(FROM “SPEECH AT THE NATIONAL BANKERS’ CONVENTION,

LOUISVILLE, KY., OCTOBER 11, 1883.”)

IT was not, however, to hear of banks and bankers and banking that you

did me the honor to call me before you. I am told that to-day you are

considering that problem which has so disturbed the politicians――the

South――and that you wish me to talk to you about the South. The

South! The South! It is no problem at all. I thank God that at last

we can say with truth, it is simply a geographic expression. The whole

story of the South may be summoned up in a sentence: She was rich, and

she lost her riches; she was poor and in bondage; she was set free,

and she had to go to work; she went to work, and she is richer than

ever before. You can see it was a groundhog case. The soil was here,

the climate was here, but along with them was a curse, the curse of

slavery. God passed the rod across the land and smote the people. Then,

in His goodness and mercy, He waved the wand of enchantment, and lo,

like a flower, His blessing burst forth! Indeed, may the South say,

as in the experience of men it is rare for any to say with perfect

sincerity:

“Sweet are the uses of adversity.”

The South never knew what independence meant until she was taught by

subjection to subdue herself. She lived from hand to mouth. We had

our debts and our niggers. Under the old system we paid our debts and

walloped our niggers. Under the new we pay our niggers and wallop our

debts. We have no longer any slaves, but we have no longer any debts,

and can exclaim with the old darkey at the camp-meeting, who, whenever

he got happy, went about shouting, “Bless the Lord! I’m gettin’ fatter

an’ fatter!”

The truth is, that behind the great ruffle the South wore to its shirt,

there lay concealed a superb manhood. That this manhood was perverted,

there is no doubt. That it wasted its energies upon trifles, is beyond

dispute. That it took a pride in cultivating what it called “the vices

of a gentleman,” I am afraid must be admitted. But, at heart, it was

sound; from that heart flowed honest Anglo-Saxon blood; and, when it

had to lay aside its “store-clothes” and put on its homespun, it was

equal to the emergency. And the women of the South took their place

by the side of the men of the South, and, with spinning-wheel and

ploughshare, together they made a stand against the wolf at the door.

That was fifteen years ago, and to-day there is not a reward offered

in a single Southern State for wolf-skins. The fact is, the very

wolves have got ashamed of themselves and gone to work.

I beg you to believe that, in saying this, my purpose is neither

to amuse nor mislead you. Although my words may seem to carry with

them an unbusiness-like levity, I assure you that my design is wholly

business-like. You can see for yourselves what the South has done;

what the South can do. If all this has been achieved without credit,

and without your powerful aid――and I am now addressing myself to the

North and East, which have feared to come South with their money――what

might not be achieved if the vast aggregations of capital in the

fiscal centres should add this land of wine, milk and honey to their

fields of investment, and give us the same chief rates which are

enjoyed by nearer, but not safer, borrowers? The future of the South

is not a whit less assured than the future of the West. Why should

money which is freely loaned to Iowa and Illinois be refused to

Alabama and Mississippi? I perfectly understand that business is

business, and that capital is as unsectional as unsentimental. I am

speaking from neither spirit. You have money to loan. We have a great

country to develop.

We need the money. You can make a profit off the development. When

I say that we need money, I do not mean the sort of money once

demanded by an old Georgia farmer, who, in the early days, came up to

Milledgeville to see General Robert Toombs, at the time a director of

the State Bank. “Robert,” says he, “the folks down our way air in need

of more money.” The profane Robert replied: “Well, how in ―――― are

they going to get it?” “Why,” says the farmer, “can’t you _stomp_ it?”

“Suppose we do _stomp_ it, how are we going to redeem it?” “Exactly,

Robert, exactly. That was just what I was coming to. You see the folks

down our way air agin redemption.” We want good money, honest money,

hard money, money that will redeem itself.

We have given hostages to fortune and our works are before you. I know

that the capital is proverbially timid. But what are you afraid of? Is

it our cotton that alarms you, or our corn, or our sugar? Perhaps it

is our coal and iron. Without you, in truth, many of these products

must make slow progress, whilst others will continue to lie hid in

the bowels of the earth. With you the South will bloom as a garden

and sparkle as a gold-mine; for, whether you tickle her fertile

plains with a straw or apply a more violent titillation to her fat

mountain-sides, she is ready to laugh a harvest of untold riches.

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

MURAT HALSTEAD.

JOURNALIST AND POLITICIAN.

THE editor of “The Cincinnati Commercial Gazette” may be ranked as

one of the greatest living journalists. He has directed the policy

first of “The Commercial” and then of “The Commercial Gazette” for a

space of forty years, and has wielded an influence over the people of

the vast region in which his paper circulates, and, indeed, upon the

whole nation, hardly second to that of any other single man. Sometimes

mistaken, but always honest, fearless and persistent, his work as

a journalist may be cited as a model of excellence, and he may well

be described as typical of the highest form of American manhood. He

is now sixty-seven years of age, but he bears his years with such

buoyancy and retains so fully his powers of mind and body that he

distinguished himself in 1896 by going as special correspondent to the

scene of the rebellion in Cuba, writing from that island, not only a

daily letter to “The New York Journal” on the military and political

situation, but also a series of daily articles in “The Standard-Union,”

describing the manners and customs of Havana, and relating incidents

of life in the tropics in a delightfully characteristic manner.

Mr. Halstead is a native of Butler County, Ohio, a locality which

has produced its full share of the notable men of our time. As the

inhabitants of the neighborhood were of Welsh extraction, with no one

of Irish descent among them, the name, “Paddy’s Run,” borne by their

Post Office, was a cause of great offence to them. A strong party,

however, among whom was Mr. Halstead, made consistent opposition to

every effort to change the name, but, though the struggle was long,

the whimsical title which referred to an almost forgotten incident

in General Wayne’s expedition had finally to be abandoned, and the

fastidious inhabitants now have their mail addressed to “Shandon.”

The Halstead family came from North Carolina at the time when so many

of her noble sons bore practical testimony to their belief in free

institutions by refusing to remain longer in a slave state, and making,

in many cases, the greatest sacrifices in order to live on free soil

in the Northwest Territory.

Murat Halstead grew up on a farm and made his way through the Farmer’s

College, at College Hill, Ohio, as so many men of his class have done,

by alternating college work with teaching a district school. He went

immediately from college into newspaper life, contributing a great

variety of articles to the Cincinnati papers, and in 1853 joined the

staff of “The Commercial.” He soon became part owner and controlling

editor. The success of his paper has been continuous from that time,

and the fact is due in greatest measure to the foresight, energy and

skill of Mr. Halstead. He became prominent in a national sense during

the presidential campaign of 1856, and he was probably the only man

who was present at all the national conventions of 1860, and one of

the very few who foresaw the terrible conflict which was to follow.

He had seen the hanging of John Brown, and reported it in vigorous

fashion for his paper, and he was the Washington correspondent of “The

Commercial” during the trying sessions of Congress which followed.

He served as correspondent at the front during a part of the war, and

“The Commercial” was no small factor in the national councils during

that stormy time. His independence of mind is shown in his frequent

criticism of the policy of the government. On one occasion he wrote a

long letter to Secretary Stanton censuring in the strongest terms the

measures which had been taken and outlining those which, in his

opinion, would result in success. The document was afterwards filed

away in the archives of the war department, bearing an inscription

characteristic of the grim humor of the great war secretary: “How to

Conduct the War――Halstead, M.”

He went to Europe in 1870 with the purpose of joining the French

armies, but not succeeding, managed to attach himself to those of the

Germans. The experiences thus obtained not only furnished the basis

of his newspaper correspondence at the time, but supplied the material

for a number of delightfully instructive magazine articles. He has

since visited Europe on several occasions, and in 1874 formed one of

a distinguished company which made a journey to Iceland and took part

in the celebration of the thousandth anniversary of its settlement.

In 1872 Mr. Halstead again demonstrated his independence by breaking

loose from the regular organization of the Republican party and taking

part in the bolt which resulted in the nomination of Greeley for

the Presidency. He was not long, however, in getting back into the

ranks, but his unwillingness to submit to party discipline and his

persistence in criticising men and measures when he considered that

they were opposed to the public interest, has probably been the means

of preventing him from election on at least one occasion to the United

States Senate. When he was nominated by President Harrison to be

Minister to Germany, it was undoubtedly the same cause which insured

his rejection in the Senate.

For many years the “Cincinnati Gazette” and the “Commercial” had

continued an energetic rivalry. Their political attitude was very much

the same, and there was everything to gain and little to lose by the

consolidation of the two papers which occurred early in the eighties,

with Mr. Halstead as editor-in-chief, and Mr. Richard Smith, of the

“Gazette,” as business Manager. Since 1884 Mr. Halstead has made his

headquarters in Washington or New York; his editorial contributions

going by telegraph to his paper and for several years past he has

been editor of the Brooklyn “Standard Union,” and has contributed very

largely to other papers, his signed articles upon the money question

in “The New York Herald” being notable examples of his ability as a

writer and of his grasp of the great questions of the time. The amount

of work turned off by such a writer is prodigious. He says that he has

undoubtedly written and published an average of more than a million

words a year for forty years. If put in book form this would make in

the aggregate some five hundred volumes of good size.

Mr. Halstead was married in 1857 to Miss Mary Banks. They have four

grown sons, all engaged in journalism; three younger ones, and three

daughters. Their family life has been all that such life should be,

and the present generation of the Halsteads bears every promise of

maintaining the high standard of honest thought and persistent effort

set by the florid faced man, whose large figure and massive head――hair

and beard long since snow white――seem likely to be conspicuous in

many presidential conventions yet to come, as they have been in almost

every one for nearly half a century.

* * * * *

TO THE YOUNG MAN AT THE DOOR.

(FROM ADDRESS ON “THE MAXIMS, MARKETS,

AND MISSIONS OF THE PRESS,”

DELIVERED BEFORE THE WISCONSIN PRESS ASSOCIATION, 1889.)

WE need to guard against ways of exclusiveness――against the assumption

that for some mysterious reason the press has rights that the people

have not; that there are privileges of the press in which the masses

and classes do not participate. The claim of privilege is a serious

error. One either gains or loses rights in a profession. We have the

same authority to speak as editors that we have as citizens. If we

use a longer “pole to knock the persimmons,” it is because we have

a larger constituency for our conversational ability; that doesn’t

affect rights. It simply increases responsibility. One can say of a

meritorious man or enterprise, or of a rascally schemer or scheme,

as an editor the same that he could as a citizen, a tax-payer, a

lawyer, minister, farmer, or blacksmith. It conduces to the better

understanding of our business to know that we are like other folks,

and not set apart, baptized, anointed, or otherwise sanctified, for

an appointed and exclusive and unique service.

It is in our line of occupation to buy white paper, impress ink upon

it in such form as may be expressive of the news and our views, and

agreeable to our friends or disagreeable to our foes, and sell the

sheet when the paper becomes, by the inking thereof, that peculiar

manufactured product, a newspaper, for a margin of profit. We are as

gifted and good as anybody, so far as our natural rights are concerned,

and are better or worse according to our behavior. It is our position

to stand on the common ground with the people, and publish the news,

and tell the truth about it as well as we can; and we shall, through

influences certain in their operation, find the places wherein we

belong. No one can escape the logic of his labor.

Communications from young gentlemen in, or fresh from college,

or active in other shops, who propose to go into journalism or

newspaperdom, and want to know how to do it, are a common experience,

for there is a popular fascination about our employment. There is

nothing one could know――neither faculty to perform nor ability to

endure――perfection of recollection, thoroughness in history, capacity

to apply the lessons of philosophy, comprehension of the law, or

cultivated intuition of the Gospel――that would not be of servicegoing

into newspaperdom. But it is beyond me to prescribe a course of study.

It is easier, when you have the knack, to do than to tell.

When the young man comes to say that he would be willing to undertake

to run a newspaper――and we know that young man as soon as we see his

anxious face at the door――and we sympathize with him, for we may

remember to have been at the door instead of the desk, and willing to

undertake the task of the gentleman who sat at the desk and asked what

was wanted――when, perhaps, the youth at the door had in his pocket

an essay on the “Mound Builders” that he believed was the news of the

day――and we don’t like to speak unkindly to the young man. But there

are so many of him. He is so numerous that he is monotonous, and it is

not always fair to utter the commonplaces of encouragement. It is well

to ask the young man, who is willing to come in and do things, what he

has done (and often he hasn’t done anything but have his being). What

is it that he knows how to do better than anyone else can do it? If

there be anything, the question settles itself, for one who knows how

to do right well something that is to do, has a trade. The world is

under his feet, and its hardness is firm footing. We must ask what the

young man wants to do? and he comes back with the awful vagueness that

he is willing to do anything; and that always means nothing at all. It

is the intensity of the current of electricity that makes the carbon

incandescent and illuminating. The vital flame is the mystery that is

immortal in the soul and in the universe.

Who can tell the young man how to grasp the magic clew of the globe

that spins with us? There is no turnpike or railroad that leads into

journalism. There are vacancies for didactic amateurs. Nobody is

wanted. And yet we are always looking out for somebody, and once in

awhile he comes. He does not ask for a place, but takes that which

is his. Do not say to the young man there are no possibilities. There

certainly are more than ever before. Young man, if you want to get

into journalism, break in. Don’t ask how. It is the finding of it out

that will educate you to do the essential thing. The young man must

enter the newspaper office by main strength and awkwardness, and make

a place for himself.

The machines upon which we impress the sheets we produce for the

market――and we all know how costly they are in their infinite variety

of improvements, for the earnings of the editor are swept away by

the incessant, insatiable requirements of the pressmaker――this facile

mechanism is not more changeable than the press itself, in its larger

sense――and the one thing needful, first and last, is man. With all the

changes, the intelligence of the printer and the personal force of the

editor are indispensable.

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

WHITELAW REID.

EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK “TRIBUNE.”

THERE is an old adage which declares “fortune favors the brave.” This

seems to be eminently true in the case of Whitelaw Reid, than whose

life few in American literature are more inspiring to the ambitious

but poor youth struggling upward for recognition among his fellow-men;

for it was by dint of hard work, heroic energy and unflagging

perseverance that he has worked himself from the ranks of obscurity to

one of the most prominent and honorable positions in modern journalism.

Whitelaw Reid was born near Xenia, Ohio, October 27, 1837. The

principle of industry was early inculcated in his life; and, besides

doing his share in the work of the family, he found so much time for

study that he graduated from the Miami University before he was twenty

years of age and was actively engaged in journalism and politics

before his majority,――making speeches in the Fremont campaign on the

Republican side,――and was made editor of the “Xenian News” when only

twenty-one years of age. When the Civil War began, he had attained

such a reputation as a newspaper writer that the “Cincinnati Gazette”

sent him to the field as its special correspondent. He made his

headquarters at Washington, and his letters concerned not only the war,

but dwelt as well on the current politics. These attracted attention

by their thorough information and pungent style. He made excursions

to the army wherever there was prospect of active operation, was

aide-de-camp to General Rosecrans and was present at the battles of

Shiloh and Gettysburg. In 1863, he was elected Librarian of the House

of Representatives at Washington, in which capacity he served until

1866. After the war, he engaged for one year in a cotton plantation

in Louisiana and embodied the result of his observations in his first

book entitled “After the War” (1867).

One of the most important of all the State histories of the Civil

War is Mr. Reid’s “Ohio in the War,” which was issued in two volumes

in 1868. It contained elaborate biographies of the chief Ohio

participants of the army and a complete history of that State from

1861 to 1865. This work so attracted Horace Greeley, of the New York

“Tribune,” that he employed Mr. Reid as an editorial writer upon his

paper, and the latter removed to New York City in 1868, and after Mr.

Greeley’s death, in 1872, ♦succeeded as editor-in-chief and principal

owner of the “Tribune.” “Schools of Journalism” appeared in 1871, and

“Scholars in Politics” in 1873.

♦ ‘succeded’ replaced with ‘succeeded’

The Legislature of New York in 1878 manifested the popular esteem in

which Mr. Reid was held by electing him to be a regent of the State

University for life. He was also offered by President Hayes the post

of Minister to Germany and a similar appointment by President Garfield,

both of which he declined, preferring rather to devote his attention

to his paper, which was one of the leading organs of the Republican

Party in the United States. In 1879, Mr. Reid published a volume

entitled “Some Newspaper Tendencies,” and in 1881 appeared his book,

“Town Hall Suggestions.” During President Harrison’s administration,

though he had already twice declined a foreign portfolio, he accepted,

in 1889, the United States mission to France. At the Republican

Convention which met at Chicago in 1892, he was nominated for

Vice-President of the United States and ran on the ticket with

President Harrison.

Mr. Reid has a magnificent home in the vicinity of New York, where he

delights with his charming family, consisting of a wife and several

children, to entertain his friends. He has traveled extensively in

foreign countries and many of the celebrities of Europe have enjoyed

the hospitality of his palatial home. In 1897, Whitelaw Reid was

appointed a special envoy to represent the United States at the

celebration of the Queen’s Jubilee. His wife attended him on this

mission, and, in company with the United States Ambassador, Colonel

John Hay, they were the recipients of many honors, among which was an

invitation to Mr. and Mrs. Reid to visit the Queen on the afternoon of

July 6, when they dined with Her Majesty, and, at her special request,

slept that night in Windsor Castle. It may be of interest to state in

this connection that, though Mr. Reid was the United States’ special

envoy, he and his secretaries are said to have paid their own expenses.

This statement, if it be true, notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Reid

is a very wealthy man, evinces a liberality in the service of the

government which should not pass unnoticed.

* * * * *

“PICTURES OF A LOUISIANA PLANTATION.”¹

(FROM “SOME SOUTHERN REMINISCENCES.”)

¹ Copyright, Wm. F. Gill & Co.

I SPENT a year or two, after the close of the war in the Southern

States, mostly on Louisiana and Alabama cotton-plantations; and I

shall try to revive some recollections of that experience.

It was one of those perfect days which Louisianians get in February,

instead of waiting, like poor Massachusetts Yankees, till June

for them, when I crossed from Natchez to take possession of two or

three river plantations on which I dreamed of making my fortune in

a year. The road led directly down the levee. On the right rolled

the Mississippi, still far below its banks, and giving no sign of

the flood that a few months later was to drown our hopes. To the

left stretched westward for a mile the unbroken expanse of cotton

land, bounded by the dark fringe of cypress and the swamp. Through a

drove of scrawny cattle and broken-down mules, pasturing on the rich

Bermuda grass along the levee, under the lazy care of the one-armed

“stock-minder,” I made my way at last down a grassy lane to the

broad-porched, many-windowed cottage propped up four or five feet

from the damp soil by pillars of cypress, which the agent had called

the “mansion.” It looked out pleasantly from the foliage of a grove

of China and pecan trees, and was flanked, on the one hand by a

beautifully cultivated vegetable garden, several acres in extent, and

on the other by the “quarters,”――a double row of cabins, each with

two rooms and a projecting roof, covering an earthen-floored porch.

A street, overgrown with grass and weeds, ran from the “mansion” down

between the rows of cabins, and stopped at the plantation blacksmith

and carpenter shop. Behind each cabin was a little garden, jealously

fenced off from all the rest with the roughest of cypress pickets,

and its gate guarded by an enormous padlock. “Niggers never trust one

another about their gardens or hen-houses,” explained the overseer,

who was making me acquainted with my new home.

* * * * *

Illustration: A COTTON FIELD IN LOUISIANA.

I rode out first, that perfect day, among the gang of a hundred

and fifty negroes, who, on these plantations, were for the year

to compromise between their respect and their newborn spirit of

independence by calling me Mistah instead of Massa, there were no

forebodings. Two “plough-gangs” and two “hoe-gangs” were slowly

measuring their length along the two-mile front. Among each rode

its own negro driver, sometimes lounging in his saddle with one leg

lodged on the pommel, sometimes shouting sharp, abrupt orders to the

delinquents. In each plough-gang were fifteen scrawny mules, with

corn-husk collars, gunny-bags, and bedcord plough-lines. The Calhoun

ploughs (the favorite implement through all that region, then, and

doubtless still, retaining the name given it long before war was

dreamed of) were rather lazily managed by the picked hands of the

plantation. Among them were several women, who proved among the best

laborers of the gang. A quarter of a mile ahead a picturesque sight

presented itself. A great crowd of women and children, with a few aged

or weakly men among them, were scattered along the old cotton-rows,

chopping down weeds, gathering together the trash that covered the

land, and firing little heaps of it, while through the clouds of smoke

came an incessant chatter of the girls, and an occasional snatch of

a camp-meeting hymn from the elders. “Gib me some backey, please,”

was the first salutation I received. They were dressed in a stout

blue cottonade, the skirts drawn up to the knees, and reefed in a

loose bunch at the waists; brogans of incredible sizes covered their

feet, and there was a little waste of money on the useless decency

of stockings, but gay bandannas were wound in profuse splendor around

their heads.

The moment the sun disappeared every hoe was shouldered. Some took

up army-blouses or stout men’s overcoats, and drew them on; others

gathered fragments of bark to kindle their evening fires, and balanced

them nicely on their heads. In a moment the whole noisy crowd was

filing across the plantation towards the quarters, joining the

plough-gang, pleading for rides on the mules, or flirting with the

drivers, and looking as much like a troop flocking to a circus or

rustic fair as a party of weary farm-laborers. At the house the

drivers soon reported their grievances. “Dem women done been squabblin

’mong dei’ selves dis a’ternoon, so I’s hardly git any wuck at all

out of ’em.” “Fanny and Milly done got sick to-day; an’ Sally heerd

dat her husban’s mustered out ob de army, an’ she gone up to Natchez

to fine him.” “Dem sucklers ain’t jus’ wuf nuffin at all. ’Bout

eight o’clock dey goes off to de quarters of deir babies, an’ I don’

nebber see nuffin mo’ ob ’em till ’bout elebben. Den de same way in

de a’ternoon, till I’s sick ob de hull lot. De moody (Bermuda grass)

mighty tough ’long heah, an’ I could’nt make dem women put in deir

hoes to suit me nohow.” Presently men and women trooped up for

the ticket representing their day’s work. The women were soon busy

preparing their supper of mess pork and early vegetables; while the

plough-gang gathered about the overseer. “He’d done promise dem a

drink o’ wiskey, if dey’d finish dat cut, and dey’d done it.” The

whiskey was soon forthcoming, well watered with a trifle of Cayenne

pepper to conceal the lack of spirit, and a little tobacco soaked

in it to preserve the color. The most drank it down at a gulp from

the glass into which, for one after another, the overseer poured “de

lowance.” A few, as their turns came, passed up tin cups and went

off with their treasure, chuckling about “de splendid toddy we’s hab

to-night.” Then came a little trade with the overseer at “the store.”

Some wanted a pound or two of sugar; others, a paper of needles or

a bar of soap; many of the young men, “two bits’ wuf” of candy or a

brass ring. In an hour trade was over, and the quarters were as silent

as a churchyard. But, next morning, at four o’clock, I was aroused

by the shrill “driber’s horn.” Two hours later it was blown again,

and, looking from my window just as the first rays of light came

level across the field, I saw the women filing out, with their hoes,

and the ploughmen leisurely sauntering down to the stables, each

with corn-husk collar and bedcord plough-lines in his hands. The

passion for whiskey among the negroes seemed universal. I never saw

a man, woman or child, reckless young scapegrace or sanctimonious

old preacher, among them, who would refuse it; and the most had no

hesitancy in begging it whenever they could. Many of them spent half

their earnings buying whiskey. That sold on any of the plantations I

ever visited or heard of was always watered down at least one-fourth.

Perhaps it was owing to this fact, though it seemed rather an evidence

of unexpected powers of self-restraint, that so few were to be seen

intoxicated.

During the two or three years in which I spent most of my time among

them, seeing scores and sometimes hundreds in a day, I do not remember

seeing more than one man absolutely drunk. He had bought a quart of

whiskey, one Saturday night, at a low liquor shop in Natchez. Next

morning early he attacked it, and in about an hour the whiskey and

he were used up together. Hearing an unusual noise in the quarters, I

walked down that way and found the plough-driver and the overseer both

trying to quiet Horace. He was unable to stand alone, but he contrived

to do a vast deal of shouting. As I approached, the driver said,

“Horace, don’t make so much noise; don’t you see Mr. R.?” He looked

around as if surprised at learning it.

“Boss, is dat you?”

“Yes.”

“Boss, I’s drunk; boss, I’s ’shamed o’ myself! but I’s drunk! I ’sarve

good w’ipping. Boss,――boss, s-s-slap me in de face, boss.”

I was not much disposed to administer the “slapping;” but Horace kept

repeating, with a drunken man’s persistency, “Slap me in de face,

boss; please, boss.” Finally I did give him a ringing cuff on the ear.

Horace jerked off his cap, and ducked down his head with great respect,

saying, “T’ank you, boss.” Then, grinning his maudlin smile, he threw

open his arms as if to embrace me, and exclaimed, “Now kiss me, boss!”

Next morning Horace was at work with the rest, and though he bought

many quarts of whiskey afterwards, I never saw him drunk again.

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

ALBERT SHAW.

EDITOR OF THE “REVIEW OF REVIEWS.”

IT seems, sometimes, that the influence of the editor has departed,

and that notwithstanding the survival of a few men like Halstead

and Reid, who helped to make the papers which moulded public opinion

thirty years ago, the newspaper fills no such place as it did in

the day of their prime, but a different place, not a lower or a less

important one. Among the men who through the medium of the press are

doing most to promote the spread of intelligence, and particularly to

further the cause of good government and to elevate the civic life of

our country, Albert Shaw fills a prominent place.

Dr. Shaw is a young man of Western birth, tall and slender in figure,

with a keen eye, a quick and rather nervous manner, and features

expressing in an unusual degree intelligence, energy, and character.

Born in Ohio, the central West, Dr. Shaw represents a catholicity of

feeling and knowledge which very few Americans possess. He knows the

whole country. He is not distinctly an Eastern man, a Western man,

or a man of the Pacific slope: he is a man of America. He knows the

characteristics of each section, its strength and its weakness. With

New England blood in his veins, but with the energizing influences of

the West about his boyhood, Dr. Shaw graduated at Iowa College, the

oldest institution of its class west of the Mississippi. During his

college life the future journalist and writer devoted a great deal

of time to the study of literature and of literary style, disclosing

very early two qualities which are pre-eminently characteristic of him

to-day, lucidity and directness. After graduation Dr. Shaw began his

professional life as editor of “The Grinnell Herald,” a position which

enabled him to master all the mechanical and routine work of

journalism.

His aims were not the aims of the ordinary journalist. He saw with

unusual clearness the possibilities of his profession, and he saw also

that he needed a wider educational basis. His interest in social and

political topics was the interest of a man of philosophic mind, eager

to learn the principles and not simply to record the varying aspects

from day to day. In order the better to secure the equipment of which

he felt the need, he entered the Johns Hopkins University and took a

post-graduate course. It was during his residence in Baltimore that he

met Professor Bryce, who recognized his rare ability and intelligence,

and who used his unusually large knowledge of social and political

conditions in the country. While carrying on his special studies at

the Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Shaw joined the editorial staff of

the Minneapolis daily “Tribune.” After receiving the degree of Ph.D.

in 1884, he removed permanently to Minneapolis, and took his place

at the head of the staff of the “Tribune.” His work almost at once

attracted attention. Its breadth, its thoroughness, its candor, and

its ability were of a kind which made themselves recognized on the

instant. Four years later Dr. Shaw spent a year and a half studying

social and political conditions in Europe, traveling extensively

and devoting much time to the examination of the condition of

municipalities. It was this study which has borne fruit in the two

volumes on Municipal Government which have come from the press of

the Century Company, and which have given Dr. Shaw the first rank

as an authority on these matters. When the “Review of Reviews” was

established in this country in 1891, Dr. Shaw became its editor, and

his success in the management of this very important periodical has

justified the earlier expectations entertained by his friends, for he

has given the “Review of Reviews” a commanding position. He is one of

the very few journalists in this country who treat their work from the

professional standpoint, who are thoroughly equipped for it, and who

regard themselves as standing in a responsible relation to a great and

intelligent public. Dr. Shaw’s presentation of news is pre-eminently

full, candid, and unpartisan; his discussion of principles is

broad-minded, rational, and persuasive. He is entirely free from the

short-sighted partisanship of the great majority of newspaper editors,

and he appreciates to the full the power of intelligent, judicial

statement. His opinions, for this reason, carry great weight, and it

is not too much to say that he has not his superior in the field of

American journalism.

* * * * *

RECENT DEVELOPMENT OF THE WEST.

LET us imagine a man from the East who has visited the Northwestern

States and Territories at some time between the years 1870 and 1875,

and who retains a strong impression of what he saw, but who has not

been west of Chicago since that time, until, in the World’s Fair year

he determines upon a new exploration of Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas,

Minnesota and Wisconsin. However well informed he had tried to keep

himself through written descriptions and statistical records of

Western progress, he would see what nothing but the evidence of his

own eyes could have made him believe to be possible. Iowa in 1870

was already producing a large crop of cereals, and was inhabited by a

thriving, though very new, farming population. But the aspect of the

country was bare and uninviting, except in the vicinity of the older

communities on the Mississippi River. As one advanced across the State

the farmhouses were very small, and looked like isolated dry-goods

boxes; there were few well-built barns or farm buildings; and the

struggling young cottonwood and soft-maple saplings planted in close

groves about the tiny houses were so slight an obstruction to the

sweep of vision across the open prairie that they only seemed to

emphasize the monotonous stretches of fertile, but uninteresting

plain. Now the landscape is wholly transformed. A railroad ride

in June through the best parts of Iowa reminds one of a ride

through some of the pleasantest farming districts of England. The

primitive “claim shanties” of thirty years ago have given place to

commodious farm-houses flanked by great barns and hay-ricks, and the

well-appointed structures of a prosperous agriculture. In the rich,

deep meadows herds of fine-blooded cattle are grazing. What was once

a blank, dreary landscape is now garden-like and inviting. The poor

little saplings of the earlier days, which seemed to be apologizing

to the robust corn-stalks in the neighboring fields, have grown on

that deep soil into great, spreading trees. One can easily imagine,

as he looks off in every direction and notes a wooded horizon, that

he is――as in Ohio, Indiana, or Kentucky――in a farming region which

has been cleared out of primeval forests. There are many towns I might

mention which twenty-five years ago, with their new, wooden shanties

scattered over the bare face of the prairie, seemed the hottest place

on earth as the summer sun beat upon their unshaded streets and roofs,

and seemed the coldest places on earth when the fierce blizzards of

winter swept unchecked across the prairie expanses. To-day the density

of shade in those towns is deemed of positive detriment to health,

and for several years past there has been a systematic thinning out

and trimming up of the great, clustering elms. Trees of from six to

ten feet in girth are found everywhere by the hundreds of thousands.

Each farm-house is sheltered from winter winds by its own dense groves.

Many of the farmers are able from the surplus growth of wood upon

their estates to provide themselves with a large and regular supply

of fuel. If I have dwelt at some length upon this picture of the

transformation of the bleak, grain-producing Iowa prairies of thirty

years ago into the dairy and live-stock farms of to-day, with their

fragrant meadows and ample groves, it is because the picture is one

which reveals so much as to the nature and meaning of Northwestern

progress.

The tendency to rely upon united public action is illustrated in

the growth of Northwestern educational systems. The universities of

these commonwealths are State universities. Professional education

is under the State auspices and control. The normal schools and the

agricultural schools belong to the State. The public high school

provides intermediate instruction. The common district school,

supported jointly by local taxation and State subvention, gives

elementary education to the children of all classes. As the towns grow

the tendency to graft manual and technical courses upon the ordinary

public school curriculum is unmistakably strong. The Northwest, more

than any other part of the country, is disposed to make every kind of

education a public function.

Radicalism has flourished in the homogeneous agricultural society

of the Northwest. In the anti-monopoly conflict there seemed to

have survived some of the intensity of feeling that characterized

the anti-slavery movement; and a tinge of this fanatical quality

has always been apparent in the Western and Northwestern monetary

heresies. But it is in the temperance movement that this sweep of

radical impulse has been most irresistible. It was natural that the

movement should become political and take the form of an agitation

for prohibition. The history of prohibition in Iowa, Kansas and the

Dakotas, and of temperance legislation in Minnesota and Nebraska,

reveals――even better perhaps than the history of the anti-monopoly

movement――the radicalism, homogeneity, and powerful socializing

tendencies of the Northwestern people. Between these different

agitations there has been in reality no slight degree of relationship;

at least their origin is to be traced to the same general condition of

society.

The extent to which a modern community resorts to State action depends

in no small measure upon the accumulation of private resources. Public

or organized initiative will be relatively strongest where the impulse

to progress is positive but the ability of individuals is small. There

are few rich men in the Northwest. Iowa, great as is the Hawkeye State,

has no large city and no large fortunes. Of Kansas the same thing

may be said. The Dakotas have no rich men and no cities. Minnesota

has Minneapolis and St. Paul, and Nebraska has Omaha; but otherwise

these two States are farming communities, without large cities or

concentrated private capital. Accordingly the recourse to public

action is comparatively easy. South Dakota farmers desire to guard

against drought by opening artesian wells for irrigation. They resort

to State legislation and the sale of county bonds. North Dakota

wheat growers are unfortunate in the failure of crops. They secure

seed-wheat, through State action and their county governments. A

similarity of condition fosters associated action, and facilitates

the progress of popular movements.

In such a society the spirit of action is intense. If there are few

philosophers, there is remarkable diffusion of popular knowledge and

elementary education. The dry atmosphere and the cold winters are

nerve-stimulants, and life seems to have a higher tension and velocity

than in other parts of the country.

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

JULIAN HAWTHORNE.

THE POPULAR NOVELIST AND CONTRIBUTOR.

JULIAN HAWTHORNE has inherited much of his father’s literary ability.

His recent celebrity has been largely due to his success in portraying

to the readers of popular magazines facts of world-wide interest like

the famine in India, but to the special power of vivid statement which

belongs to the newspaper reporter, he joins the imaginative power

which enables him to recognize the materials of romance and the gift

of clear and graceful expression. He is the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne,

and was born in Boston in 1846. He traveled abroad with his parents,

returning and entering Harvard in 1863. His college life seems to have

been devoted more to athletics than to serious learning. He took up

the study of civil engineering and went to Dresden to carry it on, but

the Franco-Prussian war breaking out while he was visiting at home,

he found employment as an engineer under General George B. McClellan

in the department of docks in New York. He began soon after to write

stories and sketches for the magazines, and losing his position in

1872, he determined to devote himself to literature. He now went

abroad, living for several years, first in England and then in Dresden,

and again in England, where he remained until 1881, and then after a

short stay in Ireland, returned to New York. A number of his stories

were published while he was abroad. Of these the most important were

“Bressant” and “Idolatry.” For two years he was connected with the

London “Spectator,” and he contributed to the “Contemporary Review”

a series of sketches called “Saxon Studies,” which were afterwards

published in book form. The novel “Garth” followed and collections

of stories and novelettes entitled “The Laughing Mill;” “Archibald

Malmaison;” “Ellice Quentin;” “Prince Saroni’s Wife;” and the “Yellow

Cap” fairy stories. These were all published abroad, but a part

of them were afterward reprinted in America. Later he published

“Sebastian Strome;” “Fortune’s Fool,” and in 1884 “Dust” and “Noble

Blood.” On his return to America he edited his father’s posthumous

romance “Dr. Grimshaw’s Secret,” and prepared the biography of his

father and mother. Since that time he has contributed a large number

of stories and sketches to magazines. His most recent work has been

an expedition to India to write for American periodicals an account

of the famine in that country. One of our extracts is taken from

this account and will very adequately illustrate his power of

telling things so that his readers can see them with his eyes. Mr.

♦Hawthorne’s activity does not abate and his friends and admirers

expect from him even better work than he has yet done.

♦ “Hawthrone’s” replaced with “Hawthorne’s”

* * * * *

THE WAYSIDE AND THE WAR.¹

(FROM “NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND HIS WIFE.”)

¹ Copyright, Ticknor & Co.

IT was a hot day towards the close of June, 1860, when Hawthorne

alighted from a train at Concord station, and drove up in the railway

wagon to the Wayside. The fields looked brown, the trees were dusty,

and the sun white and brilliant. At certain seasons in Concord

the heat stagnates and simmers, until it seems as if nothing but a

grasshopper could live. The water in the river is so warm that to

bathe in it is merely to exchange one kind of heat for another. The

very shadow of the trees is torrid; and I have known the thermometer

to touch 112° in the shade. No breeze stirs throughout the long sultry

day; and the feverish nights bring mosquitoes, but no relief. To come

from the salt freshness of the Atlantic into this living oven is a

startling change, especially when one has his memory full of cool,

green England. Such was America’s first greeting to Hawthorne, on his

return from a seven years’ absence; it was to this that he had looked

forward so lovingly and so long. As he passed one little wooden house

after another, with their white clap boards and their green blinds,

perhaps he found his thoughts not quite so cloudless as the sky. It

is dangerous to have a home; too much is required of it.

The Wayside, however, was not white, it was painted a dingy buff color.

The larches and Norway pines, several hundred of which had been sent

out from England, were planted along the paths, and were for the most

part doing well. The well-remembered hillside, with its rude terraces,

shadowed by apple-trees, and its summit green with pines, rose behind

the house; and in front, on the other side of the highway, extended

a broad meadow of seven acres, bounded by a brook, above which hung

drooping willows. It was, upon the whole, as pleasant a place as any

in the village, and much might be done to enhance its beauty. It had

been occupied, during our absence, by a brother of Mrs. Hawthorne; and

the house itself was in excellent order, and looked just the same as

in our last memory of it. A good many alterations have been made since

then; another story was added to the western wing, the tower was built

up behind, and two other rooms were put on in the rear. These changes,

together with some modifications about the place, such as opening up

of paths, the cutting down of some trees, and the planting of others,

were among the last things that engaged Hawthorne’s attention in this

life.

* * * * *

FIRST MONTHS IN ENGLAND.¹

FROM “NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND HIS WIFE.”

¹ Copyright, Ticknor & Co.

WE are told, truly enough, that goodness does not always command

good fortune in this world, that just hopes are often deferred until

it is too late to enjoy their realization, that fame and honor only

discover a man after he has ceased to value them; and a large and

respectable portion of modern fiction is occupied in impressing these

sober lessons upon us. It is pleasant, nevertheless, to believe that

sometimes fate condescends not to be so unmitigable, and that a cloudy

and gusty morning does occasionally brighten into a sunny and genial

afternoon. Too long a course of apparently perverse and unreasonable

accidents bewilders the mind, and the few and fleeting gleams of

compensation seem a mockery. One source of the perennial charm of

Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield” is, I think, that in it the dividing

line between the good and the bad fortune is so distinctly drawn.

Just when a man has done his utmost, and all seems lost, Providence

steps in, brings aid from the most unexpected quarter, and kindles

everything into brighter and ever brighter prosperity. The action

and reaction are positive and complete, and we arise refreshed and

comforted from the experience.

It was somewhat thus with Hawthorne, though the picture of his career

is to be painted in a lower and more delicate tone than that of

Goldsmith’s brilliant little canvas. Up to the time of publication

of “The Scarlet Letter,” his external circumstances had certainly

been growing more and more unpromising; though, on the other hand,

his inner domestic life had been full of the most vital and tender

satisfactions. But the date of his first popular success in literature

also marks the commencement of a worldly prosperity which, though

never by any means splendid (as we shall presently see), at any

rate sufficed to allay the immediate anxiety about to-morrow’s

bread-and-butter, from which he had not hitherto been free. The three

American novels were written and published in rapid succession, and

were reprinted in England, the first two being pirated; but for the

last, “The Blithedale Romance,” two hundred pounds were obtained from

Messrs. Chapman and Hall for advance sheets. There is every reason to

believe that during the ensuing years other romances would have been

written; and perhaps they would have been as good as, or better than,

those that went before. But it is vain to speculate as to what might

have been. What actually happened was that Hawthorne was appointed

United States Consul to Liverpool, and for six years to come his

literary exercises were confined to his consular despatches and to six

or eight volumes of his English, French and Italian Journals. It was

a long abstinence; possibly it was a beneficent one. The production

of such books as “The Scarlet Letter” and “The House of Seven Gables”

cannot go on indefinitely; though they seem to be easily written

when they _are_ written, they represent a great deal of the writer’s

spiritual existence. At all events, it is better to write too little

than too much.

* * * * *

THE HORRORS OF THE PLAGUE IN INDIA.

(FROM THE “COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE.”)

I MET the local inspectors at the railway station leading a horse

which they had kindly provided for me. We made a tour of half a dozen

villages, alighting to investigate anything that appeared suspicious.

The first and largest of the villages rambles along on either side

of a street scarcely wider than an ordinary footpath. The houses were

mud huts, whitewashed, or built of a kind of rubble, with the roofs

of loose tiles common in India. Cocoa palms were numerous all over the

region, and there were solid groves of them outside the settlements,

coming down to the water’s edge. The inhabitants for the most part

professed the Roman Catholic faith; crosses stood at every meeting

of the ways, and priests in black gowns with wide-brimmed black hats

stole past us occasionally. Of native inhabitants, however, we saw

very few; those who were not in the graveyards had locked up their

houses and fled the town. All the houses in which death or sickness

had occurred had been already visited by the inspectors, emptied of

their contents and disinfected. Those which were still occupied were

kept under strict supervision. One which had been occupied the day

before was now found to be shut. The inspectors called up a native

and questioned him. From his replies it appeared that there had been

symptoms of the disease. We dismounted and made an examination. Every

door and window was fastened, but by forcing open a blind we were

able to see the interior. It was empty of life and of most of the

movable furniture; but the floor of dried mud was strewn with the dead

carcasses of rats. Undoubtedly the plague had been here. The house was

marked for destruction, and we proceeded.

* * * * *

Low, flat ledges of rock extended into the sea. A group of creatures

in loin-cloths and red turbans were squatting or moving about between

two or three heaps of burning timber. These were made of stout logs

piled across one another to a height of about four feet. Half-way

in the pile was placed a human body; it was not entirely covered by

the wood, but a leg projected here, an arm there. The flames blazed

up fiercely, their flickering red tongues contrasting with the pale

blue of the calm sea beyond. The smoke arose thick and unctuous, and,

fortunately, was carried seaward. One of the pyres had burnt down to

white ashes, and nothing recognizable as human remained. The people

whose bodies were here burned had died in the segregation huts the

night before.

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS.

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS has shown a marvelous skill in seeing the

world, in travel, and of describing it as he sees it. He is not a

profound student of the mystery of the human mind, but he possesses

in high degree and in rare quality an instinct of selection, a clear

sense of an artistic situation in a group of more or less ordinary

circumstances and a gift in interesting description. He is, in short,

a very clever newspaper reporter who has transferred his field of

service from the region of the actual to the realm of the imaginary.

His reputation, however, is about equally divided between his works

of description and travel and his stories of a more imaginative order,

though in both classes of writings, he is above everything else a

describer of what he has seen.

He was born in Philadelphia in 1864, the son of L. Clark Davis, an

editor of reputation, and Rebecca Harding Davis, the author of many

good stories, so that the child had a literary inheritance and an

hereditary bent for letters. He studied for three years in Lehigh

University and one year in Johns Hopkins, after which he began

his interesting career as a journalist, serving successively “The

Record,” “Press,” and “Telegraph” of Philadelphia. On his return from

a European trip, he became connected with the New York “Evening Sun,”

for which he wrote the famous series of “Van Bibber Sketches.”

The story, however, which gave him his first real fame was

“Gallegher,” the scene of which is laid in Philadelphia, though,

as is true of all his stories, locality plays but little part in his

tales, modes of life and not scenery being the main feature.

He describes the happy-go-lucky life of the young club man, adventures

in saloons, and scenes among burglars with remarkable realism, for as

reporter he lived for a time among the “reprobates,” in disguise, to

make a careful study of their manner of life. Again when he describes

“The West from a Car Window,” he is giving scenes which he saw and

types of life which he closely observed. His books always have the

distinctive mark of spirit; they are full of life and activity,

everything moves on and something “happens.” This is as true of his

books of travel as of his stories. He has traveled extensively, and

he has given descriptions of most of his journeys.

Beside “The West from a Car Window” he has written, with the

same reportorial skill and fidelity to observed facts, a book

of descriptions of life and manners in the East, with scenes

and incidents at Gibraltar and Tangiers, in Cairo, Athens and

Constantinople.

He has also produced a book of travels in England, which touches

rather the surface of English life than the deeper traits of character

which Emerson has so faithfully described. Davis writes as reporter

of what is easily observed, while the other writes as philosopher. His

latest collection of stories which shows his storytelling faculties at

their best is called “The Exiles and Other Stories.” His most recent

service as a journalist was as correspondent of “The London Times,”

with the Greek forces during their recent humiliating conflict with

the Turks. The selection given below will illustrate his vigorous

style and the vivid character of his descriptions.

* * * * *

THE GREEK DEFENCE OF VELESTINO.

(FROM THE “LONDON TIMES.”)

THERE is a round hill to the north of the town, standing quite alone.

It has a perfectly flat top, and its proportions are exactly those of

a giant bucket set upside down. We found the upper end of this bucket

crowded with six mountain guns [there was one other correspondent with

Mr. Davis at the time], and the battery was protesting violently. When

it had uttered its protest the guns would throw themselves into the

air, and would turn a complete somersault, as though with delight at

the mischief they had done, or would whirl themselves upon one wheel

while the other spun rapidly in the air. Lieutenant Ambroise Frantzis

was in command of the battery. It was he who had repulsed a Turkish

cavalry charge of a few days before with this same battery, and he

was as polite and calm and pleased with his excitable little guns as

though they weighed a hundred tons each, and could send a shell nine

miles instead of a scant three thousand yards.

“From this hill there was nothing to be seen of the Turks but puffs

of smoke in the plain, so we slid down its steep side and clambered

up the ridges in front of us, where long rows of infantry were

outlined against the sky.... A bare-headed peasant boy, in dirty white

petticoats, who seemed to consider the engagement in the light of an

entertainment, came dancing down the hill to show us the foot-paths

that led up the different ridges. He was one of the villagers who had

not run away or who was not farther up the valley, taking pot-shots

at the hated Turks from behind rocks. He talked and laughed as he

ran ahead of us, with many gestures, and imitated mockingly the sound

of the bullets, and warned us with grave solicitude to be careful,

as though he was in no possible danger himself. I saw him a great

many times during the day, guiding company after company through the

gulleys, and showing them how to advance protected by the slope of the

hills――a self-constituted scout――and with much the manner of a landed

proprietor escorting visitors over his estate. And whenever a shell

struck near him, he would run and retrieve the pieces, and lay them

triumphantly at the feet of the officers, like a little fox-terrier

that has scampered after a stick and brought it to his master’s feet.

“The men in the first trench――which was the only one which gave

us a clear view of the Turkish forces――received us with cheerful

nods and scraped out a place beside them, and covered the moist

earth with their blankets. They exhibited a sort of childish pride

and satisfaction at being under fire; and so far from showing the

nervousness and shattered morale which had been prophesied for them

after the rout at Larissa, they appeared on the contrary more than

content. As the day wore on, they became even languidly bored with

it all, and some sang in a low crooning tone, and others, in spite of

the incessant rush of the shells, dozed in the full glare of the sun,

and still others lay humped and crouched against the earthworks when

the projectiles tore up the earth on the hill behind us. But when the

order came to fire, they would scramble to their knees with alacrity,

and many of them would continue firing on their own account, long

after the whistle had sounded to cease firing. Some of the officers

walked up and down, and directed the men in the trenches at their feet

with the air of judges or time-keepers at an athletic meeting, who

were observing a tug-of-war. Others exposed themselves in what looked

like a spirit of braggadocio, for they moved with a swagger and called

upon the men to notice how brave they were. Other officers rose only

when it was necessary to observe some fresh movement upon the part of

the enemy, and they did this without the least haste and simply as a

part of their work, and regarded the bullets that instantly beset them

as little as if they were so many flies.

“A Turkish soldier dragging a mule loaded with ammunition had appeared

a quarter of a mile below us, and at sight of him the soldiers at

once recognized that there was something tangible, something that

could show some sign if they hit it. The white smoke they had aimed at

before had floated away, but at the sight of this individual soldier

the entire line ceased firing at the enemy’s trenches, and opened on

the unhappy Turk and his mule, and as the dust spurted up at points

nearer and nearer to where he stood, their excitement increased in

proportion, until, when he gave the mule a kick and ran for his life,

there was a triumphant shout all along the line, as though they had

repulsed a regiment. That one man and his load of ammunition had for

a few minutes represented to them the entire Turkish army.

“As the Turks suddenly appeared below us, clambering out of a long

gully, it was as though they had sprung from the earth. On the moment

the smiling landscape changed like a scene at a theatre, and hundreds

of men rose from what had apparently been deserted hilltops, and

stood outlined in ♦silhouette against the sunset, waves of smoke ran

from crest to crest, spitting flashes of red flame, and men’s voices

shrieked and shouted, and the Turkish shells raced each other so

fiercely that they beat out the air until it groaned. It had come

up so suddenly that it was like two dogs springing at each other’s

throats, and, in a greater degree, it had something of the sound of

two wild animals struggling for life. Volley answered volley as though

with personal hate――one crashing in upon the roll of the other, or

beating it out of recognition with the bursting roar of heavy cannon;

and to those who could do nothing but lie face downwards and listen

to it, it seemed as though they had been caught in a burning building,

and that the walls and roof were falling in on them. I do not know

how long it lasted――probably not more than five minutes, although it

seemed much longer than that――but finally the death-grip seemed to

relax, the volleys came brokenly, like a man panting for breath, the

bullets ceased to sound with the hiss of escaping steam, and rustled

aimlessly by, and from hilltop to hilltop the officers’ whistles

sounded as though a sportsman were calling off his dogs. The Turks had

been driven back, and for the fourth day the Greeks had held Velestino

successfully against them.”

♦ ‘silhoutte’ replaced with ‘silhouette’

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

GREAT ORATORS AND POPULAR LECTURERS

Illustration: GREAT AMERICAN ORATORS AND POPULAR LECTURERS.

PATRICK HENRY • HENRY CLAY • DANIEL WEBSTER

HENRY WARD BEECHER • JOHN B. GOUGH • HENRY W. GRADY

CHAUNCY M. DEPEW • WENDELL PHILLIPS • EDWARD EVERETT

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

PATRICK HENRY.

THE GREATEST ORATOR OF COLONIAL TIMES.

I HEARD the splendid display of Mr. Henry’s talents as a popular

orator,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “they were great indeed, such as

I have never heard from any other man. He appeared to me to speak

as Homer wrote.”

Few men in the history of the world have possessed in a degree

equal to that of Patrick Henry, the power to move men’s minds and

to influence their actions, but it was not until he was twenty-seven

years old that his oratorical powers became known. He was a native

Virginian of distinguished parentage and good education. He married

very young, and tried farming and merchandising before he decided to

become a lawyer, when he came at once into a large practice. He was

engaged in 1763 to defend the Colony against the suit of a minister of

the Established Church, brought to recover his salary which had been

fixed at sixteen thousand pounds of tobacco. A failure of the crop had

made the tobacco exceedingly valuable, and the Colonial Legislature

had passed a law requiring the ministers to take money payment at the

rate of two pence per pound. This act had not been approved by the

King, and in his speech on this occasion, Mr. Henry boldly proclaimed

the principles which afterward led to the Declaration of Independence,

declaring that “the King by disallowing acts of a salutary nature,

from being the father of his people, degenerates into a tyrant

and forfeits all rights to his subjects’ obedience.” From that day

the fame of Patrick Henry, as a popular orator, spread throughout

the Colonies. His famous speech, two years later, in the House of

Burgesses, resulted in the passing of resolutions defining the rights

of the Colonies and pronouncing the “Stamp Act” unconstitutional.

The public mind was so inflamed that open resistance was everywhere

made and the enforcement of the tax became impossible. Mr. Henry was

now the leader of his Colony. He was concerned in all the principal

movements during the trying times until 1774, when he was foremost in

the movement which resulted in the calling of the Continental Congress.

Being a delegate to the Congress, he opened its deliberations by a

speech in which he declared: “I am not a Virginian, but an American,”

and this broad patriotism characterized his speech and actions

throughout his life. On the outbreak of the war, he was made Commander

of the forces raised in Virginia; but when these troops became a part

of the Continental Army, his lack of military experience prevented his

continuance in so high a command and he retired to civil life.

He became the first Governor of Virginia and was re-elected several

times. Among his distinguished services was the sending out of the

expedition which conquered the territory northwest of the Ohio, which

territory now embraces the great States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,

Michigan and Wisconsin. He early saw the defects in the Articles of

Confederation and favored the formation of a stronger government.

He thought the plan of the Constitution gave too much power to

the general government; but his objections were largely removed

by the first eleven amendments and he gave a hearty support to the

administration of President Washington. When the Alien and Sedition

Laws were meeting with great opposition and there was danger of an

attempt on the part of Virginia to resist their further execution,

he strongly opposed such action, and, although he did not approve of

the laws, and urged the use of every possible means to effect their

repeal, he secured his election to the Legislature for the purpose

of advocating submission to the authority of the general government.

Before he had taken his seat, his life came to a close.

Mr. Henry was a devoted Christian and lived a life consistent with

that high profession. His services to the cause of civil liberty can

hardly be overstated. His powers have been testified to by many men

of great culture and ability, and John Randolph, of Roanoke, declared

that he was the greatest orator that ever lived and spoke of him as

“Shakespeare and Garrick combined.”

* * * * *

RESISTANCE TO BRITISH AGGRESSION.

Delivered before the Virginia Convention, March 23, 1775, in

support of resolutions he had introduced, providing that the

colony should immediately be put in a state of defence against

British aggression. Of the effect of this speech, Mr. Wirt says,

that, when Henry took his seat, at its close, “No murmur of

applause was heard. The effect was too deep. After the trance

of a moment, several members started from their seats. The cry

_to arms!_ seemed to quiver on every lip, and gleam from every

eye. They became impatient of speech. Their souls were on fire

for action.”

MR. PRESIDENT, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of

hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen

to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts. Is

this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for

liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes,

see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern

our temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may

cost, I am willing to know the whole truth,――to know the worst, and to

provide for it!

I have but one lamp, by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp

of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the

past. And, judging by the past, I wish to know what there has been

in the conduct of the British ministry, for the last ten years, to

justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace

themselves and the House? Is it that insidious smile with which our

petition has been lately received? Trust it not, sir; it will prove a

snare to your feet! Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss!

Ask yourselves how this gracious reception of our petition comports

with those warlike preparations which cover our waters and darken

our land. Are fleets and armies necessary to a work of love and

reconciliation? Have we shown ourselves so unwilling to be reconciled,

that force must be called in to win back our love?

Let us not deceive ourselves, sir. These are the implements of war

and subjugation,――the last arguments to which kings resort. I ask

gentlemen, sir, what means this martial array, if its purpose be not

to force us to submission? Can gentlemen assign any other possible

motive for it? Has Great Britain any enemy in this quarter of the

world, to call for all this accumulation of navies and armies? No, sir,

she has none. They are meant for us; they can be meant for no other.

They are sent over to bind and rivet upon us those chains which the

British ministry have been so long forging. And what have we to oppose

to them? Shall we try argument? Sir, we have been trying that, for

the last ten years. Have we anything new to offer upon the subject?

Nothing. We have held the subject up in every light of which it is

capable; but it has been all in vain.

Shall we resort to entreaty and humble supplication? What terms

shall we find which have not already been exhausted? Let us not,

I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves longer. Sir, we have done

everything that could be done, to avert the storm which is now coming

on. We have petitioned, we have remonstrated, we have supplicated,

we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored

its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the Ministry and

Parliament. Our petitions have been slighted, our remonstrances have

produced additional violence and insult, our supplications have been

disregarded, and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot

of the throne.

In vain, after these things, may we indulge the fond hope of peace and

reconciliation. There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be

free,――if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges

for which we have been so long contending,――if we mean not basely to

abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and

which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious

object of our contest shall be obtained,――we must fight; I repeat it,

sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms, and to the God of Hosts, is all

that is left us!

* * * * *

THE WAR INEVITABLE, MARCH, 1775.

(_Continuation of the foregoing._)

THEY tell us, sir, that we are weak,――unable to cope with so

formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the

next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed,

and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we

gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the

means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs, and

hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have

bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak, if we make a proper use

of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power.

Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in

such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force

which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight

our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies

of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us.

The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant,

the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we

were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the

contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains

are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The

war is inevitable; and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come!

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, peace,

peace!――but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next

gale that sweeps from the North will bring to our ears the clash of

resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we

here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is

life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of

chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course

others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

HENRY CLAY.

“THE GREAT PACIFICATOR.”

IT is impossible within the necessary limits of this article to give

anything like a satisfactory account of the life and services of the

“Great Pacificator.” For nearly fifty years he took a prominent part

in the discussion of every public question. In a time whose dangers

and difficulties were so great that the most far-seeing statesmen

almost despaired of the future of our country, it was to Henry

Clay that all eyes were turned, and it was to him that we owe the

postponement of the great conflict of 1861 almost for a generation.

Clay was a native of Hanover County, Virginia; born in 1777. His

father dying when he was four years old, the future statesman lived a

life of great hardship, toil and poverty. He had almost no education,

and at fourteen he was placed in a drug store in Richmond, where he

served for a year as errand boy. His mother having remarried, her

husband obtained for Henry a clerkship in the office of the Court of

Chancery. While here he studied law, and, believing that his chances

of success would be better in the West, he followed his mother and

stepfather to Kentucky, and opened an office in Lexington. His success

was immediate, and he was soon possessed of a lucrative practice and

of a position of great influence.

In 1799 Clay married Miss Lucretia Hart, the daughter of a gentleman

of prominent standing in the State. His prosperity rapidly increased,

and he was soon able to purchase “Ashland,” an estate of some six

hundred acres near Lexington, which afterwards became famous as the

home of Henry Clay. In 1806 Mr. Clay was elected to fill a vacancy

in the Senate of the United States. Returning to Kentucky, he became

a member of the Kentucky Legislature, where he took a leading part.

Again, in 1809, he was sent to the United States Senate, but it may

be said that his public life properly began in 1811 as a member of

the House of Representatives. He was immediately elected Speaker,

and so distinguished himself in that office that it is sometimes said

that he was the best presiding officer that any deliberative body in

America has ever known, even down to the present time. It was to him

more than to any other individual that we owe the War of 1812, and

when President Madison, discouraged at the failures of the National

armies in the first year of that war, was about to appoint Clay

commander-in-chief of the land forces, he was persuaded not to do so

because he could not be spared from the House of Representatives. In

1814 Mr. Clay was one of the commissioners to arrange the terms of

peace with England. Returning from Europe, he remained Speaker of the

House of Representatives until 1825, when he became Secretary of State

under John Quincy Adams. During this time the great conflict over

slavery began. The introduction of the cotton-gin had made slavery

profitable, and the sentiment of the South, which at the time of

the Revolutionary War had apparently favored the gradual doing away

with that system, now insisted upon its extension; but while Southern

sentiment had progressed in this way, the feelings of the North

had grown in the opposite direction, and the increasing importance

of the North and its approaching predominance in the government,

made Southern politicians anxious about the future of their peculiar

institution. The conflict broke forth in 1818, when Missouri asked to

be admitted to the Union. “It was,” said Thomas Jefferson, describing

the suddenness with which the danger appeared, “like the ringing of

a fire-bell in the night.” It was the most dangerous crisis which had

yet occurred in the history of the government. It was to the genius

of Henry Clay that the ship of State was successfully steered out

of these waters. The famous “Missouri Compromise” admitting one free

State――Maine――and one slave State――Missouri――at the same time and

enacting that no other slave State should be formed north of latitude

thirty-six degrees, thirty minutes, which was the southern boundary

line of Missouri, seemed likely to solve the difficult question, and

certainly postponed the conflict.

The disappointment of Henry Clay’s life was his failure to be elected

President. He was a candidate in 1824, but with little hope of

success, and when his party, in 1840, found conditions favorable for

the election of their candidate, the popularity of General Jackson

had convinced the party managers that success demanded a military

hero as a candidate, and accordingly General Harrison took the place

which belonged by right to Clay. When he was again nominated, 1844,

the slavery question had again assumed so dangerous a form that

it prevented his election. He was a slave-holder, and so could

not receive the votes of the Liberty Party; he was opposed to the

extension of slavery, and, therefore, not satisfactory to the South.

Although the situation was evident to the party managers, a large

majority of the people expected Clay to be elected, and when the news

of his defeat came the public sorrow was greater than has ever been

manifested for such a cause.

Returning to the Senate, Mr. Clay completed his public services by

accomplishing the famous “Compromise of 1850,” which is believed to

have postponed for ten years the Civil War. He was now an old man,

but his labors for the preservation of the Union were untiring. On the

morning when he began the great speech of that session, he was so weak

that he had to be assisted to climb the steps of the Capitol. He was

aware that the exertion would probably shorten his life; but under

the fear that if he did not complete the speech at that time he would

never be able to resume it, he determined to continue. He spoke for

two days with the force, pathos and the grandeur possible only to the

greatest orators. The underlying thought of his speech was the unity

of the nation and the paramount allegiance owed by her citizens, not

to a single State; but to the country. Although he lived two years

longer, he never recovered from the effort.

Probably no man was ever more fondly loved, probably no man was so

nearly worshipped. An Englishwoman, traveling in America, in 1844,

wrote that three-quarters of all the boys born in that year must have

been named Henry Clay. “Whatever Clay’s weakness of character and

errors in statesmanship may have been,” says Carl Schurz, “almost

everything he said or did was illumined by a grand conception of

the destinies of his country, a glowing national spirit, a lofty

patriotism.” It was a just judgment which he pronounced upon himself

when he wrote, “If anyone desires to know the leading and paramount

object of my public life, the preservation of the Union will furnish

him the key.”

* * * * *

DEFENCE OF JEFFERSON, 1813.

NEXT to the notice which the opposition has found itself called upon

to bestow upon the French emperor, a distinguished citizen of Virginia,

formerly President of the United States, has never for a moment failed

to receive their kindest and most respectful attention. An honorable

gentleman from Massachusetts, of whom I am sorry to say, it becomes

necessary for me, in the course of my remarks, to take some notice,

has alluded to him in a remarkable manner. Neither his retirement from

public office, his eminent services, nor his advanced age, can exempt

this patriot from the coarse assaults of party malevolence. No, sir!

In 1801, he snatched from the rude hand of usurpation the violated

Constitution of his country,――and _that_ is his crime. He preserved

that instrument, in form, and substance, and spirit, a precious

inheritance for generations to come, and for _this_ he can never be

forgiven. How vain and impotent is party rage, directed against such

a man! He is not more elevated by his lofty residence, upon the summit

of his own favorite mountain, than he is lifted, by the serenity

of his mind and the consciousness of a well-spent life, above the

malignant passions and bitter feelings of the day. No! his own beloved

Monticello is not less moved by the storms that beat against its sides,

than is this illustrious man, by the howlings of the whole British

pack, let loose from the Essex kennel. When the gentleman to whom I

have been compelled to allude shall have mingled his dust with that of

his abused ancestors,――when he shall have been consigned to oblivion,

or, if he lives at all, shall live only in the treasonable annals of

a certain junto,――the name of Jefferson will be hailed with gratitude,

his memory honored and cherished as the second founder of the

liberties of the people, and the period of his administration will be

looked back to as one of the happiest and brightest epochs in American

history!

* * * * *

REPLY TO JOHN RANDOLPH.

(FROM SPEECH IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 1834.)

SIR, I am growing old. I have had some little measure of experience

in public life, and the result of that experience has brought me to

this conclusion, that when business, of whatever nature, is to be

transacted in a deliberate assembly, or in private life, courtesy,

forbearance, and moderation, are best calculated to bring it to a

successful conclusion. Sir, my age admonishes me to abstain from

involving myself in personal difficulties; would to God that I could

say, I am also restrained by higher motives. I certainly never sought

any collision with the gentleman from Virginia. My situation at

this time is peculiar, if it be nothing else, and might, I should

think, dissuade, at least, a generous heart from any wish to draw me

into circumstances of personal altercation. I have experienced this

magnanimity from some quarters of the House. But I regret that from

others it appears to have no such consideration.

The gentleman from Virginia was pleased to say that in one point, at

least, he coincided with me――in an humble estimate of my grammatical

and philological acquirements. I know my deficiencies. I was born

to no proud patrimonial estate; from my father I inherited only

infancy, ignorance, and indigence. I feel my defects; but, so far as

my situation in early life is concerned, I may, without presumption,

say they are more my misfortune than my fault. But, however, I regret

my want of ability to furnish to the gentleman a better specimen of

powers of verbal criticism, I will venture to say, it is not greater

than the disappointment of this committee as to the strength of his

argument. It is not a few abstractions engrossed on parchment, that

make free governments. No, sir; the law of liberty must be inscribed

on the heart of the citizen: THE WORD, if I must use the expression

without irreverence, MUST BECOME FLESH. You must have a whole people

trained, disciplined, bred,――yea, and born,――as our fathers were, to

institutions like ours.

Before the Colonies existed, the Petition of Rights, that Magna Charta

of a more enlightened age, had been presented, in 1628, by Lord Coke

and his immortal compeers. Our founders brought it with them, and

we have not gone one step beyond them. They brought these maxims of

civil liberty, not in their libraries, but in their souls; not as

philosophical prattle, not as barren generalities, but as rules of

conduct; as a symbol of public duty and private right, to be adhered

to with religious fidelity; and the very first pilgrim that set his

foot upon the rock of Plymouth stepped forth a LIVING CONSTITUTION,

armed at all points to defend and to perpetuate the liberty to which

he had devoted his whole being.

* * * * *

ON RECOGNIZING THE INDEPENDENCE OF GREECE, 1824.

ARE we so low, so base, so despicable, that we may not express our

horror, articulate our detestation, of the most brutal and atrocious

war that ever stained the earth, or shocked high Heaven, with the

ferocious deeds of a brutal soldiery, set on by the clergy and

followers of a fanatical and inimical religion, rioting in excess of

blood and butchery, at the mere details of which the heart sickens;

if the great mass of Christendom can look coolly and calmly on, while

all this is perpetuated on a Christian people, in their own vicinity,

in their very presence, let us, at least, show that, in this distant

extremity, there is still some sensibility and sympathy for Christian

wrongs and sufferings; that there are still feelings which can kindle

into indignation at the oppression of a people endeared to us by every

ancient recollection, and every modern tie.

But, sir, it is not first and chiefly for Greece that I wish to see

this measure adopted. It will give them but little aid,――that aid

purely of a moral kind. It is, indeed, soothing and solacing, in

distress, to hear the accents of a friendly voice. We know this as a

People. But, sir, it is principally and mainly for America herself,

for the credit and character of our common country, that I hope to see

this resolution pass; it is for our own unsullied name that I feel.

What appearance, sir, on the page of history, would a record like

this make:――“In the month of January in the year of our Lord and

Saviour 1824, while all European Christendom beheld with cold,

unfeeling apathy the unexampled wrongs and inexpressible misery of

Christian Greece, a proposition was made in the Congress of the United

States,――almost the sole, the last, the greatest repository of human

hope and of human freedom, the representatives of a nation capable

of bringing into the field a million of bayonets,――while the freemen

of that nation were spontaneously expressing its deep-toned feeling,

its fervent prayer for Grecian success; while the whole Continent

was rising, by one simultaneous motion, solemnly and anxiously

supplicating and invoking the aid of Heaven to spare Greece, and

to invigorate her arms; while temples and senate-houses will be

resounding with one burst of generous sympathy;――in the year of our

Lord and Saviour,――that Saviour alike of Christian Greece and of us,

a proposition was offered in the American Congress to send a messenger

to Greece, to inquire into her state and condition, with an expression

of our good wishes and our sympathies;――and it was rejected!”

Go home, if you dare,――go home, if you can,――to your constituents,

and tell them that you voted it down! Meet, if you dare, the appalling

countenances of those who sent you here, and tell them that you shrank

from the declaration of your own sentiments; that, you cannot tell how,

but that some unknown dread, some indescribable apprehension, some

indefinable danger, affrighted you; that the spectres of scimitars and

crowns, and crescents, gleamed before you, and alarmed you; and that

you suppressed all the noble feelings prompted by religion, by liberty,

by national independence, and by humanity! I cannot bring myself to

believe that such will be the feeling of a majority of this House.

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

DANIEL WEBSTER.

THE DEFENDER OF NATIONAL UNION.

AMONG the men who may properly be called the makers of the nation,

Daniel Webster holds a foremost place. If Washington was “the father

of his country,” and Lincoln its “saviour,” it may also be said

that it was Webster, more than any other one man, who laid down the

principles upon which it was made possible for the nation to endure;

for it was he who maintained that the Federal Constitution created not

a league, but a nation, thus enunciating far in advance the theories

which were wrought into our constitutional law at the expense of a

long and bloody Civil War.

The life of Daniel Webster extended from 1782 until 1852. His father

was one of the brave men who fought at Lexington, and Daniel was the

youngest of ten children who were compelled very early in life to

share in the labor of supporting the family on a rocky New Hampshire

farm. Working in his father’s sawmill, he used the time while the

saw was going through the log in devouring a book. His abilities were

very remarkable and the fame of “Webster’s boy” was known far and

wide. His memory was very extraordinary. In a competition between the

boys of his school in committing to memory verses in the Bible, the

teacher heard him repeat some sixty or seventy which he had committed

between Saturday and Monday and was then obliged to give up as Webster

declared that there were several chapters more that he had learned. By

means of great sacrifice on the part of the entire family, Daniel was

sent to Phillips Exeter Academy, and, by teaching school in vacations,

made his way through Dartmouth College. He took up the study of law

and was admitted to practice in 1805.

There was something in Mr. Webster’s appearance and bearing which

must have been very majestic. He seemed to everyone to be a giant;

but as his proportions were not those of an unusually large man, his

majestic appearance must have been due to something within which shone

out through his piercing eyes and spoke in his finely cut and noble

features. It is said that he never punished his children, but, when

they did wrong, he would send for them and silently look at them, and

the sorrow or the anger of the look was reproach enough.

Webster was a lawyer, an orator and a statesman. As a lawyer, his most

famous arguments are those in the “Dartmouth College Case,” the “White

Murder Case” and the “Steamboat Case,” as they are called. A part

of his speech in the “Murder Case” is still printed in the school

readers. The “Dartmouth College Case” is very famous. It was a suit

whose success would have destroyed the college, and, after trial in

the State Courts, it was appealed to the United States Supreme Court,

before which Mr. Webster made his argument. The interest was very

great and the details of the trial are among the most interesting in

the history of our jurisprudence. The eloquence with which Mr. Webster

described the usefulness of the institution, his love for it, and

the consequences which the precedent sought to be established would

involve, all contributed to make this one of the greatest oratorical

efforts of which we have any record.

“Sir,” said he, “you may destroy this little institution; it is weak;

it is in your hands! I know it is one of the lesser lights in the

literary horizon of our country. You may put it out, but, if you do

so, you must carry through your work! You must extinguish, one after

another, all those great lights of science which, for more than a

century, have thrown their radiance over our land.

“It is, sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet, there are those

who love it――――”

Here the feelings which he had thus far succeeded in keeping down

broke forth. His lips quivered; his firm cheeks trembled with emotion;

his eyes were filled with tears; his voice choked, and he seemed

struggling to the utmost simply to gain that mastery over himself

which might save him from an unmanly burst of feeling.

The court room, during these two or three minutes, presented an

extraordinary spectacle. Chief Justice Marshall, with his tall,

gaunt figure bent over as if to catch the slightest whisper, the

deep furrows of his cheeks expanded with emotion, and eyes suffused

with tears; Mr. Justice Washington at his side, with his small and

emaciated frame, and countenance like marble, leaning forward with

an eager, troubled look; and the remainder of the court, at the two

extremities, pressing, as it were, toward a single point, while the

audience below were wrapping themselves round in closer folds beneath

the bench to catch each look, and every movement of the speaker’s

face. If the painter could give us the scene on canvas――those forms

and countenances, and Daniel Webster as he then stood in the midst――it

would be one of the most touching pictures in the history of eloquence.

As an orator, Mr. Webster’s most famous speeches are the “Plymouth

Rock Address” in 1820, on the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Landing

of the Pilgrims, the “Bunker Hill Monument Address,” and his speech in

the Senate in reply to Hayne in 1830, and on “Clay’s Compromise Bill

of 1850.”

Upon Mr. Harrison’s inauguration in 1841, Mr. Webster became

Secretary of State, which office he held until 1843. During this time,

he negotiated the famous treaty with Lord Ashburton which settled

a long-standing dispute with England over the boundary of Maine. He

supported Clay for the presidency in 1804 and opposed the annexation

of Texas. In the debate on the “Compromise of 1850,” Mr. Webster

advocated the acceptance of the provisions for extending slavery into

the territory purchased from Mexico, and for the “Fugitive Slave Law,”

and in so doing gave great offense to his supporters in the North. In

1850, he was appointed Secretary of State, which office he held until

his death.

Illustration: DANIEL WEBSTER’S HOME, MARSHFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS.

He took great interest in the operations of his farm at Marshfield,

near Plymouth, Massachusetts, and delightful stories are told of the

pleasure he took in his cattle――how he might be seen breaking ears of

corn to feed to his oxen on the right and left declaring that he would

rather be there than in the Senate, and adding with a smile, “I think

it better company.” It was here, in 1852, that he was thrown from his

carriage and received severe injuries from which he did not recover.

In his last words, he manifested a desire to be conscious of the

approach of death and his last words were, “I still live.” In the vast

concourse which gathered at his funeral was a plain farmer who was

heard to say, as he turned from the grave, “Daniel Webster, without

you the world will seem lonely.”

* * * * *

SOUTH CAROLINA AND MASSACHUSETTS, JANUARY, 1830.

An extract from a speech by Mr. Webster, in reply to Mr. Hayne,

of South Carolina, in the Senate of the United States, January,

1830. This was probably the most remarkable speech ever made

in the American Congress. His peroration, comprised in the last

paragraph, under the succeeding heading, “Union and Liberty,”

for patriotic eloquence has not a counterpart, perhaps, in all

history. The speech is the more remarkable for the fact that

Mr. Webster had but a single night in which to make preparation.

THE eulogium pronounced on the character of the State of South

Carolina, by the honorable gentleman, for her Revolutionary and

other merits, meets my hearty concurrence. I shall not acknowledge

that the honorable member goes before me in regard for whatever of

distinguished talent or distinguished character South Carolina has

produced. I claim part of the honor, I partake in the pride of her

great names. I claim them for countrymen, one and all. The Laurenses,

the Rutledges, the Pinckneys, the Sumpters, the Marions,――Americans

all,――whose fame is no more to be hemmed in by State lines, than their

talents and patriotism were capable of being circumscribed within

the same narrow limits. In their day and generation, they served and

honored the country, and the whole country; and their renown is of the

treasures of the whole country. Him whose honored name the gentleman

himself bears,――does he suppose me less capable of gratitude for his

patriotism, or sympathy for his sufferings, than if his eyes had first

opened upon the light in Massachusetts, instead of South Carolina?

Sir, does he suppose it is in his power to exhibit a Carolina

name so bright as to produce envy in my bosom? No, sir; increased

gratification and delight, rather.

Sir, I thank God, that, if I am gifted with little of the spirit which

is said to be able to raise mortals to the skies, I have yet none,

as I trust, of that other spirit, which would drag angels down. When

I shall be found, sir, in my place here, in the Senate, or elsewhere,

to sneer at public merit, because it happened to spring up beyond the

little limits of my own State or neighborhood; when I refuse, for any

such cause, or for any cause, the homage due to American talent, to

elevated patriotism, to sincere devotion to liberty and the country;

or, if I see an uncommon endowment of heaven,――if I see extraordinary

capacity and virtue in any son of the South,――and if, moved by local

prejudice, or gangrened by State jealousy, I get up here to abate the

tithe of a hair from his just character and just fame, may my tongue

cleave to the roof of my mouth!

Sir, let me recur to pleasing recollections; let me indulge in

refreshing remembrance of the past; let me remind you that, in early

times, no States cherished greater harmony, both of principle and

feeling, than Massachusetts and South Carolina. Would to God that

harmony might again return! Shoulder to shoulder they went through

the Revolution, hand in hand they stood round the administration

of Washington, and felt his own great arm lean on them for support.

Unkind feeling, if it exist,――alienation and distrust,――are the growth,

unnatural to such soils, of false principles since sown. They are

weeds, the seeds of which that same great arm never scattered.

Mr. President, I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts;――she

needs none. There she is,――behold her, and judge for yourselves.

There is her history,――the world knows it by heart. The past, at least,

is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker

Hill,――and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons,

fallen in the great struggle for Independence, now lie mingled with

the soil of every State from New England to Georgia,――and there they

will lie forever. And, sir, where American liberty raised its first

voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it

still lives, in the strength of its manhood, and full of its original

spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it,――if party strife and

blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it,――if folly and madness, if

uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraints, shall succeed

to separate it from that Union by which alone its existence is made

sure,――it will stand, in the end, by the side of that cradle in which

its infancy was rocked; it will stretch forth its arm, with whatever

vigor it may still retain, over the friends who gather round it; and

it will fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the proudest monuments

of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin!

* * * * *

LIBERTY AND UNION, 1830.

(_Continuation of the foregoing._)

I PROFESS, sir, in my career hitherto, to have kept steadily in view

the prosperity and honor of the whole country, and the preservation

of our Federal Union. It is to that Union we owe our safety at home,

and our consideration and dignity abroad. It is to that Union we are

chiefly indebted for whatever makes us most proud of our country.

That Union we reached only by the discipline of our virtues, in the

severe school of adversity. It had its origin in the necessities of

disordered finance, prostrate commerce, and ruined credit. Under its

benign influences, these great interests immediately awoke, as from

the dead, and sprang forth with newness of life. Every year of its

duration has teemed with fresh proofs of its utility and its blessings;

and although our territory has stretched out wider and wider, and

our population spread further and further, they have not outrun its

protection, or its benefits. It has been to us all a copious fountain

of national, social, personal happiness.

I have not allowed myself, sir, to look beyond the Union to see what

might lie hidden in the dark recess behind. I have not coolly weighed

the chances of preserving liberty, when the bonds that unite us

together shall be broken asunder. I have not accustomed myself to hang

over the precipice of disunion to see whether, with my short sight,

I can fathom the depth of the abyss below; nor could I regard him as

a safe counsellor in the affairs of this government whose thoughts

should be mainly bent on considering, not how the Union should be best

preserved, but how tolerable might be the condition of the people when

it shall be broken up and destroyed.

While the Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects

spread out before us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to

penetrate the veil. God grant that, in my day, at least, that curtain

may not rise! God grant that on my vision never may be opened what

lies behind! When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last

time, the Sun in Heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and

dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States severed,

discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched,

it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering

glance, rather, behold the gorgeous Ensign of the Republic, now known

and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms

and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased

or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing, for its motto,

no such miserable interrogatory as――_What is all this worth?_――nor

those other words of delusion and folly――_Liberty first and Union

afterwards_,――but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living

light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and

over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other

sentiment, dear to every true American heart, Liberty _and_ Union, now

and ♦forever, one and inseparable!

♦ ‘forver’ replaced with ‘forever’

* * * * *

THE ELOQUENCE OF ACTION.

WHEN public bodies are to be addressed on momentous occasions, when

great interests are at stake and strong passions excited, nothing

is valuable in speech, further than it is connected with high

intellectual and moral endowments. Clearness, force, and earnestness

are the qualities which produce conviction. True eloquence, indeed,

does not consist in speech. It cannot be brought from far. Labor and

learning may toil for it, but they will toil in vain. Words and

phrases may be marshalled in every way, but they cannot compass it. It

must exist in the man, in the subject, and in the occasion. Affected

passion, intense expression the pomp of declamation, all may aspire

after it,――they cannot reach it. It comes, if it come at all, like

the outbreaking of a fountain from the earth, or the bursting forth of

volcanic fires, with spontaneous, original, native force. The graces

taught in the schools, the costly ornaments and studied contrivances

of speech, shock and disgust men when their own lives, and the fate of

their wives, their children, and their country hang on the decision of

the hour. Then, words have lost their power, rhetoric is vain, and all

elaborate oratory contemptible. Even genius itself then feels rebuked

and subdued, as in the presence of higher qualities. Then, patriotism

is eloquent; then, self-devotion is eloquent. The clear conception,

outrunning the deductions of logic, the high purpose, the firm resolve,

the dauntless spirit, speaking on the tongue, beaming from the eye,

informing every feature, and urging the whole man onward, right onward,

to his object,――this, this is eloquence; or, rather, it is something

greater and higher than all eloquence,――it is action, noble, sublime,

godlike action.

* * * * *

THE TWENTY-SECOND OF FEBRUARY.

(SUITED TO WASHINGTON’S BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION.)

GENTLEMEN, a most auspicious omen salutes and cheers us this day.

This day is the anniversary of the birth of Washington. Washington’s

birthday is celebrated from one end of this land to the other.

The whole atmosphere of the country is this day redolent of his

principles,――the hills, the rocks, the groves, the vales, and the

rivers shout their praises and resound with his fame. All the good,

whether learned or unlearned, high or low, rich or poor, feel this day

that there is one treasure common to them all; and that is the fame

of Washington. They all recount his deeds, ponder over his principles

and teachings, and resolve to be more and more guided by them in the

future.

To the old and the young, to all born in this land, and to all whose

preferences have led them to make it the home of their adoption,

Washington is an exhilarating theme. Americans are proud of his

character; all exiles from foreign shores are eager to participate

in admiration of him; and it is true that he is, this day, here,

everywhere, all over the world, more an object of regard than on any

former day since his birth.

Gentlemen, by his example, and under the guidance of his precepts,

will we and our children uphold the Constitution? Under his military

leadership, our fathers conquered their ancient enemies; and, under

the outspread banner of the political and constitutional principles,

will we conquer _now_? To that standard we shall adhere, and uphold

it, through evil report and good report. We will sustain it, and meet

death itself, if it come; we will ever encounter and defeat error, by

day and by night, in light or in darkness――thick darkness――if it come,

till

“Danger’s troubled night is o’er,

And the star of peace return.”

* * * * *

AMERICA’S GIFTS TO EUROPE.

AMERICA has furnished to Europe proof of the fact that popular

institutions, founded on equality and the principle of representation,

are capable of maintaining governments, able to secure the rights

of person, property, and reputation. America has proved that it

is practicable to elevate the mass of mankind――that portion which

in Europe is called the laboring or lower class――to raise them to

self-respect, to make them competent to act a part in the great right

and great duty of self-government; and she has proved that this may

be done by education and the diffusion of knowledge. She holds out

an example, a thousand times more encouraging than ever was presented

before, to those nine-tenths of the human race who are born without

hereditary fortune or hereditary rank.

America has furnished to the world the character of Washington; and if

our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have

entitled them to the respect of mankind. Washington! “First in war,

first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” Washington

is all our own! The enthusiastic veneration and regard in which the

people of the United States hold him, prove them to be worthy of such

a country, while his reputation abroad reflects the highest honor on

his country.

I would cheerfully put the question to-day to the intelligence of

Europe and the world, “What character of the century, upon the whole,

stands out, in the relief of history, most pure, most respectable,

most sublime?” and I doubt not that, by a suffrage approaching to

unanimity, the answer would be, Washington!

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

EDWARD EVERETT.

THE GREAT CLASSIC ORATOR OF NEW ENGLAND.

GEORGE S. HILLARD, himself an orator of no slight renown, has

spoken with much critical insight and appreciation of the mental

characteristic and oratorical style of Edward Everett, the great

classic orator of Massachusetts: “The great charm of Mr. Everett’s

orations consists not so much in any single and strongly developed

intellectual trait as in that symmetry and finish which, on every page,

give token to the richly endowed and thorough scholar. The natural

movements of his mind are full of grace; and the most indifferent

sentence which falls from his pen has that simple elegance which

it is as difficult to define as it is easy to perceive. His style,

with matchless flexibility, rises and falls with his subject and is

alternately easy, vivid, elevated, ornamented, picturesque, ♦adapting

itself to the dominant mood of the mind, as an instrument responds

to the touch of a master’s hand. His knowledge is so extensive

and the field of his allusion so wide, that the most familiar

views, in passing through his hands, gather such a halo of luminous

illustrations that their likeness seems transformed, and we entertain

doubts of their identity.”

♦ ‘adpating’ replaced with ‘adapting’

He was born in Dorchester, Mass., April 11, 1794, and was graduated

from Harvard College with the highest honors in 1811. He entered the

ministry, and at the age of nineteen he was installed as pastor of the

Unitarian Church in Brattle Square, Boston, and only six years later

he preached a sermon in the Hall of Representatives at Washington,

which made a marvelous impression on all who heard it, and won him

great fame for eloquence.

He was chosen at the age of twenty to fill the Chair of Greek

Literature at Harvard College, and he spent four years abroad to

qualify himself for this position, and Victor Cousin said of him at

this period that he was one of the best Grecians he ever knew.

In 1820, crowded with honors and distinguished in many fields, he

became editor of the “North American Review;” during the four years

of his editorship he contributed fifty articles to this magazine.

He sat in Congress as Representative from Massachusetts from 1824

to 1834. In 1835, and for three years following, he was Governor of

Massachusetts, and in the election following he was defeated by one

vote.

While traveling abroad he received the appointment as Minister to

England, and during this period of sojourn he received from Oxford

the degree of D.C.L., and from Cambridge and Dublin that of LL.D.

For three years, from 1846 to 1849, he was President of Harvard

College, and in 1852 he succeeded Daniel Webster as Secretary of State,

becoming in the year following a member of the United States Senate,

which position he filled with great dignity, and rendered his country

honorable service. It was largely through his efforts that the money

was raised to purchase Mount Vernon. For this purpose the great orator

delivered one hundred and twenty-two times his oration on “Washington,”

from which more than $58,000 was realized, and he secured $10,000

from a series of articles in the New York “Ledger.”

His lecture on the “Early Days of Franklin,” and other lectures for

charitable purposes, brought in no less than $90,000.

His orations have been collected and published, and form one of

the most remarkable collections of graceful and eloquent addresses

ever produced in this country. They are as follows: “Orations and

Speeches on Various Occasions” (Boston, 1836); “Orations and Speeches

on Various Occasions from 1826 to 1850” (2 Vols., Boston, 1850);

“Orations and Speeches” (Boston, 1859). He is also the author of two

stirring poems, “Alaric the Visigoth” and “Santa Croce.”

Despite the fact that he and Daniel Webster were often on opposite

sides of great questions and issues, and frequently crossed swords in

the debate of the giants, they were life-long friends, and Mr. Webster

wrote to him three months before the death of the former in the

following touching words: “We now and then see stretching across the

heavens a clear, blue, cerulean sky, with no cloud or mist or haze.

And such appears to me our acquaintance from the time when I heard

you for a week recite your lessons in the little schoolhouse in Short

Street to the date hereof” [July 21, 1852].

In 1860, much against his will, Mr. Everett became the candidate for

the Vice-Presidency on the ticket of the Constitutional-Union Party,

which polled thirty-nine electoral votes.

He died at his home in Boston, January 15, 1865.

* * * * *

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF PEACE.

While we act, sir, upon the maxim, “In peace prepare for war,” let us

also remember that the best preparation for war is peace. This swells

your numbers; this augments your means; this knits the sinews of your

strength; this covers you all over with a panoply of might. And, then,

if war must come in a just cause, no foreign state――no, sir, not all

combined――can send forth an adversary that you need fear to encounter.

But, sir, give us these twenty-five years of peace. I do believe, sir,

that this coming quarter of a century is to be the most important in

our whole history. I do beseech you to let us have these twenty-five

years, at least, of peace. Let these fertile wastes be filled up with

swarming millions; let this tide of emigration from Europe go on; let

the steamer, the canal, the railway, and especially let this great

Pacific railway, subdue these mighty distances, and bring this vast

extension into a span.

Let us pay back the ingots of California gold with bars of Atlantic

iron; let agriculture clothe our vast wastes with waving plenty; let

the industrial and mechanic arts erect their peaceful fortresses at

the waterfalls; and then, sir, in the train of this growing population,

let the printing office, the lecture-room, the village schoolhouse,

and the village church, be scattered over the country. And in these

twenty-five years we shall exhibit a spectacle of national prosperity

such as the world has never seen on so large a scale, and yet within

the reach of a sober, practical contemplation.

* * * * *

THE FATHER OF THE REPUBLIC.

TO be cold and breathless, to feel not and speak not――this is not the

end of existence to the men who have breathed their spirits into the

institutions of their country, who have stamped their characters on

the pillars of the age, who have poured their heart’s blood into the

channels of the public prosperity.

Tell me, ye who tread the sods of yon sacred height, is Warren dead?

Can you not still see him――not pale and prostrate, the blood of his

gallant heart pouring out of his ghastly wound, but moving resplendent

over the field of honor, with the rose of heaven upon his cheek and

the fire of liberty in his eye?

Tell me, ye who make your pious pilgrimage to the shades of Vernon,

is Washington indeed shut up in that cold and narrow house? That which

made these men, and men like these, cannot die.

The hand that traced the charter of independence is, indeed,

motionless; the eloquent lips that sustained it are hushed; but the

lofty spirits that conceived, resolved and maintained it, and which

alone, to such men, make it life to live――these cannot expire.

* * * * *

THE LAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS.

FOR myself, I can truly say that, after my native land, I feel a

tenderness and a reverence for that of my fathers. The pride I take

in my own country makes me respect that from which we are sprung.

The sound of my native language beyond the sea is a music to my ears

beyond the richest strains of Tuscan softness or Castilian majesty.

I am not――I need not say I am not――the panegyrist of England. I am not

dazzled by her riches nor awed by her power. The sceptre, the mitre

and the coronet, stars, garters and ribbons, seem to me poor things

for great men to contend for.

But England is the cradle and the refuge of free principles, though

often persecuted; the school of religious liberty, the more precious

for the struggles through which it has passed; she holds the tombs of

those who have reflected honor on all who speak the English tongue;

she is the birthplace of our fathers, the home of the Pilgrims; it is

these which I love and venerate in England.

I should feel ashamed of an enthusiasm for Italy and Greece did I not

also feel it for a land like this. In an American it would seem to

me degenerate and ungrateful to hang with passion upon the traces of

Homer and Virgil, and follow without emotion the nearer and plainer

footsteps of Shakespeare and Milton. I should think him cold in love

for his native land who felt no melting in his heart for that other

native country which holds the ashes of his forefathers.

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

WENDELL PHILLIPS.

THE DEMOSTHENES OF AMERICA.

NO MORE majestic figure in the anti-slavery struggle for thirty

years――1835 to 1865――appeared on the American rostrum than the

“silvery tongued orator,” Wendell Phillips.

In 1830, William Lloyd Garrison wrote in the “Liberator,”――a journal

founded primarily by the abolitionists for the sole purpose of freeing

the slaves――“I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as

justice. I am in earnest; I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;

I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard.” But the

abolitionists remained many years a small and despised faction, and,

with all of Garrison’s determination, might never have amounted to

anything had he not enlisted in his cause such men and masters as

Wendell Phillips on the platform, Henry Ward Beecher in the pulpit,

Charles Sumner in the United States Senate, and Harriet Beecher Stowe

among novelists. It was a great day of promise when such educated

talent caught the spirit of Garrison’s zeal.

In 1835, an angry pro-slavery mob dragged William Lloyd Garrison

through the streets of Boston. A young man of twenty-four witnessed

this cruel treatment and determined to abandon the practice of law

and devote his life to the same cause. That man was Wendell Phillips.

He first came into prominence by his impassioned address in Faneuil

Hall, Boston, in 1837, at an indignation meeting called to condemn

the killing of Lovejoy, at Alton, Illinois, while defending his

anti-slavery newspaper office against a pro-slavery mob. The direct

and impassioned eloquence of the orator on this occasion was the

key-note to the forward movement toward the liberation of the black

man. It was the bugle-blast which cheered the pioneers in the movement,

and awoke the slumbering spirits in sympathy with it, but whose timid

hopes had not dared to dream of its possible ultimate success.

As Demosthenes aroused and fired the Athenians, so Phillips’ appeals

carried like an avalanche everything before them. The only way to

prevent his influence was to prevent his speaking, and accordingly

when he went to New York in 1847, there was such a prejudice against

the abolitionists, and such a predominant pro-slavery sentiment, that

he could not procure a hall in either of these cities in which to

speak. Finally, Henry Ward Beecher, who had recently become pastor of

Plymouth Church, prevailed upon his congregation to allow Phillips to

address the people from their pulpit.

From this memorable occasion Beecher, himself, it is said, became

a flaming torch, second only to Phillips in his efforts in the same

cause, while Plymouth Congregation seconded him with all its mighty

influence, a further account of which may be found under the treatment

of Henry Ward Beecher in this volume.

Wendell Phillips was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 29th day

of November, 1811, and died there February 2, 1884. His parents were

prominent in Boston society, his father at one time being Mayor of the

city. Phillips was educated at Harvard College, graduating in 1831,

after which he studied law at Cambridge and was admitted to the bar

in 1833; but his gift as an orator, in which he is regarded as second

only to Daniel Webster, and his overmastering zeal in the abolitionist

movement, required so much of his time that he did little practice

before the court. He was a most fascinating platform speaker outside

of politics, and was in constant demand as a lecturer. His most

celebrated addresses were “Toussaint l’Ouverture” and “The Lost

Arts,” the former being used as an argument of the native ability,

intelligence, and possibility of progress on the part of the negro

under proper opportunities.

The eloquence of Phillips was impassioned and direct, but his manner

was so pleasingly polished as not to give personal offence to his most

antagonistic hearers, while his English was singularly pure and simple,

and his delivery was characterized by a nervous sympathy that was

peculiarly magnetic.

Like most other great orators, Wendell Phillips has left behind him in

literature only his public speeches and letters. One volume of these

was published in Boston in 1862, another (largely a revision of the

first, with additions to the same) in 1869.

* * * * *

POLITICAL AGITATION.

ALL hail, Public Opinion! To be sure, it is a dangerous thing under

which to live. It rules to-day in the desire to obey all kinds of

laws, and takes your life. It rules again in the love of liberty,

and rescues Shadrach from Boston Court House. It rules to-morrow

in the manhood of him who loads the musket to shoot down――God be

praised!――the man-hunter Gorsuch. It rules in Syracuse, and the

slave escapes to Canada. It is our interest to educate this people

in humanity, and in deep reverence for the rights of the lowest and

humblest individual that makes up our numbers. Each man here, in fact,

holds his property and his life dependent on the constant presence of

an agitation like this of anti-slavery. Eternal vigilance is the price

of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna

of popular liberty must be gathered each day, or it is rotten. The

living sap of to-day outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand

intrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or _esprit

de corps_, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual

oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening

into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be kept

sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in

material prosperity.

All clouds, it is said, have sunshine behind them, and all evils have

some good result; so slavery, by the necessity of its abolition, has

saved the freedom of the white race from being melted in the luxury or

buried beneath the gold of its own success. Never look, therefore, for

an age when the people can be quiet and safe. At such times Despotism,

like a shrouding mist, steals over the mirror of Freedom. The Dutch,

a thousand years ago, built against the ocean their bulwarks of willow

and mud. Do they trust to that? No. Each year the patient, industrious

peasant gives so much time from the cultivation of his soil and the

care of his children to stop the breaks and replace the willow which

insects have eaten, that he may keep the land his fathers rescued from

the water, and bid defiance to the waves that roar above his head, as

if demanding back the broad fields man has stolen from their realm.

* * * * *

TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE.

[Toussaint L’Ouverture, who has been pronounced one of the

greatest statesmen and generals of the nineteenth century,

saved his master and family by hurrying them on board a vessel

at the insurrection of the negroes of Hayti. He then joined

the negro army, and soon found himself at their head. Napoleon

sent a fleet with French veterans, with orders to bring him

to France at all hazards. But all the skill of the French

soldiers could not subdue the negro army; and they finally made

a treaty, placing Toussaint L’Ouverture governor of the island.

The negroes no sooner disbanded their army, than a squad of

soldiers seized Toussaint by night, and taking him on board a

vessel, hurried him to France. There he was placed in a dungeon,

and finally starved to death.]

IF I were to tell you the story of Napoleon, I should take it from

the lips of French men, who find no language rich enough to paint the

great captain of the nineteenth century. Were I to tell you the story

of Washington, I should take it from your hearts,――you, who think

no marble white enough on which to carve the name of the Father of

his country. But I am to tell you the story of a negro, Toussaint

L’Ouverture, who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it

from the reluctant testimony of his enemies, men who despised him

because he was a negro and a slave, hated him because he had beaten

them in battle.

Cromwell manufactured his own army. Napoleon, at the age of

twenty-seven, was placed at the head of the best troops Europe ever

saw. Cromwell never saw an army till he was forty; this man never saw

a soldier till he was fifty. Cromwell manufactured his own army――out

of what? Englishmen,――the best blood in Europe. Out of the middle

class of Englishmen,――the best blood of the island. And with it he

conquered what? Englishmen,――their equals. This man manufactured his

army out of what? Out of what you call the despicable race of negroes,

debased, demoralized by two hundred years of slavery, one hundred

thousand of them imported into the island within four years, unable to

speak a dialect intelligible even to each other. Yet out of this mixed,

and, as you say, despicable mass he forged a thunderbolt and hurled it

at what? At the proudest blood in Europe, the Spaniard, and sent him

home conquered; at the most warlike blood in Europe, the French, and

put them under his feet; at the pluckiest blood in Europe, the English,

and they skulked home to Jamaica. Now, if Cromwell was a general, at

least this man was a soldier.

Now, blue-eyed Saxon, proud of your race, go back with me to the

commencement of the century, and select what statesman you please.

Let him be either American or European; let him have a brain the

result of six generations of culture; let him have the ripest training

of university routine; let him add to it the better education of

practical life; crown his temples with the silver locks of seventy

years, and show me the man of Saxon lineage for whom his most sanguine

admirer will wreathe a laurel, rich as embittered foes have placed on

the brow of this negro,――rare military skill, profound knowledge of

human nature, content to blot out all party distinctions, and trust

a state to the blood of its sons,――anticipating Sir Robert Peel fifty

years, and taking his station by the side of Roger Williams, before

any Englishman or American had won the right; and yet this is the

record which the history of rival States makes up for this inspired

black of St. Domingo.

Some doubt the courage of the negro. Go to Hayti, and stand on those

fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had, and ask

them what they think of the negro’s sword.

I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way to empire over

broken oaths and through a sea of blood. This man never broke his word.

I would call him Cromwell, but Cromwell was only a soldier, and the

state he founded went down with him into his grave. I would call him

Washington, but the great Virginian held slaves. This man risked his

empire rather than permit the slave-trade in the humblest village of

his dominions.

You think me a fanatic, for you read history, not with your eyes but

with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing,

the Muse of history will put Phocion for the Greek, Brutus for the

Roman, Hampden for England, Fayette for France, choose Washington

as the bright consummate flower of our earlier civilization, then,

dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue,

above them all, the name of the soldier, the stateman, the martyr,

TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE.

Illustration: (‡ decoration)

HENRY WARD BEECHER.

THE GREATEST PULPIT ORATOR OF AMERICA.

IT may be safely said that as a pulpit and platform orator, Beecher

has had no superior. Nothing is studied or artificial about his

delivery. Naturalness, frankness, cordiality, fearlessness, clearness,

and depth of thought, expressed in the simplicity and beauty of

diction, and enlivened by a rich vein of pungent humor, were marked

characteristics of his speech.

Those familiar with the public career of this great orator and

reformer can scarcely conceive of him at four years of age sitting

in the Widow Kilbourn’s school occupied in saying his A B C’s twice

a day, and putting in the intervals between recitations in hemming

towels and aprons; yet such is the story told of Henry Ward Beecher’s

first school-days.

His father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, was a Congregational minister, a

profound thinker and scholar, stationed at Litchfield, Connecticut,

where, on the then large salary of eight hundred dollars per year, he

and his wife and ten children lived. Henry Ward was born on the 24th

of June, 1813――the eighth child in the family.

Beecher tells many interesting stories of his childhood. Among others

are his accounts of the Sabbath-day struggles with the Catechism.

He declared it was a day of terror. Once on referring to it in his

Plymouth pulpit he said: “I think that to force childhood to associate

religion with such dry morsels is to violate the spirit not only of

the New Testament, but of common sense as well. I know one thing, that

if I am lax and latitudinarian, the Sunday Catechism is to blame for

part of it. The dinners I have lost because I could not go through

‘sanctification,’ and ‘justification,’ and ‘adoption,’ and all such

questions, lie heavily on my memory. One Sunday afternoon with my Aunt

Esther did me more good than forty Sunday mornings in church with my

father. He thundered over my head. She sweetly instructed me down in

my heart. The promise that she would read Joseph’s history to me on

Sunday was enough to draw a silver thread through the entire week.”

Dr. Beecher received a call to preach in Boston in 1825, and removed

his family there. The ships, the sea, and the stories Beecher here saw

and read of Lord Nelson and other naval heroes, and of Captain Cook’s

marvelous voyages and discoveries in new countries, determined him to

make a sailor of himself. He was at this time a shy boy with a thick

tongue and very indistinct speech. His father, while secretly opposing

his project to go to sea, apparently encouraged it by suggesting

that he go to Amherst College, where he would learn mathematics and

navigation, preparing himself to be a commander instead of a “common

Jack Tar.” Henry Ward readily consented to this.

At Amherst he studied elocution, and became not only an easy reader

and talker, but showed promise of distinction. This opened a new world

to him. The spirit of oratory found lodgment in his soul and he forgot

his old longing for the sea. Shortly after this, during a religious

revival in the college, Beecher determined to be a Christian, and,

as a biographer says of him, “Made a joyful consecration of himself

to the Lord. It was no doleful giving up to live a life of gloom and

sadness. He believed that a Christian life ought to be of all lives

the most joyful, and if he could not be a joyful Christian, he should

not be one at all.” These convictions followed him through life.

Mrs. Stowe, his sister, wrote of him: “He was never found sitting in

solemnized meditations in the depth of pine trees like the owl.”

Dr. Beecher was elected President of Lane Seminary, Cincinnati,

Ohio, in 1832, and removed to that city, whither Henry Ward followed

him after graduation at Amherst in 1836, and took his theological

course under his father and Prof. Stowe (who afterwards married his

sister, Harriet Beecher, the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”). After

completing his theological course he entered upon his first pastorate

at Lawrenceburg, Indiana, at a salary of three hundred dollars per

annum, where, he said: “I did all the work of both sexton and pastor;

in fact, everything except come to hear myself preach――that much the

congregation had to do.”

One of his first steps after securing this position was to go back to

Massachusetts and marry Miss ―――― Bullard, his boyhood’s sweetheart,

to whom he had been engaged for many years. The young couple started

bravely in two rooms over a stable as their first home, and it is

doubtful if any young prince and princess have been more truly happy

than were these poor but true lovers in their humble nest in the

stable loft. Mrs. Beecher’s “Recollections of Henry Ward Beecher,”

written just before her death in 1897, furnishes a most delightful

description of these early days of privation and poverty, chills

and ague, but withal of such cheerfulness we almost envy them. Space

forbids that we dwell upon Beecher’s private life, interesting and

inspiring as it was. From Lawrenceburg he went to Indianapolis, where

he preached for eight years with great success and growing fame, until

August 24, 1847, when he was installed as pastor of Plymouth Church,

Brooklyn, New York.

From this point Beecher becomes a national figure, and until the

day of his death――a period of forty years――he was ever prominent in

the public eye. There was a time when the escutcheon of his moral

character was sullied by scandal,――but it was only scandal――which

he met boldly, his church standing by him, and before the most

scrutinizing investigation he remained steadfast, and in time the

world exonerated him――while his accuser fled to Paris, where he spent

his life in exile. Few people in the world now believe Beecher was

guilty of the charges Theodore Tilton brought against him.

Beecher early espoused the cause of the abolition of slavery and of

temperance. He considered both these doctrines a part of the gospel of

Christ, and preached them boldly from his pulpit. Thus Plymouth Church

rose grandly to the need of the age. Wendell Phillips, who in 1847

could find no audience room in New York or Brooklyn, was cordially

invited to Beecher’s church, and “from the day that Phillips made

his great anti-slavery speech from that pulpit until the Emancipation

Proclamation――nearly twenty years later――the Plymouth preacher became

a flaming advocate for liberty of speech and action on the question

of the national evil. If there was anything on earth to which he was

sensitive up to the day of his death, it was any form of denial to

liberty either in politics, religion, or literature.” With pen and

voice he ceased not to labor until the shackles fell from the black

man’s hands.

A number of slaves were sold from Plymouth pulpit, purchased by public

contributions and given their liberty, Mr. Beecher himself acting as

auctioneer. The dramatic scenes on such occasions have been vividly

recounted in Mrs. Beecher’s “Recollections,” and some of Mr. Beecher’s

auction speeches have been preserved.

When Fort Sumter’s guns announced the beginning of war, Beecher sent

back the echo from Plymouth pulpit in no uncertain sounds. His church

organized and equipped a regiment which he was pleased to call “My

own boys.” Mr. Beecher was in such constant demand as a public speaker

that early in 1862 his voice failed and his health gave way, and he

went to Europe and traveled in France and Switzerland. On invitation,

after regaining his health, he went to England, where he delivered

speeches――though England was in sympathy with the South――at Manchester,

Glasgow, London and Edinburgh. The opposition which he met in these

efforts would have completely overcome a man of less rugged physique,

or discouraged one of less imperious will. But Beecher――confident

in his own mind that he was right and his soul afire with

patriotism――faced, spoke to, and quieted the most vicious and howling

mobs into which he went often at personal peril. He describes his

experiences as being “like driving a team of runaway horses and making

love to a lady at the same time.”

After the war was over, Beecher preached as earnestly for forgiveness

and reconciliation toward the South as he had preached to abolish

slavery and retain the Southern States in the Union. His actions

throughout had been purely patriotic and from no hatred of the

people whose institution of slavery he fought. These principles made

him unpopular for a time at the North and even in his own church.

But he was ever the champion of the right, and did much toward the

restoration of harmony between the sections. He delivered the oration

at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1865, when the flag of the Union was

again raised over Fort Sumter, and in 1879 made a tour of the Southern

States, delivering lectures on popular topics, one of which was

entitled “The Reign of the Common People.”

Henry Ward Beecher died March 8, 1887. He retired on the evening of

March 3d apparently in usual health and fell into a sleep from which

he never awoke, but merged into an unconscious condition in which he

lingered until the morning of March 8th, when it is said as “a ray of

sunlight flashed full and strong into the room and fell upon the face

of the sufferer, who was surrounded by his family, calmly and without

a struggle the regular breathing ceased and the great preacher was

gone.” The eloquent tongue was silent forever.

The remains of Beecher were viewed by thousands, and many came who

could not see the bier for the crowds that thronged the house and

streets. It is doubtful if any private citizen’s funeral was ever so

largely attended. One of his admirers in writing of the occasion said:

“He loved the multitude, and the multitude came to his funeral; he

loved the flowers, and ten thousand buds breathed their fragrance and

clad his resting-place in beauty; he loved music, and the voice of

the organ rose, and the anthems which had delighted him again rolled

their harmonies to the rafters; he loved the sunshine, and it streamed

through the windows and was a halo around him.”

Within the beauty of this halo we would leave the memory of this great

man, hung as a portrait in a frame of gold from which his benign and

cheerful face shall continue to look down upon succeeding generations.

And as we read his encouraging “Lectures to Young Men;” his broad

and profound sermons from “Plymouth Pulpit;” his inspiring “Patriotic

Addresses;” his editorials in the “Christian Union;” his “Yale

Lectures on Preaching;” his “Star Papers;” his “Evolution and

Religion;” his novel “Norwood,” or his “Life of Jesus Christ: Earlier

Scenes,” on which he was engaged when he died (which are his chief

contributions to literature), we will often look up at the picture and

exclaim, “Oh! that those lips might speak again!”

* * * * *

PUBLIC DISHONESTY.

A CORRUPT public sentiment produces dishonesty. A public sentiment in

which dishonesty is not disgraceful; in which bad men are respectable,

are trusted, are honored, are exalted, is a curse to the young. The

fever of speculation, the universal derangement of business, the

growing laxness of morals is, to an alarming extent, introducing such

a state of things.

If the shocking stupidity of the public mind to atrocious dishonesties

is not aroused; if good men do not bestir themselves to drag the

young from this foul sorcery; if the relaxed bands of honesty are not

tightened, and conscience tutored to a severer morality, our night

is at hand――our midnight not far off. Woe to that guilty people who

sit down upon broken laws, and wealth saved by injustice! Woe to a

generation fed by the bread of fraud, whose children’s inheritance

shall be a perpetual memento of their father’s unrighteousness; to

whom dishonesty shall be made pleasant by association with the revered

memories of father, brother and friend!

But when a whole people, united by a common disregard of justice,

conspire to defraud public creditors, and States vie with States in an

infamous repudiation of just debts, by open or sinister methods; and

nations exert their sovereignty to protect and dignify the knavery of

the commonwealth, then the confusion of domestic affairs has bred a

fiend before whose flight honor fades away, and under whose feet the

sanctity of truth and the religion of solemn compacts are stamped down

and ground into the dirt. Need we ask the cause of growing dishonesty

among the young, the increasing untrustworthiness of all agents, when

States are seen clothed with the panoply of dishonesty, and nations

put on fraud for their garments?

Absconding agents, swindling schemes, and defalcations, occurring in

such melancholy abundance, have at length ceased to be wonders, and

rank with the common accidents of fire and flood. The budget of each

week is incomplete without its mob and runaway cashier――its duel and

defaulter, and as waves which roll to the shore are lost in those

which follow on, so the villainies of each week obliterate the record

of the last.

Men of notorious immorality, whose dishonesty is flagrant, whose

private habits would disgrace the ditch, are powerful and popular. I

have seen a man stained with every sin, except those which required

courage; into whose head I do not think a pure thought has entered

for forty years; in whose heart an honorable feeling would droop for

very loneliness; in evil, he was ripe and rotten; hoary and depraved

in deed, in word, in his present life and in all his past; evil when

by himself, and viler among men; corrupting to the young; to domestic

fidelity, recreant; to common honor, a traitor; to honesty, an outlaw;

to religion, a hypocrite――base in all that is worthy of man and

accomplished in whatever is disgraceful, and yet this wretch could

go where he would――enter good men’s dwellings and purloin their votes.

Men would curse him, yet obey him; hate him, and assist him; warn

their sons against him, and lead them to the polls for him. A public

sentiment which produces ♦ignominious knaves cannot breed honest men.

♦ ‘ignominous’ replaced with ‘ignominious’

We have not yet emerged from a period in which debts were insecure;

the debtor legally protected against the rights of the creditor; taxes

laid, not by the requirements of justice, but for political effect,

and lowered to a dishonest inefficiency, and when thus diminished,

not collected; the citizens resisting their own officers; officers

resigning at the bidding of the electors; the laws of property

paralyzed; bankrupt laws built up, and stay-laws unconstitutionally

enacted, upon which the courts look with aversion, yet fear to

deny them lest the wildness of popular opinion should roll back

disdainfully upon the bench to despoil its dignity and prostrate its

power. General suffering has made us tolerant of general dishonesty,

and the gloom of our commercial disaster threatens to become the pall

of our morals.

* * * * *

EULOGY ON GENERAL GRANT.