expression of their patriotism and their religion. A noble-hearted

woman puts a noble meaning into even the commonplace details of life.

The women of America can, if they choose, hold back their country from

following in the wake of old, corrupt, worn-out, effeminate European

society, and make America the leader of the world in all that is good."

"I'm sure," said Humming-Bird, "we all would like to be noble and

heroic. During the war, I did so long to be a man! I felt so poor and

insignificant because I was nothing but a girl!"

"Ah, well," said Pheasant, "but then one wants to do something worth

doing, if one is going to do anything. One would like to be grand and

heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be _very_

something, _very_ great, _very_ heroic; or if not that, then at least

very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity

that bores me."

"Then, I suppose, you agree with the man we read of, who buried his one

talent in the earth, as hardly worth caring for."

"To say the truth, I always had something of a sympathy for that man,"

said Pheasant. "I can't enjoy goodness and heroism in homoeopathic

doses. I want something appreciable. What I can do, being a woman, is a

very different thing from what I should try to do if I were a man, and

had a man's chances: it is so much less--so poor--that it is scarcely

worth trying for."

"You remember," said I, "the apothegm of one of the old divines, that if

two angels were sent down from heaven, the one to govern a kingdom, and

the other to sweep a street, they would not feel any disposition to

change works."

"Well, that just shows that they are angels, and not mortals," said

Pheasant; "but we poor human beings see things differently."

"Yet, my child, what could Grant or Sherman have done, if it had not

been for the thousands of brave privates who were content to do each

their imperceptible little,--if it had not been for the poor, unnoticed,

faithful, never-failing common soldiers, who did the work and bore the

suffering? No _one_ man saved our country, or could save it; nor could

the men have saved it without the women. Every mother that said to her

son, Go; every wife that strengthened the hands of her husband; every

girl who sent courageous letters to her betrothed; every woman who

worked for a fair; every grandam whose trembling hands knit stockings

and scraped lint; every little maiden who hemmed shirts and made

comfort-bags for soldiers,--each and all have been the joint doers of a

great heroic work, the doing of which has been the regeneration of our

era. A whole generation has learned the luxury of thinking heroic

thoughts and being conversant with heroic deeds, and I have faith to

believe that all this is not to go out in a mere crush of fashionable

luxury and folly and frivolous emptiness,--but that our girls are going

to merit the high praise given us by De Tocqueville, when he placed

first among the causes of our prosperity the _noble character of

American women_. Because foolish female persons in New York are striving

to outdo the _demi-monde_ of Paris in extravagance, it must not follow

that every sensible and patriotic matron, and every nice, modest young

girl, must forthwith, and without inquiry, rush as far after them as

they possibly can. Because Mrs. Shoddy opens a ball in a

two-thousand-dollar lace dress, every girl in the land need not look

with shame on her modest white muslin. Somewhere between the fast women

of Paris and the daughters of Christian American families there should

be established a _cordon sanitaire_, to keep out the contagion of

manners, customs, and habits with which a noble-minded, religious

democratic people ought to have nothing to do."

"Well now, Mr. Crowfield," said the Dove, "since you speak us so fair,

and expect so much of us, we must of course try not to fall below your

compliments; but, after all, tell us what is the right standard about

dress. Now we have daily lectures about this at home. Aunt Maria says

that she never saw such times as these, when mothers and daughters,

church-members and worldly people, all seem to be going one way, and sit

down together and talk, as they will, on dress and fashion,--how to have

this made and that altered. We used to be taught, she said, that

church-members had higher things to think of,--that their thoughts ought

to be fixed on something better, and that they ought to restrain the

vanity and worldliness of children and young people; but now, she says,

even before a girl is born, dress is the one thing needful,--the great

thing to be thought of; and so, in every step of the way upward, her

little shoes, and her little bonnets, and her little dresses, and her

corals and her ribbons, are constantly being discussed in her presence,

as the one all-important object of life. Aunt Maria thinks mamma is

dreadful, because she has maternal yearnings over our toilet successes

and fortunes; and we secretly think she is rather soured by old age, and

has forgotten how a girl feels."

"The fact is," said I, "that the love of dress and outside show has been

always such an exacting and absorbing tendency, that it seems to have

furnished work for religionists and economists, in all ages, to keep it

within bounds. Various religious bodies, at the outset, adopted severe

rules in protest against it The Quakers and the Methodists prescribed

certain fixed modes of costume as a barrier against its frivolities and

follies. In the Romish Church an entrance on any religious order

prescribed entire and total renunciation of all thought and care for the

beautiful in person or apparel, as the first step towards saintship. The

costume of the _religieuse_ seemed to be purposely intended to imitate

the shroudings and swathings of a corpse and the lugubrious color of a

pall, so as forever to remind the wearer that she was dead to the world

of ornament and physical beauty. All great Christian preachers and

reformers have levelled their artillery against the toilet, from the

time of St. Jerome downward; and Tom Moore has put into beautiful and

graceful verse St. Jerome's admonitions to the fair church-goers of his

time.

'WHO IS THE MAID?

'ST. JEROME'S LOVE.

'Who is the maid my spirit seeks,

Through cold reproof and slander's blight?

Has _she_ Love's roses on her cheeks?

Is _hers_ an eye of this world's light?

No: wan and sunk with midnight prayer

Are the pale looks of her I love;

Or if, at times, a light be there,

Its beam is kindled from above.

'I chose not her, my heart's elect,

From those who seek their Maker's shrine

In gems and garlands proudly decked,

As if themselves were things divine.

No: Heaven but faintly warms the breast

That beats beneath a broidered veil;

And she who comes in glittering vest

To mourn her frailty still is frail.

'Not so the faded form I prize

And love, because its bloom is gone;

The glory in those sainted eyes

Is all the grace _her_ brow puts on.

And ne'er was Beauty's dawn so bright,

So touching, as that form's decay,

Which, like the altar's trembling light,

In holy lustre wastes away.'

"But the defect of all these modes of warfare on the elegances and

refinements of the toilet was that they were too indiscriminate. They

were in reality founded on a false principle. They took for granted that

there was something radically corrupt and wicked in the body and in the

physical system. According to this mode of viewing things, the body was

a loathsome and pestilent prison, in which the soul was locked up and

enslaved, and the eyes, the ears, the taste, the smell, were all so many

corrupt traitors in conspiracy to poison her. Physical beauty of every

sort was a snare, a Circean enchantment, to be valiantly contended with

and straitly eschewed. Hence they preached, not moderation, but total

abstinence from all pursuit of physical grace and beauty.

"Now, a resistance founded on an over-statement is constantly tending to

reaction. People always have a tendency to begin thinking for

themselves; and when they so think, they perceive that a good and wise

God would not have framed our bodies with such exquisite care only to

corrupt our souls,--that physical beauty, being created in such profuse

abundance around us, and we being possessed with such a longing for it,

must have its uses, its legitimate sphere of exercise. Even the poor,

shrouded nun, as she walks the convent garden, cannot help asking

herself why, if the crimson velvet of the rose was made by God, all

colors except black and white are sinful for her; and the modest Quaker,

after hanging all her house and dressing all her children in drab,

cannot but marvel at the sudden outstreaking of blue and yellow and

crimson in the tulip-beds under her window, and reflect how very

differently the great All-Father arrays the world's housekeeping. The

consequence of all this has been, that the reforms based upon these

severe and exclusive views have gradually gone backward. The Quaker

dress is imperceptibly and gracefully melting away into a refined

simplicity of modern costume, which in many cases seems to be the

perfection of taste. The obvious reflection, that one color of the

rainbow is quite as much of God as another, has led the children of

gentle dove-colored mothers to appear in shades of rose-color, blue, and

lilac; and wise elders have said, it is not so much the color or the

shape that we object to, as giving too much time and too much money,--if

the heart is right with God and man, the bonnet ribbon may be of any

shade you please."

"But don't you think," said Pheasant, "that a certain fixed dress,

marking the unworldly character of a religious order, is desirable? Now,

I have said before that I am very fond of dress. I have a passion for

beauty and completeness in it; and as long as I am in the world and

obliged to dress as the world does, it constantly haunts me, and tempts

me to give more time, more thought, more money, to these things than I

really think they are worth. But I can conceive of giving up this thing

altogether as being much easier than regulating it to the precise point.

I never read of a nun's taking the veil, without a certain thrill of

sympathy. To cut off one's hair, to take off and cast from her, one by

one, all one's trinkets and jewels, to lie down and have the pall thrown

over one, and feel one's self, once for all, dead to the world,--I

cannot help feeling as if this were real, thorough, noble renunciation,

and as if one might rise up from it with a grand, calm consciousness of

having risen to a higher and purer atmosphere, and got above all the

littlenesses and distractions that beset us here. So I have heard

charming young Quaker girls, who, in more thoughtless days, indulged in

what for them was a slight shading of worldly conformity, say that it

was to them a blessed rest when they put on the strict, plain dress, and

felt that they really had taken up the cross and turned their backs on

the world. I can conceive of doing this, much more easily than I can of

striking the exact line between worldly conformity and noble aspiration,

in the life I live now."

"My dear child," said I, "we all overlook one great leading principle of

our nature, and that is, that we are made to find a higher pleasure in

self-sacrifice than in any form of self-indulgence. There is something

grand and pathetic in the idea of an entire self-surrender, to which

every human soul leaps up, as we do to the sound of martial music.

"How many boys of Boston and New York, who had lived effeminate and idle

lives, felt this new power uprising in them in our war! How they

embraced the dirt and discomfort and fatigue and watchings and toils of

camp-life with an eagerness of zest which they had never felt in the

pursuit of mere pleasure, and wrote home burning letters that they never

were so happy in their lives! It was not that dirt and fatigue and

discomfort and watchings and weariness were in themselves agreeable, but

it was a joy to feel themselves able to bear all and surrender all for

something higher than self. Many a poor Battery bully of New York, many

a street rowdy, felt uplifted by the discovery that he too had hid away

under the dirt and dust of his former life this divine and precious

jewel. He leaped for joy to find that he too could be a hero. Think of

the hundreds of thousands of plain, ordinary workingmen, and of

seemingly ordinary boys, who, but for such a crisis, might have passed

through life never knowing this to be in them, and who courageously

endured hunger and thirst and cold, and separation from dearest friends,

for days and weeks and months, when they might, at any day, have bought

a respite by deserting their country's flag! Starving boys, sick at

heart, dizzy in head, pining for home and mother, still found warmth and

comfort in the one thought that they could suffer, die, for their

country; and the graves at Salisbury and Andersonville show in how many

souls this noble power of self-sacrifice to the higher good was

lodged,--how many there were, even in the humblest walks of life, who

preferred death by torture to life in dishonor.

"It is this heroic element in man and woman that makes self-sacrifice an

ennobling and purifying ordeal in any religious profession. The man

really is taken into a higher region of his own nature, and finds a

pleasure in the exercise of higher faculties which he did not suppose

himself to possess. Whatever sacrifice is supposed to be duty, whether

the supposition be really correct or not, has in it an ennobling and

purifying power; and thus the eras of conversion from one form of the

Christian religion to another are often marked with a real and permanent

exaltation of the whole character. But it does not follow that certain

religious beliefs and ordinances are in themselves just, because they

thus touch the great heroic master-chord of the human soul. To wear

sackcloth and sleep on a plank may have been of use to many souls, as

symbolizing the awakening of this higher nature; but, still, the

religion of the New Testament is plainly one which calls to no such

outward and evident sacrifices.

"It was John the Baptist, and not the Messiah, who dwelt in the

wilderness and wore garments of camel's hair; and Jesus was commented

on, not for his asceticism, but for his cheerful, social acceptance of

the average innocent wants and enjoyments of humanity. 'The Son of man

came eating and drinking.' The great, and never-ceasing, and utter

self-sacrifice of his life was not signified by any peculiarity of

costume, or language, or manner; it showed itself only as it

unconsciously welled up in all his words and actions, in his estimates

of life, in all that marked him out as a being of a higher and holier

sphere."

"Then you do not believe in influencing this subject of dress by

religious persons' adopting any particular laws of costume?" said

Pheasant.

"I do not see it to be possible," said I, "considering how society is

made up. There are such differences of taste and character,--people move

in such different spheres, are influenced by such different

circumstances,--that all we can do is to lay down certain great

principles, and leave it to every one to apply them according to

individual needs."

"But what are these principles? There is the grand inquiry."

"Well," said I, "let us feel our way. In the first place, then, we are

all agreed in one starting-point,--that beauty is not to be considered

as a bad thing,--that the love of ornament in our outward and physical

life is not a sinful or a dangerous feeling, and only leads to evil, as

all other innocent things do, by being used in wrong ways. So far we are

all agreed, are we not?"

"Certainly," said all the voices.

"It is, therefore, neither wicked nor silly nor weak-minded to like

beautiful dress, and all that goes to make it up. Jewelry, diamonds,

pearls, emeralds, rubies, and all sorts of pretty things that are made

of them, are as lawful and innocent objects of admiration and desire, as

flowers or birds or butterflies, or the tints of evening skies. Gems, in

fact, are a species of mineral flower; they are the blossoms of the

dark, hard mine; and what they want in perfume, they make up in

durability. The best Christian in the world may, without the least

inconsistency, admire them, and say, as a charming, benevolent old

Quaker lady once said to me, 'I do so love to look at beautiful

jewelry!' The love of beautiful dress, in itself, therefore, so far from

being in a bad sense worldly, may be the same indication of a refined

and poetical nature that is given by the love of flowers and of natural

objects.

"In the third place, there is nothing in itself wrong, or unworthy a

rational being, in a certain degree of attention to the fashion of

society in our costume. It is not wrong to be annoyed at unnecessary

departures from the commonly received practices of good society in the

matter of the arrangement of our toilet; and it would indicate rather an

unamiable want of sympathy with our fellow-beings, if we were not

willing, for the most part, to follow what they indicate to be agreeable

in the disposition of our outward affairs."

"Well, I must say, Mr. Crowfield, you are allowing us all a very

generous margin," said Humming-Bird.

"But, now," said I, "I am coming to the restrictions. When is love of

dress excessive and wrong? To this I answer by stating my faith in one

of old Plato's ideas, in which he speaks of beauty and its uses. He says

there were two impersonations of beauty worshipped under the name of

Venus in the ancient times,--the one celestial, born of the highest

gods, the other earthly. To the earthly Venus the sacrifices were such

as were more trivial; to the celestial, such as were more holy. 'The

worship of the earthly Venus,' he says, 'sends us oftentimes on unworthy

and trivial errands, but the worship of the celestial to high and

honorable friendships, to noble aspirations and heroic actions.'

"Now it seems to me that, if we bear in mind this truth in regard to

beauty, we shall have a test with which to try ourselves in the matter

of physical adornment. We are always excessive when we sacrifice the

higher beauty to attain the lower one. A woman who will sacrifice

domestic affection, conscience, self-respect, honor, to love of dress,

we all agree, loves dress too much. She loses the true and higher beauty

of womanhood for the lower beauty of gems and flowers and colors. A girl

who sacrifices to dress all her time, all her strength, all her money,

to the neglect of the cultivation of her mind and heart, and to the

neglect of the claims of others on her helpfulness, is sacrificing the

higher to the lower beauty. Her fault is not the love of beauty, but

loving the wrong and inferior kind.

"It is remarkable that the directions of Holy Writ, in regard to the

female dress, should distinctly take note of this difference between the

higher and the lower beauty which we find in the works of Plato. The

Apostle gives no rule, no specific costume, which should mark the

Christian woman from the Pagan; but says, 'whose adorning, let it not be

that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or

of putting on of apparel; but let it be the hidden man of the heart, in

that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet

spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.' The gold and gems

and apparel are not forbidden; but we are told not to depend on them for

beauty, to the neglect of those imperishable, immortal graces that

belong to the soul. The makers of fashion among whom Christian women

lived when the Apostle wrote, were the same class of brilliant and

worthless Aspasias who make the fashions of modern Paris; and all

womankind was sunk into slavish adoration of mere physical adornment

when the Gospel sent forth among them this call to the culture of a

higher and immortal beauty.

"In fine, girls," said I, "you may try yourselves by this standard. You

love dress too much when you care more for your outward adornings than

for your inward dispositions,--when it afflicts you more to have torn

your dress than to have lost your temper,--when you are more troubled by

an ill-fitting gown than by a neglected duty,--when you are less

concerned at having made an unjust comment, or spread a scandalous

report, than at having worn a _passée_ bonnet,--when you are less

troubled at the thought of being found at the last great feast without

the wedding garment, than at being found at the party to-night in the

fashion of last year. No Christian woman, as I view it, ought to give

such attention to her dress as to allow it to take up _all_ of three

very important things, viz.:--

_All_ her time.

_All_ her strength.

_All_ her money.

Whoever does this lives not the Christian, but the Pagan life,--worships

not at the Christian's altar of our Lord Jesus, but at the shrine of the

lower Venus of Corinth and Rome."

"O now, Mr. Crowfield, you frighten me," said Humming-Bird. "I'm so

afraid, do you know, that I am doing exactly that."

"And so am I," said Pheasant; "and yet, certainly, it is not what I mean

or intend to do."

"But how to help it," said Dove.

"My dears," said I, "where there is a will, there is a way. Only resolve

that you will put the true beauty first,--that, even if you do have to

seem unfashionable, you will follow the highest beauty of

womanhood,--and the battle is half gained. Only resolve that your time,

your strength, your money, such as you have, shall not all--nor more

than half--be given to mere outward adornment, and you will go right. It

requires only an army of girls animated with this noble purpose to

declare independence in America, and emancipate us from the decrees and

tyrannies of French actresses and ballet-dancers. _En avant_, girls! You

yet can, if you will, save the republic."

THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS.

The President of the United States was not elected to the office he

holds by the voice of the people of the loyal States; in voting for him

as Vice-President nobody dreamed that, by the assassination of Mr.

Lincoln, he would constitutionally succeed to the more important post.

The persons who now form the Congress of the United States _were_

elected by the people or the States for the exact positions they hold.

In any comparison between the two as to the direct derivation of their

power from the people and the States, Congress has everything in its

favor; Mr. Johnson, nothing. The immense power he enjoys, a power not

merely greater than that of Queen Victoria, but greater than that of

Earl Russell, the real British Executive, is the result not of design,

but of accident. That the executive power he holds is legitimate, within

its just constitutional bounds, must not blind us to the fact that it

did not have its origin in the popular vote, especially now when he is

appealing to the people to support him against their direct

representatives.

For the event which the Union party of the country was so anxious to

avert, but which some clearly foresaw as inevitable, has occurred; the

President has come to an open rupture with Congress on the question of

reconstruction. No one who has witnessed during the past eight months

the humiliating expedients to which even statesmen and patriots have

resorted, in order to avoid giving Mr. Johnson offence, without at the

same time sacrificing all decent regard for their own convictions and

the will of the people, can assert that this rupture was provoked by

Congress. The President has, on the whole, been treated with singular

tenderness by the national party whose just expectations he has

disappointed; the opposition to his schemes has, indeed, exhibited, if

anything, too much of the style of "bated breath" to befit the dignity

of independent legislators; and the only result of this timorous dissent

has been to inflame him with the notion that the public men who offered

it were conscious that the people were on his side, and concealed

anxiety for their own popularity under a feigned indisposition to

quarrel with him.

The President seems to belong to that class of men who act not so much

from principles as from moods; as his moods vary, his conduct changes;

but while he is possessed by one of them, his mind is inaccessible to

evidence which does not sustain his dominant feeling, and uninfluenced

by arguments which do not confirm his dominant ideas. Mr. Covode and Mr.

Schurz could get no hearing from him, because they were sent south to

collect evidence while he was in one mood, and had to report the results

of their investigations when he had passed into another. This

peculiarity of his mind makes the idea of a "Johnson party" so difficult

of realization; for a party cannot be founded on a man, unless that

man's intellect and integrity are so manifestly pre-eminent as to dwarf

all comparison with others, or unless his conduct obeys laws, and can

therefore be calculated. Thus the gentlemen who spoke for him in New

York, on the 22d of February, at the time he was speaking for himself in

Washington, found that they were unwittingly his opponents, while

appearing as his mouth-pieces, and had accordingly to send telegrams to

Washington of such fond servility, that the vindication of their

partisanship could only be made at the expense of provoking the hilarity

of the public. But one principle, taken up from personal feeling, at the

time he resented the idea that "Tennessee had ever gone out of the

Union," has had a mischievous influence in directing his policy, though

it has never been consistently carried out; for Mr. Johnson's mode of

dealing with a principle is strikingly individual. He uses it to justify

his doing what he desires, while he does not allow it to restrain him

from doing what he pleases. The principle which he thus adopted was,

that the seceded States had never been out of the Union as _States_. It

would seem to be clear that, constitutionally speaking, a State in the

American Union is a vital part of the government, to which, at the same

time, it owes allegiance. The seceded States solemnly, by conventions of

their people, broke away from this allegiance, and have not, up to the

present moment, formed a part of the government. The condition in which

they were left by their own acts may be variously stated; it may be said

that they were "States out of practical relations to the Union,"--which

is simply to decline venturing farther than one step in the analysis of

their condition,--or "States in rebellion," or "States whose governments

have lapsed," or "Territories"; but certainly, neither in principle nor

in fact, were they States in the Union, according to the constitutional

meaning of that phrase. The one thing certain is, that their criminal

acts did not affect at all the rights of the United States over their

geographical limits and population; for these rights were given by

conventions of the people of all the States, and could not therefore be

abrogated by the will of the particular States that rebelled. Whether or

not the word "Territories" fits their condition, it is plain that they

cannot be brought back to their old "practical relations to the Union"

without a process similar to that by which Territories are organized

into States and brought into the Union. If they were, during the

Rebellion, States in the Union, then the only clause in the Constitution

which covers their case is that in which each house of Congress is

authorized "to compel the attendance of absent members"; but, even

conceding that we have waged war in the character of a colossal

sergeant-at-arms, we should, by another clause of the Constitution, be

bound to compel their attendance as members, only to punish their

absence as traitors.

Still, even if we should admit, against all the facts and logic of the

case, that the Rebel communities have never been out of the Union as

States, it is plain that the conduct of the Executive has not, until

recently, conformed to that theory. He violated it constantly in the

processes of his scheme of reconstruction, only to make it reappear as

mandatory in the results. All the steps he took in creating State

governments were necessarily subversive of universally recognized State

rights. The Secessionists had done their work so completely, as regards

their respective localities, that there was left no possible organic

connection between the old States and any new ones which might be

organized under the lead of the Federal government. The only persons who

could properly call State conventions were disqualified, by treason, for

the office, and might have been hanged as traitors while occupied in

preserving unbroken the unity of their State life. In other words, the

only persons competent to act constitutionally were the persons

constitutionally incompetent to act,--a gigantic practical bull and

absurdity, which met Mr. Johnson as the first logical consequence of his

fundamental maxim. He accordingly was forced to go to work as if no

principle hampered him. He assumed, at the start, the most radical and

important of all State rights; that is, from a mixed _population_ of

black and white freemen he selected a certain number, whose

distinguishing mark was color; and these persons were, after they had

taken an extra-constitutional oath, constituted by him the _people_ of

each of the seceded States. A provisional governor, nominated by

himself, directed this people, constituted such by himself, to elect

delegates to a convention which was to pass ordinances dictated by

himself. In this, he may have simply accepted the condition of things;

he may have done the best with the materials he had to work with; still

he plainly did not deal with South Carolina, Mississippi, and the rest,

as if they were States that "had never been out of the Union," and

entitled to any of the rights enjoyed by Pennsylvania or New York. But

the hybrid States, which are thus purely his own creations, he now

presents, in a veto message, to the Senate of the United States as the

equals of the States it represents; informs that body that he is

constitutionally the President of the States he has made, as well as the

President of the States which have not enjoyed the advantage of his

formative hand; and unmistakably hints that Congress, unless it admits

the representatives of the States he has reconstructed, is not a

complete and competent legislative body for the whole Union,--is, in

plain words, a _Rump_. The President, to be sure, qualifies his

suggestion by asking for the admission only of loyal men, who can take

the oaths. But is it not plain that Congress, if it admits Senators and

Representatives, admits the States from which they come? The

Constitution says that "the Senate of the United States shall be

composed of two Senators from each _State_"; that "the House of

Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by

the people of the several _States_." Now let us suppose that some of the

South Carolina members are admitted on the President's plan, and that

others are rejected. What is the result? Is not South Carolina in the

Union? Can a fraction of the State be in, and another fraction out, by

the terms of the United States Constitution? Are not the "loyal men" in

for their term of office simply, and the State in permanently? The

proposition to let in what are called loyal men, and then afterwards to

debate the terms on which the States which sent them shall be admitted,

might be seriously discussed in a Fenian Congress, but it would prove

too much for the gravity of an American assembly. The President thinks

Congress is bound to admit "loyal men"; but in conceding this claim,

would not the great legislative bodies of the nation practically confess

that they had no right or power to exact guaranties, no business

whatever with "reconstruction"? It is the office of the President, it

seems, to reconstruct States; the duty of Congress is confined to

accepting, placidly, the results of his work. Such is the only logical

inference from Mr. Johnson's last position. And thus a man, who was

intended by the people who voted for him to have no other connection

with reconstruction than what a casting vote in the Senate might

possibly give him, has taken the whole vast subject into his exclusive

control. Was there ever acted on the stage of history such a travesty of

constitutional government?

The loyal States, indeed, come out of the war separated from the

disloyal, not by such thin partitions as the President so cavalierly

breaks through, but by a great sea of blood. It is across that we must

survey their rights and duties; it is with that in view we must settle

the terms of their readmission. It is idle to apply to 1866 the

word-twisting of 1860. The Rebel communities which began the war are not

the same communities which were recognized as States in the Union before

the war occurred. No sophistry that perplexes the brain of the people

can prevent this fact being felt in their hearts. The proposition that

States can plunge into rebellion, and, after waging against the

government a war which is put down only at the expense of enormous

sacrifices of treasure and blood, can, when defeated, return _of right_

to form a part of the government they have labored to subvert, is a

proposition so repugnant to common sense that its acceptance by the

people would send them down a step in the zoölogical scale. Have we been

fighting in order to compel the South to resume its reluctant _rôle_ of

governing us? Are we to be told that the States which have sent mourning

into every loyal family in the land, and which have loaded every loyal

laborer's back with a new and unexampled burden of taxation, have the

same right to seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives which

New York and Illinois can claim? The question is not whether the

victorious party shall exercise magnanimity and mercy, whether it shall

attempt to heal wounds rather than open them afresh, but whether its

legal representatives, constituting, as it was supposed, the legislative

department of the United States government, shall have anything to do

with the matter at all. The President seems to think they have not; and

finding that Congress, by immense majorities, declined to abdicate its

functions, he and his partisans appealed to such legislative assemblies

as could be extemporized for the occasion. Congress did not fairly

represent the people of the whole Union; and Mr. Johnson accordingly

unfolded his measures to a body which, in his opinion, we must suppose

did, namely, a Copperhead mob which gathered under his windows at

Washington. The Secretary of State addressed a meeting in New York,

assembled in a hall which is the very symbol of mutation. Some

collectors and postmasters have, we believe, been kind enough to take

upon themselves the trouble of calling similar legislative assemblies in

their respective cities; and Keokuk, it is well known, has won deserved

celebrity for the rapidity with which its gathering of publicists passed

the President's plan. Still more important, perhaps, is the unanimity

with which the "James Page Library Company," of Philadelphia, fulfilled

its duty of legislating for the whole republic. This mode of taking the

opinion of the people, if considered merely as an innocent amusement of

great officials, may be harmless; but political farces played by actors

who do not seem to take their own jokes sometimes lead to serious

consequences; and the effect upon the South of suggesting that the

Congress of the United States not only misrepresents its constituents,

but excludes "loyal men" who have a right to seats, cannot but give

fierce additional stimulants to Southern disaffection.

We are accordingly, it would seem, in danger of having a President, who

is at variance with nearly two thirds of Congress, using his whole

executive power and influence against the party he was supposed to

represent, and having on his side the Southerners who made the

Rebellion, the Northerners whose sympathies were on the side of the

Rebellion, a small collection of Republican politicians called "the

President's friends," and the undefined political force passing under

the name of "the Blairs." But Congress is stronger than the whole body

of its opponents, and is backed by the great mass of the loyal people,

determined not to surrender all the advantages of the position which has

been gained by the profuse shedding of so much loyal blood.

"Constitutional government is on trial" in this contest; and Mr. Johnson

seems neither to have the constitutional instinct in his blood, nor the

constitutional principle in his brain. The position of the President of

the United States is analogous, not so much to that of a Napoleon or a

Bismark, as to that of an English prime-minister. In the theory and

ordinary working of the government, he is one of a body of statesmen,

agreeing in their general views, and elected by the same party; what are

called his measures are passed by Congress, because the majority of

Congress and he are in general accord on all important questions; and it

is against the whole idea of constitutional government that the

executive _will_ is a fair offset to the legislative _reason_,--that one

man is the equal of the whole body of the people's representatives. The

powers of an executive are of such a character, that, pushed wilfully to

their ultimate expression, they can absorb all the other departments of

the government, as when James the Second practically repealed laws by

pushing to its abstract logical consequences his undoubted power of

pardon; but a constitutional government implies, as a condition of its

existence, that the executive will have that kind of mind and temper

which instinctively recognizes the practical limitations of powers in

themselves vague; for if the executive can defy the legislature, the

legislature can bring the whole government to an end by a simple refusal

to grant supplies. In his Washington speech, the President selected for

special attack the chairman of the House Committee of Ways and Means,

and the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations; but it

would be difficult to conjecture how he could carry on the government

without the aid of what these men represent, for Mr. Stevens pays him

his salary, and Mr. Sumner gives effect to his treaties. Bismark, in

Prussia, snaps his fingers in the faces of the Prussian Chambers, and

still contrives to get along very comfortably; but an American President

does not enjoy similar advantages. He can follow his own will or caprice

only by the toleration of the legislative body he defames and

disregards. His great power is the veto; but the perverse use of this

could easily be checked by the perverse use of many a legislative power

which a mere majority of Congress can effectively use. The fallacy of

the argument of "the President's friends," in their proposition that

Congress should settle the dispute by the easy method of allowing Mr.

Johnson to have his own way, consists in its entire oversight of the

essential character of constitutional government.

And now what would be the consequences of the yielding of Congress in

this struggle? The first effect would be the concession that, in respect

to the most important matter that will probably ever be brought before

the United States government, the executive branch was everything, and

the legislative nothing. The second effect would be, that the Rebel

Slates would re-enter the Union, not only without giving additional

guaranties for their good behavior, but with the elated feeling that

they had gained a great triumph over the "fanatical" North. The third

effect would be the establishment of the principle, that they had never

been out of the Union as States; that, accordingly, a doubt was over the

legality of the legislation which had been transacted in the absence of

their representatives; and that, Congress having, for the past five

years, represented only a section of the country, that section was alone

bound by its measures. The moment it is admitted that the national

legislature, as now constituted, is an incomplete body, and that it

needs Southern "loyal men" to make its laws operative over the South, a

whole brood of deductive reasoners will spring up in that region, eager

to carry the principle out to its remotest logical consequences. After

two or three of those cotton crops on which some persons rely so much to

make the South contented have given it the requisite leisure to follow

long trains of reasoning, it will by degrees convince itself that the

whole national legislation during the war, including the debt and the

Anti-Slavery Amendment, was unconstitutional, and that, as far as it

concerns the Southern States, it is void, and should be of no effect.

Persons who are accustomed to nickname as "radicals" all those statesmen

who do not consider that the removal of an immediate inconvenience

exhausts the whole science of practical politics, are wont to make merry

over this possibility of Southern repudiation, or to look down upon its

fanatical suggesters with the benevolent pity of serenely superior

intelligence; but nobody who has watched the steps by which Calhoun's

logic was inwrought into the substance of the Southern mind,--nobody who

has noted the process by which the justification of one of the bloodiest

rebellions in the history of the world was deduced from the definition

of an abstraction,--nobody who explores the meaning of the phrase,

common in many mouths, that "the South _thought_ itself in the

right,"--will doubt that the seeming bugbear may turn out a dreadful

reality. It is impossible, in fact, for the most far-sighted mind to

predict all the evils which may flow from the heedless adoption of a

vicious principle; if the war has not taught us this, it has taught us

nothing.

But it is not to be supposed that Congress will yield, for to yield

would be to commit suicide. There is not an interest in the nation which

is not concerned in its adherence to the principle, that in it the whole

legislative power of the United States government is vested, and that it

has the right to exact irreversible guaranties of the Rebel States as

the conditions of the admission of their Senators and Representatives.

They are not _in_ the Union until they are in its government; and

Congress has the same power to keep them out that it has to let them in.

By the very nature of the case, the whole question must be left to its

judgment of what is necessary for the public safety and honor. Its

members may be mistaken, but the only method to correct their mistake is

to elect other persons in their places, when their limited period of

service has expired; and any new Congress will, unless it is

scandalously neglectful of the public interests, admit the Rebel States

to their old places in the Union, not because it _must_, but because it

thinks that a sufficient number of guaranties have been obtained to

render their admission prudent and safe. It is in this form that the

subject is coming before the people in the autumn elections; and this

explains the eager haste of the President's friends to forestall and

mislead the public mind, and sacrifice a great party, founded on

principles, to the will of an individual, veering with his moods.

We think, if the vote were taken now, that Congress would be

overwhelmingly sustained by the people. We think this, in spite of such

expressions of the popular will as found vent in the President's meeting

at Washington and Mr. Seward's meeting in New York,--in spite even of

the resolutions of Keokuk and the address of the "James Page Library

Company" of Philadelphia,--in spite, above all, of the perfect felicity

in which, if we may believe the Secretary of State, the President's

speech left the American people. The loyal men of the loyal States do

not intend that the war they carried on for great ends shall pass into

history as the bloodiest of all purposeless farces, beginning in an

ecstasy of public spirit and ending in an ignominious surrender of the

advantages of hard-won victory. They demand such guaranties, in the

shape of amendments to the Constitution, as shall insure security for

the future from such evils as have scourged them in the past; and these

guaranties they do not think have been yet obtained. They make this

demand in no spirit of rancorous hostility to the South, for they

require nothing which it is not for the permanent welfare of the South

to grant. They feel that, if a settlement is patched up on the

President's plan, it will leave Southern society a prey to most of the

influences which have so long been its curse, which have narrowed its

patriotism, checked its progress, vitiated its character, educated it in

disloyalty, and impelled it into war. They desire that a settlement

shall be effected which shall make the South republican, like the North,

homogeneous with it in institutions, as well as nominally united to it

under one government,--a settlement which shall annihilate the accursed

heresy of Secession by extinguishing the accursed prejudice of caste.

Such a settlement the people have not in the "President's plan." What

confidence, indeed, can they place in the professions of the cunning

Southern politicians who have taken the President captive, and used him

as an instrument while seeming to obey him as agents? There is something

to make us distrust the stability of the firmest and most upright

statesman in the spectacle of that remarkable conquest. Mr. Johnson,

when elected, appeared to represent the most violent radical ideas and

the most vindictive passions engendered by the war. He spoke as if the

blacks were to find in him a Moses, and the Rebels a Nemesis. It seemed

as if there could not be in the whole land a sufficient number of

sour-apple trees to furnish hanging accommodations for the possible

victims of his patriotic wrath. One almost feared that reconciliation

would be indefinitely postponed by the relentless severity with which

he would visit treason with death. But the Southern politicians, finding

that further military resistance was hopeless, resorted at once to their

old game of intrigue and management, and proved that, fresh as they were

from the experience of violent methods, they had not forgotten their old

art of manipulating Presidents. They adapted themselves with marvellous

flexibility to the changed condition of things, in order to become

masters of the situation, and began to declaim in favor of the Union,

even while their curses against it were yet echoing in the air. They

wheedled the President into pardoning, in the place of hanging them;

they made themselves serviceable agents in carrying out his plan of

reconstruction; they gave up what it was impossible for them to retain,

in order to retain what it would destroy their influence to give up;

they got possession of him to the extent of insinuating subtly into his

mind ideas which they made him think he himself originated; and finally

they capped the climax of their skilful audacity, by taking him out of

"practical relations" with the party to which he was indebted for his

elevation, and made him the representative of the small party which

voted against him, and of the defeated Rebel Confederacy, which, of

course, could not do even that. The Southern politicians have succeeded

in many shrewd political contrivances in the course of our history, but

this last is certainly their masterpiece. Its only parallel or precedent

is to be found in Richard's wooing of Anne:--

"What! I, that killed her husband and his father,

To take her in her heart's extremest hate;

With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,

The bleeding witness of my hatred by,

Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,

And I no friends to back my suit withal,

But the plain devil, and dissembling looks,

And yet to win her,--all the world to nothing!"

Now can the people trust these politicians to the extent of placing in

their hands the powers of their State governments, and the

representative power of their States in Congress, without exacting

irreversible guaranties necessary for the public safety? Can the people

uphold, as against Congress, a President whose mind seems to be so much

under the influence of these men that he publicly insults the

legislature of the nation? Is the President to be supported because he

sustains State Rights against Centralization? The only centralization

which is to be feared, in this case, is the centralization of all the

powers of the government in its executive branch. Is the President to be

supported because he represents the principle of "no taxation without

representation"? The object of Congress is to see to it that there shall

not be a "representation" which, in respect to the national debt, shall

endeavor to abolish "taxation" altogether,--which, in respect to the

freedmen, shall tax permanently a population it misrepresents,--which,

in respect to the balance of political power, shall use the black

freemen as a basis of representation, while it excludes them from having

a voice in the selection of the representatives. Is the President to be

supported because he is determined the defeated South shall not be

oppressed? The purpose of Congress is not to commit, but prevent

oppression; not to oppress the Rebel whites, but to guard from

oppression the loyal blacks; not to refuse full political privileges to

the late armed enemies of the nation, but to avoid the intolerable

ignominy of giving those enemies the power to play the robber and tyrant

over its true and tried friends. Is the President to be supported

because he is magnanimous and merciful? Congress doubts the magnanimity

which sacrifices the innocent in order to propitiate the guilty, and the

mercy which abandons the helpless and weak to the covetousness of the

powerful and strong. Is the President to be supported because he aims to

represent the whole people? Congress may well suspect that he represents

the least patriotic portion, especially when he puts a stigma on all

ardent loyalty by denouncing as equally traitorous the "extremists of

both sections," and thus makes no distinction between the "fanaticism"

which perilled everything in fighting _for_ the government, and the

"fanaticism" which perilled everything in fighting _against_ it. And,

finally, is the President to be supported because he is the champion of

conciliation and peace? Congress believes that his conciliation is the

compromise of vital principles; that his peace is the surrender of human

rights; that his plan but postpones the operation of causes of discord

it fails to eradicate; and that, if the war has taught us nothing else,

it has taught us this,--spreading it out indeed before all eyes in

letters of fire and blood,--that no conciliation is possible which

sacrifices the defenceless, and that no peace is permanent which is

unfounded in justice.

GRIFFITH GAUNT; OR, JEALOUSY.