The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Vol. LXXXV, No. 2, December, 1912, by Various

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ONE Saturday morning in October the head-workers and some of the teachers of the Settlement School on Perilous were unpacking barrels and boxes on the front porch of the “big house,” a wagon having come in from the railroad the previous day. Christine Potter, the newest and youngest teacher, looked up from a box of books to see an odd procession approaching along the road. A yellow mare, bearing a small woman with an infant in arms, and a tiny child behind, was followed by a half-grown mule colt, on which rode three little girls, while a small yellow colt trotted sedately in the rear. At the school gate the party halted. The yellow colt flung his four legs in as many directions and began to frisk about his mother; the riders dismounted and came up the walk.

The woman came straight to the heads, her eager face beaming under the black sunbonnet, inevitable badge of the married woman.

“Don’t you know me?” she inquired—“little Anne Goodloe that was, from the head of Clinch? Don’t you mind the summer, ten year’ gone, you sot up a tent over there, and I holp you with the singing and gatherings?”

Yes, indeed, the heads remembered, and gave Anne a hearty welcome, asking a volley of questions about her family. But these she cut short.

“Women,” she said, “all that will keep. Let me first get off my mind what I come for. Before I lose another minute I crave to enter these young uns of mine on the highroad to l’arning in this here fine school. I have heared you write ’em down in a book, and take as they come; and many’s the time I have woke with a nightmare, dreaming my offsprings was writ down too late to get a show. I want you to put ’em down immediate’. Phœbe, Ellen, Minervy, Lukeanna, stand forth!”

The four small girls drew up in line before[Pg 164] their mother, their blue sunbonnets forming an exact stairway.

“Six, four and a half, three, and going on two is their ages,” continued Anne, “and my man-child here, too—John Jeems, four month’,—don’t pass over him.”

“I allowed it would take your breath to hear that John Goodloe’s daughter had married Jeems Talbert’s son,” Anne said, smiling.

“When we were over on Clinch the Goodloes and Talberts were mortal enemies. There was constant trouble between them, and not a Talbert would ever come inside our tent simply because it was on Goodloe land.”

“Yes,” said Anne; “forty year’ they have been at war—ever since Paw and Jeems fell out over a gal, and shot each other all up.”

Christine had gathered the sunbonnets, and placed a chair for Anne, who now sat down, smoothed and recoiled her abundant yellow hair, and proceeded to give her man-child his dinner, the little girls ranging themselves silently on a bench, still in step formation, and gazing about them with big eyes and bobbing pigtails.

“There was some little shooting going on when we were there,” continued the heads, “and five years previous the two eldest sons had killed each other in an engagement.”

“Yes,” replied Anne; “that was a mighty sorry time when the boys on both sides got sizable enough to take up their paps’ war—a sorry time it was for both Goodloes and Talberts.” She sighed deeply.

“No, they hain’t never made peace; but there never was no war betwixt me and Luke. We was the youngest on both sides, and I allus did think Luke was the prettiest boy that ever rid a nag. When we would be out hunting the cows, I never regretted when I met up with him, though of course we wouldn’t speak or let on to[Pg 165] see. But one day when we had passed in the road unseeing that a-way, we both turned back to look. Luke he blushed, and I laughed. ‘Goodloes hain’t pizen,’ I says. ‘Neither is Talberts,’ he says; and from that time we would stop and pass a few words when there wa’n’t nobody in sight. ’T wa’n’t long before I knowed he was the onliest boy I would ever marry, and him the same of me. Of course I never told nobody but granny, and she holp us off; she allus did contend that Goodloes and Talberts never ought to be nothing but friends, paw and Jeems having been raised like own brothers.

“Well, maybe you think there wa’n’t a general commotion when me and Luke run off. Paw and Jeems b’iled and raged scandalous, for men lamed and maimed up like them, and it looked like the war would be fit all over ag’in. Luke had took his logging money and bought a piece of ground from his paw right j’ining ours, and raised a house on it, so we had a roof over our heads; but nary a foot did a Goodloe or a Talbert set in it, or so much as look our way in passing, for over a year. But me and Luke we never seed no slights, and allus spoke civil and cheerful to all we met, and in time they begun to drap in, first one side and then t’other. Then when my young uns come along, paw he would sa’nter down now and then to see ’em, and finally Jeems he stumped up on his crutch a time or two, which pleased me a sight, and I had hopes of their meeting peaceable and maybe patching up the war, like granny says she knows they pine to in their hearts, now they are both widows, and getting along in years, and lonesome. But when my man-child come, what did I do but spile everything by naming him John Jeems, atter both; sence which I hain’t had a glimp’ of neither.

“But though the feeling keeps up, there hain’t been to say no active warfare betwixt paw and Jeems sence Luke and me married, and no bad shootings amongst the sons and sons-in-law, like there used to be at Christmas and election-time. Four year’ gone, a five-month district school started up two mile’ down Clinch from us, and both Goodloe and Talbert young uns has been a-going, and has got acquainted and friendly, which has sort of swaged down their payrents; so you might say the war is ended with everybody now but Jeems and paw.

“I been a-going to that district school myself sence it took up. From the time you women was over on Clinch I got me a big hankering for l’arning. Jeems Talbert had sont Luke away to school two term’, and when we was married, to see him read and write and figure, and me not able to tell a from izzard, went ag’in the grain terrible. No Goodloe don’t like to be outdone by a Talbert. So when the school started, though I were a’ old married woman of nineteen, I gathered up my young uns and lit in for l’arning, riding back and forth to school on Cindy and her mule colt. Luke he made cradles for the babes to lay in at school, and the scholars holp me mind ’em, and they never give a’ hour’s trouble. Minervy here she started on the road to knowledge at five days old,—time was precious, and I couldn’t stay away,—and now at three she knows all her a b c’s. And I am able to read and write and figure as good as Luke, and can read every word of that Testament you give me, and hain’t neglected my cooking or spinning or weaving neither.”

Having made sure that Anne would remain to dinner, the heads resumed their work, leaving Christine to entertain the guest. The interesting fact was soon established that the two were almost of an age, both being twenty-three, with birthdays in August.

“Just as good as twins,” exclaimed Anne, delightedly. Then she sighed, and looked wistfully at Christine’s girlish face. “But you that fair and tender you don’t look sixteen,” she said, “and me a’ old woman!” Later she asked, “When a woman don’t marry at fourteen or fifteen or anyhow sixteen, how does she put in her time? What is there for her to do?”

“Many girls put in their time as I did,” replied Christine. “After finishing school, I spent four years in college, then I traveled in Europe for a year, then my father said I knew little more than an infant about actual life, and ought to do some real work for a while to find out; so I came here, where I hope I am learning.”

When the dinner bell rang, Christine found great pleasure in taking Anne to the table and in watching her eager scrutiny of room, children, manners, service.

At two o’clock Anne announced that[Pg 167] she must depart, as it would be necessary to reach the half-way stop-over place, nine miles distant, by night.

“My young uns sets a nag uncommon’ well, from such constant practice going to school,” she said; “but I consider nine mile’ is about enough for ’em to travel in a day. And now,” she continued, flashing a smile at Christine, “being as we’re twins, I do hope you will use your endeavors to make me a visit before long. Seems like I have a mighty near feeling for you.”

“Would you like me to come over and have my Christmas tree at your house?” she asked. “Father has promised that I may have one.”

“I don’t rightly know what a Christmas tree is,” said Anne, “but I will be proud to have you any time or season.”

Christine explained that a Christmas tree is simply a small evergreen tree on which at Christmas time presents and candy are hung for the children.

“I should like to have the tree at your house, and invite all the children, and older people, too, in the neighborhood,” she said.

“I can answer for the young uns turning out if there’s pretties and rarities to see,” said Anne; “but the grown-ups is different. There hain’t nobody but Goodloes and Talberts on the head of Clinch, and I misdoubt if they’ll gather under one roof. But I’ll do my best, and give ’em all a’ invite.”

Letters passed between the two later, Anne sending the names and ages of the children of the neighborhood, Christine giving directions for making strings of popcorn and holly-berries for the adornment of the tree.

BEFORE day on Christmas morning, Christine, accompanied by Howard Cleves, a big boy from the school, set forth for the head of Clinch, the great “pokes” of Christmas things slung across the saddles standing out like panniers from the sides of the two nags. As they wound up the mountain-side above Perilous Creek, the whole east awoke and flushed with joy in memory of the day.

The eighteen miles were long and difficult and lonely; the mountains folded in and out, dazzling white where they caught the sunlight, deep blue in the shadows. Occasionally in a hollow or beside a frozen stream appeared a small log-house, tight-shut against the cold, the only sign of life or cheer the thin column of smoke rising straight from its chimney. Once or twice the travelers met parties of young men and boys riding with jugs and pistols, doing their utmost to celebrate the day, but always suddenly quiet at sight of Christine.

About half-past one they drew up before Luke Talbert’s house on Clinch, and Anne, Luke, and the four little girls gave Christine the warmest of welcomes. After being thawed and fed, she glanced about the two rooms of the house with some surprise and disappointment.

“Hain’t put the tree up?” she repeated. “Why, it’s already up—up and growing back here in the gyarden.” She led the way to the back porch. There, beyond the tall palings of riven oak, in the very center of the small, sloping garden, its delicate branches garlanded with snowy popcorn and scarlet berries, was a splendid young hemlock, apparently rejoicing in its vigor and beauty and in the sacred use to which it was being put.

“Yes, beautiful, the loveliest I ever saw,” answered Christine. “Usually people cut down the Christmas tree and set it up in the house; but how much more appropriate to have it living and growing!”

“It was such a pretty little tree I wouldn’t let Luke cut it when we cleared the land,” said Anne; “I told him I would plant my gyarden round it. Granny she allus liked it, too. She come down yesterday and holp me cap corn and string berries. She’s powerful keen to see the doings to-day, and aims to fetch paw along if she can.”

Two fires were already burning, one to the right, one to the left of the tree, and large piles of wood stood beside them in the snow. “Luke allowed the folks would freeze to death if we never fixed to warm ’em abundant’,” Anne explained.

Then Christine and Anne and Luke[Pg 168] and Howard set to work to fasten on Christmas bells, tinsel, bags of candy, dolls, and lighter gifts, climbing up on chairs when necessary. The oranges and heavier things were stacked below the tree. There was no need to take out the candles, with the glorious sunshine streaming all around.

“I warned the young uns not to show their faces before three,” said Anne, “but they are that wild I look for ’em any minute.” She had scarcely spoken the words before a dozen small excited faces peered through the palings. Picking up a stick of wood, Anne sallied forth. “Shoo, you feisty young uns, you!” she cried, “get along into that house there! Anybody that shows a face outside till called don’t get nary single pretty.”

Before she could return to the tree again, another crowd of children had collected at the palings, and the rout had to be repeated.

“And I see ’em a-coming as far as eye can reach,” she reported, “up Clinch and down Clinch, Talberts and Goodloes, both young and old. Of course I knowed the young would turn out, but the older ones wouldn’t make no promise, though I could see they was terrible curious to behold a Christmas tree. They’ll be mad as hops over being shut up that a-way; but they had no business to come so soon. And I hain’t aiming to take no chances on their raising a quarrel, neither: I’m locking Goodloes in one house and Talberts in t’ other, with the door fastened between.”

From this time Anne was busily occupied meeting visitors and diverting them to the two “houses” (rooms). Once a little old lady who had just dismounted from behind a gaunt, grizzled man dodged past Anne and ran into the garden. “I am just bound to see how it looks,” she said. “Oh, hain’t it a sight for cherubim!” She stood in an ecstasy of delight, hands clasped, withered little face shining within the quilted woolen sunbonnet, small body all alertness beneath the heavy homespun shawl.

“Now, Granny, you get right back in that house there with paw,” admonished Anne. “You have brung him thus far; but if he sees any Talberts, or gets wind of a whole passel being locked up in t’ other house, you know he’ll be off like a shot.”

“That’s p’int’ly true,” she admitted, hastening into the Goodloe room after her tall, stoop-shouldered son.

For a few minutes longer the sky seemed to rain Goodloes and Talberts. Both rooms must have been filled to bursting. Then, just as the tree was completed, and Anne was about to call out the guests, there was a last arrival. A heavy-set man, with a crutch under one arm, rode slowly into the yard, peering carefully about the house and over the palings as he came.

“My Lord! Luke, if there hain’t your paw!” cried Anne, breathlessly. “I made sure he wouldn’t come. Help him down and bring him right here, and don’t let on there’s any Goodloes in fifty mile’!” She placed a chair by the left-hand fire, and hither, on his crutch, Jeems Talbert was piloted, all the time gazing in fascination upon the tree.

The next instant garden gate and house doors were flung open, and the guests streamed out, young and old with eyes glued to the dazzling tree. Last of all came granny, her arm in that of her son, John Goodloe, whose one remaining eye was so intently fixed upon the tree that he had almost reached it before he saw his blood-enemy, Jeems Talbert, rise on his crutch not five feet distant, surprise and rage in his eyes. Both men stiffened and glared; the hand of each instinctively moved toward his hip-pocket; a gasp ran through the crowd. Granny’s cracked old voice rang out sharply:

“John, Jeems, hain’t you got no manners? Do you aim to spile the woman’s Christmas tree?”

The appeal to chivalry had its effect. Still glaring, the two enemies backed away, each to a fire.

The general uneasiness and apprehension abated somewhat when Christine stepped out in front of the tree, Anne’s Testament in her hand, and began to read, in her earnest, tender voice, the story of the first Christmas. As she proceeded, there was absolute silence. Not a person whispered, not a child stirred, not a baby winked. Faces became rapt, astonished, awed. The white, everlasting hills themselves appeared to hearken. “And Joseph also went up ... to Bethlehem ... to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife.... And she brought forth her firstborn[Pg 169] son, ... and laid him in a manger.... There were in this same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, ... and the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.... And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

Christine and Howard lifted up their voices in “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” then, beginning with the youngest,—there was one infant even newer than John Jeems, a Goodloe baby of three weeks,—Anne and Luke read off the names and handed out the gifts. To children who had not seen a store doll or toy before, the simple things were marvels indeed. For every girl, little or big, there was a doll; for every boy, a toy of some kind; every person received an orange and a tarleton bag of candy; every family a large Christmas-bell. And at the last, at Anne’s suggestion, the smaller bells and ornaments and tinsel were stripped from the tree, in order that no one should go away without a “pretty.” For granny there was a handsome Bible, none the less joyfully received that she could not read a word of it. But even as she clasped it, her eyes wandered to the dolls.

“Who would ever believe there was such pretty poppets in all this world!” she exclaimed, hearing which, Christine laid the prettiest poppet of all in her arms. At this, three or four other old ladies crowded about granny in such voluble delight that Christine was glad she had enough dolls left over to present to them.

Nor, in the general largess, was the “stranger within the gates” forgotten. The tree held for Christine a fine pair of mittens from granny, a most beautiful woven coverlet from Anne, and a rosy apple each from Phœbe, Ellen, Minervy, Lukeanna, and John Jeems.

The scene was indeed a happy one. Absorbed in the joy of their offspring, and in their own gratified love of the beautiful, Goodloes and Talberts mingled freely, and melted into friendliness and cordiality. John Goodloe and Jeems Talbert alone stood apart, each by his fire, eying gloomily his orange and poke of candy.

Suddenly granny, laying her “pretty poppet” in Christine’s arms, stepped forward in front of the tree and raised a hand for silence.

“Friends, Talberts and Goodloes,” she began, in a wavering old voice which took on strength as she proceeded, “we find ourselves gathered to-day in onlooked-for and, I may say, onpossible fashion, refreshing our mortal eyes with the sight of this here wonderly tree, and our immortal sperrits with the good tidings the fotch-on woman has just read us out of the Book. I never heared just that particular scripture read before, or if so I never kotch its full meaning. Of course I knowed Christ had come to earth ’way back yander in old, ancient days some time or ’nother; but I never heared tell of his coming to all men. From what the preachers said, I got the idee he just come for to snatch a few elect favor-rites out of the hell to which all the rest of us was predestinated, whether or no; and consequent’, I never tuck no great interest in him, or felt particular’ grateful. Even if I had had the assurance of being one of the elect myself, which I never, I still would have worried a sight over them which was bound to be lost, not seeing no justice, let alone mercy, in it.

“But now comes the woman, and reads out of the scripture that the angels theirselves laid down and declared that unto all men was borned a Saviour, that the tidings of joy was for all. Which, though it takes me by surprise, is the very best and most welcomest news that ever fell upon my years. Yes, glory to God! all men,—not only the elect, not only the upright, but the very low-downest and dog-meanest, the vilest and needingest and most predestinated, is all took in. Now that’s the kind of a Saviour my heart has allus called for; that’s the kind I have laid awake of nights longing to hear tell of; and now at last the news has come, ’pears like my bosom will bu’st with the joy I hain’t able to utter.

“And that hain’t the only good tidings we have heared this notable day. That selfsame angel, and a multitude more, sang together in that Christmas sky, ‘Peace on earth, good-will toward men.’ O[Pg 170] friends and chillens, words indeed fails me when I try to tell what powerful good news that is to me. For if ever a woman has craved peace and pursued it, if ever a woman has had her fill of bloodshed and warfare, and her heart tore and stobbed by violence and contention, I am that woman. Yes, for forty year’ I hain’t opened my eyes a single morning without fear of what the day might bring forth; my soul and body has been wore to a frazzle by anxiousness and tribulation. All you Talberts and Goodloes under the shadow of my voice know well what I mean, for all of you has staggered under the same burden. Yes, I’ll be bound there hain’t one here but has had his ’nough of war and strife, and is ready to welcome the good Christmas news to-day, and forgit whether he’s a Goodloe or a Talbert.

“Not a one, that is, but two. Surveying all around and about me, I don’t behold but two faces here that hain’t decked out, like the love-lie tree, with Christmas joy and peace. John Goodloe and Jeems Talbert is onliest humans in all this gathering that wears gloom and darkness on their countenance.

“John and Jeems, I am minded to speak out my full thought to you two boys here and now, if I die for it. I’m a-going to unbottle my mind and feelings, now I got you together, which God knows hain’t likely to happen ag’in. And I aim to speak to you, Jeems, just as free as to my son John, for the time was when you was every grain as dear to me as a son, and I never knowed no difference betwixt the two of you. Yes, when your pore young maw died at your birth, and you was left a leetle, pindling, motherless babe, not scarce able to cry, it was me, your nighest neighbor, that tuck you in and keered for you, that worked over you and prayed over you, tryin’ to keep life in your puny leetle body. Many’s the hour you and John have laid in my arms together, him a-sucking one breast and you t’other; and if the milk run short, he was the one that done without, being a week older and a sight stronger than you. And I would set, looking on you both, not able to tell which I loved the best. For him I had love, but for you both love and pity. Yes, I loved you pine-blank as good as John; I may say you was both my firstborns. And when your paw got him a new woman, it was with weeping and wailing and rebelling that I give you up; I reckon I’ll never git over the hurt of it. But even atter that, having fell into the hands of a step-maw, you was allus a-running back to me; my house was home to you; you knowed where to find understanding of your leetle troubles, sympathy for your hurts, and comfort for your stummick. I allow you hain’t forgot them batches of gingercake I used to keep cooked up for you and John?”

Jeems made no reply; but he swallowed perceptibly, and the hand on his crutch twitched nervously.

“You and John,” continued granny, “was allus together in your boy-time in all your pranks and antics; when I whupped one, I knowed it was safe to whup t’ other, and I done it glad’ and generous’, for your future profit. And as you begun, you kep’ on. In your teens, if one sneezed, t’ other kotch his breath. And finally when you got up to be tall, pretty boys, sprouting mustaches and dashing around on nags, you was just as onseparable, doing all your rambling and drinking and gallivanting together, even down to falling in love with the same gal. Yes, that ’ere pretty leetle jade, Nance Bolling, I can see her now,—these store-poppets reminds me pine-blank of her,—just as beautiful, just as empty-headed and hollow-hearted. Well, Nance she left nothing undone to agg you both on, and foment jealousy and hate in your hearts, and then, when she had you plumb beside yourselves, she sot you to fight it out. You fit it out, to that extent Jeems has gone through life on a crutch, and John with one eye and one lung; and while you was laid up with your wounds, Nance upped and run off with another boy, God help him! But did that restore you to your nateral senses and feelings? Did you rise up clothed in your right mind and ashamed of your conduct? Far from it! You riz up b’iling with rage, thirsting for blood, black in the face with that fierce hate which springs only from the root of love. You that had once lived closer than brothers, sot in to layway and ambush and kill, and to rid the earth of one another. You will both bear me out in saying it hain’t the fault of neither that t’ other draws the breath of life to-day.

“And even when you had both forgot Nance time out of mind, and tuck you[Pg 171] two of as nice women as the wind ever blowed on, you still cherished deadly hatred in your hearts, and handed it down to your innocent offsprings as they come along, so that as they growed up they holp you in your devilment, and there was war betwixt every man and boy that bore the name of Goodloe and Talbert, shootings every Christmas and election, and battles and ambushings at odd times, till I allow there hain’t a man here that hain’t got a lot of scars to show. And the worst come fifteen years gone, when your two oldest, as likely and handsome a pair as ever drawed breath, and with young wives and babes depending on them, fit the terriblest battle of all, and fell both with six bullets in ’em, stone-dead. Yes, having nothing ag’in’ each other, they died, a living sacrifice to the hatred in your hearts. Jeems, John, it was a costly price to pay. I seed John, and heared of Jeems, aging twenty-year’ in a week. The fight was right smart took out of both of you, though the pride wa’n’t; you continued to go about with hate in your eyes and guns in your pockets.

“John and Jeems, you know it’s the truth I’m a-laying down when I say it is pride, and naught but pride, that stands betwixt you now at this present time. You know well you hain’t neither of you forgot, or can forget, them fair early days when you was nigher than brothers, and never had a thought you couldn’t share, and that it is them very ricollections that has give’ such a keen edge to your hate. You know well that, being sixty year’ old now, and considable past your youth, and widows at that, with many of your acquaintance’ drapped off and gone, you would both injoy fine having a boyhood friend and brother to set by the fire and talk old times with. I know myself how lonesome it is to git old and outlive everybody.

“Jeems and John, the message comes to you this bright Christmas day straight from the tongue of angels, ‘Peace and good-will’; no more hate, no more pride, no more projeckin’ and devilment, but ‘Peace on earth, good-will toward men.’ I charge you both, boys, hearken to the words, put by your stubbornness, tromple on your pride; for Christ’s sake and your old mother’s, be j’ined together ag’in in brotherly love!”

The two grizzled, scarred men were staring across the intervening space now into each other’s eyes, fixedly, painfully, awfully, as though they saw ghosts. Suddenly the hand of Jeems dropped to his hip-pocket, he drew forth his revolver, and flung it far up on the mountain-side. John’s pistol rose almost simultaneously in the opposite direction. Then, with working faces, the two advanced and silently clasped hands.

Weeping and shouting, little granny caught the big men to the shrunken bosom from which they had once drawn life. Goodloes fell on the necks of Talberts; men embraced and wrung hands solemnly, women wept hysterically on one another’s shoulders, children cried, not knowing why; Anne and Luke shed happy tears on the face of little John Jeems between them.

After a long while granny released the two men from her clasp, held them at arms’-length a moment, looking at them hungrily and joyously, and then laid a hand on the arm of each.

“Come along home now, boys,” she said; “it’s a-gitting on late, and I allow you’ll both injoy a good batch of gingercake for supper.”

IF the generation now coming to the front in France is healthy and vigorous physically, mentally, and morally, and proud of its health and vigor, if it is confident, expectant, full of energy and will, impatient for action and fit to act, if it dares to be happy, if it will have none of the pessimism of Schopenhauer or of the nihilism of Renan; if it is, in a word, a generation of young young men, whereas the generation that preceded it was a generation of old young men, melancholy, morbid, dilettante, neurasthenic, and proud of its melancholia, morbidness, dilettantism, and neurasthenia,—and such is generally admitted to be the case,—certainly not the least of the numerous and varied influences that have combined to bring about this radical transformation is the inspiriting message of Henri Bergson.

In the early years of the twelfth century, at the base of the Tower of Clovis, on the summit of the Montagne Ste.-Geneviève in Paris, a scholar in the habit of a monk, Pierre Abélard, proclaimed under the open sky “the rights of the earth, the right of the reason to reason” in discourses which Michelet characterizes as “the veritable point of departure of the first Renaissance for France and for Europe.” The élite of the then civilized world—two popes, twenty cardinals, fifty bishops, “all the orders,” Romans, Germans, Englishmen, Italians, Spaniards, Flemings—flocked thither to listen to the great innovator. He was silenced by the dogmatists of the period, but he left behind him an idea which “became more and more the fixed idea of the Renaissance, namely, ‘wisdom is not wisdom if it confines itself to logic, if it does not add thereto erudition, all human knowledge.’”

Five hundred years later, on this same Montagne Ste.-Geneviève, René Descartes demolished scholasticism and founded modern psychology. Persecuted by the Sorbonne, as was nearly every other expounder of new doctrines at that time, he nevertheless created a veritable furor among the bluestockings of the magnificent court of Louis XIV. His “vortexes” and “fluted matter,” his “three elements” and his “innate metaphysical ideas,” were the small talk of the précieuses; snobbishness for the most part, of course, but it is one of the redeeming features of snobbishness that it sometimes bestows its plaudits and its patronage upon genuine merit.

At the present time the philosopher Henri Bergson is assailing, in his turn, another scholasticism—the scholasticism of science. At the Collège de France, the consummation and the coronation of the various schools of the Montagne Ste.-Geneviève, he is creating a flutter in the dove-cotes of bluestockingdom such as no pure philosopher has created there since the time of Descartes. Indeed, Bergson has become so fashionable that soon, as some one facetiously observed regarding Francis of Assisi after the appearance of Sabatier’s fascinating biography of that saint, “they will be wearing him upon bonnets,” another instance of snobbishness adoring actual achievement.

The biggest amphitheater the Collège de France can provide is quite too small for M. Bergson’s would-be auditors. Long before the lecture-hour, the seats and the steps of the aisles, which can be made to serve as seats, are preëmpted by patient waiters of both sexes, of varying ages, sorts, conditions, and all nationalities. The standing-room fills up rapidly also, while about the doors are enacted scenes vaguely reminiscent of those that occur daily at the City Hall terminal of the Brooklyn Bridge during the rush hours, in which the gentle, but not always mannerly,[Pg 173] sex does rather more than its share of pushing, tugging, elbowing, and treading upon toes, in virtue, no doubt, of its superior zeal for knowledge.

When the lecture begins, the sitters, and such of the standers as are lucky enough to have their arms free, scribble furiously in their note-books, the hapless strugglers at the doors and in the vestibule crane their necks in a futile attempt to catch a glimpse of the platform through the rifts in the monstrous feminine headgear now in fashion, and all alike, those who neither see, hear, nor comprehend, as well as those who do, promptly take on the rapt, superior expression of initiates—the expression that used to characterize the audiences at “Pelléas and Mélisande” when Debussyism was in its infancy.

The lecturer is short of stature, spare, an almost perfect ascetic type, somewhat, gray and slightly bald. He has slender hands, tapering fingers, a weasel-shaped head, heavy eyebrows, a close-cropped mustache grayer than the hair, and “liquid and profound eyes that suggest mysterious molten metals in the stars.” He is correctly, even fastidiously, but not foppishly, dressed. He speaks slowly and distinctly, but easily, with engaging indifference to his notes and without any effort at oratory, his nearest approaches to gestures being abruptly arrested semispasmodic workings of the hands, periodical inclinations of the head, and an occasional deepening and darkening of the eyes. It is as though sheer intellect, abstract intellect, were endowed with the power of speech. There is not the slightest trace in M. Bergson’s manner of the overweening vanity that too often mars the public appearances of world celebrities, nor is there a scrap of the unlovely pedantry and arid officialism against the prevalence of which at the Sorbonne a considerable portion of cultivated France recently rose in revolt. On the contrary, he is constantly referred to in university circles as “the lark,” partly perhaps because he offers a certain physical resemblance to that ungarish creature; but mainly because there is a touch of lyricism in all his utterances, even his most trenchant analyses. He presents his views progressively and with a modest tentativeness which makes his auditors feel that they are assisting at the birth of a system rather than listening to the exposition of a perfected one. They seem to see the lecturer suffer and create, as the symbolical pelican of ecclesiastical tradition pierces her flank for the wherewithal to feed her young. Indeed, the regular attendants follow the stages of the creative process as eagerly and impatiently as though they were the instalments of an absorbing novel.

How far Henri Bergson’s extraordinary vogue is due to the substance and how far to the form of his thought is not easy to determine, since either alone amply suffices to account for it. His philosophy is a rehabilitation, to employ untechnical language, of God and the soul. It is a reconciliation “in a harmony felt by the heart of terms irreconcilable, perhaps, by the intellect,” of science and metaphysics with religion, of knowledge with life, of law with conduct, of liberty with authority, of the ideals of the Occident with the ideals of the Orient, of the present with the past and with the future. According to M. Bergson, the universe, which is incessant mobility, perpetual, continuous flux, is acquiring a constantly swelling volume of free creative activity, and the inner life of each and every person in the universe is absolutely original. “Life is really creation. It is not a fabrication determined by the idea of an end to be realized; it is an impetus, an initiative, an effort to make matter produce something which it would not produce of itself.” We know reality by living it. We may act freely, and in so acting we experience creation.

M. Bergson’s philosophy is a vindication of intuition, the faculty upon which the poets, the Shelleys and the Keatses, the Villons and the Verlaines, have always depended for their knowledge of themselves, of the universe, and of their relations to the universe. We who are not poets are the deluded victims, says M. Bergson in effect, of our reasoning faculty, which is constantly playing hob with us. We should submit to the authority of intuition, for to do a thing without reason, even against reason, may in certain cases be to act from the best of reasons. This does not mean that reason should be despised or discarded, as some of the philosopher’s overzealous followers are prone to proclaim,—even the great poet must resort to it in expressing the conceptions[Pg 174] his intuition gives him,—but rather that reason is a highly useful subordinate of intuition, bearing much the same relation thereto that the housemaid bears to the housewife, the mason or carpenter to the architect, the private soldier to the strategist. In short, M. Bergson’s attitude toward reason is essentially that of the immortal seers. It recalls Pascal’s “The heart has its reasons which reason knoweth not,” Joubert’s “It is easy to know God if you do not attempt to define Him,” Emerson’s “With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do,” and Browning’s “Others may reason and welcome, ’t is we musicians know.”

Our William James pronounced every page of Henri Bergson to be “like the breath of morning and the song of birds.” M. Bergson’s style, though delightfully free from affectation, is not so simple and direct as these comparisons imply. They suggest admirably its freshness, melodiousness, graciousness, and grace, but they fail to suggest the exquisite subtlety which is its most distinctive trait. They may be given a fair approach to adequacy, however, by substituting for “the morning,” a morning of luminous haze such as Corot loved to paint, and for “the song of birds,” the cuckoo’s “wandering voice.” As soft, tenuous, filmy, fluid as mist or wreathing smoke, it is as precise, not to say geometrical, in design as the spider’s gossamer web, and is equally iridescent. The critic who characterized it as Arachnean, therefore, was most happily inspired, though his purpose in doing so was, if I remember right, to hold it up to derision. No living writer, not even Maurice Maeterlinck, surpasses Henri Bergson in evoking, in projecting, in visualizing, so to speak, those subconscious activities of the soul which are commonly esteemed unanalyzable and, great poetry, possibly, apart, unutterable. He “forces language to express things for which language was not intended.” With impalpable pigments and ghostly brushes he paints upon imaginary canvases veritable landscapes of the soul. We do not go to pure philosophers for esthetic sensations,—no one ever frequented Kant, for instance, for his style,—and in general we enjoy or do not enjoy them according as they do or do not succeed in convincing us. Henri Bergson is a striking exception to this rule. We read[Pg 175] Bergson, as we read Plato, out of sheer infatuation with his verbal artistry, and we should continue to read him ecstatically if he should undertake to prove that the moon was made of green cheese.

Such as he is in the lecture-room, such as he is in his books, unassuming, unpedantic, gracious, well-poised, subtle, tactful, alert, resourceful, stimulating, such Henri Bergson is in his every-day existence. In his case, and to an unusual degree, the style is the man. An easy talker, ever ready to speak freely upon all subjects,—his personal affairs, work, and politics excepted,—he nevertheless goes little into society, not because he dislikes social functions, but because he cannot contrive to make the necessary leisure. He resides about midway between the Seine and the Bois de Boulogne, in an umbrageous and incredibly tranquil corner of the Auteuil quarter, where he is well nigh as secure from the hustle and bustle of Paris as he would be in a provincial village; and he spends his summers in Switzerland at St.-Cergue, almost ten miles from the nearest railway station, in a modest two-story villa, surrounded by meadows and evergreen woods, the front windows and veranda of which afford ravishing views of Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc. Winter and summer alike, six in the morning finds him installed at his desk, and from that moment until he retires for the night he allows himself virtually no respite save that which is afforded by an occasional varying of occupations.

Though so little of a Parisian in the sense in which the word is currently employed, M. Bergson is one of the relatively few famous Frenchmen who possess a clear title to that distinction. He was born in Paris on the eighteenth of October, 1859. From nine to eighteen he attended as a day student the Lycée Condorcet (then Lycée Bonaparte), in the Opéra quarter, an institution founded in 1803 under the consulship of the First Napoleon, which numbers among its illustrious alumni Dumas fils, De Banville, the Goncourts, Eugène Sue, and Hippolyte Taine. Less precocious than Pascal, who at sixteen wrote a treatise on conic sections that excited the admiration of Descartes, and who is said to have rediscovered at twelve the first propositions of Euclid, young Bergson was nevertheless sufficiently[Pg 176] advanced at eighteen to produce in the concours général of the Paris lycées a mathematical solution which was accorded the unusual honor of being published in full in the “Annales Mathématiques,” and which, if I mistake not, exempted him from the obligation of military service. From the Lycée Condorcet he went to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, matriculating in the section of letters, which he had chosen over the section of sciences after not a little hesitation and misgiving, for he was at that time an ardent disciple of Herbert Spencer and[Pg 177] dreamed of perfecting Spencerianism. While at the Ecole Normale he came under the joint influence of Félix Ravaisson, harmonizer of the Greek spirituality of the intelligence and the Christian spirituality of the will and of the heart, and Emile Boutroux, author of a memorable assault upon the then dominant determinism entitled “De la contingence des lois de la nature,” and now President of the Institut de France, who speedily freed him from his Spencerian obsession and turned him in the direction he has since followed. Obliged, after his graduation from the Ecole Normale to submit, like the majority of its graduates, to a period of banishment from Paris, he taught philosophy for two years at the Lycée of Angers, in the province of Anjou, and for five years at the Lycée of Clermont-Ferrand, in the province of Auvergne. During his stay at Clermont, he delivered a number of lectures in the university of that city, and wrote the work “L’essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience,” which revealed him as an original thinker and as a redoubtable antagonist of determinism. At Clermont he also mapped out his life-work (studies, researches, and publications), calculating carefully the time to be allotted to each subject, and thus far he has not only succeeded in executing his program to the letter, but he has been able to permit himself such interludes as a course of lectures on Plotinus, his essay on laughter, a lecturing sojourn at Oxford, and the projected visit to the United States.

His “stage” in the provinces over, he taught first in the Collège Rollin and then in the Lycée Henri IV, located upon the very spot where Abélard held his open-air classes. While connected with the latter institution, he published “Matière et mémoire,” and it is thanks, no doubt, to the sensation this work created in the university world that he was called in 1897 to an assistant professorship in the Ecole Normale, and, in 1900, to his present professorship at the Collège de France.

Teaching, for Henri Bergson, is not a makeshift, but a veritable sacrament. His former pupils are virtually unanimous in[Pg 178] testifying to his conscientiousness and zeal, as well as to his magnetic qualities as a teacher. Not a few of them, become teachers in their turn, call upon him often for counsel and guidance, which he invariably bestows gladly, however preoccupied and harassed by his formidable undertakings he may be at the time. And this is not the least of the reasons why a goodly proportion of the younger professors of philosophy in the French lycées and collèges of France proclaim themselves Bergsonians. Furthermore, the young men who have attended his classes or his lectures or who have come under the less direct, but only a shade less potent, spell of his writings, seem to be possessed with a passion for “living things”—for “doing things,” we would say in America—as distinguished from analyzing things.

Bergson has been hailed as “the inaugurator of a new era in philosophy,” “the foremost thinker of France,” “the most original and significant figure in the philosophical field of Europe,” “the sole philosopher of the first rank France has had since Descartes and Europe since Kant,” “the restorer of psychology,” “the modern Heraclitus,” “the Darwin or the Newton of philosophy,” “the Wells of philosophy, adventurous inventor of a new machine for exploring the world.” And his system has been characterized as “a new principle for the integral renovation of philosophy,” “the matrix of all future systems,” “the ruin of Marxism,” “the annihilation of materialism.”

Whether all of these appraisals be just or none of them be just, whether Bergsonism be sound or unsound, enduring or ephemeral, time, the supreme winnower, will of course determine. In the meanwhile it is perfectly safe to affirm that Bergson is a peculiarly fine and rich personality, an admirable example of the consecrated scholar, a consummate literary artist, a genuine prose poet, a keen psychologist, an observer of life, and one of the most suggestive and stimulating of contemporaneous thinkers; and this, even though his philosophy may ultimately share the fate of the greatest of its predecessors, is enough to make the glory of one man.

[1] Professor Bergson is about to visit the United States, and will deliver a series of lectures at Columbia University in January.

[2] The Christmas chimes, so called from the confection of that season.

LIZETTE AMBOISE sat beside the window making lace. The lovely line of her profile caught the light; the clear white of cap and kerchief enriched the olive of her skin. Seen thus from within the room, she was so beautiful that the old eyes of Pierre’s mother brightened as they looked at her.

Pierre himself was working in the woolen mills at Lisieux. Soon after he went his house had caught fire, and Lizette, rushing through the flames, had led his mother out to safety. Since then the old woman had remembered only in flashes.

So there she sat in Lizette’s cottage, her eyes brightening as they rested on the girl. But all at once they clouded; she had remembered.

“If it was as it used to be,” she broke out in a quavering voice, “you might be restored for Pierre’s coming home.”

The girl looked quickly away. The rich olive of her cheek had faded to a dead pallor; her hands lay idle in her lap. “For him to come back to see that!” She used to rejoice in Pierre’s love of beauty. He was different from the other young men of the village, who cared more for a woman’s strength than for her face, and who looked always at the earth they tilled and never at the sky. Pierre could be keen and shrewd as any other Norman peasant; but Lizette knew his dreams, his delight in beauty, the thoughts he hid from his neighbors.

“Perhaps I can serve you as well making my lace as though I were strong to work in the fields.”

“It is not your service I want, my Lizette. I want only to have you near me, to be able to look into your face.”

The words had pleased her when he spoke them; now they stabbed her to the heart. And so did these lines of the letter Pierre had written after he heard from the curé about the burning of his house, and how Lizette had saved his mother: “My beautiful, brave Lizette! How shall I wait to see you! Your face is always before me.”

“Mère Bernay,”—Lizette had turned again to the old woman,—“listen to me, Mère Bernay. What did you mean when you said I could be restored for Pierre’s return if it was as it used to be?”

“By a miracle of Little Noël. You would make the nine-days’ prayer before Christmas mass. Many are the cures were made so at our church in the old days. But that was long ago; they are made no more.”

The miracles of Little Noël! Lizette had heard of them ever since she was a child, but they had seemed merely a tradition. Suppose—her eyes widened and she drew her breath in quickly.

If the miracles had ceased, it must be because the faith of the people had died. Had not the curé often bewailed the worldliness of the times, the love of pleasure that had replaced piety? If she had faith, if she prayed with her whole heart,[Pg 183] it might be that a miracle of Little Noël would be wrought even now for her!

It was only two weeks before Christmas. Soon she could begin the nine days of special fasting and prayer; and there was time before that for preparation. Lizette rose, took down her long cloak, bent over Pierre’s mother, kissed her withered cheeks, and then went out into the golden light of the sunset.

She pulled the hood of her cloak far over her face, and walked rapidly. She saw no one until Mère Fouchard came to her door, calling shrilly to the little Henri. Mère Fouchard stopped shrilling when she saw Lizette.

“How the girl keeps the hood over her face!” she said to herself. And then, “Does she think she can hide it thus from Pierre Bernay when he comes back!”

She called a greeting, hoping Lizette would turn; but she was disappointed. The girl answered without looking around.

The church was in the middle of the wood in which the village was built. In Normandy these little villages try to hide themselves among the trees; but the gleam of their white-walled cottages betrays them.

When Lizette reached the church, twilight was gathering, and the branches of the trees wove delicate traceries against a sky of pale amethyst and rose. The old stone church, with its square tower, made a picture amid that setting which Lizette was quick to note. Pierre had taught her to see such things.

But she noted also, and with a sorrow she had never felt before, the dilapidated condition of the church. In the days when the miracles of Little Noël made the village famous, it had been different. Then, as Lizette knew, not a crumbling bit of mortar had gone untended or a candlestick unpolished. And the women of the village had woven finest cloth for the altars, and bordered them with lace of their own making. Lizette resolved that she would begin such an altar-cloth on the morrow.

Now she pushed the door open and looked shrinkingly about. There was only stillness and peace within, and the Virgin with the Child in her arms. It seemed she was waiting for Lizette. With a little sob, swept by a wave of emotion that laid bare all her heart, the girl went forward and fell on her knees, throwing back the hood from her head.

Her face was now revealed, as though for the pitiful eyes of the Virgin to see. On one side it was the beautiful face Pierre Bernay hungered for day and night: on the other it was furrowed across by the crimson scars the fire had made.

The starry eyes, upraised, overflowed with tears; the lips quivered in their supplications: “Grant to me faith, that a miracle of Little Noël may be wrought upon me! Have pity upon me and restore me for Pierre’s return!”

How often she had pictured that return—the leap of her lover’s eyes to her face, their horrified turning away; for she had begged the curé to write no hint of her disfigurement. She would have no pretense, she who had throbbed and glowed under the long caress of Pierre’s gaze. If he could not bear to look upon her, she must know it. It would be better than finding out little by little. If it should be as she feared, she would go away. She had a cousin who worked on a farm in the rich country to the east. Perhaps she could find the place; it did not much matter.

Suddenly Lizette realized that these thoughts were intruding themselves upon her devotions; that fear and foreboding were driving out the faith she longed for. She began to pray again, and little by little her heart grew still within her. It was as though a light broke softly and grew; there was no room left for fear.

In the church, meantime, the dusk had been gathering. Lizette, when she rose to her feet, could just see the face of the Child. It was in honor of his birthday the cures had been made; for the sake of the little Jesus, who had come to heal the sicknesses and sorrows of all the world.

For some minutes Lizette stood there. Then she remembered the Mère Bernay, sitting all alone, with the fire dying on the hearth; and she hurried away. But the crushing weight was gone from her heart. She walked with light steps, and looked up at the stars, which were beginning to come out in the sky.

Every day now Lizette prayed in the church, but no one who saw her pass guessed at what was in her heart. It may be, however, that Pierre’s mother knew;[Pg 184] she knew many things that no one ever told her. Sometimes when Lizette came in with that light on her face the old woman would look at her with eyes which seemed to understand.

When the time came for her to make the nine-days’ prayer, Lizette went to her devotions both morning and evening, and so absorbed was she that the fire often died on the hearth, and Pierre’s mother shivered as she sat beside it. But it was on the last day of her waiting that the girl knelt longest in the little church. When she came again it would be for the midnight mass; she hardly dared to think further than that. The old fear seemed to be hovering near, threatening to seize her. She sought shelter from it in her prayers: she even tried to forget a certain resolve she had made, lest it argue lack of faith. This resolve was that Pierre’s eyes should be the first to rest upon her after the midnight mass. She would neither look in her glass nor touch her face with her fingers. His eyes, and his alone, should tell her whether the miracle had been performed.

Pierre had written again, saying that he would come early on Christmas morning. In a few hours he would be on his way, walking from Lisieux to a little inn where he slept. But long before dawn he would start again, and be with her soon after the sun was up. She was glad that Mère Bernay lay in bed until late. She wished to watch for Pierre alone.

That evening she told the old woman that they would eat the réveillon before mass. “You would be too weary if you waited for my return,” she said; but the true reason lay in her resolve that Pierre should be the first to see her face after the midnight mass.

The réveillon may be spread either before or after that mass. Lizette brought out the roasted chestnuts soaked in wine and the little cakes. Her heart was suddenly light and gay. She made Mère Bernay put her shoes on the hearth, ready for gifts; then Lizette put one of her own beside them, and next to that she put the other of the pair for her lover.

The gifts were in readiness; the cottage wore a festive air. Branches of laurel and pine were fastened over the fireplace, and the vessels of copper and brass twinkled in the light of the yule log. Père Fouchard had brought the log in that morning. He was as kind as his wife was shrewish.

When the feast was eaten and Pierre’s mother was in bed, Lizette made herself ready to go to the church. With greater care than ever she hid her face in the hood of her cloak; then she lighted her lantern and stepped out into a white mist, which seemed to open to receive her. The frosty road crackled beneath her feet, and the branches of the trees waved ghostly arms on each side.

The mist was like a delicate veil, entwining everything. Lizette knew that the little procession of village folk had already passed on its way to the church. She had heard them singing a few minutes before as they went; but she had not wished to join them.

Now that she was on her way, she realized that her gaiety had deserted her, that she felt frightened. But she must not be frightened; she must have faith. It was faith that would make the miracle possible.

So Lizette came to the church after the others, and slipped into a dim corner. Nevertheless, several saw her and peered curiously. Among these was Mère Fouchard. Like all the rest, she had heard that Pierre Bernay returned on the morrow.

Lizette scarcely heard the hymns or the sermon. She sat like one tranced, waiting. Her rosary slipped through her fingers, and her pale lips moved. She tried to think of the words of the prayers, and she tried not to see Pierre’s eyes as they leaped to her face. Beyond her meeting with Pierre everything was a blank.

The mass was over, and Lizette was on her way home. The others had lingered to sing the Christmas carols and to exchange greetings; but Lizette had slipped out quickly, and went alone through the fog. She held her cloak tight about her with both hands. At first it had been all she could do not to touch her face, but that temptation had passed. She did not even think of it; she knew she would wait for Pierre’s coming.

But the reaction after the long strain had set in. She felt a great weariness; she would have liked to creep away into the wood and cry like a little child. But she stumbled on through the fog, came to the cottage, and lay down on her bed.

Then it was morning, and the mist was lifting and drifting away. It drifted away in trailing veils, clinging to everything it passed. But Lizette looked at the mist only a few moments; she had to make herself ready for Pierre’s coming.

She watched for him from the window where she sat when she made her lace, and the mist rose as though to let her see as far down the road as possible. She could not have said whether she believed herself healed. There was a sort of blankness in her head. Yet she knew she was suffering supreme suspense. Now and again the anguish of it pierced through the blankness; but it was only for a moment, or she could not have borne it.

Then a figure came into sight at the farthest point of the road she could see. She rose instantly; she knew it was Pierre. His tall figure, his eager gait—how often she had seen him coming thus to the cottage! But now her heart seemed to stop, and she felt she would never get to the door; never put on her cloak, and pull her hood over her head. She held the hood tight about her face as she went.

When Pierre saw her coming he stood perfectly still, his head lifted up. It was as though his very longing, the piercing delight of her nearness, had fixed him there. And Lizette, her knees trembling beneath her, went on toward him. Then stopping suddenly, she lifted her hands and threw back the hood from her face.

Ah, the leap of Pierre’s eyes! But before Lizette’s there came a swimming blackness; the earth seemed to rise up and the trees to rush past her. She tried to speak, she tried to see; then the deadly struggling ceased.

She found herself in Pierre’s arms. His eyes were on her face. Their love enveloped her and drew her close—closer than ever before. It was like something in which she lost herself. She lay still, looking up at him.

“Lizette,” he whispered brokenly. He put his face down against hers. “My brave, beautiful Lizette!”

Pierre paid no heed. He seemed not to care about her meaning; he cared only for her. Raising her to her feet, he supported her with his arm. He gazed in her face as though his hunger for it could never be appeased; and at last he put one hand beneath her chin and turned her head gently to one side.

“This is the Lizette I left,” he said—“the Lizette whose beautiful face made me forget her soul. I loved her as a man loves a woman when both are young.”

He stopped, and then he turned Lizette’s face so that his eyes rested upon the side which had been burned.

“And this—” He broke off; when he could speak again, his voice had a hushed, exquisite note—“and this,” he said, “is the Lizette I never knew. It is the wonderful, beautiful soul of Lizette. When we are old and our bodies have changed, still I shall always see your brave, tender, beautiful soul.”

But Lizette, with a low cry, had pushed him from her. She put a hand to her face.

Pierre seized her hands in his. He drew her to him, kissing the scars again and again.

“My Lizette,” he whispered, “I did not know before what love was—this love of soul and body!”

THE IMPEACHMENT OF ANDREW JOHNSON

No period of our history better repays perusal by thoughtful readers and good citizens than the political happenings of the three years following the Civil War, culminating in the attempt to “recall” President Johnson. But the subject is so vast that no magazine article can more than suggest its outlines, or sketch the personalities involved in the first efforts to reëstablish civil order in the South.

Probably no actor in that series of passionate events could write of them without some bias; nor would any picture be quite true without the perspective due to individual experience.

Considered in the large, the long fight between Congress and President Johnson must be regarded as a wrestling of political forces, a struggle for major influence in reconstruction, between the executive and legislative branches of the Government.

In the Civil War the Democratic party, which for many years had been dominated by the slave-holding interests of the South, had been dethroned by the new Republican party, which, however, could not have achieved its purpose to save the Union and abolish slavery without the aid of the large body of War Democrats who had been rallied to the support of Lincoln by his defeated rival, Senator Douglas.

At the end of the war, the Republican party was dominated by its Radical wing, whose extreme aims were almost as offensive to the War Democrats as to their old allies of the South; and the latter were not slow to grasp at the political advantage of a reunion which promised Democratic control of the National Government.

A fourth great factor in the war had been the Union men of the South, formerly Democrats, of whom Andrew Johnson had been the forceful leader. It was this prominence which dictated his nomination for Vice-President in 1864. When, at the close of the war, by the assassination of Lincoln he became President, his utterances gave the Republicans hope that as a convert his zeal would equal if not exceed that of the Radicals in their purpose to subject the South to a period of political probation. But it was soon manifest that he would steer the course of conciliation which Lincoln, before the end of battle, had already charted and begun. The tendency of Johnson’s policy was to draw to him men imbued with the old Democratic sentiment. In a little while, the Republican leaders perceived that as soon as the Democrats of the South should be allowed to vote they would unite with the Democrats of the North, and thus Republican ascendancy might come to a sudden end, and some of the results achieved by battle might be reversed at the ballot-box.

The black man had been freed, and, to protect him against the political power of his former masters, the Republicans decided to give him the ballot. This, it was expected, would also offset Democratic votes in the South, and help to perpetuate Republican rule. President Johnson had championed emancipation, but was opposed to immediate Negro suffrage. In the minds of the Radicals that attitude not only stamped him as a traitor to the party which elected him, but also incited an obstinate South. When the efforts to thwart the President by obstructive laws had failed, the Radicals sought to remove him by impeachment.

Each side had abundant legal and moral grounds for its actions, and each believed that the other was reaching for selfish political advantage. Outbreaks of lawlessness in the South, peculiar to the extraordinary conditions, and chargeable to both sides, convinced each that its worst fears were justified.

In the pages which follow, the main motives for impeachment are sketched by General Otis, who fought through the Civil War as a Union soldier, then entered the long political contest as a militant journalist, and finally resumed his place by the flag in the war with Spain. A more conservative view is taken by General Henderson, a War Democrat high in Lincoln’s confidence, and a slaveholder who yet proposed the final edict of freedom in the Senate. He is the only survivor of the seven Republican senators who thwarted impeachment, ex-Senator George F. Edmunds, of Vermont, being the only other surviving member of the court. Out of his personal recollection General Henderson describes his intercourse with Lincoln in securing emancipation, and his part in the impeachment fiasco.

Papers to follow, in the January CENTURY, will include an account of the impeachment trial, largely based on the President’s notes and letters, and an anecdotal sketch of Andrew Johnson, one of the most peculiar characters in American history.

In subsequent papers, after an interval, the later aspects of “Reconstruction” will be treated from the Southern point of view.—THE EDITOR.

Editor of the “Los Angeles Times”; veteran of the war for the Union; Brevet Major-General in the war with Spain

THE SAVING OF THE UNION

THE War of the Rebellion was the offspring of a desire on the part of the South to secure exemption from laws that its people believed would be enacted by a great Northern party, following the election of Abraham Lincoln, and which would put an end to the extension of slavery, and menace its safety in the States where it existed. In vain Republican statesmen protested that slavery would not be interfered with south of the Potomac. Behind Lincoln and Seward the South beheld Garrison and Lovejoy and Phillips. It was the belief of Davis and Breckinridge and Benjamin and Toombs that to exclude slavery from Kansas and Nebraska would be to sound the prelude of its abolition in Virginia and the Carolinas, and that those who commended the raid of John Brown and indorsed Helper’s “Impending Crisis” would sooner or later dominate the Republican party and commit it to universal abolition of the system of servile labor, upon the perpetuation of which depended the industrial life of the South.

It was believed by Southern publicists that the Dred Scott decision would be[Pg 188] reversed by a reorganized Supreme Court, and that a Republican Congress would enact laws denying the slaveholders the right to carry their slaves into the territories, and to be protected there by Federal power. As a matter of fact, slave labor could not have been employed profitably in the corn-fields of Kansas and Nebraska, and the cotton States had no slaves to spare. As was wittily said by Charles Francis Adams, “The South seceded because she couldn’t get protection for a thing she hadn’t got, in a place where she didn’t want it.”

In the months between the election and inauguration of Lincoln, during which the Southern Confederacy was organized, members of the Thirty-sixth Congress made futile efforts to avert the coming struggle. Senator Mason of Virginia sneeringly characterized the Crittenden compromise resolutions as “a bread pill.” Senator Douglas rejoined that “hypochondriacs were sometimes best cured of imaginary disorders by the use of bread pills.” Compromise was impossible. The South was determined on separation. Her press and her orators cherished the delusion that Northern men would not fight to preserve the Union. They fired the Southern heart and precipitated the cotton States into a revolution.

The uprising in the North that followed the assault on Sumter amazed the South and astonished the world; but it was not until nearly two years after Sumter that the nation became fully aroused to a sense of its power, its duty, and its destiny. The Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln struck swift and sure at the cause of the war, which was the Southern determination to perpetuate slavery. It enlisted the sympathies of Christian civilization. By the late summer of 1864 it became apparent that the sacrifices, the generalship, and the desperate valor of the Confederates could not much longer hold out against the superiority of the Union forces in numbers and arms, and the financial resources of the Federal government. The one hope of the Confederacy was that, at the ensuing election, the people of the loyal States might decree to end the contest. But the soul went out of the Confederacy on the sixth of November, 1864, when the ballots cast for Abraham Lincoln settled the issue of continuing the war for the Union. Victory succeeded victory, until the old banner, hallowed by the new motive, floated over every Southern stronghold.

AN ELECTION ON THE MARCH

MANY of the volunteer troops had been authorized by the laws of their respective States to vote in the field for President of the United States. In the case of my command, this voting was done in the Shenandoah Valley on November 6, about a fortnight after the famous battle of Cedar Creek, the scene of “Sheridan’s Ride.” My brigade was then on the march from Cedar Creek to Martinsburg as guard to a long supply-train. The usual practice on infantry marches was to march fifty minutes and rest ten minutes. Our troops availed themselves of the opportunity offered by these ten-minute rests to go to the polls and cast their ballots. Polling-places had been provided in every regimental line, proper election blanks supplied by the State, and the voting was done not “early and often,” but with honesty and a fair degree of regularity. In my own regiment the care of the rolls fell to me and my associate election judges, who had charge of the polling throughout the day. A bullet through the leg, received in the battle of Kernstown three months before, had deprived me of my full “hiking” powers, compelling me to resort to the “hurricane-deck” of a mule for transportation throughout the march; but I “arrived” all right, and on the following day, in the midst of a snow-storm, I was able to collect the rolls, certify to the results, and officially transmit the papers to the Ohio Secretary of State. The votes cast were almost entirely for Abraham Lincoln’s reëlection, General George B. McClellan, his Democratic, anti-war opponent, securing scarcely more than a “look in” at the hands of this steadfast Ohio brigade. McClellan fared little better at the hands of those Ohio volunteers than had Clement L. Vallandigham when he was a candidate for governor of the Buckeye State.

CIVIC AND MATERIAL DESOLATION

THE surrender of Lee and Johnston left the South in a deplorable condition. Its[Pg 189] people were without money or credit, and their labor system was destroyed. Its legislators and judges were fleeing or hiding from Federal soldiers. The organic and statutory laws of the South that were in existence before the war had been changed by State conventions and legislatures during the war. Twelve millions of people, white and black, were not only without representation at Washington, but they were without local law, without civil government of any kind, without other protection than the bayonets of Federal troops. Somewhere there must exist the power to create, to adjust, to set the machinery of government again in motion. Clearly the creative power was in the people of each State capable of giving their consent to be governed, and not in a few, or in a class who should assume to govern the others. The adjusting power was in Congress under Section 8 of Article I of the Federal Constitution, which provides that Congress “shall have the power to provide for the general welfare of the United States.”

The national statesmen of those days were confronted with a perplexing problem. They desired to remove the blight from the fair face of the South, to open her seaports to the ships of the world, to restore her marts to commerce, her fields to plenty, her people to prosperity, to citizenship, to equality, and to a place in the councils of the Government. Nothing less than this was intended by those who undertook the task of reconstruction. There was no vengeful outbreak of passion, no proscription of the Southern people, no spirit of retaliation in the hearts of Union men.

The new nation which was to issue from the war began to take form before the surrender of Lee or the assassination of President Lincoln. The Thirteenth Amendment, validating the Emancipation Proclamation and abolishing slavery, had been ratified by eleven of the States which had joined the Confederacy, also by Maryland and Missouri of the border States, and by all the Northern States. Delaware and Kentucky alone had refused to ratify. But it was unfortunate for the Southern people that their leaders in the fighting did not participate in the public affairs of the South and advise the politicians that they could not expect to win from Union statesmen what their armies had failed to gain on the battle-field. Southern soldiers, as a whole, showed the spirit of men who had fought bravely and lost fairly, and recognized the duty, not less than the patriotism, of submitting to the inevitable. Almost without exception, Union soldiers of the line and their officers stood ready to reflect in their acts, attitude, and feelings the sentiments of their great commander General Grant, who had said to the vanquished at Appomattox: “Take your horses home with you; you will need them to put in your crops.” Had the Southern people, the non-combatants among them, taken the attitude of the mass of the Confederate soldiers, the difficulties of reconstruction would have been lessened. But in the first year after the close of the war the country, as already described, was convulsed by disturbing political events, in which the rebellious spirit shown by the Southern people caused deep anxiety and created marked revulsion in the North. There were strong exhibitions of aroused and indignant sentiment in Union conventions and other public assemblies, and there was a tremendous outpouring of protest and warning. At the same time the South was aflame with claims of Southern rights denied and of wrongs suffered.

INCIDENTS OF PROVOST-MARSHAL RULE

TWO incidents within my personal knowledge illustrate the inconvenience caused by the total absence of civil law in the South at that juncture. In June, 1865, I was serving as provost-marshal at the town of Harrisonburg, in the Valley of the Shenandoah, with instructions to preserve order, gather up various sorts of United States military property scattered through the country, arrest outlaws and marauders, and receive the surrender of, and give paroles to, bands of scattered Confederate soldiers who had not been “in” at the all-compelling surrender at Appomattox Court House two months before. The country was honeycombed with stragglers, and I was burdened with my unique tasks. Civil government being non-existent, there was not even authority for the issuance of marriage-licenses and for the performance of like civic duties. One day, in this emergency, I received a personal[Pg 190] application from an ardent Virginia swain, who announced that he wished to get married, and appealed to me for instructions as to how to go about the tender though untimely task. Rising to the occasion, I told him that I would issue him a license, and accordingly did so in my capacity as a captain of United States Volunteers, and for the time being provost-marshal of that district. I wrote out the necessary authority, observing no forms, empowering any minister of the gospel, or any former justice of the peace under the Confederacy, to perform the ceremony. Then I sent the happy lover on his way rejoicing, and assumed that the knot was tied with due solemnity, that the couple would live happily ever after, and rear a family of Virginia children.

As provost-marshal I imposed a fine on a portly Negro saloon-keeper for violating a military order commanding the closing of all liquor shops in the town. The amount of the fine was fifty dollars in greenbacks, which was promptly, albeit ungraciously, paid by the aggrieved dispenser of firewater. Then, not knowing what to do legally with the money, I transmitted it to the regimental and post commander. He, also, not knowing how to dispose of this exceptional collection under any section of the army regulations, sent it to the Treasury of the United States at Washington, accompanied by an explanatory letter. The treasury officials, likewise “stumped” by the unusual problem, sent the fifty dollars back to the colonel commanding. He in turn threw the money back upon me, with a hint that in the unique dilemma the colored man’s unwilling contribution might not inappropriately be covered into the treasury of a certain regimental fund which was then being raised to promote a permanent, patriotic, and reverent object. Without delay I proceeded to act upon the hint, and to this day I hold among my private military archives the receipt of the regimental quartermaster for the money thus forcibly extorted from that Negro at Harrisonburg who had undertaken to sell Virginia apple-jack without a military license.

OPPOSITION TO THE EDICT OF FREEDOM

THE Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, which was pending when Lee surrendered, was not acceptable to the South. Almost the first acts of the Southern legislatures which assembled under President Johnson’s proclamation of amnesty, and the provisional organizations provided for by these agencies, breathed antagonism to the abolition of slavery. In November, 1865, Mississippi provided by legislative enactment that any Negro over eighteen years of age found in that State with no lawful employment or business should be deemed a vagrant. Conviction of vagrancy was punished by fine, and for non-payment of fine for five days it was made the duty of the sheriff to hire out the “vagrant” to any person who for the shortest period of service would pay the fine. In March, 1865, three months after the Thirteenth Amendment was declared in force, Georgia enacted a vagrant law authorizing the sale of the black man’s time for a year. The same law provided for the return and punishment by fine and imprisonment of runaway black employees, and authorized the employer to pay the fine and deduct it from the servant’s wages. Alabama, South Carolina, and Virginia had vagrant laws similar to those of Mississippi, and Louisiana had an additional provision requiring employers to pay only half-wages, and giving them the right to keep the remainder if the laborer quit before his time was out; and also the right to complain of a laborer who might quit work, and cause him to be put on the public works, without pay, until he returned to his employer.

Union men who had left their Southern homes during the war came back to find their property, real and personal, in the hands of Confederates, who refused to surrender it. Returning Unionists encountered such persecution as compelled them to leave again. There was, under “the black law,” a virtual reënslavement of Negroes. Confederate sentiment was nearly as dominant from the Potomac to the Gulf as when the Stars and Bars floated from every flagstaff. Georgia elected, or tried to elect, Alexander H. Stephens a United States Senator. Mobile made Raphael Semmes, the captain of the Alabama, a probate judge. Monroe was elected mayor of New Orleans, and Robert E. Lee was offered the nomination for Governor of Virginia. National airs were[Pg 191] hissed in the theaters, and the national flag was insulted in the streets. The local press extolled the “Lost Cause” and flouted those who had overthrown it. Former Confederate officers were the chosen leaders of public sentiment. Taxation was levied to pay municipal indebtedness contracted to fit out Confederate regiments. The generally expressed Southern opinion was that, if reconstruction was necessary, it was the Confederates who should do the reconstructing.

Northern representatives in Congress, under the leadership of Thaddeus Stevens and Henry Winter Davis, were not hospitable to the Southern claims for immediate and unconditional representation in Congress. In substance they said: The alleged “right” of secession has been trampled under the feet of the Union armies; the Confederate claims of exemption from the consequences of their action is not allowed. The North does not demand punishment of Confederates, nor indemnity for the past, but it will have security for the future. Taxation is a consequence of war which the South must bear with the North. Representation—participation in public rule—is a privilege which, except under satisfactory conditions and guarantees, will not be extended to the people of the cotton States.

THE MILITARY STATE GOVERNMENTS

A LAW of Congress was enacted authorizing an officer not below the rank of brigadier-general of the United States army to make a list of all the voters in a State which might be under his command as a military district. In making this list, residence and manhood were the only qualifications.[3] The general was authorized and directed to issue a proclamation inviting the listed voters to assemble at the polls and elect delegates to a convention to draft a State constitution to be submitted to a vote of the people, and if ratified and approved by Congress, the State to be placed at once in practical political relations with the other States, and accorded her proper representation in Congress. The only persons excluded from participation in reconstruction were those who before the war had taken an official oath to support the Government and Constitution of the United States, and who had afterward violated that oath by voluntarily bearing arms against the Government of the United States. The class thus excluded from suffrage was perhaps 30,000 in number. The conventions were required to perpetuate the basis of suffrage set forth in the Reconstruction Act and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. That amendment provided that Federal indebtedness should be paid, and that Confederate indebtedness should not be paid; that those who were under disabilities should not be eligible to office until Congress should remove their disabilities; that representation in Congress and in the Electoral College should not be accorded to those to whom the right of suffrage had been or might be denied, and that all persons should be protected in their rights of liberty and property.

The Fourteenth Amendment was opposed both South and North by those who asserted that the Union armies had fought to establish the doctrine that no State could secede from the Union; that the Union victories had established such doctrine; that as no State could secede, therefore no State did secede, and, so being in the Union, every Southern State was entitled to representation without conditions.

To such reasoning it was answered that no statesman and no party had ever claimed that a State might not destroy herself, even as a city might disincorporate, or a county merge itself with another. No State could absolve its citizens from their allegiance to the United States or release them from their obligation to obey Federal laws and their liability for Federal taxes, or deprive them of their right to Federal protection. No State could withdraw her territory or her people from the dominant jurisdiction of the United States. But, nevertheless, a State might destroy her internal government, repeal her local laws, and discontinue her political relations with the other States. She might commit state suicide. If she sent no senators or representatives to the Federal Congress; if through her officers she emptied her treasury, abrogated her courts, disrobed herself of sovereignty, dissolved her legislature, smote her constitution[Pg 192] to pieces with anarchic blows, and submitted to military rule or to the sway of a revolutionary central power, she did not take her territory or her people out of the Union, but she took herself out of existence as a State, leaving only her territorial boundaries to mark her place on the map. In such circumstances it became the duty of the Government of the United States to treat such disorganized Federal territory as it would treat unorganized Federal territory acquired by purchase or by conquest.

LINCOLN’S RECONSTRUCTION POLICY IN WAR AND JOHNSON’S IN PEACE

BETWEEN the assassination of President Lincoln and the meeting of Congress in December, 1865, an interval of over seven months, there was no authoritative Republican declaration of the party policy as to reconstruction. The murder of Lincoln, hastily and unjustly charged by some Union men against the entire South, was received with an outburst of rage that encouraged Thaddeus Stevens and other leading Radicals to propose that the South should be reconstructed by treating the eleven late Confederate States as conquered territory, wiping out State lines, and organizing the Territory of Grant, the Territory of Lincoln, the Territory of Sherman, the Territory of Sheridan, and other territories to be named after Union officers, which should be governed like the Territories of Idaho, Montana, and Colorado, and in due time admitted to the Union on a satisfactory showing in each case.

President Johnson opposed the program of Thad. Stevens. He called attention to the fact that before the surrender of Lee at Appomattox the white men of Tennessee elected two United States senators and a full complement of congressmen, made Brownlow governor, and gave a majority for Lincoln and Johnson. He reasoned that if Tennessee was in the Union sufficiently to provide a Vice-President who had become President, she was in the Union absolutely, and entitled to have her senators and representatives admitted to seats in Congress. Johnson’s policy was to ignore everything in the past; to readmit senators and representatives from the late Confederate States without guarantees and without delay; to withdraw our armies, and permit the Confederates to reëstablish their local governments to suit themselves. He proposed, in effect, that the Confederates, after four years of fighting, having surrendered to the Union, Union men in turn should, after four weeks of rejoicing, surrender to the Confederacy.

In assuming this position, Johnson claimed that he was carrying out Lincoln’s plan of reconstruction, for Lincoln had said long before the surrender of Lee that his purpose was to save the Union, whether such saving was accomplished by abolishing slavery or by preserving it. But Lincoln was a progressive and constructive statesman, and a policy which he might have favored to obtain peace conditioned on the disbandment of the Confederate armies, while they were still in the field as a mighty force, might not have been his policy after the enforced surrender of Lee and Johnston.

There was no time between the collapse of the Confederacy and the assassination of Lincoln for him to formulate any policy. It may be said, however, that he was not in favor of the plan of Thad. Stevens and Ben. Wade to blot out lines and names in eleven States, and deal with them as conquered territory. Lincoln’s plan was not to destroy the Southern States as existing entities, but to recognize the fact that, as far as government in those entities was concerned, “chaos had come again,” and it was the duty of Congress to provide for a reëstablishment of government there, and to prescribe the conditions on which the people of those States should be accorded national representation.

NEGRO SUFFRAGE

CONGRESS was determined that one of the conditions of reconstruction should be the admission of colored men to the right of suffrage. Most of those who advised this were influenced by politico-economic rather than moral or sentimental considerations. They said to the South, the action of your legislatures and the utterances of your public men and newspapers all evince your determination virtually to restore slavery by establishing peonage. We must either garrison every school district in the South with soldiers at enormous cost in[Pg 193] order to protect the Negro, or else we must give him the ballot and enable him to protect himself. If he is made a voter, the struggle of candidates to obtain his vote may protect him.

Congress, as subsequently appeared, was determined to make Negro suffrage an essential part of any plan of reconstruction. Johnson was equally determined to refuse the franchise to the black man, and he had the power to do it.

KU-KLUX OUTRAGES

ONE of the most potent instrumentalities in discrediting Andrew Johnson was the Ku-Klux Klan. It would be impossible within the limits of this article to give even a brief synopsis of the outrages of this remarkable band of outlaws. The report of the “Congressional Committee on Affairs in the Insurrectionary States,” made to the Forty-second Congress, fills thirteen large volumes. The Ku-Klux organization extended over eleven States. It was estimated that its membership exceeded one hundred thousand, and included men who otherwise were reputable and respected citizens. Its avowed purpose was to exclude from participation in public affairs, either as voters or office-holders, all Negroes, all “carpet-baggers,” as incomers from the North were called, and all “scallywags,” as Southern Union men were designated.

The purpose of the Ku-Klux Klan was not primarily to depredate private property, but for a long period they were merciless in dealing with those who came under their ban. A white man obnoxious to them was ordered to leave the vicinage. If he failed to obey, the torch was applied to his home, and he was openly assaulted or secretly assassinated. If he offered armed resistance, he was murdered. The colored man who attempted to exercise the right of suffrage was called from his cabin at midnight, tied to a tree, and whipped, and his house was burned to the ground. Prosecutions of the members of the Ku-Klux instituted in the Federal courts in North Carolina, in South Carolina, and in other States almost invariably resulted in failure for want of proof, hard to get; and not until the second administration of General Grant were these outlaws finally disbanded and dispersed.

PUBLIC SENTIMENT AGAINST JOHNSON’S POLICIES

TWO great national conventions were held in the year 1866, one at Pittsburg and the other at Philadelphia. The latter, beginning on September 3, was made up in large measure of Southern loyalists and other civilians, among whom the tide of patriotism ran high. It made a tremendous impression upon the country and upon the recalcitrant and dissatisfied South. Among the delegates were Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John G. Whittier, eleven governors, and eight United States senators. Among the thousands of Unionists whom I met there was James A. Garfield, who had won his spurs as a major-general in the field, who subsequently served in the House of Representatives, became President, and died that tragic death which history has sadly recorded. In his joyousness and geniality he seemed to me like a great overgrown boy. While masses of shouting, cheering, and singing men were parading through Independence Square, within the sound of the Liberty Bell, that big man passed his arms affectionately about the shoulders of a young soldier, whom he did not know, and strode proudly along as though the latter had been his lifelong friend. It was enough for Garfield to know that the other was a comrade. I was the obscure young soldier.

The object of the convention was to devise means for the protection of the imperiled lives and property of loyal Southerners. The chairman, the Hon. Charles Gibbons, voiced the purpose of the convention when he said: “It is the honest sentiment of the North, held and uttered in the interests of union, of peace, and of Christianity, that when the South returns to her duty she must come in new robes, with new covenants for liberty, equality, and justice, led by her own loyal Unionists, who are free from the guilt of treason.”

The Union Soldiers’ and Sailors’ convention, at Pittsburg, followed the other in the same month. It was equally large, equally serious and determined in its character and utterances. It was attended by hosts of soldiers of all grades, from private to major-general. The speeches and resolutions breathed a sentiment of deep devotion[Pg 194] to the restored Union, expressed a fearless determination to prevent the fruits of the nation’s sacrifices from being snatched away or diluted. Revolt against the tendencies in the White House and the South was general among the friends of the Union.

THE FAILURE TO DISLODGE THE PRESIDENT

IN 1867 an act of Congress was passed depriving the President of the power to issue an amnesty proclamation, which he overrode. His disposition and his plans to defy Congress and pursue his own method of reconstructing the South caused Congress to deprive him of the command of the army, a bold act, the constitutionality of which might well be disputed at any stage, but which illustrates the almost desperate frame of mind in which Congress then was. Johnson’s continued defiance was met by the enactment into law of the Tenure-of-Office bill, which prevented him from making a change in his cabinet, his own official household.

These strained relations between the President and Congress, which had existed for more than two years, reached an open rupture on February 21, 1868, when the President informed the Senate that he had removed Edwin M. Stanton as Secretary of War, contrary to the Tenure-of-Office act. The House at once adopted a resolution, by a vote of 122 to 47 (not voting 17) to “impeach Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, of high crimes and misdemeanors.” James G. Blaine, in his “Twenty Years of Congress,” says that, in adopting this resolution of impeachment, Congress acted hastily; but it is the opinion of many still living that he did not consider the precedent circumstances, which, as much as the removal of Stanton, led 122 congressmen to cast their votes for impeachment. Still, it was probably fortunate for the nation that Johnson was saved from impeachment by one senatorial vote. If Johnson had been impeached, Ben. Wade of Ohio, a fearless Republican statesman, would have become President. Wade was a Radical of the Radicals, who always had the courage of his convictions. He probably would have given the whole force of his administration to the plan of Thad. Stevens to organize the South into territories and govern it as such, yet granting the States readmission to the Union gradually and on stipulated terms. The people of the North were so enraged over the assassination of Lincoln and the continued efforts of the Southern States to nullify the Thirteenth Amendment that they might then have approved the Stevens plan of reconstruction. At this day, nearly half a century after Appomattox, it seems best that neither the Johnson plan nor the Stevens plan did prevail.

TWO CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS

THE failure to impeach Johnson accentuated the need of further constitutional amendment. As early as June 13, 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment, declaring that no State may abridge the rights of citizens of the United States, was proposed in Congress, but it was not finally ratified and declared to be in force until July 28, 1868. California never took final action on this amendment. It was rejected by Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky. New Jersey and Ohio rescinded their ratification of it. Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia at first rejected the amendment, but afterward ratified it.

Notwithstanding the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, feud, anarchy, and devastation continued in the Southern country, and the failure to impeach Johnson was an incentive to continued disorder. How to secure peace, justice, and prosperity was the pressing question of the hour. Congress had tried constitutional amendments, and the South ignored them. It had tried civil-rights bills, which were useless without military power to enforce them. Then Congress said in effect to the Southern people: “If you have not a loyal white majority which can be trusted with the administration of civil government, we will enfranchise the black man. We must either garrison every school district with Union troops in order to protect the Negro from a peonage that is practical reënslavement, or we must give him the ballot and let him protect himself.” It was believed that the contending ambitions of office-seekers to obtain the colored man’s vote would cause them to treat him justly.

It was such conditions that produced the Fifteenth Amendment, providing that no State might deprive a citizen of his vote[Pg 195] “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The first draft contained the word “nativity,” which was obnoxious to the Pacific coast because of the apprehension of Chinese suffrage, so the word was eliminated. Nevada was the first State to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment. California, Oregon, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and New Jersey rejected it. Georgia and Ohio at first rejected it, but finally ratified it. New York rescinded her ratification. The amendment was proposed February 26, 1869, and declared in force March 30, 1870.

Half a century ago human slavery had been banished from every civilized nation in the world except the United States. Here it was intrenched behind apparently impregnable fortifications composed of cotton-bales, pulpits, and counting-rooms, of bank vaults and political conventions.

The reverberations of Sumter’s guns changed a majority of the people of the Northern States from conservative indifference to toleration of antislavery sentiments, and, as the war progressed, into active abolitionists; and thus the Emancipation Proclamation was acclaimed by millions who three years before would have scouted such a measure. It is more than forty-seven years since the last gun was fired in the Civil War; it is more than forty years since the last measure of reconstruction was enacted. The generals and statesmen of that historic era have journeyed on. The veterans in the soldiers’ homes grow rapidly fewer in number, and it will not be many years until the last of them will have joined the great majority. The acerbities and rancors of the war have been submerged in Lethean waters, and the Southern States, once desolated, have become prosperous and powerful supporters of the Old Flag.

[3] See page 195 for a reference to the Fifteenth Amendment, which introduced into the fundamental law the phrase, “without distinction of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE SENATOR WHO PROPOSED THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT, AND WAS ONE OF THE SEVEN REPUBLICANS WHO THWARTED THE ATTEMPT TO IMPEACH PRESIDENT JOHNSON

THE “RECALL” FOR PRESIDENTS

ARTICLE II, Sec. 4, of the Constitution provides that “The President, Vice-President, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Thus the principle of the “recall,” in very broad terms, has been written into our fundamental law. Human nature is such that the idea of resorting to this remedy originates first in the minds of political opponents. As applicable to Presidents, the recall was probably much desired by the enemies of John Adams, the second President, and of Andrew Jackson, the seventh. Fortunately it has actually been invoked only against the seventeenth President, Andrew Johnson, who owed his position to the recall by assassination of Abraham Lincoln. His impeachment, I believe, was due mainly to a counter-tide of passion, prejudice, and political revenge. His trial formed a crisis in the life of the nation, the dangerous import of which may not yet be fully understood. His rescue from conviction by the narrow margin of one vote was followed by demands for the recall of the seven Republican senators who voted with the Democrats. I happened to be the youngest of the seven, though not the least berated. By the refusal of a reëlection, all of the seven were retired to private life. Then out of several years of bitterness came the wisdom of reflection. Those who had reviled began to praise and finally to utter words of thankfulness. Even some of the leaders of impeachment, in the calm of reason, have put on record frank confessions of error. Thus it has been my happiness to live to see the keenest disappointment of my public life transformed into its chief honor.

BORDER-STATE INFLUENCE AND WARFARE

IN his great wisdom Lincoln early perceived that unless antislavery sentiment could be sustained in the border States, the Federal cause was likely to fail. With that belief he sought information and counsel from those men in Congress who, like myself, had been bred in the shadow of slavery and who yet desired the extinction of the institution. Though born in Danville, Virginia, most of my early life was spent at Louisiana, a town north of St. Louis, on the Missouri side of the Mississippi. There I began to practise law in 1848 and to hear of a lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, located at Springfield, seventy-five miles to the northeast. In that year he was serving his only term in Congress, while I was beginning public life as a member of the Missouri legislature, to which I returned in 1856. Though a member of the Electoral College in 1856 which made Buchanan President, I was strongly opposed to his Kansas policy. In 1860 I was an elector on the Stephen A. Douglas ticket. I had inherited slave property, but was convinced that slavery was an economic drawback in Missouri. On her borders, east and north, white settlers were founding prosperous communities, and avoiding us because white labor would not compete with slave labor. My only purchase of slaves was made on the appeal of a black man who had built the fires in my office. He and his wife and son were sold at auction to pay the debts of their master. I bought them in for about $1400. Thereafter they never served me; but as the law required that[Pg 197] they should be in regular employ, I hired them out, they taking the wages.

Civil war was an actual fact in Missouri before the sword and the torch were at work in the other border States. Early in 1861 our legislature, which was secessionist in sentiment, provided for a state convention to join, as they hoped, the other seceding States; but, to their great surprise, a majority of Union delegates were chosen at the special election, I being among that majority. Ex-Governor Sterling Price, then classed with the opponents of secession, became president of the convention which assembled soon after Lincoln’s first inaugural made it plain that a conflict was inevitable. As Jackson, our governor at that time, was disloyal, the life of the convention was prolonged by adjournment, during which the secession element ranged itself under Jackson and Price, and the Union element, with the continuing authority of the convention, grew strong enough to organize and to elect Governor Gamble. Under the arrangements for home defense, I organized a brigade, and in General Schofield’s command operated against the raiders who burned bridges and disturbed northeastern Missouri during the first year of the war. The conditions were such that no man could safely remain neutral. Unless he was openly for one side or the other, he was suspected by both, and doubly liable to pillage and arrest.

THE TREND TOWARD EMANCIPATION

FROM the field I was sent to the United States Senate in January, 1862, to fill the unexpired term of Trusten Polk, who had joined the South. In March, President Lincoln sent to Congress his message asking for a joint resolution favoring the gradual abolishment of slavery with compensation. A few days later he asked the border States delegations to a conference at the White House in which he urged that policy without gaining much encouragement. On July 12 he made a second direct appeal to the same delegations, in conference, and urged that if the border States would adopt measures of compensated emancipation, the war must shortly end, since then, and not till then, would the South realize that slavery was doomed. Twenty of them signed a written qualified refusal to urge his recommendation; seven assented in a prepared address; and Horace Maynard and I wrote individual replies. I had been absent from the conference on business relating to my duties as senator, but I gave the President my view that, while I had supported the measure when first introduced, I did not share his belief that it alone would bring the war to an early termination. But I added that in such a period of national distress I knew of “no human institution too sacred for discussion, no material interest belonging to the citizen that he should not willingly place upon the altar of his country, if demanded by the public good. The man who cannot now sacrifice party and put aside selfish considerations is more than half disloyal. Pride of opinion, based upon sectional jealousies, should not be permitted to control the decision of any political question. These remarks are general, but apply with peculiar force to the people of the border States at present.”

THE FAILURE OF PLANS TO PURCHASE EMANCIPATION

THESE sentiments indicated that I was drifting toward Lincoln’s position that emancipation was indispensable to the saving of the Union. After the July conference at the White House, a general bill offering aid to the border States if they would adopt compensated emancipation was introduced in Congress, but not brought to final action. In the autumn, at Mr. Lincoln’s request, I went to Missouri to take part in the agitation of the question, and the reversal of sentiment shown at the November election seemed altogether favorable. So, on December 10, I introduced a bill in the Senate appropriating twenty millions of dollars to aid Missouri if her people would adopt compensated emancipation. At the same time Congressman Noell, in the House, gave notice of a similar bill, but reducing the aid to ten millions. His bill passed the House on January 6, 1863, and was sent to the Senate, where, on February 7, a compromise of fifteen millions was adopted; but the pro-slavery members from Missouri gathered enough strength to prevent action by the House. Meantime Lincoln’s proclamation of freedom to all slaves in rebellious territory had gone into effect on the first of January.

The idea of compensated emancipation[Pg 198] for the border States made no further progress in Congress, and probably lost ground in the North, for a reason humorously stated by Senator Jacob Collamer of Vermont. During the recess he addressed a meeting of several hundred neighbors and stated that the measure would call for the payment of about $300 each for four million slaves. He asked them to go home and consider what they would advise their representatives to do. An old leader in the town waxed eloquent over the fact that the North shared the responsibility for slavery and ought to help settle the bill, and, though poor, he declared himself willing to pay his share. But in a day or two he was back again with a different opinion.

“Senator,” he exclaimed, “me and wife and the boys figure that our share would be just about all we’ve got; so I guess you might as well let that damned Negro question alone.”

THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT

A YEAR later the distress of the nation had enforced a more united sentiment, and on January 11, 1864, I offered in the Senate a joint resolution to abolish slavery in the United States. After a good deal of discussion over the wording of the resolution, Senator Sumner offering one form, and Senator Trumbull suggesting the terms of the ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery in all the Northwest, the latter was favored. Though the requisite two-thirds vote was obtained in the Senate, the House did not acquiesce until after a whole year of discussion. The bill became a law on January 31, 1865. A hundred guns announced the event, and the rejoicing was great and spontaneous.

LINCOLN AND THE LIQUOR HABIT

AT the second inauguration of Lincoln I was chairman of the committee which escorted the President to the Capitol, and sat by his side while Andrew Johnson, after taking the oath as Vice-President, harangued the crowded senate chamber. During the painful ordeal, Mr. Lincoln’s head drooped in the deepest humiliation. As I offered him my arm for the procession to the steps of the Capitol, where he delivered the Inaugural, he turned to the marshal and said, “Don’t let Johnson speak outside.”

Senator Doolittle, who had escorted the Vice-President elect to the Capitol, told me that when they went into Mr. Hamlin’s room Johnson said to the retiring Vice-President:

“Mr. Hamlin, I have been feeling very ill. Can you give me some good brandy?”

A bottle of French brandy was found, and to brace his nerves for the task before him, he poured out the full glass that wrought the mischief. His reputation was that of a temperate man; and this was his only show of inebriety; but the scene was so deeply humiliating that a caucus of senators a few days afterward seriously considered the propriety of asking him to resign as their presiding officer.

Mr. Lincoln’s aversion to liquor and tobacco was well known. He once told me with relish of a rebuke for his abstinence given by a friendly stage-driver. During the time that he was a circuit lawyer, he sometimes walked from one county court to another. While on such a tramp a stage overtook him and the driver invited him to take a seat on the box. After they had chatted for a while the driver produced a whisky-flask, saying:

“Stranger, I’ll tell you what I think: those men who have no small vices seldom have any large virtues.”

I once heard Mr. Lincoln tell of another liquor experience, this time at the[Pg 199] expense of Senator David Davis, who was present and enjoyed it as much as the rest of the company. While attending a session of court presided over by Judge Davis, the latter overtook him one morning on the road, and asked him to get into the Davis carriage, which was drawn by a pair of spirited horses, driven by a trusted coachman. They traveled at a rate which made Lincoln uneasy, and soon entered on a piece of new road abounding in ruts and stumps. As the carriage bumped and swayed, Lincoln, in much alarm, turned to the judge and asked:

“No,” replied the judge, “Michael is a sober man and never takes anything.”

After a jar which nearly upset them,[Pg 200] Lincoln asked that the carriage should be stopped, so that he could get out. The judge expostulated, but when they struck another stump, Lincoln exclaimed:

Thereupon Davis loudly demanded of the coachman that he should stop, and, observing him closely, saw the whole truth in the wild gleam of his eyes. The judge indignantly exclaimed:

“Judge Davis, that’s the correctest decision you’ve rendered in the last twelve months.”

LINCOLN’S CLEMENCY

MY last interview with Mr. Lincoln occurred after the adjournment of the extra session of the Senate about the middle of March, 1865. I went to the White House to ask the President to pardon a number of the men who had been languishing in Missouri prisons for various offenses, all political. Some of them had been my schoolmates, and their mothers, sisters, and sweethearts had persisted in appeals that I should use my influence for their release. Since it was evident to me that the Confederacy was in its last throes, I felt that the pardon of most of these prisoners would do more good than harm. I had separated them according to the gravity of the offense into three classes, and handing the first list to him, I said:

“Mr. President, the session is closed, and I am about to start for home. The war is virtually over. Grant is pretty certain to get Lee and his army, and Sherman is plainly able to take care of Johnston. In my opinion, the best way to prevent guerrilla warfare at the end of organized resistance will be to show clemency to these rebel sympathizers.”

“Henderson, I am deeply indebted to you and I want to show it, but don’t ask me at this time to pardon rebels.”

“I can’t do it! People are continually blaming me for being too lenient. Don’t encourage such fellows by inducing me to turn loose a lot of men who, perhaps, ought to be hanged.”

“Mr. President, these prisoners and their friends tell me that for them the Rebellion is over, and it will surely have a good influence now to let them go.”

“Mr. President, you should do it. It is necessary for good feeling in Missouri that these people should be released.”

“If I sign this list as a whole, will you be responsible for the future good behavior of the men?” he asked.

“Then I will take the risk and sign it.” He wrote the word “pardoned,” signed the general order of release, and returned the paper to me.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” I said, “but that is not all; I have another list here.”

“Yes,” I answered, “but I am not quite so sure of the merits of this list. However, I believe the men are not dangerous, and it will be good policy to let them go. My argument for this list is the same as for the other. The war is virtually over; the guilt of these men is at least doubtful; mercy must be the policy of peace.”

“I’ll be durned if I don’t sign it!” and he signed the second list like the first. “Now, Henderson,” he said, as he handed the list back to me, “remember that you are responsible to me for these men; and if they don’t behave, I shall have to put you in prison for their sins.”

THE DISCONTENT WITH PRESIDENT JOHNSON

ON December 18, 1865, eight months after the death of Lincoln, the Thirteenth Amendment was proclaimed by Secretary Seward, it having received the indorsement of two thirds of all the States in the Union. Partly through my solicitation, President Johnson had used his great influence with the border States to gain their approval of emancipation. During the fight for the Thirteenth Amendment it was no secret that some of the leading[Pg 202] Radicals in Congress were indifferent toward the abolishment of slavery at that time, as well as toward Mr. Lincoln’s scheme of reconstruction, out of the belief that those measures would make inevitable his renomination and election, which they did not favor. The Radicals had been sympathetic toward Andrew Johnson as senator and as military governor of Tennessee, on account of his vigorous antislavery views, but when he became President, and, as he believed, took up the work of reconstruction on the lines that Lincoln had begun, they at once realized that his success would frustrate their plans for the political domination of the South.

Senator Sumner’s theory of “State suicide” and Thad. Stevens’s idea of “conquered provinces,” became the basis of the Radical scheme of territorializing the South by keeping the States that had seceded under semi-military rule, and condemning them to a period of probation before they should be allowed to come back into the Union on terms of self-government.

Those of us in Congress who believed that Johnson’s policy was in the main in line with the right principles were nevertheless not in entire agreement with him. He felt that he was following precedent as far as Lincoln had established it, and that he was entitled to the confidence of the conservative Union element of the country; but he was hot-headed, and as the controversy with the Radicals in Congress grew, his attitude became more and more aggressive and irritating to the majority.

Early in 1866, Congress passed a bill enlarging the powers of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Johnson vetoed it, as well as a revised bill that followed, and the latter was enacted over his head. Congress soon after enacted a measure to fortify the rights of the Negroes, known as the Civil-Rights Bill, which he promptly vetoed, and which was as promptly passed over his head. Then, to prevent the President, who was now in open conflict with the Radical Republicans, from dispossessing the office-holders who were their friends, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act in a form which most of the Radicals interpreted to mean that the President might not supplant even a member of his own Cabinet. As another weapon against the administration, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act, which designated as illegal the State governments which had been set up by Johnson in the South, and provided that those States should be ruled by military governors appointed by the President, but really under control of the head of the army. Both these bills were vetoed by the President and Congress promptly enacted them over his head.

The President’s official advisers, who, it should not be forgotten, were those who had formed Lincoln’s Cabinet, themselves strongly objected to the Tenure of Office Act, the President’s veto being drawn up by Seward and Stanton. The latter was most emphatic in declaring that the act was unconstitutional; but it was part of the irony of the situation that Stanton was the first to feel its effects, and thereafter to become active in maintaining its validity. With Stanton’s suspension and the appointment, first of General Grant, and then of General Lorenzo Thomas, as Secretary of War ad interim, the first practical move for impeachment may be said to have begun.

PREPARING FOR IMPEACHMENT

THUS the impeachment of Andrew Johnson was the culmination of political differences which had become increasingly strained in the disturbed conditions which followed the death of Lincoln. The trial has been wrongly described as a great judicial event, but in the strict sense it was not a judicial event, since it was without sound basis in law. It was the culmination of a struggle for political advantage. Still the Radicals who brought it about were intensely in earnest. They felt that the tendency of Johnson’s reconstruction policy was toward the return of the Democratic party to power, which would have the effect of neutralizing the political results of the Civil War.

The very nature of the so-called Court of Impeachment was a monstrosity, as several of the lawyers in that body perceived, for the Senate was to act both as judge and as jury. I made several motions or orders to separate the jurisdiction of the jury from that of the judge, but in vain. I wanted a judge, preferably Chief-Justice Chase, to decide the judicial points, as the Senate was like a mob, deciding everything for themselves.

Impeachment was of course a matter in which personalities and personal ambitions played a large part. Without Benjamin F. Butler and Thad. Stevens, there never would have been an impeachment trial, for impeachment was chiefly a scheme to get place and power for themselves and their friends. Like many other politicians of selfish aims, they flourished under the peculiar conditions following the war—conditions in which the sole inquiry was, “Is he loyal?” and not, “Is he honest?”

Butler was able to push the impeachment scheme on the claim that Johnson was not loyal. It was even charged that Johnson was conspiring to form a new secession, despite the fact that he had been instrumental in securing the adhesion of a number of the Southern States to the Thirteenth Amendment. And this charge was fomented by Butler, the man whom I had heard vote fifty-seven times in the Charleston convention for Jeff Davis as President, and whom I heard address a group of Southern delegates in support of a declaration for the protection of slavery in all territories. On that occasion he declared that if the North undertook to raise troops to “coerce the South,” the bones of the Northern soldiers would rot upon the mountains before they reached the South. Yet this same man was the leader of one of the first regiments to march through Baltimore to “coerce the South.”

Feeling ran high in all parts of the country, and whenever a Republican senator showed a disinclination to join in impeachment he was bombarded by excited constituents. I was not slow to make my attitude known, for I would as soon have voted to condemn an innocent man to death as to vote to impeach Johnson on the articles that were presented. The Republicans in Missouri were, if possible, more aroused than in other parts of the country. Even the legislature passed a resolution requesting me to resign. I replied finally that I would hold my seat until impeachment was defeated. That position carried a great deal of significance, since the alinement of forces indicated clearly that the change of a single vote would result in the President’s condemnation.

All of the articles of impeachment were based on some phase of the quarrel with Stanton. The eleventh article, which accused him of violating an act of Congress in suspending the Secretary of War was the strongest, though in my view of the law, as I declared in the Senate, he had legally suspended Stanton and had undoubted[Pg 205] authority to fill the vacancy by an ad interim appointment. When the Tenure of Office Act was before the Committee of Conference, Senator John Sherman, chairman of the committee, was asked if the bill was intended to take away the power of the President to remove his own Cabinet, and he answered, “No, it is not to interfere with his power to remove or to retain his Cabinet.” During the impeachment trial, when it was reported that Senator Sherman was in favor of convicting Johnson on the eleventh article, I had a talk with him, and asked:

“Do you remember your attitude in the Committee of Conference on the question of the power of the President to remove his Cabinet?”

“You are not going to stultify yourself by voting for the eleventh article?”

That conversation convinced me that the advocates of impeachment could not depend, as they hoped, on Sherman to vote guilty on the eleventh article, and in fact, when the crucial moment came, he voted against it.

GENERAL GRANT’S CHANGE OF VIEWS

DURING most of the period of agitation for impeachment General Grant had ranged himself with those who stood by the President. Everybody believed in the honesty of his purpose, and owing to his great fame, his influence was paramount. The Radical leaders understood the difficult task of carrying out their plans without Grant’s coöperation, and they shaped their course so that he would profit by the overturn of the administration. Grant’s quarrel with the President, over the question of his relations as head of the army to the Secretary of War, afforded them a line of approach, and the talk of making Grant a Presidential candidate in the coming election suggested the reward.

About the last of April, 1868, I received an invitation to a ten o’clock breakfast at General Grant’s house, which had recently been presented to him. Commodore Porter and other guests were present. Our host asked me to remain, and after the other guests had departed, he lighted a cigar—I did not smoke—and proposed a walk.

He shortly broached the question of impeachment, and asked for my opinion as to the result, saying that there were personal reasons why he should like to know definitely what might be expected.

“Senator, I have reason to believe, from good authority, that the managers of impeachment are confident of success.”

“I may tell you in confidence,” he then said, “that not only is it expected that Ben. Wade will become President, but the members of his Cabinet have already been selected.”

“Perhaps I ought not to say,” he replied, “but I will tell you, at least, that General Butler has been designated as Secretary of State.”

I reiterated my belief that the program never would be carried out, whereupon General Grant said:

“You know that people are talking of me for the Presidency at the coming election. I have not had political ambition, but I begin to think that possibly I might be of great service to the country in bringing peace to the disturbed sections of the Union. These men who are counting on the success of impeachment offer me their influence as the nominee to succeed Wade in case he becomes President by the removal of Johnson.”

“Good God, General!” I exclaimed, in astonishment, “you didn’t consent to that, did you?”

He expressed distrust of Butler; yet I thought he seemed to lean toward the bargain. Then I said:

“General Grant, you may feel confident of the nomination whether these men support you or not; and you may rest assured that the succession will not occur as they promise.”

About a week later, as I was coming from the Capitol in a street-car, General Grant got in. The car was well filled, and the General came over and sat beside me. He asked whether I had changed my opinion about the impeachment.

“Well, I can’t warrant that,” I replied. “We have friends enough against it to defeat it, but I cannot give a pledge that we shall actually defeat it.”

“Yes,” he repeated, “I would impeach him if for nothing else than because he is such an infernal liar.”

“I very much regret to hear you say it,” I answered, looking at him earnestly, for his language and manner aroused my indignation. “I regret it because on such terms it would be nearly impossible to find the right sort of man to serve as President.”

He seemed annoyed, but made no further remark, and in a few minutes left the car. We never had any further conversation on the subject. I inferred that the Radicals hoped to influence me through Grant, since they knew I was ready to support him for President. When I saw how and why he had changed about, I lost respect for his opinion.

From that time a coolness entered into our relations; but during his Presidency I was paid the compliment of being asked to take charge of the Whisky Ring prosecution in St. Louis.

THE SEVEN REPUBLICAN SENATORS

ALL of the Democratic senators were ranged on the side of President Johnson, and the division of the voting power was such that seven Republican senators voting with the Democrats could defeat impeachment. We senators who were opposed to the scheme held several informal conferences. At first we numbered at least eight, since Senator William Sprague of Rhode Island joined in the talks and was frankly on our side. He was the son-in-law of the Chief-Justice who would preside at the trial, and it was no secret that Chase looked upon the articles of impeachment as flimsy. But after the opposing senators began to be deluged with appeals and threats from their constituents, Sprague evidently decided that the good of the country required that he should return to the Senate, and he absented himself from further conference. It was rumored that Senator Edwin D. Morgan, formerly Governor of New York, would have voted with us in case of the defection of one of the seven. For political reasons he finally alined himself with the Radicals.

The tension in the senate chamber during the first vote, which was on the last, or eleventh, article, was tremendous, for at least two of the seven Republicans were claimed by both sides. William P. Fessenden of Maine was the first of the seven to rise on roll-call and be questioned by the Chief-Justice, saying:

“Mr. Senator Fessenden, how say you? Is the respondent, Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, guilty or not guilty of a high misdemeanor as charged in this article?”

Fessenden responded in a clear voice, “Not guilty.” In a written opinion filed later he disposed of the suggestion that “popular opinion” demanded the conviction of the President, by saying that the people had not heard the evidence as the Senate had heard it, and that the responsibility was not on the people, but on the senators who had taken an oath “to do impartial justice according to the Constitution and the laws.”

When the name of Senator James W. Grimes of Iowa was called, Fessenden asked for a moment’s delay, in order that the senator, who was ill, might be brought into the chamber. He was carried in and placed in his seat. Before the Chief-Justice summoned him to answer he suggested that Grimes might answer from his seat; but the ill senator rose with the aid of friends and, after the summons, in a feeble voice answered, “Not guilty.” Perhaps no one of the seven was afterward so roundly abused by newspapers and politicians who had formerly been his friends.

Senator Joseph F. Fowler of Tennessee had been claimed by both sides, since he had voted on some questions favorable to[Pg 208] the Radicals and on others favorable to the President. Though not a man of conspicuous ability, he was regarded as level-headed. After his vote of “Not guilty” he received a despatch congratulating him on the position he had taken, to which he answered, “I acted for my country and posterity, in obedience to the voice of God.”

After my vote of “Not guilty,” which created no surprise, Senator Edmund G. Ross of Kansas was the next Republican to disappoint his party friends. He had begun political life as an Abolitionist and had been appointed to fill the unexpired term of the noted senator, “Jim” Lane. He had voted with the Radicals on some questions, and the reticence he had maintained with regard to his position on impeachment subjected him to enormous pressure. Still he maintained silence, and the audience held its breath until, in a clear voice he unhesitatingly answered, “Not guilty.” As Ross had been the main hope of the Radicals, his vote made a sensation. It was claimed that a sum of money had been subscribed to reward him for taking the stand he did contrary to the sentiment of the people of Kansas, who had threatened him with expulsion from the State if he voted for the President. He was made to suffer heavily for his adherence to principle, and his immediate hardships and poverty indicated that he was not bribed. After the trial was over, he stated in the Senate that he had entertained doubts on some of the articles until a few days before the vote, but had settled the matter in his own mind, as he said, “by giving his country the benefit of his doubts.”

Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, though he had voted for the resolution censuring Stanton, had been outspoken against impeachment; consequently his vote of “Not guilty” awakened no surprise. His position was based on the harm which would be done to the country by setting the example of impeaching a President, and he expressed the opinion that if Johnson were removed on such partizan grounds, “no future President will be safe who happens to differ with a majority of the House and two thirds of the Senate on any measure desired by them, particularly if of a political character.” In other words, his action was based on antagonism to the principle of the “recall” as it is being urged to-day.

Senator Peter G. Van Winkle of West Virginia was a substantial, fair-minded man, who on some questions had favored the President and on others had voted with the Radicals. Still, his vote of “Not guilty” occasioned no surprise.

During the clamor from Missouri to induce me to change my attitude, I was appealed to by the Missouri delegation in Congress, who, as a body, besought me to vote for impeachment. Under the stress of their urging I entertained momentarily the question of resigning, but as that would have brought victory to the side of the impeachers, I resolved to stay. On May 13 I received from St. Louis a despatch making a final appeal, which read:

Every one of the seven Republican senators who voted against impeachment was relegated to private life at the expiration of his term. In addition to all kinds of printed and written abuse, I was burned in effigy at Macon, Missouri.

HOW TIME VINDICATED THE RIGHT

MY part in this crisis strained some of my friendships, particularly that with Sumner. At first he had been rather opposed to impeachment, especially to the eleventh article, remarking that no one but a Pennsylvania justice of the peace (alluding to Thad. Stevens) could have drawn that article; but he and Stevens were “thick as thieves” before the trial terminated. Meantime, as Sumner’s enthusiasm for impeachment grew, his regard for those of us who opposed it lessened. After the trial he directed a personal remark at me in the senate chamber that rankled. I was denouncing the course of the managers of impeachment for converting themselves[Pg 209] into a committee to investigate and punish the seven senators. They sent telegrams and spies over the country. Butler was the most active in using the spy system, and it became an acute annoyance. Mr. Fessenden complained of it to me. He said, “I cannot go out at night without being pursued by spies who come behind me at every cross street.” Others told me the same. I had nothing to fear, for there was nothing they might not know about me. While I was denouncing the conduct of this committee as that of traitors, Sumner in a taunting voice exclaimed, “It is only the wounded bird that flutters.”

The coldness between us lasted for several years. In fact, it was not until the controversy over the treaty for annexing Santo Domingo arose that I had any further relations with him. At that time I had gone to Washington to argue a case before the Supreme Court, and Mr. Sumner asked me to dinner. I was a little surprised, but I went to his dinner, where I found a very good company. When I was ready to bid him good night, he insisted on my staying, as he wished to talk with me; but I was reluctant, as I wanted to do some work before I went to sleep. Still he insisted, and after Senator Thurman, who lingered enjoying his cigar, had gone, Sumner said that he had desired for several years to have a private talk with me over the impeachment of Johnson. He then said impressively:

“Mr. Senator,” I answered, “I am very glad to hear you say so for my own satisfaction, and also on your own account, because your course was a disappointment. I believed that you would take ground against impeachment.”

“That was my original impression,” he replied, “but Johnson talked so foolishly, and was so abusive, I came to believe it would be just as well to turn him out.” After a pause he repeated earnestly: “I didn’t want to die without making this confession, that in the matter of impeachment you were right and I was wrong. But,” he added, “if it is just as convenient to you, I would rather you would say nothing about it until I am dead—and I won’t live many years.”

In his “Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate, and Cabinet” John Sherman says:

James G. Blaine in “Twenty Years of Congress” is less apologetic and more candid. He says:

It would be well if those who are urging the “recall” as a general panacea for mistakes and dissatisfaction in the working of elections, would study the personal motives and partizan manœuverings which were the soul and body of this enormity of injustice in American history.

“How would you like a Christmas day deep in the woods, with no tissue-paper parcels or tinsel ribbon, with the people that you know best and like best and their children, with old English carols and games and wassail-songs and morris-dances, and stockings, and a huge bowl of innocent punch, and presents that cost fifteen cents, and no more, on pain of death? Now, how would you?”

“They can,” said the Angel, snapping her glove-clasp into its socket. She rose.

“I should like that,” she said. “I remember seventy Christmases, but none like that.”

“If I go,” said the Objector, “my Christmas-tree shall be a living tree. No cut-down, mutilated trees in a forest for me.”

The Angel frowned. Commentators spring up to amend the text almost before a miraculous visitant can catch a ferry-boat back to town. “We will see,” she said with the asperity common to women and angels.

MANY were called before our party of foresters was chosen. We were told that a little inn on a mountain-side, in a redwood grove, even in California, is a drafty place for aged parents and young children to be laid. And who would be separated from his own on Christmas day?

We found, too, that when Heaven had made the marriages between our friends, that no trouble had been taken to pair them for like qualities. Initiative and energy lay in streaks in families: the woman would, and the man would not, or the other way around, which, alas! was no way around at all, but just an impasse. Then there were aged parents-in-law who purposed to eat their turkey in the immemorial, family way or to perish forthwith of reproachful old age; others frankly confessed themselves caught in the Christmas mill: it was not that they enjoyed shopping for Christmas, or even the effects of Christmas-shopping, but to stop seemed perilous. Had it been tried?

At length forty freed spirits agreed.[Pg 211] Muir Inn, part way up the shaggy flank of Mount Tamalpais, was to be the place; December 24 was to be the time; and sixteen young people were to do what they could toward supplying the action.

On the day before Christmas seven of us, tucked in a touring-car, were climbing the foot-hills opposite the purple bulk of the mountain. A soft drizzle hung its drops on the fronds of the redwoods and made the leaves of the dwarf manzanita look ashen on their twisted, wine-red stems. As we beat up the grade, the world behind and below began to unroll, the inlets of the bay and the light-lying islands flattened to a map, while across and beyond we lifted San Francisco on her hills. The broken gray of the city houses laid washes of color, one above another, dove against rose-gray, against fawn, against pearl, and all cut by the sharper tones of the dark buildings.

At the crest of the foot-hills the car plunged down into the green-black shade of Muir Woods. Autumn and winter had touched the interior of the forest, and left sparse, lantern-like leaves of pale yellow on the bushes along the stream that gave to the wide, dim evergreen space an air of delicate and transient mortality. We ran beside the stream, the huge, shifting columns and the red, needle-silenced ground flowing past us, and on our eyelashes clung the caressing mist. Then our good cylinders labored hard to lift us by a winding, slippery grade up the abrupt side of the mountain to the inn. At a turn, without warning, we came out on a little plateau and up to the weather-stained building itself.

As we stopped, the inn doors flew open, and out on the porches came friends, and friends, children, young girls, and men called our names, tossing us greetings and laughing. Something tightened in the throat, and we knew, before we tore the rugs off our knees, that the Muir Woods Christmas was going to be—different.

The inn was chiefly one big room of seventy feet or so smelling of evergreens. The fireplace, built for a sleigh-and-six, held a red mound of fire that just now gnawed, half-sated, at the carcass of a tree. Evergreens hung from the rafters, and all the tangle of California winter woods—wild huckleberry, manzanita, sallol, Oregon grape, rose-haws, Woodwardia fern, as tall as the tallest child, and swordfern—branched forth from jars in the corners.

We were busy at once. There were costumes to arrange for the charades, and costumes to trim in secrecy for the Christmas masque in the woods; there were stockings—each family had brought characteristic ones for its group—to make ready to be strung on the wire in front of the fire; there were derisive jingles to be written and affixed to fifteen-cent presents for one’s dearest friend; ferns, evergreens, and candies had to be tied to things; there were packages with disguised contours to be hidden. Concealment, like a worm, preyed everywhere, and people talked muffledly because of twine and tacks between the teeth. Busy, efficient men nailed things, to the envy of wives who had brought ruminative, pocket-handed men of the smoking variety. The children romped and peeped at forbidden things, and the people who were not their mothers said they were wonderfully good, and what the mothers said was not recorded. About the whole place there was such a smell of evergreens and such a mood of noisy fellowship, climbing, nailing, upsetting, and standing about, that one suddenly realized that Dickens was not a caricaturist, just a merrymaker.

When the lights were lighted and things at their busiest, so that they could not possibly be moved from the tables, the waiters came to lay the cloth for Christmas-eve dinner. This sent us all to the fire. Laps were made, two-child deep; the very little people were fed hygienic pulp and simmered into drowsiness, so that they could be put to bed; and the women, and especially the girls, went and dressed in chilly little bedrooms smelling of matting.

We got back to the warm room again, to find that the tables had been laid in the form of a great cross, red berries at every place. All seemed sweet and familiar as we seated ourselves, for every face was the face of a friend. Food came and went, songs, stories, laughter; toasts were drunk and answered, and we wagged our heads and said the inevitable thing, “There used to be a time when people had families the size of this!” and were half sad and half glad for the decline of the good old times of abundance.

After dinner, chairs and tables were pushed aside, the great fire was fed again, and by its light Christmas stories, in sober pantomime, were enacted: Joseph and Mary, foot-sore and weary, knocked at the door of the inn at Bethlehem, and found not where to lay their heads; the shepherds fed their flocks by night, and a voice sang of peace on earth, good-will to men; then came the Magi, following the star, to the manger where the Child was laid and offered gifts of frankincense and myrrh, and all the simple, reverent scenes spelled adoration for those who watched. The absence of footlights and formal costumes made the little plays seem a part of some humble worship in memory of the hallowed and gracious time. The familiar faces, with a thousand every-day associations, perhaps, under veil or turban took on a new suggestion, a shade of mystery from a time and thought not wholly ours, yet wrought with ours by centuries of faith.

“Mirth is also of Heaven’s making,” and this soberness melted into laughter with the tramping of feet as the big circle formed to play the old English ring-games that have been sung and played where children have gathered, in merrymaking times, since our speech broke into rugged, rhythmic verse. As the older children and most of the grown people played,—for only trundle-bed trash had been put to bed,—the rope in front of the fire was putting forth a grotesque fruitage of harlequin stockings, stuffed with ten-cent surprises. One giant, pink sock, decorated with carnations, was for some one’s big, red-haired nephew, and the St. Patrick[Pg 215] green one, bound with serpents, was marked “For Rattlesnake Pete, the Sierra Snake-Destroyer.” And so all down the line the stockings mocked their owners with intimate audacities. There were genuine baby stockings, too, to melt one’s heart, so little, woolly, and shrunken from the wash.

It grew late; the piano, which had been beating its life out all the evening over, “Oats, Pease, Beans, and Barley Grows” and “London Bridge is Falling Down, O My Lady!” began whispering a strange, old air, a marching tune with a pulse of marching feet, more and more loudly, until suddenly we all sang in lusty unison:

when in came the large and paunchy punch-bowl, borne by the stoutest of the waiters. All in line, singing and marching, old and young, we circled in a wide detour about the room, coming to a stand, our glasses high, about the wassail-bowl.

“Christmas! God bless us!” We drank the toast, and even the lip of the abstainer was touched with the foam of egg-nog.

When at last all was quiet for the night, the big room dark and empty, and the heavy line of forty stockings sagged and bulged in front of the fire, several sober rioters stole back for a few last words.

“The only thing that could spoil Christmas now,” said an anxious Martha, stooping to pick up a string from the floor, “would be that some of the younger children who have been sending letters to Santa Claus for automobiles and hill-coasters may be disappointed by ten-cent toys.”

“I know children,” said the Chief Emancipator. “They are not half as mercenary as we think. Play is what they love. They will never think of hill-coasters on the happy day when the grown people come to their senses and give themselves up to fun.”

Did you ever wake on a Christmas morning to the sound of fresh voices singing at your door and the soft swish of a redwood bough across your window-pane—eyes opening upon walls as bare as the walls of a stable, and the smell and feel of Christmas in the air of your naked little room?

The carolers were down from the little cabins on the hillside where they had slept with a figment of roof between them and the stars, and the cries of Merry Christmas beat upon our doors until we all came together, in noisy collision; on the porches, and swept in to strip the line of stockings. The babies dropped on the floor with their pouches, dumping their toys frankly between their outspread legs, laughing, crooning, and picking, with tiny, pointed fingers, at the mystery of things. It was with them, as the wise woman had said, all bubbling contentment and delight. Little tin wagons bounded over the floor, any side up, two babies abreast, and every mouth blew upon squeakers and trumpets the blasts of which were mercifully tempered to the short wind of the little lambs. Our own gifts unmasked, with even-handed justice, our inner foibles, but the children’s came to the breakfast table with them in a spirit of peace. Live stock surrounded every plate, and cattle fed from porcelain mangers, and became entangled in patent breakfast foods.

As breakfast ended, a call came from the doorway, “Who wants to come with me to the woods and pick out a Christmas tree?” It was she of the Yerba Buena wreath and shoe-top skirt. We all wanted to come. This finding of the tree was to be a ceremony. Though a faint mist was still a-drift, no one cared, and a few wraps made the children snug.

A dozen tangled little paths lead down among the chaparral to the redwoods, and here the children gathered from everywhere, laughing and calling among the undergrowth, scattering, breaking, and[Pg 216] running down the steep paths exactly as a brood of quail run and call and scatter through the mesquite under the convoy of their crested leader.

“The Woodsman! The Woodsman! First we must find a woodsman with an ax to cut the Christmas-tree,” called the leader. “He used to live over here. Who can find him?”

Her brood scurried here and there, unconsciously led where she would, beating up the brush, when suddenly, shouting with delight, they came full upon a man with an ax—a flannel-shirted man with a kind face and a great, broad, shining ax.

“Yes, I am the Woodsman,” he called. “May I cut a Christmas-tree for you this morning?” He came forward, and jumped straight into the story, without preliminaries. The whole flock surged down upon him and off to find the tree, accepting his being there with his ax as children do accept pleasant things. We all went down into the winding wood road, almost roofed over by redwood plumes, the little children stopping to consult gravely with the Woodsman about the suitability of trees two hundred feet high or saplings of a century’s growth, squinting up trunks, considering, rejecting, earnestly intent, each one, upon finding the perfect tree. The older conspirators, half lost in brake and fern, kept close behind.

“This one I think will do,” cried the Woodsman at last, and he lifted his ax.

At that moment from the hollow trunk of a redwood another figure stepped out, and all the children started, he was so strange.

“I am the Spirit of the Woods,” he said in a deep voice; “I come to plead with you for the life of this tree.”

He wore a mantle bordered with fern and moss. Instead of hair, his head was closely covered with the greenish lichen that grows on the north side of trees in winter, and his beard was of long, gray moss. He spoke very earnestly, and told the children how sweet it is to live, as a tree, in the forest. They were not exactly frightened; they even drew a step nearer: in that beautiful, solemn place strange things might happen. Then the Woodsman once more lifted his ax, when a very little boy, quite unprompted, and to every one’s surprise, suddenly broke from his father, and ran to the Woodsman, clasping his arms about him, crying out for the life of the tree.

“Don’t cut it down!” he sobbed. “It wants to be a tree; it doesn’t want to be logs.”

We were quite still for a moment, then the Spirit of the Woods said: “The tree has another friend. I thought I was the only one who really loved it.” Then turning to us all, he said with authority: “Do as the child bids. Come with me, for I have something to show you.” He moved with a long stride in his long mantle, the moss wagged from his sleeves like the beard of a goat, and the children crowded nearer to the Woodsman; but at a turn of the road they all cried out and ran forward. Growing beside the road, with its branches full of gold and silver ornaments, snow and cranberries and gifts, was a lovely living Christmas-tree, bearing its shining fruitage in the thick forest.

Then all took hands and danced about the tree, and sang to it, and praised it, and called it beautiful. From the thick branches, which were not so very high in that high place, grown people took packages marked with names. There were little Robin Hood costumes for several of the children, with feathered caps and feathered bows, and a Cupid’s dress of white gauze and filmy wings for the four-year-old cherub, and green mantles for every one, that slipped over the head, and wreaths of fresh green vines for the hair. The living tree gave up toys and tinsel and everything, as other trees, that have given up their lives, have never been known to do. The children starred themselves over with its ornaments, and everybody dressed at the same moment. The pretty girls wrapped tinsel and cranberry ropes in their hair, and looked prettier than ever. It was so deep in the forest that for mirrors each must inquire of the eyes that loved her for news of how she looked.

By the time that the tree was stripped quite bare, with only a spangle here or a fleece of snow there, the whole party was peacocking in its finery down the wood road, two by two, and two by two: the Woodsman with his boy on his shoulder; the green-mantled, vine-wreathed folk; the lonely Spirit of the Woods, a hesitating child peeping up at him; the little Robin Hoods, a-chase for sparrows; and, straggling behind the rest, the Cupid-baby,[Pg 217] like a new-born butterfly, not quite able either to run or to fly. And so, winding with the winding red road, all our brightness subdued to the dim atmosphere in which we moved,—that impalpable violet that floats about the stems of the trees in these vast groves, giving an almost intolerable beauty to the age-old trunks,—we came to recognize that about us were the real Christmas-trees; for they were fast-rooted here when homeless Mary was with child in Bethlehem.

What broke the spell was the old Edenic curse. Some one spoke of food. I think it was a man. He said, in effect, that he wished to be comforted with apples; that he was sick of love; he described a cold Christmas dinner; then a dinner burned to a crisp and served to forty empty chairs. It was a moving tale, and had that effect upon our procession.

The dinner-hour had been set early that every child might come; and one or two little heads, with their first thistle-down thatch, beside the old white ones, made the Christmas dinner seem more than ever a gracious family feast. We did not come dressed as people dining on Christmas day, but all still in our mantles of forest green and wreaths of vine. Down the tables, formed like a cross, shone the red of toyon berries, in the folds of the girls’ coiled hair and in the chains about children’s necks.

If there, was a moment of disillusionment, it was the one in which it was discovered that the Spirit of the Woods did not subsist on wood-alcohol, as had been rumored, but contrived large pieces of turkey between the fringes of moss about his lips. But this, too, had a happy influence, because it loosened some rather silent tongues, and the children’s talk burst out fluent and simultaneous.

Housed intimately in by the evergreen-hung walls, the fire-light and soft lamps bringing us into one warm group, the sense of comradeship, up there on the big, misty mountain, and the gracious presence of little children and our own, dear people, brought us to our feet to sing again the wassail-song.

And as we stood, glasses lifted, we looked from the faces that had made our own first Christmases bright to the little ones, just above the cloth, and pledged the birth of this good, new way of being glad on Christmas day.

MISS ASHBELL’S first name was Matilda, but everybody at her boarding-house called her “Miss Mittie” by way of friendliness to a stranger; nor did they express much wonder as to what had brought her from Philadelphia to Laramie, because to a Wyomingite it is the most natural thing in the world that anybody should forsake every other place in the world for Wyoming, the only wonder being that millions more did not do it all the time. Possibly these dwellers on the altitudes would have thought her being in Laramie still more natural had they seen the house of her birth and rearing, one of those three-hundred-and-forty-seven-thousand-all-just-alike homes for which Philadelphia is famous, each with its bath-room, each bath-room with its cake of Cashmere bouquet soap, each parlor with its onyx-topped table between the two lace-curtained windows; and outside, white marble steps, and white, solid wood shutters to keep the Indians out at night. That is, they were to keep the Indians out, but as the Indians went faster than Philadelphia, the shutters are there yet. And Miss Mittie missed them dreadfully in Laramie; it didn’t seem like home if you couldn’t barricade at night, and scrub white marble steps in the morning.

But at Mrs. Ingersoll’s store, where Miss Mittie “had the ribbons,” they called her “Holy Calm,” pronouncing it “ca’m.” Coming from peaceful nights behind white, solid shutters, calm was to be expected, though perhaps not so much of it as Miss Mittie had. Her calm was of the peculiarly Quaker variety that exasperated you to the depths: instantly your desire was to ruffle it, to tear it open, and find out what was underneath, and if it were calm all through, and holy, or just put on for effect. And you felt somehow that the Lord made her on Sunday, after He had rested from His labors in the meetings attended by her father and mother; and by the same token, you felt that the Lord made Roddy McQueed on Monday, as a preliminary to getting the creative hand in on original chaos. It is beyond me to determine why these two should have been each other’s particular fate, yet such was the case.

My one experience with Miss Mittie showed me what she was. It was in the days when they were wearing yard-long hat-pins as articles of warfare. I went into the store to buy two short ones, and Holy Calm showed me a cushionful of rapiers, and told me “those were all they had now.”

There was just something in the way she said it that “got” me. I retorted that she didn’t know her stock—that I had bought proper hat-pins there three months before on my way up to the ranch, and there were a million of ’em still in a box.

“Oh, only two sold,” said she, taking it for truth, though never till that instant had she set eyes on me. “Then they must all be here except those two,” and with that, she drew out a box marked “ruching” in black letters six inches long. It contained ruching.

Miss Mittie only murmured apologetically to the box, “Not here, I see,” and drew forth another marked “stocks” containing stocks, and then one marked “gloves” containing gloves, and a fourth marked “ties” containing ties.

At this point my wickedness took me, and I showed her a box marked “corsets” containing corsets, a box marked “baby ribbon” containing baby ribbon, a box marked “embroidery cotton” containing embroidery cotton; after which I swept a commanding gesture over a table where silk hose were displayed and said artfully, “You’d better look under those stockings.”

She thanked me for the kind suggestion and conscientiously turned over every pair, soberly telling me, when she was through, she “didn’t see any hat-pins.” Neither did she see the glitter in my eye nor hear the derision in my voice; she positively never suspected that I was “doing her” in a way that would have reduced a New York “saleslady” either to rage or a red-faced[Pg 219] pulp. I’d have kept it up for an hour until I forced her to show some sign of human feeling, but time was pressing, and I couldn’t sacrifice my sleeping-car berth east for the fine sport of baiting her Holy Calm. I stepped behind the counter and took a box, in full sight all the time, marked “hat-pins—short,” opened it, and put it in her hand.

No written words can convey the manner in which she said, “Oh, yes—two of those. Ten cents,” and wrote her slip.

I went off feeling defeated—the calm had never quivered; I had mentally made no more impression on her than if she’d been a waxwork.

But it had been borne in upon me that Miss Mittie’s soul needed saving to a world of human endeavor—that she was in bondage to some intangible inner force; and I was still thinking of her as a psychological phenomenon, wondering how a person so devoid of perception and imagination could contrive to earn her daily bread even in Wyoming, where the stress of commercial conditions is much easier than in the East, when the porter took my suitcase from Roddy’s hand and he cheered me off.

Roddy had driven me down from the ranch,—an all-day trip across the plains, with a sandwich lunch in the middle,—and he had made use of the opportunity to tell me the whole, true story of his life. He was emphatic on the truth of it, and said that I ought to write it up for the New York papers; and with this in view he went into details that would have made me faint away if they had been true. But knowing Roddy after three summers of him, I took his recitation quietly. My vague “Did you’s?” annoyed him but stimulated him to larger invention; and when at last we reached Laramie, he was in fine fettle for an adventure that would eclipse all the rest.

In this mood he strolled up the street after leaving me, and almost trampled Mrs. Ingersoll under foot as she dashed out of her store. She, too, had just received defeat at the hands of Holy Calm, and felt she had to save a soul alive.

Mrs. Ingersoll and Roddy were friends, after a sort. Everybody in the country was friends with him in the same fashion, as you’ve got to be with a next-to-nature man who has a reputation for originality in sin and has been in the papers no less than five times for it. So when Roddy and she collided and he said: “Why, hello, Mis’ Ingersoll! I didn’t go fer to smash ye,” and held out his big paw, she, with fine courtesy, gave him her hand and told him, smiling as though she liked to be smashed by careless cow-boys, “You’re just the one I want to see.”

Roddy was flattered. He knew, of course, that he was “just the one” any lady would want to see,—why not?—but somehow Mrs. Ingersoll was a little bit different from the rest. She did things, too, and her name was in the papers almost any time, attached to real news. Didn’t she organize the Laramie brass band that beat the Cheyenne band all to pieces?

So it really meant something to be wanted to be seen by her, and Roddy, hastily reviewing the situation, returned a handsome, “Well, you’re jest the one I wanta see. Now, ain’t that two of a kind?” and felt he had scored himself.

This paved the way for confidences. They were both smarting from too much Holy Calm. Mrs. Ingersoll blurted out her own experience, and asked Roddy how did he account for a girl like that?

Roddy pushed his hat back on his head to let out the thought that Miss Mittie seemed to lack a sense of humor and ought to be shown a thing or two; Mrs. Ingersoll, however, inclined to the belief that the trouble was “Holy Calm was too good for use,” or at least too good for any use in a millinery establishment. Roddy suggested that “something might be done fer her if ye went about it right,” but Mrs. Ingersoll averred despairingly that you’d never get an idea into Miss Mittie’s head short of cutting it open with an ax. However, after sifting the situation back and forth between them, the upshot was a soul-saving plot: Mrs. Ingersoll was to slip out just before closing time, leaving Miss Mittie to shut up shop alone; then Roddy, with a gang of cow-boys, was to “jump the store” and hold her up for a couple of hundred yards of ribbon, which they were to carry up to Mrs. Ingersoll’s house afterward.

All started off according to program. Holy Calm, softly humming to herself, was putting the store to bed as snug as anything, and thinking of her well-earned rest, when five young, seemingly desperate[Pg 220] rascals, Roddy leading, fired their guns in the air and landed with a bounce inside, two of the boys blocking the door so she couldn’t get away.

“What can I do for you, gentlemen?” she asked, fixing her gaze and a smile on Roddy, whom she had met, and admired tremendously for the tales told of him.

Roddy was just a trifle dashed by her politeness, for he’d “allowed she’d screech, er something, like a woman always does,” and when anybody screeched his rule was, “Give ’em some more o’ the same medicine.” But under her serene, uncomprehending stare Roddy forgot what he’d come for.

Beany Johnson nudged him in the ribs as a reminder, and then, seeing a hesitancy, kicked him with his spur. Thus pushed to his duty, Roddy blurted out:

“I want some ribbon—pink ribbon—fer a church-fest’val decorations.” He slipped his gun into its holster, gave a hitch to his chaps and a jerk to the red handkerchief about his neck, picked up a roll from the counter, and told her in an offhand way: “This here will do. Gimme forty yards offen it,” and began carelessly unwinding it on the counter.

“There aren’t forty yards in that piece,” said she, taking the roll from his hand with her holiest calm and a smile at him, and at the same time noting the number on the roll. “There’s only eight and a quarter.”

She measured off the eight and a quarter, then ten from another roll, said she was sorry she couldn’t match that pink exactly, but it was “special-sale goods,” and wouldn’t something else do, since it was for a church and not for a dress? The quality would be absolutely the same; the store didn’t carry any but the best.

Roddy, who had somewhat found himself by this time, amiably explained that “It didn’t matter about the match; it was only fer a church, anyways,” and handed her a roll of bright green.

She measured it demurely without looking at him. Still, it wouldn’t have helped her if she had; she wouldn’t have perceived the glitter of his eye.

With the green on the counter his self-confidence entirely returned. At the same time Beany Johnson and Hank Homans began to clamor, their arms overflowing with ribbons, that she measure some for them; and presently upon that counter lay a haystack of silk of all colors of the rainbow, and every roll that the boys could lay hands on had been unwound.

“Thirty-seven dollars and five cents,” said Miss Mittie. “But I’ll throw in the remnant and call it an even thirty-seven, since you took so much.” She had done the sum all in her head while she was measuring off!

“Charge it,” said Roddy, loftily. “This here gent—” He presented Hank, who bowed acknowledgment—“is Mr. Andy Carnegie. I guess you heard of him often enough, and know you can trust him all right; an’ this here one with the mustache is Mr. Pierpont Morgan. I am John D. Rockyfelly.” That being the preconcerted cue for them to go on with their parts, they began gathering the ribbons into their arms as fast as they could, meaning to cut and run with them.

“Excuse me, but this is a cash-down store,” informed Miss Mittie, laying her hand on the ribbons nearest her. “I can’t charge anything. I’m sorry not to oblige,—” She turned a little pale at the thought of it,—“but you see how it is; I’m not allowed, so I can’t. Thirty-seven dollars, please.”

“Well, I guess you won’t refuse us,” said Roddy, ingratiatingly, pulling surreptitiously at the ribbons while Hank added this sweet touch, “it’s fer a strawb’ry fest’val—real strawb’ries, real cream, you know.” (The season was late October.)

The words gave Roddy an idea. “Perhaps you’d like to go—with me.” The wretch beamed at her, thinking here was the best chance yet to “do her one” and send the shivers over her in a way she’d never forget.

A faint tinge of color suffused her cheeks. How kind of him, the great Roddy, to want her! She spoke, however, with her calm:

“I’d like to go with you ever so much. Yes, I’m sure I can go to-night; I haven’t anything else. I’ll go,” she accepted, making what she felt a momentous decision. Never yet had she been anywhere with a real live cow-boy, and it had been the dream of her life—the dream now at last come true! What a story to write[Pg 221] home to Philadelphia! She smiled happily at Roddy, then, suddenly remembering her duty, said, “Thirty-seven dollars, please,” but very sweetly, and as though she hated to ask him for it after that invitation, and felt it not quite ladylike.

“Charge it, please,” he gave back, with a sweetness imitating her own, while a flush was beginning to be felt on his cheeks also. He hadn’t expected her to take him up so quickly. He was prepared to wheedle and urge, and it made him feel just a bit mean to see her so eager to go with him to a fictitious festival; and after his first stab of self-pride came the thought, was he “the first fella ever ast her to go somewheres in the evening? Didn’t she git no amusement at all? Why, the poor kid!”

“I haven’t been to one thing,” she replied, giving him a wistful look, and adding with a brighter one and a sigh, “until to-night.”

Meanwhile the two guards at the door had become so entranced with the scene at the ribbon counter that they’d cast aside their duty: they acknowledged the duty, however, by tiptoeing to the region of the ribbons, flattering themselves that, if they were not heard, they would not be seen.

Miss Mittie swept a glance at the five young men ranged before her and then at the clock. It was ten minutes past closing-time, and the street door stood wide open! Dreadful! In her shy delight at the prospect of a strawberry festival, she’d forgotten her sacred trust in putting the store to bed. What would Mrs. Ingersoll say when she found it out?

With a quick, “Excuse me,” she slipped along behind the counter, those five cow-boys standing like gawks and watching her do it, and locked the door and put the key in her pocket. She took the key, naturally, so she could get in the next morning, and she was intending to let the young men out by a certain back way in order that nobody should know how remiss she’d been. Returning hurriedly, she said, “Thirty-seven dollars, please,” and stuck her pencil in her hair.

The young men had been exchanging disconcerted glances. Roddy dropped his ribbon on the counter. Figuratively speaking, he threw up the sponge then; but it was Hank Homans who first found a usable tongue.

“I guess we don’t want it, after all,” said he, depositing his armful beside Roddy’s.

She smiled at him a smile that nothing but calm that is calm all through can produce on earth, and said, “Thirty-seven dollars, please.”

“No—I guess we don’t want it,” corroborated Roddy, trying to appear self-confident while he bunched his ribbons together with decisive gestures that eschewed ribbons from his life forever.

For the fraction of a second she appeared to believe it; then she repeated, “Thirty-seven dollars,” and thrust the slip across the pile at him.

She took this for a pleasantry, and held out her hand for the money. At the same moment he felt a spur dig into his boot; the situation was become exceedingly unpleasant to his fellow-missioners. What was the girl up to, anyway? And what in thunder did she mean by locking them in? Beany Johnson came to the rescue.

“I say, why, this here was—a—er—kinder joke,” he explained sheepishly, and feeling dreadfully uncomfortable.

“I don’t see it,” she remarked. Literally she didn’t. “What is the joke?”

“Why—er—all this here—” He waved his hand over the pile of ribbons—“this here pink ribbon hold-up—why, it was all a—er—kinder joke, without meanin’ any offense,” he trailed off, blushing.

“Well, it is, anyway,” he assured her, desperately. “It’s what it is all right—a joke.”

For a moment after this brutal confession they thought comprehension dawned in her eyes; then she murmured, looking critically at the ribbon: “But I’m sure I measured it all right; I never make mistakes on ribbons. Mrs. Ingersoll will tell you that. I was very particular as I went along. And I know I counted it right—thirty-seven dollars, and the remnant, five[Pg 222] cents; but I threw that off; I didn’t charge it on the slip.” She glanced at the slip to make sure on that point.

“Oh, you’re all right,” Hank chipped in courageously. “We ain’t kickin’ on yer measurin’. An’ the thirty-seven—it’s all right, too; but—why—er—”

“I gave you all-silk ribbon, no cotton-back,” she interrupted. “I looked at every piece before I undid it. There’s some cotton-back in the store for cheap trimmings and flower ties, but I was very particular to give you the same as you started out with—that pink Mr. McQueed took first.” She began rummaging the pile for the original sample.

“Oh, that’s all right; we ain’t kickin’ on the quality,” Hank rumbled on, despite the pucker on her brow feeling he was making progress—that by a process of elimination of false scents he was gradually getting her on the track of a true apprehension. He motioned with his hand to include the others. “We ain’t kickin’ on that part of it, fer it’s all right; but—”

“Then I don’t see what isn’t all right,” she sighed helplessly, glancing at the sale-slip to make sure the joke wasn’t there. “Yes, thirty-seven.” With that a light dawned on her face, and she handed the slip to him. “Oh, I see,” she cried, “I’ve been asking the wrong gentleman to pay!”

Beany only shook his head and pushed the bill aside. He was beginning to perspire, and the others, coming to his rescue in a chorus, protested:

“But it was all a joke—this here. Don’t you see?” hoping she’d see and make the best of it by opening the door and telling them to get out for a mean lot of—, well, anything you like and can imagine as coming from her chaste lips. Getting out was now all they were capable of thinking of in the present predicament; they wouldn’t have cared what she called them. Hank added firmly, and as a sort of inspiration, “You see, we don’t want it now.”

She looked from one to the other of them, repeating, “Don’t want it now, did you say?” Then with another of her comprehending smiles, “But you ain’t the kind of gentlemen that orders things you don’t want, and then don’t pay up for ’em, and you wouldn’t disappoint a church. Besides—” Here she presented them with a smile apiece—“I know you wouldn’t leave a lady to roll up ’most two hundred yards of ribbon just for a matter of thirty-seven dollars.”

“It wouldn’t be kinder jes right,” Hank admitted, seeing a chance here to slide out on excuses. “Sure it wouldn’t; but we didn’t none of us fellas think o’ that—”

She broke in on him with a quick, “I see it now!” and they waited breathless while she looked at the price-tags on several rolls. “You think I made a mistake in the different prices, carrying the different widths in my head, and you’re all too nice to tell me for fear you’ll get me in trouble with Mrs. Ingersoll. Well, maybe I did. Nobody’s perfect; no matter how careful you are, you’re liable to a slip-up once in a while. But I’ll measure it again and count it over just to satisfy you.”

She took a long ribbon in her hand. Inwardly they groaned, and Roddy felt spurs digging at his legs and elbows at his ribs that said, “You got us into this fix; now get us out, and be quick about it, too.”

But Roddy seemed to have been struck with paralysis. The truth is, Miss Mittie had those young missioners cowed. They didn’t dare tell her to her face how they’d planned and played a mean joke on her confiding innocence when she’d never done anything to harm or annoy them in the whole of her blameless life. To leave her to roll up that pile of ribbon was, as Roddy afterward confessed when he told me the story, “sich a dirty, ornery trick to play on a lady as only a coyote would think of.” And, then, they didn’t dare to give Mrs. Ingersoll away. Yet if they didn’t make a clean breast of it and show Miss Mittie just how low-down cussed they’d been, how were they to get the key? They couldn’t take it from her by force; at least things hadn’t reached the point where they felt they could “do anything that was reely ungentlemanly,” as Roddy said. And then this thought came to all of them: suppose they did make her understand, and “she struck it hoppin’ mad an’ kep’ ’em there all night to pay ’em fer it an’ git even!” By this time they felt her capable of anything through sheer lack of imagination.

“One—two—three—four—five—” She measured swiftly, counting aloud as she went that they might be sure she was making no mistake. Under cover [Pg 223]of her voice Hank hissed in Roddy’s ear:

“It’s yer turn to play. Say something, can’t yer? An’ git us outa this here hold-up.”

“Hold-up! I should say yes!” snorted Beany in Roddy’s other ear, suddenly appreciating the real essence of the joke; and then snorted again as he heard “Seventeen—eighteen—nineteen,” accompanied by the rapid swish of silk along the counter.

But all Roddy, now very red of face, could contribute toward a graceful retreat for himself and friends from the scene of disaster was, “We don’t want it,” while pushing the ribbons weakly in her direction.

Before he could think of anything else, she raised her unsuspicious eyes questioningly to his, acknowledging him the leader and his word her law. That was the glance that shot him through the heart—that, and the way she’d beaten them at their own game and never turned a hair. Roddy was enough the man and the sport to appreciate the laugh on himself.

“Fellas, the drinks are on us,” he informed them, grimly. “The little girl gits the jackpot. It’s up to us to shell out an’ be P. D. Q. about it, too.”

Miss Mittie stopped her measuring, since he was satisfied to take the ribbon as it was, and put the slip into his hand with a smile that said, “Now I’ll be ready to go with you to our entertainment.”

They made up the amount with difficulty,—it took every cent Roddy had and most of the spare cash in the party,—and when he had given it to her, he leaned over the counter, almost to kissing distance, and said:

All she had, and she was giving it to him in earnest! In one swift flash it came to him why she hadn’t seen through the mean joke they were playing on her: she had trusted him too much; or, as he more picturesquely put it, “She knowed I was too much of a gentleman to do a girl dirt.” Her lack of comprehension of the true inwardness of the whole affair was precisely her measure of the high estimate she placed on his chivalry; she saw him as his own deepest ideals painted him, and he knew she saw him thus; and in the shine of the heavenly revelation he saw her as lovely calm womanhood confiding in his nobility. Something broke loose in him; his better nature, his affection, his generosity, his instinct for fair play, rose to its occasion, and in one instant he ceased to be a lawless young rapscallion—his heart truly and in the scriptural sense turned from its wickedness and the error of its ways.

“Little girl, if I take this here nickel offen ye, it’s a bargain between us,” he told her, dizzily. “You an’ me’ll belong to each other fer keeps. I mean it, honest.”

She hesitated, blushing from throat to forehead under the gaping stare of the other young fellows; then she said bravely, “I mean it honest, too,” and laid the nickel in his hand.

I fear I’ve told this so jocosely I’ve belittled their miracle, which was very real. I met her on the street in Laramie last summer, five years after the episode, and speaking of her marriage she confided to me that she and Roddy had been “made for each other.”

MISS RICKERT’S article, “The Fraternity Idea among College Women,” in the November number, developed the argument that women’s fraternities like men’s are aristocratic, in that they are self-perpetuating and destructive to freedom of intercourse; that they stand for the privilege of one as against the common rights of all; that the benefits that they claim to bestow upon members are exaggerated, even in the case of individuals, and do not counterbalance the two evils which are inherent in the system and cannot be done away with by regulation from without or reform from within; and that these evils are, as regards members, that the fraternities educate to type, and, as regards outsiders, that they harden social differences into caste.—THE EDITOR.

CAN we do anything? Should we try? Some of the women’s colleges are taking action. Fraternities have recently been abolished at Rockford as contrary to the democratic spirit of that institution; also at Pembroke, on the ground that they had come to absorb too much of the interest that should go into general college activities. At Elmira, where they have been since 1856, they have recently disbanded of their own accord, and they are to be discontinued at Mount Holyoke after 1913.

Among coëducational institutions, however, the fraternal spirit is certainly growing. Although the entire number of fraternity women is less than one fifth that of fraternity men, the active members—that is, the undergraduates—are almost half as numerous as the men, and the rate of initiation is nearly the same. Unless some check is put upon them, the women will soon outnumber the men, as they are said to surpass them in efficiency of organization.

FACULTIES AND THE FRATERNITIES

PRESIDENTS and deans of colleges in which the Greek-letter societies exist show little inclination to abolish them, but rather a distinct recognition of the value of their coöperation in manipulating the student body. On the other hand, officers of institutions where only the local organizations are admitted, with no uncertain voice, declare that they mean to keep the control in their own hands, while the authorities of colleges where no fraternities have ever been admitted[4] are equally emphatic in stating that, as a force hostile to democracy, they shall never be allowed to enter.

The women’s fraternities, which first arose in small colleges that were scarcely more than boarding-schools, were purely in imitation of men’s organizations. But when women students were admitted to the state universities and other big endowed institutions, which were without provision for their students beyond lecture halls, laboratories, and libraries, the situation changed. In so far as the universities were concerned merely with intellectual training and made no attempt to reach the social side, the women’s fraternities took on a certain defensive quality—the banding together of the minority, whose presence was more or less resented by the men. Their practical value in providing safe and comfortable homes for students was quickly recognized both by parents and by deans, upon whom came the responsibility for student welfare. But now this question[Pg 228] of housing is a very minor aspect of the case, as even in institutions where chapter houses exist, these provide for less than one third of the women, usually much less; and in the majority of institutions the fraternities have no chapter houses at all.

On the other hand, the immediate practical use of the fraternities to-day is that by their organization and their training in organizing power they can be trusted to put things through. One dean writes, “Unconsciously one often chooses a fraternity girl to do a necessary thing, knowing that she will see it through.” Several others, deans and presidents, say that the fraternities do valuable service in two ways: first, by making themselves responsible for the conduct of individual members of their societies who give trouble to the faculty; and, second, by taking the initiative, and standing solid in passing measures for the welfare of the whole student body.

These two virtues seem to me to be on very different levels. In regard to the first, I doubt whether any other agency could easily be found to deal as successfully with a recalcitrant student as a self-appointed committee of her intimate associates. It does not follow, however, that this committee need have the social characteristics of the fraternity. As for the second, it would seem that larger and more weighty organizations, such as the Young Women’s Christian Association and the Women’s League, not subject to the jealousies and rivalries of the fraternities, could be of much greater service.

SOME GOOD AGAINST MUCH EVIL

IT is difficult to balance the good and the bad points of the local and national organizations. The former are more democratic in that they are usually larger, being less strictly limited. They are without the element of permanent regulation that comes from the national union. They lack the exchange of ideas which comes from the association of a group of organizations, and their activities are entirely confined to the undergraduate years. In that they are always subject to faculty regulation, it is probable that loyalty to the society or club does not, as is too often the case among the fraternities, usurp the place of loyalty to alma mater.

As for the alleged democracy of the women’s colleges, it is, in many cases, largely theoretical. These colleges provide for their students both housing and social life. The latter is somewhat cloistral, to be sure, but it is open to all. By the very conditions of their life, they do not need the help of the fraternities for disciplinary or legislative measures. Does this mean that the colleges are without cliques, that every student is a sister to every other? Who that has lived in a woman’s college does not know that every class is run usually by one group of friends, with occasional more or less successful attempts by other rival groups to grasp the power? The “fraternity spirit” comes into play all over the world as soon as three people meet, because one combination of two will always be more congenial[Pg 229] than the other, and one is always left out. The fraternity spirit is simply the aristocratic impulse, the social instinct that is ever working toward the formation of class. Then, as it cannot be torn out of human nature, is it to be recognized and allowed to develop freely as in the case of the national organizations, or is it to be checked and controlled from without as in the case of the local organizations, or is it to be ignored, hidden under a cloak of theoretical democracy, as in the women’s colleges?

REFORMING THE SYSTEM

THE furthest limit to which the national organizations will go in the way of outside regulation is to allow a representation of non-fraternity members of the faculty on their boards—a minority, I judge. On the other hand, they freely admit the more obvious faults of their system, and declare their earnest purpose of self-regulation. They even admit that these measures are defensive; they feel that their system is threatened. Let us look at the reforms they propose, and see how far they will go to change its fundamental nature.

They propose to do away, first, with the practice of “rushing” and the hysteria, expense, bitterness, and heartburn that accompany it, and to insure a thorough acquaintance on both sides by postponing pledge-day to the sophomore year. At the same time they mean to raise the scholarship standard for admission, and to regulate the social life of the chapter houses by insisting upon the observance of uniform and reasonable house rules.

The first trouble is that their chance of success in these reforms is very small. They may keep rushing, to all appearances, within bounds, but the feelings that it engenders must arise wherever a few persons are singled out by the arbitrary choice of several rival organizations.

When they postpone pledge-day, they cease to house the very students—the beginners—who in our big, promiscuous universities chiefly need care. Even if they provide for the freshmen by themselves building dormitories, they have to face the problems how the wide acquaintance of the first year is to pass into the segregation of the later years without breaking up friendships formed at that time, and whether, to avoid this thing, there will not be formed among the freshmen defensive cliques which will be taken in as wholes when the time comes. Under these conditions, which actually prevail in at least one university where sophomore pledging has been adopted, the system will remain unchanged.

The scholarship standard for admission, while it will improve the tone and efficiency of the fraternities by keeping out the thoroughly frivolous and incapable element, might conceivably, must inevitably render them still more exclusive by adding pride of intellect to pride of social standing. Even where a most beneficent result is confidently urged, that is, when the fraternity acts as a stimulus to drag the poor student up to the required grade, I am still in doubt. Is it worth while to force scholarship[Pg 230] by means of social reward? Would it not be better to let these girls drop and find their place in another level in which they are moved by real interest in the thing they are doing, instead of by the goad of social ambition? This is at least a question to be considered.

As for the uniform house rules, where is the machinery that can enforce them in an aggregation of societies widely scattered and independent?

But suppose these reforms are carried out to the last degree, how will they affect the system? Will they break down the barriers between Greek and barbarian? Will they make the selection of the college aristocracy any less artificial? Will they not, by still further elimination of “mistakes,”—the incongruous element,—tend to make the fraternity woman still more conventional? Will they not ingrow more and more in their limitation of types? Will they not be still more the circle of girls looking inward and blowing up the little flame of their own ideals and aspirations, instead of individual women mingling with the great crowd of human beings, and turning their faces this way and that according to the needs of the time?

But if outside regulation is impracticable where the national organizations are already in control, and the proposed regulation from within only intensifies the abnormal conditions of the system, what can be done?

The fundamental problem for both the fraternities and the officers of colleges where they exist, is, whether or not the number of societies is to be restricted.

One dean says: “If I could, I would keep them out. As I cannot, I say let us have as many as possible.”

Another dean stands for, “The rendering of fraternities inconspicuous and unimportant as an element in college life.” She adds: “Often this end may be in a measure accomplished by strengthening the organizations to which all women students are eligible.”

A FOMENTER OF CASTE FEELING

THERE is the difference of theory. One view looks toward enough fraternities to take in all the students who have any inclination to be “clubable”; the other, toward preserving what is sometimes called “the balance” between fraternity and non-fraternity women. The first tendency is democratic by bringing the majority into the position held by the minority to-day; the second is democratic by limiting the powers of the present minority. The regulation from within, being urged by the National Pan-Hellenic, is aristocratic in that it aims to increase the efficiency and power of this minority.

Where the fraternities contain nearly the whole body of women students, as happens in some small institutions, the few who are left out suffer proportionately. Again, as the “barbs” need not be reckoned with, jealousies between chapters are almost sure to arise.

On the other hand, in regard to the balance, one of the fraternity journals says in effect: Why should there be this balance between the fraternity and the non-fraternity element? If the system is ideal for one girl, is it not for all? What ground can a college stand on in putting a premium on the fraternity girls? Why increase the difference which we would all gladly lose sight of? Our ideals are the same as those of every true college woman, and the banding together into a fraternity is a help toward these ideals. Why refuse any college woman this help?

It is not merely a question of ideals and of the help of friends, but of definite social values, such as, for example, more intimate association with members of the faculty, more opportunities for meeting distinguished guests, and so on. Why should the fraternities have the monopoly of these social pleasures and assets?

The usual answer of the fraternity woman would be, I think: “Shall we do away with colleges because fewer than two persons out of a thousand go to college? Opportunities must necessarily be limited to the few.”

“Limited to the few?” Yes, necessarily to a few at a time; but not always to the same few.

No, the fraternity woman does not wish to open up her fraternity to the general public. She may go outside her walls and speak with the barbs on terms of what she calls perfect equality and friendliness; but she wishes to keep to herself the fastness of her fraternity, with its idealistic ritual, its trivial secret, as a sanctuary secure from the miscellaneous hordes of the world.

There is no getting over or around or away from this attitude of mind. The insidiousness of it is that no amount of theory will save from it the average human being who gets the chance. One may have heard of the college professor who objected strongly when his sister was “bid” because he did not wish her to become a snob. Later, as fate would have it, he himself was called upon to organize a fraternity. Where was the snob then? On the other side of the wall, to be sure! And that is just where the difference comes in.

DO COLLEGE AUTHORITIES FACE THEIR DUTY?

ONE conclusion which would be generally admitted is, that the colleges and universities where the fraternities thrive have not done their whole duty by their students. Suppose, then, that they realize this, and wish to use the fraternal spirit to forward the welfare of the general body of students, what can they do? As a result of many suggestions, I seem to see that a somewhat definite line of action is possible.

In the first place, they are even now facing the problem of housing their students, and there arises the question of choice between the dormitory and the cottage. The large dormitory is more economical, and it was more manageable than a group of cottages in the old days before student government; but from every other point of view it fails. The small dormitory and the large cottage are rapidly approaching each other in size, and the approximation is due to a compromise between the desire of each college to put first the welfare of its students and the money available to carry out its plans.

But suppose—a somewhat visionary hypothesis, I am afraid—that an institution is free to build as many cottages as it needs, of the size that should bring the best possible results of group development, so that every girl student may be assured of a comfortable home with, for example, nineteen or twenty-nine others. She would then be on the proper basis for extending and receiving hospitality, and social training would follow as a matter of course.

THE GROUPING OF STUDENTS FOR DEVELOPMENT

THE fraternity girls put great stress on their power of developing one another, the “house mother,” or chaperon, even when she is not the cook, seeming to be usually more or less a figurehead. In this cottage system, what would happen if the group were left to itself in the same way? Naturally this would depend entirely upon the[Pg 232] constitution of the group. If all birds of a feather flocked together, no sparrows would learn the song of the canary. If they were housed haphazard, in the order, for example, of registration, there would be at first anarchy, with the speedy assertion of the clique and government by the strongest spirits who were attracted to one another by congeniality, much as happens in the chapter houses now, while the weak and isolated spirits would have much the position of extension members of fraternities, taken in to help pay the coal bills. Clearly some sort of regulation from without would be not only desirable, but essential, unless the development of the individual girl is to be as much a matter of chance as with the fraternities. The line of remedy would seem to be by a proper distribution of upper-class girls and new students—poor dean!—and by the appointment of some responsible older woman as “house mother.”

A great deal would depend upon the type of woman in charge. As one of the fraternity members said, she ought to be an alumna. But however important it is that a woman of fine ability, tact, social distinction, and loving-kindness should be paid an excellent salary for developing this side of life in every cottage or dormitory on the campus, there is probably not an institution in the country that can afford to pay for such service exclusively. A middle way, perhaps not so impracticable, would be to choose from the graduating class of each year girls for whom college has been rather a general training for life than a specialized preparation for some one profession—girls who could afford to give a year’s time and who would gladly do so in return for board and lodging, special college privileges, such as graduate courses, and so on, and the not invaluable experience that they would gain by acting as these house mothers. They would be near enough in age to sympathize with the undergraduate point of view, far enough away to counsel, direct, and influence; and they, acting with house committees chosen by the household of each cottage, could guide each little group in such a way as to insure a flexible system which would permit both the individual and the social virtues to flourish. One might even foresee that a conference of these house mothers with the officers of the large students’ organizations and a committee of the faculty might form a board comparable to the local Pan-Hellenics of the fraternities for the general guidance of student affairs.[5]

This might allow for social training and group development; but, the objection may be urged, how would it react upon student friendships? What assurance is there that in any cottage home there might not be as many “mistakes” as occur in fraternity choosing? Deans are proverbially not infallible, and the burden put upon them by such a plan would be heavy.

The answer is that congenial friendships are no more a matter of accidental living together than of arbitrary imposition by upper classmen, but of a free choice that in undergraduate years should range over[Pg 233] the campus and as far as possible out into the world. With these the cottage system has little to do, except that by its flexibility it saves a girl from being unhappy more than one year or perhaps even a semester. Whether her most intimate friends are all in her own house or scattered over the campus and through the town is a matter of special temperament. No two—poor dean again!—should be treated alike. The intense girl who tends to abnormality of the affections should have scattered friends. The solitary, self-sufficient girl should have her friends about her. With the eminently conventional, clubable girl it will make little difference with whom she lives; those about her will always be her friends, and by continued intimate association with them, she will develop a certain attitude of permanence in her ties which probably makes for character development.

A NARROWING INFLUENCE

IN this connection I cannot forbear pointing out another fallacy in the fraternity theory. As most fraternity girls are naturally of the clubable type, it is undoubtedly true that the four years of close association lead them to permanent ties of friendship as no other system could do; but, on the other hand, as these girls in their teens must grow at different rates of development, the fraternity becomes an actual clog on those who might otherwise develop more rapidly and more freely; it tends to keep them all back to the pace of those who remain most nearly what they were in college years.

It must be admitted, however, that the cottage system does not do much to foster the kind of growth that comes, not from the clash of different types of personality, but from congenial associations. But is there not in every college adequate machinery for such expression of tastes? With the students’ associations, the women’s leagues, the Young Women’s Christian Association, literary associations, tennis clubs, golf clubs, garden clubs, walking clubs, journal clubs,—the multifarious club activities of almost any college, to which ability, or at least interest, is the test for admission, there should be no lack of opportunity for any student to encourage to the utmost any taste whatsoever. Nor should there be any limitation as to the number of clubs to which any student belongs, apart from the question of her interests and the amount of energy that she diverts from her main business as a student.

Because of the diversity of their activities and the overlapping of their memberships, with such clubs as these there could be no question of rivalry. Rivalries and jealousies between the different cottages might spring up, but with a strong students’ association and with partizanship weakened by the inevitable scattering of friends, this could not grow into anything like the hostility between fraternities and non-fraternities, between Greeks and Greeks, that exists in many institutions to-day.

INTERCOURSE BETWEEN ALUMNA AND STUDENT

ONE thing not provided for in the scheme outlined is put forward by the fraternities as one of the great advantages of their organization, and that is the continued relationship between the alumna and her alma mater. Without admitting the wisdom of allowing too much alumnæ interference and control, one may see that some continuance of the tie is a good thing. The fraternities foster this connection, where they have chapter houses for the small proportion of students whom they reach, by means of a permanent college home and an abiding interest in the younger sisterhood. A similar result could be secured for the whole student body by means of a club-house built by the alumnæ to put up those who return for visits and to accommodate offices for the various organizations of students.[6]

All this is visionary and impracticable, at present; and yet it is only following out the various lines of suggestion, which are based upon institutions already in existence.

SOCIAL EXCLUSIVENESS

IN the colleges and universities should develop in this direction, what would become of the fraternities? The double system of cottages and clubs would remove the practical reasons for their existence. There is no work that they claim to do for the few that could not be done for the whole either in a cottage organization of students[Pg 234] or by a club. They would be driven back upon the real ground of their growing prosperity in our land of the Newly Made—social exclusiveness. On that basis doubtless they will continue to exist. There will always be some people who will wish to wear a badge possessed by the few, who will wish to retire into an inner circle of common knowledge and common acquaintance where they are safe in feeling superior to those whom they keep outside as far as the choice lies with themselves. But these cliques, whatever each thinks of itself, will be forced to yield to the larger organizations of students both the control of affairs and the right to set the fashion in character and in social customs. They may become specialists in “cliquocracy”—the frat of the Vans and the frat of the Vons and the frat of the Log-Cabin Ancestors, the frat of the Ultra-Platonists, the frat of the Super-Bogies, and the frat of the Number-Two Shoes. That is, if the element of good which the fraternities give to their members is supplied to all college students in other ways, the fraternities themselves are bound to dwindle and shrivel until they become mere social excrescences, curiosities of aristocratic affinities.

Probably it is too late to make a stand. The fraternities are strong among the privileged classes, and tenacious of their privilege. They see, as who does not, that in an age and a country where opportunities are increasingly restricted to the few, this caste system of education is the best possible preparation to enable the few to use the opportunities that are theirs, in that it gives them all the social powers and affiliations by which chiefly the few rule the many; and the development of the individual is not the concern of a system that works to make corporate bodies closed against individual striving.

When one remembers the movement against the high-school fraternities, one is tempted for a moment to hope for a revision of popular opinion. How should what is generally condemned for the years between twelve and twenty be approved for the years between sixteen and twenty-four? Is there so wide a difference between the fraternity idea as it finds expression in the high-school girl of eighteen and the college girl of eighteen? The very women who most earnestly advocate the system in the colleges are bent upon driving it out of the high schools. Yet the fact that neither the joint effort of parents and teachers and state legislation has succeeded in this, argues ill for any successful movement against it in the colleges.

A NEW ALTRUISM NEEDED

WHAT can we do? We need a new religion to teach the subordination of personal good to communal welfare. We believe in it theoretically, we are anxious that our neighbors should practise it; but when it cuts home, we falter and fail. We see the evils of the fraternity system, and the fraternity people are among our most desirable acquaintances. We like them for friends and especially for our children’s friends. We argue against the system and preach its abolition; but when Alice goes to college and is rushed by Beta and Gamma and Kappa in eager rivalry, we step down from the pulpit and rejoice with her and suffer with her anxious little heart until she is safely housed within the chapter that has the best standing.

And yet we do not call ourselves snobs. There must be a top layer. Why should not we be in it? Democracy? Yes; but that we and our children are to be on the same level with venders and hagglers and foreigners and other impossible people—absurd! Let us hasten to put on the Alpha[Pg 235] Omega pin, which assures public recognition of our social superiority.

In other words, we still care more for individual distinction than for the welfare of society. I have heard more than a few thoughtful fraternity women sum up their position thus: “I hate the system; I deplore it! But as it’s here, I’ve got to be in it because I can’t bear to be left outside!” Can we fight this spirit? Can we win? If we do, the victory will mean that we have grown wise and sane and strong enough for such a democracy as the world has never yet known.

[4] As Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Radcliffe; and, properly speaking, Smith.

[5] It has also been pointed out to me that the system could be used even in a large dormitory by dividing up the building into floors or sections, and that this is now being done in the newest dormitories. The idea is not, of course, to secure boarding-school supervision.

[6] Such club-houses are already in existence for men, and seem to fulfil their purpose admirably.

THE present condition of England is a very curious one, and the only obvious thing to say about it is that there is virtually nothing about it in the English papers. When I heard long ago that Mr. Balfour never read the papers, I thought it was because he was languid and frivolous; by which you will see that I did read the papers. Now I am older, I think it was more likely because he was practical and busy, and preferred to deal direct with the real facts. If, like the English, you run what is still at best an aristocracy with most of the forms of a democracy, it is found virtually necessary that the journalists should talk in public about anything or everything except what the politicians are really doing in private.

You may therefore utterly disregard all the things printed in very large letters in the “Daily Mail” or the “Daily Chronicle.” I have heard that American journalism is in a manner more truthful, if it is only by being more transparently untrue; but I will not presume to guess about that, or to imagine what the headlines in American papers mean. The headlines in English papers mean nothing. Mr. Bonar Law means nothing. Sir Edward Carson means nothing. Belfast means nothing. There is not one man of education and influence in England who cares a button about Belfast; at least in the governing classes, who have long seen that Home Rule is horse sense and nothing else; and least of all in the Conservative party, where a general High-Church flavor can be varied by Romanism, Atheism, Theosophy, Christian Science, or Devil-worship, but where such a thing as a No Popery puritan simply could not live for twenty minutes. Nor is there anything in Mr. Churchill’s supposed frenzy for war, or the other Radicals’ frenzy for peace. There is no more division among Englishmen about the need for national defense than there would be among you Americans or among Frenchmen or any other white men. And the mysterious ambitions and alterations of Mr. Churchill (of which you will see a great deal in the papers) mean nothing whatever but this: that the man is a cynic and an oligarch, but not a traitor; and that he is behaving exactly as any Englishman in his place would behave.

There was more in the comparatively slight stir about the tragedy of the Titanic. For that was connected, though largely unconsciously, with what is the deepest thing in modern England, a general suspicion that the men and methods now on top everywhere are not the best even from their own paternalist point of view; or, to use the foolish modern phraseology, that the survival of the unfittest rather than the fittest is the real result of our competitions or conspiracies. But here again the very phrase reminds us that in the modern world the real issue is carefully cloaked with a false issue.

There is much in the English papers just now, and I do not doubt in the American papers also, about degeneration and eugenics and the appalling sexual conduct and physical condition of the submerged. This also is a mere plutocratic fad, and corresponds to no general public feeling. Every sensible man in England knows that the poor must somehow or other be given[Pg 237] more money for food and rest; but every sensible man also knows that in other respects they are as mixed and average as any other class, and marry and are given in marriage, as people always have done and always will do.

The suspicion really abroad in England is not a doubt about the people below, but about the people above. Looking at those who emerge into the first social rank, we are more inclined to be ashamed of our successes than of our failures. It is the breed of the top dog rather than the breed of the bottom dog that is becoming a mongrel breed. And there is certainly something amusing in the picture of the rich and powerful peering down into the abyss and dropping tears over the poor specimens that make up the populace, while by far the greater part of the populace is remarking more and more what uncommonly poor specimens are looking down at them.

This doubt of the powers that be is vague but universal, and had a sort of stifled explosion at the time of the Titanic affair; a general suspicion that governors cannot be trusted to govern or inspectors to inspect or arbiters to arbitrate, that captains are not to be trusted with ships, that lawyers are not to be trusted with laws. The kind of man who comes to the top everywhere conquers nothing but his superiors, gains nothing but his own gain. In modern England the successful man is not a success.

Now this state of public feeling has produced one rather odd, but very important, effect. While our attitude is growing more revolutionary, it is growing less Socialistic. For Socialism proposes to give to the state, and therefore to statesmen, fresh powers against social abuses. And England in its modern mood is rather more suspicious of the statesmen than of the bosses or middlemen whom they are supposed to control. The simple Socialistic formula that government should own the mines, for example—that simple formula begins to look a little too simple when people are suspecting that the mine-owners own the government. The mere proposal to set the politician to watch the capitalist has been disturbed by the rather disconcerting discovery that they are both the same man. We are past the point where being a capitalist is the only way of becoming a politician, and we are dangerously near the point where being a politician is much the quickest way of becoming a capitalist. But while the European haute politique is hypocritical and diseased (much more so, I should say, than the American), there is certainly less “graft” and corrupt give-and-take in the mass of minor functionaries or moderate fortunes; and this very comparative honesty in the less successful mass of Europe increases their uneasiness touching the national leadership. The English people, so far from being supine or decadent, are much more vigorous and wide-awake than they have been for a long time. But they have awakened in a cage. This cage produces a curious situation in which we silently but suddenly find ourselves.

When your nation separated from our nation, to my present delight and yours, it separated before most men had become commercial wage-earners. Our ruler was called Farmer George; but yours might have been called Farmer George also. Last week I went up the great Sussex road where stands the village of Washington; and I remembered that your sword was also beaten out of a plowshare. If we had separated later, he might have been called General Brighton, or Heaven knows what.

Now the big difference made by that fact is this: that in America industrialism may be quite as strong; but agriculture is not so weak. A hazy horizon of free farms surrounds your most insane cities: but with us all the eager and intelligent have become servants of the capitalists; it is only the idle or idiotic that remain servants of the landlords. It is undoubtedly tenable that the idle and idiotic were the wiser of the two.

On us, thus situated, has come an insurrection against industrialism itself. Our recent strikes have really been a revolt against the whole system of wage-earning. But while your workers would have some cloudy notion of an alternative in farming the larger country by freer men, with us the agricultural alternative has slipped out of sight. The workers know what they don’t want more than what they do; like Miss Arabella Allen in “Pickwick.” This state of mind is called by the learned syndicalism. It is really something much more serious; it is anger.

In the stress of these strikes two extraordinary things happened. The capitalist became a Socialist. The proletarian became an individualist. The employer wanted the community to intervene; and the employee didn’t want it to intervene. It was the rich man who used the Socialist argument; the comfort and convenience of the whole nation. It was the poor man who used the individualist argument; the freedom of contract and the private rights of man. It was the coal-owner who said, “Salus populi suprema lex.” It was the coal-miner who said, “Fiat justitia ruat cœlum.” He may not have expressed it precisely in those terms; though he is often no more illiterate than the coal-owner. This, then, is the extraordinary inversion that is the deepest dilemma of England to-day. Hamlet and Laertes have really changed swords in the scuffle: which is the poisoned sword I will not at this moment inquire.

The results of this extend and solidify every hour. For nearly a century now Socialists and social reformers in England, as in the rest of Europe and in America, have preached either greater philanthropy among the rich or greater rebellion among the poor. In both cases they have been suddenly taken at their word; but in such a manner as to sweep away the very foundations of their social science and their social scheme. The rich have become philanthropists; the rich have, in a sense, become Socialists; but only on condition that they may also be slave-owners. The poor have become rebels—but rebels against Socialism.

So far is this from being an exaggeration that every daily detail in the present development illustrates this and nothing else. The railway men, who led the revolt, were not, literally and legally, striking against an employer at all. They were striking against the decisions of State Arbitration Courts and Conciliation Boards such as State Socialists would set up; and semi-socialistic publicists had set up. The capitalists, wishing to strike back at the trade-unions, have not struck back by cutthroat competition or irresponsible locking out. They have struck back by a big act of Parliament, aimed at limiting the trade-unions by the law of the land; and tying men to their masters by a new and constructive social scheme. Here they have much the advantage of their proletarian opponents; who have to fight mainly with the remains of rather rhetorical Socialism and dreams, as yet somewhat dim, of the old liberty of the medieval guilds and charters. Thus it may too often seem that capitalists can combine and Socialists can only quarrel.

I do not myself think things can be cured except by a wider equalization of strictly private property, especially in land. This is not done or even demanded, not because it is impossible, but because its tradition has been lost. Meanwhile the Insurance Act, by which the rich contribute to the medical support of their servants, on condition of obtaining a tighter hold on their service, is the first of many legislative acts which will have for their object the ordering and cleansing, but also the strengthening, of the wage-system. They will attempt to forbid strikes. Thus we shall have the poor, with better conditions perhaps and under some general social stipulations; but bound irrevocably to particular and private masters.

The only thing I have to say about such a scheme concerns your country more than mine. This system of fixed service for certain masters has much to be said for it; and much was said by men dead and alive. In the wilderness by Chancellorsville or down all the roads to Richmond, there must be the dust of great gentlemen who came up out of the South to fight for such a system; and I think our Liberal social reformers owe them an apology. I think they ought to stand a moment and salute the dead, who had the courage to die for this thing, and the courage to call it by its name.

THEN CAME WE TO A BOUNDARY, WHICH PARTS

THE THIRD AND SECOND CIRCLES, WHERE ARE SHOWN

THE RACKS OF JUSTICE, ...

... WE REACHED A WIDE AND DESERT GROUND,

THAT SPURNS EACH PLANT FROM ITS UNGENIAL BREAST;

THIS PLAIN IS COMPASSED BY THE MOURNFUL WOOD,

AND THAT ENCIRCLED BY THE FOSS PROFOUND:

HERE ON THE VERY EDGE OF BOTH WE STOOD.

BEFORE US LAY A THICK AND ARID SAND

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

O HEAVENLY VENGEANCE! HOW SHOULDEST THOU BE FEARED

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

O’ER ALL THE SANDY DESERT FELL BELOW

LARGE FLAKES OF FIRE, AS WHEN ON ALPINE HILL,

WHILE SLEEP THE WINDS, ARE FALLING FLAKES OF SLOW.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“LETHE, BEYOND THIS FOSS, THOU SHALT SURVEY,

THERE, WHERE THE SHADES RESORT, THEIR FORMS TO LAVE,

WHEN PENITENCE HATH WASHED THEIR SINS AWAY.”

EAGER THAT HEAVENLY FOREST TO SURVEY, ...

... I LEFT THE ROCKY BOUND,

AND THERE APPEARED TO ME ...

A LADY ALL ALONE: WHO ROVED ABOUT

SINGING, AS SHE SELECTED FLOWER FROM FLOWER,

WITH WHICH HER PATHWAY PAINTED WAS THROUGHOUT ...

LIKE TO A LADY TURNING IN THE DANCE,

FOOT BEFORE FOOT FROM EARTH SO SLIGHTLY MOVED,

THAT SCARCE PERCEPTIBLE IS HER ADVANCE;—

... TO ME SHE TURNED AROUND, ...

“THE STREAMS THOU SEE’ST SPRING NOT FROM EARTHLY VEIN, ...

BUT ISSUE FROM A NEVER-FAILING SOURCE,

REPLENISHED BY THE WILL OF GOD ...

ON THIS HAND, ABLE—SUCH THE POWER ASSIGNED—

TO TAKE AWAY THE MEMORY OF SIN;

ON THAT—TO CALL EACH VIRTUOUS DEED TO MIND:

THIS, LETHE NAMED—THAT EUNÖE.” ...

AS THOUGH BY LOVE INSPIRED—HER HEAVENLY LAY

TO ITS LAST CADENCE SANG THAT LADY FAIR:

“BLESSED ARE THOSE WHOSE SINS ARE WASHED AWAY.”

AND LO! A VOICE—“COME, SPOUSE FROM LEBANON,”

AS THOUGH FROM HEAVENLY MESSENGER ...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“O BLESSED THOU WHO COMEST,” THEY ALL CRIED;

“SCATTER WE LILIES WITH UNSPARING HAND”;

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

E’EN SO, ENCOMPASSED IN A CLOUD OF FLOWERS,

WHICH UPWARD BY ANGELIC HANDS WERE FLUNG,

AND ALL ABOUT THE CHARIOT FELL IN SHOWERS—

IN VEIL OF WHITE, WITH OLIVE CHAPLET BOUND,

A MAID APPEARED BENEATH A MANTLE GREEN,

WITH HUE OF LIVING FLAME ENROBED AROUND.

AND NOW MY SPIRIT (WHICH FOR MANY A DAY,

UNUSED TO FEEL HER PRESENCE) ...

FELT, THOUGH SHE WAS NOT FULLY MANIFEST, ...

HOW STRONG THE LOVE THAT ERST MY SOUL POSSESSED.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“YES, I AM BEATRICE; REGARD ME WELL:—

AND HAS THOUGH DEIGNED AT LAST TO ASCEND THE MOUNT,

WHERE JOYS UNSPEAKABLE FOREVER DWELL?”

THE CEASELESS INNATE THIRSTING OF THE SOUL

BORE US TO GOD’S OWN DWELLING ...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I LOOKED ON BEATRICE—AND SHE ON HEAVEN;

“AS TO THE HAMMER FROM THE ARTIST’S BLOW,

SO, THAT SAME HEAVEN WITH STARS RESPLENDENT DIGHT

RECEIVES ITS IMPRESS FROM THE MIND PROFOUND

THAT ROLLS IT EVER THROUGH THE FIELDS OF LIGHT.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

THUS DOTH INTELLIGENCE WITH GOODNESS FILL

THE ORBS OF HEAVEN; THOUGH MULTIPLIED, THE SAME;

ON ITS OWN UNITY REVOLVING STILL.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

SHINES THROUGH EACH ORB THE INFLUENCE DIVERSELY,

SWAYED BY THE JOYOUS NATURE WHENCE IT STREAMS,

LIKE GLADNESS THROUGH THE PUPIL OF THE EYE.

HENCE IS DERIVED THE DIFFERENCE THAT WE MARK

’TWIXT STAR AND STAR ...”

NOW ON THE FACE OF MY LOVED LADY WERE

MY EYES AND MIND AGAIN INTENTLY STAYED: ...

HER LOOK BORE NOT THE ACCUSTOMED SMILE DIVINE;

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . SHE SAID: . . .

“FOR SINCE MY BEAUTY, HIGHER AS WE RISE

TOWARDS THE ETERNAL PALACE, GLOWS MORE BRIGHT

AT EVERY STEP, AS WITNESSED BY THINE EYES,—

WERE NOT A VEIL BEFORE ITS RADIANCE CAST,

THY MORTAL VISION, DAZZLED AT THE SIGHT,

WOULD SHRINK AS LEAVES BEFORE THE LIGHTNING BLAST.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . MY SOARING EYE

BEHELD A STAIR OF GOLDEN COLOURS BRIGHT ...

“O SPIRIT BLEST THAT DOST THY FORM CONCEAL

WITHIN THINE OWN DELIGHT, TO ME DISCLOSE ...

WHY THE SWEET SYMPHONY OF PARADISE

IN THIS HIGH SPHERE IS SILENT.” ...

“MORTAL THY HEARING AS THY SIGHT,” SHE SAID;

“AND THE SAME REASON NOW FORBIDS THE SONG,

THAT LATE IN BEATRICE THE SMILE FORBADE.”

“SEE THE VAST NUMBER OF THESE SNOW-WHITE DRESSES!

SEE HOW EXTENSIVE IS OUR CITY!”....

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

ARRAYED IN SEMBLANCE OF A SNOW-WHITE ROSE

THAT HOLY ARMY WAS REVEALED TO SIGHT

WHICH FOR HIS SPOUSE, IN DEATH OUR SAVIOUR CHOSE.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“VIEW NOW THE CIRCLES E’EN THE MOST REMOTE

UNTIL THE QUEEN UPON HER THRONE THOU SEE’ST.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

O SOVRAN LIGHT! WHO DOST EXALT THEE HIGH

ABOVE ALL THOUGHTS THAT MORTAL MAY CONCEIVE,

O PLENTEOUS GRACE THAT NERVED MY SOUL TO RAISE

SO FIXT A LOOK ON THE ETERNAL LIGHT.

THAT I ACHIEVED THE OBJECT OF MY GAZE....

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

THE GLORIOUS VISION HERE MY POWERS O’ERCAME:—

BUT NOW MY WILL AND WISH WERE SWAYED BY LOVE—

(AS TURNS A WHEEL ON EVERY SIDE THE SAME)

LOVE—AT WHOSE WORD THE SUN AND PLANETS MOVE.

THE newsboys of New York were having their Christmas dinner, and I was bidden to the feast. I stood at the door and saw them file in, seven hundred strong, to take their places at the long tables. Last of all came the little shavers, brimful of mischief waiting to break out. The superintendent pulled my sleeve when he set eyes upon them.

I saw them eye the lay-out as they went down the line, where turkey and mincepie stood waiting, and make quick, stealthy passes with their hands, but nothing happened until they had taken their seats. Then up went eight grimy fists, and eight aggrieved voices piped out:

“How is that?” he said. “No pie? There was one; I put it there myself, at every plate. Why, what is that?” And he patted each of the little rascals in the region of the bread-basket, where something stuck out in a lump inside the shirt.

“Me pie,” was the unabashed reply. “I was afeard it ’u’d get stole on me.” There was just the ghost of a wink.

“Well,” laughed the superintendent, “we’ll forget it. It is Christmas. Go ahead, boys, with your dinner.” And they fell to.

It was great. Talk about the charge of the Six Hundred. These were seven hundred, and they used their knives, their forks, and their tongues all at once and for all they were worth. The noise was deafening. You could not have heard yourself think. One alone among them all did no shouting. He devoured his dinner like a famished little wolf, and all the while he never took his ferret eyes from my face. It was in the days when New York had a militant police commissioner, who set the town by the ears every other day with his unheard-of ways of enforcing dead-letter laws, and rattled its dry bones. All of a sudden the boy snatched his fist from his mouth and pointed it straight at me.

“I know you,” he piped in a shrill treble that cut through the Babel of tongues like a knife. “I seen yer picter in de papers. Ye ’r’—ye ’r’—Teddy Roosevelt!”

Instantly there was the silence of the tomb in the big hall. Where just before one would not have known that a dray went over the pavement outside, one could all at once have heard a pin drop. Looking down the table where the miscreants sat who had tried to get a double allowance of pie, I saw something stirring, and the stolen pies appeared and were swiftly and silently deposited on the table. The dreaded name had brought them back even on a false alarm.

That was seventeen years ago. Chance carried me past the Newsboys’ Lodging-House the other day at the dinner-hour, and I went in to have a look at things. There were no newsboys there. The little shavers with their gimlet wits were gone. The boys who sat about the tables did not hail from Newspaper Row. They were older, and evidently earning their bread in shop and factory.

“Gone,” said the superintendent to my question where the little fellows were. “Societies got them, and they don’t run in the street. The old times went out a dozen years ago. Before that we had them at six, even at five, and more and more of them up to fourteen. They overflowed from the city’s tenements in homeless hordes. They don’t any more. The boys we now have average seventeen or eighteen; they come mostly from out of town.[Pg 248] The lure of the city, the Wanderlust, gets them. Now and then it is a stepfather. Here we sift them, get them work if we can. A few sell papers, but not many. There are not half a dozen newsboys in the house to-day, and its name might as well be changed. Less than one third belong in New York. Last year when Christmas was coming on we had a talk here, and the speaker touched the string of mother waiting at home for her wandering boy.”

There was a tremendous demand for note-paper that week, and seventeen runaways were returned to their homes.

“The newsboy of to-day is another kind of chap, who has a home and folks. No, Santa Claus has not lost the way. We still have our Christmas dinner. Come and see for yourself.”

What he said was true. The newsboy of old, who foraged for himself, who crowded street and alley about the newspaper offices and mobbed the pressmen, who curled up by the steam-pipes or on the manhole-covers in the small hours of the morning for a “hot-pipe nap” till the clatter of the great presses began below, and was rounded up there by the “Cruelty man” in zero weather, is a rare bird nowadays.

In his place has come the commercial little chap who lives at home and sells papers after school-hours, sometimes on his own account, but oftener to eke out the family earnings with what may be the difference between comparative comfort and abject poverty.

Shorn of his lawless privilege of sleeping out and of imperiling his life a hundred times a day by jumping on moving cars in his hunt for trade, he is still a feature of metropolitan life, even holds the key to some of its striking phases; for, as the circulation manager will tell you, he is the one who makes the sales. The dealer at the stand merely registers the purchaser’s desire for a paper; the boy prompts it. He has surrendered some of his picturesqueness to become a cog in the industrial wheel, small but indispensable.

Like all business in our day, he is being[Pg 249] concentrated, capitalized. From an atom he has become an asset, quite without his assistance.

It was neither the change from the jovial Irish to the sunny Italian, nor from him to the sharp-witted Jew, that wrought the transformation. It was something more potent than either or both. It was the Spanish War, with the great boom of the sensational papers that set a new pace in the press-rooms. Where there had been one afternoon edition, half a dozen grew. It was clearly impossible for the boy to go down-town every half-hour for his papers; he would be traveling all day if he did. So he stayed where he was. The clamoring crowds about the newspaper offices disappeared. Pony expresses and automobiles carried the editions up-town, throwing them off at points where newsdealers and boys were waiting. Year by year the routes were extended, and they are growing yet. The old distribution centers under the equestrian statue in Union Square, in Greeley Square, Times Square, Columbus Circle, and at the Grand Central, have been multiplied many times. In this rush of development the little fellow has been caught up as in a whirlwind, and is being carried on with a speed that leaves him and, for that matter, the rest of us little chance to think or ask where he is going.

Thus lassoed by the big business of the time, what sort of lad has the little pirate of the past become? And what is he, with the training of the street, in the way to become? It depends on the angle from[Pg 250] which he is seen, and angles he has in plenty. Let it be said at once that the boy who weeps in the street at night, appealing to the tender-hearted with an armful of unsold papers, whatever he was once, is not now the typical newsboy. He can return his papers now, if “stuck,” or at any rate a fair share of them. Nine chances to one the tearful one is a preposterous little fraud. If he confronts you with a plea for a quarter, “to make the dollar and a half he needs to go to the camp,” the tenth chance is gone. He does not have to pay a dollar and a half to go to camp. The Newsboys’ Home Club gives him all its privileges, including the summer camp, through the whole year for a quarter. He is the crafty little rascal upon whom the “Cruelty man” keeps a wary eye, for he knows that he will encounter him in the Children’s Court some day, or, rather, that he will take him there. It is this lad who is responsible for the showing of the reformatories, that more than half of the prisoners “sold newspapers” in their day. Doubtless they did, and they made short change to begin with, and picked pockets a little later on. But they are no more representative of their class than the get-rich-quick swindlers, to whom the post-office authorities forbid the mails, represent the honest business of the land.

There is evil enough abroad in the streets. Its touch, with all that is cheap and tawdry and vulgar, from the perennial cigarette to the vile bar-room and worse that open upon it, sharpens the lad’s wits and too often tends to dull his morals. Seen from that angle, he gives the philanthropist concern with cause. Despite child-labor laws, he is on the street at too early an age and too late an hour. The law now forbids him to cry his extra after ten o’clock if he is under fourteen. This winter an effort will be made to shorten his hours by two and send him to bed at eight, while raising his age to sixteen. Even then there will be mischief enough and to spare in his path. School licenses and badges do not banish it. The lad does not always take them seriously.

“Where is your badge?” asked a man suddenly of a little fellow who pushed a paper at him. He was dirty and out at[Pg 251] elbows. The rent in his trousers was mended with a bent nail.

Seen from the angle of his friend in the “club,” he is an honest little fellow whose earnings out of school help make both ends meet at home. The very independence that is arraigned as tending to defiance of authority, to irregularity and loose habits, in his view helps make a man of him early, “if it is in him.” He will point to the lad who just left his desk after arranging to take his week in camp in Sunday doses, and tell you the reason: he cannot get away from business. A Jew has set up a stand on his corner, and it is up to him to meet the competition, which he does by hiring another boy to waylay the customer in the middle of the block while he forages at the crossing. That other boy over there is going into a silk house on the first of the month, and his younger brother will take over his route. That boy began, as most of them do, by making six or ten cents a day. For a long while now he has brought home five dollars a week to his father, who presses clothes for a living, and weekly earns little more than that the year round.

From the point of view of the circulation[Pg 252] manager, who, after all, perhaps knows him best, it being to his interest, the lad is just a boy who, if he goes crooked, goes fast and far, but who grows straight in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, and, whether the one or the other, can take care of himself. The one needs no one to weep over him; the other will “do” you while you are at it. It is the circulation manager who has housed him in his own club, once the dignified home of the Historical Society, at Eleventh Street and Second Avenue, sends him to camp in summer, has culled the chaff from the wheat generally, and given him a social footing because of the commercial one he has conquered.

Fresh from its humanizing influence, I corralled one of the species on the avenue and catechized him, investing at intervals in his stock to hold his attention. He was thirteen and had no badge. “My boss has one,” he said. The boss proved to be an older boy who “had the corner” and bought the papers at two for three; that is, for every two one-cent papers he paid for, he received one free. That was his profit. My boy was hired for the hours between half-past four and seven on all school-days at a wage of sixty cents a week. Here then was the capitalist at the beginning of things.

“He has no more right to the corner than you have; why don’t you fight him for it?”

Does that help you to understand the following of Big Tim Sullivan and such leaders? Big Tim was a newsboy once, and he sticks up for them always. I tried once more.

I felt for the tribal instinct on another tack. The boy had been to camp. It is on the salt water.

“If he shouldn’t be there, and a boy be drowning, would any of the others go in to help him?”

“They’d all go.” It was plain that he was not boasting; he stated a simple fact.

Some kingdoms have rested on no better claim than the boss’s corner. There was one boss who took the title with the power, but neither lasted long. Jack Sullivan, “the King of the Newsboys,” lies in the Tombs at this writing, mired in the infamy that bred the Rosenthal murder. His was the choice of the gutter that is always handy to the street, but it was not typical. Neither is that of the newsboy, now grown to man’s size, who owns the route on which I live and counts me among his subjects. Knowing that I have become a farmer, he lingers whenever he finds me at home, to hear the news of potatoes and crops. He dreams of them, asleep and awake, and he has saved nearly enough to buy his farm, beside raising a family of little children. When he has it all, he will sell his route to another boy as young as he was when he began and, let us hope, as honorably ambitious. He is not typical because it is not often that the newsboy’s longing takes the shape of a farm, though I know of at least one, a[Pg 254] graduate of one of the Children’s Aid Society’s lodging-houses, who did the same. He is a settlement worker now when he is not farming. Another, who came out of the same place, is superintendent of a boys’ club in a New Jersey town. And there is one, a cripple, of whom some of the readers of this article have doubtless bought papers, whose domain lies on the north side of Forty-second Street and yields him a revenue of five dollars a day, so they say in the Forty-fourth Street lodging-house in which he used to live, and which he now supplies with papers.

But the newsboy’s ambition is more apt to run to business or the professions. There are clergymen, lawyers, and bankers in New York who began their careers crying newspapers in the street. I know of a distinguished physician on Madison Avenue who so paid his way through college. At the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge one sells newspapers to-day who is in his last year in the medical school. Another, around in Fulton Street, will be graduated with the next class from the dental college, and up at the Grand Central I brush against one who is taking his second year’s course in the law school. All these are still at their posts, making the money that pays for their education; but I pass them all by, when bound up-town, and buy my paper or magazine of one who stands at the corner of Twenty-third Street and Fourth Avenue. Let me tell you his story.

From his window across the street one of the officers of the Gerry Society saw a boy with a crutch and an armful of papers dive into the hurrying crowd on the crossing and snatch a customer from under the very nose of a big, bearded man, also a news-vender, who in revenge struck him an angry blow that sent him sprawling in the dirt. The boy picked himself up and limped back to his corner, where the officer found him brushing off his coat and attending to business as though nothing had happened.

“It is all right,” was Fred’s only comment;[Pg 255] “I wasn’t hurt, and I guess it was his sale, anyhow.”

The boy had just passed fourteen. He had no time to waste in fighting, for his father was sick at home and the support of the mother and three younger brothers was upon his frail shoulders. That was fifteen years ago, and he still sticks to the corner that is his by right now. And this is how he met his responsibility, for the father died without ever earning another dollar: one brother is a capable engineer connected with one of the great electric companies, another is in the employ of an express company; the third is a stenographer. Fred’s earnings brought them all up and gave them their start. One of the brothers helped him sell papers when not in school. The family have left the tenement where the father died, and live in a nice home. Fred, as I said, sticks to his corner. It is the key-note of the man, as it was of the boy—to stick it out. He has seen the tide of little Italians succeeded by a flood of Jews, big and little, but through it all has held his own serenely. Best of all, he no longer walks with a crutch, though he still limps. Open air plus his dogged grit has triumphed also over this obstacle and made him whole.

A good many years ago word came to the office of the “Sun” that there had been an accident in which a newsboy was hurt. I went out and asked the old news-woman at the bridge entrance who it was. I remember, as though it were yesterday, her answer:

“Oh, no one but God; and I guess He is too busy with other folks’ boys to mind him much.”

The little Mahers of that day are happily no more. Society has taken over the duty of looking after them, and attends to it. Their successors follow business principles, but that they have not lost either their wit or their spirits in the change you will discover before you have kept their company long. Last autumn I went to New Haven to lecture and, stepping off the train at dusk, had a paper poked at me by one of the tribe. On the front page was my picture.

“Who is that?” I asked the boy, pointing to it. He took one look at it and at me.

THE NEWLY DISCOVERED AND ONLY AUTHENTIC PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR OF “DON QUIXOTE”

THE circumstances of the finding of the portrait, reproduced on the opposite page (from the monograph by D. Alejandro Pidal y Mon, published in Madrid, 1912, for the Spanish Royal Academy), are there given as follows:

A Spanish silversmith in Seville of the name of Albiol, a great collector of old things, had, in his shop, a painted board, which, from age and dirt, showed only the bright parts of a face. On cleaning it he found it to be a portrait of Cervantes, painted by Juan de Jauriguí. At the top of the picture is the inscription: “Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra,” at the bottom: “Juan de Jauriguí Pinx. 1600.” Señor Albiol did not know that Cervantes in his preface, of his Novels, published in 1613, refers to “my portrait by the famous D. Juan de Jaureguí.”

This portrait has been sought for all over the world for three centuries by admirers of Cervantes. The ones at the beginning of the innumerable editions, in every known language, have been made up from his description of himself:

Of course every artist has conceived the appearance of Cervantes in accordance to his fancy, no two alike. The importance of a genuine portrait of the author of “Don Quixote” can hardly be overestimated.

Señor Albiol, not being a scholar, consulted the librarian of his city, the archæologist D. Narciso de Sentenach, an expert on Cervantes, who as soon as he heard the name “Jauriguí” became greatly excited and elated. He inspected the portrait and believed it to be that of Cervantes by Jaureguí, and immediately communicated the matter to his friend the Cervantist D. Francisco Rodriguez Marin, who agreed that it was genuine and communicated the find to the Royal Academy at Madrid.

Some of the principal members of that illustrious body who were present at the time Marin called resolved that, without summoning the members, they would try to obtain the portrait, at whatever trouble or expense. They delegated D. Alejandro Pidal y Mon to enter into negotiations with Señor Albiol, who was induced to take it to Madrid. Señor Pidal frankly told Señor Albiol that, in his opinion, the painting was genuine and the only portrait of the great author, and, as such, of great value; that it would be a national calamity if such a treasure should go abroad, and that the Academy would make any possible sacrifice to buy it.

This proved unnecessary, for Señor Albiol gave it to the Royal Academy without compensation, though he was offered a large sum of money.

Considering that Señor Albiol is a simple artisan and that the money would have made him independent for life, I have no doubt that some more thrifty persons will say that there are Don Quixotes yet in Spain.

[The Editor is indebted to Mr. E. J. Molera of San Francisco for calling his attention to this portrait and for the material for the above note, based on the monograph above referred to.]

Author of “The Beloved Vagabond,” “The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne,” “Septimus,” “The Glory of Clementina,” etc.

CHAPTER XXIV

ALTHOUGH Stella had been in London for a day or two, the morning of the funeral was the first time that John had seen her since the riotous June day when he had waved farewell to the train carrying her back to Southcliff. He had gone to the front gate to meet her in his ill-fitting, outgrown frock-coat, sticking-plaster still hiding the wounds on his scalp, and his heavy face white and drawn. She, in her black dress, looked a startling lily enveloped by night; her great eyes had softened from diamond into starshine. Behind her came the old people, attendant ghosts. John folded her hand in his.

He bowed over her hand. She passed into the house where Miss Lindon received her.

“My dear,” she said, holding Stella’s hand, “I think our poor darling will go to her grave very happy. She was always talking of you, ever since she came to live here, and if you wonder what has become of the beautiful lilies you sent, it’s because I have put them inside with her, knowing that there’s where she would wish them to be. And now you’ve come yourself, and I’m sure she wouldn’t ask for more.”

The weak mouth, set in the full, foolish face crowned with white hair, worked dolorously. Stella, with a sudden movement, threw her arm round her neck and broke into uncontrollable sobbing. A soul pure and beautiful beyond question spoke to Stellamaris in simple words and in silly yet exquisite sentiment. She clung very close,—why, the unsuspecting and innocent lady never guessed,—but it made her broad bosom swell with an emotion hitherto unknown to have a girl lay her head there and sob and seem to find comfort; and, as she clung, the lingering poison of the evil woman melted forever from Stella’s heart, and she knew that the place whereon she stood, where Unity and she had talked, that gimcrack, tawdry, bamboo drawing-room, was holy ground.

She had come, poor child, full of her fierce and jealous maiden pride—she was only twenty, and life had been revealed to her of late as a tumultuous conflict of men with devils,—she had come highly wrought for battles with the Apollyons that straddled across the path; she had come with high hopes of bringing help to the faint-hearted, solace to the afflicted, of proving to her tiny world that she was the help-giver instead of the help-seeker; she had come on the wings of conquest; and she fluttered down like a tired bird to the surrender of herself on, the bosom of the simplest and, in the eyes of men, the least important creature on God’s earth.

She drew gently away and dried her eyes, and while Miss Lindon spoke a few words to Lady Blount, she went somewhat shyly up to John.

“I should have done many things long ago,” he replied. “But I myself have known my aunt only the last few days.”

“Yes,” he said, “it’s true. The last few days have taught me all kinds of things. I never knew what she was”—he made a vague gesture—“until it was too late. I think, Stella dear, I have gone through life with my heart shut.”

He left her abruptly and joined the group of the three elders by the window. She came to Herold, who had been standing[Pg 260] with his back against the empty fireplace.

He saw her brows knit in their familiar little fairy wrinkles as she anxiously scanned his face. Indeed, he was very weary, and his eyes and cheeks showed it.

“You! Oh, no! You? You’ve been strong. There’s no need for you to do any more. You’ve got to live your own life and not that of other people—”

“The only life left to me,” he said in a low voice, “is that of those dear to me.”

John lumbered up gloomily. “You must persuade him to take a rest, Stella. He has been driving himself to death.” He laid a heavy hand on his friend. “God knows what I should have done without him all this time. Wait,” he said suddenly, with the other hand uplifted.

And all were silent when to a scuffle of feet succeeded a measured tramp of steps descending the stairs. The bearers passed along the passage by the door of the drawing-room. Unity was going forth on her last journey through the familiar Kilburn streets.

They arrived at the cemetery. In the bare mortuary chapel Stella knelt and heard for the first time in her life the beautiful words of the service for the burial of the dead. And there in front of her, covered with poor, vain flowers, was the coffin containing the clay of one whom man with his opportunist laws against murder and self-slaughter was powerless to judge. At the appointed time they went out into the summer air and walked to the grave-side. The surpliced chaplain stood a pace or two apart. The dismal men in black deposited the coffin by the yellow, upturned earth. The group of six gathered close together. The July sunshine streamed down, casting a queer projection of shadow from the coffin-end.

“Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”

Stella heard the chaplain’s voice as in a dream. The rattle of the earth on the coffin-lid—“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”—roused her with a shock. Below, deep in the grave, lay Unity—Unity, who had taken a human life, and had taken her own for the sake of those she loved; Unity, who in the approach to her murderous and suicidal end was all but unfathomable to her; Unity, whom she had read and thought enough to know to be condemned by the general judgment of mankind. She stood tense until the end. A great peace had fallen upon her. “Blessed are those that die in the Lord.” The simple words held a mystic significance. They reiterated themselves in her brain. Young, emotional, inexperienced, overwhelmed by the shattering collapse of the exquisite, cloud-capped towers of her faith, she found in them an unquestioned truth. By that grave-side, in the sacred presence of the dead, not only of “the dear sister here departed,” but of the inhabitants of all the gleaming stone and marble tenements around, there could be no lying; such was the unargued conviction of her candid soul. A voice, coming not from the commonplace, white-robed man, but from the blue vault of heaven, proclaimed that Unity had died in the Lord and that she was blessed. The message was one of unutterable consolation. Unity had died in the Lord. The comforting acceptance of the message indicated the restoration of Stella’s faith in God.

The mind of the child-woman is a warp of innocence shot with the woof of knowledge, and the resultant fabric is a thing no man born can seize and put upon canvas, and, for the matter of that, no woman, when she has ceased to be a child.

STELLA’S heart had softened toward John. Herold had told her how he had nearly come by his death on the rocks below the Channel House. It had moved her to[Pg 261] the depths. And now she saw that he was bowed down with grief for Unity. All resentment against him had died. She recovered her faith, not perhaps in the wonder of the Great High Belovedest of the past, but in the integrity of the suffering man. When they reached and had reëntered the house, she took an opportunity of being alone with him. The two elder ladies were up-stairs, and Walter and Sir Oliver had gone out to smoke in the little front garden. Then she said with shy gentleness:

“This must be very desolate for you, dear. Won’t Miss Lindon and you come down with us to Southcliff? I have fallen in love with her. I wonder whether I dare ask her. The sea air would do her good.”

“She would be delighted, I’m sure; but would you like me to come, too?” he said, bending his heavy brows.

“I’m afraid I’m not a very gay companion, Stella. In fact, I don’t think I ever was one—except in the days when I used to tell you fairy-tales about the palace—”

“Oh, don’t!” She could not restrain the quick little cry and gesture. “We mustn’t talk about that any more. We’ve got the future to think of. Reconstruction—isn’t that what they call it? We have got to look at things as they are, and laugh sometimes.”

He paused for a moment, his hands thrust deep in his trousers’ pockets, and his heel on the fender. At last he said: “It would be the best thing in the world for the dear old lady. And God knows it will be good for me. So if you’ll have us for a week or two, we’ll be glad to get away from here.”

And Miss Lindon, coming down soon afterward with Lady Blount, received and accepted the invitation. Sir Oliver, summoned from the garden, expressed his approval.

“My boy,” said he, “we’ve been perfectly wretched without you. Make him put in a long time with us, Miss Lindon. We three old folks will join forces.”

Stella slipped out by the front door and stood by Herold, who was leaning over the gate. Of course he too must come to the Channel House. He smiled rather wearily and shook his head.

“Not just now, dear,” said he. “I have a week’s business to do in London, settling my autumn arrangements. I’m going into management, you know, and then I must run away for a bit—abroad somewhere, a little mild climbing in Switzerland, perhaps.”

“Of course you do; but I was hoping,” she faltered, “that you could find rest at Southcliff.”

“It’s good of you, dear,” said he, “to think of me. For Heaven knows how many years I’ve looked upon the Channel House as a second home; you can never realize what it has meant to me. But I need a complete change, a sort of medicine I must take, no matter how nasty it may be. Besides,” he added with a smile, “you will have John now.”

“John is John, and you are you,” said Stella. There was a little pause. Then after a glance at his tired face, she said in a low voice “You’re right, Walter; you must go away and get strong again. I spoke very selfishly. I’ve not been accustomed to think much of other people.”

“Stellamaris dear,” he said, “if I thought I could serve you by staying, I would stay. But there’s nothing for me to do, is there? The—the what shall I say—the veil between John and you has been cut in twain, as it were, by a flaming sword, perhaps. Unity did it. But there’s no veil now. The only thing that has to be done is to bring back the sunshine into John’s life. That’s for you to do, not for me.”

She looked at him queerly. Her face was so white, her dress so black! The only gleam about her was in her eyes.

“I know that,” she said. “But who is going to bring back the sunshine into your life?”

He leaned against the wooden gate and gripped the top bar tight. What did she[Pg 262] mean? Was she a woman or, after all, only the old fancied child of sea-foam and cloud?

“When I can eat like a pig and sleep like a dog,” he said lightly, “and feel physically fit, I shall be all right.” He smiled, and took her black-gloved hand. “And when I see the roses in your cheeks and hear you laugh as you used to laugh—that fascinating little laugh like a peal of low silver bells—then I’ll be the Princess Stellamaris’s court jester again.”

She smiled wanly. “You were never court jester; you were Great High Favorite.” She sighed. “How far off those childish days are!”

“Life is too full of pain for me to find happiness in superficial things,” said Stella.

For all his wretchedness he could have laughed, with a man’s sweet pity, at the tone of conviction in her philosophic but childish utterance.

She made no reply, but stood thoughtfully by his side, and drew with her fingers little lines in the summer dust on the upper surface of the bar of the gate.

“There’s something silly I want to say to you, Walter,” she murmured at last, “and I don’t quite know how to say it. It’s about the sea. I think you can understand. You always used to. Our long talks—you remember? Since all this has happened, the sea seems to have no meaning for me.”

“It will all come back, dear,” said Herold, “with your faith in God and the essential beauty of the world.”

“My dear,” he laughed, “you mustn’t ask a poor man such conundrums and expect an instantaneous answer. I should say roughly it was strength and sacrifice and love.” He took a cigarette from his case and lit it. “You’ll find the comfort of the sea again. I think it will have quite a new meaning for you, a deeper meaning, when you sit by it with the man whom you love and who loves you, as you know he loves you, and all the past has become sacred, and there’s no longer a shadow between you.”

“Quite sure. You see, Stellamaris dear,” he added after a second or two, “you don’t need me any longer. Your happiness, as well as John’s happiness, is in your own hands. I can go away with an easy mind. And when I come back—”

Pain started through his eyes. When he came back? What would be left for him? His art, his ambitions? What were they? A child’s vain toys cumbering his feet. His soul was set on the slip of pale girlhood, startlingly black and white, with her mass of soft hair beneath the plain, black hat, and her great pools of eyes, no longer agates or diamonds, but aglow with remote flames, who, in poor common earthliness, stood by his side, but in maddening reality was pinnacled on inaccessible heights by the love between her and the man they both loved. He felt that the pure had an unsuspected power of torture.

“When I come back? Well—” he broke off lamely. And they looked at each other without speaking until they became aware of a human presence. They turned and saw John, his huge bulk in the frame of the doorway, watching them dully beneath his heavy brows.

AT the Channel House Stella’s health began to mend. The black shadows disappeared from beneath her eyes, and her lips caught the lost trick of a smile. She no longer wandered desolate about house and garden, but sought the companionship of those about her. The old folks discussed and wrangled over the change.

“One would have thought,” said Lady Blount, “that this terrible affair would have crushed her altogether.”

“Any one who didn’t know her might have thought so,” replied Sir Oliver; “but I’ve watched her. I sized her up long ago. It’s astonishing how little you know of her, Julia. She has lots of pluck—the right stuff in her. And now John’s free and he’s down here. What more can she want?”

“You don’t expect him to go about grinning as if nothing had happened, do you?” said Sir Oliver. “Can’t you understand that the man has had a devil of[Pg 263] a shock? He’ll get over it one of these days.”

“I don’t want him to grin; but I’d like him to look a little more cheerful,” said Lady Blount.

But cheerfulness and John Risca were strangers. Even when he and Stellamaris were alone together, looking at the moonlit sea from the terrace outside the drawing-room windows, or in the sunshine of the sweet cliff garden, the cloud did not lift from his brow. Unless they talked of Unity,—and it relieved his heart to do so, and Stellamaris loved to listen to the brave little chronicles of her life,—long silences marked their intercourse. To get back to the old plane was impossible. They could find no new one on which to meet. She gave him all her pity, for he was a man who had suffered greatly, and in a way it was she herself who had brought the suffering on him. Her heart ached to say or do something that would rekindle the old light in his rugged face; but an unconquerable shyness held her back. If he had thrown his great arm around her and held her tight and uttered broken words of love, pity would have flamed passionate in surrender. If he had pleaded for comfort, pity would have melted warm over his soul. But he made no appeal. Both were burningly aware that Unity had died so that they could be free, no barrier between them. Yet barrier there seemed to be, invisible, inscrutable.

“I’ll go on living with my old aunt. We’re a queer couple, I suppose, but we understand each other.”

They walked on in dead silence, which was broken at last by John, who made a remark as to Constable’s growing infirmities.

So the visit came to an end without a word having been said, and John went back to his desolate house, physically rested and able to take up the routine of his working life. Herold in Switzerland wrote letters about snows and glaciers and crystal air. The calm tenor of existence was resumed at the Channel House. Incidentally Stella found an occupation. Old Dr. Ransome, in casual talk, mentioned a case of great poverty and sickness in the village. Stella, followed by Morris bearing baskets of luxuries, presented herself at the poor house in the character of Lady Bountiful. At the sight that met her eyes she wept and went away sorrowful, and then it dawned upon her inexperienced soul that gifts costing her nothing, although they had their use, might be supplemented by something vastly more efficacious. She consulted the hard-worked district nurse, and, visiting the house again, learned how to tend the sick woman and wash the babies and bring cleanliness and air and comfort into the miserable place. And having made in this way the discovery that all through her life she had accepted service from all and sundry and had never done a hand’s-turn for anybody, she plunged with young shame and enthusiasm into the new work. Afraid lest convalescence on the part of the patient would throw her back into idleness, she ingenuously asked the nurse if there were other poor people in Southcliff who needed help. The nurse smiled. Even at Southcliff there was enough work among the poor and needy for every day in the week the whole year round.

“I’m glad,” said Stellamaris. Then she checked herself. “No, I can’t be. I’m dreadfully sorry.” The little lines of complexity knit themselves on her brow. “It’s a confusing world, isn’t it?”

The state of mind of Stellamaris at this period may be best described as one of suspended judgment. It was a confusing world. She could not pronounce a more definite opinion. The Land of Illusion was a lost Atlantis of which not a speck remained. On the other hand, the world was no longer the mere abode of sin and ugliness and horror to which she had gradually awakened. Unity had taught her that. What, then, was this mysterious complication of life in which she found herself involved? It no longer frightened her. It interested her curiously.

He stared at her, covering his non-comprehension with the usual military twirl of his mustache.

“Philosophy, then. Kant, Schopenhauer,—um—er,”—he hooked a name from the depths of his memory—“Bain, and all those fellows. I could never make head or tail of them myself, so I don’t suppose you could, dear.”

She pulled down a dusty volume of the “Critique of Pure Reason” from a top shelf and puzzled her young brains over it. It seemed to be dealing with vital questions, but, like Sir Oliver, she was hopelessly befogged. She asked the old doctor. He had a glimmering of her meaning. “The best book in the world, my dear,”—he waved a hand,—“is life itself.”

This was pretty, but not satisfactory. “Walter could tell me,” she said to herself, and forthwith wrote him a long letter.

She lived in a state not only of suspended judgment, but also of suspended emotion. The latter hung in the more delicate balance. Her maidenhood realized it vaguely. She had half expected John to speak of his love for her; at the same time she had dreaded the moment of declaration; and, at the same time also, she had felt that beneath the shadow of the wings of death it behoved mortal passion to lie still and veiled. The anguish of the weeks preceding the tragedy had passed away. She had no pain save that of yearning pity for an agonized world. The old people in their dependence on her and in the pathos of their limited vision once more became inexpressibly dear. The childish titles were invested in a new beauty. Her pretty labors in sorrow-stricken cottages, amateurish as they were, held a profound significance. Unlike the thousands of sweet English girls up and down the land who are bred in the practice of philanthropy and think no more of it than of its concomitant tennis-parties and flirtations, she had come upon it unawares, and it had all the thrill of a discovery. It was one little piece fitted certainly into the baffling puzzle of life.

John came down again for the weekend. Stella found him gentle, less gloomy, but oddly remote from her—remoter even than when he lay crushed beneath the tragedy. Now and again she caught him looking at her wistfully, whereupon she turned her eyes away in a distress which she could not explain. Gradually she became aware that the Great High Belovedest of the past had vanished into nothingness, with so many other illusory things. The awakening kiss that he had given her as he carried her in his arms faded into the far-off dreamland. On the Sunday night they lingered in the drawing-room for a moment after the old people had retired to bed.

“I must be going back by the early train in the morning, and sha’n’t see you,” said he, “so I’ll say good-by now.”

“I’m sorry, dear.” She put out her hand. “I hope the little change has done you good.”

For answer he bent down and touched her forehead with his lips. Then he held the door open for her to pass out.

She went up-stairs, feeling in a half-scared way that something, she knew not what, had happened, and she cried herself to sleep.

CHAPTER XXV

IT was a sullen evening in mid-August, following a breathless day and an angry sunset that had shed a copper-colored glow above a bank of cloud. The great windows of the drawing-room of the Channel House were flung open wide, and on the terrace beneath the starless heaven sat the little group of intimates, which now included the placid lady of the little Kilburn house. Walter Herold, who had returned from Switzerland tanned and strong, told his adventures to Sir Oliver and Dr. Ransome, while John and Stella, a little way apart, listened idly. Lady Blount and Miss Lindon murmured irrelevances concerning the curates of long ago and the present price of beef. They had many points at which the curves of their natures touched, such as mathematicians,[Pg 265] with unique spasm of romance, call points of osculation.

But for the voices all was still. From below, at the base of the cliff, came the lazy lapping of the sea against the rocks. Outside the glow of light cast by the illuminated drawing-room the world was pitch black. The air grew more and more oppressive.

“I hope not,” said Miss Lindon. “I know John thinks it foolish, but I’m terribly afraid of thunder.”

“So does Sir Oliver; but I don’t care. Whenever there’s a thunder-storm, I go up to my room and put my head under the bedclothes until it’s over.”

“Now isn’t that remarkable, my dear,” said Miss Lindon—“I do exactly the same! I draw down the blinds, and hide scissors away in a drawer, and throw a woolen shawl over the steel fender, and then I put my head under the blankets. My Aunt Margery, I remember, invariably used to go and sit in the coal-cellar. But she was a strong-minded woman, and would put her foot on a black beetle as soon as look at it. I hope I’m fond of most of God’s creatures, but a black beetle frightens me out of my wits.”

“What do you think of thunder-storms, Stella?” John asked, knocking the ashes out of his pipe.

“I’m rather frightened,” she confessed. “Not because I think they’ll hurt me.” She paused and sighed. “I never could understand them.”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “You either understand things or you don’t.”

Herold broke in to spare her further explanation. “There was a splendid one the week before last in the mountains—a real Walpurgisnacht. It seemed as though hell had broken loose.”

He described it in his vivid way. The elderly ladies looked at the glimmer of white shirt-front and the glowing cigarette-end by which alone he was revealed, and wondered at the heroical, or, as it seemed in the unconfessed depths of their souls, the God-defying qualities of male humanity. A few resounding splashes fell from the sky. The party rose hurriedly.

A flash of lightning rent the southern sky, and a clap of thunder broke over the channel, and the rain came down like a waterspout. In the drawing-room Lady Blount put her hand before her eyes.

“You must all forgive me. I can’t stand it. I must go up-stairs. Besides, it’s late, very near bed-time. My dear Miss Lindon, shall we go?”

The two old ladies, after hasty good nights, retired to the protection of their respective bedclothes. A great wind arose and swept through the room, blowing over a vase of flowers on the piano. Dr. Ransome, who happened to be standing near, mopped up the water with his handkerchief. Herold sprang to the window and shut it. Stella was by his side. Another flash sped through the blackness, and the thunder followed. They drew near together and waited for the next.

Sir Oliver hospitably pushed John and the old doctor toward the drawing-room door. “There are drinks in the library. It’ll be cozier there, on the other side of the house, away from this confounded racket. Come along, Walter. Stella darling, you had better go to bed. It’s the best place for little girls in a thunder-storm.”

She turned, the breadth of the drawing-room separating Walter Herold and herself from the others.

“I’ll stay up a little longer and look at it, dear Excellency,” she said, with a smile. “I’ll come into the library later and tell you all good night.”

At this announcement, and Stellamaris’s announcements had ever been sovereign decrees, John and Dr. Ransome, standing by the open door, obeyed the courteous wave of Sir Oliver’s hand. The old man waited for Herold, who advanced a pace or two.

He stopped short. “Not in the least. I would far rather look at this,”—he flung a hand toward the window,—“if you would let me.”

Sir Oliver went out, shutting the door behind him. Herold and Stellamaris were alone in the spacious room. There[Pg 266] came another flash and the thunder peal, and the rain spattered hard on the stone terrace.

“Why shouldn’t we sit down?” he asked, and drew a small settee to the window.

She stood, expectant of the lightning. It came and lit up a suddenly tempestuous sea. With her eyes straining at the blackness, she said in a low voice:

He went to the door, snapped the electric switches, and the darkness was so absolute that he waited for the next flash to see his way across the room. They sat down together side by side. A flash of vehement and reiterated radiance revealed a God’s wrath of spindrift scattered from mountainous waves that tossed in the middle distance the three-masted skeleton of a ship, and blasted the chalk-cliffed promontory to the west into a leprous tongue. They watched in silence for a long, long time. Save for the lightning, pitch blackness enveloped them. The rain swished heavily against the windows, and the surf roared on the rocks below. After a livid revelation of elemental welter and the deafening crash of cataclysm, she clutched his arm. When the peal had rolled away into an angry rumble, he whispered:

“No,” she replied, also below her breath, “not frightened. It excites me, it makes me feel, it makes me think. I seem to be understanding things I never understood before. Don’t let us speak.”

To remove impression of rebuke, her hand slid down his arm, found his hand, and held it. Neither spoke. After a while he scanned her face by the lightning. It was set, as though she saw a vision, her eyes gleaming, her lips parted. At the thunderclap her grasp involuntarily tightened. Again and again her face was startlingly visible. Herold’s mind went back down the years. He had seen that rapt expression times without number when she lay by the window of her sea-chamber and looked out into the mysteries of sea and sky; and times without number she had held his hand while her spirit, as he had loved fantastically to believe, went forth to dance with her sisters of the foam or to walk secure through the gates of the sunset. And he had loved to believe, too, that his own spirit, in some blind, attendant way, though lagging far behind, followed hers over the borders of the Land That Never Was. Sensitive to her moods, he felt now a strange excitement. She had become once more the Stellamaris of the cloudless and mystical years. The sea that had rejected her had again claimed her for its own, and was delivering into her keeping mysteries such as it had withheld from her even then; for she had found no message in the war of elements, mysteries deep and magnificent. He returned her tense pressure, and followed her spirit out into the vastness.

The storm grew fiercer. Every few moments spasms of livid daylight rent the darkness and dazzlingly illuminated the eager faces of the pair, the window-jambs and transoms, the terrace, the howling waste beyond, the skeleton ship tossing grimly, the promontory, the pitch black of the sky; and the thunder burst in awful detonations over their heads. Unconsciously and instinctively Stellamaris had drawn nearer to him, and her arm rested against his. After a long time, in the stillness of the dark, he spoke like one in a dream:

“The terrible splendor of life, that is the secret—the terrible splendor.”

She awoke almost with a shock, and, turning round, shook him by the lapel of his coat.

Her voice quavered; he felt that she was trembling. A flash showed her straining her eyes into his face. They waited for the thunderclap during a second of intensity.

“Those words. Those very words had just come to me, the meaning of everything. The terrible splendor of life. How did you know?”

“It was strange,” she said. “I hardly[Pg 267] knew that I was here. I seemed to be away in the midst of it all, but I don’t think I lost consciousness. I had adventures—curious adventures.” She paused abruptly, then she continued: “They seemed to be definite then, but they are all a blur now. It was a kind of battle between man and evil forces, and I think I felt a voice speaking through it, and saying that the splendor of man would never be subdued; and the impression I’ve got is, that I saw something, whether it was a shape or a scene I don’t know, but something great and grand and fierce and heroic, and the voice told me it was life. The only thing I have clear is the words, ‘the terrible splendor of life,’ the words you plucked out of me.”

There was another silence. The storm began to pass gradually away. The lightning became rarer, and the intervals longer between flash and thunder.

“It is beginning to be clear,” she said at last. “All that has troubled me. All that you guessed I was feeling, and that I told you of only when you compelled me. You have been right. Once—do you remember?—you said that if I saw God through the beauty and the vanity of the world all would be well.”

“I ought to have told you to see Him through the pain of the world,” said Herold.

“Yes, you. Now I understand.” She drew a deep breath. “Now I understand. It’s like an open book. That woman—Unity—wait,” she paused, and put her two hands to her head in the darkness. “I have a glimmer of a memory—it’s so illusive. It seems that I saw Unity just now. I understand all that she was, all that she meant.” A flash showed the sea. “Yes, I was out there,” she cried excitedly, and pointed. “Just out there.” Darkness engulfed them. “I forget,” she faltered, “I forget.”

She seized his hand and held it during the peal. Then she cried in a tone of sudden terror:

“What you said—your prophesy—the comfort of the sea—the deeper meaning—”

“Don’t think anything more of it. They were just foolish words to comfort you. You and I seem to have been on the Edge of Beyond and looked over, and we’re not quite normal. We must get down now to practical things. I’m just what I always was, dear, a fantastic person who rode with you into fairy-land. I am still. Nothing more.”

“Are you quite sure?” suddenly asked a deep voice out of the blackness of the room.

Stella with a little cry of fright sprang to Herold for protection. For a second or two they were still. In their exaltation the question seemed to come from some vast depth of the abysm of time. Their hearts beat fast, and they clung together, listening, and there was not a sound. Then the lightning played its dancing daylight about the room, and they saw John Risca standing by the door. They sprang apart.

In another moment the room was flooded with electric light. The drawing-room, for all its beauty, looked mean and unimportant. The lights showed up glaringly an old Florentine tapestry over the chimney-piece. It seemed to have singularly little relation to life. It jarred impertinently.

“I came in to find Walter,” said John; “I didn’t think Stella was still up. It’s late. You didn’t hear me. I’m sorry I inadvertently overheard.”

“There’s nothing, my dear John, that you could not have heard,” said Herold.

For a minute or two no one spoke. The three stood stock-still, their hearts thumping. Outside, the rain fell pitilessly on the flags of the terrace, and the waning storm flashed and growled. John’s burning eyes looked at Herold beneath heavy, knitted brows. At last he said:

“That is not so,” said Herold. “You have found us in a foolishly false position. A thunder-storm is an emotional[Pg 268] piece of business. My old intimacy with Stella has its privileges. I’ll leave you. Stella will speak for herself.”

John stretched out a detaining arm. “No, my friend; stay. We three must have a talk together. It was bound to come sooner or later. Let it be now.”

“There is nothing for us to talk about,” said Herold,—Stellamaris stood clutching the back of an arm-chair, and looking from one man to the other,—“the words you overheard ought to tell you that. And in answer to your question, I can say that I am quite sure.”

“You lie,” said John, quietly. “You lie out of the loyalty of your heart—” he raised his great hand to check the other’s outburst—“God Almighty in Heaven knows I’m not accusing you. If ever man had deep and devoted and unselfish love from another, I’ve had it from you. And I have it still. It’s a matter not of reproach, but of reparation.”

“Don’t you think,” said Herold, “we might continue this extraordinary conversation in the library—by ourselves?”

“No,” said John in the obstinate tone that Herold had known for many years. “You and I are two men, and Stella is a woman, and a hell-mess just like that—” he pointed to the tempest—“has upset our lives. It’s time to put them to rights again.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Herold. “It’s a pity you have chosen to-night. Things are a bit abnormal. Let us go to bed and talk to-morrow, if you like, in the light of common sense.”

John folded his arms. “I’m going to talk to-night. I want you calmly to consider the position.”

“I do,” said Herold. “Stop,”—as John was about to interrupt,—“let me speak.”

“Yes,” said Stella, breaking silence for the first time; “let Walter speak.”

But she stood apart, fascinated by this strange duel, as her primitive ancestress might have done when two males fought for her with flint-headed axes.

“What I feel as regards Stella is neither here nor there. I’ve never told her that I loved her. I’ve never told you. Both you and she have told me that you loved each other. That was enough for me. I joined with Unity in seeking to remove the obstacle in the path of your happiness. If Unity had not forestalled me, I—well, God knows what I should have done! I left you asleep that evening, and went, half crazy, to the flat, and there I found what I found. But, anyhow, Unity committed murder and suicide to set the two of you free. If you want strong, blatant words, there you have them. A girl, one of God’s chosen, has laid down her life for the two of you.” He stood between them and threw up his hands. “Take each other. It is a sacrament.”

Stella, her arms still on the back of the chair, hung her head and stared downward. John cast a quick glance at her and then, a thing which he rarely did, drew his great frame up to its full height and challenged his friend.

She threw out a flutter of delicate fingers and covered her face. “No, no!” she gasped.

The lightning flickered mildly in the well-lit room, and the eventual thunder reverberated in distant anger.

John again came close to Herold. “This may be an extraordinary conversation, but it has to be. If Stella loved me, do you think she would stand like that?”

“My dear old man, I’ve learned many things of late. I can’t tell you exactly. I’m not good at that sort of thing. But Unity has been too big for me.”

“I mean—oh, God knows what I mean.” He strode blindly across the room, returned, and faced the two, still near together. “Can’t you understand?” he cried, with a wide gesture. “I’m infinitesimal sand beneath that child’s feet. I’m a blind mole in comparison with her transcendent vision. I’m in the dust. Oh, God!” He turned away.

“Not shadows, not lies. Once I thought—indeed, I knew—you loved me. That was when you were an ignorant child. You loved some one you thought was me. Now your eyes are opened. You have passed through flames. Knowledge has come to you. You see me as I am, and your love has gone. I know, too, what I am. Unity has taught me. You can’t—you don’t love me, Stella. That I know. I’ve known it ever since that day when we put her into her grave.”

Herold came between them imploringly. “My dear man—my dear fellow—what is the use of this wild talk? You two love each other. Unity gave her life for the two of you. If you two don’t come together, it’s all overwhelming, blasting irony. I couldn’t believe in God after it. It would be hellishly cynical. Stella, in God’s name, tell him that you are bound by Unity’s sacrifice—that you love him and will marry him and make his life happy!”

Stella, very pale, looked at John. “If you want me, I will marry you,” she said in a clear voice.

“I stopped caring? I? Merciful God, I’ve never loved you so much. But you love a better man. What’s the good of saying the same things over and over again? But I’ll tell you this, both of you, that if Unity had not given her life, and if I had been free, I should have fought for you and had you despite everything. That’s my accursed nature. But Unity has not died in vain, and it’s because of that child’s death, the beauty and heroism of it, that I’m able to stand here and tear my heart out and throw it away. Don’t make any mistake,”—he turned fiercely on Herold,—“it’s not I who am giving her up. It’s Unity.”

“Very well,” said Herold. “Let us put it at that. It’s your point of view. You also force me to speak. It would be grotesque to keep silence any longer. Yes, I do love her. She is the beginning and end of life to me. If she had lain on her back all her days, I should never have married another woman. There! You have it now.”

The two men’s eyes held each other for a space. Stellamaris looked at the pair with a fearful admiration. They were men. Herold she had divined and known long ago; this, on his part, was only the supreme fulfilment of promise. But John Risca, who had passed through the illusion and disillusion of her soul, stood before her in new strength, a great and moving figure.

The smile sent swift pain through her heart. She made a step or two, and fell sobbing on his breast.

He caressed the bowed head tenderly for an instant, then releasing himself, he clapped his hand on Herold’s shoulder and shook it with rough affection.

“I’m going to bed,” said he. He moved to the door. There he paused to nod a good night; but at sight of them both looking sadly at him he walked back a couple of paces.

“Don’t worry about me. I’m at peace with myself for the first time for years. There’s lots of happiness in the world left.” He smiled again. “Enough for the three of us—and for Unity.”

He left them, and went to bed in the room which Stellamaris had furnished for him long ago, and fell into the sleep of the man who has found rest at last in the calm and certain knowledge of spiritual things. Unity had not died in vain. And Stellamaris, sitting once more by Herold’s side in the wide bay of the window, and talking with him in a hushed voice of the wondrous things that had come to pass, knew that John Risca had spoken a great truth. It had been God’s will that so should the terrible splendor of the world be made manifest.

“There was never a time when I didn’t love you. I mean—I don’t quite know what I mean,” she said confusedly. “You see, I’ve lived a strange life, dear,” she went on. “You seem to have been a part of me ever since I can remember what is worth remembering. You have always understood things that went on inside me almost before I could tell them to you. I always wanted you to explain foolishnesses that I couldn’t speak of to any one else.”

“That’s very beautiful,” Herold interrupted, “but love is a different matter. When did the real love come to you?”

“I think it was that morning in the garden when you almost whipped me,” said Stella. She started an inch or two away from him. “And I’m sure you knew it,” she said.

And he remembered, as he had often remembered in his great struggle, her eyes, turning from agates to diamonds and her words, “Do you love me like that?”

She laughed the enigmatic laugh of a woman’s contentment, and Herold was too wise to ask why.

They spoke of deepest things. “There is something I must tell you,” said he, “which up to now I have had to keep secret, and it is right that you should know.”

And he told her the story of Unity and himself—the revolver, their talk of the evil woman, their parting words, his crazed adventure through the sunny streets.

She listened, her body leaning forward, her hands clasped on her knee. When he had finished, she sat without change of attitude.

“You did that so that another man could marry the woman you loved. Unity did that so that the man she loved could marry another woman. John came in to-night to sacrifice himself and give us both happiness. The three of you have done terrible and splendid things. I am the only one of us four who has done nothing.”

Herold rose, took a nervous pace or two. What she said needed more than a lover’s sophistical reassurance. He could speak a thousand words of comfort; but he knew that her soul required a supreme answer, a clue to the dark labyrinth through which she had worked. What could he say? He looked through the window, and suddenly saw that which to him was an inspiration. He threw the folding-doors wide. It had stopped raining long ago, though neither had noticed.

She followed him into the gusty air. The sea still roared resentfully at the late disturbance of its quiet. The southwest wind that had brought up the storm had driven the great rack of black cloud above the horizon, and there below the rack was a band of dark but cloudless sky, and in it one star hung serene. Herold pointed to it.

“What have you done, dear?” His voice broke in a catch of exultation, and his usually nimble wit failed to grasp the lunatic falsity of the analogy. “You have done what that has done—come through the storm pure and steadfast.”

“No; you yourself.” He put his arm around her, and all his love spoke. “You. The living mystery of beauty that is you.” He whispered into her lips. “You—Stellamaris—Star of the Sea.”

HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT AND HUMAN NATURE ON THE CANAL ZONE,—INCLUDING A CONVERSATION WITH COLONEL GOETHALS

“The observation-platform’s been taken down, sir, and the track leading to it torn up. That part of the bank’s ready to go out any minute. You can get a good view of the cut, though, from the Y. M. C. A. Building.”

When, in 1906, Uncle Sam put up this building in Culebra, and officially christened it an “I. C. C. Club-house,” because it was the Government, and not the Y. M. C. A., that was paying the shot, he placed it at some little distance from the cut. But in August, 1912, the club-house was very near the cut,—nineteen inches nearer than its own concrete foundation-piers,—and if it had not been lifted and braced with heavy timbers, it would long ago have gone tobogganing down the bank. As I walked through the reading-room, it moved and creaked like a wicker basket with the shock of a heavy blast; but the other men in the room did not raise their eyes from their magazines. From the back porch I looked down into the Culebra Cut, a wider, deeper cut that had completely swallowed up the one I knew well in 1910. Then the fifty-odd giant steam-shovels had been scattered over the nine miles from Bas Obispo to Pedro Miguel; now I saw them concentrated in and about the deep gulch between Gold Hill and Contractor’s Hill for the last battle of the long campaign. From here to where the dike at Bas Obispo keeps out the rising waters of Gatun Lake they are taking up the construction tracks, and the rank jungle-grass grows thick on the bottom of the finished, empty canal.

Between Gold Hill, advance-guard of the Andes, and Contractor’s Hill, southernmost point of the Rockies, lies the deepest part of the cut, and the nearer the big steam-shovels dig down to grade, the harder it is to haul away their spoil. Double-engined and coupled together, the dirt trains climb the steep grade in pairs. First come two straining, spouting Moguls, then a string of loaded “Lidgerwood flats,” like a hill on wheels; then a third locomotive, a string of swaying, clanking “Oliver dumps,” their side-chains jingling like artillery-harness; and last a fourth locomotive, detached, which, with the air of an enthusiastic small boy, comes running up behind to help push. The marbled mass of steam and soft-coal smoke takes strange colors in the tropic sunlight, then shreds away, revealing a patch of vividly blue sky, a palm, and a lone steam-shovel eating away the top of a slide on the edge of the opposite bank.

Whenever a fresh slide begins to break down the bank of the Panama Canal, Colonel Goethals, like the Duchess in “Alice in Wonderland,” cries, “Off with its head!” Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of slides, both curable by decapitation. The first is a mass of soft clay, resting on a sloping ledge of rock, made slippery by seeping rain-water. When dug away at the bottom, the whole hillside begins to slip down, usually with the deliberation of a glacier, but often with the rush of an avalanche. The second kind of slide is caused by the collapse of a stratum of rock under the weight resting upon it. Some of the hard volcanic material in the cut, laboriously blasted out[Pg 272] with dynamite, crumbles into dust on exposure to the air. This failure of the foundations causes a lateral pressure against the bottom of the cut, sometimes heaving it up fifteen or twenty feet. In either case, the remedy is to lighten the load on the top of the bank, often aggravated by the presence of an old French dump-heap. Now that the famous Cucaracha (Cockroach) Slide, that began to plague De Lesseps in 1885, and increased until forty-seven acres were in motion, is nearly, or quite, at rest, the two largest slides are the ones that have at last swallowed up the Culebra club-house, and the even larger landslide on the opposite bank. Between them, since 1907, they have involved the movement of nearly seven million cubic yards of earth and rock. A few days after my visit, a notice was posted at the door of the club-house, warning all who entered the building that they did so at their own risk, and workmen began to tear it down, and the bank where the observation-platform used to stand, a few hundred yards away, “went out” with a rush, to the tune of 900,000 cubic yards.

“Altogether between nineteen and twenty million cubic yards will have been brought into the canal prism by slides before the completion of the work. About 5,915,000 cubic yards of this extra material was taken out during the year ending July, 1912, or more than thirty-three per cent. of the total excavation for that year. Less than 4,000,000 cubic yards of slides remain to be accounted for.”

“Have these slides proved the impossibility of a sea-level canal here?” I asked.

“Will new slides continue to develop after the water has been turned into the cut?”

“Two things will tend to minimize that tendency,” he replied. “First, there will be no more shaking of the ground by blasting; second, the forty-five feet of water in the channel will exert a pressure on the banks of thirty-one tons per running foot of canal. Any earth brought into the cut then could be easily taken out by dredges.

“The last steam-shovel should be taken out of the cut, and all remaining rock broken up by blasting in the dry, by July 1, 1913. Then the dike at Bas Obispo will be blown up, and the water from Gatun Lake will flow into the cut and through Pedro Miguel Lock into Miraflores Lake. The dredge Corozal, now working at sea-level at the Pacific end of the canal, will then be brought up through the Miraflores and Pedro Miguel locks, and put to work in the cut.”

Prominent among the few ornaments of Colonel Goethals’s bare, barrack-like office is a framed photograph of the Corozal, the largest ladder-dredge in the world. Each bucket of her endless chain lifts two cubic yards at a time. She was built in Renfrew, Scotland, in 1911, by a firm that thirty years ago made several smaller dredges for the De Lesseps Company. After rusting for a quarter of a century in tropical tidal-swamps, most of these, floated and cleaned, are still doing good work. Their honest craftsmanship impelled the purchase of the Corozal. Virtually like all the floating equipment at the Pacific end of the canal, she was brought round South America under her own steam. Her name is that of the first railroad station out of Panama City, and, literally translated, means “Merry-go-round.”

“There will always remain a certain amount of dredging to be done in the two entrances, at Balboa and in Limon Bay,” the colonel continued.

“And to keep Gatun Lake clear of silt and wreckage brought down by the Chagres River?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “There will be several miles of dead water at the upper end of the lake above Bas Obispo, where it will settle before reaching the channel.”

“The canal will be informally opened, Colonel, in September, 1913?” I asked.

“I expect to put the first ship through then; and if one can go, any number can. The range-lights, buoys, and other aids to navigation will all be placed and in working order. Less than ten per cent. either of the total excavation or of the concrete-laying in the locks remains to be done. At the present rate of speed, both will be finished, and all the gates and machinery for the east locks installed by September, 1912.”

The locks of the Panama Canal are in two sets, side by side, like the two tracks of a railroad, so that ships can cross in both directions simultaneously. As at this[Pg 273] point the Pacific lies almost due south of the Atlantic,—which is why it was called by the Spaniards the South Sea,—the east locks are those on the left, or South American, side of one going from the Caribbean to the Gulf of Panama.

“When will everything be finished and ready for the formal opening?” I asked.

“I cannot say for certain. If the steelwork and towing-locomotives are delivered when promised, the west gates will be finished by the end of 1914. To operate those on the Pacific side, a transmission-line must be built from the spillway power-plant at Gatun to Miraflores. In the meanwhile one set of gates can be operated by local power-houses. Eventually the power generated by the surplus water running through the spillway of the Gatun Dam will generate enough electricity to run all the lock machinery, the Panama Railroad, and the machine-shops at Balboa, besides illuminating the lighthouses, the employees’ quarters, and the search-lights of the coast defenses.”

“Yes, if Congress appropriates the money to bring down the guns. We’ll have the emplacements built, and everything else ready for them. Of course a strong garrison should be maintained here. The strength of the details guarding the different locks is a matter to be determined by the General Staff. There is no danger of a lock’s being disabled by a solitary spy with a bomb. All the essential machinery is in duplicate or triplicate.”

“Then the popular idea of the Gatun Dam’s being blown up by one man with a suitcaseful of dynamite is—”

“Absurd. The only way that an enemy could let the water out of Gatun Lake would be to blow up the gates of the spillway, and that would require a large number of men, with plenty of time and explosives.”

“Now that the Canal Bill has passed, Colonel, you can begin to organize the operating-force?”

“Yes,” he replied. “As only one thousand Americans will be needed, and there are six times that many here now in the construction-force, the permanent organization will be a picked body of experienced men. There will also be about fifteen hundred West Indian Negroes to serve as helpers in the machine-shops, pass hawsers, and clean up about the locks. The bulk of the operating-force will be quartered at Balboa, and the lock-tenders at Pedro Miguel and Gatun.”

“Have the lessons learned in building the canal brought about any more useful inventions, like the well-known track-shifting machine?” I asked.

“H-m. One of the cranemen has patented a trip for emptying the bucket of a steam-shovel by steam instead of by hand. We’re using it on all the large shovels. Then there is the new lock-gate machinery; you will find the inventor up-stairs in this building. Remember, if you write anything about it, you must give him full credit.”

That is the colonel’s way, to insist on fair treatment for every man under him. He is not only the boss, but the hero, the big brother, the father confessor, of every man on the job. Stories innumerable are told about him, and even rough sagas are sung in his praise.

Speak his name among a group of employees, and immediately each will begin to tell of his experience with “Uncle George.”

“I was sittin’ in the cab, waitin’ to pull a string of dirt cars out of the borrow-pit at Gatun, when who comes a-hikin’ along the track but the Old Man. ‘Can you give me a drink of water?’ he says, and I draws him one from the cooler on the engine. He takes a swallow and says, ‘This is pretty warm for ice-water.’

“‘Yes, sir,’ I says, ‘we’re supposed to have ten pounds a day to put in it, but we’re not gettin’ more’n one.’ The colonel just hands back the cup and walks away, but, say, next mornin’ I drew an iceberg.”

“Yes, and somebody else got stung for that little graft, you can bet your pants. Remember that foreman at Peter Magill [Orthodox pronunciation of Pedro Miguel] who made his gang of Gallegos come across every pay-day? They picked one of the bunch who could handle the English to go up to Culebra, for a hablar [talk] with Uncle George. Zing! Mr. Foreman’s job dropped out from under him, and he dropped through, and the job swung back, and he wasn’t on it. He’s out making roads now with the rest of the chain-gang.”

“The day after I hit the isthmus in 1907,” put in a third man, “I got a cablegram from home, saying my wife was dead. And they wouldn’t let me go back to look after my babies; turned me down cold when I asked for a passage north, and all I had was my job here, and pay-day a month away. I heard there was a new chief engineer at Culebra, and I put it up to him. The colonel he signed a paper, and said:

“‘I’ve had too many letters from wives in the States whose husbands are down here neglecting their families. I’m glad to meet one of the other kind. Show Mr. Smith this, and he’ll give you a passage. Bring your family down with you, and I’ll give you a married-quarters.’”

Colonel Goethals is no longer the handsome, smooth-faced boy officer in full-dress uniform, shown in the well-known photograph taken when he was “the new chief engineer.” His latest portrait, here published for the first time, shows how the heavy responsibilities of the last five years have left their mark on him. His is a splendidly virile face, strong, kindly, and vigorously intellectual. He is appropriately shown in citizen’s clothes, for, except on the most formal occasions, he never wears his uniform. It was with the greatest difficulty that he was persuaded to sit for this picture, and he absolutely refuses to let himself be photographed at work either in his office or in the field.

“No,” said “Old Bill” May, chief clerk and Cerberus of the outer office, “the colonel isn’t one of those fellows who keep the photographer waiting till they can have a lot of extra papers brought in and dumped all over the desk, so folks can see how busy they are. Nobody’s got a camera into his room yet, and I’d hate[Pg 275] to be caught trying it. Maybe you think you’re going to get a snap-shot of him to-morrow when he takes you over the Gatun Dam; but you ain’t.”

And Old Bill May was right. When the morning express from Panama City stopped at Culebra, Colonel Goethals swung nimbly aboard and greeted our party as follows:

“Good morning. I’m sorry, but I can’t go to Gatun with you to-day; there’s a dock gone out at Balboa. Colonel Sibert will show you over Gatun. Good morning, good morning!”

Through the car window we saw him spring into a trim little railroad-motor, which slid clanging and whistling through the crowd at the station, and was half a mile down the track to Balboa before our train had started again for Gatun.

We traveled a curiously zigzag path, now on the old line of the Panama Railroad, now on the new. Ever since the first canoe-load of Peruvian gold was floated down from Cruces to the sea, nearly four hundred years ago, the valley of the Chagres has been the pathway of the isthmus. The Panama Railroad of[Pg 276] the 1850’s, the days of lignum-vitæ ties, wood-burning locomotives, and twenty per cent. dividends, followed the banks and killed the river trade. To-day the rapidly rising waters of Gatun Lake have driven the railroad to higher ground to the east between Gatun and Bas Obispo. From that point the new permanent way was to have been carried through the cut on a berm, or shelf, on the east bank, ten feet above the water’s edge. It was a picturesque plan, but was reluctantly abandoned because of the danger from slides. So that part of the relocation has been built with great labor through the hills to the east of the cut, and is now finished and in use for freight. Not, however, for passengers, for the existing towns in the central division are all on the wrong side of the cut. Our train left Panama City on the old line, switched to the new at Corozal, crossed the cut on a temporary trestle near Pedro Miguel, and ran through Culebra and Empire, where in five years the macadamized and electric-lighted streets will be covered with second-growth jungle, to the busy railroad town of Gorgona, where the lake water will soon be lapping over the floors of the machine-shops. Here a coal-burning locomotive—oil-burners are the rule for passenger-traffic on the Panama Railroad—was attached to the rear of the train, to the disgust of the tourists on the observation-platform of the parlor-car. The train then ran backward up the other arm of the Y, across the dike at Bas Obispo to the new steel bridge across the Chagres at Gamboa, not far below ancient Cruces.

The rest of the way to Gatun ran through country marked on the map as part of Gatun Lake, but covered to-day with virgin jungle. Only in the channel and the anchorage-basin above the locks has the bottom been cleared of vegetation; elsewhere the finished “lake” will be one tangle of deadwood. Now near at hand, now miles away in the valley, the yellow line against the dark green shows where the rising water is drowning out the jungle. In a remarkably short time the leaves and small branches drop off, leaving the dead trunks gray and bare. The cocoanut-palms hold out the longest. The railroad runs high above the lake, on the solidest kind of stone embankments, containing millions of cubic yards of rock from the Culebra Cut. Probably the best-built fifty miles of road-bed in the Western Hemisphere is the relocated Panama Railroad.

Neat little concrete lighthouses, rising incongruously out of the forest, mark the approach to Gatun. Here is the key-point of the canal. From the northwest corner of the veranda round Colonel Sibert’s office, the whole scheme of things leaps to the eye. Four miles to the north lies Limon Bay, with the Caribbean beyond, the long breakwater stretching out from Toro Point on the left, to make the open roadstead a safe harbor, and on the right the new docks of Cristobal, the American-owned port of Colon. What looks like an over-fed dreadnought guarding the entrance is the sea-going suction-dredge Caribbean at work on the four miles of canal that run under the bay to deep water. The next four miles of all-but-finished[Pg 278] sea-level canal, up which ships will sail to Gatun; the profile of the three great locks that will lift them eighty-five feet; the beginning of the broad lake, over which they will sail at that level to Bas Obispo and through the cut, and then down through Pedro Miguel and Miraflores locks to sea-level on the Pacific side, can here be seen and comprehended with a turn of the head. From east and west the hills that inclose the valley of the Chagres close in to the gap, little more than a mile wide, now filled by the Gatun Dam.

You must not think of the Gatun Dam as an ordinary dam, a high, thin wall holding back a body of water, but as an artificial continuation of the gently sloping hills it joins together. In cross-section it resembles the most obtuse of triangles. A cow could walk over it anywhere, and find fairly good pasturage by the way; for coarse, thick-stemmed grass springs up wherever the surface is left undisturbed for a few days. By the time the canal is opened, so quickly is bare earth overgrown in the tropics, those seeing the dam for the first time from the deck of a steamer will have the greatest difficulty telling where it begins and the hills end.

We rode in a railroad-motor along one of the several railroad tracks on the broad crest of the dam; its sides sloped down to a quarter of a mile away on each side. Halting the car about a hundred feet from the edge of the spillway, Colonel Sibert pointed directly down at the mass beneath our feet, and said:

“Eighty or so feet below us lies the site of old Gatun. Morgan and his buccaneers spent their first night there on their way up the Chagres to the sack of old Panama, and it was a famous stopping-place for travelers in the days of the Forty-niners. When we began work here in 1907 there was an island in the river, with a village of fifty thatched huts and a church on it. Now the village is over back of us, and big enough to need three separate fire companies; and the island’s gone, and the river’s gone, and there’s where the railroad used to run along its bank.”

The colonel pointed to where the tops of a few old telegraph-poles made a straight line across the surface of the lake.

“Here.” He led the way to the edge of the spillway, the concrete-lined artificial channel, larger than the original river-bed and hewn through a natural hill of living rock, that carries off the surplus water of Gatun Lake. Last rainy season a certain photographer took a snap-shot of the spillway from down-stream during a flood,[Pg 279] and impudently sold it to a magazine as a picture of the finished canal, “with the water turned in!”

“Colonel, could a fish from the Caribbean swim up that mill-race and cross over to the Pacific?”

“I think so, and so does Colonel Goethals. The only question is, Could a saltwater fish live through the thirty-four miles of fresh water in the lakes and the cut?

“As fast as we want the water to back up against the big dam, we keep raising that semicircular concrete dam down there in the spillway. Those openings you see are being fitted with steel gates, and no matter how hard it may rain up in the hills, we’ll always have enough gates to open and let the water through without any danger of its washing over the crest. Now we’ll cross the bridge over the spillway to the other end of the dam, and then run back and go over the locks.”

The elaborate concrete-laying plant at Gatun, which cost over a million dollars to erect here in the wilderness, has nearly finished its mighty task. The tall steel towers, which stand in pairs on each side of the lock-pit and hold aloft the cableways along which traveling-cranes carry the skips of freshly mixed concrete to the forms and return them empty to the little electric cars that go hurrying back to the mixing-house for more, have been moved down to the lower end of the third and lowest lock. By the time this article appears in print they will probably have been taken down and sold for scrap.

A concrete and timber bulkhead, the nearest approach to an orthodox-looking dam a layman can find at Gatun, keeps the water of the sea-level canal out of the lock-chambers. Directly in front of it float three or four high-decked craft that look for all the world like old-time Mississippi River packets. All they seem to lack are a few roustabouts and a gilt trotting-horse between the tall smoke-stacks. As a matter of fact, they are dredges, with living-quarters for the crews. Across the channel behind them, shutting them off from the sea, is a solid-looking clay dike.

“Colonel,” we asked, “how did you put those boats into that mud-puddle,—fly them or jump them over?”

“The dipper-dredge cut the way in, and the suction-dredge closed it behind them. That dike keeps them from being disturbed by the rise and fall of the tide. A great part of the canal between here and Limon Bay was excavated in the dry by steam-shovels working behind dikes forty feet below sea-level; but that was in rock. The stuff these dredges are pumping out[Pg 280] is prehistoric sea-bottom—soft, black ooze that runs like oil. A big slide of it started due north toward Limon Bay, swung round to the east, and then due south, went three quarters round the compass, and half-way up the lowest lock-pit. We had to force it out by building the permanent lock-walls right into it, section by section—shoved it out by sheer weight.”

“No, this mud is nearly three quarters of a mile north of it. The entire dam rests on the solidest kind of clay, and the locks are built on a ledge of sandstone, except the north approach wall. That will have to be built on piers driven down through the mud to bed-rock. The approach wall is the continuation of the dividing-wall between the two sets of locks, which projects into what we call the forebay, where ships must come to a stop and make fast to the electric locomotives that will tow them through the locks.

“These towing-locomotives,” continued Colonel Sibert, leading us to the top of the nearest lock-wall up a broad, well-proportioned stairway cast in one piece with the rest of the structure, “will be equipped with winches and slip-drums, so that they can tighten or slacken the hawsers, a flexibility that is going to save breaking a lot of line. Four locomotives will take charge of each large ship, two forward and two aft. When they reach those archways carrying the tracks from one level to another, one pair will take the weight of the ship, while the others will climb up to the level above by this rack-rail.”

Between the two ordinary rails of the towing-track, neatly embedded in the concrete top of the lock-wall, was a third rail, broad and strong and indented for the teeth of a mighty cog-wheel. With isthmian thoroughness, these depressions are made self-draining, lest rain-water accumulate and breed fever-carrying mosquitos.[Pg 281] There is a tragedy connected with the third, or return-track, of the towing-railroad, which runs down the middle of the center wall. It had to be there, and so did the range-light that will guide ships across the lake into the upper forebay of the locks. So they stuck that dignified lighthouse up on four bandy legs, like a mangrove on its roots; and when the Art Commission come down from Washington and see it, they will say unkind things of the engineers.

They are building the control-house, the nerve center of all the delicate, ponderous machinery at Gatun, at the lower end of the uppermost lock, where half a dozen operators can oversee and control everything. The control-board will be like a flat-topped table desk, with a model of the locks in low relief, the gates, large valves, and all important machinery shown in miniature, and moving in unison with the main machines. The switches which control the different units will be interlocked in such a manner that the operator cannot move the wrong machine. This switch will stretch a chain across the path of a runaway ship; that will open or close a valve in one of the three great culverts (each as large as the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels under the Hudson River), and so empty or fill a lock; a third will swing round and drop into place the emergency dam that would hold the water in the lake were every gate and guard-gate swept away. If the control-house itself were destroyed, the machines could be operated in detail.

One man has succeeded in making a true picture of the gates of the Gatun Locks—Mr. Pennell.[8] I shall only ask you to imagine the blind walls of two six-story office-buildings swinging open on hinges, like the front of a doll’s house. This miracle is accomplished by a device called the “Bullwheel,” the invention of an employee of the Isthmian Canal Commission, Mr. Edward Schildhauer. A ponderous wheel, revolving horizontally, thrusts out through the side of the lock-wall a long steel arm that opens and closes one of the massive gates as easily as one could a bedroom door. These gates are of what is known as the “mitering-pattern,” making, when closed, a blunt wedge pointing up-stream, like a beaver dam. Mr. Schildhauer is also the inventor of a “miter-locking machine,” which bears a strong family resemblance to the large purple land-crab of the isthmus. One of these machines squats on the top of every gate, and, grasping a pin on the opposite leaf, holds both tightly together.

The fact that the three locks of the Atlantic division of the Panama Canal are together in one place has attracted the attention of the world to Gatun, to the disadvantage of the equally good work done at Miraflores and Pedro Miguel, and the quiet, efficient civil engineer under whom it has been done. Mr. S. B. Williamson, C.E. Of him they tell a story, one of the few that deal with the pre-isthmian days of Colonel Goethals.

Mr. Williamson was working under the colonel on some irrigation-project in the southwest. One morning his chief discovered him shoveling away a gravel-bank with his own hands among a gang of common laborers. The colonel took his subordinate roundly to task. Mr. Williamson blushed, stammered, and finally admitted:

“There was a bit of a slide, sir, and the men were afraid to go back into the pit until I showed them there was no danger.”

The colonel apologized, and has kept Mr. Williamson by him ever since. It is a good illustration of the spirit of Colonel Goethals and his men—the men who have put through the big job.

[7] “Panama Roughneck Ballads.”

[8] See “Building the Panama Canal,”—a group of eight lithographs made by Mr. Pennell for this magazine,—in THE CENTURY for August, 1912.

WHEN his barograph marked twelve thousand feet, Reese pushed the yoke of his warping-wheel forward a few inches, and gave a slight inclination to the foot-bar of the rudder. The monoplane, which had been climbing up into the wind so sharply as to remain almost motionless as far as horizontal progress was concerned, settled to a level keel and began to describe a wide circle, gracefully lifting its outside and lowering its inside wing like a bird when it turns. From behind the trailing edge of the lowered wing, its driver looked down on the creeping expanse of earth two miles below.

The hangars and pylons and crowded stands of the aviation-field were pressed together, made small, blurred, as though seen through the wrong end of a misted telescope. The broad field itself seemed not larger than a lady’s handkerchief; it was almost lost in the blur of villages, boulevards, railroad-tracks, and tree-clumps of the level Long Island country. To north and south, as the great bird swept steadily on its arc, appeared expanses, smooth and polished like metal—the Atlantic and the Sound. Shapes like beetles represented ships.

“It might be Lilliput,” said Reese, aloud, bending his helmeted head over the inch-wide rim of aluminium that separated him from space. The strangeness of sheer height and aloofness had written awe on his face. He lifted his eyes from the Atlantic to the curved walls of sky, dark blue with the thinness of the air, dazzling like steel with the resplendence of untempered sunshine, which curved downward all around him. He was as though suspended in the monstrous metal reflector of a monstrous electric light; dizzying, blazing distance was all around him. “God!” he muttered; “isn’t this—” There was a catch of awe and rapture in his voice—“isn’t this tremendous! And lonely! A man on a mountain-peak wouldn’t be half so much alone.”

Behind the glass of his goggles his wide, hazel-colored eyes shone with a dull excitement, like that following the first exhilaration of champagne. His rapid ascent, the thin, icy air, the powerful hum of the muffled motor, the blazing sunshine, the voice and fingers of the wind, the sweep of his winged machine obeying the circular blur that showed the tractor’s power at its head, the invisible supporting strength that thrilled along the steel nerves of the great bird into his hands—all these new and strong forces registered themselves on the brain of the man, doubled the time of his heart-beats, made him quiver more with excitement than with the cold that suggested itself despite his furs. There was no fear on his keen face; rather exultation, triumph, delight in the presence of danger. A strong swimmer might have struck out toward sirens on their rocks with such an expression of eager, abandoned joy.

“‘They shall mount up with wings as eagles!’” he chanted somewhat wildly, glad of the sound of his voice in the strange emptiness and silence of the place. His eyes wandered along the dazzling, blue-black horizon to a blazing mass of snow-like mist that was forming on the seaward side. “I wish I could go to sleep—like a frigate-bird on the wing,” he finished inconsequently.

He had got little sleep the night before, the nearness of his first real flight, his first unattended trip toward the sun, had been too poignant. From his first lesson in “grass-cutting,” with an instructor in the seat behind him, he had dreamed of this; height and distance allured him as by some affinity with his nature, with the very blood in his veins. His privateer ancestors of 1812, his balloonist great-uncle, his grandfather who had been a naval officer, had bequeathed him their love of free spaces and adventure. The care of his father, a well-to-do professor in a technical school, to bring the boy up to the teaching[Pg 284] profession had not survived young Reese’s first sight of an aëroplane. The professor bowed to the inevitable; John Faraday Reese gave up higher mathematics to adventure on the highways of the sky.

As the machine completed its three-mile circle and came once more up into the wind, Reese straightened it out again, and pulled back a little on the yoke that worked the big double elevator in the tail. The great wings turned upward again, soaring. Playing the controls as instinctively as though the machine had been a part of him, the driver kept his eyes on the lethargic needle of the barograph. From beneath drooping eyelids he watched it crawl upward over the lined paper strip. Twelve thousand five hundred, twelve thousand seven hundred fifty, thirteen thousand, thirteen thousand two hundred feet.

Despite the sharp angle at which the big bird poised, the ascent was growing more gradual; the thinned air offered less grip for the tractor, less support for the wings. To increase the power of the motor, Reese cut out the muffler. The rapid musketry of the exhaust broke out, strangely sharpened and clamorous in the attenuated air. With something like a shudder, he threw over the lever that muffled the engine. His nerves were on edge; the strange sound hurt. The barograph marked thirteen thousand six hundred feet.

Still they climbed, enveloped in a blaze of sunshine that was to the tempered sunlight of the earth’s surface as diamonds to glass. Despite the zero air, Reese’s temples inside his padded leather helmet were bathed in sweat. He was panting, and fine, red lines appeared on the smarting surface of his eyeballs. Below the mask of his goggles his face was drawn into deep, straining lines of exultant determination.

“Up we go!” he shouted. His voice seemed smothered in a vacuum, but he disregarded the strangeness. “Sixteen thousand and a world’s record, or bust!”

He glanced again over the quivering rim of the car. A fine white mist, a mist that gave back the blazing sunshine like cloth of spun-glass, had shut out the earth. It was as though a cover had been put over the mouth of the tremendous reflector inside of which he was buzzing upward, smaller than a midge in the globe of an arclight. The very air seemed to turn to flames and ice. A great wave of melancholy gathered, rose, and broke over him; he was alone in an inhuman world that blazed and swayed, that burned and froze, that had no stability, that allowed him air only in searing little gasps.

“Nevertheless,” he muttered, biting at his hardened nether-lip—“nevertheless, up we go!”

He closed his eyes for a moment to get rid of a slight vertigo caused directly by the glare of the aluminium hood that covered the engine. Colored blotches of light danced before his eyeballs, and the rushing of the icy wind rang on his brain like faint voices. He could hear the feverish whispering of the blood in the tympans of his ears, like a magnified replica of the sound that sometimes comes just before sleep. He felt sleepy.

“Sixteen thousand!” he muttered to himself, crushing down his dizziness and languor. “Sixteen thousand! Sixteen thousand feet!”

“Yes, twenty thousand!” In the thrill of determination that the voice gave him, he momentarily overlooked the queerness of its presence. “Twenty thousand feet high!”

He opened his eyes in some faint distress and perplexity of mind, and blinked through his goggles. In the forward seat, turned three quarters toward him, was a woman, a girl. He could hardly make her out at first, for the dazzle of the aluminium hood was just beyond her, and she was dressed all in white—white, knitted wool and some close, white fur that was almost as dazzling as the aluminium itself. A white, knitted cap was pulled down over her head; a few strands of hair, blazing with the sun’s own color, lay along the snow-white oval of her face.

“I didn’t know—I had the two-seater,” he remarked dazedly. His voice was thin and whistling; he raised it to make himself heard above the hum of the motor and screw. “I thought I took out the one-place machine; I’m out for altitude, you know.”

Her eyes, blue-black and flashing like the sky, regarded him with a little look of questioning; her mouth’s faint scarlet line[Pg 285] turned down a trifle at the ends, suggesting polite surprise.

“I don’t mean to intimate that I’m not delighted to have you along,” he assured her warmly. “I merely forgot; it’s the first time I’ve been anywhere near as high as this, and it makes me feel slightly dippy, not bad enough to make me be afraid of losing control, of course, but still—not just right.”

“Oh, I feel all right, aside from the fact that I can’t remember engaging a passenger for this trip.”

“That’s not worth worrying about now,” she assured him, smiling in a dim, dangerous way into his eyes. “What does the barograph read?”

He had to bend down close to read the dial. “Fifteen thousand three hundred,” he said with a stray air, and lifted his head to stare at her. “I’ll not cut out the muffler until we stop rising; the exhaust makes a ghastly clatter up here. It jabbers like the ghost of itself.”

“I love it; it sounds—high,” she said, and again he was thrilled by the weird music of her voice. It allured, it inspired like a bugle-note, and yet there was a chilling something in it. It reminded him of the “ice-crackle,” that peculiar trilling reverberation from the expanding of thin, new ice on the skating lakes of his boyhood. One glided along over the thin, glass-clear surface, one saw the steel-blue water just beneath, one heard the sudden silvery “Kr-r-r-ring!” of the ice-crackle, and one put his whole soul into speed.

He stared at her, racking his benumbed wits to remember her place on his passenger-list. Like most of the new pilots, he was accustomed to earn an honest penny now and then by taking up persons with the desire and the necessary fifty dollars. She frankly yielded herself to his inspection; she turned farther around in her seat and smiled at him.

She was exquisite, perfect in every line, beautiful with the abstract beauty of an idealist painter’s work. An artist might have called her a “pure type”; there was no little trick of outline or coloring to give personality, character, to the flawless symmetry of her face. She seemed less a real woman than some ideal created to embody an idea: she might have stood for “Purity,” or, perhaps better, “Danger.” Her beauty lost nothing by its impersonality; to Reese’s sun-dazzled eyes, at least it was all the more poignant. The faint scarlet of her lips, the scintillating blue-black of her eyes, the flashing gold of her hair, and the sheer radiant white of all the rest of her allured, intoxicated, astounded. He breathed quickly for reasons other than the thinness of the air. She was unhuman, almost superhuman, for sheer perfection of line and color.

“Well, you have been staring at me for some time,” she said without the slightest show of self-consciousness. “Do you like me?”

“If you’d recall the circumstances. The lessened atmospheric pressure up here makes my head feel as big and empty as a balloon.”

“Oh, it makes no difference; acquaintances begin only when they get interesting, anyway. How you stare! What are you thinking about me now?”

He had been casting about for words, a metaphor, to describe her; in his youth he had made metaphors, boy’s way, to put into verses.

“I was thinking that you are like this height,” he cried, bending toward her over the yoke of the warping-wheel. The great bird lurched drunkenly, and he threw over the wheel to bring it back into equilibrium. He laughed, made reckless by the answering light in her eyes, and let it lurch in the other direction like a swooping eagle. “Yes, you are like height. You are beautiful, you allure, you call to all a man’s manhood and daring; and yet there is something in your look that makes me tremble, as though you were a blade pointing at my heart. Come, we’re three miles above conventions; you won’t mind if I worship you a little? For you are wonderful and beautiful—beyond belief.”

“Why, and so are you. Or is it only this dizzy loneliness that makes us think so?”

“Who are you?” he demanded. “I knew I’d engaged to take up several women[Pg 286] this week, but no one like you. Who are you? Give me a name to call you by. Tell me who you are.”

“Why, only your poor feminine passenger,” she laughed, bending toward him. One lithe arm and hand, gantleted nearly to the elbow in close, white, glistening fur, lay along the aluminium edge of the car. “As for my name, how do you like Alta?”

“Good! I remember just enough Latin to appreciate it. Alta—High! Well—” He threw back his head recklessly—“I’m out for altitude!”

He threw back the yoke with a laugh. In bending toward her he had permitted the machine to gain the level once more. The great bird slanted upward at an abrupt angle, and poised, quivering.

“You are brave!” she cried. Her level eyes dared him, her lips provoked and promised. He closed his eyes for a moment, made giddy by her radiance and by the blaze of the untempered sun on the aluminium hood just beyond her. The reflection surrounded her with an aura like white flames.

Instinctively he eased off the dangerous lift of the wings; he had no need to look at the needle of the level-indicator to know that the machine was threatening to slide backward into the abyss.

“Why do you shut your eyes, height-seeker?” she demanded. “Are you afraid? What does the barograph read now?”

“Sixteen thousand three hundred,” he said shortly. “A record, I believe; but what of it? No, I’m not afraid,” he added, stiffening his neck and fixing his bloodshot gaze on her untroubled eyes and dangerous lips; “I’m not even afraid of you. It’s you who’d better be afraid of me. Do you know we were ready to drop backward a minute ago?”

“I felt it. It was superb. We must have gained two hundred feet in that one tremendous lift. And yet I think—you were afraid.”

“Perhaps I can prove I wasn’t by letting go the controls and coming over there to you. We’d be together for as long as it took us to drop three miles, anyway. Shall I?”

“Oh, brave words—and true! I believe you would. Now you are a demigod by the look on your mouth and eyes; you are man no longer! So, Spirit, send us upward once more till we poise over the abyss! Height and the spirit of adventure! Throw back the yoke with a laugh, as you did before.”

“It is right. Well—when the barograph marks twenty thousand feet, I will come and sit at your knees!”

“It is what I had on the tip of my tongue to ask,” he shouted, wild with exaltation. “Good; and block the rudder-bar! We will go down on the warp alone—a proper finish. Down twenty thousand feet, with the rudder blocked!”

“A bargain!” he shouted, and turned his face up into the candent dome of sky and laughed aloud. His arms jerked the yoke of the elevator back until the wheel touched his breast; the machine leaped upward like a diver, soared, poised trembling. He threw back the lever that cut out the muffler. The exhaust broke out in a weird salvo like sharpened rifle-shots. He eased off the precipitate angle until they had gained way once more, and again threw the elevator up to its highest limit. They bounded upward, swaying, clattering, whistling through the knife-edged wind. And all the while she smiled into his face.

He no longer noticed the barograph; he saw only her untroubled gaze of inspiration and allurement. A thin trickle of scarlet started from both his nostrils; his blackened lips gaped for breath; his bulging, bloodshot eyes left her only to glare over the powers at his command. He was all resolve and eagerness; he was determination incarnate. He shot one hand forward, ungloved, to adjust the carbureter, which was beginning to fail for lack of air. He threw back and forth the lever that put extra pressure on the gasolene tank. With demoniacal abandon he worked the hand-pump that jetted oil on the flying bearings of the engine.

“Do-er! Accomplisher!” He started at her voice. The reflection of his own exaltation was on her; her face quivered, yearned toward him. With a steady, sinuous movement she drew herself backward[Pg 287] over the low back-rest of her seat, and crept back under the curved yoke that held the warping-wheel. She sat up, sidewise, near him, lifted her face slowly until it curved backward like a flower on the fair, white stem of her throat, and offered him the curved, scarlet miracle of her lips.

As he bent toward her the sky became black. As from the depths of a dream he heard her voice chanting:

Her voice was like a softened, hundred-toned ice-crackle. He trembled in his coma, and then relaxed as for a long fall in sleep. The voice went on:

“Leonardo da Vinci laid aside the brush that made the Mona Lisa to grope for the realization of this dream that we have made real.

“To fly, to spread wings on the impalpable air, and soar, to follow the way of an eagle in the air.

“To skim the invisible columns of the sky—are not men become as gods now in very truth?

“You have dreamed true, Spirit—Spirit of Dreams and High Emprise; you are all men who aspire.

“How beautiful you are in the torture of accomplishment! The very chords on your throat are lute-strings to sing of victory.

“The blood from your nostrils is a libation to the jealous powers that you have trampled underfoot.

He was suddenly aware of a great rush of wind and of the delirious, gripping sensation of falling. Drunk with her voice and beauty, he had forgotten warping-wheel, rudder-bar, elevator-yoke, everything. The cutting air roused him; frantically he threw the elevator down, drawing her head backward before the yoke to his breast. The great bird shuddered, and swung dizzily to one side. He remembered that she was blocking the rudder-bar; painfully, ineffectually, as in a dream, he warped down the lower wing, biting his lips in an agony of helplessness.

“Why struggle further? You have attained—you have attained!” he heard her siren’s voice chanting in his ears; her lithe arms sprang to meet each other about his neck. “Kiss me—kiss me, Spirit!” she cried, with her icy cheek pressed to his. “I am height!”

“No,” he shouted, struggling to keep his eyes open and his hands on the wheel, “you are mad—we are both mad! Don’t you understand? This is death!”

“Kiss me!” she repeated in her voice of ice and silver. “How wonderful is this death! Where are your arms, Spirit? Am I not beautiful? Look at me!”

Her breath enveloped him, numbing him, filling him with a Lethean languor; but still, with all the strength of his instinct and training, he struggled to bring the machine back under his command. Despite her presence, he managed to get his feet on the rudder-bar. They whirled downward, listing so far that he felt the grip of the straps that bound him to his seat. He worked the controls, holding her away from him with elbows and knees. They dashed into a blinding mist, beginning to circle at last, and he threw all his remaining power into a desperate attempt to warp the wings back into equilibrium. At the same time he forced the rudder-bar over to turn the machine in the direction away from the lowered side.

The great bird righted, and began to swoop as lightly as a descending gull. He cut out the engine. “There!” he bellowed, crazy with triumph and with the sudden increase of oxygen in his starved lungs. “I’ve saved you despite yourself! Your idea was all very romantic—” His head whirled again as she lifted herself in his arms.

“You were afraid,” she whispered, catching his face to her breast—“afraid! Your fear was greater than your love—of me!”

“You don’t understand; you don’t—this is how—I am afraid!” he concluded in a sudden deathlike abandon; and lifted his arms from the wheel to hold her to him. He felt the ineffable, keen sweetness of her lips on his. Then consciousness went like a blown-out candle. The perfectly balanced monoplane continued its slow, even swoop toward the earth.

Some one shook him by the arm. He was sitting in the cockpit of the machine,[Pg 288] his hands dangling limp over the sides. A corn-field was about him; his dazed eyes made out the low, green month-old stalks all about. Several men were standing beside him, and others, a great crowd it seemed, were hurrying toward him.

“Asleep! By the great horn spoon, he was asleep!” said a man at his right hand. “Came down too fast, youngster. How high’d you get, anyway?”

Slowly he made out the features of one of the officials of the aviation-field, one of the men who had verified his barograph before he started out for altitude. The man raised himself up by the little iron step on the side of the car, leaned over to look at the barograph, and began to bellow wildly at the crowd. “Twenty thousand! It must be wrong. But even if it’s a few hundred out, even if it’s a few thousand—whoop-la! He’s done it! The kid’s done it! A record!”

“But where—where—” stammered Reese, stupidly. He sat and stared before him like a man just awakened from a dream.

The aluminium hood came close up against the steering-yoke; there was no forward seat, not even room enough for a cat: it was the one-place machine.

THEY were changing the guard at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the sacred place for which the Crusaders marched and fought, the shrine toward which the feet of pious pilgrims have turned for nearly twenty centuries. It was done quietly, and with no feature to attract attention, or emphasize the shame that made a guard necessary. In a moment the old guard of six soldiers and the young Turkish officer had gone, and on a raised platform, just within the door, the new guard were making themselves comfortable, lighting their cigarettes, and chatting in low, soft voices.

I had asked the officer before the relief arrived if the guard was actually needed. “Not often,” he replied. “But one can never tell. In the last disturbance a monk was killed. I tell you true! I saw him lying there at the foot of the steps.”

He flicked the ash from his cigarette, and shrugged a very square pair of shoulders significantly.

“Monsieur wonders, but he does not know these people. Observe, Monsieur, that the stair beyond the door has eighteen steps. All but the lowest one belong to the Latins; the bottom one and the pavement belong to the Greeks. Each morning the steps must be swept. The Latins sweep down to the last one, and there they must leave the dirt, until the Greeks sweep it off and bear it away. Generally the two come together, and so the work is done. But on that fatal day, when the Latin had swept the dirt upon the lowest step, no Greek was there. So lest the dirt should blow back again where he had cleaned, he, little thinking, swept it off, and was bearing it away. Then came the Greek, and, seeing him, snatched both broom and basket from him, with upbraiding words. Their loud voices soon reached their fellows, and in a moment a score or more were pushing and wrestling across the pavement. Nor were good solid blows lacking. Somehow in the tumult a Greek monk was pushed over, and, falling against the edge of a stone step, broke his neck, and so died, while they all knelt and prayed for his soul. Since then there has been no actual trouble, but we keep a constant guard posted here at the door. I am of Islam, effendi—the faith of my fathers. We garrison the Tower of David.”

Multitudes of people were passing in and out of the venerable portal, singly and in groups, sometimes in companies. They surely must have come from the ends of the earth, young and old, rich and poor, pilgrim and tourist, to stand or kneel beside the holiest tomb in Christendom.

Just within the entrance is the Stone of Anointing, the ancient one covered by a more modern stone, worn smooth with the touch of countless lips. Above it hangs a row of lamps, of various shapes and colors, but always burning. These lamps offer a key to the strange conditions within this ancient fane, for part of them belong to the Armenians, part to the Latins, the rest to the Greeks and the Copts.

Wherever you go, you find the same confusing conflict over jealously guarded rights, for every sect of Oriental Christendom is represented and claims some part in the ownership of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Not the church alone, but the whole city, and its environs, including Bethlehem, Bethany, Gethsemane, and every real or fabled spot of sanctity, are in the guardianship of one or the other of the many creeds.

Jerusalem is the “City of Peace,” but no city on earth has such a tumult of devotion, such a confusion of worship. In many ways it is essential that there should be all of the great substantial hospices, capable of sheltering and caring for the multitude of pilgrims who still, as in the ancient days, come from afar to worship[Pg 290] in Jerusalem. They come from every nation in Europe, mostly in comparative poverty, making their toilsome way by personal exertion and sacrifice. The roads leading from seaports are thronged with pilgrims, trudging their dusty way, sleeping beside the highway or in rude shelters erected for them, all with their faces set steadfastly toward Jerusalem. For these there must be rest and shelter and food, for which reason in the Holy City, and at neighboring shrines huge caravansaries are sustained by the various national churches. More elaborate buildings, like modern hotels, exist for those who come upon a pious pilgrimage with ample means.

Schools exist for the young, taught by monks and nuns. There are communities of pious widows, whose wealth has erected for them pleasant homes in the Holy City. There are colonies—Protestant, Jewish, Catholic—actuated by some idea, often chimerical, sometimes simple and tinged with pure devotion. The members live as a religious family, each doing some share of labor, and enjoying some share of the result. There are also modern churches, magnificent ones, built within a decade or two, either as memorials, or for some missionary purpose. The Jewish community is constantly increasing, many of them looking for the speedy coming of their Messiah, and most of them brought hither by benevolent schemes for the colonization of Palestine by its ancient people. Over all this jumble of things ancient and modern floats the crescent flag; and above, on the height of Mt. Moriah, stands the marvelous mosque, where the Moslem, bows himself toward Mecca, and worships his God.

During my stay in Jerusalem it occurred to me that it would be interesting to seek out the various heads of all these various creeds. Fortune was kind, for sooner or later I found them all, and bore away photographs showing the faces of a unique set of Lords Spiritual, probably the most varied in belief and personality to be found in the world. Together they stand for the Christian history of twenty centuries; and in a city of probably sixty thousand souls, they all have a following, and play a part in its life.

Eldest in occupancy, and claiming priority from the fact that they are the descendants of those who listened to the teaching of the Apostles themselves, are the Syrians, the ancient stock of Palestine. They are few in number, but possess the ancient Convent of St. Mark, and the tombs of Nicodemus and of Joseph of Arimathea. They are ruled by His Beatitude Abighatios II, the Syrian Patriarch of Jerusalem.

The Greek Church rests its claim to authority upon the fact that Constantine, the first Christian emperor, gave Rome the go-by when his victory over Licinius made him master of the empire, and built his capital on the Bosphorus, calling it Constantinople. The later Greek (in which the New Testament was written) was the language of the Eastern Empire. During the early centuries the language and the learning of the Christian Church was Greek, and the great fathers and teachers of the early centuries were theirs. St. Helena, Constantine’s mother, discovered, so tradition says, the true cross, and the cavity from which it was taken is reverently shown to-day, hard by the sepulcher. Most of the sacred places owe their preservation and their defense to the Greeks, who are far in advance of all other Christian sects in their Holy Land possessions and influence.

The Greek Patriarch, His Beatitude Damianos, is a grave, dignified man of great learning. Fourteen bishops are subject to him, and they control twenty-one monasteries within and about Jerusalem. The superior of the Holy Sepulcher, Monseigneur Optimus Patlafeki, ranks next to the Patriarch. He is Lord Chancellor to the Greek Patriarch, and administrator of the vast wealth (both that which daily comes from gifts and fees, and the collection of rentals), invested in real estate and buildings. A shrewd and careful diplomat, he stands close to the powers that be in the rule of the Holy City. He and the venerable Patriarch alone know what treasure the Greek Church possesses.

It is a peculiar fact that the Greeks form but a small part of the Greek Church, or, more properly, of the Holy Orthodox Church. Counting all the Slavonic peoples who belong to the orthodox, still a full four fifths are Russian. The conversion of the mighty empire of the north came as late as A.D. 989, when Vladimir married the sister of the Emperor Basil,[Pg 291] and chose the Greek in preference to the Roman form of religion. The people were baptized almost as a nation, and no other nation has remained more loyal to the faith. To-day more pilgrims come to Jerusalem from the land of the Czar than from any other nation. Literally by shiploads, in caravans of hundreds, they come to worship at the holy places. There are many large and spacious establishments where the pilgrims are sheltered, and their management and operations require the oversight of a capable man. The Holy Synod therefore maintains an Archimandrite, who, without interfering in the least with the Patriarch, looks after the detail of things Russian, and a capable man is His Excellency Monseigneur Leonidouff.

The Latins, whose Hospice is one of the most imposing, and who have built churches, monasteries, convents, schools, and a magnificent modern hospital, number about three thousand, and have for their patriarch, His Excellency Monseigneur Philippe Camassei, one of the most learned of all the throng of dignitaries. The Latins are the natural opponents of the Greeks, and since the anathemas exchanged in the year 1054, each sect has claimed independent authority and priority. Nowhere else is the great schism between the East and the West so evident as in Jerusalem.

The woes and persecutions of the Armenians at the hands of their Moslem rulers have been makers of history for centuries. Armenia has great prestige as a Christian[Pg 292] nation. A little before Rome was converted to the faith, Armenia, under the teaching of Gregory “the Illuminator,” had become the first Christian kingdom. Next to the Greek Church, it is to-day the most important in the East. In Jerusalem they have a great church and monastery on Mt. Zion. Their permanent following is not large—not more than eight hundred—but thousands of pilgrims come yearly to tarry awhile in the sacred places.

Their patriarch is His Beatitude Izimerlian, and they keep the shrine and tomb of St. James, whom Herod slew with the sword.

The Copts are an echo of far-away Egypt, where in the early centuries they were the dominant Christian force. Alexandria was one of the first great Christian capitals, and her patriarch and bishops were potent forces in the early church councils. Chief among them was St. Athanasius, who at the first General Council battled against the “iota,” the single letter that made or unmade the definition of the divinity of Christ. In Egypt to-day the Copts are looked upon as by far the most intellectual and capable of the mixed and tangled population. The Copts have no colony in Jerusalem, except for a few men engaged in banking or other commercial pursuits. However, multitudes of Copts come from Egypt at the times of the great festivals, and shelter and oversight are necessary for their protection. They have three monasteries, one being close beside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Here lives their bishop, His Eminence Thimethos, and from his household are furnished daily two priests whose high and singular dignity it is to be shut up in the great church each night, to keep watch beside the Holy Sepulcher.

Away to the south, beyond the cataracts of the Nile, preserved through long ages by its desert sands, lies the remains of one of the oldest relics of civilization, Abyssinia (wrongly associated with the ancient Sheba, now known to have been located in southwest Arabia, and whose queen came to Jerusalem to see King Solomon’s splendor and glory). In A.D. 338, St. Athanasius appointed a bishop for the Abyssinians, who had received Christianity, so the legends say, from two sailors cast upon their coasts. Through the march of fifteen centuries Christianity has endured[Pg 293] there, though in a debased form, contaminated by ancient heresies, and absorbing much from Judaism. Their patriarch is always a Coptic monk appointed and consecrated by the Patriarch of Egypt. In Jerusalem they maintain a large monastery and convent, where devout men and women spend their lives. They have recently built a new chapel, which is the seat of their abbot, Monseigneur Mahsanto.

To the northward in Palestine, near the border of Turkey in Asia, under the shadow of the mountains of Lebanon, from whose sides Hiram, King of Tyre, cut cedar-trees to send to King Solomon for his temple in Jerusalem, lives a religious and political community known as Maronites. The name is merely a patronymic and perpetuates the name of their founder, John Maron, who in the seventh century set up a civil and spiritual rule. So sturdy and independent were these mountain people[Pg 294] that they withstood the victorious onslaughts of the Mohammedans, and to this day never have been subject to them. When the First Crusade had been fought and the Templar Kingdom was established in Jerusalem, the Maronites joined themselves to Rome, which accepted them as they were. To-day they are the only church in communion with Rome not governed by Rome. They maintain a small convent in Jerusalem, presided over by their superior, Monseigneur Jiryes Domat. They hold their own synods, elect their own patriarch, and manage their own affairs.

For many years the Church of England has maintained an establishment in Jerusalem. Originally it was a missionary enterprise, professedly setting out to convert all men to anglicanism. Now, however, a new philosophy is dominant. The Rt. Rev. Popham Blythe, Bishop in Jerusalem, cares for the English folk who may be resident or transient, and directs missionary effort, chiefly toward Mohammedans and Jews.

After all, Moslems and Israelites are the original stock, the descendants of Jacob and Esau. They form by far the largest factor in the population of highly diversified Jerusalem. Nor may the various Christian sects imagine for a moment that they have a monopoly of dignity and learning. Measuring certainly up to any standard, however discriminating, are the leaders of these antagonistic faiths. Chief of the Moslems is His Honor Musa Effendi Shabik, Grand Cadi of Jerusalem; and at the head of the constantly increasing multitude of Jews is His Eminence Zacharias Ben-Abbas, Grand Rabbin of the City of David.

So dwell in as much peace as possible, yet mixed with many mocking words, and much biting of thumbs, the varied sects and sorts of the population of this ancient and unique metropolis. Each sect, of course, believes itself a trifle nearer the original pattern of faith and practice than its neighbor. That this belief might at times take the form of extremely vigorous missionary endeavor, is certain, were it not firmly, but tactfully, restrained. To supply that tact and firmness requires a peculiar personality, in which patience plays an important part.

Amid all this procession of titles, regalia, rank, pomp, and ceremony, he whose position has most of care and least of comfort, is His Excellency Djoudat Bey, Governor of Jerusalem. When returning from beyond the Jordan, we found ourselves face to face with an outbreak of cholera in Jaffa, the port of Jerusalem, and observed the quick official action of this official in flinging a protecting barrier of quarantine about the city, and providing the military and civil espionage which was necessary to the crisis. Not a single case crossed the barrier, or gained a footing in Jerusalem.

Despite all the confusion and jumble of faith and creeds, Jerusalem is still a city to be desired. Much of its sanctity is merely legendary. Many, indeed most, of its holy places are incapable of identification. Still it is Jerusalem. Here are the ancient hilltops, where stood in far-gone years the sacred shrines of earth’s most wondrous nation. Here are still the hoary moss-grown stones, beside which there still resound the wailings that are the minor strains of the Iliad of a broken-hearted people. Here Abraham sacrificed, here David ruled, here Solomon spoke the wisdom of the proverbs. And, holiest of all, here are the rugged pathways trodden by the saintliest feet that ever pressed our sorrowful earth. And above us, glowing in their splendor, arch the soft and radiant skies that smiled on him.

City of tumult and confusion, to the heart of faith thou art still Jerusalem, the City of Peace!

Author of “The Commercial Strength of Great Britain,” “Germany’s Foreign Trade,” etc.

THE day of the awakening has come, and nearly four hundred years after these Northern voyagers discovered “the Kingdome of Moscovia” the world is witness to the greatest economic evolution in history. A nation of 165,000,000 people, increasing in numbers at the rate of nearly 3,000,000 a year despite famines, wars, and the rigors of terrible winters, occupying an area of 8,650,000 square miles, or two and a half times that of the United States, and with a proportionate wealth of natural resources, is finding itself.

The results are not problematical. The same laws of progress and development now govern Russia as have governed other countries in the past, and brought them to their present position of wealth and continuing prosperity. In all times some one nation has led the rest as the most powerful of all. It is equally true that no one nation has held this position for more than the allotted time. In the past the ascendancy of one people over another has been largely due to a greater spirit of aggressiveness or warlike tendency. In the future one nation will lead another through greater economic wealth and sturdiness of national character. In a broad sense the world is becoming commercialized, though in its best meaning this does not imply that the trader is the leader and the exponent of the nation’s life; he is merely the means to an end. Through him the world becomes more of a kin; he opens the road to civilization with all its equalizing and protective features, and, having served as the pioneer, is then regulated through the influences which follow in the wake of his adventures. Despoiling the weak is no longer the unrebuked spirit of strong nations, and international neutralization is gradually spreading its protecting influence over a large part of the earth’s surface. It is from the point of national wealth and national character, therefore, that the near future of every country must now be judged. The prophet of to-day talks not of wars and plagues; he foresees the true value of what lies in the ground and the strength or weakness of a people in realizing wisely or wastefully upon their entail.

The most powerful country of the future will be Russia, and her elements of greatness are writ fair across her thousands of miles of territory and in the character of her sturdy, peaceful, industrious, and phlegmatic people. The wealth of Russia lies in the ground, and centuries of industry will not exhaust the possibilities of expansion. From her 900,000,000 acres of forest, as compared with the 88,000,000 in the United States, will[Pg 297] come the world’s supply of timber. There are now 250,000,000 acres of land under the plow, whereas there is nearly double that amount in the United States; but Russia can expand her cultivated area twenty-fold and still leave virgin land for coming generations. From this vast farm will come the grain demanded by bread-hungry people in other lands. Oils, minerals, and fuel abound. The advance in development and transportation achieved each year will be the only measure of increasing national and individual wealth. Within the empire itself tremendous and complicated problems face the people.

Political, social, and economic conditions are as in no other land. It is only since 1861 that 22,000,000 peasants ceased to be slaves under the law, and it was some years after that before the law came into practical effect throughout any wide area. It was not until 1864, with the establishment of the zemstvos, or district assemblies, that any measure of local government fell to the lot of the people. It was not until 1890 and the years following that appreciable effort was made in the direction of general education. To-day twenty-seven per cent. of the people above nine years of age can read and write, this being an average for the whole empire, which includes the seventy per cent. of illiterates in Poland and the ninety-five per cent. of illiterates in central Asia. In 1912 the imperial budget provided for an expenditure of $55,000,000 for educational purposes, and the local governments contribute nearly as much more. This is an increase of fifteen per cent. over 1911, and is over three per cent. of the total revenue of the Government. There are now 90,000 primary schools, employing 155,000 teachers, attended by over 4,000,000 pupils.

The change that this one feature of national life will bring about among the people of Russia in the next few years can be appreciated only when the conditions of twenty years ago are fully understood—conditions which gave rise to the stigma of “Darkest Russia.” The light is being let in, and with it are coming perforce changes in administrative methods and in political life which are replete with promise of a new and better era. It requires no effort of the imagination to picture the state of a great nation buried in ignorance and at the mercy of an educated and more or less unscrupulous bureaucracy, but it needs a heroic readjustment of preconceived ideas, a sweeping away of prejudices, and a wide comprehension, to grasp the potentialities of a land and a people like these when latent natural wealth is made accessible and education and comparative freedom of thought and action are given to all. The process must be gradual; limitations upon material development are always severe, and the pace a disappointment to the enthusiastic. Mental and political development is even slower, for it is the new generation and not the old which goes to school, learns to think, and then acts upon the thought. Too rapid growth is dangerous, and unproductive of permanently good results. Some of the greatest and wisest men of Russia, men who have the interests of the country and its people unselfishly at heart, are among those who have been denounced in other countries as well as in their own as “reactionaries.” The closer this really unknown land is studied, the more tremendous and overwhelming in their complexities appear the problems with which its rulers and the people are faced. They can be solved only through the coöperation of all classes.

So far this is a long way from being achieved, but progress has been made, and when all conditions and circumstances are taken into consideration, this progress can be regarded as comparatively rapid; for the work of modernizing Russia dates back no further than the birth of the German Empire or that of modern Italy; in point of fact, less than thirty years. In the last ten years the foreign trade of Russia has doubled, exports and imports keeping pace one with the other in their increasing volume and value. Ten years ago this trade amounted to about $700,000,000; in 1912 it is about $1,400,000,000, of which fifty-six per cent. is exports and forty-four per cent. imports. This total foreign commerce, large as it appears, is considerably less than half that of the United States, though it is worth noting that in no ten-year period in its history did the foreign commerce of the United States ever increase by one hundred per cent., as did that of Russia in the last ten years, and there is every reason to believe that the present rate of increase will[Pg 298] continue, barring such hindrances as great droughts or serious political or military disturbances.

The real growth and development of Russia are within. Her increasing foreign trade is only a sign of what is taking place in a gigantic and largely unexploited empire. Education is spreading slowly but effectively among the people; millions of acres of virgin land yield annually to the plow; railroads are steadily pushing into new territory; population is being transferred from the densely settled areas to the open spaces of Siberia at the rate of a quarter of a million every year. The land and the forests are being held by Russia for Russians, and settlement is a requisite of purchase. Manufacturing plants are increasing apace, and factories of all descriptions, ranging from the mills of Moscow, one of which, a cotton mill, employs nearly 20,000 people, to the smaller establishments of the eastern-frontier cities, are all sharing in the benefits of the increasing purchasing power of the Russian unit.

The needs of the Russian people are not greater than their country can supply in time, but they are far beyond what is now being produced to supply them, or will be for many years to come. Hence they are faring abroad for markets for their raw materials, for raw materials to supply deficiencies of home production, and for the vast supplies of machinery and other manufactured goods needed to meet the demands of interior expansion and modernization now in progress and as yet only in its beginning.

It is concerning this country and this people, and at such a time, that the Congress of the United States has seen fit to denounce a long-existent treaty of trade and friendship and create a situation the outcome of which can only be to the serious detriment of the American people in their political prestige abroad and to their loss industrially, commercially, and financially. This action on the part of the United States Government came as a complete surprise and no little of a shock to the people of Russia, from the highest official in the Government to the most modest Russian vendor or purchaser of American wares. To the not inconsiderable group of adventurous Americans who have entered Russia in the last few years and built up great and profitable businesses in importing American goods or representing American financial institutions it brought bewilderment and consternation. The Russian Government, confident that it retains the right to adjust its domestic laws and economies as may be deemed best for the Russian people, or right or wrong, according to their own judgment or wishes, looks for a reason for what is deemed in St. Petersburg as unwarranted interference from without. It is recalled that within a recent year fewer than a score of naturalized Americans were refused permission to visit Russia, and these for serious political or economic reasons, while hundreds of Russians were refused admission to the United States on rulings from the immigration authorities, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of Russian subjects whom no steamship company would accept as passengers for America, knowing that, by reason of discrimination against the Asiatic races, they would be denied. The Russian Government’s official attitude toward this action on the part of the United States Government is one of contemptuous resentment; contemptuous because it is believed that American politicians yielded to anti-Russian influences for purely selfish reasons; resentment because they find from their point of view no just cause for thus destroying in offhand manner the extremely friendly and profitable relations between two great nations—relations which have become a unique and historical example of long-continuing, unbroken, and even undisturbed friendship. The diplomatic position in St. Petersburg is simple. The Russian Government maintains in effect that the United States has chosen to denounce the treaty, hence it rests with the United States to ask for a new convention. In the meantime the United States has been dismissed from the official mind except that so far as governmental influence is concerned it is now actively anti-American. No American bids to furnish steel for the great Russian navy to be built will be considered—because they are American. The present treaty expires December 31, 1912. After that date, unless some new arrangement is made, all American imports will be subjected to a heavy surtax or increase of customs dues. American life insurance companies are carrying policies[Pg 299] in Russia amounting to nearly $100,000,000. To do this business they are compelled to maintain a cash reserve in Russian banks amounting in the case of a single New York company to about $20,000,000. After the thirty-first of December, through the antagonism which would result from the absence of a treaty, American financial institutions might be subjected to such restrictions as would make business in Russia impossible. In 1911 the Russian farmers bought $27,000,000 worth of imported agricultural machinery, mostly American.

The prospect of a tariff discrimination against such an industry as this is viewed with anything but equanimity by those[Pg 300] who have spent laborious years bringing it to its present stage of development. American figures of exports to Russia are of small value as showing the real state of trade between the two countries. According to the figures compiled at Washington, the direct exports to Russia in 1909 amounted to about $30,000,000. In 1911 they were $52,000,000, a growth of eighty per cent. The truth is that more than twice this value is the real measure of American sales to Russia. Over one half of the trade is indirect, American goods being shipped to England, Germany, France, Denmark, Holland, and other countries, and credited as sales thereto, whereas they are immediately reshipped to Russia, and in fact were bought originally on the trade-account of that country. Estimates as to the real amount of American sales to Russia vary from $90,000,000 to $190,000,000, and the latter figure is probably nearer the mark.

There is reason to believe that American sales of one item alone—raw cotton—exceed the total amount of $50,000,000 credited to the Russian import account from the United States. The annual consumption of raw cotton in Russia is approximately $125,000,000. Fifty million of this is grown in central Asia: one fifth comes from Egypt, India, and other places, leaving at least $50,000,000 to be bought from the United States, as there is no other place from which it can come. The American export statistics show that less than $7,000,000 of raw cotton is sold to Russia direct. There is therefore over $40,000,000 worth the purchase of which is credited to other countries, but which in fact goes to Russia and is paid for by the Russian cotton-spinners. Purchases of raw material such as cotton by one country from another are purchases of necessity, and no matter what the diplomatic relations of those countries may be short of actual war, this business continues. If the relations be unfriendly, however, efforts are made to supply deficiencies elsewhere or to stimulate home production to its highest possible point.

Dependence upon American cotton is a[Pg 301] sore point throughout Europe, and millions are being spent by various governments and combinations of milling interests to create a cotton surplus elsewhere. Englishmen and Germans are developing African cotton-fields, the Dutch are at work elsewhere, and now Russia is spending enormous sums upon extensive irrigation schemes in the near East to enlarge the not inconsiderable cotton-producing area of the empire. In the case of manufactured goods, however, a nation has the markets of the world to choose from, and the American manufacturer meets the Englishman, the German, the Frenchman, the Belgian, and others in the fiercest kind of competition when he offers for sale the products of iron and steel, the textile mills, machinery, large and small, and, in fact, anything which, given the raw material, human ingenuity fashions to the hand of man.

It is in this field that diplomacy joins hands with commerce and industry, for modern diplomacy is based upon equal trading rights and trade extension. The foreign minister or secretary of state of to-day is judged by his people upon the success or failure of his policy as it affects the export trade of his country at the moment, or in its guarantees for the future. There is still much high-flown talk about national honor, the dignity of nations, and the cause of humanity, but careful analysis fails to discover in any recent international dispute or agreement a single instance where the maintenance of trade, its extension, or trade jealousy or rivalry, is not the fundamental question at issue. This is not to the discredit of diplomacy, nor does it put it on a lower plane than in the days when territorial aggression or offensive and defensive alliance was the purpose of pourparlers. In fact, while it may lose some of its romance in the telling, the extension of commercial spheres for the most advanced nations is an extension of enlightenment, justice, and modernization which makes for the permanent betterment of those coming under their sway.[Pg 302] A most effective and dangerous appeal to ignorance and prejudice was made not long ago by a certain cartoon which found its way into many American newspapers. It represented the hand of Uncle Sam grasping and waving an American flag across which was written the legend “Passport.” An impression which will not stand analysis exists in the United States that a passport issued by the State Department is the same thing as the flag of the nation in that it demands equal recognition and respect abroad. This construction is an absurdity, for a passport is no more or less than a certificate of citizenship. It contains no clause giving the support of the issuing country to the holder should he do other than observe the laws and regulations of any foreign countries in which he may be traveling or residing. The same question which has caused the present strained situation between the United States and Russia was broached in the Parliament of Great Britain, for Russian laws and police regulations apply to English citizens traveling in Russia, as they do to the citizens of every other country, including the United States. The English Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Sir Edward Grey, very promptly informed the House of Commons that a treaty of commerce did not give the British Government a right to demand exemption for British subjects which are contrary to the general laws of a foreign country, and there the matter ended. Where it will end in the case of the United States no one can say, but the outlook is not promising, as Russia cannot by reason of interior conditions yield the principal point at issue. There is no controversy, for it takes two to make a quarrel, and so far the United States has been the aggressor. Russia has accepted the situation, and her people have turned their attention to other fields for coöperation in the material development of the Russian Empire. In the language of the street, it is up to the United States to find a place to “get off,” and at present there is no sign of a comfortable landing-stage.

The American Government assumes the right, and with entirely good reason, to regulate the use of the Panama Canal under an ordinary interpretation of a favored nation clause; but by the action taken in the matter of the use of American passports in Russia, it denies to the latter country the right to regulate its actual domestic affairs or enforce the laws standing upon the statute-books of the country. Russia has long accepted cheerfully and without question American discrimination against millions of her subjects, and in a matter as vital to the Russian political and social system as the regulation of travel and population naturally assumes some if not equal right to act as her rulers deemed best for the safety of the individual and the peace and welfare of the community as a whole.

The seriousness of the situation brought about by this action of Congress cannot be overestimated either diplomatically or from an industrial, commercial, or financial point of view. It is realized by every American, official and other, living in Russia, or familiar with conditions in that country, that the United States is in the wrong; no one, not even those most closely concerned with the matter diplomatically, can suggest a way out, and yet there is hope that Russia will agree to a continuation of the treaty status, at least so far as commerce is concerned, for a sufficient time to allow some new adjustment to be reached, if such an outcome is possible. The apparently insurmountable difficulty in the way of a new treaty is the determined fact that Russia cannot give way on the one point which influenced the Congress of the United States to denounce the convention.

Fortunately for the United States, that country has at the moment in St. Petersburg as ambassador the Hon. Curtis Guild, formerly Governor of Massachusetts, a man whose knowledge of Russia and whose personal friendships among the Russian people render his services invaluable. His position under present circumstances is not enviable, and if at the expiration of the present treaty an open breach between the two governments is even temporarily avoided, and the United States continues to maintain an embassy in St. Petersburg, it will be due to the patience, understanding, and untiring efforts of Mr. Guild to bridge over a situation which in the interests of both countries he deems most deplorable.

Recently a well-known English writer made the statement that Russia afforded the most prolific field in the world for[Pg 303] the novelist and the sensation-monger, and that the English-reading public had been so fed up with those forms of Russian literature that a writer who ventured to treat of the country in a normal manner, to attempt to tell of its wealth, its industry, and the real life of the people, would either find a scanty audience or be accused of interested motives; and there is much truth in this observation.

Russia is a country of tremendous contrasts and contradictions. The new jostles the old. A government and a people emerging from feudal conditions, absolutism,[Pg 304] and superstition present a phase of national life somewhat bewildering to the seeker after truth. Ancient rights and privileges exist in close juxtaposition to new liberties and initiative, the former not always in harmony with the latter. It is a land which reaches south to north from the semi-tropics far into the undefined boundaries of the eternally frozen North; and west to east includes populous cities born of yesterday and others dating their beginnings centuries ago; mountain-ranges giving of their long-hidden precious metals under the persuasion of American machinery driven by American engineers, and great stretches of hundreds of miles of plain and shallow valley such as caused the American pioneers to doubt the fact that the earth was round. On this land lives a people as varied in their physique and in their tongue as are the physical characteristics of their habitat. The big, slow-moving Russian peasant, with his ox-like strength and simplicity of character; the Tatar, the Mongol, and the Chinaman each have their place in the foreground as the traveler covers the ten-day journey across the country by rail from west to east. Far to the south the prayer to Allah is cried from the turrets of the Russian mosque with a fervor equal to that of the dweller in the land of the Turks, and over five per cent. of the Russian people are of the Jewish faith.

To harmonize this population, successfully to maintain a centralized government of all these races, so different in character, needs, and actions, is a stupendous task. To see that every part of this great land gets its fair share of all that the Imperial Government has to give; to guard these far-reaching boundaries against continually threatened invasion; to watch with jealous eye the constantly shifting political boundary-lines of contiguous lands, that the people of no part of Russia, west, south, or east may find themselves barred from free access to foreign markets by land or by sea—all this is not the work of an amateur or weakling administration. The Prime Minister of Russia, administrative director of the governmental energies of this great empire, affecting as they do the welfare of nearly two hundred million people, has a responsibility lying upon him and a power in the world for good or evil such as no ruler of to-day or so-called world-conqueror of yesterday even dreamed of falling within his grasp. A wise expediency, a conservative progression, mark such a government, if it is to live. To compromise between the old and the new, the perfect theory and the actual possibility, is the task of rulers so placed, and the world must judge by permanent results in decades rather than in years, such judgment even then tempered by a real knowledge of the conditions to be met.

In this light it is evident that Russia is making progress toward that high destiny which is written across the face of things as they are within her imperial boundaries to-day. The great natural resources of the country are being conserved as well as developed. Method marks the cutting of timber, even with the countless miles of forest yet to draw upon, and forestration is even now a feature of treeless areas. Restrictions upon the acquisition of land are all in the interests of actual settlers. The Russianizing of the whole empire is proceeding with marked rapidity. The surplus population of the West is being moved into the sparsely inhabited East at an amazing rate. Several years ago it was decided to move a million people every year from west to east. In 1907, the first year of this governmental assisted exodus, 800,000 Russians, men, women, and children, entered Siberia with the intention of making it their permanent home. This was found to be more than could be handled and assisted effectually. In 1908 over 400,000 were sent eastward, but the following year and since that date an average of 250,000 have been annually successfully transplanted to the open lands of Siberia, and the movement will continue indefinitely at about that rate.

Every family is allowed about $100 in cash, and for every male in the family is given about forty acres of land. Supplies are sold at long credits, the local banks assist financially in some cases, and it is interesting to note that the American harvesting-machine manufacturers have done a great deal toward opening up the grain areas by selling machinery on long time, taking their pay when the farmer has realized upon his crop. The losses which have accrued to American companies through giving these credits to the farmers have[Pg 305] been less than one per cent. annually, a good record for any country and any people.

These American companies have also shown the Russian people that it is not only possible, but more profitable in the end, to do away with any system of commissions, bribery, or “squeeze,” as it is known to the Chinese, in the sale of goods. This was an innovation in Asia, but from the beginning this rule has been adhered to in sales of American machinery, and is now recognized as an admirable peculiarity of American methods. Such losses as have come to American firms doing business in eastern Russia have occurred through the failure or dishonesty of middlemen, or local agents. The Russian peasant or farmer is honest, and will pay if he can. The local agent, or middleman, ostensibly at least of better social business and intellectual status than the farmer, has not proved as scrupulous.

It is in the development and building up of new communities that the so-called zemstvos are proving their usefulness. These organizations may be compared to the boards of county commissioners which exist in the United States, but the powers of the Russian organizations are almost unlimited. They have complete local authority, subject only to the governors of the provinces. They have from fifteen to sixty-two members, representation being based upon population, and are elected by the people. The voters are those who pay taxes on at least $7500 worth of property. In addition to exercising the usual functions of local government, such as taxation, road-building, school supervision, etc., they conduct agricultural credit banks, provide fire and crop insurance, maintain a medical department, give agricultural instruction, and conduct stores much on a coöperative plan.

Some indication of their activities is shown in the one item of agricultural machinery, for about thirty-two per cent. of all the sales made in Siberia in 1908 were made through these government agencies, and the agricultural loan made through the zemstvos banks amount to many millions annually. As far east as Vladivostok the emigrant trains arrive daily, crowded with settlers, laborers, and soldiers. Farther to the west this emigrant movement becomes at times an actual blockade of traffic, and the most notable feature of it all is the amazing number of children ranging from babes in arms to half-grown boys and girls. They are a big, strong people, these Russian peasants, and their children give equal promise of sturdy physique. The men are given work in town and country, and the tremendous task of double-tracking the Trans-Siberian and of building the many feeder-lines now under construction, give employment to many thousands.

It is Russia for the Russians now in the East, and all foreign Chinamen have been given notice to go home. They are being ousted from Russian towns, and no longer outnumber the Russians in the construction work in progress everywhere. Thousands of Russian soldiers line the railroad from Europe to the Sea of Japan, and in northern Manchuria, ostensibly a Chinese possession, fifty thousand Russian troops guard the right of way and the small towns or groups of houses which cluster about every railway station. These soldiers are in reality only the pioneers of the home-builders who are en route.

From the inception of the enterprise the locomotives of the Siberian railroads have burned wood, but the wood-burner is now doomed. The great strata of coal which underlies the extreme eastern part of Siberia is soon to be extensively worked, and with the expiration of the present fuel contracts on the railroads coal will be substituted. Westward from Vladivostok for hundreds of miles there is as yet virtually no human settlement, though the country is as promising, as fertile, and as inviting to the plow as were the millions of acres of the Dakotas prior to their settlement.

The word “Siberia” has always called to the mind great stretches of bleak or snow-covered landscape, intense cold, and human suffering and privation. It has figured in truth, in art, and in fiction as the scene of heart-breaking cruelties to chained gangs of prisoners, criminals, and exiles. Packs of ravening wolves sought out the lonely traveler, and to be sent to Siberia was to leave the world behind. There is still enough reality in these tales to serve as a foundation of truth in the telling, but this is not the Siberia of the Russian emigrant, farmer, and trader. It is the five thousand miles which lie east[Pg 306] and west between latitudes 40° and 60° north toward which his ambitions lead. A new United States lies within these boundaries. The fertile plain, the broad valley, the virgin forest, and the massive mountain-range of this region all lie within the temperate zone. Cold in winter, warm in summer, the seasons regular and normal the year round, this is the Siberia traversed by the Russian Trans-Continental Railroad, and which is destined as time goes on to play a part, constantly increasing in importance and seriousness, in the economics of the world. The productive power of this region is limited only by the degree of development attained, and its absorptive power will be of equally heroic measure. Cities and towns of no inconsiderable size are rapidly appearing at the most central points of the new settlement, and in many ways their life and appearance is reminiscent of the boom days of Western America. Novonikolaesevsk in ten years has achieved a population of over 50,000. Omsk, Petropavlovsk, Irkutsk, Tomsk, Nikolaievsk, Vladivostok, and others are as modern, as bustling, as prosperous, and are growing as rapidly as if they were situated west of the Missouri.

Nearly all of these prosperous towns are built on the banks of magnificent rivers, the names of which in some cases are familiar only to students of geography. These great and numerous streams constitute a system of natural waterways invaluable in the development of the country. In summer they are navigable for steamers of considerable size, and in winter they are highways of travel for vehicles. Their sources lie in the hearts of the great forests to the north, and their quick-flowing currents bear upon them rafts of timber of great size. The inland trade of Siberia has grown in ten years from $30,000,000 to $75,000,000, and in one province alone, that of Akmolinsk, there are held 105 yearly fairs, at which over $50,000,000 worth of merchandise changes hands.

Government revenues increase only gradually, and with great and varied areas to be served in national utilities make[Pg 307] progress seemingly slow. In the matter of posts and telegraphs an unusual state exists, for on the operations of this branch of the Government in 1911 a profit of $17,000,000, or fifty-one per cent., was recorded. In 1912 the profit was reduced to thirty-one per cent., showing that the service was extended and improved. It would be better that the entire profit were wiped out through extensions of facilities, for now there is only one post-office for every ten thousand people, and in the Moscow province, with a population of over 4,000,000, there are only eleven sub-post-offices. As shown by an annual decrease in the surplus, it is probable that the Russian post-office budget will in time balance itself or show a deficit, as is the rule in other countries. Labor legislation is coming in Russia much along the same lines that now prevail in Germany.

The status of the Russian laborer is not very different from that of his brother in other European countries. His wages are somewhat lower in many occupations, but in the large industrial centers of European Russia conditions are much the same as elsewhere. Of all the labor-strikes recorded of 1911, twenty-five per cent. were determined favorably to the strikers, and forty per cent. were compromised as between employer and employed. Nearly $500,000,000 is now on deposit in the Russian savings-banks, and if the population of outlying territory, where there are no banks, be deducted, the showing per capita is on all fours with that of many other countries where consideration for the interests of the wage-workers is much older in its application to national affairs. As it is, there are nearly eight million depositors, or more than in any other country excepting the United States, England, or Germany. In 1911 the foreign trade of Russia across the Black Sea and Finnish borders, together with the trade across the eastern boundaries by land and sea, amounted to over $1,400,000,000. During the five years 1901 to 1905 the total foreign trade amounted to about $350,000,000 annually. In the five years 1906-10 the annual average was $980,000,000, and in 1911 it was, as stated, over $1,400,000,000. The following figures illustrate the growth of the foreign commerce account in the last ten years expressed in millions of dollars:

The exports for 1911 are thirty-two per cent. larger than the average of the five preceding years, and the imports show a gain of thirty-four per cent. The revenue from the customs for 1911, which amounted to $173,000,000, shows a gain of twenty per cent. over the average for the preceding five years. The customs dues of Russia amount to about twenty-nine per cent. of the value of the imports. Nearly half of the export trade of Russia is of grain, the entire export being roughly divided into food-stuffs, sixty-five per cent.; raw material and partly manufactured goods, thirty per cent.; animals, two and one half per cent.; and manufactured goods, two and one half per cent. The export wheat of Russia, amounting to nearly four and a half millions of tons, goes principally to Holland, England, Italy, France, Germany, and Belgium, in the order named. The barley goes to Germany, the oats to Holland and England, the corn to England, and the bran to Germany. The principal manufactures exported are rubber goods, textiles, crockery, glass, and metal goods. The exports of manufactured goods have not increased to a great extent in the last ten years, and probably will not for some time to come, as Russia is developing so rapidly within that the home market absorbs more of everything than can be produced with present facilities. The import trade of Russia for the last six years, expressed in millions of dollars, was as follows:

As compared with the average of the[Pg 308] preceding five years, the figures of 1911 show an increase in the imports of food products of fourteen per cent.; in raw material and partly manufactured goods of twenty-six per cent.; in live stock of one hundred and twelve per cent.; and in manufactured goods of fifty-six and a half per cent. The increase in food-stuff importations was due to the increased consumption of fish, this increase amounting to over $26,000,000. Other increases noted consisted largely of fertilizers, building materials, machinery, and the thousand and one manufactured articles long in use in other countries.

The five-year average of manufactured goods imported into Russia annually tells the story of the growing importance of this trade to the manufacturers of the world. From 1897-1901 it was $92,751,000. From 1902-06 (the period of the war with Japan) it was $84,048,000. From 1907-11 it was $140,440,000. The larger part of the export trade of Russia goes to Germany, England, Holland, Austria-Hungary, France, and Italy in the order named, Germany being by far the largest buyer of Russian goods. According to the figures of direct trade, Russia buys nearly all of her supplies from Germany, England, the United States, France, and Austria-Hungary in the order named; but if the indirect trade be taken into consideration, the United States comes second. Even then Germany, with her Russian sales amounting as they did in 1911 to $250,000,000, is by far the most important trader. The position of Germany in Russia in trade, finance, and diplomacy is very strong. To Germany goes more of Russian produce than to any other three countries, and from Germany are purchased at least half of all the imports of the Russian people. Much of this is indirect business, it is true, the Germans acting as brokers for other nations; but a considerable profit on the transaction remains in Germany, and the mere fact of the enormously strong trade relation constitutes a powerful factor in holding the two peoples in close friendship and in giving to all German enterprise in Russia a predominating prestige.

The beginnings of this Russo-German trade date back many years, for geographic and racial reasons, but it has been encouraged at all points by the Germans themselves, or it would not have maintained its phenomenal lead over that of other countries. The effect of this trade is apparent everywhere. German is the most useful language in Russia to those who do not speak Russian. A stroll along any one of the principal business streets of Moscow or St. Petersburg will reveal the names of scores of German firms with large Russian connections, or, in fact, the names of many German firms whose sole business is in Russia. The Germans come, stay, and conquer in foreign trade matters here as elsewhere, because they do not deal through foreign agencies or commission houses, but through their own people on the ground, to sell direct to the consumer. Another point in foreign trading which forces itself upon the attention everywhere is the banking facilities furnished to German traders by German banks or branches of German banks established in foreign cities. The bank and the trader arrive at the same time, and coöperate most successfully in their joint campaign for business. German railroads at home give low through rates on goods to any part of the world; German ships are waiting at the docks to carry the goods; German firms are at the other end of the journey to receive the goods and distribute them; and German banks advance the money to facilitate purchase, shipment, and sale until such time as the money is available from the consumer. Long credits are the rule in Russia, as in many other countries, and financial coöperation is a requisite of successful trading in a majority of cases.

English banks do little or no industrial or commercial business. Years ago there were private banks in England that worked in harmony with the English foreign traders, and it was partly due to the liberality and activity of these banks that the foreign commerce of England gained such headway as it did in far-away places. For one cause or another, these private or trading banks have disappeared in England, and in the financial districts money is now a commodity, as it is in the United States, handled without imagination and with no sympathy or understanding of the needs of foreign business. An English or American bank of to-day is nothing more or less than a glorified pawnbroker, who will cheerfully lend ninety-five per cent. on a gold[Pg 309] dollar as security, but will lock his moneybags when a man with orders for goods to be sold on long time in foreign countries comes asking for intelligent coöperation in the production and vending thereof. Able financial experts devote pages of good white paper and pounds of ink in England and America to criticism of the German industrial banking system, but whatever may be its faults at home, it is beyond cavil almost entirely responsible for the tremendous gains made in German and foreign commerce in recent years.

Nowhere is this illustrated more forcibly than in Russia, and here as elsewhere the class of goods sold by the Germans contains larger elements of labor and profit than the foreign trade of most nations. To export raw materials, food-stuffs, steel rails, and other staples at infinitesimal margins of profit when the home markets are slack may bring export figures up into the hundreds of millions, but it does not leave in the country of origin the paid wage-roll or the manufacturing or middleman profit recorded of intricate machinery, novelties, chemicals, and other high-priced products of hand, loom, or other ingenious machines inspired by mechanical and inventive genius.

The United States buys from Russia about seven million dollars’ worth of goods, eighty per cent. of which are included in alcoholic product, glycerin, furs, hides, and skins. Among other important items of Russian export to America are flax, fusil-oil, and wool. In 1911, Russia sent nothing to the island possessions of the United States. There is no branch of manufacturing in which Russia competes seriously with America. Three years ago the Russian steel mills on the Black Sea underbid the American steel mills in the efforts of the latter to secure a large order from the Argentine Government, but since that time the Russian producers have joined the international steel conference, and serious underbidding is no longer feared from that direction. The United States sells to Russia about fifty million dollars’ worth of raw cotton, eleven million dollars in agricultural machinery, five million dollars in leather, three million dollars in general machinery, a million and a half dollars in flour, a million in raw rubber, and the balance of her sales comprise a variety of manufactured products. In this latter classification it is encouraging to note half a million dollars in type-writers, and the same amount in automobiles. Indirect trade in these items adds largely to these figures, but is difficult of exact determination.

A number of great American industries have organized Russian companies and built factories in Moscow and elsewhere. Notable among these is the sewing-machine industry, which employs 4000 people in its Moscow factory, and is said to have 20,000 selling agents in the Russian Empire. The American harvesting-machinery interests manufacture in Russia such implements as fall under import duties in the Russian tariff, and import duty free those which are under the existing treaty of commerce. Should no new treaty be negotiated between Russia and the United States, it is evident that new extensions of the Russian-American factories must result, and importations from the United States must decline.

The result of this serious threat of discrimination against American goods is already felt throughout Russia. Experiments are now being made with German, Belgian, and other competitive machinery in the effort to substitute them for American products, and while the American machines have at present a tremendous lead in public favor, this is no guaranty that other countries will not ultimately derive advantage from the situation. It is true that American inventions may still dominate the Russian market, but the machines themselves will be manufactured in Belgium, Germany, France, or elsewhere to avoid any discrimination that might be imposed upon an American manufactured product. This is not such a difficult result to achieve as might be supposed, for the foundations are already laid, and one great American industry which has recently fallen under the displeasure of the American Government will within a short time be able to supply its entire foreign trade from plants erected in other countries than the United States, and thus restrict the output of American mills to the supplying of the home market.

Nearly one half of the export trade of Russia leaves the port of Riga on the north, but the goods originate in Moscow and other inland cities. St. Petersburg, Libau, and other north-coast points share[Pg 310] in the great shipping industry of the Baltic. To the south, Odessa, Batum, and other ports on the Black Sea are the outlets for southern Russia, and serve the near Eastern trade. In the far East, Vladivostok is destined to become an important commercial stronghold, and the entrepôt by sea of Oriental products, serving at the same time as the shipping-point for grain and other food products to Japanese, Chinese, and South Sea communities.

The great causes of trade increase or decrease in Russia are the fullness or poverty of the harvest and the peace or disturbance of political conditions in Europe and the near East. War in Persia, Turkey, or elsewhere in that part of the world has a directly unfavorable effect upon the total of Russian commerce. This is strikingly illustrated in the loss which has come to Russian trade by the closing of the Dardanelles for even a short time. Bad crops mean famine in large areas, and considering the vastness of the territory involved, it is not surprising that hardly a year passes that some part is not demanding relief for a stricken people. This feature of national life is so well recognized as a probable annual occurrence that the Government deals with the same almost as a regular business, and the whole plan of relief has been systematized to the best advantage of all concerned. Business organization is not yet very strong in Russia, but is improving. Chambers of commerce are being formed, and in course of time the shipper of goods to Russia or the seeker after commercial information will find the same conditions there as elsewhere so far as the machinery of trade is concerned.

There is now a strong movement in England for political as well as commercial reasons to take advantage of the present development of Russia. In 1911 there were organized in Russia forty foreign companies for the purpose of doing Russian business. Out of this number, thirty were English, four were French, two Belgian, two German, and not one American. Out of the $40,000,000 capital of these forty companies nearly $35,000,000 were English money. In that same year there were 222 Russian concerns organized to do business in Russia, and one of them was an American harvesting company, with a large manufacturing plant in Moscow. As a nation, England is showing more interest in Russian industrial affairs than any other country except Germany. This interest comes a little late in the day for full advantage to be reaped, but the interest now shown in England is far more general and practical than has shown itself in the United States, with the exception of that manifested by a few powerful American manufacturing concerns that are able financially to perform all the functions of buyer, manufacturer, seller, and banker from their own resources and within their own company organizations.

It is difficult to bring the mind to a full comprehension of the vastness of the Russian Empire and its interests. It is not a scattered domain of far-flung possessions, held at the cost of sleepless vigilancy, and constant treaty-making, but a great, compact possession; and yet while Russian diplomacy is demanding the neutralization of the far-Eastern border state of Mongolia, a quarter of a million men, or more than the entire standing army of Great Britain, are lying under arms five thousand miles distant from Mongolia, but still in Russia, to protect that country’s interests in case the long-deferred but long-expected explosion takes place in the near East.

One nation’s honor or dignity cannot be compromised for the sake of continuing favorable commercial relations with another; but it is a serious matter for one government, at the dictation of whatever interest it may be, or whatever may be the result to be gained at home, to destroy the long-existing friendship and profitable commercial exchanges of two peoples without a full understanding of the consequences of such action. The United States cannot impose its views upon Russia, for the good and sufficient reason that such views do not coincide with the necessities of Russian interior government. The United States has no power to punish her old friend for not agreeing with her; in fact, quite the reverse, hence an impasse. Those upon whom the burden of this action falls diplomatically and financially are now trying to find a basis for honorable compromise. That they will fail, is feared; that they will succeed, is the earnest hope of every understanding friend of the two nations.

NEW ANXIETIES ABOUT VOTING

MACAULAY, who did not believe in universal suffrage, had a fine sneer at the folly of supposing that the great policies of a modern nation could be determined by the ballot-box. But this will do to put alongside his famous prediction that “spoliation” of the rich by the poor would begin in the United States in the twentieth century. That century is here and spoliation has not begun, while the ballot-box has gone on, in England as well as in America, from one conquest to another; until now, in either country, it is regarded, if not as the final arbiter of national destinies, at least as the power which sets up one party or administration and puts another down. Yet during the very years when voting by the mass of the citizens has been marching on to political supremacy, there has been coming in a new set of doubts, or anxieties, concerning the whole process. This concern may be only one way of recognizing the sovereignty of the ballot. If it is sovereign, care must be taken that it functions safely. Granted that its decisions are conclusive, the more reason for seeing to it that they are freely and clearly pronounced. If we are to listen for the voice of the people in their votes, nothing must be permitted to obstruct or confuse that utterance.

It was doubtless this feeling that lay behind the movement to reform and simplify the ballot and to guard elections against corruption. That is a long and familiar story. One device after another, one safeguard following another, has been urged and adopted, and each has in its turn done something to purify our electoral methods. It would be impossible for the nation to lurch back now to the loose and hugger-mugger system under which both State and national elections were held fifty or sixty years ago. The “repeater” has been largely eliminated; the way of the venal voter has been made hard; official ballots have replaced the tricky things that party-workers used to “hand out”; corrupt-practice acts and registration laws have weeded out a great deal of the bribery and fraud that were formerly common. Yet despite all these and the other advances, a distinctly new uneasiness about the whole process of voting has recently been making itself manifest. Many thoughtful citizens have been troubled by doubts not whether elections are honest, but whether they can be made fully representative of the popular will; not whether the citizen can freely cast a pure ballot, but whether he cares enough about it to cast any ballot at all.

What disturbs many in this connection is the evidence seeming to show that the number of voters is not increasing as fast as the population. Figures both of registered voters and of actual ballots cast are scrutinized, with the result of appearing to prove a growing disinclination to make full exercise of the right of suffrage. From one Presidential campaign to another during the last dozen years, the total poll has not risen as it should. Some statistics of the vote in Wisconsin were recently published which seemed startling in their implications. That State, though having a marked growth in population, has been casting a vote fewer by many thousands than were polled ten years ago. Partial explanations suggest themselves. Wisconsin elections have been one-sided and foregone conclusions; so that the inducement to make efforts to bring out a full vote has often been lacking. Moreover, the very reforms in the State’s election laws may have had the effect of cutting off what was before a purchasable or fraudulent vote. This was the kind of vote which in the old days Tammany used to ask for money in order to “get out.” One rich man replied to a solicitor of funds that he would not give five thousand dollars to get that vote “out,” but would gladly subscribe[Pg 312] ten thousand to keep it “in.” It is possible that the keeping “in” of corrupt votes, by means of reform legislation vigorously enforced, has had something to do with the apparent check in the normal increase of the voters.

After every fair allowance has been made, however, the fact is notorious that many citizens entitled to vote do not go to the polls. The registration figures often fall far below what they should be, and the ballots finally cast and counted reveal a surprisingly large number of indifferents or stay-at-homes. Hence the demand, which seems to be a rising demand, that the citizen be compelled by law to do his duty as an elector, if he will not do it unforced. Compulsory voting has been advocated of late by the Attorney-General of the United States. No one would class Mr. Wickersham among the impetuous faddists. He has studied European practice and precedents in the matter of inflicting penalties upon citizens who fail to exercise the franchise, and favors the adoption of some modified form of such legislation in this country. The argument for it will certainly be greatly reinforced if we are widely to enter upon the experiment of law-making by initiative and referendum. The people are sovereign, but if only a portion of them speak, how are we to know the real voice of authority? There have been elections, some of them passing on statutes referred to the electorate, some on important constitutional changes, in which the votes of only a majority of a minority were effective. If that should become common, the case for compulsory voting would obviously be stronger. Objections to it at present lie mainly against details. It is urged, for example, that no compulsion should be laid upon the voter to choose between two candidates neither of whom could he conscientiously support. But in that event he could cast a blank or a “scratched” ballot. He is within his right in refusing to express a preference between two equally offensive nominees; but it may be held that he has no right to remain away from the polls. Mr. Chesterton has argued that all who fail to vote should be “counted in the negative,” but that is to put a premium upon sloth. An active negative by ballot is much more significant than mere abstention. We know too well what “apathy” means in elections; but we should be much better off if, instead of their apathy at home, we had all our citizens expressing their honest zeal or their burning indignation at the polls.

The whole subject is not yet ripe for positive remedies embodied in law, but the deep interest taken in it is both suggestive and encouraging. It helps one to believe that the democratic experiment will continue to keep level with its problems as they successively present themselves. Whatever the exact method of reform that may be adopted, it must not omit to tie up intelligence with duty. Voting, whether it should be made compulsory or not, cannot safely be severed from education. The two must always go together, as they did in Emerson’s vision of the ideal commonwealth, where, before

THE CHILDREN’S UNCENSORED READING

THE old saying that “Books make the best presents” must be in the minds of many in the pre-Christmas season, and many a parent is puzzling over the problem of selection. The classics of their childhood they know—some of these the classics of three generations; in fact, ever since children began to be considered as worth writing for. But here is the year’s new “bumper” crop of books, in fine array of type and picture and gay cover—what is to be done with them? Who is to sift and choose between the good and the bad? And all that are not good must be considered bad, for nothing is so bad as a poor book. May the publishers’ imprint be implicitly relied upon? May the authors’ reputation, name, or vogue be blindly accepted? May the reviewers’ judgment be made the standard? Obviously it is impossible, if only for economic reasons, to buy and sample, not to say read, a tithe of the books presented for choice. Either parents must renounce the responsibility, restrict the range to a few volumes, or get some efficient aid from others.

We venture a suggestion. This issue of THE CENTURY will appear just a month before Christmas. In nearly every town of 2500 inhabitants there is a literary club[Pg 313] or a woman’s club which through a committee of its members might set on foot an advisory censorship of children’s reading, which another year would become more effective. To be helpful, it should start with a standard of what are the desiderata in books for the young. Negatively, one must aim to exclude immoral, priggish, namby-pamby, artificial, cynical, and unsympathetic writing. To these must be added the seventh deadly sin of dullness.

and unless a book is interesting, it would better never have been conceived. On the positive side the aim should be wholesomeness, vitality, inspiration, humanness, and, most of all, an appeal to the imagination. A child needs not so much books of knowledge of the “how” type, which satisfy craving for facts, as those that set forth the wonders of the world so suggestively as to stimulate his search for the “why.” Those of two generations ago who were steeped in copy-book morality know what an effort it was to displace it with the natural religion of human sympathy. And it is because, in the reading and training of boys, there is danger of neglecting the robust—what we may call the wholesomely perilous—that it is important that every such committee as we have suggested should have the counsel of men. When its list shall have been made, the committee should be subjected to cross-examination, in order that the principles of selection should become fixed not only in the minds of its members, but in those of the entire club. Whatever the result might be upon children, it would be salutary upon parents, arousing them to the importance, and to the qualities, of mental pure food. It is not to be expected that the committee’s recommendations would be impeccable or that they would always be followed. Indeed, the same experiment might be tried with more advantage in a circle of a dozen families of friends related by a similarity of tastes and standards.

Even more in need of supervision is the periodical pabulum. There are two or three American magazines for children the tone and traditions of which are so firmly established and so well known as to place them beyond the need of censorship. Their editors are alive to the exclusion of the objectionable, but are chiefly occupied with the search for valuable and delightful articles. The editorship of a child’s magazine, by reason of its many limitations, is one of the most difficult tasks in the educational world. The bearing of every article, poem, and picture has to be considered in its formative influence upon character. The editor has to think for the child, the parent, and the teacher, and at the same time he must never lose sight of the noble function of delight, which it is his privilege to exercise. We know of one such, to whom, through his rare sympathy with children, these responsibilities have become insight. Joyous himself, he knows how to communicate joy to a world of children.

When it comes to the juvenile page of the newspaper, the need of censorship is acute. Some of the daily journals, which are properly proud of their own ethical standards and of the influence of their editorial columns, have no moral compunction in leaving to a syndicate the preparation of the children’s page or the colored supplements. Otherwise careful and conscientious parents will turn over to their children, without examination, sheets of vulgar, grotesque, badly drawn, and badly colored pictures on unworthy themes, the chief influence of which is to glorify sheer mischief and bad manners. Many protests have been made against these by public associations and in some quarters there has been improvement, but the censorship of thoughtful and mature minds would still find much to condemn.

In what is selected for the children let us make a plea for the best poetry. A world is all before us where to choose, and if the interpretation of masterpieces of verse be not pedagogic, but sympathetic, the resources of pleasure thus available are rich and enduring. The parsing and analysis of Pope’s “Essay on Man” may so spoil one’s taste for that writer as to obscure the sublimity of his “Universal Prayer.” America more than any other country cultivates, and needs to cultivate, the love of poetry. Here we are confronted with materialism as a daily spectacle.

We need every stimulus to the imagination, every spur to spirituality, every rhythm of harmony. We need not only[Pg 314] music itself but the music that is in poetry. The arts are, so to speak, fighting for their lives, and a brave fight it is. We need them to uplift and crown and glorify democracy, and we shall produce greater poetry as there is a deeper love and appreciation of the great poetry that exists. It is, therefore, no small service to the future of America to instil in our young people a respect and love for poetry. We find these suggestive lines in the autobiography of Charles Darwin:

A CHRISTMAS THOUGHT ON WAR AND ARBITRATION

THE year 1912, by its manifestations of internal violence, its external wars, and by its hardly less disquieting rumors of wars, has afforded from time to time the pretext for much cynical satire at the expense of the advocates of peace and arbitration. A strange sort of beginning of the millennium this, it is said, which has witnessed Italy’s year-long war with Turkey; the old Balkan wounds reopened, with the religious issue involved; China aflame with bloody revolt against her Manchu dynasty; Mexico in the throes of a rebellion little less than civil war; turbulent Cuba barely escaping American intervention, actually exercised in Nicaragua; Morocco the bone of contention of two snarling powers; and withal Great Britain and Germany like open powder-magazines exposed to the peril of a careless smoker—a year, moreover, that has seen strikes of unusual acerbity in England and in Massachusetts, and the unearthing of such vast conspiracies against life and property as the one executed by the McNamaras and their associates and the other avowed by the Industrial Workers of the World. The threat of the latter to raze the Salem jail is matched by the intention of McNamara, recently revealed, to blow up the Panama Canal. As a climax of horror comes the attempt of a disordered mind to assassinate Colonel Roosevelt. Surely, at first glance one might think that the wild beast in man has lately come to the surface to a surprising and disheartening extent.

It would be futile to claim that this sinister impression is entirely offset by the fact that some of these events have aspects of self-restraint and progress; that China, through her overturn, is making the way toward freedom and self-government; that Cuba has again shown that she is learning the same lessons; that the responsible conservative forces of England, France, and Germany have refused to follow the hotheads who talk lightly of war. There remain in human nature, modern or barbarian, primal impulses of hatred, violence, and lawlessness.

It is one of the most important functions of education, government, and religion to subdue these impulses, and this can be done, in part, by turning their force into new channels. Through Tesla’s discovery and invention the natural turbulence of the mountain stream, even that of Niagara itself, is electrically utilized to do the work of the world at a great distance. It is the aim of the inventive resources of philanthropy to do something similar with the wild and waste forces of humanity itself. Wise benevolence is increasingly occupied with imposing not only upon others, but upon ourselves, restraints without which we should revert to the brute. Sometimes this is done by solemn formalities like the Constitution of the United States; sometimes the compact is the tacit one of civilization involved in the establishment and observance of law. This it is now sought to extend to nations, by the agreement to enlarge the limits of judicial arbitration which already exist in every modern country, and thus through men and peoples of advanced ideas of justice to affect those more backward. Because of this great opportunity to uplift the world, those in authority are under obligation—a sort of noblesse oblige—to hold their own country to its highest standards of conduct, internal or international.

Whatever the croakers may say, there is no relapse from the sentiment in favor of arbitration and peace. There have been righteous rebellions, and probably there[Pg 315] will be others, but there are many wars based on territorial aggression or trivial or fancied wrongs which may be prevented by an appeal to an international court. Compulsory this appeal must be, by our consent in the cool air of wisdom: but along with humanity at large we shall be the gainer. Arbitration is a shorter cut to justice than war has ever been.

At this time of the recurrence of the festival of the Prince of Peace, it is becoming to the Christian world to renew its faith in the power of love to cast out hatred, of good-will to accomplish the uplifting of humanity through sympathy and opportunity. Such a vast work demands the ultimate release of the forces now held in readiness for international wars. Prevent by arbitration the causes of such wars, and you divert colossal waste forces—including the constant anxieties of the people—to the real and crying need of the times.

GIVING AWAY THE NATION’S PROPERTY

ON the twenty-fifth of November there is to be a hearing before the Secretary of the Interior to receive and consider the report of a board of army engineers to determine whether or not there is any other adequate source of water-supply for San Francisco than the beautiful Hetch-Hetchy Valley, which the city desires to submerge for a reservoir. This valley, as our readers know, is a part of the great Yosemite National Park, and lies eighteen miles north of the Yosemite Valley, just over the divide, so to speak. The representatives of the city have already acknowledged before the Public Lands Committee of the Senate that they could find an adequate supply of pure water “anywhere along the Sierra,” to the north of the valley—“if,” as they said, “we would pay for it!” The mainspring of the assault upon the people’s National Park—and, if it shall succeed, it will be but the first of many similar assaults on other parks—is the desire to get something for nothing. The public interest in resisting the attempt is to save from destruction one of the most wonderful of the Sierra gorges, which a good wagon road would make an integral part of the Yosemite trip. It remains to be seen whether any amount of speciousness, any elaborate and misleading volume of argument will be able to obscure the main issue—the wanton invasion of the people’s greatest park.

We believe that the Roosevelt administration had no more legal or moral right to divert a part of this National Park from the purposes for which it was created, as was done by the Garfield grant, than it would have had to give away the nation’s coal-fields in Alaska. The Sierra Club, contending with the unlimited financial resources of San Francisco, has yet presented a “brief” which riddles the arguments of the city’s case.

That fable teaches that the time to save the rest of our great scenery is before it is largely visited, for then it will become to the advantage of some “interest” to divert it from the use of posterity.

EDITORIAL NOTE: CONTRIBUTIONS DESIRED

THE Editor of THE CENTURY invites the offer of contributions to the departments of “Open Letters” and “Lighter Vein.”

In “Open Letters” the aim should be a light and lively treatment of social, political, domestic, artistic, or other topics in an easy, natural, epistolary style, having the give-and-take of correspondence, and witty or humorous treatment, mellow, without didacticism; articles should have a novel and piquant motive; and, in order to save them from dilettantism, they should have useful and substantial suggestions. A convenient length is fifteen hundred words.

For the “Lighter Vein” Department contributions are invited of brief narratives from real life, of a humorous character, and of such entertaining interest as will entitle them to rank as good “after-dinner stories.” What is desired is not so much a short anecdote as a narrative of about a thousand words, having a certain natural plot. It is desired to avoid stock stories which, told in past generations, are located in the present. While in general the stories should be humorous, once in a while that quality might be varied by something unusually dramatic, quaint, or curious. The Editor must be assured that the articles have not before been in print.

All contributions found available will be paid for at the magazine’s customary rates.

ON MAGIC CASEMENTS

Enjoy our new home? Indeed I do, as much as you enjoy “Parva sed Apta.” Yet I confess to a little restlessness at times, such as Browning’s Juan in “Fifine” felt over his “honest civic house.” I want to cut away, and to wander foot-loose and free. And if it weren’t for the magic casement—don’t you want to hear about the magic casement?

The architect’s assistant proposed it, a young fellow with irregular eyebrows and a nice smile. You would like him. We had been talking windows, and he asked me all of a sudden:

“Since you like the type, sha’n’t I put a magic casement in your study? We sometimes find it a very acceptable little addition in suburban building.”

I gasped, and seized on a familiar phrase. “Will it add materially to the cost?” I inquired.

“No, not materially,” he answered. “And it would harmonize capitally with the study.”

For many a day after we moved I forgot all about the conversation and the casement. You know what it is to get settled. The dining-room flue wouldn’t draw, and our invaluable but expansive Maggie grumbled because she had to turn sidewise to get up the narrow back stairs, and to arrange family and furniture absorbed my energies. But a day came finally when I shut myself in the study for a bout of work. A set of examination blue-books had come in from my college classes, and my mood was grim. I learned that the “Shepheard’s Calendar” consisted of twelve pastoral decalogues, and that Ariel’s song was intended to “guide Hamlet to his shipwrecked father,” or, as another student suggested, “to lead Minerva on.” Most of the papers were equally stupid and less funny. My muscles were aching, for the furniture had been heavy. As for my heart, here I was starting life afresh and receiving felicitations in a pretty new house, but life seemed over. Well, dear, never mind that; but you will understand. You know what narrow house guarded by two tall cypresses is always before my eyes.

It opened at a touch. I had expected to look out on Mr. Baker’s hen-yard; but I didn’t. There was instead a wide stretch of tumbling seas—splendid, perilous seas, gray and fierce, with glints of silver at the horizon, and great waves racing inland and breaking in sheets of foam below! As I leaned out and drew deep breaths of salty, foamy air, I saw a dim sweep of coast through the spray.

were plain enough; but were those “human shores” or the forlorn coasts of faery-land?

“Please, Miss, the butcher,” called Maggie’s voice behind me, and I shut the window and ran down-stairs as though I had never heard of tired muscles or heart. When I got back to blue-books, it was amazing how brilliantly the students were writing.

When I next opened the casement the sea was moony-calm, and a nightingale was singing outside in balm-laden air. Mr.[Pg 317] Baker’s hen-yard, viewed from the next window, never varied, but let me tell you that out of a magic casement one does not see the same sight twice. I did not let myself open it often. When I was leaning from it I forgot the passage of time, and you can’t imagine how “jobs” crowded last winter. But if, while I worked, I left a crack ajar, and this grew to be rather a habit, the air that came in kept me fresh and fit, so that I have never carried my work so easily.

One day—inside, I remember, it was bleak winter twilight—there was an island rising from the sea. The tremulous waters were tinged with the first promise of dawn. A planet on the horizon glowed red. Though the heavens elsewhere were clear, the summit of the mountain isle was veiled in drifting mists, like tears; yet behind the mists the sun seemed to be shining on level reaches of springlike verdure, which caught the longing of the heart, yet stilled all longing with an exceeding peace. As the dawn brightened, I could discern two figures on the low sands at the base of the hill, and presently, speeding across the waters faster than flight of bird, appeared a spark, glowing as though the planet had left the sky. Faint shining grew at sides and center, till I could see the vesture and the two wings, serving as sails, of an angel whose face was as the morning star. If you had only been there! Of the blessed folk who filled the ship, some looked affrighted, some exceeding glad; and though I could not clearly hear the chant they sang, one voice sweet above the rest, I knew it to be a song of deliverance. Do you remember our Dante readings under the pines? All that day there was absolution in the air.

But there was none on that other day when sky and sea blazed blue fire, thunder-caps lay pearled in the west, and a high-pooped ship dropped anchor beneath my window. Sea-weary serving-folk in medieval garb, went ashore by ones and twos, while a knight in green array and a most fair lady lay talking on the deck. Now and again he touched a harp, with skill, I thought, seeking languidly to please her; but she looked on him in distaste. Then a page brought them liquid from a crystal flask of curious fashioning, and the two drank thirstily, for it was hot. Then they gazed startled on each other with changed eyes. The thunder-caps rolled up, and I heard them speak in troubled, riddling words of “aimer” and “la mer,” and I shut the window lest I prove indiscreet. Besides, the air was stifling.

It was not always sea that greeted me. You can imagine the pleasure of opening in harsh March weather on the cool depths of a summer forest, where the angel face of a sleeping girl in white nun’s habit made a sunshine in the shade! My worries rolled away as I watched joyous wood-folk—fauns, satyrs, and fair hamadryads—caper and dance through the forest, and saw them, awestruck at her sweet holiness, bend their knees before her, grinning gently, and crown her with garlands. In that same wood, when the moon was risen, I saw star-crossed lovers misled by faery pranks, and the queen of faery herself beguiled. But the next evening my window gave on a blasted, treeless heath, where weird women lay in wait for two doomed soldiers.

One of the best things I got from the window was a glimpse of Utopia. Several of us had spent the day trying to organize relief in a mill town where a three-cornered strike was going on, and the regular unions, the employers, and the I. W. W. were involved in a hideous wrangle-tangle. It was worse than any of our old settlement experiences. I came back sick at heart and touched the casement spring, afraid that I couldn’t see out for the smart in my eyes. But there lay Utopia before me. Yes, dear, Utopia.

Did it? I dared not be sure. Past the rear gardens of the pleasant houses a clear river ran sweetly, just as Sir Thomas More had said, and through the wide street passed comely, alert citizens, full of grave, friendly cheer. But might there not be slums and strikers round the corner? The power of faith was blurred in me that night.

Just then a man who carried a kit of carpenters’ tools, whistling as he walked, looked up and waved his cap. It was young Stanton of our economics department. He was always tinkering at his house, but it looked odd to see him carry a kit on the public way.

“Good morning. Isn’t Utopia the greatest ever?” he cried. “My lectures are over; I’m off to help with those new houses around the bend.”

“I perceive, however, that the inhabitants have not changed their nature,” he laughed. “You have your old skeptical mind.”

“If it’s Utopia,” I retorted, “why in the name of common sense are you still lecturing on economics?”

“The wonder is how I lectured on it in the old days,” he replied. “I was like a professor of harmony, with nothing to expound but discords. Now we have a symphonic whole to study and even fuller harmonies to evolve. The department is the largest in the college.”

“Have pity on my skeptical mind,” I[Pg 318] pleaded. “Give me a sign that Utopia is here.”

And I was satisfied: for never could there have been that serenity of eye had one factory been left exploiting the labor of children, one sweat-shop, or one malcontent. Yet even while I watched, a woman, dressed in black, passed, sobbing bitterly. Tears? In Utopia?

“We are still on the earth, you know,” said Stanton, gently; “we are not exempt from tears.”

NOT long after I met the architect’s assistant. I had been worrying somewhat. I was troubled about the price of the magic casement, even though he had said that it would not add materially to the cost of the house. He caught the same train as I to town by a flying jump at the last minute. He was scurrying by, but I pulled his coat and made him sit down.

“Very, on the whole,” I replied. “The door-panels warp, but no house is perfect. I want to ask you about the price of the magic casement. It was not included in the specifications, and I am anxious to settle for it.”

“I shall not haggle,” I replied with spirit; “but if the window is as expensive as I fear, perhaps you wouldn’t mind being paid on the instalment plan.”

“If I had not supposed you perfectly solvent, I should never have put that casement in,” he returned.

“You had strict instructions to avoid all luxuries,” I said with indignation, for I was frightened. “You knew that I was living on a salary and that I had to mortgage in order to build. However, I am not complaining. I am willing to pay heavily for the casement, for it certainly is a shipshape affair.”

“That’s better talk,” said the assistant. “Now, as a matter of fact, you’ve paid already. The contract for magic casements is to the effect that the article is paid for by use. It runs, ‘For so much value received in vision, equivalent price in use, thus and so.’ I knew you could pay cash for that window.”

To pay by using! Now, Margaret, did you ever hear of anything like that! “How uncommon,” I protested. “How absurd!”

“People are dull,” he complained ruefully. “Of course they are in Utopia the minute they believe themselves there.” As he talked, I was noticing that ruffled hair of his and those queer, triangular, merry eyebrows.

“They have nothing to do with magic casements. Those are a little specialty of my own which I put in now and then for a suitable client like yourself.”

“Who are you, anyway?” I cried; and with a flourish he handed me a card engraved in the latest style. Mr. Robert Goodfellow was the name it bore. The wind from the train window blew the hair from his ears.

“At your service,” he laughed. “You see, I adapt myself to the times. There’s no use playing helter-skelter pranks on systematic Americans. They get their cream by a separator, so they never put out bowls of milk for me; the chores are done by machinery; and if I prowl about the kitchen by night, I get nervous prostration for fear some one will turn on the electricity. So I went in for scientific efficiency, and studied for the professions. I have lots of fun. But you people who live in steam heat are so afraid of drafts that hardly anybody will let me put in a magic casement. I was really grateful to you for giving me the chance. Hello! Here we are at Back Bay! Good-by!”

There’s my story. Now, may I not send Robin to give you a magic casement in “Parva sed Apta”? I am sure he would not mind the journey. But I suspect you may have one already; Robin and you were always on good terms.

AN AFTER-DINNER STORY

MANY visitors to Rome will remember the German book-store on the Piazza di Spagna, kept by Herr S——, of whom a story is told which throws a backward light upon the apparently troublesome activities, as a boy, of a distinguished American novelist. Herr S——, who had been established in Rome as a bookseller almost a lifetime, once met in his store another elderly gentleman, who said:

“Why, about his book—a great success. Haven’t you heard? Haven’t you read it?”

“Oh, yes; no doubt of it. Giuseppe,”—calling a salesman,—“let me have a copy of ‘Mr. Isaacs,’ please.”

When the volume was brought to the incredulous bookseller, he held it at arm’s-length, looking at it curiously as he turned it from side to side and from end to end; then he cautiously examined the title-page, with its “—th edition,” which he greeted with a guttural “Huh!” Next he turned to the last page, and read the concluding sentence with another grunt of astonishment. Then he dipped into the volume in two or three places, and finally, satisfied that he was not being deceived, handed back the book to Giuseppe without looking at him, and said:

THOUGHTS, DECEMBER TWENTY-FOURTH

EMMY JANE’S CHRISTMAS

MAWNIN’, Miss Johnson. Is yer out doin’ yer Chris’mas shoppin’? You sure is de forehandestest pusson I eber did see. Here ’t is five whole days ’fore Chris’mas, an’ you ’most frough gettin’ ready.

What’s we goin’ ter do? Why, jes as usu’l, an’ dat’s good ’nough fer we. You see, we spends Chris’mas day sorter foragin’ roun’ ’mongst de white folks, an’ c’llectin’ things tergether, an’ ketchin’ ’em Chris’mas gif’; den de nex’ day we all has our Chris’mas.

What? We ain’t got it on de right date? What’s dat got to do wid de ’joyment ob it, I’d like to know? An’, anyhow, no one doan’ know fer sure what is de right date nohow, ’ca’se dere ain’t no one erlivin’ now what was erlive when Chris’mas started in on us, an’ if dere was, I wouldn’ b’lieve him nohow, ’ca’se he’d be too ole ter trus’ his mem’ry. So one day’s as good as anudder, an’ maybe better. Dis here way suits me, an’ it saves er lot ob trouble an’ hard wuk, not ter speak ob de money.

Dis is de way we wuks it, an’ ’scusin’ de walkin’ roun’ an’ totin de load home, it ain’t no trouble ’t all.

We ’vides de city up into pahts. I takes de av’nues, ’Lindy teks de lengthways streets, li’le Polly Ann an’ John Andrew de cross streets, an’ Jeemes William—my ole man—de gen’lemen’s clubs. We all has our own way ob doin’ it, but we all gits de things.

Jeemes William he jes stan’s near de do’ ob de club-houses wid his hat in his han’, an’ as de gen’men goes in, he says ter all ob de sassy-lookin’ ones, “Chris’mas gif’, Gen’al,” an’ p’ints ter de army-button what he foun’ in de White Lot, an’ what he puts in his buttonhole on dese ’casions. Den as de South’rn gen’men goes in, he hol’s dat li’le ’Federate flag ober de button an’ says, “Chris’mas gif’, Massa.” An’ I’ve knowed him ter come home wid as much as twelve dollars in his pocket jes f’om his good manners; dey is so skase nowerdays, wid all dis passle ob young niggers growin’ up roun’ here, dat de white folks is willin’ ter pay high fer ’em when dey do come ’cross ’em.

’Lindy she puts on dat black alpacky frock of hern an’ er white collar an’ a starched white ap’on, an’ she takes de rich-lookin’ houses an’ rings de bells, an’ asks kin she hope out wid de extra wuk jes fur er tas’e oh de Chris’mas-time, an’ dat fetches some one ’fore she’s made more ’n five or six tries, an’ den she jes lays herse’f out ter please de white folks, an’ ebery endurin’ one ob dem gibs her sumpen ’nudder what dey doan’ want an’ what somebody else done gib dem, an as ’Lindy mos’ in gen’al picks out de big famblies, dere ain’t no mean showin’ f’om her.

Polly Ann an’ John Andrew dey sings “I’s er-rovin’ li’le darky all de way f’om Alabam’” an’ some yudder sech chunes un’er de winders, an’ folks t’rows dem pennies an’ nickels, an’ lots ob ’em gibs ’em cakes an’ or’nges an’ candy an’ de like er dat.

Me? How do I git my share? Now yer’ll laugh! Jeemes William say’, “No one wouldn’t thunk er sech er thing ’cep’in’ you, Emmy Jane,” but I ain’t nuss nine li’le white chillun, ’sides thirteen ob my own piccaninnies, countin’ de halves an’ de dade ones, an’ not learn nothin’ ter hope me ’long in dis world.

I jes puts on er clean purple caliker frock an’ er stiff white ap’on wid er white handkuchief roun’ my neck, an’ I ties er colored handkuchief ober my h’ad ter make our kind er white folks ’member de days when we all uster be jes like one fambly, an’ laugh an’ cry togeder, an’ dat’s how come it dat I done foun’ out so many ob de quality.

What I do ’sides dress up like ole times? Well, all de endurin’ year I saves up all de putty fedders f’om de tu’keys an’ chickens an’ geese an’ sech, an’ I gets me er ball ob red cord fer five cents, an’ I ties de fedders up in li’le bunches an’ puts ’em in er basket.

Chris’mas I teks dat basket on my arm, an I s’lec’s de houses where dey is babies, an’ dere is plenty ob ’em on de av’nues, too, ’spite ob Mr. Roosterfelt er-sayin’ rich chillun is fallin’ off in comin’ ter our big cities. He oughter hab my job one year an’ see fer hisse’f.

Well, I rings de bell an’ asks kin I gib de baby er Chris’mas gif’, an’ ’most ebery fambly say “Yes,” an’ brings de baby out, an’ acts pleased-like. Den I hol’s out my arms to de li’le chile an’ says, “Come ter Mammy, Honey!” an’ most in gen’al dey jumps right to me, an’ dat settles de mas an’ pas.

Den I s’lec’s er bunch ob fedders an’ gibs dem to de baby. All chillun, white or black, loves ter play wid fedders. Reckon it’s ’ca’se dey ain’t so long lef’ dem off in de wing-country what dey come f’om, an’ I tell you dat basket is er heap sight heavier on de home trip dan on de goin’ out.

Next day we all brings out our pickin’s an’ we builds er fire in de bes’ room, an’ den’s our Chris’mas.

Doan’ we give no presen’s? Co’se we does. We s’lec’s all de things what we doan’ want, same as de white folks does, an’ we makes er pile ob ’em, den we makes a lis’ ob de names ob de people what we wants ter gib to,—’Lindy she does dat paht, ’ca’se she’s had schoolin’ an’ kin write grand,—den we blin’fol’s li’le John Andrew, an’ ’Lindy she calls out er name, an’ John Andrew grabs er gif’. Dat’s how come you ter git er pair of gallusses, an’ Daddy Bundy er long gingham ap’on las’ year.

I hopes de givin’ dis year will turn ter tu’key an’ cramberry, jes fer de sake ob ole times down home. I sure does get lonesome fer de ole place roun’ ’bout Chris’mas.

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		PAGE
AFTER-DINNER STORIES.
A Reminiscence of Marion Crawford.	Baddeley Boardman	319
AFTER-THE-WAR, SERIES, THE CENTURY’S.
The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
I. The Causes of Impeachment	Harrison Gray Otis	187
II. Emancipation and Impeachment	John B. Henderson	196
Portraits, and drawing by Jay Hambidge.
ARTIST SERIES, AMERICAN, THE CENTURY’S
Mary Greene Blumenschein: Idleness		162
Printed in color.
BERGSON, HENRI	Alvan F. Sanborn	172
Portrait by Jacques Blanche.
BIG JOB, THE, THE END OF	Farnham Bishop	271
Pictures from photographs, map, and diagram.
CHILDREN’S, THE, UNCENSORED READING	Editorial	312
CHRISTMAS EMMY, JANE’S	Julia B. Tenney	319
CHRISTMAS FÊTE, A, IN CALIFORNIA	Louise Herrick Wall	319
Pictures by W. T. Benda.
CHRISTMAS TREE, THE, ON CLINCH	Lucy Furman	163
Pictures by F. R. Gruger.
COLE’S (TIMOTHY) ENGRAVINGS OF MASTERPIECES IN FRENCH GALLERIES
Lady Mildmay. By Hoppner		225
DANTE’S DIVINE COMEDY. Red chalk drawings	Violet Oakley	239
FRATERNITIES IN WOMENS’S COLLEGES
Exclusiveness among College Women	Edith Rickert	227
GIVING AWAY THE NATION’S PROPERTY	Editorial	315
“HOLY CALM,” THE WOOING OF	Marion Hamilton Carter	218
Picture by Fletcher C. Ransom.
JERUSALEM, LORDS SPIRITUAL IN	Thomas E. Green	289
MAGIC CASEMENTS, ON	Vida D. Scudder	316
NEWSBOY, THE NEW YORK	Jacob A. Riis	247
Pictures by J. R. Shaver.
NOËL, LITTLE, THE MIRACLE OF	Virginia Yeaman Remnitz	182
Pictures by W. T. Benda and Joseph Clement Coll.
SIREN OF THE AIR, THE	Allan Updegraff	283
Picture by W. M. Berger.
SOCIALISM, ENGLISH, THE SET-BACK TO	Gilbert K. Chesterton	236
STELLA MARIS	William J. Locke	259
Pictures by Frank Wiles.
TRADE OF THE WORLD PAPERS, THE	James Davenport Whelpley
XIV. The Trade of Russia		296
Pictures from photographs.
VOTING, NEW ANXIETIES ABOUT	Editorial	311
WAR AND ARBITRATION, A CRISTMAS THOUGHT ON	Editorial	314
VERSE
DREAMS DENIED, THE	Marion Couthouy Smith	217
GLORY SHALL FOLLOW GLORY	Charles Hanson Towne	288
LIMERICKS
Text and pictures by Oliver Herford.
XIX. The Filcanthropic Cow		321
XX. Tact		322
PITILESSNESS OF DESIRE, THE	Shaemas O’Sheel	235
PROVENCE, CHRISTMAS ECHOES FROM	Edith M. Thomas	177
Pictures by Charles S. Chapman.
THOUGHTS, DECEMBER TWENTY-FOURTH	Deems Taylor	319

“LIGHT IS THERE ABOVE WHICH MAKES THE CREATOR VISIBLE	© V. O.	TO THAT CREATURE WHICH HAS ITS PEACE ONLY IN SEEING HIM”

PARADISO CANTO XXIX–XXX		THE RIVER OF LIGHT

“O GLORY AND LIGHT OF OTHER POETS: MAY THE LONG ZEAL	© V. O.	AVAIL ME AND THE GREAT LOVE THAT MADE ME SEARCH THY VOLUME”

INFERNO CANTO I		DANTE, DRIVEN BACK BY THE THREE BEASTS

“THEN GRIEVED I, AND I NOW DO GRIEVE AGAIN WHEN I DIRECT MY	© V. O.	MIND TO WHAT I SAW, AND MORE REIN IN MY THOUGHT THAN I AM WONT”

INFERNO CANTO XIV		VERGIL LEADS DANTE THROUGH THE RAIN OF FIRE

“THY WILL HENCEFORTH IS UPRIGHT, PURE, AND SOUND.	© V. O.	LORD OF THYSELF BE MITERED AND BE CROWNED.”

PURGATORIO CANTO XXVIII–XXIX		DANTE UPON THE MOUNTAIN OF PURIFICATION

“A LITTLE WHILE AND ME YE SHALL NOT SEE— AND THEN AGAIN	© V. O.	O SISTERS, MY DELIGHT, A LITTLE WHILE AND ME YE SHALL BEHOLD!”

PURGATORIO CANTO XXX		BEATRICE, DIVINE WISDOM, DESCENDS FROM HEAVEN UPON THE CHARIOT OF THE CHURCH

“HIS WILL IS OUR PEACE. IT IS THAT OCEAN VAST WHEREUNTO ARE	© V. O.	MOVING ALL THINGS WHICH HE CREATES AND WHICH NATURE MAKES”

PARADISO CANTO II, FIRST HEAVEN OF THE MOON		BEATRICE LIFTS DANTE FROM THE EARTH

“HER BEAUTY RAINETH LITTLE FLAMES OF FIRE FULL OF A SPIRIT	© V. O.	THAT INSPIRES LOVE AND IN OUR NATURE QUICKENS ALL GOOD THOUGHTS”

PARADISO CANTO XXI–XXII SEVENTH HEAVEN OF SATURN		THE SACRED STAIRWAY OF CONTEMPLATION

“IN ITS DEPTH I SAW THAT WHATSOEVER IS DISPERSED THROUGHOUT THE UNIVERSE	© V. O.	IN SEPARATE LEAVES— IS THERE INCLUDED, BOUND WITH LOVE IN ONE VOLUME.”

PARADISO CANTO XXX–XXXI		THE TENTH HEAVEN.—THE GREAT WHITE ROSE

YEAR	IMPORTS	EXPORTS	TOTAL	EXCESS OF EXPORTS
1902	275	425	700	150
1904	300	500	800	200
1906	322	514	836	192
1908	390	484	874	94
1910	490	713	1203	223
1911	600	800	1400	200

YEAR	FOOD PRO- DUCTS	RAW MA- TERIAL AND PARTLY MANUFACT.	LIVE STOCK	MANUFAC- TURED GOODS	TOTAL
1906	55	174	.500	93	322
1907	61	194	.550	106	361
1908	65	212	.762	114	392
1909	60	212	.800	132	405
1910	63	266	1.580	161	492
1911	69	266	1.780	190	527

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (December 1912)

THE CENTURY MAGAZINE

CONTENTS

THE CHRISTMAS TREE ON CLINCH

HENRI BERGSON

The Almond Branch

Saboly

“Little Christmas Ghost.”

THE IMPEACHMENT OF ANDREW JOHNSON

THE CAUSES OF IMPEACHMENT

THE SAVING OF THE UNION

AN ELECTION ON THE MARCH

CIVIC AND MATERIAL DESOLATION

INCIDENTS OF PROVOST-MARSHAL RULE

OPPOSITION TO THE EDICT OF FREEDOM

THE MILITARY STATE GOVERNMENTS

LINCOLN’S RECONSTRUCTION POLICY IN WAR AND JOHNSON’S IN PEACE

NEGRO SUFFRAGE

KU-KLUX OUTRAGES

PUBLIC SENTIMENT AGAINST JOHNSON’S POLICIES

THE FAILURE TO DISLODGE THE PRESIDENT

TWO CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS

EMANCIPATION AND IMPEACHMENT

THE “RECALL” FOR PRESIDENTS

BORDER-STATE INFLUENCE AND WARFARE

THE TREND TOWARD EMANCIPATION

THE FAILURE OF PLANS TO PURCHASE EMANCIPATION

THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT

LINCOLN AND THE LIQUOR HABIT

LINCOLN’S CLEMENCY

THE DISCONTENT WITH PRESIDENT JOHNSON

PREPARING FOR IMPEACHMENT

GENERAL GRANT’S CHANGE OF VIEWS

THE SEVEN REPUBLICAN SENATORS

HOW TIME VINDICATED THE RIGHT

THE DREAMS DENIED

THE WOOING OF “HOLY CALM”

TIMOTHY COLE’S WOOD ENGRAVINGS OF MASTERPIECES IN AMERICAN GALLERIES

EXCLUSIVENESS AMONG COLLEGE WOMEN

FACULTIES AND THE FRATERNITIES

SOME GOOD AGAINST MUCH EVIL

REFORMING THE SYSTEM

A FOMENTER OF CASTE FEELING

DO COLLEGE AUTHORITIES FACE THEIR DUTY?

THE GROUPING OF STUDENTS FOR DEVELOPMENT

A NARROWING INFLUENCE

INTERCOURSE BETWEEN ALUMNA AND STUDENT

SOCIAL EXCLUSIVENESS

A NEW ALTRUISM NEEDED

THE PITILESSNESS OF DESIRE

THE SET-BACK TO ENGLISH SOCIALISM

THE NEW YORK NEWSBOY

HOW CERVANTES LOOKED

STELLA MARIS

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

THE END OF THE BIG JOB

THE SIREN OF THE AIR

GLORY SHALL FOLLOW GLORY

LORDS SPIRITUAL IN JERUSALEM

THE TRADE OF RUSSIA

NEW ANXIETIES ABOUT VOTING

THE CHILDREN’S UNCENSORED READING

A CHRISTMAS THOUGHT ON WAR AND ARBITRATION

GIVING AWAY THE NATION’S PROPERTY

EDITORIAL NOTE: CONTRIBUTIONS DESIRED

ON MAGIC CASEMENTS

AN AFTER-DINNER STORY

THOUGHTS, DECEMBER TWENTY-FOURTH

EMMY JANE’S CHRISTMAS

INCUBATOR CHICKENS

LIMERICKS

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

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