St. Charles! Eighteen miles from New Orleans. Another hour! We try to catch the landscape as the pools and marshes, cedars and palmettoes slip behind us; but we try in vain to fix our minds on trifles by the way. A grove of orange trees, the fruit all burning ripe, arrests attention and provokes a cry of rapture; yet the coolest brain among us frets and flutters, for we know that we are driving towards a scene of strife, on which the eyes and hearts of forty millions of people are fixed in passionate hope and dread.

President Grant affirms that ‘anarchy reigns in Louisiana.’ No one doubts the fact; but General McEnery and the White citizens assert that this ‘reign of anarchy’ was introduced by Grant, and VOL. II. B 0008 2 is maintained in New Orleans for purposes of his own. This ‘reign’ began, they say, two years ago, on the receipt by Stephen B. Packard of a telegram in these words:—

‘Washington: Department of Justice, Dec. 3, 1872.

‘You are to enforce the decrees of the United States Courts, no matter by whom resisted, and General Emory will furnish you with the necessary troops for that purpose.

‘ George H. Williams, ‘Attorney-General.’

This message was a riddle. Stephen B. Packard is a carpet-bagger, whom the President has sent to New Orleans as United States Marshal. General Emory is a Federal officer commanding the Department of the Gulf. But who were Marshal Packard and General Emory to fight? No mandate of the United States Courts had been resisted in New Orleans. No opposition was expected by those Courts. Judge Durell, the only Federal magistrate in Louisiana, had never made a complaint. Why, then, was an inferior officer like Stephen B. Packard, urged by Attorney-General Williams, President 0009 3 Grant's legal adviser, to call out troops in order to execute the mandate of his court?

The President was supposed to have two objects in view at New Orleans; first, to secure the State vote for his second term as President; second to procure the State senatorship for his brother-in-law, James B. Casey. For either of these purposes Federal troops might be employed by an unscrupulous President; but Judge Durell was trying to get the Senatorship for Norton, and therefore unlikely to assist in bringing Casey to the front. Neither Governor Warmoth nor General McEnery could make it out. Against whom was Packard to march the Federal troops? Time solved the mystery.

Stephen B. Packard got his telegram on Wednesday night. Next evening, Durell sent for him to his private lodgings on important business. Billings, an attorney acting for the scalawags, was sitting at Durell's table, writing out an order, which the judge explained to his visitor. Packard was to ask for troops, to march on the State House, and to hold that edifice against all comers. In New Orleans the Capitol is both executive office B 2 0010 4 and the legislative hall. Packard was to oust the Governor, seize the archives, and close the doors. When Billings had drawn and Darell signed his warrant, Packard left the two lawyers, ran to the barracks, got a company, and in the dead of night attacked and occupied the Capitol.

No living man, not even President Grant, pretends to think that order of Durell lawful, or those proceedings of Packard just.

Durell had his reward. Casey withdrew from the contest for Senator, taking the snug and lucrative berth of Collector, while Durell's friend Norton was adopted by a scalawag county as their party candidate.

General Warmoth, Governor of the State, was a Fusionist: the Fusionists being a party of timid people, led by Senator Jewell, who wished for nothing so much as peace, and sank all points of difference with their neighbours in order to oppose the policy attributed to President Grant of meaning to rule Louisiana and her sister States by the sword. Warmoth's term of office was near an end. Jewell proposed him for a second term; but Jewell's advocacy failed. ‘A second term for Warmoth, and no 0011 5 second term for Grant,’ proved a bad cry. The contest for Governor and Lieutenant-Governor lay between General McEnery and General Penn, soldiers of local name, on one side; and William P. Kellogg, a lawyer from Illinois, and Cæsar C. Antoine, a Negro porter, on the other side.

Each party claimed the victory, and till the Chambers met no one could say how matters stood. The evidence might have to go before the Supreme Court of Louisiana; but as six or seven weeks remained of Governor Warmoth's term, there was plenty of time to sift the lists before Louisiana should find herself without a legal governor and a regular government. McEnery was content to wait until the Chambers met; but Kellogg dared not face a chamber meeting under Warmoth's orders; and Kellogg's movements brought about the reign of anarchy.

William Pitt Kellogg, a lawyer out of practice, came from Illinois to New Orleans in search of fortune. Hundreds of his neighbours do the same, exchanging the frosts of Lake Michigan for the sunshine on the Gulf. He brought to New Orleans a carpet-bag, a glozing tongue, and a supply of sentiment. John Brown was his hero, and in company 0012 6 with John Brown's ‘soul,’ he marched and chorused till a Negro caucus ran him for the local Senate. Lank and smooth, with. sanctimonious garb and speech, he won the Negro heart, and got Republicans in Washington to mark him as a man to carry out their plans. Kellogg was intriguing for the State senator's chair, when the more lucrative and dazzling prize of Governor swung before his eyes. The place is worth eight thousand dollars a year in gold. Except the Governor of Pennsylvania, who receives ten thousand dollars a year, the Governor of Louisiana has the highest pay of any governor in the United States. Governor Coke of Texas has only five thousand, Governor Houston of Alabama only four thousand—Governor Ames of Mississippi only three thousand dollars a year. Besides his eight thousand a year, a Governor of Louisiana has perquisites and patronage worth more than double his official salary. If he wishes to make money fast, and feels no scruple as to means, the wealth of New Orleans, the commerce of the Gulf, are in his hands. Governor Warmoth is said to have found a fortune at the State House.

The highest prizes offered to ambition by the State appeared to lie within Kellogg's reach; 0013 7 but he required much strength and skill to grasp his prize. In everything save numbers his opponents were superior to his friends. McEnery and Penn were men of wealth, position, and repute, with every citizen of New Orleans and every planter of Louisiana at their side. Kellogg was a stranger in the city, having no other force behind him than the scalawags, the Black leaguers, and the Federal troops.

From Governor Warmoth he had nothing to expect. Warmoth was trying a middle course. Like Kellogg, Warmoth is a stranger on the Gulf. His friends are scalawags and Negroes, but scalawags and Negroes who have lost their faith in Grant. Young, bold, and dexterous, Warmoth is not the man to be discouraged by a single check. As Governor he held the lists. It was his duty to convene the Chambers, open the sessions, and endorse the bills. Nothing could be done without his signature. Might not this feud between Conservatives and Cæsarians be turned to good account? If neither Kellogg nor McEnery should be able to prove his case, Warmoth, the only legal officer, must continue to rule the State until a new election was held, a new return verified, a new 0014 8 convention held. Who knew what candidates might be chosen on that second trial? Many things were in his favour. He was Governor. A moderate man, he stood between two factions, neither of which was strong enough to crush the other. Under him there might be order. Under McEnery there was likely to be disorder; under Kellogg there was certain to be anarchy.

Unable to trust Warmoth, and unwilling to meet a chamber opened by him, Kellogg convened a meeting of his partisans. It was Saturday morning; on Monday the Chambers were to meet. A Chamber organised by Warmoth would proceed to verify the elections, and would probably refer the great question as to which of the two candidates, McEnery and Kellogg, was legally elected, to the judges of the Supreme Court. Kellogg feared alike the senators and the judges. But how was he to sweep them both aside?

Billings, the unscrupulous attorney, who was acting in the Negro interest, proposed that Cæsar Antoine, the Negro porter, should be employed to steal a march, not only on the Governor and the Chambers, but on the local courts.

The scheme proposed by Billings was adopted 0015 9 and the Negro porter went before Judge Durell, not in open court, but in the Judge's lodgings, and exhibited a bill, setting forth a statement that, whereas he, Cæsar C. Antoine, had been duly elected Lieutenant-governor of Louisiana, and whereas he had reason to expect embarrassment in entering on the said office, he prayed the United States Court to grant him an order restraining certain persons, named in a schedule prepared by Billings, from doing any act, from speaking any word, from giving any sign, in prejudice of his claim to the said office of Lieutenant-governor.

The persons named in the schedule as likely to prejudice Antoine's claims were one hundred and thirty-five in number. The first was Governor Warmoth. Next came the Secretary of State. Then followed nineteen Senators, more than a hundred representatives, and the members of both the Conservative and Republican returning boards. In short, this Negro asked Judge Durell to prohibit the executive and legislative bodies of Louisiana from doing any act in prejudice of his claims—for five clear days! Judge Durell granted him an order in the terms set down.

President Grant is faithful to his tools; yet 0016 10 President Grant has been compelled to own that the order made by Judge Durell on the application of Antoine was not only ‘illegal’ but a ‘grave mistake.’

Yet this ‘illegal order’ was signed, and the ‘grave mistake’ carried into full effect. These things were not only done in ignorance, but are maintained to-day, when the illegality is admitted, and the ‘grave mistake’ denounced by President Grant himself. In fact, this order, hardly to be matched in absurdity by the edicts of Rio Jacques on the Senegal, governs the domestic politics of Louisiana to the present hour!

If Judge Durell had not signed that order, the legislature of Louisiana would have met, and organized itself under Governor Warmoth. It is all but certain that Chambers freely organized would have found McEnery and Penn duly elected to the executive office. It is certain that the Supreme Court of Louisiana would have sustained that finding. Under a Conservative ruler, New Orleans might have found such peace as reigns in Charleston and Raleigh.

Judge Durell's order gave the partisans of Kellogg an advantage over the citizens of Louisiana, and by Kellogg's act the reign of ‘anarchy’ began.

On Monday morning, Packard, having the Republican writs in his hand, the Federal soldiers at his back, arrived at the Mechanics' Institute, in which edifice the Assembly was to meet. Cæsar C. Antoine, holding Durell's order, stood at the door, pointing out who should enter and who should not enter. None but his friends were passed. Once in the legislative hall, these lost no time in prate, for Durell's order would expire on Wednesday, and many things had to be done before the Conservative members took their seats.

The first thing was to depose Governor Warmoth and obtain possession of his official lists. But how was the lawful governor to be displaced?

A Negro, named Pinchback, known familiarly as Pinch, offered his services to Kellogg—at a price. This Pinch, a bustling fellow, had been a steward on 0018 12 board a steamboat, and afterwards an usher in a gambling den; but, like others of his tribe, he found that politics paid him better than washing basins, keeping doors, and dodging the police. As senator for a Negro district he happened to have served some weeks in office as successor to Lieutenant-governor Dunn. His time was up; but in America titles cling to men for life. Once a professor always a professor; once a Lieutenant-governor always a Lieutenant-governor. Though lost to office, Pinch had still a handle to his name.

This man seemed worth his salt, and Kellogg came to terms with him. Pinch was to upset Warmoth. If he succeeded, he was to be Acting Governor for a few days, to have a large sum of money, and, if Norton could be set aside, to go as senator to Washington.

These terms being settled, Billings led Pinch into the Senate Chamber, and, by help of Cæsar C. Antoine, seated him as Lieutenant-governor in the chair of state. In ten minutes Pinch organized a house. Then he produced a paper, written out by Billings, charging Governor Warmoth with certain offences, and asking for his deposition. Ten 0019 13 minutes more sufficed to get these articles read and passed. The Federal troops were handy, under Packard's orders, so that things were done as easily as they were said. Pinch assumed the rank of Acting Governor, took possession of the State House, seized the Great Seal of Louisiana, and proclaimed his advent to the world.

Seldom in either history or fiction have grotesqueness and absurdity been carried to such lengths. We sigh over the doings of Bocking, the tailor of Leyden, as a pitiful illustration of human folly. We laugh at the impudence of Sancho, as a pleasant creation of satiric art. But Münster and Barrataria must look to their bays. If Bocking has no rival, and Sancho no superior, Pinchback and Antoine in high places have an air of burlesque not easily surpassed.

Warmoth refused to recognise Pinchback, and Pinchback was puzzled how to act even though he had Packard and a guard of honour in his ante-room. A duellist, who shoots his man as coolly as he shoots his bird, General Warmoth was not a man for Pinch to bully. The Conservative members, too, on finding the Chambers closed to 0020 14 them, met elsewhere in protest, and appealed to Warmoth, as the lawful Governor, for support against a man who had no pretension to the rank and office he assumed.

Kellogg contrived that Pinch should be proposed as the republican candidate for Senator. Norton gave way for him; and it was hoped that his election to the Senate might help to cover his illegal acts. Yet Warmoth stood unmoved. Pinch ran to Packard for advice, but Packard was afraid to speak. Every lawyer in New Orleans told him the warrants he was executing were illegal. No one in authority recognised Pinch; and Packard, brazen as he was, declined to stir one step unless supported by a message from the White House.

Unable to move without Pinch, as Pinch was unable to move without Packard, Kellogg threw himself on his patron, President Grant, and wired this message to Attorney General Williams:—

‘New Orleans: Dec. 11, 1872.

‘If President in some way indicate recognition, Governor Pinchback and Legislature would settle everything.’

If President indicate—only indicate recognition—in some way indicate—colourably indicate—recognition of Governor Pinchback, then—all will be well.

George H. Williams is a man of large resources, never failing in audacity, but he was not prepared to ask the President to recognise a Negro rowdy as Governor of Louisiana, merely because that Negro rowdy, in the absence of executive and legislature, had squatted in the chair of State. But he was only scrupulous as to forms. For Pinch as public man, Williams had no respect; for Pinch as party man, he had a duty to perform. What could be done, without too gross an outrage on public decency? Pinch could not be addressed as Governor; neither could he be recognised in open words. But, since he was acting as Governor, he might be addressed as ‘Acting Governor,’ and his functions, though not acknowledged, might be taken as ‘understood.’ Williams is adroit in vague and shadowy terms. Next day this telegram, which fully established the reign of anarchy, was sent from Washington to New Orleans:—

Acting Governor Pinchback, New Orleans.

‘Department of Justice: Dec. 12, 1872.

‘Let it be understood that you are recognized as the lawful Executive of Louisiana, and that the body assembled at the Mechanics' Institute is the lawful Legislature of the State; and it is suggested that you make proclamation to that effect, and also that all necessary assistance will be given to you and the Legislature herein recognized to protect the State from disorder and violence.’

On this authority from the Cabinet, Governor Warmoth was deposed and Pinchback was intalled in office by the Federal officers. Yet Pinch was not at ease; nor could he feel at ease, so long as Governor Warmoth stayed in New Orleans. This gentleman might meet him in the street, and thrash him. Pinch was not desirous of a thrashing, and having Federal judges, as well as Federal generals at his back, he tried what law could do to rid him of his terrible enemy.

A second Federal judge, named Elmore, came to New Orleans, and Pinch appeared in 0023 17 Elmore's court with his old articles against Governor Warmoth, and prayed that the said Governor Warmoth should be declared deposed from his office. Elmore had no jurisdiction in this case. Such questions could be argued in the Supreme Court of Louisiana, and in no other place. For Elmore to hear the plaintiff was a contempt of court; yet Elmore read the articles, and, without hearing the accused, declared that Governor Warmoth was deposed. Refusing to recognize this decree, Warmoth appealed to the judges of Louisiana, who decided that Elmore's proceedings were irregular, and his decree of no effect. Elmore would not cancel his decision, and the judges of Louisiana cited him for contempt of court. He only jeered. Like Pinch, he had a Federal army at his back. Through all these usurpations General Emory stood by the nominees of President Grant.

For four or five weeks Pinch ruled the State, as Jacques rules his duchy in the ‘Honeymoon.’ Jesters squibbed him as King Pinch, His Nigger Majesty, Lord Paper Collar, and Marquis of Pomade. They sent him false despatches, and printed comic ukases in his name. At length, his reign was over, VOL. II. C 0024 18 and he handed the State House and the Great Seal to Kellogg; taking as his price the title of Governor, the Senatorship in Washington, and all the openings and emoluments of that chair.

Pinchback's entry in the Senate, where he claimed a seat among the Shermans and Wilsons, Boutwells and Camerons, grave and conscript fathers of the republic, raised a storm which has not yet subsided, though twenty-two months have passed since he first laid his credentials on the table of that house.

A committee was appointed by the Senate to investigate his claim. The members of this committee had to see that Pinch's credentials were in order; among other things to see that they were signed and sealed by a lawful governor. Then the whole question of Kellogg's government came up. A good majority of the committee were Republicans, and to give Pinch his seat was to strengthen their party by a vote. But such a finding was impossible for serious men. The Senators found that Kellogg was not Governor of Louisiana; that his signature was worthless; that the broad seal of Louisiana had been improperly used; and that Pinchback had no claim to sit in Congress.

A debate arose on their report. No case was ever argued in the Senate with more frankness of expression. Three Senators in five would have been glad, for party reasons, to support Kellogg and admit Pinchback; but the Senators were driven by facts to a conclusion dead against their party interests, and extremely honourable to them as individual gentlemen. A long debate ended in the adoption of the committee's report. The Senate not only declared that Kellogg was not the lawful Governor of Louisiana, and Pinchback not the lawful Senator for Louisiana, but directed that a new election should be held, so that the ‘reign of anarchy’ might be put down in true republican fashion, by a public vote.

When pressed by the Senate to explain his action, President Grant admitted that the late election in Louisiana was ‘a gigantic fraud.’ He yielded to the Senate, that a new election ought to be held, so as to ascertain whether General McEnery or William P. Kellogg was the popular choice; but he reserved to his cabinet the right of choosing a convenient time for calling on the citizens of Louisiana to exercise their right. C 2

All parties being now agreed that the late elections were void, Warmoth remained, as he contended, the legal Governor, bound to keep his seat and hold the Seal till his successor had been named.

Nothing was done towards carrying out these wishes of the Senate, these conclusions of the President. Kellogg was afraid to face a second vote. Promises had been made to the Negroes which he could not keep. The Negro brain is dull, and offers must be made in very plain terms. Thousands of Negro votes had been obtained by a promise of ‘forty acres of land and a stout mule’ for each vote. Thousands of Negroes were annoyed at the postponement of these lands and mules, and it was dangerous to tempt them in their angry mood. So Kellogg was allowed by President Grant to put off the new elections to a safer time.

Two Senates and three Governors contended with each other for the mastery of New Orleans. No man could tell where his allegiance lay. The reign of anarchy was complete.

For seventeen months New Orleans groaned under the yoke of Governors who could not rule, of Assemblies which were unable to pass bills, and of Tribunals which reversed each other's decrees.

Kellogg, though backed by Grant, was repudiated by Congress. McEnery though supported by the main body of White citizens in New Orleans, was not recognised by the authorities at Washington. The courts were open to Kellogg, if he cared to try his right. Though taunted by the citizens to take a case, he shrank from courting a decision, which he feared must go in favour of his enemies, and would weaken his hold on the Federal power. In spite, therefore, of having the support of Packard, the countenance of Pinch, the salary of a Governor, and an official residence in the State House, William P. Kellogg found his situation grow more desperate every passing day.

New Orleans is Louisiana, very much as Paris is France. When New Orleans suffers, Louisiana suffers; when New Orleans recovers, Louisiana recovers. Now, under Kellogg and his reign of anarchy, New Orleans was bankrupt in public credit as well as in private means.

A mixed executive of Negroes and strangers ruled the city and jobbed the public lands—a Rump Chamber, in which the Negroes had a large majority, pocketing their fees, and voting bills which have no legal force. A band of Negroes, officered by aliens, ruled the streets and quays. Black clubs were multiplied, with secret signs and passwords. While a dollar lay in the Treasury, these aliens helped themselves and their adherents. Offices were sold, State bonds were hocussed, and a solvent city was made responsible for an impoverished State. Foreign creditors were defrauded, and the citizens suffered in repute. All branches of the shipping trade declined. Merchants and brokers left their magazines empty on the quays, and the market value of shops in fashionable quarters fell below their former annual rent. Imports almost ceased. Taxes increased so rapidly that owners 0029 23 of good houses handed their tenements over to the State. All salaries, except the eighteen dollars paid each week to Kellogg's Negro senators, were in arrear. Teachers and professors went unpaid. Colleges and schools were closed. The river companies, unable to get their dues, stinted the supplies of water. Rich and poor were equally distressed. Some nights the streets were dark, the gasmen having stopped the mains. The streets of New Orleans are never safe at night, but in the darkness of that reign of anarchy, every evil thing came forth. Policemen levied black-mail on every shop. These servants of the public carried arms, and men with arms will never starve. Food rose in price. Fish grew scarce and mutton dear. The prisons and asylums were neglected, and their inmates, like those of Naples and Seville, were left to rot in filth and rags. Levees were broken through; and fertile fields lay under water. Weeds and mosses sprang up rich and rank. The cotton fields seemed wasting into jungle, the ramparts crumbling into the river, and streets and gardens rotting in a physical and moral blight.

Proud and beautiful New Orleans! Ruined in 0030 24 her trade, her credit, and her hope, the city rose in her despair and put the question to herself—Shall the White family perish on the Gulf of Mexico?

Her answer was emphatic. A reaction instantly set in—a reaction in the sense of setting the question of race above that of party—the Republic above the Republicans.

In clubs, in drawing-rooms, in magazines and stores, a White sentiment began to show. This movement was directed less against the coloured people than against the strangers and scalawags, who managed the coloured people for party purposes. A league was understood; a White League, in opposition to the Black League; but the members held no meetings, named no committees, elected no chiefs. It was a sentiment rather than a society; but the European genius is organic; and the European sentiment was ready to take an active shape.

These leaguers, say they, are not a party but a people, and the object of their union is to save the White race. Yet, as nearly every white man in New Orleans has been a soldier, the leaguers are 0031 25 an army, ready, on two hours' notice, to fall in—on twelve hours' notice, to take the field.

This league gave confidence to those White citizens who wished to end the reign of anarchy, by driving Kellogg as a stranger from New Orleans, by sending Antoine, the Negro porter, back to his stand in the Custom House, and by installing General McEnery and General Penn in office, as the Governor and Lieutenant-governor of their choice.

Election-day was coming on, when a new set of local legislators must be chosen. The citizens wished to have as free and fair elections as were possible with the register drawn up by the scalawags and Black leaguers; but in order to have a free and fair election, it was necessary for the strangers to retire. Republican Senators in Washington agreed with Conservative Senators in New Orleans that Kellogg was not the lawful Governor of Louisiana. But how were the White citizens to use such pressure as would cause him to withdraw?

Besides the Federal troops, Kellogg had considerable forces at his back; the city police, a Negro regiment, under General Badger; and the 0032 26 State militia, mainly a Negro army, under General Longstreet. Badger was a carpet-bagger, sure to stand by Kellogg while his fortunes were upheld by President Grant. Longstreet, the famous soldier, was uncertain. In a question of disputed powers, where neither party had the sanction of Congress, Longstreet might see his duty in standing aside, while the voters who had chosen McEnery and Penn settled with the voters who had chosen Kellogg and Antoine. Might . . . but who could tell?

At eleven o'clock on Monday morning, September 14, 1874, a mass meeting of citizens was held in Canal Street. Standing by the great statue of Henry Clay, Marr, as chairman of the meeting, put this question to the citizens—Whether they would endure the reign of anarchy any longer? They replied by shouts that they preferred the tyranny under which they had groaned before the Reconstruction Act. A soldier, though a despot, was a man of discipline. He kept the streets in order, and the lobbies of the State House pure. A ruler like Hancock was a blessing compared to a ruler like Kellogg. Under a Federal soldier there would be no pretence of freedom, civil order, and republican 0033 27 institutions. The tyranny would be undisguised, and Louisiana governed like the Duchy of Warsaw. Yet the citizens preferred a man of iron to a carpet-bagger; anything being better than adventurers having no other hold on the country than the support of an alien soldiery and a Negro mob.

A resolution was carried that five citizens should proceed to the State House, in St. Louis Street, and in the name of a free and sovereign people, request William P. Kellogg, as a stranger in their city, to retire.

Kellogg shut himself in his apartments, with his Negro guard, but sent out Billings and an officer of his staff to parley with his visitors. ‘You ask the Governor to retire!’ said Billings, ‘He refuses to hear a message from a body of armed men, accompanied by a menace.’

The crowd in Canal Street were not armed, as Kellogg and Billings knew. An hour later, Packard telegraphed to Attorney-general Williams:

‘The people assembled at the meeting were generally unarmed.’

This talk about armed men was meant for Washington and New York, not for New Orleans.

‘Go home, gentlemen,’ said Marr. ‘Provide yourselves with rations and blankets, and assemble at two o'clock, when arms and leaders will be ready.’

Packard, feeling uneasy about the mass meeting, had telegraphed to Jackson, in Mississippi, for troops, and early in the day a company had arrived in New Orleans. These troops were at the Custom House. He now sent messages to Holly Springs, and was informed by wire that four additional companies were coming to his aid. He chuckled in his sleeve. ‘There is little doubt of a conflict to-night,’ he joyfully telegraphed to Washington. ‘I have a company of United States troops guarding the Custom House. Four companies are en route from Holly Springs. The local authorities have several hundred men under arms at the State House and arsenals.’

When Marr went away, Kellogg sent for General Badger and arranged with him the details of an attack on the White citizens. The police, under Badger's orders, were a regiment, drilled and armed like our Irish constabulary, and furnished with a park of guns. This force is raised and paid by the 0035 29 city, and in a reign of order is commanded by the mayor; but the intruders have usurped the mayor's authority, driven White men out of the service, and filled up the ranks with tall and burly Negroes. In the hands of Badger this police is nothing but a black prætorian guard.

As Longstreet's presence at the State House covered Kellogg, Badger occupied Canal Street, a strong position, sweeping the main thoroughfares, connecting the quays with the lake, and dividing the French quarter, in which St. Louis Street lies, from the English quarter, in which the White citizens mostly live. He had three guns in position, one Gatling and two Napoleons, and two hundred of his Black. Regiment stood under arms round the statue of Henry Clay.

By twos and threes the unarmed citizens passed Canal Street towards the State House, and at two o'clock seventeen hundred of these unarmed citizens occupied the sidewalks of Poydrass Street and the adjacent avenues

‘Fall in!’

The citizens seemed to know their duties. Companies and battalions were formed. Rifles, hastily 0036 30 landed from a steamer, were distributed, and General Ogden, an old campaigner, took the chief command.

The enemies whom General Ogden might have to face were three: first, General Badger and the metropolitan police; second, General Longstreet and the State militia; third, General Emory and the Federal troops. His theory was that neither Longstreet nor Emory would feel himself justified in meddling with the purely local question as to whether Kellogg or McEnery had a true majority of votes. Longstreet was a Southern man, and Emory would hardly go against the vote of Congress. Should he be left to deal with Badger and his Negro regiment, Ogden supposed that fifteen or twenty minutes would suffice to settle the affair.

At half-past two Badger began to move his forces towards St. Louis Street. Trailing the three big guns, his heads of column hove in sight, with Badger riding gallantly in front, and some of his leading company yelling and discharging their pieces as they came along.

‘Fire!’ cried Ogden. The citizens fired, and Badger dropt from his horse—supposed to be killed.

‘Charge!’ cried Ogden. The citizens charged, and the Negroes, surprised by bayonets, broke and fled.

Captain Angel led his company against the Gatling gun. Dropping their arms in scorn, the citizens ran at the gun, cuffed and kicked the Negro gunners, chasing them in and out of yards and stores, until the tag-rag reached the Custom House, and found a refuge under the Federal flag. Hardly one of the Negroes stood to fight. One Negro general crept into an undertaker's shed. ‘Get out,’ shouted the little French coffin-maker, ‘zey will follow you and murder me!’ The Negro stripped himself of lace and feathers. ‘God's sake, massa, let me hide!’ A citizen entered; no brigadier-general to be seen: nothing but a Negro in a sack mopping the mire from a hearse. The citizen looked round, gave the Negro a kick, and went out laughing.

Neither General Longstreet nor General Emory interfered. At five o'clock the four companies arrived from Holly Springs, but were not placed by Emory at Packard's disposal. Longstreet held the State House, which was not attacked. By six o'clock the firing was over, and the victorious citizens grounded arms in presence of the Federal troops.

Of Badger's force, thirty were killed and thirty wounded; of Ogden's force, twelve were killed and thirteen wounded. Guns, arms, and stores were captured, and a hundred prisoners remained in Ogden's hands. At dusk the City Hall, with the whole town, except the State House and Custom House, were in possession of the citizens. At midnight, Kellogg stole away from his apartments in the State House, and sought a refuge in the Customs under the United States flag. Next morning Longstreet surrendered the State House, which was at once occupied by General Penn. Then peace returned. Shops were opened and cars began to ply. The White movement was complete.

But such a change in New Orleans was fatal to the policy of President Grant. Election-day was nigh; and if Governor McEnery sat in the State House of New Orleans, the Republican ticket would be lost in Louisiana. Kellogg assured the President that, with prompt support, the vote might yet be saved to the Republicans.

Grant ordered Emory to crush the victorious citizens and restore the beaten scalawags to power.

The vote took place under a state of feeling bordering on the phrenzy of civil war. Again each party claimed the victory. The one thing certain was, that Kellogg had not carried the State for Grant. Kellogg had promised his patron five votes out of the six possessed by Louisiana. Of the six votes only two were won for Grant.

In the State Legislature, the elections for which were held at the same time as the elections for Congress, the Conservatives claim to have gained a small but sure majority of votes. So far as the White reaction turned on votes, this White reaction was secure.

One chance, and only one, remained for Kellogg and his patrons: such an intervention of the Federal troops as might prevent the Conservative members from taking their seats. It was a daring, nay, a desperate policy; but the beaten scalawags are desperate men.

To carry out such a project required a sterner officer than General Emory, and General Sheridan has been sent to New Orleans. VOL. II. D

Soon after our arrival at the St. Charles Hotel, in New Orleans, General Sheridan leaves a card, and two hours later we pay the young and brilliant Irish soldier a visit in his quarters: ‘Headquarters of the Military Division of the Missouri.’ Like ourselves, General Sheridan and his staff are lodged in the hotel.

Our talk is general and on public matters; about the Plains of Kansas, where we saw Indian scares in 1866; about the disturbed districts in Texas, which we have just left; about our several travels and adventures since the war. As usual, General Sheridan is frank and friendly, laughing merrily at the fears which people express of him, and showing me the nature and extent of his commission in the South.

For military purposes, America is divided into 0041 35 four great sections: a Division of the Pacific, a Division of the Atlantic, a Division of the Missouri, and a Division of the South. Four officers of eminence hold these great commands: Major-general Scholefield ruling the Pacific, from San Francisco; Major-general Hancock the Atlantic, from New York; Lieutenant-general Sheridan the Missouri, from Chicago; and Major-general McDowell the South, from Louisville. General Sherman, the Commander-in-Chief, is stationed at St. Louis.

Each military division consists of two or more departments. The division of Major-general McDowell, of which New Orleans forms a part, consists of two departments:—a Department of the South, and a Department of the Gulf. That of the South comprises seven States: Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida, except the forts in Pensacola Bay, from Fort Jefferson to Key West. The head-quarters are at Louisville, where General McDowell resides. That of the Gulf comprises three States: Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas, with all the military stations in the Gulf of Mexico, from Fort Jefferson to Key West, except the forts in Mobile D 2 0042 36 Bay. The head-quarters are at New Orleans, where General Emory commands, under the orders of his superior officer, General McDowell.

General Sheridan's Division of the Missouri is of greater extent, and, in a military sense, of vaster importance, since it runs from the British frontier to the Mexican frontier, and cuts off every line of intercourse between the Eastern and Western States. This great division consists of four departments, called Dakota, Platte, Missouri, and Texas. The Department of Dakota comprises the State of Minnesota, with the Territories of Dakota and Montana; that of Platte, the States of Iowa and Nebraska, with the Territories of Utah and Wyoming; that of Missouri, the States of Kansas, Colorado, Illinois, and Missouri, with the Territory of New Mexico and the district of Camp Supply; that of Texas, the State of Texas, and the Territories of the Indian Nations, with the exception of Camp Supply. These regions form the ordinary province over which General Sheridan rules, but on coming to New Orleans he has brought with him a secret power to add, at his discretion, either the whole or any part of General McDowell's division to his own.

What sort of a man is he who has the charge of eight free States and six great Territories, and who may at any moment on his own mere motion, and without consulting a single native, add ten more States to his overgrown command? As a companion by the way, I like General Sheridan, and if I paint him somewhat darkly it is because the facts of history leave me no choice of tints. Nature has not drawn Philip Sheridan in sepia, nor need one pay him the poor compliment of softening a grand and sombre figure. To feel the situation you must see the man.

A soldier, short in stature, squat in form, and plain of face, with head of bullet-shape, and eyes lit up with sullen fire, is ‘Little Phil,’ the wild Irish devil, who has fought his way to one of the highest seats within a soldier's reach. Five names emerge from the confusion of the war, and that of Sheridan is one of these five. If Lee and Jackson leave a brighter record, who among the Northern men, excepting Grant and Sherman, have a greater name than Sheridan? These captains are immortals, and Sheridan is youngest of the five. Alert as Mosby, he is hot as Hood and cool as Bragg. Think of poor Early in his grasp! Few strokes of war 0044 38 excel the charge by which he shook, shattered, and destroyed the enemies who had burnt Chambersburg and menaced Washington. He reaps a rich reward. America has only one Lieutenant-general, and Philip Sheridan is that one.

Sheridan has seen hard service, in a region where the nicer feelings have no field; for he has spent six years among the Cheyemes and Sioux, learning their dialects and mixing in their feuds. It is a saying in the camp that Little Phil is one-half Irish savage, the other half Indian savage. If a merciless deed has to be done, everyone expects Sheridan to do it. When a cruel need of war induced General Grant to order the Shenandoah Valley to be burnt, the torch was placed in Sheridan's hands. ‘The whole country, from the Blue Ridge to the North Mountain, has been made untenable!’ was his brief report; and never since the French generals, under advice of Louvois, ravaged the Palatinate, have eyes of man beheld a wreck so awful as that of the beautiful Virginian dale. When the Government wished to make example of an Indian tribe, Sheridan was sent into the Plains. The Piegans were selected for a sacrifice; 0045 39 and the work of slaughter was so sudden and so thorough, that as long as Indian bards and seers recite the legends of their tribes no Red man or woman will forget the name of Sheridan and the horrors of that Piegan war.

Thus it happens that General Sheridan's arrival at New Orleans, in a time of much disorder, rouses the great city like an alarm of fire.

General Sheridan was in Chicago, busy with the duties of his post, and idling through the pleasures of courtship, and the festivities of Christmas, when a letter reached him from General Belknap, Secretary of War, marked ‘confidential,’ which upset all his arrangements for balls and dinners. The letter ran:—

Confidential. War Department, Dec. 24, 1874.

‘General: The President sent for me this morning, and desires me to say to you that he wishes you to visit the States of Louisiana and Mississippi, and especially New Orleans and Vicksburg. . . . Inclosed herewith is an order authorizing you to assume command of the Military Division of the South, or any portion of that division, should you see proper to do so. . . . You can, if you desire it, see General 0046 40 McDowell in Louisville, and make known to him, confidentially, the object of your trip. But this is not required of you. Communication with him by you is left entirely to your own judgment. Of course you can take with you such gentlemen of your staff as you wish, and it is best that the trip should appear to be one as much of pleasure as of business. . . . You can return by Washington, and make a verbal report. W. W. Belknap. ’

Ever ready to obey orders, Sheridan telegraphed to Washington: ‘Your letter arrived—all right.’

A party of ladies and officers, including a young lady who was the object of General Sheridan's courtship, was made up for this ‘pleasure trip,’ and a note to the Chicago journals told the world that General Sheridan, having got leave of absence, was about to spend his winter holidays in Cuba. It was understood to be his courting trip, to end on his return in bridal cakes and marriage bells.

Lying on the road from Chicago to Cuba, New Orleans might be reached without exciting much suspicion and distrust. The presence of ladies, among them a damsel to whom Sheridan was said to be vowed, would give his journey a holiday and 0047 41 festive air. The main difficulty lay with those great officers whose functions Sheridan was about to seize. The mission was unusual, the method of it irregular. If Emory is not strong enough for his place, a firmer hand might be sent down, without calling Philip Sheridan from the shores of Lake Michigan. If unity of command is needed, General McDowell is the officer in charge of the South. If the situation is thought so serious that a higher officer than McDowell should be on the spot, General Sherman is that higher officer.

It is no great secret that General Sherman notes these doings of Belknap and the War Office with alarm. Sherman has no taint of Cæsarism. A patriot first, a soldier afterwards, he values military prowess mainly as the shield of liberty and safeguard of the Commonwealth. Unable to support a personal policy, even by his silence, he has broken with the presidents, secretaries, and adjutants, and shifted his head-quarters from Washington to St. Louis, where he stands apart, an American Achilles, disgusted by the passing phase of public affairs. Sherman is too great a man to slight; and Belknap, on receiving Sheridan's answer, sent a confidential 0048 42 letter to St. Louis, explaining Sheridan's mission to the South. Of this letter General Sherman simply acknowledged the receipt.

General McDowell's case was still more delicate. No officer likes to be set aside, especially by a secret order, and without a hearing. Belknap threw his burthen on to Sheridan's back, by that clause in his letter which instructed Sheridan to see General McDowell in Louisville, and make known to him, confidentially, the object of his trip, if he saw fit to do so.

Sheridan preferred to keep McDowell in the dark.

The party of ladies and officers started from Chicago, and in five days they were in New Orleans, lounging about Canal Street, reading the proclamations of King Carnival, and asking dreamily when the next steamer sails for Cuba!

Sunday, January 3, is a busy day in St. Louis Street, the next day being marked, on both sides, as the date on which the great conflict is to be carried from the streets into the legislative halls. Monday is to either make or mar the scalawag government in New Orleans.

Out of one hundred and eleven members recently elected to the lower house, fifty-eight are called Conservative, fifty-three Republican; giving the Conservatives not only a legal quorum but a working majority of five members. All these fifty-eight Conservatives are White. If such a house should meet the Kelloggites are lost.

A first battle has been fought in the Returning Board—a body of five assessors, who, according to statute, should be chosen from both parties, so as to represent all the great shades of opinion. Kellogg 0050 44 named this board, and in open violation of the law, selected five Republicans. By law the sittings should be held in public, so that every word should be open and beyond suspicion. By Kellogg's order, all the most serious business has been done in secret. Longstreet retired from the board. An easy-going Conservative was named in place of Longstreet; but on finding his colleagues bent on violating the law this easy-going Conservative protested and retired. His resignation leaves the rump incapable of acting, since by law the board consists of five members. But the rump cares nothing about legal forms. Two thousand Federal soldiers occupy the posts and arsenals—why should they conform to law?

In Louisiana, the votes are counted many times. The local ballots are first sent to the Supervisors of Registration, who count them up and forward them to the Commissioners of Elections. They undergo three scrutinies, so to speak, before they reach the Returning Board. When laid before these party experts the ballotting papers showed these broad results:

Seventy Conservative members.

The Conservatives had a majority of twenty-nine; but Kellogg's illegal Returning Board has continued to sweep away this Conservative majority of twenty-nine. The figures, as manipulated by the rump of four members, are:

Fifty-three Republicans.

One hit is scored by Kellogg. If pretexts can be found for shutting out the five members, four of whom are Conservatives, neither side will have a legal quorum, and the Conservatives will not be able to carry a party vote. In free popular assemblies the candidates usually sit and vote until their cases have been heard; but Kellogg thinks that rules which govern free assemblies everywhere else may be defied in New Orleans. If these five members take their seats on the opening day, the Conservatives will have a legal quorum of fifty-six, and a sure majority of three, a probable majority of five. What is to prevent that sure Conservative majority from indicting and deposing Kellogg, as Governor Warmoth was indicted and deposed?

A House in which neither party counts a 0052 46 quorum is a body open to ‘arrangements.’ Kellogg believes that some of the voters may be bought. Already, there are stories told of his having secured one vote. He only needs two others to make his quorum. He has every reason to bid brisk, for he is bound to either keep a show of legal order or confess his failure and retire. His faction in the country is getting sick of him—a man who brings them no substantial gain, and lays them open to reproach of Cæsarism. To Kellogg's last appeal for help, the President wired, impatiently: ‘It is exceedingly unpalatable to use troops in anticipation of danger; let the State authorities be right, and then proceed with their duties.’ Other critics, also of his own party, show as much impatience as the President. Colonel Morrow, a Republican officer, is travelling through the country, and reporting on affairs to General Sherman. Morrow reports, according to his observation, that the South is loyal to the Union, but opposed to scalawags and carpet-baggers. The Republican majority in Congress, scared by the November elections, have appointed a committee to visit New Orleans and look into the state of things. Three members of this committee, Foster of Ohio, 0053 47 a Republican, Phelps of New Jersey, a Republican, and Potter of New York, a Democrat, are in the city taking evidence, and the two Republicans hardly hide their agreement with the Democrat, that the attempt to govern through the aid of Federal soldiery is the cause of all the disorder seen about the Gulf. With critics so unfriendly to disarm, it is Kellogg's policy to seek some safe and legal ground; but where in Louisiana can intruders like Kellogg find that safe and legal ground?

McEnery is not only stronger in votes but in repute and training. Many of his adherents, such as Penn, his Lieutenant-governor, and Wiltz, his candidate for Speaker, are familiar with public business and the rules of public life. Wealth, culture, eloquence are on their side. In Kellogg's group there is hardly a man of name. Among them may be good Republicans, men who heartily believe there is no way of saving Black equality except by crushing White freedom; but these Republicans have no voice in the clubs and drawing-rooms where White men meet and White women reign. They stand apart, committed by their heresies to a social ban.

In Kellogg's list of fifty-three adherents, twenty-eight are Negroes. Nearly all these Negroes have been slaves—labourers in the rice-ground and the cotton-field. A few can read print, and scratch their names; not many can do either; while only three or four can express their meaning in decent English words. Most of them are so poor and ignorant, so vain and shifty, that Kellogg dares not trust them in the streets and grog-shops. New Orleans, a gay and rattling town, is rich in drinking-bars and gaming hells—places in which men like Pinchback serve apprenticeships. These bars and hells have dangerous fascinations for Mose and Pete, Negroes fresh from the cotton-fields, and eager to enjoy their freedom in a great metropolis. Spies bring in news to the State House, that clever and unscrupulous men are dealing with the Negro senators. Cousins, the Negro member for St. Tammany, is said to have been kidnapped in the street and carried to a distant part. His vote is lost—a set-off to the one false Conservative. Other Negroes are said to be spending their dollars and getting drunk.

Kellogg perceives that he must act.

Sending out for carpenters and innkeepers, he orders them to convert the State House into a fortress and hotel. A vast and handsome edifice, standing at the angle of St. Louis Street and Royal Street, this State House was originally built for an hotel, and called, after the royal founder of Louisiana, the Hotel St. Louis. Rue Royale and Rue St. Louis cut and cross the old French quarter. This side of New Orleans is quaint with balconies, green shutters, high gateways, and inner yards, tricked out with squirts of water and pots of oleander, doing duty for fountains and gardens; a decrepit and deserted corner of the town, from which the tides of life and trade have long since ebbed away. The stench reminds you of Dieppe, the dominoes and billiards of Bayonne. Yet this French quarter used to be a fashionable lounge, where ladies flirted, duellists fought, and senators ruled. The Rue St. Louis was an afternoon drive for belles and beaux, where sparkling Creoles ruined their admirers with a smile; but since that period fashions have changed, and everyone now lodges at the Hotel St. Charles. The once fashionable hotel has sunk into a State capital; one wing of the old hostelry being VOL. II. E 0056 50 turned into an executive office, and a deserted dining-room into a legislative hall.

By Kellogg's orders, planks are nailed across the doors and windows, and secured by iron stanchions. Barricades are thrown across St Louis Street, and the main entrance of the hotel is closed. One door—a back door in Royal Street—is left open. Inside and out the State House is strengthened to resist assault. Forty Negro police, armed with clubs and six-shooters, take position in the hall, while others of their company occupy the stairs and corridors. Rifles are stacked against the wall; and General Campbell, a Southern fire-eater, now turned scalawag, is charged with the defence. Provisions, reckoned for a siege of twenty days, are brought into the yard: canned fruits, dried fish and flesh, whisky, tobacco, and pale ale. A bar is opened, and spittoons are placed. A hundred mattresses are fetched from the barracks and strewn about the halls and passages. Supper is cooked, and boxes of cigars displayed. When everything is ready, Kellogg sends his scouts into the streets to bid Negro members come in, enjoy a smoke and drink, and sleep in Government House, in readiness for the morrow's work.

A hundred senators, loafers, and police, five in every six of whom are coloured persons, spend the Sunday night at Kellogg's bar, drinking whisky straight and hiccuping comic songs.

Kellogg's officers stand ready at any moment of the night to call the roll and organise the house, if accident should raise the members present to a legal quorum of fifty-six. It is a desperate game, but desperate men are seldom wise. If they can snap a vote, and carry their own Speaker, Clerk, and Serjeant, they may find some means of braving a small majority of Conservative voters. William Vigers, clerk of the late Chamber and candidate for the next, is waiting in Kellogg's anteroom, with his official roll. Michael Hahn, a lawyer, whom the Republican party have pricked for Speaker, sits in Kellogg's cabinet. The scalawags distrust Michael Hahn, on account of his legal scruples, but their party is too poor in law to overlook his claim. Who else is fit to stand against Louis A. Wiltz? Some members want to have a Negro in the chair. Some others, heated by spiced liquors, say they ought to pull down Kellogg and set up Pinch. ‘Ole Pinch is some Nig,’ cries one of his tipsy partisans. ‘Guess E 2 0058 52 dat true,’ hiccups his no less tipsy comrade, ‘Ole Pinch some Nig. Bravo Pinch!’

Pinchback is with Kellogg, Hahn, and Campbell, waiting in the cabinet for a chance. If six or seven Conservatives, led by curiosity, should happen to drop in, a legal quorum would be present, and the roll might be called, Hahn voted to the chair, and Vigers appointed Clerk.

Some trimmers of the Warmoth school are noticed slipping in and out—only, as they say, to see the fun and get a drink. Pinch keeps an eye on these stragglers. Once he counts fifty-five members round the bar. He calls a caucus; and debates the matter, but let him try his most, Pinch cannot convert a minority of fifty-five into a legal quorum of fifty-six.

More serious efforts must be made. A hundred of the Black militia are marched into the House, and placed under Campbell's orders. Help is asked from the Federal officers, and in spite of the President's late rebuff this help is given, not only by the army, but the fleet. General Emory sleeps at the Custom House, where his field-guns are supported by a troop of horse. The Commodore lays his ships 0059 53 so as to rake the wharf and sweep Canal Street. A body of Marines is held in readiness to land. General De Trobriand, Emory's second in command, receives orders to proceed at dawn to Royal Street.

Sheridan remains at his hotel. Conservative scouts who visit the Rotunda, to observe his motions, find him as usual, dawdling about, puffing his cigar, and laughing with the members of his staff, as though he had no more concern with what is passing at the State House and the arsenals than any other guest in the hotel. Carnival-day is nigh. King Carnival is announced as coming; and the comic writers—a conspicuous body in New Orleans—are hinting that ‘King Philip’ is that prince in masquerade. Sheridan only laughs and smokes.

At break of day, while the Negro senators, yawning on their fever-moss, are yelling for more cocktails, Royal Street is being filled with soldiery, who pile arms in the roadway, and occupy the side-walks. The scene looms black. Already everyone seems to be awake and in the streets. The paths are thronged with citizens as well as soldiers, and ominous sarcasms pass along the line. Marines are marching from the quays, cavalry are prancing near the Custom House. Two Gatling guns are trained on the Levee, and a brass Napoleon guards the State House. Emory, holding the chief command, remains at the Arsenal, ready to advance on any point; and his lieutenant, De Trobriand, having massed his troops in St. Louis Street, with their fight resting on the closed gates, their left extending towards the river, rides with a part of his brigade into Royal Street. Two thousand Federal troops are under arms.

An orderly rides in now and then, but Sheridan remains at his hotel—still known as Head-quarters of the Missouri, not as Head-quarters of the Gulf.

No one is allowed to enter St. Louis Street except the orderlies, nor is anyone allowed to pass the sentries in Royal Street, except reporters for the press, officers on duty, and members of the House provided with certificates. Potter, of the congressional sub-committee, presents his card, and is refused admission to the State House. McEnery and Wiltz, anxious to have witnesses of the scene, invite Foster and Phelps, as well as Potter, to attend the opening of the assembly. The three members come together, but the sentries push them back. As chairman of the sub-committee, Foster sends for a superior officer, who, after an explanation, passes them on, but firmly declines to pass the gentlemen in their train.

A little before twelve o&clock, the Conservatives march down Royal Street in a body, when the officer on duty asks to see their papers. Four of their number, having no certificates, are pushed aside, until their cases have been heard. The others pass through corridors lined with soldiery, and anterooms reeking with the stench of cheap cigars 0062 56 Squads of police, with bludgeons and revolvers, guard the doorways, and refuse to quit the precincts of the Chamber. General Campbell, they allege, has marched them to their posts, and till that officer orders them away they will remain. Foster and Phelps observe these facts and note these words.

To Wiltz it is now apparent that if stratagem fail, the scalawags are prepared to call in force, and to McEnery it is no less evident that the Federal officers are ready to obey that call. One hasty word, one heedless step, may lead to a collision. ‘Let us be firm and quick,’ the citizens whisper to each other; ‘most of all, let us abide within the law.’

At twelve o'clock Vigers begins to read the roll, when fifty-two Republicans and fifty Conservatives answer to their names.

‘A hundred and two members and a legal quorum are present,’ shouts Vigers through the rising din of Negro voices.

‘I move,’ says Billieu, the Conservative member for La Farouche, ‘that the Hon. Louis A. Wiltz, late Mayor of New Orleans, take the chair.’

Vigers, waiting for some one to propose Michael Hahn, has the impertinence to say he will not put 0063 57 Billieu's motion. Vigers is Clerk—Clerk of the last Chamber—and his function is to read the roll. By courtesy an officer in his situation is allowed to put the first motion for naming a chairman; but on his neglect to do so any member of the Chamber has the right, according to American usage, not only in New Orleans, but in Washington, to put the motion, and take a show of hands. Seeing Vigers hesitate, a member rises, puts the motion made by Billieu, takes a show of hands, and declares the proposal carried. Taking the gavel from Vigers's hands, Louis A. Wiltz moves at once into the chair, and while the Negroes are staring and shouting, he calls the House to order, and announces from the chair that business may now begin.

A member rises to propose that the deferred returns be certified, and that the five members, who are waiting in the streets, be admitted to their seats. Wiltz puts this motion, which is carried by a large majority of votes, many of the Negroes having left the room in order to seek advice from the party wire-pullers sitting in Kellogg's cabinet. When the five gentlemen come in, the White voting strength amounts to fifty-four votes.

Neither party has a legal quorum; and the Republicans, finding they have lost their small majority, begin to slip away from their seats. But the Conservatives, accustomed to such dodges, intercept them before a count-out can be tried. A member proposes the Hon. Louis A. Wiltz as Speaker; a second member proposes the Hon. Michael Hahn. Fifty-eight members are present in the House. Fifty-five cast their votes for Wiltz, who is declared elected, in the midst of frantic cheers.

Judge Houston, who is standing by his chair, administers the usual oath of loyalty to the law and constitution of Louisiana. Wiltz calls the House, and swears the members who remain. Though some have slipped away there is a legal quorum. Hahn, uncertain what to do, remains, and takes the oath from Wiltz. Captain Floyd is voted Serjeant, and Mr. Trezevant nominated Clerk. The House is now composed. Wiltz, as Speaker, invites General De Trobriand to remove the police, who occupy doors and passages, and General De Trobriand obeys his call. The Conservative Chamber, organised under Wiltz, appears to be recognised by the Federal 0065 59 troops. Are the scalawags beaten, and the citizens masters of the city? Not yet.

Sitting in his room, surrounded by officers, civil and military, Kellogg grows excited and alarmed, as news come in from the adjoining chamber. Spite of his drinking-bars and sleeping-mats, the Conservatives have beaten him in his own house and at his own game. How is he to hold his own? With a Conservative Speaker, backed by Conservative Clerk and Serjeant, the house is in his enemy's power. Nothing but Federal bayonets can undo his morning's work.

Are Federal bayonets still at his disposal? Wiltz calls for help, and they obey that call. Will they obey his call? He puts them to the test by sending a written order for General De Trobriand to invade the Legislature, and expel the four members who have been admitted to their seats!

De Trobriand refers this message to General Emory. Whether Emory seeks advice of Sheridan is uncertain; but a long delay takes place; and Wiltz is carrying on his business, when De Trobriand, having received his orders, clanks into the Chamber, and asks to have the ‘intruders’ pointed 0066 60 out. Wiltz answers that he knows of no intruders—all the gentlemen present are members of that House, and the person of every member of an American legislature is inviolate.

‘I am a soldier, only second in command, and must obey my orders,’ urges De Trobriand. ‘General Emory has ordered me to follow the instructions of Governor Kellogg.’

‘I have to state to you in formal words,’ replies the Speaker, ‘that this House, duly elected, has organised itself, by electing me as Speaker, Captain Floyd as Serjeant, and Mr. Trezevant as Clerk. After organization, we have seated five members, whose cases are referred to us by the Returning Board. Will you eject these men?’

‘My duty as an officer leaves me no choice.’

Wiltz calls on every member to rise with him in protest. All the Conservatives rise, put out their hands, and call on heaven to witness their appeal. The Negroes, fearing that a fight is coming on, surge over the seats and benches, crouch behind desks, press into corridors, and shut themselves up in closets.

‘Point them out!’ cries De Trobriand to Vigers.

‘Vigers has no authority in this Chamber,’ interposes Wiltz. ‘For him to meddle in the public business of this assembly is an outrage. Vigers was Clerk of the former House; Trezevant is now our Clerk.’

‘Call the roll!’ roars De Trobriand, on which Vigers gets up, and begins to read.

‘Conservative members will not answer to their names,’ says the Speaker, and no Conservative answers to his name.

General Campbell now comes in, to assist Vigers in searching the benches. Troops are also called. John O'Quin, member for Aroyelles, is pointed out as one of the four Conservatives. ‘Remove him!’ shouts De Trobriand. O'Quin appeals to his Speaker for protection. ‘We submit to nothing but force,’ says this dignitary to the military officer. De Trobriand calls in men in full array, with loaded rifles and bayonets fixed. Two of these soldiers drive O'Quin from his seat. Vaughan, member for Rapides, is the next victim. Facing De Trobriand and his armed followers, Vaughan rises and protests: ‘In the name of my constituents, the people of Louisiana, and as a free-born citizen of the United 0068 62 States, I protest against this outrage.’ Turning to his colleagues, the Conservative gentleman calls on them to witness the extremity of this outrage on a free assembly. ‘You see, they thrust me out with bayonets!’

‘Let it be done!’ sighs Wiltz, and the indignity is done. Eleven more members are in turn expelled. When Floyd endeavours to obey the Speaker and protect a member, he is seized and held in custody by the soldiery. When they have searched the hall, and turned the last Conservative member out by violence, Wiltz stands up, and, with a proud and mournful gesture, calls the Chamber to itself, and says:—

‘As legal Speaker of the House of Representatives of Louisiana, I have protested against this invasion of our hall by soldiers of the United States with drawn bayonets and loaded muskets. We have seen our brethren seized by force, and torn from us in spite of their solemn protests. We have seen a force of soldiers march up the aisles of this hall of representatives, and we have protested against this act. In the name of a once free people, in the name of the once free State of Louisiana, in 0069 63 the name of our American Union, I enter our solemn protest against all these abuses of the military power. My chair of Speaker is surrounded by troops. Our officers are prisoners in their hands. Members of the Legislature, I solemnly believe that Louisiana has ceased to be a sovereign State; that she has no longer a republican government; and I call on every representative of our country to retire with me before this show of arms!’

So saying, Wiltz adjourns the House, and followed by the whole body of Conservatives, quits the hall, marches round to St. Louis Street, with half the city at his back, the citizens cheering him with lusty English shouts. At number 71 in St. Louis Street they find new quarters, and after a formal act of possession, they adjourn the House.

Kellogg is little pleased with his victory. In place of mending matters by his violence he has made them worse. The four Conservative members, though expelled by force, are not expelled by vote; nor can they now be expelled, even in appearance, for the Negro rump falls short of a legal quorum—fifty-six votes. Wiltz has been sworn as Speaker, 0070 64 and as Speaker has adjourned the sittings to St. Louis Street. Looking back on events, Kellogg sees that he is beaten on every side, and weaker in strength than ever. Neither he nor his rival has a legal quorum, and without a legal quorum government is at an end.

The situation seems to call for a Dictator, and at nine o'clock in the evening General Sheridan assumes the chief direction of affairs.

The camp is pitched, the sword is king!

If President Grant will leave Sheridan as free to act in Louisiana, as he left him free to act in the Blue Ridge valleys and the Peigan hunting-grounds, my dashing neighbour sees his way to square accounts with such opponents as Wiltz and Ogden, McEnery and Penn. ‘I know these people well,’ he says, ‘having lived with them in other times, when they were wilder than they are to-day. I have no doubt about my course. The White League must be trodden down. They are a bad lot: mere banditti, bent on mischief. In New Orleans you see the best of them. The men are pleasant fellows; even the White Leaguers here are decent; but in the country districts—Bossier and St. Bernard, Natchitoches and Red River—they are hell.’ VOL. II. F

At ten o'clock in the evening Sheridan wires these words to Belknap, Secretary of War:

New Orleans: Jan. 4, 1875.

‘It is with deep regret that I have to announce to you the existence in this State of a spirit of defiance to all lawful authority, and an insecurity of life which is hardly realized by the General Government or the country at large. The lives of citizens have become so jeopardized, that, unless something is done to give protection to the people, all security usually afforded by law will be over-ridden. Defiance to the laws and the murder of individuals seem to be looked upon by the community here from a standpoint which gives impunity to all who choose to indulge in either, and the civil government appears powerless to punish or even arrest. I have to-night assumed control over the Department of the Gulf. ‘ P. H. Sheridan. ’

This Department of the Gulf, comprising three great States—Louisiana, Missisippi, and Arkansas, with all the forts and stations in the Gulf of Mexico, except the forts in Mobile Bay—are swept by one stroke of the pen from McDowell's Division of the South.

Next morning brings Sheridan an assurance from the Adjutant-General, Townsend, that his conduct is ‘approved:’ to which assurance he replies by sending up his scheme for dealing with the Southern States; a document likely to be famous in the story of American Liberty. No Spanish viceroy in Sicily, no Muscovite governor of Poland, ever asked imperial masters for such license as Sheridan asks of President Grant. His scheme for governing the South rests on a proposal to have the chief citizens of these rich and prosperous States denounced by Government as outlaws and banditti, and delivered over to his subalterns for punishment!

This startling telegram to Belknap runs:

New Orleans: Jan. 5, 1875.

‘I think that the terrorism now existing in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas could be entirely removed, and confidence and fair-dealing established, by the arrest and trial of the ring-leaders of the armed White Leagues. If Congress would pass a bill declaring them banditti they could be tried by a military commission. The ring-leaders of this banditti, who murdered men here on the 14th of September last, and also more recently F 2 0074 68 at Vicksburg, in Mississippi, should, in justice to law and order, and the peace and prosperity of this Southern part of the country, be punished. It is possible that if the President would issue a proclamation declaring them banditti, no further action need be taken, except that which would devolve upon me.’ ‘ P. H. Sheridan. ’

If the President will only declare them banditti! Yes; in that case you can stand aside and leave the rest to me!

Is this, men ask, the language of an American soldier, living in the nineteenth century, writing of his fellow-citizens? The tone is that of a Castilian general in Oran, of a Turkish pasha in Belgrade.

The adjutants and secretaries near the President seem delighted by such vigour, and in forwarding the news to public departments they begin to use scant courtesy and suspicious terms. A copy of Townsend's first letter to Sheridan, now twelve days old, is sent to General McDowell, from which this eminent soldier learns that his command in the Gulf has been swept away! In telling General Sherman that 0075 69 Sheridan has taken the command in New Orleans, Townsend describes this officer, as having ‘annexed’ the Gulf, and adds by way of clincher, ‘the measure is deemed necessary, and is approved.’

General Sherman answers dryly:

St. Louis: Jan. 6, 1875.

‘Your telegram of the fifth instant, stating that General Sheridan has annexed Department of Gulf to his command, has been received.’

Meanwhile the President is called to study a remonstrance and appeal from Speaker Wiltz, who first telegraphs to him a brief account of the invasion:

‘I have the honour to inform you that the House of Representatives of this State was organized to day by the election of myself as Speaker, fifty-eight members, two more than a quorum, voting, with a full House present. More than two hours after the organization, I was informed by the officer in command of the United States troops in this city that he had been requested by Governor Kellogg to remove certain members of the House from the State House, and that, under his orders, he was obliged to comply with the request. I protested 0076 70 against any interference of the United States with the organization or proceedings of the House; but notwithstanding this protest, the officer in command marched a company of soldiers upon the floor of the House, and by force removed thirteen members, who had been legally and constitutionally seated as such, and who, at time of such forcible removal, were participating in the proceedings of the House. In addition to this the military declared their purpose to further interfere with force in the business and organization of this assembly, upon which some fifty-two members and the Speaker withdrew, declining to participate any longer in the business of the House under the dictation of the military.’

Such being the facts, Louis A. Wiltz, as Speaker, respectfully appeals to the President to be informed ‘by what authority and under what law the United States army interrupted and broke up a sessions of the House of Representatives of the State of Louisiana?’ Should it appear, Wiltz goes on to say, that this invasion has been made without law and authority, he urgently requests that the Federal troops may be ordered to restore the House to its 0077 71 old position, and he demands, no less urgently, that the Federal officers shall be instructed by the War Department that it is no part of their duty to interfere with the internal workings of a general assembly.

What is President Grant to say?

Cæsar—as General Grant is now called, not only in the South, but in the North and West—is not so confident as Belknap and his adjutants that things are all going well in New Orleans. America has many voices, and her voices reach him in the secret places of his Cabinet. They strike him like the roar of coming storms.

Accounts of what was done in Royal Street on Sunday night and Monday morning fill the daily prints of every town from Galveston to Portland, from Savannah to San Francisco. Most of these accounts are printed with satirical and indignant leaders. Many of the writers treat the incident as a pastime. Is it not Carnival—a time for quips and cranks? This Negro orgy in the State House is a joke; that drinking-bar, those hot suppers, that midnight caucus, and those morning cocktails, are conceits of comic writers. But the press, in 0078 72 general, take the thing in serious mood, and to their credit the ablest Republican journals are the sternest critics of De Trobriand's acts. Are we in France? they ask. Is Grant a Bonaparte? Are Emory and De Trobriand the hireling soldiers of a bastard empire? Are we already governed by a Cæsar, and is the White House an American Tuileries?

Each word pronounced of late by President Grant is scanned, and in their present temper people are disposed to find Cæsarism lurking under phrases which at any other time would seem no worse than awkward forms of speech. Grant is seldom happy in his words. Knowing his weakness, he is silent in strange company; but the ruler of a great country cannot choose but speak and write; and with all his great qualities he is often unfortunate in his use of tongue and pen. His recent Message to Congress on the Centennial Exposition is a case in point. In this State paper he gives a new reading to that famous passage in the Declaration of Independence which describes the primary rights of man as ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ By way of better reading, President Grant describes 0079 73 Americans as a people engaged in ‘the pursuit of fame, fortune, and honours;’ not of honour, but of ‘honours.’ It is nothing, probably, but a clumsy phrase; yet critics roused to anger cry out against it, as the very accent of a Cæsar. Fame, fortune, and honours! Are these things the ideals to be held before American youth? Snakes hide in grass—Cæsars may lurk in an unguarded phrase.

A whisper of the President's doubts and fears arrives at head-quarters, in the St. Charles Hotel. The adjutants want a little more ‘vigour;’ and Sheridan, who never stops to weigh his words telegraphs to his friend the Secretary of War:

New Orleans: Jan. 5, 1875.

‘Please say to the President that he need give himself no uneasiness about the condition of affairs here. I will preserve the peace, which it is not hard to do, with the naval and military forces in and about the city; and if Congress will declare the White Leagues and other similar organizations, White or Black, banditti, I will relieve it from the necessity of any special legislation for the preservation of peace and equality of rights in the States of 0080 74 Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas; and the Executive from much of the trouble heretofore had in this section of the country.

‘ P. H. Sheridan. ’

Ave Cæsar! With the fleet and army now at New Orleans, no White citizen dares to stir!

The White Leaguers to be denounced by Cæsar as bandits are the White people—planters, advocates, physicians, bankers, clergymen, owners of the land, the buildings, and the produce—masters of all the liberal and domestic arts. A majority are of English origin. What Sheridan asks is nothing less than that the English race in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas shall be put beyond the pale of law, and handed over to the military power. Give him free range, and the Executive shall have no further trouble in these parts. Here is no Carnival prince, as people say, in sport. Men recollect the Peigan business. Since Sheridan paid his visit to their hunting-grounds, the Executive has never been troubled by reports from Peigan camps.

The evening papers print the text of Sheridan's telegram. Banditti! Banditti! Still banditti? Yet 0081 75 a change of tone is evident in this despatch. Yesterday the word was applied to White leaguers only; now it is applied to similar organizations, whether White or Black. Sheridan has learned, not merely that a Black League exists, but that a Black leaguer may be brother in offence to a White leaguer. No longer of opinion that a proclamation by President Grant is sufficient, Sheridan now asks the ministers to get an Act of Congress passed, giving him authority to hang such men as General Ogden and Captain Angel, Governor McEnery and Lieutenant-governor Penn.

Banditti! How the word appears to leap on every lip and blister every tongue! Banditti? We banditti? We, the proudest gentlemen and noblest gentlewomen in America, branded as outlaws by a subaltern of General Grant!

‘You see a female bandit,’ sneers a young and lively girl, on whose father we make an afternoon call. ‘A dozen bandits,’ laughs a famous soldier, introducing me to an evening circle at the Boston Club. These citizens fret and fume, not only against the phrase, but what the phrase implies. 0082 76 A bandit is an outlaw, and an outlaw subject to the military arm.

A fire-spirit seems to have breathed all day on street and quay. At midnight, Sheridan telegraphs to Belknap, using a secret cipher for his message:

New Orleans: Jan. 5, 1875.

‘There is some excitement in the rotunda of the St. Charles Hotel to-night on the publication by the newspapers of my despatch to you calling the secret armed organization banditti. Give yourself no uneasiness. I see my way clear enough, if you will only have confidence. ‘ P. H. Sheridan. ’

Belknap has confidence; so have the adjutants. Cæsar is not so sure. Cæsar is never half so sure of things as his lieutenants. Will the army support a purely military policy? American soldiers are American citizens. Though brave and loyal, they are free men, caring little for glory, and much for liberty. On whom besides Sheridan can the President rely? Sherman stands aloof. McDowell is offended, not only by the loss of his Department on the Gulf, but by the secret orders under which 0083 77 his province has been seized. Yet Belknap, more Cæsarian than Cæsar, wires to New Orleans:

War Department: Jan. 6, 1875.

‘Your telegrams all received. The President and all of us have full confidence, and thoroughly appreciate your course. ‘ W. W. Belknap. ’

All of us? Who are these ‘all of us?’ The telegram is dated ‘War Department.’ ‘All of us’ may only mean the adjutants and secretaries; but as Belknap is a Cabinet minister, ‘all of us’ may mean the whole Executive. In this sense it is read by General Sheridan's staff. If they are right this telegram is the most serious document issued since the war. If Hamilton Fish and Benjamin H. Bristow have endorsed the military action in this city, we may look for storms.

At noon a second telegram comes, in explanation of the first, which seems to prove that Fish and Bristow are as much committed to Cæsarism as either Williams or Belknap; yet Sheridan, after reading and re-reading the document, feels uncertain of the sense, and puzzled as to what he is empowered to do. The message runs:

War Department: Jan. 6, 1876.

‘You seem to fear that we have been misled by biassed or partial statements of your acts. Be assured that the President and Cabinet confide in your wisdom, and rest in the belief that all acts of yours have been and will be judicious. This I intended to say in my brief telegram.’

How is Sheridan to take these words? The Cabinet is now associated with the President, but there is no more talk of approval. They confide in his wisdom! Yesterday their cry was for energy. Energy gave them confidence. Now they rest in the belief that his acts have been and will be judicious! Was Philip Sheridan sent to New Orleans in mid-winter, to be judicious? Is the word a hint? No order now to be quick and stern—to lay on and spare not! Where is the reply to his request that ministers will get a short bill pushed through Congress branding the White citizens as outlaws, and turning them over to his subalterns? Not a word. Taking then this second message as a call to order, he answers at night:

New Orleans: Jan. 6, 1875.

‘The city is very quiet to-day. Some of the 0085 79 banditti made idle threats last night that they would assassinate me. . . . I am not afraid.

‘ P. H. Sheridan. ’

Ten minutes after this message is posted in New Orleans, every lip is rippling into merriment and mockery. ‘Afraid! Who's afraid? I'm not afraid. Are you afraid? Why, Sheridan's not afraid! Ha, ha! Even Phil. Sheridan's not afraid!’

Cæsarism has strong points; but the temper to put up with scorn and sarcasm is not one of those strong points.

An aide-de-camp brings us an invitation from General McEnery to visit the Conservative head quarters in Canal Street; and in company of my old friend Consul De Fonblanque we start from our hotel, now known as ‘Head-quarters of the Gulf.’

General McEnery occupies a suite of rooms in Canal Street, looking on the effigies of Henry Clay, in which apartments he holds a modest court. ‘You're not afraid to enter,’ asks a senator, meeting us on the stairs, ‘although we are banditti?’ No, we are not afraid. Some wag has gummed a caricature of Sheridan to the wall. The general is represented as a dog snapping at a Louisiana cavalry officer. ‘Poor stuff,’ says the Senator, passing in; ‘poor stuff—but boys will have their fun. We have the Southern genius, and our boys delight in mockeries and burlesques.’

On entering the cabinet, we find Governor McEnery, Lieutenant-governor Penn, and several Senators, who decline to sit with Kellogg's group, under the presidency of Cæsar C. Antoine. A more courteous and decorous body of gentlemen than these Conservative Senators could not be seen in common-room at Oxford or committee-room in Westminster. Finer heads and gentler manners would be hard to find in any country, and you feel at once that, whether these gentlemen are right or wrong in their special claims, they will not be easily beaten from the ground they once take up.

General McEnery is a small man, something like President Grant in face, with meditative eyes, and dreamy features, half-concealed by thick whiskers and heavy moustache. General Penn is younger than his chief; a typical Southern man, with shaven chin, black eyes and eyebrows, and a penthouse of moustache; in accent and appearance the embodiment of fighting power. General Ogden has a round head, set on a sturdy frame; a prompt and ready man, not troubled, one might VOL. II. G 0088 82 say, by doubts and scruples as to where his duty lies. All three are gentlemen of property. ‘We claim,’ says General McEnery, ‘to represent ninety-five per cent. of all the property in this city, ninety-eight per cent. of all the property in this State.’ From what we learn in other quarters we have reason to believe this statement true. ‘And yet,’ adds Penn, laughing, ‘we, who own nearly all the property in the State, are bandits!’

Bandits are not usually men of property; are not so in Spain, in Greece, in Asia Minor, and in California. If Vasquez were able to read the papers, he would be pleased to find, on the authority of General Sheridan, that a good many of his brethren sit on the bench and practise at the bar.

‘No one contests your claim to represent the wealth of New Orleans; the question is about inhabitants, not property; and you claim, we understand, to have a true majority of votes in favour of the Conservative candidates?’

‘We have,’ the Governor answers, ‘a majority of votes; not large, yet large enough for us, if we are left alone, to carry on the government, and restore a reign of peace.’

‘Have not the coloured people a majority of votes in the whole State—ninety thousand against seventy-six thousand?’

‘On the present lists, they have,’ replies the Governor; ‘but the lists are drawn in fraud. How can the coloured people have more votes than we have? In numbers we are nearly equal—three hundred and sixty-two thousand Whites to three hundred and sixty-four thousand Blacks. These figures are not ours. The census was taken under Warmoth's government. We know that some of the returns are false—and false in favour of the coloured men. But take the figures as they stand. How can a difference of two thousand in the population, yield a difference of fourteen thousand in the voting lists?’

‘That is not easy to make out.’

‘Except by fraud; by manifest and unblushing fraud. The fact is, Negroes are registered in different names and different parishes. Dead Negroes are kept on the lists; Negroes under age are put on the lists. Women are inscribed as men. Wherever you have Black officials, supported by a Black police, you have abuse.’ G 2

‘Is it true, General McEnery, that Conservatives, as a rule, object to giving Negroes political power?’

‘Among Conservatives that is an open question. Many of us think it a great mistake to have given the coloured people votes; but the United States, which gave them liberty, thought fit to give them votes. We bow to facts. You meet men who would take away the Negro's personal freedom as well as his political power; but the majority of citizens has ceased to dream of going back to the old state of things. A Conservative would like to see the Right of Voting settled and defined by law. In all free countries certain classes, such as paupers, idiots, and prisoners, are excluded from the voting lists. In some free countries, those who cannot read the lists and sign their names, are not allowed to vote. With an understanding of this nature, the Conservatives of Louisiana would admit the Negro to political rights.’

‘You have no fear of educated votes?’

‘No fear at all; for educated men are never led by scalawags. Even now, the education tells. If all the Negroes were to pull together—ninety thousand against seventy-six thousand—they might 0091 85 elect Pinch for governor and have a strong majority in the Chambers. But we have educated negroes in Louisiana like Tom Chester, and educated Africans are no more likely to agree in politics than educated Anglo-Saxons. When a Negro learns to spell he sets up as a leader. He follows no one; least of all a man of his own colour. If a Negro owns a cabin and a patch of garden, he becomes Conservative and votes against the scalawags. A Conservative Negro Club exists in every parish in Louisiana; and in spite of Kellogg's promise that every Negro voting the Grant ticket shall have forty acres and a good mule, thousands of Negroes voted with us in the late elections. Tens of thousands will vote for us when the Federal troops retire.’

From General McEnery's cabinet we go to the Conservative Lower House, in St. Louis Street, where we are cordially received by Speaker Wiltz. A man of spare figure, closely-cropped hair, and pale, wan face, the Hon. Louis A. Wiltz has an easy and yet resolute manner. As we enter the House Captain Kidd is speaking; Kidd, a lawyer and a soldier, and of equal standing in the camp and at the bar. He 0092 86 proposes that the whole body of Conservative legislators shall march to the State House, lower down the street, and demand admission to their seats. Sixty-six gentlemen are present: the fifty-three members who are certified, and thirteen others who are wrongfully unseated by the Kellogg board.

‘You profess to be a lawful House?’ we ask the Speaker.

‘No,’ says Wiltz, in a decided tone; ‘We claim to be a legal quorum; but we call ourselves a caucus, not an assembly; for we mean to keep within the law, even in such things as words.’

While Kidd is urging the Conservatives to take a more decided course, a telegram is sent to Washington, asking Senator Thurman for advice. Thurman is a leading Democrat, sitting in Congress for Ohio, and is much consulted by Conservatives in the South. ‘Be patient,’ is the wise reply.

‘Our policy is patience,’ says the Speaker; ‘we must wait. Time fights for us. The dodge of forty acres and a good mule cannot be tried again. All tricks wear out. We can afford to wait. Of course, we suffer by delay; but we should suffer more by violence. The gentlemen sitting on these benches 0093 87 either own, or represent men who own, nearly all the stores and ships, the magazines, hotels, and banks, of New Orleans. Can you fancy they have any interest in disorder? If a pane of glass is broken, we have to bear the loss. The scalawags have nothing to risk except their skins, and they are careful not to risk their skins. What can it matter to Kellogg and Packard, Antoine and Pinchback, whether property declines or not? We stake our all on peace and order; but our brethren in the northern cities have yet to understand this fact. Events are teaching them, and teaching them very fast.’

In crossing the French quarter we meet Senator Trimble, a Republican of local name.

‘A Southerner and a Republican?’

‘Well,’ answers Senator Trimble, ‘like many of my old party, I am becoming rather cautious in my theories. Events are shaking my belief in platforms. An American has surely something higher to preserve than blind fidelity to a party flag.’

Senator Trimble is impressed as Colonel Morrow and the Congressional Sub-Committee are impressed. Morrow has now reported to General Emory, who 0094 88 has sent his statement on to General Sherman, that ‘after wide and close enquiry in the counties lying on Red River he is convinced that, so far as relates to the United States, there is not the slightest disposition to oppose the general government, but that the opposition to the State government by Kellogg and Antoine cannot be put down. . . . The present State government cannot maintain itself in power a single hour without the protection of Federal troops. . . . The State government has not the confidence and respect of any portion of the community.’ General Sherman has sent these warnings on to Washington, marked by him with the significant words—‘for the personal perusal of General Grant.’

What say the Sub-Committee? Foster of Ohio, and Phelps of New Jersey, agree with Potter of New York, in a Report to Congress, setting forth these five facts:

First: that the late election was mainly a fair one;

A Report, embodying these five facts, has been presented to Congress, and has roused the country like a crash of war. The full Committee is coming down, but no one thinks the four Members who have not been here will contradict the three who have. From east to west, the country seems to be aflame.

Quick, sensitive, meridional as are the men of New Orleans, they are not prepared for such an outbreak of White sentiment as fires the North. Boston is not less eager in sympathy than New York. Pittsburg joins hands with Cleveland; Cincinnatti calls aloud to San Francisco. Never, since President Lincoln's death, has so much passion found a vent in speech. Statesmen who weigh their words are coming to the front, arraigning President Grant of something like high treason to the commonwealth. Adams in Boston, Bryant in New York, are giving the highest intellectual sanction to the general fury. 0096 90 Evarts, the ablest lawyer in America, is denouncing Sheridan and De Trobriand, in terms not often applied by lawyers to the lowest tools of a despotic power. The curses showered on Kellogg have a bitterness unequalled since the war.

Should President Grant back down, repudiating Sheridan and letting Kellogg go, where, in such a reign of anarchy, will the legal government of the State reside?

‘ Where will the government reside?’ repeats General Warmoth, to whom we put this question. ‘Here! The only legal government in Louisiana resides in me. I am the governor. No man but myself has been recognised by Congress as Governor of Louisiana. Kellogg and McEnery are alike repudiated. Kellogg is Governor by grace of General Sheridan. If the Federal army left, McEnery would be Governor by force of the White League. When right and order gain the mastery, there will be no legal Governor in New Orleans except myself.’

Henry C. Warmoth holds a position in this city, not only on the legal ground of his election being undisputed, but because he represents that large mass of citizens who care for neither Blacks nor Whites so long as they can mind their shops and carry on their trade. These persons want to live in 0098 92 peace, to earn their meat and drink, to keep a roof above their heads. They take no thought for theories of race. All men who want to buy are brethren in their eyes. A Negro's dollar is as welcome in exchange for shoes or whisky as a White man's dollar. What have trading folks to do with wrangles over equal rights? Enough for them to pay their rents and taxes, leaving such theories to lawyers and senators.

Among the Negroes, too, Warmoth has a body of supporters. He has never lied to them. He got their votes without a promise of ‘forty acres and a good mule.’ His promises are not so large as Kellogg's, but he tries to carry out the pledges he makes. To his ingenuity the Negroes owe the metropolitan police, a force which some of them regard as their only guarantee of freedom. As Kellogg's star declines, the Negroes turn towards Warmoth as a man of moderate counsels who might keep them from collision with the Whites.

A man of parts and of the world, a soldier, with a pallid brow and deep-set student eyes, Warmoth has the grand style of domestic drama, and Southern ladies are said to think him very handsome. He 0099 93 affects a courtly mode. Unlike the mass of carpet-baggers, who are not received in society, Warmoth aspires to social consideration, and is sometimes honoured by a card from leaders of fashion in New Orleans. This difference is at once his merit and his curse. Society has brought him into friendly intercourse with men as stern in their Conservatism as McEnery and Penn. Wiltz has received him; Ogden has visited him in jail. By his charm of manner and his moderation of view, Warmoth has half-reconciled the upper classes to his presence in their town.

But his successes on a ground forbidden to his comrades, fill the scalawag ranks with fury. When Warmoth came to New Orleans, with the reputation of a brave soldier and a cunning politician, he was elected by the loyal citizens President of the Grand Army of the Republic in Louisiana. The Grand Army of the Republic is a patriotic association of men who fought in the war; troops now disbanded and dispersed, yet held together by the brotherhood of arms and by the memory of service in a great cause. A Grand Army of the Republic exists in every State, enjoying the patronage of 0100 94 Government, and enjoying this patronage most of all in the Southern States. The President of such a body holds a post of great advantage, and General Warmoth turned his openings to such good account that he carried the Governorship of Louisiana under the Reconstruction Act.

Of Warmoth's administration every man speaks according to his party leanings: his friends affirming that he kept order and encouraged trade, while his opponents call him a rogue, a thief, a coward, and a murderer. Conservatives who have no cause to love him, allow that in a post of great risk and heavy trials he proved himself to be a fairly able and a moderately honest man.

Fair enemies do him so much justice; not so his former friends, either Republican fanatics or Conservative trimmers. The Republican fanatics accuse him of being the ruin of their party in New Orleans. Warmoth, they say, disgraced the Republican flag by his corruption. Warmoth, in connexion with Senator Jewell, started the Fusion, by which their party was divided into two camps. Warmoth, they allege, paralyses the Grand Army of the Republic. Where is the Grand Army? Why 0101 95 are the companies not up, raising their voices in this critical hour? Why are the Union soldiers standing back, leaving Sheridan to fight alone? Warmoth is the culprit. Warmoth is bowing to the Conservatives; seeking an entrance into club and society; kissing gloves to the ladies of Pennsylvania-avenue.

Yet these Republican fanatics are tame compared with the Conservative trimmers, and especially with that Senator Jewell who was once his foremost advocate. Jewell is manager of a paper called ‘The Commercial Bulletin;’ a lively sheet, in which he carries on a war of insult and reproach against his former chief; not on the ground of high principle, but on a minor question springing out of the great conflict of race.

Shall Negroes be allowed to ride in street cars? Ladies answer, No. Car owners, unable to offend their customers, answer, No. It is a bitter feud, dividing families, like the acts of Kellogg and the messages of Grant.

A group of other questions stand, as one may say, around that of the street cars. Shall Negroes be allowed to lodge in good hotels? Shall Negroes be allowed to dine at common tables? Shall 0102 96 Negroes be allowed to sit in any part of church? The carpet-baggers, who depend on Negro suffrages, assert that all these privileges spring from the admitted theory of ‘equal rights.’ If White and Black are equal before a judge, they are equal before a car-conductor and a tavern clerk. So say the scalawags. The other side reply that the theory of equal rights implies no privilege of the kind. If two persons are equal, they are free to trade together if they like, and not to trade together unless they like. Equality consists in the right to agree or disagree—to part or join, as each may please. A free man cannot be compelled to buy and sell with another. He who keeps a store is not bound to sell his goods to anyone. He may select his customers. If you run a street car, you have a right to reject the applicant for a seat. In practice you employ that right in the rejection of whole classes. You refuse to carry idiots, beggars, drunkards, rowdies, shameless women. You exclude all persons dressed in rags or grimed with dirt, and you expel all persons using foul expressions. You have to think of decent people and the moral order they require. Opinion rules; and, be you Republican or 0103 97 Conservative, you must conduct your cars in accordance with public sentiment.

This question of whether the Negro shall or shall not be allowed to ride in street cars, excites as much debate as the telegrams of Sheridan. Everyone is suggesting remedies and discussing compromises. General Warmoth suggests, that cars might be started in Canal Street, to be marked with a star, in which Negroes may ride, with such White people as have no objection to their company. He carries this suggestion to his old friend Jewell for insertion in the ‘Bulletin.’ Jewell declines to give it space. ‘Then I must try elsewhere,’ says Warmoth. Jewell is of opinion that the scheme should not be broached. ‘I think it may and should,’ says Warmoth. ‘If you print that document,’ cries Jewell, ‘I will ruin you for ever.’

Warmoth prints his suggestion, and the two Conservative leaders, McEnery and Wiltz, adopt it as a reasonable compromise of the dispute. Next morning Jewell comes out with a leader in which Warmoth is described as ‘Lazarus, raised from the dead by Satan;’ as a ‘bold bad man, the originator and promoter of every abuse,’ as a ‘congener’ of the VOL. II. H 0104 98 ‘rattle-snake,’ and as a man of ‘infamous record.’ Warmoth defends himself by accusing Jewell of ‘lying—unmitigated lying.’ He adds that Jewell's malice towards him springs from his refusal to give the Senator a government printing job!

Jewell now sends an agent to Warmoth's residence in St. Louis Street to ascertain if he will fight. Warmoth says he cannot meet a fellow like Jewell, on hearing which reply, the Senator sends him a challenge. Warmoth, to Jewell's great surprise, accepts.

What follows is a mystery as well as a tragedy. Daniel C. Byerley, a Lieutenant in the Confederate army, and a partner with Jewell in the printing business, takes the quarrel with Warmoth on himself. Byerley, a strong man, but maimed of his left arm, follows Warmoth down Canal Street, where he assaults him with a stout cane, striking him two sudden blows on the head. Reeling from these blows, Warmoth retreats some steps. Byerley rushes on him. They close, and Byerley throws his enemy to the ground. Twisting and fighting, the two men roll to the kerbstone, Byerley beating Warmoth on the head, and Warmoth jobbing his knife into Byerley's side. 0105 99 A crowd runs on them, and lifts them up. Byerley shakes his cane, but leaves the ground, leaning on the arms of two friends, who bear him to a hospital close by. Warmoth gives up his knife, and yields himself prisoner to a captain of police.

Byerley lingers a few hours, and then expires. Having met his death in fighting an intruder, Byerley is the hero of New Orleans, and a long train of carriages follows him to his grave. Governor McEnery is one of his pall-bearers, and more than two thousand citizens march behind his hearse. No one pretends to think the worse of General Warmoth for having killed a man. His prison is a court, his visiting-book filled with famous names. McEnery calls on him in jail. Ogden and Penn are no less courteous, and Speaker Wiltz pays him a formal visit. Five hundred citizens go to see him in a single day. Never has Warmoth found himself so popular. Nobody holds him guilty of the blood so lately shed, and when the charge is brought before a judge, he is at once discharged.

‘I thought Byerley was fully armed,’ says Warmoth, in explanation of his use of the knife, ‘and I only struck at him in self-defence. He came H 2 0106 100 on me by stealth, and struck me twice before I saw him. The cane he carried was a sword-stick; a weapon as deadly as a sword; and far more deadly than a knife.’

This murder in the street has heated and perplexed the situation; for, whatever men may think of street fighting, a man with blood on his hands is not an officer whom any reasonable man would like to seat in the chair of State. In a more settled country, such an act would drive a man from public life; and for the moment, even in Louisiana, Warmouth has become impossible. How long will the ban endure?

‘You seem to think General Warmoth dead,’ says one of his admirers. ‘John Barleycorn is dead. Bury him in a hole, and cover him with earth. In five weeks he is up again. You'll live to see Warmoth President of the United States.’

William P. Kellogg's private secretary comes to the hotel to say that if we will pay a visit to the Legislature and Executive, Speaker Hahn and Governor Kellogg will be happy to receive us at the State House. In company of our consul, as before, we start for Royal Street, the entrance in St. Louis Street being still closed.

After some parley with Negro soldiers and police we pass the door. A rush of foul air, the reek of bad cigars and worse liquors, drives us back. Phew! The hall is nearly dark, and gas is burning in one corner. Windows and doors are planked, and the floors strewn with corks, broken glass, stale crusts, and rotting bones. A crowd of loafers and officials throngs the hall, most of them Negroes, all of them smoking, jabbering, pushing. Here, a cotton picker wants to go upstairs and see 'dat legislating show. 0108 102 There, a carpet-bagger explains to a coloured voter why the Negro has not yet received his ‘forty acres and a good mule.’ A fellow bawls on the stairs, as we push past him: ‘Dat all right, anyhow; the culled men now hab dere rights!’

After much ado with the Black police, who fancy that being White men we must be spies and traitors, we reach the Second Chamber, a long, uncarpeted, and filthy room. Spittoons are laid about, and some of the Negro senators smoke and loll in their easy seats. The air is foul. Each senator has a chair, on which his name is painted in big letters; but he seems incapable of sitting still. He loafs about; rises to order; chatters with a crony. Five or six senators are speaking, all at the same time, each senator accusing the other of lying and deception. ‘Order da!’ ‘Missa Speeka!’ ‘Down, you nigga, down!’ The uproar beats the tumult of a country fair.

Michael Hahn, the gentleman who presides, seats us near his chair and offers us some explanations of the scene.

‘You wonder we permit smoking in the Chambers? Well, gentlemen, my answer is, we 0109 103 don't. There is a rule against it; but how am I to put this rule in force? We have no rule against chewing; yet chewing is a nastier vice than smoking. Rules are useless. Negroes will chew and smoke.’

‘Why not let them smoke in other rooms?’

‘You think that easy. Sir, it is so far from being easy that it is actually impossible.’

‘How so?’

‘Because we cannot spare a man from his seat. You see we have only just a quorum present. If a single member quits his place we are unable to proceed.’

A Negro, named Demas, member for St. John's parish, rises, and in a voice to silence Spurgeon or Punshon, rates the House. There is a certain eloquence in his words. ‘Yes,’ says Speaker Hahn, ‘there is something in these fellows. Nearly all of them were born slaves. A dozen years ago hardly one of them dared to open his mouth in presence of a White man.’

The Hon. Michael Hahn affects not to know how many members of his parliament are Black, how many White. ‘We take no note of colour,’ he remarks; but while Massa Demas is thumping and 0110 104 roaring, we count the heads, and find them twenty-four Whites to twenty-eight Blacks. Twenty-four and twenty-eight make fifty-two; four members short of a legal quorum! Yet the Speaker has just assured us that the House we see is a full House. Counting again we find our numbers true.

‘Do you consider this assembly a lawful House, Mr. Speaker?’

‘Yes, a lawful House, the Second Chamber of Louisiana.’

‘Only fifty-two Members are present.’

‘Fifty-six answer to their names.’

O, Michael Hahn!

On passing to the Upper House, we find a tall, pale Negro, with a small head and dissipated face, presiding over fifteen Black and thirteen White senators, who are debating whether they shall or shall not read the Senators in Washington a lesson by sending Pinchback up again as State Senator for Louisiana? This pale and dissipated Negro is the Hon. Cæsar C. Antoine, Lieutenant-governor of the State, sitting in the chair by virtue of his office. No Conservative senators are present.

Cæsar C. Antoine is an African of pure blood, 0111 105 though he is not so dark as many of his brethren on the Niger and the Senegal. Small in stature and weak in frame, his only strength appears to lie in a feminine sort of shrewdness. Antoine was a porter in the Custom House. Before he took to politics he could hardly get his pay, yet, having a place under Government, he found the way open to public life. His rise was rapid. From the bench of a porter he passed to the chair of Lieutenant-governor. He was a servant of clerks; he is the master of senators. Since the Caliph made his porter a pasha, no man of his calling has been raised to so high a place. It was a golden chance. Apart from accidents, Antoine is not a man who could have risen.

This Negro Cæsar in New Orleans allows me to see that he joins hands with the White Cæsar in Washington. Chewing his quid, and squirting his tobacco-juice into a huge spittoon, he informs us that he ‘never seed sich a thing as dat affair with Wiltz;’ also that the ‘culled people in Louisiana don't mind General Grant having a third term, if he like, or even a sixth term if he like.’ Cæsar in New Orleans sails in the same boat with Cæsar in the White House.

The Negro senators agree that the White fellows in Washington are impertinent in rejecting Pinch. He is the martyr of his skin. Those White fellows talk about his character. What right have they to pry into a gentleman's private life? They prate about Governor Kellogg's election not being valid. What right have those fellows to review a State election in Louisiana? Pinch shall go back. Pinch is their choice. Pinch shall sit in their name under the marble dome, among the chief sages of the commonwealth!

On going with Antoine into Kellogg's cabinet we encounter Pinch. The Negro is in high feather, for the Negro senators have just affirmed once more his election to the State Senatorship, and Antoine has brought his credentials for the Governor to sign and seal. Got up in paper collar and pomade, Pinch smiles and smirks, and sickens you with his bows and scrapes. You think of giving him twenty cents. Kellogg appears to loathe the fellow, yet he cannot well refuse his name and seal. Who knows with what reserve he signs? Pinch watches him with eager eyes, chewing his quid, and spattering the walls and carpets. Ach! The scene is rich in comedy. 0113 107 Having got his papers signed, Pinch whips up his satchel, sticks a fresh quid in his mouth, and leaves the room with Antoine, the two Negroes going out arm in arm, strutting and sniggering through admiring crowds. ‘Dat Nig is some,’ one fellow cries. ‘You bet?’ asks another. ‘Golly,’ says a third, ‘dat Nig is ole Pinch!’ And so the dusky hero vanishes from our sight.

‘It is a farce,’ says Governor Kellogg. ‘Pinchback is no more senator now than he was before. He goes on a fool's errand, but these coloured children must be humoured. When he reaches Washington they will find out their mistake.’

Governor Kellogg is courteous, grave, and self-possessed. It is a common saying that he lives on lies. A friend who met me in Canal Street said: ‘Going to see Kellogg? Let me warn you that the man you are going to see is a wonder. He's not afraid. All the Federal troops in New Orleans could not make him tell the truth.’ Governor Kellogg has a smooth and winning way, which enemies may describe as wheedling and deceptive; but his eyes look honestly into your face, and his tone of voice is frank and earnest. He appears to me a stirring and 0114 108 fanatical person, strongly wedded to his opinions, and ready to spend and be spent in what he deems the ‘good cause.’ Turning from Pinch he asks if we have seen the Chambers—an enquiry which enables us to ask if he regards the Lower Chamber as a lawful assembly.

‘No,’ he answers with a smile; ‘until we get a legal quorum we are not a House. Some doubt exists about the quorum; our advisers tell us fifty-four Members make a quorum, but the custom is to reckon fifty-six; and till the question has been settled by the judges we abstain from acting on a dubious right.’

‘Have you fifty-four Members?’

‘No; fifty-three. Speaker Hahn has allowed three candidates not returned by the Board to take their seats. That act is wrong. Not being a legal quorum, the Assembly has no power to give away seats.’

‘Nor to elect a Speaker?’

‘You are right. So far as such things have been done, they are unlawful and without my sanction. Michael Hahn is no more Speaker than I am President. My Chamber is a caucus and no more; 0115 109 but Hahn is fond of titles, and the coloured members like to hear themselves called a Legislature. We are waiting for a compromise. If President Grant is firm, the other side will soon make terms. I could find the three voters to make up my quorum, but I will not pay the price. I wish to have an honest Government, and should be rather glad than otherwise to have a Conservative majority in the Lower House. White people are easier to satisfy than Black.’

‘Why let the Chamber meet, transact business, and print journals, as though they were a lawful Legislature?’

‘I cannot help myself. The other side are rich, and we are poor. McEnery's group, composed of rich people, can live without their pay; our group, composed of needy persons, must be paid. Unless we have a pretext for giving them three dollars a day, they cannot stay in New Orleans. In less than a week thirty out of the fifty would be gone. I let them meet, attend to formal matters, and receive their salaries, but I caution them to leave all serious business till we see our way. There is a fight between us. The Chambers are burning to pass an 0116 110 Appropriation Bill; but I refuse to let them bring it in; and tell the leaders plainly that they have no legal powers.’

‘If President Grant decides to support General Sheridan, do you think the new Legislature may be got to work?’

‘I hope the best; but I am sickening of my tasks. I shall be happy when the moment comes for my release.’

‘Release! Does any one hinder you from leaving New Orleans?’

‘A sense of duty hinders me. I am a party man. Believing that the principles of my party are the best for every corner of America, I have done my best to plant them in this region of the South. My work is not yet done; but I am older than I was ten years ago. I have deserved my rest, but shrink from taking it so long as any chance remains of finishing what I came into this State to do.’

His tone is grave and almost sad.

‘What is my life in New Orleans that I should wish to stay? To be regarded as an alien or denounced as an adventurer is nothing. I am shunned by everyone except the wretch who seeks a place. 0117 111 No lady speaks to me. No gentleman comes near me. The rabble hoot, the rowdies fire. My name a byword and a mockery, I am but too happy to escape with life. Some day I hope to get away, but not until my duty has been done.’

Scene —Rotunda, New Orleans; marble floor, and open galleries, supported by fluted shafts. Time—Wednesday, January 13, 1875, eight o'clock in the evening. Persons present—General Sheridan, with his staff, Lieutenant-governor Penn, Senators, Members of Congress, foreign consuls, sea captains, newspaper scouts, orderlies, messengers, telegraph clerks, and other crowds, including two English travellers. Temperature—boiling point of mercury.

‘Look out for squalls,’ drops a well-known voice, as we emerge from the dining-hall into the Rotunda. ‘The affair is on, and must be settled either yea or nay. If Grant backs down, there will be peace; if not, there will be war. Look out! Before you go to bed, the world will know the worst.’

The central hall of our hotel is a grand apartment—the Rotunda of an edifice which in Italy 0119 113 would be called a palace; a news-room, lounge, divan, and stock exchange; a place where merchants buy and sell, where gamblers square accounts, where duellists look for seconds, and where everyone devours the news. Here telegrams are received from every corner of the earth. Here journals are hawked and politics discussed. All strangers in the city lodge in the hotel, and citizens who want them have to seek them in this hall, the central point of New Orleans. Here idlers smoke, and chat, and see the lions. In the Rotunda you buy places for the carnival, numbers for the lottery, tickets for excursion trains. In one recess you find drink, in a second tobacco, for sale. Here you play billiards, there poker, everywhere the deuce. From seven o'clock to ten the hall is thronged by men of pleasure, politics, and business, and the corridors boom with voices, like the uproar of a stormy sea.

To-night the scene in our Rotunda is a sight. General Sheridan, dressed in plain clothes, is standing near a shaft, puffing his cigar, and chatting with his friends. Is it design or accident, his standing with his back against that shaft, so that his person is covered from assault except in front? About him VOL. II. I 0120 114 fret and seethe a crowd of citizens, many of them bearing proud, historic names. General Ogden is here, General Taylor is here, and General Penn is here. The lame man pushing through the crowd is General Badger, now recovering from his wounds. The gentlemen near Sheridan, also in plain clothes, are General Emory and Colonel Sheridan, a younger brother of the chief. Banditti! How the Southern fire darts out, the Southern pride expands, as Senator and General cross the hall, restrained alike by courtesy and policy from rushing on the man who calls them outlaws and is only waiting for a word to string them up! With what a cold and haughty mien these magnates pass the shaft against which Sheridan leans!

‘Have you no fear of accidents?’ I ask General Penn.

‘Not much,’ he answers; ‘we are fiercely tried, but we can bear the strain.’

‘Many of these gentlemen, I suppose, are armed, and some fanatic, vexed beyond endurance, may create a row.’

‘Such things may happen; but the League is under high control. No leaguer carries a weapon, 0121 115 not even a pocket-knife, on his person. We are strong enough to do without knives and pistols. If a fight must come, we shall go into it like soldiers, not like Negroes and Kickapoos. But there will be no fight—the President is backing down.’

A buzz of conversation swells and murmurs to the dome, like flow and ebb of tides on shingle. Now it rises to a roar, through which a military band outside is hardly heard; anon it sinks into such silence that the click-click of the telegraph needle strikes on the ear with pain. A crash of kettle-drums rolls up. All eyes appear to seek the clock, as though the dial were a living face on which a man might read the secrets of President Grant's Cabinet. All ears are strained towards the telegraph clerk, as though his needles were living spirits, from which men could force the secrets of the Capitol. Messages come in as fast as clerks can read them, so that we in the Rotunda learn what is being said and done in our behalf, not only in Charleston and Richmond, but in New York and St. Louis, as soon as these things are known in Broadway. Wires connect us with the Capitol, and we I 2 0122 116 are told of what occurs before it is known in Pennsylvania-avenue.

The President, we learn, is much perplexed and changes his decision every hour. Yesterday he was rock; this morning he is spray. A passionate and obstinate man, he wants to rule his country as he ruled his camp, and is amazed to find his countrymen object to military rule.

Never has President seen a rising like that of the northern and western cities on receipt of news from New Orleans. Boston and New York are up in arms; Chicago and Philadelphia are up in arms; St. Louis and Cincinnatti are up in arms. Cæsarism is answered by a White Revival. Eloquent words are ringing through the air; Republicans joining voices with Democrats in denouncing the policy of President Grant. The venerable Bryant leads the way in New York; the liberal Adams is the spokesman of Massachusetts. Evarts lends his name to what is little less than an impeachment of the President and his Cabinet. ‘These practices,’ cries Bryant, ‘must be denounced, must be stopped, must be broken up for ever!’ ‘What right,’ asks Adams, ‘have soldiers of the United States to determine who 0123 117 shall sit in the Legislature of a State?’ Evarts brings the matter home: ‘Here we have a national gensdarmerie instead of a civil police! The Legislature of Louisiana is as much a part of our Government as the Legislature of New York.’ Men who have never before this moment mixed in politics, leave their books and join these enemies of President Grant. ‘Here is an act done in a time of peace,’ says Curtis, ‘so dangerous to all civil freedom, so bold and reckless a violation of law, that men who have condoned everything else are compelled to speak out.’ Kellogg and Packard, Antoine and Pinchback, are forgotten in the fury now being vented on the great criminal at the White House. Impeachment is demanded in a thousand voices. Resignation is suggested, and in fact announced. The country seems aflame, the whole White family rallying to the defence of outraged law.

Yesterday the President seemed resolved to back his lieutenant. He was asked by the Senate to state what is passing in New Orleans, and how he means to deal with matters; for the reports of Foster, Phelps, and Potter to Congress, clearing the 0124 118 White citizens of New Orleans, and charging disorder in the South on the military party, have created a profound excitement. When such party men as Foster and Phelps can find no word to say for their political friends, the cause is lost; yet President Grant was minded to go on, assume the burthen of events, and leave Sheridan free to take his course. He framed a Message to Congress in this sense.

But beyond the War Office, where his adjutants fumed and smoked, he found few backers. Senators of his own opinions and of great experience in affairs, came to his private cabinet and told him he was wrecking his party, if not ruining his country. The Republicans have lost so much, they are afraid of risking more. By secrecy and silence on the Cæsarian question of a third term, the President lost them many thousands of supporters in the North, and now, by his unhappy interference with the Legislature of New Orleans, the South is gone. The Senators fear to face new trials. Are they to go further in a course for which Radicals like Foster and Phelps cannot say a word?

High office has no effect in softening censure 0125 119 of the President's course. General Sherman takes no pains to hide his views. Vice-President Wilson opposes his official superior, and some of the leading journals are demanding that Grant shall retire from the White House, leaving his powers in Wilson's hands. More than all else, Hamilton Fish declares that if the President sustains Sheridan and justifies Durell and Packard, he will resign his post as Secretary of State. This menace tells. Fish is not only the ablest man in Grant's Cabinet, but one of the ablest men in America. Bristow, Secretary of the Treasury, takes the same line as Fish. Without these gentlemen, the President's Cabinet could not stand a week; and if his Cabinet falls, who knows what else may fall?

The Governors of powerful States are talking in an ominous way. ‘A State has disappeared,’ says Governor Allen to the people of Ohio; ‘a sovereign State of this Union has no existence this night.’ A sovereign State! The President thinks he put an end to all that babble about sovereign States on the battle field, and here, in one of the rich and populous northern cities, the Governor of a great State is talking of Louisiana as a ‘sovereign 0126 120 member of the Union. Governor Tilden, of New York, is still more menacing and emphatic: ‘For similar acts our English ancestors sent the first Charles to the scaffold and expelled the second James from the throne.’

Louisiana is not more conscious than Ohio and New York that the day is big with fate. The policy of ruling by the sword has reached a turning-point. To-night will see this policy either make a step or fall back many steps. If Cæsar rises, the Republic sinks.

On what a thread the issue seems to hang! While President Grant is pondering pros and cons, a pistol-shot, fired by a fool, may start a civil war. Sheridan is prepared to act, and the devastator of the Shenandoah would sweep the quays of New Orleans as thoroughly as he swept the granaries of Blue Ridge. If blood begins to flow, the President will support his officers; but who can say how many States will rally to the Government? It is not easy to assert. Since the fall elections many things are changed. The White Revival has set in, the centre of political gravity has been moved. A strong majority of Democrats will sit in the new Chamber. 0127 121 If blood is shed, who knows what shape the White Revival may assume? Is it likely that men who voted with the South seven weeks ago will arm to crush her seven weeks hence?

Some ladies peer down wistfully from the gallery into the sea of dark and bearded faces which are constantly raised to the clock. One lady is that damsel who has come to the Rotunda on her pleasure trip. Poor girl! She sees these scowling brows and haughty gestures. She has reason to suppose that every man is armed. She knows that all these people hate her lover with a fury not to be appeased by blood. Who can assure her that the evening will not close in massacre?

A cry is raised at the operator's desk. News—news—from Washington!

‘Read, read!’ scream a hundred voices. One of the clerks jumps on a bench, the printed telegraph slip in his hand, and waving it before his audience, cries out lustily: ‘Gentlemen, the President backs down!’

‘Backs down?’ each wild and pallid auditor asks his neighbour; ‘Yes, backs down!’

At once the strained and tragic situation softens; 0128 122 lips relax, eyes lighten into humour, and everyone begins to chatter and shake hands. Some slip away to spread the news elsewhere. The knots and groups break up, and many seek for details in the messages which still keep pouring in.

‘Play over,’ says the well-known voice; ‘Durell repudiated, Belknap discredited, Sheridan excused. The President abandons all responsibility. Sheridan is not sustained, and his recommendations are described as unlawful. Yes, the play is over. Sheridan will now have time for his pleasure trip, and he may then go home to his wedding-cake. Third term? The third term is dead. Exit Cæsar!’

Atlanta , capital of Georgia, is rising from the dust in which Sherman's too famous march from Chattanooga left her—a sacrifice of war—when the fair young city, not yet seventeen years old, perished in her youth; wasted so fiercely that her waters seemed to be on fire; so thoroughly that a rose-bush here and there was all that told of former opulence and present wreck. Atlanta, rising from her ashes, is a type of Georgia.

Standing on a hill, the domes and turrets of Atlanta, shining over belts of ash and pine, endow her with a regal air. A natural crown of the adjacent flats, she looks the capital which a proud and grateful people have made her since the great calamity she suffered in the civil war. Her soil is rich and ruddy, with the wealth and colour of a Devonshire ridge. Wide fields and pastures lie 0130 124 around; these under grass, those under cotton, these again under rice. Maize and tobacco grow on every side, and overhead hangs a sky like that of Cyprus. Here cattle browse; there herdsmen trot. Negroes with creels of cotton on their heads slouch and dawdle into the town. The scene is pastoral and poetic; English in the main features, yet with forms of life and dots of colour to remind you of the Niger rather than the Trent.

Frame houses, painted white, with colonnades and gardens, nestle in shady nooks and cluster round hill-sides. About these villas romp and shout such boys and girls as New England poets find under apple-trees in Kent. What roses on their cheeks; what bravery in their eyes! Here glows the fine old English blood, as bright and red in Georgia as in York and Somerset. But for her Negro population, Georgia would have an English look.

The Negro is a fact—though not the fact of facts—in Georgia. Unlike Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—States in which the Black element is stronger in number than the White—Georgia has a White majority of votes; yet her 0131 125 majority on the whole is slight, and her Negro population is so massed as to command the ballot-boxes in many counties. For example—in Baldwin County, Early County, and Sumter County there are nearly two Negroes to each White; in Baker County, Camden County, Columbia County, Effingham County, and Troup County there are more than two Negroes to each White; in Liberty County there are nearly three Negroes to each White; in Bullock County and Hurston County there are more than three Negroes to each White; and in Lee County there are four Negroes to every White. If all the Negroes in these counties held together, under the advice of carpet-baggers and with the help of Federal bayonets, they might set up Negro judges, sheriffs, and assessors, as in Louisiana and Mississippi, and might send up Negro senators to Atlanta, if not to Washington. Lee County might have her Antonie, even though Georgia failed to achieve her Pinchback. At present most of them are busy on their farms and homesteads, leaving politics alone, though every word from Vicksburg and Jackson, Shreveport and New Orleans, is apt to rouse them like a cry of fire.

The session for 1875 is opening under great excitement. Unlike her neighbours, Florida and South Carolina, Georgia has recovered her independence. She has now a native Governor in James M. Smith. The Legislature and the Government are Conservative; and being Conservative, are bitterly opposed to President Grant.

Though suffering less than the Virginians and South Carolinians by the war, the Georgians are more exasperated than their neighbours in either of their sister States; the burning of Atlanta, the destruction of property at Milledgeville, and the injuries done to rails and roads, canals and bridges everywhere, appearing in their eyes as acts of savage vengeance rather than of lawful war. Such deeds are not forgotten in a day, and till they are forgotten they are never likely to be forgiven.

Ten years ago the greatest civil warfare ever waged by man against his brother was burning in these Southern cities. Armies to be counted by hundreds of thousands trampled on these vineyards and tobacco-fields. Fierce sieges were being carried on, murderous battles were being fought, in every Southern State. Dense woods were fired, 0133 127 broad rivers turned, fair villages destroyed. Ruin reigned everywhere. Need one wonder that scars are left? The rent and blackened walls of Atlanta have not disappeared. It is in vain to dream that the moral sores are healed. Wounds inflicted in a civil strife last long. Israel was divided for ever by her war of tribes. For ages the contest of patricians and plebeians stopped the growth of Rome. Internal feuds gave Seville to the Moor and Dublin to the Saxon. Street conflicts opened Constantinople to the Turk. Religious conflicts weakened Germany and France. The raid on Freiburg by the Swiss volunteers is still resented by the Catholic Cantons. But the direst form of civil war is that which has a social or a servile cause. Long years elapsed ere Rome recovered from her tug with Spartacus. English society was shaken by Cade. Munzer's rising is still recalled with horror by the people of Würtzburg and Rothenburg. The French wars of the communists, the Spanish wars of the comunidades, are not ended yet. Last year, at Cartagena, we heard the names and passwords used by Padilla in the reign of Charles the Fifth.

‘Have you many White leaguers in Georgia?’ we ask a senator in Atlanta.

‘Yes,’ he answers frankly; ‘you will find either Black leaguers and White leaguers in every district where you see Black and White men. A league is but the sentiment of a class trying to become the sentiment of all. We have White leaguers in Atlanta, but I must warn you against the idea, that in Georgia we have any of the rascals of whom Sheridan speaks and Republican journals write. There is a true White League, and a false White League. The true White League consists of a band of Conservatives, who wish to maintain order and preserve property; the false White League consists of a band of destructives, who desire to break the peace and ruin house and land. Which of these two sorts of league are we likely to belong to—we, who own and cultivate nearly all the land in Georgia? Leagues are a necessity of our life, and will be while a Federal army occupies our towns. Unless we are prepared to see this city and this country perish, we must unite our strength and close our ranks. The false White League is a creation of the President's private cabinet.’

‘You think that much of this trouble is excited by the Government in order to favour General Grant's campaign for a third term?’

‘For nothing else. These hubbubs in Vicksburg and New Orleans suit his game. If Billy Ross were President, and Bear's Paw his Secretary of War, you would hear of no Pin Leagues, Light Horse and Mourning Bands; but you would have daily articles and monthly messages on Negro misdeeds in Caddo and White encroachments on Red River. When we have a Democratic President in office, you will hear more of the Black League than of the White.’

‘The Black League is an actual fact?’

‘There is a Black League in every Negro village and every Negro barrack. You can hardly doubt that there is a Black League in Mississippi after the murder of Jemmy Gray?’

The murder of Gray, and the murderer's confession, are the talk of every city in the South. Gray was a Negro lad, who came from his plantation into Vicksburg, and was killed by order of a brother Negro, named Jeff Tucker. Oliver, a third Negro, was employed to do the deed. Since his arrest, VOL. II. K 0136 130 Oliver has turned on his employers and made a clean breast of the dirty business. Gray, a member of the Black League, heard in his lodge the purposes of his chiefs. He learned that Vicksburg was to be attacked by Negro troops, assisted by a Negro mob, and that all the White citizens were to be killed. Gray set out to warn some people who had been kind to him of the impending massacre. Jeff Tucker, an officer in the League, suspected Gray, and ordered him to be slain. Oliver expresses deep regret, for Gray had never injured him; but Tucker was his officer, and he was bound by oath to do whatever he was told, even to the shedding of a brother's blood. When Tucker bade him go and kill Gray he went and killed him, never asking why, because he dared not ask. He says he acted out of fear. If he had not killed Gray, he would have been killed himself.

In Georgia the coloured people seem content, but who can say how long this calm may last? The Negro is a child of mystery. No man can guess what he will do or will not do. Voices move him, fetishes inspire him. Traces of his African superstitions cling to him, even in a Georgian school and 0137 131 chapel. He is open to such hints as ‘forty acres and a good mule,’ and plenty of carpet-baggers are at hand, ready, at auspicious moments, with such hints. He has enjoyed one spell of power, and the intoxication of that period hangs about his hut and dug-out. What a day of glory for the son of Ham! A Negro loves to sit in a chair of state, to hear men say ‘his honour,’ and to fine White rowdies for getting drunk: ‘Hi, hi! You bad fellow. You drunk—Ten dollar! Hi, hi!’

Like other savages the Georgian Negroes want to rule. It is no use to tell them they are fewer than the Whites, and that the greater number rules the less. They think it should be turn and turn about. The Whites have had their day, and now the Blacks should have their day.

Thousands of these Negroes have been drilled and armed by the State authorities. Most of the militia regiments are Black, and these Black regiments are officered by scalawags and carpet-baggers, who have swarmed into the cotton-fields and rice-grounds from distant towns. These regiments of coloured troops, commanded by strangers and adventurers, are the cause of much distrust. K 2

Some scalawag whispers that General Grant desires to see the Negro uppermost in the State, his hands in White men's pockets, and his heels on White men's necks. The Negroes and Mulattoes think these scalawags speak the truth. Poor things! they cannot read and write. As children they were slaves. Of politics and history they know less than the most stupid Suabian boor or Wiltshire clown. Of moral codes and social sciences they have hardly an idea; but the poorest African in Georgia can see the difference between a cabin and a house, a full table and an empty one, a warm coat and a cotton rag, a place in the gutter and a seat in the legislative hall. ‘Look,’ cry the scalawags, ‘at Louisiana and Mississippi! There you have Negro sheriffs and assessors, judges and legislators. In New Orleans and Jackson you have Negro Senators, Negro Lieutenant-governors, and Federal armies keeping down the Whites. Louisiana sends Pinchback, Mississippi sends Rush, to represent the coloured people in the national Capitol! Why not unite and carry your own candidates?’

Fired by such visions Sam begins to dream of running for the State legislature. If not so lucky as 0139 133 Pinchback he may be as fortunate as Antoine. If he cannot reach Antoine, he may hope to rival Demas. If Pete can sit in Jackson or New Orleans, why should not Sam aspire to sit in Atlanta? The lowest senator, he hears, gets three dollars a day for doing nothing but loll in an easy chair, chew tobacco, answer when his name is called, and now and then get up to have a drink. A Negro toiling on a plantation has to pick and carry cotton for three dollars a week. Why not attempt in Georgia what the coloured people do so easily in Mississippi and Louisiana?

‘You would be much amused by some of our dark politicians,’ says to me a well known personage. ‘This morning, as my coloured servant was cleaning my boots, he looked up into my eyes, and, with a broad grin across his face, asked me how he could get to run for the State Legislature. The fellow can hardly read, and cannot write; he cleans my knives and holds my horse; and he wants to make laws for me! ’

In the relations of her White people to the coloured race, South Carolina is the most unlucky section of America. In Louisiana the two colours are nearly balanced. Nine or ten years may turn the scale; since the European family increases while the African falls away. Even in Mississippi the majority of coloured people is not great; not more than seven Blacks to six Whites. Neither of these unhappy States is so far overweighted by her African numbers as to make contention in the ballot-boxes hopeless. In South Carolina—called the Prostrate State—the case is otherwise. Negro ascendancy is complete; the African and his bastard brother the Mulatto reign supreme.

The last census gives ten Africans to seven Europeans in the State of South Carolina. In seven 0141 135 counties the Whites have a good majority; in three others they have a flight majority; while in the remaining twenty-two counties the Negro majorities are large. In Richland County and Charleston County they number two to one. Among the bayous and savannahs the dark people are almost separated from the fair. In Beaufort County they are nearly six to one; in Georgetown County they are nearly seven to one. Greenville, Anderson, and Spartanburg counties may return scholars, advocates, and planters to the Legislature; but the voice of a Trenholm or a Russell counts for no more in the assembly than that of a Negro from the swamp; and for every Trenholm or Russell in the assembly of South Carolina there are three Negroes from the swamp. Under a law of equality, enforced by a Federal army, what chance has the European settler in such a State?

Dark as the prospect is, the Carolinians are not sure that they have reached their blackest point. The great zone of swamp and savannah, stretching from Cape Fear to the Mississippi, and from the Mississippi back to St. Andrew's Sound, appears to be the African's new home. Within this zone 0142 136 he lives and thrives; and if he has a preference within this zone it is for the hot and humid regions lying between Columbia and the sea. Climate and produce suit him equally. Squash is cheap, tobacco grows wild, and sugar canes abound. Here, if anywhere, the Negro may hope to make a stand; and hither, it would seem, the Africans are tending, under the action of those mysterious laws of race which the Emancipation Act has called into free and easy play.

In other zones the Africans are falling off. Above this sympathetic zone, yet still within the Southern limits, runs a line of country from the Chesapeake to the Missouri and the Arkansas, in which Negroes dwelt and multiplied in a state of servitude. But from these great districts they are now retreating towards the South and towards the sea. Missouri and Kentucky are casting out their Negro citizens, not by public edicts, but by agencies of which no record can be kept. Maryland is following Kentucky, and Virginia following Maryland.

Whether the whole displacement springs from a mere shifting of the Africans from North to 0143 137 South, is matter of dispute. Who understands those movements which are common to man and beast, to bird and fish? What sorcerer has probed the secret of the pilchard, the locust, and the springbok? Who knows the true reasons which led the Goth in ancient days to leave his native seat, which drives the Mongol at this present hour to quit his sacred soil? To say that the ancient Goth and modern Mongol break away from old associations in search of food and drink, is but to answer for a part of the material facts. That theory would not cover the case of bird and fish, much less of man and beast. Some creatures move in search of warmth and light, and some are led by instincts and emotions tending to the nurture of life. Men are often swayed by higher instincts than the love of meat and warmth. What forces drove the Crusaders to Syria and the Pilgrims to New England? Not the want of food and drink. What passion led the Jesuits to Paraguay, the Franciscans to Mexico? Not the desire to lodge in huts and cover the body with antelope skins. What impulse carries the Russ to Troitza, the Moor to Mecca, and the Mormon to Salt Lake?

‘You think the coloured people are moving from Kentucky and Virginia into South Carolina?’

‘Not a doubt of it,’ says a journalist of whom we seek an answer. ‘Always on the road, in my vocation, I see the files and squads, full-blood, mulattoes, and quadroons, all creeping from the North. Sickness thins the number; for the darkies are rotten sheep, and perish on the road. More die than reach our soil.’

What are the facts? Are South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi, chiefly South Carolina, taking in the whole drain from Missouri and Kentucky, Maryland and Virginia? Or, beyond the change implied by exodus, is there a great margin of displacement, telling of decay?

Two tests may be employed. Is the African family on the whole increasing in America? Are the members of this family better lodged and fed?

Opinions differ as to whether the Africans are increasing in America. The rate of increase has assuredly fallen off. Nobody fancies they are multiplying like the Europeans in America. Every statist owns that they are not growing under freedom as they grew under servitude. Nor is there much 0145 139 difference as to whether Negroes and Mulattoes are better lodged and fed in freedom than they were in servitude. Exceptions may occur, but as a rule the coloured people live in worse houses and eat less healthy food. A man sucks more canes, and chews more quids; yet eats less wholesome food, and occupies less wholesome rooms. Child murder, the vice of every savage tribe, has come to be a common crime.

Negroes are averse to rearing offspring. Children give much trouble, cost much money, and involve much care. In servitude the Negress was compelled to nurse her offspring, for her children were property. In freedom, she is left to instinct; and the instinct of a Negress, like that of a Mongol and a Fijian, sometimes tempts her to this form of murder. Papals and Bulloms slay their issue in Africa; and American teaching has not rooted out this African custom in America. In a state of freedom the original genius of a race is likely to return. In South Carolina, a Negro, living under freedom, has to feed and clothe his child, and every dollar spent on his baby's food and clothes, is so much loss to him in quids and drams. Child murder, I 0146 140 am told, is now as common in the Negro swamp, as in a Chinese street or on a Tartar steppe.

This is the true Negro Question; not such actual trifles as whether Blacks shall ride in the same cars and sit at the same tables as Whites: or such relative trifles as whether Blacks shall vote, make laws, and carry arms like Whites? The true Negro Question in South Carolina and elsewhere is whether, in the freedom of nature, the coloured man can live?

In servitude men are not allowed to roam. The main step, perhaps, from savage licence into settled law, is that abridgment of personal liberty which converts a nomad into a citizen. Some savages cannot take this step. Can you confine an African? In freedom everyone is master of his whim. He comes and goes as fancy prompts—one week in Missouri, next week in Tennessee, a third week on the Gulf. Turkey is trying to settle some of her Arab tribes, but she has met so far with no success. Russia's attempt to colonize her steppe led her into serfage, and three hundred years of iron discipline were needed ere her rulers thought the Russ people broken of their ancient wandering 0147 141 habits. Are the Africans yet prepared for settlement? You cannot fix a free Sioux, or a free Apache on the soil. A Red man cannot live in competition with a White neighbour. Has the Negro strength enough to stand alone? Under servitude the Black men grew in numbers; under freedom the Red men fell in numbers. Will the Black men under freedom fail as the Red men fail? Have the good and pious men who gave the Negro freedom, only issued, in their ignorance of nature's rules, an edict for his slow but sure extermination from the soil?

‘Be sure of one thing,’ says Colonel Binfield, a Southern officer, who has studied the Negro Question on the battle-field, in the tobacco grounds, and in the public schools, ‘we shall have no more disorder in the streets. No local passion will dictate our course. We made a great mistake in parting from our flag; but we have long since seen the error of our way, and we shall not commit that fault again. Our trust is in the law of life. The Negro had his day of power. If he chafed us by his petulance and folly he never awed us by his strength. Even now, when he has a ruler of his 0148 142 own opinions in Columbia, a majority of friends in the Legislature, and the command of all the public forces, we have no fear of him. A European is too strong for any African. Unless he stabs you in the dark, or throws a brand into your room, a coloured man can hardly do you harm. The tussle of a White man with a Negro is the tussle of a man with a woman. It is the same in masses. Plant me one of your Utopias on the Santee or Edisto; set me ten Europeans in the midst of ninety Africans; give each of your hundred settlers an equal share of soil, seeds, implements, and money; start them with a free code and equal rights, and leave them to till the ground, to make laws, and to rule themselves. In ten years the White men will own the soil, the granaries, and the money. Nature has given the White man brain and strength, invention, courage, and endurance of a higher quality, on a larger scale, than she has given these elements to the Black. In spite of accidents the White man must be master on this continent. Why, then, should we provoke an issue in the field? No one but an enemy of White civilization wants a second 0149 143 civil war. We only need to wait, certain to conquer if we wait.’

My friend is right. A Negro cannot stand the impact of free life; the pressure rends and grinds him. All the vital forces of this world are relative, and for twenty centuries Europe has been the nursery of living power. Europe supplies the other continents with life—life in plants and animals, as well as in the higher forms of man. You bring a spruce from Europe to America. That spruce will grow into a forest, and will kill the native trees all round. Import a horse and cow, and they will drive out buffalo and elk. The lower forms give way in presence of a higher type.

Negro ascendancy, even though supported for a time by Federal troops, will fail before White science, as surely as a forest of plants fades before an English spruce and a herd of game before an English horse.

Overtopping Charleston, as St. Paul's overtops London, springs the belfry of a new Orphan Asylum; crowning the gay city and expansive bay; and looking over goodly towers, bright gardens, and ruined edifices. Emerging on the leads of this edifice we find a watchman leaning in a corner, smoking his pipe, and gazing at the sky. ‘And what may be about the time?’ he asks. ‘Time? just gone twelve.’ ‘Gone twelve? Then guess I'll sling the bell.’ Bang, bang! Men lounging in the streets below look up; the hour is noon, say the lotos-eaters; yes, it is the hour of prayer. Alla hu Akbar!

‘You don't seem to mind a few minutes?’

‘No, Sir, we are not such fools as to bother about a few minutes, more or less. Who cares?’

This watcher in the belfry is a Carolinian, and 0151 145 his eirie in the clouds the heart of South Carolina. What a proud and indolent people; what a sunny, picturesque place! Observe the Ashley and the Cooper, rivers which embrace the city, as the Hudson and East rivers hug New York—how lazily they roll into the bay, and curl about the shores and islets, lapping and ebbing with the tides, around Fort Ripley and Fort Sumter, and out, by the Beach Channel, into the Atlantic Ocean! Peep into these nooks of myrtle and palmettoes at our feet. What verdure on the ground—what colour in the trees! You may have seen sweet nooks before; but where on earth a nest more perfect in its kind than one of these villas on the bay, looking over Castle Pinckney and King Street Battery, with balconies screened by roses and palmettoes, and with oranges hanging to the water's edge? And then, what women pace these walks, peep from these lattices, adorn these balustrades! Surely the mothers of these women must have been the ladies painted by Lely and Vandyke!

Yet what a fiery energy in the men and women! It is a saying in Charleston ‘that no Negro or Mulatto dares to look straight into a VOL. II. L 0152 146 gentleman's face.’ How many Negresses and Mulattaes would face one of these White damsels?

The Government is under the control of Negro voters, and the State of South Carolina is for the moment a Black Commonwealth, ruled, like an Italian Republic of the Middle Ages, by a stranger. Daniel H. Chamberlain is the name of the American Podesta. Robert H. Gleaves, a Negro, is Lieutenant-governor. Of the thirty-three Senators for South Carolina, fourteen are Black. Out of a hundred and twenty four Members of the Lower House, no less than seventy-three are Black. Gleaves, the Negro Lieutenant-governor, presides in the Upper House; Elliot, a Negro Speaker, presides in the Lower House. Few of these senators can write their names; yet they aspire to fill the highest offices in the Government. The Secretary of State is a Negro. Offices which demand some aptitude in reading and writing, such as those of Attorney-general and Superintendent of Education, are left to White men, but those of higher pay and wider patronage are taken by the Blacks. The State Treasurer is a Negro; the Adjutant and Inspector-general is a Negro. Chief-Justice Moses is a White, but 0153 147 his Associate-Judge, Wright of Beaufort, is a coloured man.

Carolinian judges used to be named for life, like English judges, and were as rarely deposed from the bench as judges in the parent State; but this Conservative way of dealing with the higher magistracy has been set aside under the Reconstruction Act. A judge is now appointed for four years only, and is seldom named a second time. His day is short, and he must make it pay. Some of the judges (I am told, on good authority) deal in cotton, rice, and other produce, and not unfrequently appear as parties to suits at law! An ignorant Negro, placed on the bench by party voters, has much temptation to resist.

A Negro has not sense enough to see that office requires some training, not to say some natural aptitude. His only thought of office is a place where he can sit and smoke, give saucy answers, and receive his salary. Office was made for man, not man for office. If you ask a Negro what he wants, he says ‘a place,’ caring but little whether you make him a jailor or a judge.

Some weeks ago a coloured man was brought to L 2 0154 148 me in Philadelphia, whose name was Henry Griffin, whose craft was door-keeping, whose desire was legislation. A shrewd fellow, thirty-five years old, and yet obliged to mind a door for bread, Griffin thought the time had come for him to rise. His neighbours shared the public spoil—why should not he? Hence, to the amusement of his employers, he was running as a candidate in the seventh ward of Philadelphia.

‘On which side in politics do you stand?’ I asked the candidate.

‘Republican, Sah.’

‘Republican! Then you are running against Bardsley and Patterson, men of your own opinions, giving your enemies, the Democrats, a chance of slipping in?’

‘Guess that's so,’ he answered; ‘but we like to have our share, and the Republicans cheat us every way.’

‘Indeed! I thought they gave you liberty, and fought for you against their brethren in the South?’

‘Guess that was long ago. That dead and buried. I am speaking of to-day. We coloured people vote the Republican ticket. When they get 0155 149 in, by coloured votes, they give us nothing. We have a White Governor, a White Secretary of the Commonwealth, a White Chief-Justice.’

‘Would you like to have a Black Chief-Justice in the seat of Daniel Agnew?’

‘Well, sah, might we not have a coloured councillor, a coloured letter-carrier, a coloured policeman? In New Jersey, just across the Delaware, you see coloured police-officers and coloured magistrates. In Pennsylvania, though we call ourselves Republicans, we have no coloured men in office, save the turnkeys in the police-yard, and these coloured officers are required to sweep their own rooms and whitewash their own walls! Is that equality?’

Griffin is frank. Not having learned the art of wrapping up ugly things in golden words, he tells you that he wants to get his hands into the public chest.

Affairs look smooth in Charleston; smoother than anyone would expect to find under a carpet-bag Government, a Negro Legislature, and a Federal army.

Daniel H. Chamberlain, the Governor, is a New 0156 150 Englander, who came to Charleston as William P. Kellogg went to New Orleans, armed with a carpet-bag, a pleasant manner, and an eloquent tongue. He has been long in power, and has been savagely abused by the Conservatives, not without good cause; but he is now changing his policy, curbing the excesses of his coloured friends, and listening more and more to the White minority. Such moderate Conservatives as Captain Walker and George A. Trenholm, are disposed to work with him, instead of speaking, voting, and caballing against him. Chamberlain has done much mischief and is capable of doing more. An abler man than Kellogg, he has also a finer field in South Carolina than Kellogg has in Louisiana. Chamberlain has a solid Negro majority at his back. He is also stronger in the North than Kellogg; not because people in Boston and New York either know or like him better than his rival, but because they have a fresher recollection of the sins of Charleston than they have of New Orleans. In any measures of repression he might choose to adopt, Chamberlain could count on the support of Congress and the sympathy of every city in the North. The sin of Charleston is the sin 0157 151 that cannot be forgiven. Here, the scheme of Secession was planned, here the first insult was offered to the National flag. Thousands and tens of thousands in the North believe that the city should have been burnt to the ground, that her wharves and docks should have been destroyed, that her channels should have been choked up, and that her people should have been scattered over the earth.

In treating with a man who represents so much power and passion, the Conservatives see the need for prudent act and reconciling speech. Like other strangers, Chamberlain is open to the softer influences of society. He likes to sit at good men's feasts and bask in the smiles of well-born women. A podesta in Verona or Ferrari, seldom, if ever, stood beyond the reach of social courtesies; and the podesta of South Carolina shows a disposition to respond, so far as he can meet these White advances without fear of estranging his coloured friends.

‘Things are now going well with you?’ we ask a staunch Conservative.

‘So, so. We wait and bear, for time is working on our side. Chamberlain, though a stranger, like 0158 152 Kellogg in Louisiana, is something of a gentleman. Though we dislike his origin, as well as his policy, we can work with him for the public good.’

Business, our Consul tells me, is regaining something of the old activity, but not in the old languid and lofty ways. Young men are bringing in new energies; young men who have been trained in New York and Chicago. They attend to what they are about, and fag in wharf and counting-house from dawn till dusk. Such men get on.

In reading-rooms and clubs we hear the same report. Charleston, by her precipitate action, brought about the Civil War. No port had more to lose, no port has lost so much. Her pride is deeply galled, yet she is trying, in a spirit of self-denial, to forget her present miseries, undo her past offences, and prepare a better future.

‘Tell me what good there is in playing at Democracy,’ exclaims a cotton-planter, as we sit in the club window, talking of the prospects of South Carolina. ‘No use. Our branch of the American Democracy is dead. Look at these voting lists. You hear the lists are false; we know the lists are false. But here they are, with Federal officers asserting 0159 153 they are true. The law has given our negroes votes, and under a republic votes are all in all. Why strain against the rock? In 1868 we tried. What came of all our efforts to be free? Beaten at every point; routed in shame from every field! Not one Conservative Member was returned for Charleston. A third of the Assembly was white trash—strangers, bankrupts, scalawags; not a man in whom our citizens had confidence got a seat. Two-thirds were Negroes and Mulattoes, hardly any of whom could read and write. Acting with Chamberlain, these rascals robbed and scourged us; but we bore our injuries—under the muzzles of their shotted guns—until the time for a new election came. Taught by events, we tried another course; not readily and with unity, for it is hard to bind the old Adam in our spirits; yet with a promise that invites us to go on. Though we are far from having got a Conservative Government yet in Columbia, we have secured a White majority in the Senate, and a powerful White minority in the Lower House. In Charleston county, though the Negroes count two to one, we have conquered by our new tactics half the seats.’

‘How is the conquest made?’

‘By sense and science; by the White man's power of putting this and that together. In certain counties we are too weak to fight. What is the use of running seven men in Beaufort County, where the Negroes stand at six to one, or three in Georgetown County, where they stand at seven to one? Why try for eighteen seats in Charleston County, seeing that the Negro voters stand at three to one? Till we can seize Fort Sumter and the Citadel, we cannot change these voting lists. Then why not try a compromise? That is the question we asked each other.’

‘Yes; and the reply.’

‘Some said it was no use to try; others believed there was a chance. You see the Negroes have their leaders, and these leaders want to push their way. It is a great thing for a Negro to have a talk with gentlemen; and after all that has been done to set the servile race against their old masters, Negroes have the common feeling of attachment to the places of their birth. Most of us thought a bargain might be struck.’

‘You tried the scheme?’

‘Yes; Captain Dawson, one of our shrewdest 0161 155 citizens, started on a mission to the Negroes, who received him well and listened to his words. He told them, very truly, that White and coloured people are afloat in one ship, and have to sink or swim with her; and he asked them whether they would not do well to pull together, instead of pulling against each other? Yes, they thought that very true. Dawson then showed them that White men have nothing to say against Negroes choosing their own rulers where they have a clear majority; but he told them that the White men wished, for sake of the common weal, that Negroes should choose good men. He offered, on the part of his friends, that if the Negroes would select good men, whether Black or White, in those districts, the Whites would run no candidates in opposition, a policy which would save the Negroes much expense and trouble. They liked his message and his manner, and, in spite of all that scalawags and agitators urged against him, a bargain was concluded and was fairly carried out. A list of moderate Republicans has been returned, in place of a list of strangers, bankrupts, and communists, so that, in spite of Negro ascendancy, we have now a powerful influence in the Legislature.’

Governor Chamberlain, we hear, is much impressed by the success of this new policy. Working through the Negro rather than against him has begun to pay. Chamberlain is changing front; for, with his new Assembly, he could never hope to do in Columbia what Kellogg is attempting to achieve in New Orleans.

A case has just occurred which puts his feeling to the test. For many months complaints have been coming to his Cabinet of great disorders in Edgefield county. Edgefield county lies on the Savannah river, bordering Lincoln county in Georgia; a region in which the coloured people have a great majority of souls. There is a Black militia, a Black general, and a Black staff, as well as a Black sheriff, a Black judge, and other Black officers in Edgefield county. The White inhabitants are treated as a subject race. If any White man resents an insult, the Black militia is ordered out. ‘You cannot call out the State militia,’ say the citizens: ‘it's against the Constitution;’ but the Negro captains and colonels in Edgefield county know nothing about Constitutions. If a quarrel springs up between a Black man and a White, the Negro captains order 0163 157 out their companies, and blood is certain to be shed. Two years ago Governor Chamberlain declined to interfere. With his blandest smile, he. told his visitor that a great deal was being made out of nothing; while his franker secretary said these troubles only paid the tyrants back in their own coin.

But Governor Chamberlain is now open to reason, and having heard fresh complaints from the border county, he has sent a Republican magistrate, Judge Mackey, to look into the facts and report what should be done. Mackey has just returned. This Republican magistrate reports, that, contrary to an express Article in the State Constitution, the coloured officers in Edgefield county have been in the constant habit of calling out their companies, and taking part in street rows. He lays the blame of nearly all disorder on the abuses of Negro government. He declares that since the days when Norman barons put their iron collars round the throats of Saxon thralls, no people speaking the English language have been subjected to such gross indignities as the White inhabitants of Edgefield county. Mackey concludes his report by 0164 158 recommending the Governor to disarm and disband the Negro regiments.

Chamberlain is inclined to follow this advice; but such a course is not to be taken without some peril. The Negroes are now used to arms, and may object to being disarmed. A military spirit is abroad, and Negro mutinies are not unlikely to occur. If Chamberlain disbands his Negro troops, he will be forced to lean more and more on White support. Such compromises as those of Russell, Trenholm, and Dawson, are the true secrets of statesmanship; and this Conservative success in Charleston is a happy augury for every section of the South.

The Negro is seen in Virginia under two aspects—an ideal aspect and a practical aspect.

In the library of the Capitol stands a figure called the Nation's Ward—a Negro boy, in all the freshness of his youth and all the impotence of his race. The Negro type is softened, but not into that of the African Sibyl, in which Story has enchanted into stone the sadness and pathos of a servile people. In the nation's ward, the face is rich in sunshine, and the figure ripples over with animal vivacity. The eyes seem lifted up in search of light. Free, and conscious of his freedom, the Negro youth is still perplexed. What shall he do with his great gift? Virile and plucky, strong to labour and quick to learn, he yet requires to see his way. Such is your ideal picture of the Negro child.

In the shop windows of Richmond appears a 0166 160 version of the same figure treated by another artist The sun is no ideal etcher. A lens has caught the Negro as he is; sitting in the sideway of a builder's yard, abutting on the street, among a litter of chips and dirt. The yard wants cleansing, and the darky has been set to brush it up, but the seducing sunshine is too much for him. No Negro likes to work, and every Negro likes to loll and doze. Instead of sweeping out the yard, Sam has dropped among the chips and dirt. He trifles with the handle of his broom, and bends his cheek into his palm, and passes happily into the land of dreams. He wants no light to see his way. He only seeks to be left alone, that he may close his eyes, and let the sunshine burn into his back and feet. Such is your practical picture of the Negro imp.

‘Guess you'll find most of our national wards asleep, like Sam,’ laughs a friend. Some specimens of a class of Negroes who can hold their own, are found along the James River. We hear of men who, leaving the towns with all their vices, have taken bits of ground, and, after many struggles, have begun to make money, and to put their savings into farms. Several Negroes on the James River 0167 161 have become small farmers, chiefly on the tobacco lands. Tobacco is a paying crop. These coloured people send their boys to school. Mulattoes have taken honours in American Universities and entered into liberal professions with a prospect of success. All these things count for good. It is a happy sign that such careers are open. When last in Richmond, I remember the surprise expressed in a drawing-room on my remark that on the day of my own call to the bar a Negro from Jamaica was also called.

‘You admit a Negro into the Society of the Inner Temple!’ cried a lady of the First Families.

‘Yes, and by the accident of keeping terms, this Negro stood at the head of our list and answered for us when the benchers drank our healths.’

‘But were you not ashamed?’

‘Ashamed of what? This Negro was an excellent scholar and a polished gentleman. He made a speech of which the cleverest fellow in our company might have felt proud.’

‘Still, he was a Negro!’

‘Yes, madam; one knew that as the lady said she knew Greek—by sight; but, though we are VOL. II. M 0168 162 said to practise the black art, our constitutions have nothing to say about the colour of a lawyer's skin.’

A coloured man can now be called to the Virginia bar.

But the examples of such calling are so few as to appear like special wonders. As a rule, the Negro is a toiler of the earth, content to be a toiler of the earth. He hardly cares to rise. He has no stinging wants. If not a waiter in the house, he is a worker in the field. In either case his labour is worth a fifth part of similar labour by a White man; yet his food of squash and green-corn is cheap, while he can live on the rewards of his unskilful and uncertain toil. He understands the value of a dollar; it will buy him grapes and bacon, beans, whisky, and tobacco; but he cannot see the value of a second and third dollar, since he can do no more than eat, drink, chew, and smoke all day. The morrow is the future; and a Negro's life is in the passing hour. One thing only in the future weighs sufficiently on a Negro's mind to shape his action. He is very anxious about his funeral.

‘What makes us poor,’ says Bill, the waiter in my room, ‘is de expens ob buryin' us.’ The 0169 163 money spent on a Negro's funeral would keep his family for a couple of years.

‘A fren' ob mine die yesterday,’ says Bill; ‘dey bury him dis afternoon, and make much funeral.’

‘Are you going to see the last of him?’

‘No, sir, I am not in his society.’

‘What society do you speak of?’

‘De buryin' society. Ebery culled person is a member of two or three societies. He pay much money. When he die, dey have all big sight.’

In walking through Jackson's Ward towards the open country, for a peep at the picturesque ravines which surround the city and give it some rough resemblance to Jerusalem, we drop down a slope, leap over a stream, and are beginning to mount a second slope, when we are startled by a sob and moan that might have floated from the Temple wall. We turn to see the cause. Above us, on the height, is a cemetery with a few white posts and stones, and near the edge of this grassy slope stand a group of Negro women, sobbing at their utmost voice, while a Negro minister is screaming out texts, and four or five lusty Negroes are brandishing spades and shovelling earth. Before we reach the plateau, M 2 0170 164 their rite is over and the grave filled up, but as the mourners file away another group arrives; a handsome hearse, with glass sides, showing a coffin which in England would be that of a prince, followed by eight coaches, each drawn by a pair of handsome black horses, and accompanied by a dozen men in uniform, with eagles and furled banners.

‘Who is this dead man?’ I ask a Negro loafer.

‘Guess dat Mose Crump?’

‘And who is Mose Crump?’

‘Him labourer.’

‘A field labourer?’

‘Guess dat ar.’

The horses prance and tear through the rough ground, and with a vast amount of noise and show, the coffin is brought to the hole in which it is to be cast—not a vault, hardly a trench—and here with furled banner, outspread eagles, and crash of music, Mose Crump is laid down. The family are all present—men and women, boys and girls. The groans and sighs are loud, but the Negro minister contrives to drown the voices of everyone save an old woman, who, with yearning pathos, sobs and screams: ‘I nebber see my son, I nebber see my son 0171 165 no more!’ The preacher tries to storm her down. ‘You go your ways; you go and lib like him; den you see your son again!’ The Black Rachel weeps and yells, refusing to be comforted, even by a minister of her own. When the men in uniform seize their shovels and begin to fill the grave, chanting a chorus like that sung by sailors as they haul in ropes, the old woman cries still louder: ‘No, I nebber see my son, I nebber see my son no more!’ Poor soul, she knows the bitterness of her heart.

The younger people laugh and cry by turns, and when the grave is filled in, they scatter into groups, chat with their friends, and get into their coaches and ride away, passing through crowds of Negroes and Mulattaes dressed in blue shawls and pink bonnets, conscious that they make a big sight, and highly pleased that two strange gentlemen are looking on.

Mose Crump is left alone: a little soil above his head, without a stone to mark his grave. His family are also left alone, with little bread and few sweet-potatoes in their pantry, and without the father's labouring hands. The cost of that funeral would have fed the little Crumps for years to come.

To train a negro to the habit of taking care of himself, requires much time. Long used to leaning on the White man, he finds it hard to stand alone. In many cases he understands personal freedom as the liberty of idleness. What, in his eyes, was the chief distinction of a White? Immunity from labour. A White man never put his hand to spade or plough. A friend of mine, who planted cotton on a large scale in Alabama, one day asked his White overseer to lend a hand to something needing to be done. The man refused. ‘No, sir,’ he answered, with a jerk, ‘Guess I won't; for fifteen years I never do anything but oversee.’ His right had been defined by usage, and my friend the planter had to put his shoulder to the wheel. It is the old, old story of the Magyar Prince who cleaned his own boots; of the Castilian queen who perished at the fire; of the English Governor-general who cooked his own rice. The Negro notion of liberty is the faculty of standing by and looking on while others toil and spin. He always saw the White man standing by and looking on. Why should not he?

Poor fellow, he is not yet wise enough to read 0173 167 the Divine injunction that he who will not labour shall not eat. The Negro is a little world of whims and fancies, ecstacies and superstitions. He imagines life a comedy and a masquerade, in which the parts and costumes are dispensed by chance. If he could only change the parts and dresses! For the moment he is full of this idea. Fame and fortune, power and splendour, seem to him the fruit of a gigantic lottery called Public Life, and he is haunted by the notion that if he could only invest his fortunes in that lottery he might live in a fine house and have squash and sweet potato, whisky and tobacco, all his days. Hence, he is hot with politics, to the neglect of everything he has to do. Shall he come to the front? Yes, stand in front. To have a thousand faces turned towards him, to hear a thousand voices ring out: ‘Bravo!—dat is good,—hock, hi, hi, hee!’ is what he wants.

At the time of my first visit to Virginia, the Negro had been free about a year, and in the freshness of his freedom showed a spring and go that hinted, not at physical vitality only, but at a power of moral progress. Sam, the waiter, sat up half his night over book and slate. Harry, the labourer, squatted on a waste, and wrung his maize and onion from a blasted heath. Sam walked with me one evening to a score of Negro cabins, where, in dens and garrets, we saw woolly pates bending over desks and dirty fingers pointing at A B C. No city in Virginia had then a public school for either White or Black; but the enfranchised Negro seemed resolved to have such schools as he could make. His schools were small and rude; but the beginnings of many great things have been small and rude. What seemed of consequence was the impulse. 0175 169 White people were then opposed to State schools. The principle was bad. State schools were Yankee notions; only fit for regions like New England, with no ancient gentry and no servile population. First Families were above that sort of thing. A State school meant equality, and if the war had put an end to servitude, equality was still a long way off. The Negro seemed ready to seize an opportunity neglected by the Whites.

That impulse was not sustained long enough for fruit. It was a spark—a flash—and it is gone.

The Whites, grown wiser by events, have founded public schools in every district of the country; schools for White children as well as schools for Black. These schools are free, well built, ably conducted. A Father can have his child taught to read and write for nothing; but in a state of freedom, he may either set his child to learn or not. Hardly any White parents neglect to send their child to school, for the necessity of education has been forced on their attention by loss of fortune, fame and power. It is otherwise among the coloured folk. Two Negro parents out of three neglect to send their little folks to school. They will not take 0176 170 the pains. School hours are fixed, school habits orderly; and Negroes find it hard to keep fixed hours and to maintain order in their cabins. If their imps go to school, they must be called betimes, and must be washed and combed. Clothes need making and mending. Meals must be cooked, and the youngsters must be sent out early. Children bring home slates and books, and want a quiet corner for their evening tasks. But where, in the filthy cabins of Jackson's Ward, are they to find quiet nooks? And then, though schools are free, books and slates cost money; and the dollars spent on books and slates are so much taken from the margin left for drams and quids. Improvident fathers find the cost of school a burthen; indolent mothers find the worry of school a great addition to their cares. Such parents sicken at the efforts to be made; a strain from dawn to dusk; a self-denial from year to year; and, in their indolent selfishness, they let their children loiter in the lanes, and wallow in the styes.

The schools are separate: White children in one set, coloured children in another set. They never mix the two classes. Teachers assure you they could not mix the classes if they tried.

Most of the pupils in coloured schools are of Mixed blood; some of them almost White. No sight can well be sadder than to see these little ones sitting on the Negro benches, and to hear their never failing ‘No,’ in answer to the query whether they have a father? Hapless waifs! In five or six coloured schools which we have visited to-day we notice boys and girls as white as any children in New York. You see at once the facts—White father, Quadroon or Octoroon mother—lawless love, abandoned mistress, nameless child.

‘Why not allow these children to attend White schools?’

‘We cannot,’ answers the inspector. ‘Colour counts for little, family for much. In the case of every child the facts are known; and if White people were silent, the Negroes would make a row. Negroes who have no dislike to Whites, as such, detest Hybrids and Quadroons; for Hybrids and Quadroons not only despise the Negroes but remind them how many of their young women run after White men rather than Black.’

‘One remembers, in Hayti, that the full-blooded 0178 172 Negroes, fresh from Africa, made their fiercest slaughter among the Mixed breeds.’

‘It is always so,’ replies the experienced officer. ‘In Negro rows, a difference in the shade makes all the difference in the fight. Nearer in blood, sharper in feud.’

In one of the Negro schools we find a girl of nine or ten, with one of the most striking faces I have ever seen. White skin, brown rippling hair, and rosy cheeks are lighted with a pair of blue and wondering eyes. The fair young lady sitting at the teacher's desk is not so fair as this ‘coloured’ child.

‘What a sweet face! Is this girl a Negress, and excluded from an ordinary school?’

‘Yes; her face is apt to take one in. Yet this fair child is the daughter of a Quadroon of bad character, who lives among her people in Jackson Ward. Everybody knows the child's mother; no one knows her father. Yes, her case is sad, but what are we to do? The Negroes claim her. How are we to separate a mother from her child?’

‘But surely these white-looking lads will not remain among the coloured folk when they grow up?’

‘Not all. The bolder lads will run away. It will be hard for them to hide the stain of blood; but some are fair enough to pass, if they can only get away to distant parts. In London or in Sydney they might never be unmasked. In America they are sure to fail. Our people are suspicious, and the Negroes keep an eye on fellows who try to dodge. You cannot get beyond their reach. In every town of Canada and the United States, the Mulattoes are a separate class, with signs and tokens of their own. If any one of their community tries to get among the Whites they hunt him down with merciless glee.’

‘And girls?’

‘Girls have a harder time than boys, for they have fewer trades to work at, and they cannot earn as much money as men. A man who saves money may be off; but women seldom save enough to pay their fares. And, then, the jealousy is fiercer where a woman is concerned. Negresses watch Quadroons with an unsleeping ire.’

Gifted with such beauty as hers, will this poor little Octoroon, now opening her blue eyes at the fair teacher, stay in the purlieus of Richmond, where 0180 174 her mother lives? If so, will she be too proud of her White face to marry a Black mate; and yet too low in her connections to win a White one? Will she remain deaf to honest love, yet open to irregular proposals? Who, considering how likely all these things are to happen, will not hope that she may fly? Yet, if she flies, what then? Suppose she prove to be as quick in brain as she is fair in face. She may become an artist, singer, actress, authoress. She may conceal her birth of shame, her youth of misery, her taint of blood. She may assume a false name, assert a false nationality. She may be Mademoiselle This, Señora That; yet fear will dog her steps. At every whisper she will faint, at every exclamation start. Imagine her a queen of song, a popular novelist; with crowds of worshippers at her feet, one favoured more than others; when some school-mate from Virginia comes across her path. ‘Dat 'oman buffal! Hi, hi, hee! Dat 'oman ole gal—dat 'oman nigger wench!’

In English eyes Virginia is a pleasant country, with an aspect that recalls the home-like hills in Kent. Her air is soft, her climate fine. How green her fields, how fresh her streams, how bright her uplands! Fronting the sea, she faces all the world, and every port where trade is carried on lies open to her enterprise. Deep friths indent her shores and tides flow up her valleys. She is everywhere a water power. A thousand sparkling rills drop down her wooded heights. Her dells are cool with ponds and lakes, her ravines musical with steps, cascades, and falls. Down every hollow winds a rivulet, blessing the soil through which it flows, and carrying seaward the accumulating forest-trees—fuel for fire, planking for homestead, mast and spar for ship. But she has beauties of her own, the like of which we English only see in dreams. A ridge of apennines 0182 176 bulges across the country, separating the fertile Shenandoah valley on the east from the enchanting Winchester valley on the west. These apennines are called the Blue Ridge, from the purple tinge which, in the twilight after sunset, deepens into blue, as dark as that of either Syrian sea or Grecian sky. Virginia's sun is bright, and in his brightness constant through the year. Fogs are unknown, mists seldom seen. This wealth of sunlight in the sky sheds wealth of colour on the landscape. Skies as clear, and streams as fresh, are found in many places; but the beauty of this range of mountain woods is hardly to be matched on earth.

Groups of hills start here and there beyond the chain of heights; one Alp called White Top Mountain, lifting its head above the line that Snowdon would attain if she were piled on the highest peak of the Cheviot Hills. These hills are clothed with pine and maple, oak, and chestnut, to their crowns. Their sides are all aglow; gold, orange, scarlet, crimson, russet; all the burning colours of the forest mingling in one common flame. The glory of the falling year is nowhere to be seen in such perfection as in these Virginian Apennines.

Drop into this garden—you feel at home. This orchard is an English orchard; apples, pears, peaches, plums are all English fruit. Here is a potato-ridge; you pull the stalk and find it is an Irish plant. Here, too, are things well known at home, although not grown at home. In Surrey, these grapes would be under glass. These melons would not grow in an English garden; and these pippins and lady-apples, though often seen on English tables, are grown on this Virginian soil. Here we have maize ripening in one corner, tobacco in a second, pea-nuts and sweet potatoes in a third. These roots and fruits are homely things to us, yet homely in a far-off way, much as roses of Sharon and lilies of the valley are familiar to our thoughts. We draw nigh to them and feel at home among them, yet we recognise a sense of difference and of separation that clothes them with poetic charm.

Caught between two fires, burnt alike by North and South, Virginia suffered more in the civil feud than any other State. Nine years ago, when I was last in Richmond, the Capitol looked down on a heap of ruins. Main-street was gutted by fire. Masses of the city, blown up by gunpowder, lay in heaps VOL. II. N 0184 178 of charred rafters and blackened stones. A manufacturing suburb was completely wrecked. All works were stopped, hundreds of homes were roofless, every one was wanting bread. In every house there was a scowling brow, a flashing eye, a bitter tongue. A conquering soldiery filled the streets and held the Capitol as they are now holding the arsenal of New Orleans. Out of Richmond the case was not so bad as in the city, yet the war had scarred the country on every side; made a desert of the Blue Ridge, burnt up Fredericksburg, scorched the banks of York River, desolated the banks of the Rappahannock, and destroyed the fields and orchards round Petersburg. Few parts of Virginia had escaped the ravages of war.

Virginia's suffering was sharp, but her offences had been great and sore. To me Virginia is a pleasant place. I like her frank men, her lovely women. I cannot make up my mind to be harsh, even in judging her faults; yet I am bound to say that the physical wreck caused by the civil war only corresponded to the moral wreck caused by slavery.

Of all the Southern States Virginia was the worst. She had the least excuse for slavery, and she held 0185 179 the largest number of men in bonds. She was the supreme Slave State. Georgia, Louisiana, and Alabama had some shadow of excuse. They wanted labour on their land—white labour, as they fancied, was impossible; and they could only get black labour by purchasing the Negro. If it was bad to own slaves, it was odious to breed them for the market. In Virginia there was no pretence that White men could not till the soil and reap the harvest, for the country is one of the healthiest on the American Continent. The air is dry. No marshes, and few stagnant pools exist. Ague, the plague of Georgia and Louisiana, is hardly known in Virginia. The rainfall corresponds to that of France, the sunshine to that of Sicily and Andaluz. A man accustomed to no greater change from heat to cold than he may feel in Surrey, finds the climate of Richmond and Winchester suit him. Winter is so mild that sheep are left out all the year with no more food and shelter than they get on hill-sides and in ravines.

This salubrity of the climate tempted the Virginians to convert their pleasant homesteads into breeding-grounds; into nurseries from which the N 2 0186 180 slave-markets of Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana might be fed. Lucre tempted them.

In many Southern States the Negro race began to fall off as soon as the African slave trade was suppressed. The waste of life was great; the power of natural growth was small. Unlike the European, a Negro has no vast and ever-widening vital force. Left to himself he will not multiply as Saxons multiply. But, when the Georgians found it cheaper to buy new slaves than to take care of old ones, Virginia gave her wealth, her intellect, and her possessions to the service of this impious cause. She took to slave-breeding as a business. Slaves multiplied like hogs, and in Virginia they were kept like hogs. They were not taught to read and write. A man was seldom allowed to marry. In Kentucky a planter hardly ever sold a slave, thinking it mean, if not immoral; and the public feeling of his country was against the trade. But in Virginia no such shame was felt.

Rank was her sin, and stern has been her punishment. Like an enchantress she was taken in her beauty and her shame, and she is laden with the fetters, smitten by the sword, of an inflexible justice. 0187 181 She is humbled to the dust. The iron eats into her flesh; the insult breaks her heart. She is no longer bold of brow. Thrown to the ground, her high and scornful spirit sank into the earth like water poured along a field of grass. For many a year to come she will not slip those fetters from her limbs, but she is easing herself under them, trying to feel her feet and free her arms.

The civil war was marked by many new and striking features, most of all in the practical results. A wealthy aristocracy was crushed; a vast community of slaves was freed. What other war has done so much? In servile wars, the slaves have always suffered by defeat. No servile war succeeds. Until the fall of Richmond, it is doubtful whether the sword had ever freed a single slave. Slaves rose in Sparta and Syracuse, in Alexandria and Rome, but they were crushed with merciless rigour. Gallic slaves rose under Clovis, and Tartar slaves under Alexis; but the end of every rising was a deeper fall, a sterner punishment, a harder rivetting of the servile chain. From Spartacus to Pugacheff, the leaders of servile insurrections have always failed. The case of Toussaint l' Overture is no exception to 0188 182 the rule, for the war in Hayti was political rather than servile, and in the long run Toussaint failed as Dessalines and Christophe also failed. When the war of secession broke out, emancipation by the sword was a new theory; and the overthrow of a powerful aristocracy for the benefit of their serfs was a thing unknown.

No such upheaval of society, as we now find along the vast regions stretching from the Potomac to the Gulf of Mexico, is on record in any nation; nor after such a convulsion can one expect to see the moral balance of society rapidly restored. We must be patient, for we have to wait on some of the most delicate movements of the human heart.

A man learns to hide his scars and sores; a woman will not learn. Women are never so heroic, so imprudent, as in defeat. They glory in their sufferings, and prepare the day of their revenge. In all these southern towns, the ladies keep alive the memory of fights in which their brothers and their lovers fell. You note an obelisk to some fallen brave. Who raised that shaft? The ladies. You observe a cairn in some deserted field. Who built that cairn? Ladies; still ladies. Here in Richmond 0189 183 stands a pyramid; and the erectors of this pyramid were ladies, ever more ladies. Men forget, women protest.

That all these protests put the day of their recovery back we know, and all men know; but how are you to argue with impulsive and imperious politicians, who refute you with a glance, disarm you with a smile? A lovely Maryland girl used to make our London drawing-rooms ring with her scorn of ‘the northern scum.’ You saw the tone was false, the feeling vicious, the passion fleeting; but that swelling voice was in your ear, and when you turned to her in hostile mood, a pair of flashing eyes were on your face. What could you do but run?

If strangers feel such pangs in dealing with these female patriots, even when he differs from them in opinion, how much more painful must it be for son or brother? It is a consolation to perceive that these Conservatives have a better and more wholesome side. If last to forget the old, women are first to begin the new. If ladies build pyramids, they also set the example of teaching in the public schools.

Entering on a course of self-reform, Virginia is making efforts in the one way that is likely to be fruitful and enduring. She is educating her citizens for a new career; a career of freedom and industry, in which she hopes to gain the sympathy and assistance of the old country. English in her heart, she is perfectly American in her head. She thinks, and rightly thinks, that in the beauty of her landscape, in the fertility of her soil, in the salubrity of her climate, she has means of drawing towards herself the thoughts of many English families who are looking out for new homesteads and settlements. A better education for her old stock, a freer opening for new comers, are the two planks in her platform of improvement.

The first plank comes first. Virginia has an evil reputation in the world; and men might hesitate ere putting their money and their characters into the power of such rowdies as the old Virginian drunkards, duellists, and gamesters are reported to have been. Some members of these classes still remain. In article number three of the New Constitution there is a clause condemning duellists to loss of civil rights. 0191 185 But is the article enforced? I grieve to say that public feeling is against the code.

Here are two gentlemen, Mosely and Paine, of good position in society, gentlemen who ought to set an example to people in Jackson Ward. They have a personal difference, and a challenge to fight passes between them. The authorities stand up, and talk of visiting the offenders with civil death; but Paine and Mosely are the darlings of society, and social sentiment is stronger than the law. In spite of their duel, Mosely and Paine are still in the enjoyment of their rights.

In time the code will prevail; but training in the school and sentiment in the drawing-room must go before concession in the club and sympathy in the street.

On our arrival in Washington we start for the White House to see the President. In crossing the park we meet Secretary Fish and Secretary Bristow, and exchange with them the latest news from New Orleans. The Full Committee, startled by the Sub-Committee's report, is going South; but no one thinks a new enquiry will present new facts. The thing is done: the truth is told. Yet President Grant, though yielding to public opinion, appears to cling to his old idea that the South should not be left to settle their elections at the ballot-box.

Finding the President engaged, we go into the drawing-room and spend some minutes with his family. Mrs. Grant receives us, and presents us to her son, Colonel Grant, and that son's wife. No princess does the honours of her house more affably 0193 187 than Mrs. Grant. She likes the White House very much, she says, and few ladies have seen more of it than she. ‘Before we came to live here, many of my female friends assured me it was a hole, a wretched hole,’ she rattles merrily, ‘and I whispered in their ears that if I could not get on I would send for them—ha! ha!’ Some critics, in their present state of mind, would find a taint of female Cæsarism in such persiflage. Her drawing-room window looks on a garden, at the end of which stands the unfinished column of George Washington, cutting the line of the Potomac, and parting the hills of Virginia. Vanities of human pride! That column, which was meant to reach the sky, is broken short. That river, which was deemed a sure defence of the republican capital, has been profaned by hostile fleets. Those hills, which are so lovely and so fertile, have been wasted by American fire.

‘Another deputation from the Senate,’ sighs the President, coming through a private door from his reception-room. He looks fatigued and worried. Dropping on a chair he puffs at his cigar, apparently 0194 188 forgetting guests and drawing-rooms, his broad and intellectual features strained and grim. We talk of New Orleans.

‘The state of things in that section is unbearable,’ says the President, brightening up. ‘Here, in this cabinet, I have a list made out by General Sheridan of three thousand murders and attempts at murder in Louisiana.’

‘I have seen a later list, in which the figures count up to four thousand.’

‘Four thousand!’ exclaims the President.

‘Yes, four thousand; and the list is growing every hour. Nothing is easier than to make such lists. You have only to ask for ten thousand; Packard and Pinchback will be able to supply them in a week.’

‘You think the figures incorrect?’

‘The figures may be true enough. Violence is common on the Gulf of Mexico, where a civilized race is fighting with two savage races; but the question is—how far these murders and attempts at murder have their sources in political passion?’

‘Why,’ puts in Colonel Grant, ‘there were three thousand political murders in Texas last year; three 0195 189 thousand murders of Negroes in a single State in one year!’

‘That statement strikes one oddly. We have recently come from Texas, which we crossed from north to south, from Red River to Galveston. On every road we heard of crime; a man stabbed here, a cabin burnt there. At every drinking-crib we heard of rows in which knives were drawn and shots fired. Much of this crime was Negro crime. Yet, from Red River to Galveston, although the talk ran constantly on acts of violence, we never once heard these acts of violence attributed to political causes. Books and journals show you that the crime in Texas is not so much White on Black, or Black on White, as Black on Black.’

‘I don't read books nor journals either,’ says the President moodily, ‘except the clippings made for me by Babcock.’ General Babcock is the Private Secretary.

This saying of the President is no joke. General Grant never opens a book or peeps into a paper; yet he cannot keep his eyes off caricatures of himself. Opponents, well aware of his weakness, sting and flout him through the eye. Here squats 0196 190 the President in a nursery, with a wooden horse, a paper crown, marked ‘Cæsar,’ and a box of toy bricks, which he is trying to build into a throne. Senator Kernan, a democrat, addresses him—speaking for the coming host of Democrats: ‘Oh, mighty Cæsar! dost thou lie so low?’ Here Uncle Sam, in the character of a pedlar, struts into the White House, with a coffin on his shoulder, which he tilts against the wall. The coffin is inscribed: ‘Third Term.’ Uncle Sam points to his wares, and asks the President: ‘You want a third term?’

Great pains are taken by the President's family to hide the coarser things from him. It is a common pleasantry for American girls to say they peep at all books and papers before laying them on the family table, to see whether they are fit for older people to read. The ladies of the White House assume these offices for the President; but he ferrets out the worst attacks, and sits in front of them for hours, chewing his cigar in speechless rage.

‘I am disgusted with these wasps and hornets,’ he remarks, ‘yet cannot help looking at them.’

Few soldiers have enjoyed the art of treating caricatures like Fritz der Einige: ‘Let everyone see 0197 191 and speak. My people and myself understand each other; they say what they like, I do what I like.’

If it be true that a man is not really famous till he is well abused, it is not the less true that a man is never much abused till he has made himself famous in some other way. Grant may not be, like O'Connell, the best-abused man alive, but is assuredly the worst-abused man in the United States. All sorts of sins and vices are imputed to him. According to the caricatures he is a tyrant and a traitor, an assassin and a thief. He wants a third term of office, he keeps a military household, he despises civil authority. He is called Cæsar in mockery, Soulouque in earnest. Hosts of mean offences are imputed to him—avarice, nepotism, venality—and the comic papers bristle with insults and assaults. In one of these prints a naughty boy, climbing into Uncle Sam's pantry to reach some ‘third term’ preserve, upsets ‘habeas corpus’ jam, for which, being caught in the fact, he is soundly whipped on the back. One large cartoon, by Matt Morgan, has the title: ‘Grant's Last Blow at Louisiana.’ A handsome female figure mounts the steps of the Capitol with a petition. Grant comes out to 0198 192 meet her, with his two mastiffs, Phil and Belknap, and upbraids her: ‘You have dared to despise the masters I put over you; you have the temerity to wish to govern yourself. I whipped you once. You have no rights that a soldier is bound to respect.’ To which abuse Louisiana objects: ‘I am a Free State. I obey the Federal law. I am suffering for law and peace. I merely wish to rule myself under the constitution.’ ‘Constitution!’ cries the armed ruler, plunging his dagger into her heart, ‘I am your constitution.’

In the passion of the moment, everything good and fine in General Grant is overlooked, even his genius as a captain and his services in the field. It is a great misfortune for a soldier to have won his laurels in domestic strife. One half the nation hates him for his talent, and the second half desires to bury him and his services in oblivion. If Naseby and Dunbar had been fought in France instead of in England and Scotland, Cromwell would not have been without his statue. What German ever mentions Waldburg? What Gaul is proud of Guise? Yet hardly any Cavalier denied that Cromwell was a great soldier; and an Englishman cannot hear 0199 193 without surprise and pain that the man who captured Donelson, Vicksburg, and Richmond is not a great soldier.

‘Sheridan,’ says the President, returning to his lieutenant, ‘is a man of drill and order, who understands the South. But the public have mistaken Sheridan, and they will not see his actions in the proper light.’ Without saying so in words, he seems to mean that Sheridan is suffering from the general but unjust suspicion under which his Government lies. If so, the President is right. The odium is undoubtedly great; yet Grant is suffering as much for Sheridan as Sheridan is suffering for Grant.

The Black Question, like the Red Question, is broader than the policy of a day, and longer than the lives of Sheridan and Grant. Can coloured people live in freedom? Can a Negro bear the rough friction, the close contact, and the hot competition of an Anglo-Saxon? Higher races than the African are dying in this fierce contention. Where is the Pict, the Cymri, and the Gael? Where, on American soil, are the Six Nations, the Horse Indians, the Mexicans? What facts in natural history suggest that Negroes are exceptions to a VOL. II. O 0200 194 general rule? The strong advance, the fit survive. Are Negroes stronger to advance, and fitter to survive than Whites?

In going to the Capitol with Senator Fowler, we meet Tom Chester, a Negro of pure blood, from New Orleans, whose acquaintance I made some years since, in our salad days. Chester was a student of the Middle Temple when I was eating mutton at the Inner Temple. Called to the English bar, he went to New Orleans, where he has practised ever since. He sails to Europe now and then, and we have met in good houses, of the revolutionary sort, tenanted by Polish, French, and German refugees.

‘Are you a Kelloggite?’

‘No! A native of the South, I wish to live at peace with my White neighbours. I am not exactly a public man, for I have never sought and never held office. I am not ashamed of my complexion. Many of my people are very ignorant and very stupid. I admit the laziness, too; but they are such as God made them; and, in truth, they have fine qualities. If left alone, they would soon be on good terms with their old masters. It is not the Negro, as a rule, who makes the row.’

‘You mean that the carpet-baggers, men like Kellogg and Chamberlain, make the rows?’

‘Not in our interest, but their own. These men our friends! You know me. In New Orleans I have the respect of bar and bench. No advocate objects to act with me or to oppose me in any suit. White judges receive me. I dine with high and low, just as I should dine in London, Paris, and Berlin. But let me go up North, into the towns from which these Chamberlains and Kelloggs hail. I should not be allowed to dine at a common table in Boston and Chicago! I tell you we shall get on better in New Orleans when we are left alone.’

On coming from the Senate, where the Members are still flaming out against the President's policy in Louisiana, we meet Pinchback in the lobby.

‘Cheated, sah,’ he bawls at me; ‘cheated, sah. The Senators reject my papers! It is all dat Kellogg, sah!’

‘Has not Governor Kellogg signed your papers properly?’

‘Gubnor Kellogg! He gubnor! Dat Kellogg is a rascal, sah. He sign de papers all right; put big seal all right; den he write a letter underground, O 2 0202 196 for de Republicans not to vote. He want to come hisself. He neber stay in New Orleans. Sah, Kellogg is de greatest big rascal in America!’

‘Pinch seems put out,’ the Senator remarks, ‘but we must draw the line somewhere. A sound party man, I draw a line at the penitentiary. It may seem singular, but I object to sitting on the next chair to a Senator who has recently come out of jail.’

Emerging from the hall, and standing on the marble terrace looking over the Potomac towards the mountains of Virginia, I venture to say: ‘A White Revival seems to be setting in, not only in the South, but in the North and West. Have you Republicans no fear of going too far in trying to crush the whole White population of Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina under the heels of a small majority of Negroes and Mulattoes?’

‘Yes, frankly; we have gone too far. It was an error; but we seemed to have no choice. We gave the Negroes votes in order to secure the policy of emancipation. If all fear of a return to slavery were gone, we should be willing to allow each State to judge how far the franchise ought to go, and 0203 197 where it ought to stop. A common rule is good for common cases; but a man must be a fool, as well as a fanatic, who insists on applying one rule to every case. Logic is one thing, the public weal another. We allow the people of Nevada, Oregon, and California to refuse political rights to Asiatics.’

‘Is not that Asiatic Question your next affair?’

‘Yes: greater than the last. The Yellow Question is more menacing to republican institutions than the Black.’

Our first glimpse of this Yellow brother is in the market-place of Baltimore, the noisiest and dirtiest spot in the United States, excepting China Town in San Francisco, which is not regarded by Sanitary Boards as being in the United States. Our brother is two-fold: perhaps man and wife; perhaps only twins. Whether he is male and female who can say? The two parts of him are of one height, and wear the same round hat and blue frock. Each part of our Asiatic brother has the same smooth face, round chin, dark eyebrows, matted hair, snub nose, and placid look. Amid the din and squalor of that mart of fish and flesh, of fruit and greenstuffs, he moves about, himself unmoved, neither bold like a Yankee, nor restive like an Apache, nor awkward like a Negro, but severely stolid and observant, asking no questions with his tongue, yet taking in every sort of 0205 199 knowledge through his eyes. Chewing his betel-nut, he stares at stall and pen, at rack and shelf, at fish and flesh, at fruit and herb, without a brightening smile or puzzling frown; yet when he turns away, he wears the visage and expression of a man who could build that stall and pen, set up that rack and shelf, dress that fish and flesh, and sell that fruit and greenstuff.

At night we meet him in a sham-auction room, watching, with intentest unconcern, the cheap-jack put up his lots of rags, cotton, paper shoes, zinc razors, glass jewels, and shoddy skins for sale. He never makes a bid; but when the cheap-jack passes off his spurious wares, mostly on poor old Negresses, a smile of approval lights his face. Our Yellow brother is evidently at school.

A little later in the night we find him at a shooting-gallery; not firing away his cents, like the Yankees and Negroes, but looking on, and noticing the scores. If any difference can be traced in his impassive eyes, he seems less at home in the shooting-gallery than in the cheap market-place and sham auction-room. The bells ring too often. Hitting bull's-eyes appears to pain as well as puzzle him. 0206 200 After watching eight or nine fellows crash their money on the iron disks, he gives his betel-nut a turn, squirts out his red saliva, and steps into the street, paying no more heed to the yelp of Negro sneers behind him than an Arab pays to the bark of his street dogs.

In Chicago, at the moment of starting for California, we make the acquaintance of Paul Cornell, chief partner in the great watch factory of that city. Cornell's watches are known in America as Breguet's watches are known in Europe. From the senior partner, who is going to San Francisco with a view to business, we learn that Ralston's busy brain has conceived the idea of opening a great watch factory in San Francisco, and doing the watch trade on a scale not yet attempted in Geneva or Neufchâtel The main feature of Ralston's scheme is the employment of Yellow labour in the place of White.

‘Yellow labour,’ says Cornell, ‘is cheap and good; the men are docile and intelligent; they never drink, and they are easily kept in order.’

‘Have they any skill in making clocks and watches?’

‘No, not yet; they have the trade to learn; but they are quick and patient. In six or eight months a poor fellow picked up in Jackson Street will be able to make a watch.’

A company has been formed in San Francisco, with Cornell as president, Ralston as treasurer, and Cox as secretary. Cornell is a patron of religious enterprises. Ralston is a patriot, so stiff in local feeling that he will not have a sofa in his parlour, a picture in his lobby, that is not of native origin. Cox is a shining light among street preachers, who devotes his Sunday energies to labour in the slums and alleys of San Francisco. Part of a factory on Fourth Street, now occupied by a carriage company, not far from the Chinese quarter, has been hired and fitted up. Tools and machinery have been sent from Cincinnatti and New York. The whole affair looks well.

‘The climate of San Francisco,’ Cornell explains to me, ‘is suitable for the watch trade. In Chicago we have many things to overcome. Summer is very hot, winter very cold. Workpeople need warm clothes, good rooms, and costly food. The heat and cold affect our tools and implements. 0208 202 Fuel is scarce and dear. In California there is neither heat to strain nor frost to chill our wheels and levers. We can work the whole year round, and if our business needs it we can run our machinery night and day.’

With Piety at the prow and Patriotism at the helm, what have the new Watch Company to fear?

‘The laws of God to fear!’ snaps a voice at my side, the voice of a physician, who has lived for many years in San Francisco, and has watched the coming of our Yellow brethren from Hong Kong with pained and speculative eyes.

‘I have a strong aversion to this enterprise,’ he says to me in the privacy of his state-room. ‘I am a born American, and I want to keep America for the Americans. Few persons see so much of our Asiatics as myself, and I can tell you, as a man of science and of moral order, that I should be sorry to see the population of China Town increase. What are the Cornell Company about? They say, they are going to set up a new industry in San Francisco. But for whom? Not for Americans, but for Asiatics. They are going to teach Chinese labourers how to do the White man's work and steal the White 0209 203 man's market. Why? Because the Asiatic, living on rice and tea, will labour for seventy-five cents. a day, while an American, living on roast beef and beer, asks five dollars a day! Should they succeed, as Cornell thinks, the watch factories in Chicago will be closed, two hundred skilful artizans will be thrown on the world, Illinois will be robbed of an artistic industry, and five or six thousand Mongols will come over from Hong Kong, of whom five or six hundred will find lucrative employment on our shores!’

As we ascend the mountains of Wyoming, we begin to meet our Yellow brother on the track; here skipping nimbly as a waiter, there drudging heavily as a hedger and ditcher; but in every place silent, docile, quick, and hardy. Sam shrinks from these mountain blasts and winter snows. Good wages tempt him to come up; but when the icy winds enter his soul, he prefers the squash and sugar-cane of South Carolina to the elk and antelope of Wyoming. Hi Lee can live in any climate and any country; in Bitter Creek, as well as in San Jose and Los Angeles; caring, it would seem, for neither heat nor cold, neither drought nor rain, 0210 204 neither good food nor bad, neither kindness nor unkindness, so that he can earn money and save money. At Evanston, an eating station on the heights above Salt Lake, we have a troop of Chinese waiters, dressed in short white smocks like girls, having smooth round faces like girls, and soft and nimble ways like girls.

After passing Salt Lake we find these Asiatics increase in number. In and out, among the valleys at Cape Horn, Toano, Indian Creek, and Halleck, they are settling down in hut and ranch. We find them in Copper Cañon and along the Palisades; we hear of them in the White Pine Country, in Mountain District, at Tuscarora, Cornucopeia, and Eureka. They go anywhere, do anything. One of the race comes up to me at Elko with a bit of paper in his hand, on which is written ‘Lee Wang, Antelope Ranch, White Pine Country.’ Lee Wang cannot speak a word of English, yet he is going up alone into the mining districts of Nevada, to serve an unknown master, who may treat him as a dog. Chinese can live where other men, even Utes and Shohones, die. It is enough for them to scrape abandoned mines and glean exhausted fields. A 0211 205 grain of silver pays them for the toil; a stalk of maize rewards them for the search. They eat dead game, which Indians will not touch. As waiters, woodmen, navvies, miners, laundresses, they drive off every labourer, whether male or female, whether White or Black.

At Elko all the races on this continent meet; Red men, Black men, White men, Yellow men; not many Red, and fewer Black; yet some of each. The Whites are mostly male, the Chinese male and female.

Elko is the capital of Elko County, and a thousand souls are said to huddle in and out among the railway blocks. A State University is rising in the neighbourhood, based on the two great principles—first, that ‘tuition is to be free,’ and second, ‘that no one is to be excluded from the class-room on account of sex, race, or colour.’ This emancipated city in the mountains is spread in canvas and reared in plank, but five or six whisky-shops and faro-banks are being raised of brick. You dainty little sheds, with muslin blinds, are tenanted by Chinese girls, and I have reason to believe that all these Chinese girls are slaves. A centre of many 0212 206 roads, as well as a railway depôt, Elko has a future history. Will that history be made and told by the offspring of Mongolian slaves?

At Sacramento a street scene shows us how the White children of California are being trained to regard their Yellow brother.

‘There's John!’ shouts a boy to his playmate; ‘let's pelt him.’

The two urchins stop their play to shy pebbles at a Mongol labourer toiling at his task, giving his fair day's labour for his unfair day's wage. No one appears to think these urchins wrong in pelting that unoffending man.

‘It's only John!’ fires up the first lad, as I catch his arm and shake the pebbles from his fist. ‘It's only John! Don't you see it's only John?’

This habit of looking on a Yellow face as scum and filth, has grown up with these lads from their cradles, just as the habit of looking on a Black face used to grow up with Georgian and Virginian lads. Born in the Golden State, these boys have seen, since they could see at all, their Yellow neighbours treated like dogs—pushed, shouldered, cuffed, and kicked by every White. At home they see their Chinese 0213 207 servant treated as a slave; at church they hear him branded as a pagan. Never since their birth have they known a Chinee resent an insult and return a blow. Where, then, is the risk of pelting such a weak and helpless butt?

The boy's father seems to take this view of the affair. Banter and argument are equally thrown away on him. John is a druge, a waif and stray, without a public right. The child, he rather thinks, pays John a compliment by trying to crack his skull.

Nothing so strange, hardly anything so grave, has happened in our time as this opening of a new Asiatic problem on the field of American politics.

Time out of mind the Chinese people stayed at home, asking for no fraternity of men, but barring their doors in every stranger's face. Not caring for the outer world, they sought to dwell alone, living their own life, enjoying their own produce, observing their own rites. A wall, the greatest work of human toil, divided them from neighbours on the west, while in the east they had no neighbours save the winds and waves. In every Chinese port, at every Chinese town, a barrier rose; a wall, a gate, a tariff, an observance; something that kept the world at bay. A pilgrim now and then slipped through the toils and brought back stories from the land of flowers. Some trader now and then corrupted an 0215 209 official, and exchanged the produce of one country for another. Thus a gate was opened, here and there, to let in opium and to fetch out tea. Yet, taken as a whole, the countries stretching from the Hindu Koosh to the Yellow Sea were closed against the enterprise, sealed against the knowledge of mankind.

A stranger might not enter and a native could not leave the country. China was a land apart, having no relation with the outer world. Even for natives there were classes and societies, which for social purposes were separated from each other like the castes in Bengal. On every door there was a mystery. A trader could not see his mandarin, nor could a mandarin speak to his prince. Women were hidden in zenanas, and a hundred rules and rites divided class from class and man from man. Except a member of the Royal House, no one could look on the ‘Son of Heaven.’ Locked in his palace, ignorant alike of men and things, surrounded by female slaves, the ruler of one third of the human race passed his days in drinking tea, in smoking opium, and in fonding slaves. In his besotted pride and ignorance, the Tartar prince regarded every one VOL. II. P 0216 210 who lived outside his empire, as a dog, unfit to bask in the light of his celestial eyes.

An English broadside smashed the gates of this paradise of tea drinkers and opium-smokers. Through the breach then opened by our guns the natives came pouring forth, and ever since that day, they have continued rushing, like the water from a mountain lake. They pour in threads, in cataracts, in streams; one stream turning into Polynesia, a second stream running to Australia, and a third stream racing towards the Golden Gate. Who can assure us that these streams will ever stop?

By preference these Mongols make for California; first, because the voyage is cheap and easy; second, because the climate suits them; third, because the pay is higher and the market wider than they find elsewhere. From California they go to Oregon by sea, to Nevada, Idaho, and Montana by land. In Utah they have found few markets, the Mormons being as sober and laborious as themselves. Yet even in Salt Lake City they have found a lodgment. They arrive in shoals, and every year those shoals expand in size. At first they entered in twos and threes, then by tens and twenties, in a while by 0217 211 hundreds and thousands. Now they are coming by tens of thousands.

The entry of these Asiatic hordes into America has been so silent, and their presence in the land has proved so useful, that the graver aspects of the case, though seen by men of science, have never yet been faced by politicians. A thinker here and there has asked himself—how this invasion of barbarians will affect the European races in America? But he has shrunk appalled from his own query as the Yellow Spectre rose before his mind.

Five great facts are plainly visible, and the consequences of these five great facts are obvious to every thinker:

1. China is the next neighbour of California on her western face; the ports of Canton, Ning-po, and Shang-hae, being those from which passengers arrive most cheaply at the Golden Gate. A Celtic emigrant in Cork must count on spending a hundred dollars in money ere he lands at Hunter's Point. A Mongol emigrant in Canton can reckon on reaching Hunter's Point at a cost of forty-five dollars; five of which are held by the Fook Ting Tong Society as a reserve for carrying back his bones to Hong P 2 0218 212 Kong after death. An Irish settler has to brave the roughest sea and scale the highest mountain-road on earth, while a Mongolian from Fokien or Kiang-Su is borne from port to port, along a summer zone, in waters smoother than those of the Ladies' Sea. What other proofs are needed that, when Cork and Canton cast out any of their surplus tenants, the starving overflow from Canton must arrive at San Francisco in advance of that from Cork? If China has a mouth unfed, that mouth is likely, if American ports are open, to seek for food within the Golden Gate.

A Californian thinker sees that the Mongol question in America is—Shall European civilization or Asiatic barbarism prevail on the Pacific Slope?

The Chinese legend current in San Francisco is a little wild; making the Chinese in America a mere gang of bondsmen, owned by the Six Companies, and governed by an Asiatic Vehm Gericht, Grand Lodge or Council of Ten, who wield a secret and mysterious power, which neither male nor female can escape.

Feeling some doubt as to the truth of this Chinese legend, taken as a whole, we seek for light among persons who are likely to have ferretted out the facts—officers of police and ministers of religion; but for several weeks we search in vain. The Chinese legend is in books and magazines, and no one cares to ask his neighbour whether that current legend be true or false.

At length, by help of Consul Booker, we approach the only people who have sure and perfect 0224 218 knowledge of the facts—the upper class of resident Chinese.

Among the small group of rich and educated Chinese living in San Francisco, Lee Wong, a merchant of high standing and approved integrity, seems to be a man more likely than any other to give true answers to plain questions. Lee Wong happens to lie under obligation to our excellent Consul, for certain good offices in connection with his business. He is willing to pay some portion of his debt, by giving us any information we may seek. We therefore ask him to a conference at the Consulate. He comes at the appointed hour, and after formal compliments we seat him in a chair, so that the majesty of Queen Victoria's face may beam into his Asiatic eyes.

‘Will you be kind enough to tell us, Lee Wong, about the Six Companies?’

‘Six Companies! Your people make mistakes about these Companies. We have, in fact, Five Companies, not six. The body called by you the Sixth Company is a committee of management and arbitration, a local body, living in America, and charged with looking after business on the Pacific 0225 219 coast. The Five Companies have their seats in China, and are known by the localities in which their members live. These Five Companies are—1. Ning Yung; 2. Kwong Chaw; 3. Hop Wo; 4. Sam Yep; 5. Yung Wo. These Five Companies collect the emigrants, carry them to Canton and Hong-Kong, make all arrangements for their transport, and see them put on board the mails. The Sixth Company (or Committee) sits in San Francisco, where its functions are to receive the emigrants on their arrival, and to see that all their contracts and obligations are carried out.

‘Will you explain to us these contracts and obligations?’

‘Yes; but will you put yourselves in our place, and see the truth in a good light? The Melicans call us heathen, but we have our own religion; and our religion is not, like the Melican religion, only for those who like and only when they like. Our religion is for while we live and after we die. So, when the Five Companies agree to bring a man over to California, that is one thing; when they agree to take his ashes back to China, that is another thing. You see? The agreement to bring him over is a 0226 220 contract; the agreement to carry his ashes back is an obligation.’

‘Are all your passengers placed under the same kind of bond?’

‘Not all. We have two classes on our lists: first—such as come over in our debt, and under bond to us; second, such as pay their own fares in Hong Kong and land in San Francisco free. We have a contract with the first class only; but we have our obligations towards the second class also, since we are bound to carry them back in case of death.’

‘Tell us how you begin your labour. Where do you find the people to come over?’

‘The Five Companies send their agents up and down the provinces, both near the sea and far in land, to tell poor people, who are pinched for rice and tea, of the great markets which are opening for their labour in California, Oregon, and Nevada. Of course they talk big. Melican talk big; Chinaman talk bigger than Melican. These agents say the hills are made of silver, and the rivers run with gold. They offer help, giving passes to such persons as care to move. They find all means of transport; 0227 221 here by road, there by river; doing things so well—having plenty of rich men to help—that they bring a man to the coast in carts and boats for less money than he could get along on foot. For five dollars they pick him up in his village, and carry him down to Hong-Kong. If he is poor they take his bond for those five dollars, supplying his needs in meat and drink, for which they take a second bond. When he arrives in Hong-Kong, they get his licence and secure his berth. The fare is forty-five dollars, which money they pay, also a landing-fee of five dollars, which is repaid by the Steam Company to our Committee in San Francisco. These five dollars paid by the Committee, go into the Dead Fund.’

‘Then, as a rule, each man who sails from Hong Kong to San Francisco is not merely a pauper, but a pledged debtor and bondman?’

‘Hum! Chinaman is used to all that—he no care; he work hard and save much money. Then he go free.’

‘How much, on an average, is the amount of his debt when he lands?’

‘From first to last a common passenger may owe 0228 222 his Company ninety or a hundred dollars. All this money he will have to work out.’

‘Before he becomes his own master—before he can do as he likes?’

‘Of course, before he does as he likes, he must redeem his bond.’

‘Do the Five Companies in China take his personal bond, trusting to the Sixth Company in San Francisco to get their money back?’

‘They take a family bond as well. In China, every man has some one—father, uncle, brother—who is ready to give pledges. We are not like Melicans. Our family system makes it easy to obtain such bonds, for every member of a family has his place in a sacred line, ascending and descending in a series from the first man to the last. If there be house and land, we take a lien on house and land, the family giving us a mortgage and allowing us interest at the rate of twenty-four or thirty-six per cent.’

‘Good interest!’

‘Yes; it is a trade, and as a trade we make it pay. If an emigrant has neither house nor land, we ask the personal security of his father and 0229 223 grandfather; his ancestors being the most sacred things a Chinese man can pledge. We charge more interest when the security is only personal? Yes, we charge ten dollars a month in place of two. Yet these securities seldom fail. Of course, we run some risk. Our man may die; worse still, he may fall sick; worst of all, he may commit a crime. If sent to jail, his work is lost. Again, his bond may turn out bad. But every business has a lucky and unlucky turn.’

‘A man with such a debt as you describe is virtually a slave?’

‘In Canton, yes; in San Francisco, no. We never use such words. We are his masters and parents. We receive him on landing into our two great societies in San Francisco—the Wing Yung and the Fook Ting Tong—where he is watched over in life and death.’

‘What are these great societies of Wing Yung and Fook Ting Tong?’

Wing Yung is our living office, near the county jail. When the ships arrive we bring our people to Wing Yung, where we lodge them, feed them, and hire them out. Fook Ting Tong is our Dead Office, 0230 224 in Laurel Hill Cemetry, where we lay the ashes of our people till they can be sent home to China.’

‘Do many of your bondmen run away?’

‘They cannot run away. They have no food, no money. They speak no English words; they know no Melican magistrates. Nearly all the people in San Francisco think them bad men—paupers, convicts, and rebels. No family will engage a Chinaman unless we give him a character and guarantee his conduct. So they have to stay with us, or die in the streets. We let them out on hire, receiving their wages, and giving them so much a month to live on—till our debts are paid.’

‘About the second class—the men who pay their own fares, and come on their own account—are they on landing free from your control?’

‘Free from the Sixth Company?’

‘Yes: are they free from all control, save that of the American courts?’

‘They pay the Company five dollars each as a landing-fee. This fee they are compelled to pay, because they cannot land without our leave.’

‘Then, your company have some authority over 0231 225 every man who comes from Hong Kong, and lands in this port?’

‘We have the moral obligation to restore his bones to China; so we tax him five dollars on his landing—to be safe. Unless we give him our certificate, the Pacific Mail Company will not let him come on shore. That contract is made by the Five Companies with the Mail Company. When a passenger has paid his fee, he is at liberty to leave his ship—but not till he can show that he has paid this fee, in either gold or bonds.’

‘You keep an eye on him afterwards, much as you keep an eye on your bond-servant?’

‘The same. We keep an eye on every one. Who else would care about his bones?’

‘You have your own police and magistrates?’

‘We have our spies and head-men everywhere. In San Francisco we have many spies. It is thought a good thing to be a spy; a bad thing to be a ghost. A spy serves the Chinese, a ghost serves the Melicans. By means of these spies and headmen we hear of what is going on in every house. We know every man's name, and where he is, and what he is about. It is our duty to fish out VOL. II. Q 0232 226 things. Even when a man is dead, we have to find his bones and send them home. If not, he would be buried and forgotten like a dog.’

‘Your Company is said to wield such secret powers that you can reach offenders in any place, and strike them down at any moment, even under the eyes of local magistrates. For instance, I have heard that two of your people lived near Reno, in the Nevada Mountains; that one of them broke some rule of the Six Companies; that his fellow received a hint to kill him; and that he was put away so craftily that the crime has never yet been traced. Can such a tale be true?’

‘Who knows? Some Chinamen good, some bad. Melican law make bad men worse. In Hong-Kong if you kill a man, you will be hung, whether you have plenty money or not. Money makes no difference. In San Francisco, you kill a man; if you have plenty money, you get off. That is not good law. Here, too, all sorts of secret societies are allowed. In China, only bad men enter into Masonic lodges; rogues and rebels, who want to change the dynasty and destroy the faith. These secret societies are all put down by 0233 227 mandarins. Here, the bad Chinamen start a lodge. We ask the Melicans to put them down. They answer that the law allows Masonic lodges. That bad law. The Sixth Company has to put them down.’

‘You seem to exercise the power of a Vigilant Committee?’

‘No; we have no secret powers. We only have our bonds and mortgages, the sway which those who lend money have on their debtor. All beyond is moral force—and the two great societies of Wing Yung and Fook Ting Tong. Chinese ourselves, we understand our brethren; having the same religious rites, the same family sentiment, as the poorest followers of Tao and Buddha. Our chief authority lies in our control of the Dead Fund. A man who might not stop at murder, would shrink from vexing a tribunal that may cause delay in sending back his bones to Hong-Kong.’

‘Is such delay frequent?’

‘Yes, for months and years. Except on our certificate no steamer will carry dead men's bones, and some of the captains will not carry them at all.’ Q 2

‘You have no vessels of your own?’

‘Not yet. Our trade is carried on in English ships, and English sailors hate to carry bones. It is no part of their religion, as of ours, to be buried on the spot where they are born.’

‘Your people all go back?’

‘Yes, all good people. Here and there some Tartar rascals, having no regard for their ancestors, cut their pig-tails and put on Melican clothes. Not men, but curs. Except these dogs, all Chinese go back—when they are dead.’

‘Still you are pouring in?’

‘Yes; more and more; each season more than ever. Last year five thousand; this year thirteen thousand; next year twenty-five thousand—perhaps. In Melica, plenty land, not much people; in China, plenty people, not much land; so Chinamen like to live in Melica, and go back to China when they die.’

A meek -eyed, passive Mongol moves your heart to pity, even while your ears are ringing with the scorn, and tingling with the curses, heaped on him and all his brood.

Note him at table, where his shining face, his natty figure and his nimble movements, tell so much from contrast with the dull tint, the shapeless contour, and the lumpy languor of a Negro servant. Note him in the kitchen, on the railway track, and in the silver mine; where he is always ready, with his shaven face, his twisted pig-tail, and his deferential smile, to do his best for you.

When sick of Biddy and her dirty finery, it is a cheery sight to find Hop Ki skimming about your table in a smock like newly-fallen snow.

‘Two knives under that smock, as innocent as he looks,’ whispers my next neighbour, a gentleman 0236 230 who abhors the Yellow race and has an excellent Chinese cook.

‘A decent sort of lad to look at,’ I observe.

‘Ugh! A Heathen Chinee; as big a scoundrel as the rest; perhaps worse, if one only knew the truth.’

‘You don't know, then?’

‘Know! Sir, nobody can know. Why, this fellow has no name; he comes from no place. How am I to guess how many people he has stabbed, how many periods he has spent in jail? If I enquire, he tells me lies. The rascal says he has never stabbed man or woman, and has never been a day in jail. Look at the wretch as he skips round that lady's chair. No doubt, he has two knives concealed under his white smock.’

‘Give him the benefit of that doubt.’

‘No, Sir, I will give him nothing but his wages. So much work, so much pay; that is the end of our agreement. Take my word for it, that fellow in his own country was either a thief, a rebel, or a slave. Those Chinese won't send us their best people. Guess they have no mandarins to spare.’

A man who hears such gossip in the clubs and at 0237 231 the dinner-tables of San Francisco might infer that much of the fear, hatred, and suspicion heaped on Hop Ki falls to him, not so much because he is a heathen, as because his face is womanish, his manner passive, his labour cheap. Of course, some people may have higher grounds for hating him; but these considerations have their bearing on the great result.

‘You like to have these Asiatic servants in your house?’ I ask my cynical host.

‘On principle, no—in practice, yes,’ that host replies. ‘Like other hussies, you can do nothing with them, nothing without them. Out of many evils, you are glad to choose the least. As cooks and waiters they are worth their salt. You may not like them, not being certain who they are, and why they left Canton. At home, you may be sure, they were no good. To us of the White race they are as shadowy and irresponsible as children of the mist. Yet if you want a dinner, you must have a Chinaman for cook.’

‘Why not an Irish Biddy or Bavarian Traut?’

‘No, no; no Irish Biddies and Bavarian Trauts for me! Look at my rascal Ki. You notice that 0238 232 when I speak to him, I call him Ah Ki, not Hop Ki. “Ah” means Master, and the fellow is not without his spice of pride. To call a man “Ah” is one of his three thousand ceremonies of politeness, and the three thousand ceremonies of politeness are coming into use in San Francisco. I call this chap Ah Ki instead of raising his wages, and my politeness pays me five dollars a month. That comes of paying attention to the Book of Rites. Now, Hop Ki is cheaper to me than any Biddy or Traut alive, and acts in his vocation more like a decent sort of wench. Ask my wife, there, whether Ki is not the best seamstress, chamber-maid, and washer-woman she ever had to scold and pinch? At first you can't help laughing to see a moon-face Heathen Chinee in your bath and dressing-room, emptying pails and cleaning combs; but after lugging at his pig-tail three or four times, and finding the chignon won't come off, your eye gets used to him and you forget his sex.’

‘Compared with Traut and Biddy, your rascal Ki appears to be a domestic pet.’

‘Well, yes—a sort of pet; just as a polecat might be made a pet. You see, he stays at home 0239 233 of nights, and grubs his nose into the grate. He begs no Sunday outs. When he goes to joss-house, he comes to ask my leave, and never stays beyond his hour. No cousins follow him to the house, and eat my venison-pie. To do the heathen justice, though he carries two knives under his smock, he has some qualities rare among White people, and quite unknown to Irish Biddies and German Trauts. He never drinks. He seldom sulks and storms. He uses no offensive words; at least, no words that your wife and daughter understand. No doubt, the rascal storms in his sleep and curses in his native tongue; sometimes I catch him at his capers; but the heathen is so cunning that when he is storming and cursing at his loudest, a man who didn't know him would think he was only lulling a baby to sleep.’

‘Is it a fact that, like other Asiatics, the best of these Mongols fib and pilfer?’

‘Yes, they fib and pilfer; not, however, beyond the margin of their class. All servants lie and steal. Biddy pockets more, Traut bullies more, than Ki. Then Ki has moments of remorse, which Traut and Biddy never have. When Ki is very bad he comes 0240 234 to me, white in the eyes, and begs me to give him a good beating.’

‘You comply?’

‘Sure enough. He likes the stick, and so do I. Giving Ki a beating now and then is good for both of us. I always feel better after wallopping Ki.’

Mine host is not more notable for his humour than his kindliness of heart. No man in San Francisco has done more than he to get these Asiatics treated fairly by the judges and police.

‘You can form no notion of the impudence of these rascals,’ he continues. ‘Only the other day, in our rainy season, when the mud was fifteen inches deep in Montgomery Street, a Yellow chap in fur tippet and purple satin gown, was crossing over the road by a plank, when one of our worthy citizens, seeing how nicely he was dressed, more like a lady than a tradesman, ran on the plank to meet him, and, when the fellow stopped and stared, just gave him a little jerk, and whisked him, with a waggish laugh, into the bed of slush. Ha ha! You should have seen the crowd of people mocking the impudent Heathen Chinee as he picked himself up in his soiled tippet and satin gown!’

‘Did any one in the crowd stand drinks all round?’

‘Well, no; that Heathen Chinee rather turned the laugh aside.’

‘Ay; how was that?’

‘No White man can conceive the impudence of these Chinese. Moon-face picked himself up, shook off a little of the mire, and, looking mildly at our worthy citizen, curtseyed like a girl, saying to him, in a voice that every one standing round could hear: “You Christian: me Heathen: Good-bye.”’

More serious are the questions raised in San Francisco by the Chinese knack of learning trades. The Mongol's advent in America has brought into the front the great struggle for existence between eaters of beef and eaters of rice.

Living on rice, asking no luxuries beyond a whiff of opium and a pinch of tea, John Chinaman can toil for less money than a beef-eating fellow who requires a solid dinner, after which he likes to smoke his cuddy, drain his pot of beer, and top his surfeit with a whisky-smash. John will live and save where Pat must shrink and fall. The first Chinese who came over were labourers, and their first rivals were Irish navvies and hodmen. John drove these rivals off the field, doing more work at less cost, and pleasing his employers by his steady doings and his silent ways. John builds the 0243 237 chapels, banks, hotels, and schools. No room is left in San Francisco for the unskilled Irish peasant, and the movement of Irish labourers towards this Slope has ceased. In one or two hotels Pat is retained in the dining-room; but even in these hotels the laundries and kitchens are occupied by Hop Ki and Lee Sing.

‘Tell me, Pat, have you any rows with these Chinese?’ I ask the servant in my room at the Grand Hotel.

‘No, Captain,’ says Pat; ‘would you have me demane meeself by jumping on a dirty thing in a pig-tail?’

‘But he lowers the rate of wages in the docks and yards?’

‘Bad luck to him—the skunk! Before he showed his dirty face in Market-street, a man could earn his six dollars a day. Now, he gets no more nor two. That's four dollars a day gone; all along of the pig-tails! Some of the masters are no better nor the skunks; they say they wont pay a White man more than double what they give a Yellow chap. Holy Mary! as if a Christian could live on 0244 238 two dabs of rice, because a heathen Chinee can starve on one! ’

‘You think this fall in wages owing to the Chinaman?’

‘What else, Captain? Why, before the brute came in, my ould woman got her bit of washing and ironing, enough anyhow to buy a drop of drink; but now the squinting villain robs the women as well as he robs the men. If it were not for soiling one's hands, I'd like to squash them head and heels into the bay—just there, by Hunter's Point.’

‘You don't say, Live and let live, eh, Pat?’

‘Live! Why, Captain, he's a heathen Chinee; a real heathen Chinee! What business has the loikes of him over here? Is not Chinay big enough for him?’

‘Come, Pat, haven't you come over from County Cork?’

‘That's thrue, Captain; but then the country's ours. We conquered it from the Injuns and the Mexicans. Let the Chinese try to conquer it from us! Bedad, won't I loike to see the day when they come out and fight—och, the heathen Chinee!’

No sort of labour comes amiss to John. He cooks your food and digs your quarry; rocks your cradle and feeds your cow; mends your shed and smelts your ore. When he has choice of work, he settles down most readily to household tasks, but he can turn his hand to any work; and after once seeing things done by others he can do them pretty well himself.

Ho Ling came by train to San Jose; the first moon-face ever seen in that old Free Town. Hiring a small shed, Ho Ling put out his sign: ‘Washing and Ironing done by Ho Ling.’ Much linen may have been lying by unwashed in San Jose; anyhow, Ho Ling was soon busy day and night. He sent for Chou Ping; but the two moon-faces, scrubbing and squinting in their narrow room, could hardly overtake their work. Ho Ling saved money. When he had lived three months in San Jose, he called a carpenter, and asked his price for setting up ten frame shanties on a piece of ground in rear of Main Street, Ho Ling supplying him with poles and planks.

‘For ten houses, one hundred dollars.’

‘Muchee dollar, muchee dollar!’ objected Ho Ling.

‘No,’ replied the carpenter, ‘very cheap.’

‘Ten house—ten dollar—one hundred dollar?’ asked Ho Ling.

‘Yes,’ returned the carpenter, not thinking of his words.

‘Then you makey, makey.’

When the carpenter set to work, seven fresh moon-faces came down by train, and, after calling on Ho Ling, slouched towards the back street, in which the new Mongolian town was starting into shape. Squatting on the ground, each moon-face twiddled his bit of bamboo cane, chewed his morsel of betel nut, and watched the carpenter stake his poles and nail his planks.

‘Goodee buildee—ten dollars,’ smirked Ho Ling when the first shed was roofed.

‘I'll put 'em all up for you in no time,’ said the carpenter, pocketing his coin.

‘No wantee more house,’ replied Ho Ling; ‘me makee all, me makee all.’

In his new home in America, moon-face has to deal with new materials. In his native land bamboo is everything: here cedar is everything. At home 0247 241 he builds his house—floor, wall, and roof—of bamboo. Of bamboo he makes a bridge and a fan, a scroll and a cart, a pipe and a plough. Here he must work in cedar, on other principles, and with other tools. But he is quick to learn. Watching the carpenter at San Jose with sleepy eyes, moon-face catches up the knack of staking poles and planking wall and roof. The carpenter swears, but he has no redress. Ho Ling has not only built his street, but moon-face has become an expert in the builder's craft, and underworks his rival in every builder's yard at San Jose. In fact, the building trade is passing into Chinese hands.

It is the same in many other trades. The business of cigar making is the largest separate craft in San Francisco; thousands of persons are employed in smoothing, rolling, twisting the tobacco leaves; and this great business has passed entirely into Chinese hands. The boot-trade, the woollen manufactures, and the fruit-preserving business are also mainly carried on by Chinese labour.

‘You want a pair of boots?’ asks a friend at the Pacific Club; ‘then try Yin. Yung of Jackson Street, the best bootmaker in California.’ VOL. II. R

‘Cheapest, you mean,’ sneers a gentleman in our circle.

‘Best, as well as cheapest, I assert,’ replies the first speaker.

Going up Jackson Street we look into Yin. Yung's shop, surprised to see so good a show of work; the boots and shoes appearing to be as neat and strong as any you will find in rival stores, yet marked at figures much below the ordinary price elsewhere.

Until the other day Yin Yung had never seen an English boot. A mandarin wears slippers, a merchant clatters down the street in clogs. An English high-low was as strange a mystery to Yin Yung as a Chinese puzzle would be to Giles Hodge. But Yin Yung wanted rice to eat, and reading a notice in Kearney Street that ‘good hands’ were wanted by one Aaron Isaacs, bootmaker, he applied for work; and, as he asked for next to nothing in the way of wages, the worthy Israelite gave him a stool, a mallet, and a ball of wax. A Jew has no objections to cheap labour on the score of race and creed. He knows, indeed, that John will learn his art and steal his trade; but he imagines he can make his 0249 243 game and bank his dollars long before that evil day arrives. That certain crafts should pass from White men to Yellow men is nothing to him—a Jew—a citizen of the world. He likes a docile Mongol, whom, if need be, he can cuff and cheat, with no great risk of a returning blow. The Hebrew shops are, therefore, full of Yellow-men. It is from this connection with the Jews of San Francisco, that John has got his droll idea that the Melicans crucified Christ—a crime for which John Chinaman mildly suspects and hates all Melican men!

Yin Yung drew his brethren to Isaacs's shop, and for a year or so Isaacs drove a rattling trade in English boots and shoes; being able to run down prices in Montgomery Street, and force the other makers to employ Chinese hands. What cared the Jew? He lowered his rate of wages. One by one his White men left him. Isaacs took on more Chinese, Yin Yung being now expert enough to instruct them in their trade. Then Yin Yung left him also; left him to engage in business on his own account. To-day Yin Yung is a big man, keeping a large shop, and having a good repute. While he was Isaacs's thrall, he took the Hebrew's cuffs and R 2 0250 244 curses with a patient face, and now he pays his debt by under-selling the Jew to his old customers in the clubs.

Isaacs is very angry and very spiteful; but he has not yet been able to destroy Yin Yung.

In vain he gets more and more Chinese into his shops. He has to teach them, and as soon as they are taught they start as rivals in his trade. By every effort to suppress Yin Yung he helps to make five more Yin Yungs.

Paul Cornell's fight is raging in the watch trade, just as Isaacs's fight is raging in the shoe-trade. Seventy hands have come from Chicago as his staff; twenty-five married men with their wives and children, and a few single men. They are engaged for fixed periods, ranging from six months to two years. Not a word was said to them before they left Illinois about the company employing Chinese hands in San Francisco. They were only told of the lovely scenery, the temperate climate, the abundant fruits. Money was advanced to pay their railway fares—a heavy sum for artizans with wives and children to procure. These fares are still owing to the Cornell Company, so that the White men from 0251 245 Chicago are bound to Cornell and Ralston very much as the Yellow men from Canton are bound to the Wing Yung and the Fook Ting Tong.

The lathes and wheels being ready, Cornell calls in seven of his overseers, and tells them, for the first time, that he means to use Chinese labour in his works. The overseers protest. ‘You are discharged,’ he says. Piper, one of these seven overseers, complains that this notice is a great surprise.

‘Pack up your duds and go,’ says Cornell. In time both parties get a little cooler, and the master enters into detail.

‘The Chinese, you must understand,’ says Cornell to his White overseers, ‘are mere animals; they cannot learn to do fine work; they are only to be used in common tasks. Now go and explain these matters to the men.’

The men are no less resolute than the overseers. ‘No one,’ they urge in opposition to Cornell's proposal, ‘can draw a line between the White man and the Yellow man. A Yellow man is quick at learning things; and, as he lives on rice and fish, he can afford to take a lower wage. He has no family to 0252 246 house and feed. To teach the Chinese how to make watches, is to rob our little ones of bread.’

Both sides seem firm. ‘We have your covenants,’ says Cornell. ‘Those covenants are broken,’ shout the men on strike. Meetings are held. As all the craftsmen in the town are with the strikers, money is subscribed, and promises of support are given. Telegrams are sent to every watch factory in the United States, calling on the workmen to assist in beating down this effort of three or four great capitalists to hand over an artistic industry to Asiatics. One committee is appointed to see the various Trades Unions; a second is charged to make arrangements for carrying the whole seventy watchmakers back to Chicago. Yet Cornell, sustained by Ralston, and knowing that his workmen have no money, takes up very high ground.

‘Repay your fares and go; like Piper, you can pack your duds and go.’

The workmen ask for an interview with Ralston, known to be the chief proprietor in the new company, if not the first suggestor of employing Chinese hands. Ralston consents to see them. An interview is held, of which a report is given in the daily 0253 247 papers, painting the situation in a pleasant way—that pleasant way which tells the truth in jest.

Piper advances to the front and thus addresses the Lord of Belmont, Manager of the Bank of California:

‘Sir! We are American citizens, with families dependent on our labour for bread. We are skilled and willing workers in the business of making watches. We have been induced to come to California to aid this new industry, in which you have risked a single speck of your great wealth. If the work prospers it becomes the vocation of our lives, and the inheritance of our children as a place to labour; if it fails, you have had a little of your gold-dust blown away. We are informed that it is your intention to employ Chinese labour. This is not agreeable to us. We have a prejudice against these strangers. They do not speak our language; their religion, manners, customs, dress are not ours. They have no families to support. If we educate them in our skilled pursuit, they will soon rival us in it, and ultimately drive us from it. Instead, therefore, of employing these people, be kind enough to give the light labour to our wives and to our boys and girls. Thinking it is better to give this 0254 248 labour to our own people, we ask you respectfully to consider our petition.’

Ralston replies:

‘Individuals! I am William C. Ralston. I own thirty-five thousand dollars in the stock of this company. We intend to manage this business in our own way, to submit to no dictation from workmen. We may find it expedient to employ Chinese; if we do, we will employ as many as we see fit. If you think we are in your power you make a great mistake. We will hire whatever race of men we think best, and if you do not like it—you can leave. We can better afford to lose a hundred thousand dollars than submit to your dictation. We can send to Switzerland for watchmakers. We are in no hurry. While capital reposes, labour starves. We can wait. I am the same Mr. Ralston who made this same speech to the bricklayers and plasterers on the Palace Hotel. I once discharged a clerk. I am in earnest. However, I will be generous, and I make this proposition: if you can get me American girls and boys who will do as much work and do it as well as the Chinese, I will give them the preference 0255 249 and the same pay. You may now apologize and retire.’

Dropping this tone of pleasantry, the writer adds, with pain, if not with shame:

‘The result is the Chinese are to be employed; a few at first, and more in time; so that the seeds are sown for the destruction of a profitable industry. Another weapon of defence is taken from the hand of free labour.’

Here, as elsewhere in California, Oregon, and Nevada, the rice-eater is pushing the beef-eater to the wall.

Like Paddy Blake and Juan Chico, Hop Lee and Hong Chi appear to be social animals, who love to jostle in a crowd, and lodge by preference in a narrow court. Like many of their Irish and Mexican peers, they seem to delight in close alleys, and enjoy abominable smells. When they might camp out in the open, they burrow in the earth, under the houses of great cities, hiding their heads in drains and vaults, in sinks and sewers. They make a rookery in the heart of every city they invade. At Salt Lake they huddle round the market-place; at Virginia they cower about the mines. In San Francisco they have taken up their rest in the oldest quarter. When they reach New York they will settle on Five Points; when they arrive in London they will occupy Seven Dials. If a great city has a low and filthy section, the celestials sniff 0257 251 it out, crowd into it, and by their presence make that low and filthy place their own. It seems to them a natural process. When they get to Rome, they will drive the Jews out of their Ghetto; when they come to Naples, they will expel the lazzaroni from their Marinella; just as they have driven the low Irish and the lower Mexicans from their old haunts in San Francisco. How these lovers of dirt would revel in the port-side of Alexandria, in the sacred precincts of Nablous, in the leper-quarter of Jerusalem! Yet, in their native land, there is a vast river population; people who live in dhows and junks, feeding on fish, and seldom going into towns. In the Five Provinces these water-people are counted by millions. Are there no water-people yet on the Pacific Slope?

At Monterey we hear of a group of Chinese squatters, who have come from San Francisco, and settled as fishermen on the bluff near Pinos Point. Scorning to boil shirts, roast mutton, and make roads, like their meeker comrades, these squatters near Pinos Point neither wash nor starch, neither cook nor serve, neither dig nor delve. They are said to be free men, owing no money, and therefore no duty, to 0258 252 the Five Companies. Left to their own choice, they show no preference for city life, and give up garbage, reek, and squalor for a lodging on the hill-side, in the midst of wild sage, with the ocean breezes on their roofs. They are not alone. With them are many women and children. Living on the coast, away from white capital and white employment, they are said to make a homely livelihood for their wives and families by catching and drying fish.

A colony of Asiatics, who seek neither work nor favour from the white capitalist, but go out boldly into nature, taking their chances in the primary and heroic, rather than the secondary and parasitical, struggle for existence, raises our curiosity. Unlike the Mexican labourers, whom they are driving out of California and Nevada, here are people who can live without the Whites!

A trail leads off from Monterey to this Asiatic village, going by way of Fray Junipero's Cross and Don Rivera's Castle; but this trail is a mere Indian line, not made for horses, still less for wheels. We have to trudge on foot. A walk of two miles from the old Mexican jetty brings us to a pile of rocks, on turning which we are in China—close to 0259 253 a huddle of log-sheds and drying-poles—the place snarling with dogs, and reeking with the smell of dead fish and the fumes of joss-wood.

The first comers seem to have squatted anywhere and anyhow, just as the levels tempted them, and the logs for building purposes lay handy near the beach. To get into the labyrinth is easy. You follow the smell of joss-wood, kick away the dogs, and fall over the naked urchins. But to find your way about is like trying to undo a Chinese puzzle. English ingenuity is unequal to the task. Here, in your front, is a pig-sty, with the customary mess. This wicker-frame is the hen-roost, flanked by a puddle for the ducks and geese. What filth! About a hundred ricketty sheds and kennels—houses, stores, and attics—compose this free and independent settlement. These sheds and kennels are so frail in build, that some of them come down in every puff of wind and every shower of rain. A gale might sweep the whole colony into the bay. Happily for the settlers this coast is a Pacific coast, where storms are almost as rare as in the Ladies' Sea.

Four or five hundred Asiatics dwell in this corner of America, winning from the sea and 0260 254 shore a scanty supply of food. They take in shoals of smelts, and pick up thousands of shell-fish. Whaling is too hard a business, but they sometimes get a haul of cod. They are fond of cuttle-fish. In summer-time, as Ah Tim, one of the settlers, tells me, they live very well. The wood supplies them in fuel, the bay never fails them in fish. The little clearings near their tenements yield them peppers, cabbages, and herbs. By drying a part of their summer hauls they provide for the winter, when the waters are too rough for them to brave. The sale of some part of their dry stock gives them money enough to buy a little tea, joss-wood, and opium. For the rest a Chinaman can dream. ‘Mee goot, opium pipe,’ says Ah Tim; ‘me smoke, me dine all-ee-same Melican mans.’ A pinch of opium makes Ah Tim a king.

Ah Tim takes us into several tenements. The sheds are pretty much alike; all neat and tiny; more like dolls' houses than the residences of human beings. Most of them have scraps of red paper pasted on the walls, announcements of lotteries, of performances in the theatres, and of services in the great joss-house of San Francisco. Every Mongol 0261 255 in America regards San Francisco as his capital and the great joss-house in that city as his temple. Tim, like most of his countrymen, is pious. No joss-house has been raised in the village near Pinos Point, for the fishermen cannot afford the luxury of a priest; but in every shanty on the bluff, we find an image of Buddha on the mantelpiece, just as in every Basque hovel we see a cross, and in every Russ cabin an icon of the Virgin. Poor though he be, each Mongol keeps a small cup of tea simmering and a few spikes of cedar-wood burning in front of his joss. ‘Man better go, all-ee-same, says Ah Tim, ‘without his rice and opium, than leavee joss without his tea and cedar-wood, all-ee-same, no.’

In one tenement five or six men are sitting down to dinner—a mess of cabbage boiled in tallow, flanked by a little fried shell-fish—each moon-face with his chop-sticks in his hand. Before sitting down they look to the joss, and see that his tea is warm. On rising from their meal they light a few cedar matches and leave them to burn out; but they do these acts of worship without delicacy and reverence, showing nothing of that awe which 0262 256 softens and subdues a Moscovite's face as he crosses himself after meals and cries to his icon in the corner, ‘Slava Bogu!’

Poor fellows, they have not eaten much! No Celtic labourer, no Mexican peasant, could exist on such food as these poor Asiatics eat. Can the African? When two races dwell on the same soil, the race which eats the least must drive the other race off. The lean kine ate up the fat kine, the thin ears of corn ate up the good ears. Watching these fellows pick up their morsels with chop-sticks, I remember a saying of Clarke, the Negro teacher in Cincinnati, that his people, though able to compete with the Celts, are not able to compete with the Chinese. ‘Let us have no Chinese,’ urged Clarke, in answer to my enquiry how far the advent of a few thousand Chinese labourers would affect the interests of his people in Ohio, ‘let us have no Chinese. They work for cents where we want dollars. They live on scraps and filth. A Negro lives on the fat of the land, and needs as much food as any other American. John and Sam will never be able to live in peace. John works hard on rice and tea, and not much of either; while Sam 0263 257 wants roast turkey and cocktail, and a good supply of each.’ Under a system of equal laws, the Negro would be unable to keep a footing in the labonr market of America, in presence of his thrifty, docile, and intelligent brother of the Yellow race.

Ah Tim invites us to his shanty, where his wife makes tea, and his two little boys roll and wallow in the mud. Tim is a curious fellow; cold, prosaic, worldly; with the hard and callous brain which American poets have not ascribed unjustly to the ‘Heathen Chinee.’ Unlike his countrymen as a rule, Tim is a man of politics. He owes no money to the companies. He has no reason to fear their spies and head-men. He is a native of the soil, and has no wish to see Canton. He wants his rights; he wants to have a vote; he wants his neighbours to have votes. Tim was the first Chinee born in California. As a native, he has the right of standing for any office. If he had his dues, according to the American Constitution, he might stand against General Grant for the Presidency. But the White people in California set the Constitution at defiance, as Ah Tim believes, by pretending that the legal maxim, ‘every man born VOL. II. S 0264 258 on the American soil is an American citizen,’ only means that every White man born on the American soil is an American citizen.

‘Are you making a formal claim of citizenship?’

‘Yes, sir. I born in Melica Land; I marry in Melica Land; I live in Melica Land; my children born in Melica Land. Is not that all-ee-same?’

When the American Constitution was drawn up, the noble assertion that ‘all men are born free and equal’ was confined to the White race. A Black man was not free. A Red man was not an equal. But a great development has been given to this assertion by events. A Negro born on the soil enjoys the rights of a free citizen. Why not a Mongol? Is the African race nobler than the Asiatic? If Zete Fly is considered worthy of the franchise, how can such a privilege be refused to Ah Tim?

A seventh part of the population—a seventieth part of the surface—of San Francisco is Asiatic. All Orientals pack closer than Europeans. A man may see big crowds in many cities: Russ and Tartars at Nishni-Novgorod, Copts and Armenians in Jerualem, Arabs and Algerines in Cairo; but in neither Russia, Syria, nor Egypt can he see such crowds as we find packed in the Asiatic quarter of San Francisco.

The term Asiatic quarter may suggest a separate portion of the city, walled off from the remaining parts like China Town in Moscow; but the Asiatic quarter in San Francisco is an open colony, like May Fair in London, like the Second District in New York. The Chinese have squatted in the very heart of San Francisco.

Lock Sin's tea-house in Jackson Street may be S 2 0266 260 regarded as the heart of this new Asiatic empire in America; for in Jackson Street, grouped around Lock Sin's balcony, lie the Chinese banks and stores, the Chinese stalls and markets, the Chinese theatres and gaming-hells; while off this thoroughfare, to the right and left, extend the blind alleys and nameless passages in which reside the Chinese rogues and thieves, with their unfailing complement of female slaves.

Here, bright with paper lanterns, glare the two great tea-houses, kept by Lock Sin and Hing Kee, in which you sip green tea and watch the dancing girls perform their rites. Here, rich in red and black flags, and musical with gongs and cymbals, stands Yu He Un Choy, the royal theatre, in which a grand historical play, a chronicle of the Ming Dynasty, has been going on for three weeks past, and is to run on briskly for about nine weeks yet to come. In front of us, hardly less rich in red and yellow paint, hardly less noisy with shawm and tom-tom, rises Sing Ping Yuen, the new theatre, in which lighter pieces are performed, not lasting more than thirty or forty nights. Hereabouts lie the tan cellars and thieves' gaming cribs, in which sallow 0267 261 wretches and their hideous partners of the other sex indulge in the lawless pleasure of staking their bottom dollar on a domino. About these cellars lie the opium dens, to which the gamesters come in their frenzy, and snatch the still more fearful joy of staking their health and manhood on a fume of poppy-juice. Round that corner stands the great joss house, a large room, hung with screens and banners, dazzling in red and gold, in which an idol squats; not a Mongolian god, with flat and shaven face, and turned-up Tartar eyebrows, but a Teutonic master, with straight nose, fair moustache, and pointed beard. Before this foreign idol, tea-cups hiss and fuzees burn by night and day.

China Town is running over San Francisco, spreading to east and west, to north and south. The Asiatics have seized a good part of Dupont Street and Kearny Street, swarmed into Pine Street, invaded Stockton and Pacific Streets, and got their feet in California Street. Some houses in these streets are owned by Mongols. When Asiatics get their feet inside a door they drive the Europeans out. A European cannot stand the fume and stench, the dirt and din. Thus, shop by shop, and street 0268 262 by street, they crawl along, a swarm of clean and unclean things, so oddly mixed that White men shrink from them, in fear and wrath, as from a company of lepers. No White man likes to sleep under the same roof with a Yellow man; no White woman likes to pass through Jackson Street. A rookery and a cesspool drive off decent folk.

Let us drop into some of these houses, no fear of lepers in our hearts, and see these Asiatics in their homes.

Not far from Lock Sin's tea-house stands a big edifice, first used as the Globe Hotel; a house four storeys high above the ground, six windows to the front, and boasting of rooms enough for fifty guests. Including vaults and attics there may be sixty rooms in all. Surrounded by the Chinese rookery, this Globe Hotel, no longer fit for decent visitors, is let to Lee Si Tut, a rich Chinese, who re-lets his apartments to Chinese residents of the better class—to shopmen, waiters, clerks, and agents. Lee Si Tut takes care to have no tenant of bad repute. A thief, a rag-picker, a night-prowler cannot hire a bed in his hotel. No painted women pass his door. Tan and other lawless games are forbidden. No 0269 263 wrangling or fighting is allowed within the house. So far as order can be made by rules, order is said to reign among Lee Si Tut's tenants; and the Globe Hotel in Jackson Street may be regarded as the royal khan and summer-palace of the Chinese empire in America.

Pass in. Oh, Lee Si Tut! A sickening odour greets your nostrils on his steps. A reek comes out of every door, and dirt lies heaped on every landing-stage. The dust of years encrusts his window-panes. Compared with this Globe Hotel, under Lee Si Tut, a Turkish or a Spanish prison is a desert place. The bannisters drip; the passages sweat. A black and fetid slime runs down the walls. And then what press and multitude of tenants on the stairs and in the rooms! Men swarm at every door, and crowd down every stage; each pale and melancholy wretch vomiting his narcotic poison in your face. A nameless horror seems to brood in every corner of the house, for out of every corner glare the spectral eyes of beings fevered by tan and stupefied with drugs.

Each room, arranged for the accommodation of a single guest, is either parted into six or seven sections 0270 264 by a string of mats, or shelved in tiers all round the walls. Shelves are preferred, since no one cares to pay for privacy; and a room that will only sleep six or seven in sections may be got to sleep a dozen on shelves. From vault to attic, each room is foul with smoke, and black with dirt, and choked with men.

No less than fifteen hundred ghastly creatures find a lodging day and night in this Chinese paradise!

Rooms crowded and unwholesome I have seen before—at a feast in Einsiedeln, a mad-house in Naples, an emigrant ship at Liverpool, a barrack on the Nile—but nowhere have I seen human creatures packed and crushed as these tenants of the Globe Hotel are packed and crushed. Lee Si Tut lets his house, he says, to eight hundred tenants; which would give him, in a house of sixty rooms, including cellars and lofts, thirteen tenants to each chamber; but the rascals cheat him, he alleges, out of half his rent, by sub-letting their shelves to men who occupy them only half the day. Enquiry shows me that this story of subletting and dividing the room is strictly true. Ki Wgok lets his shelf to Li Ho; 0271 265 Ki Wgok using his shelf for twelve hours, and giving it up to Li Ho for the other twelve hours. In some rooms three sets of lodgers occupy the shelves each twenty-four hours—eight hours a-piece.

Yet those who lodge in this hotel live in a light and roomy palace by the side of those who live in the labyrinth of courts and styes, yards and entries, lying round Bartlett Alley. Here some of the first White settlers in San Francisco threw up their hives. The ground is undrained. The log shanties were run up hastily and cheaply; and in these fever-haunted hovels, rotten with age, putrid with filth, overrun with vermin, the masses of Mongolians make their home. They creep into vaults, they climb into eaves, they burrow in the earth. In holes unfit for dogs, you may discover ten or twelve wasted creatures, sprawling on shelves, staring into space, and trying to smoke themselves into the opium-dreamer's paradise.

Worse still, if in the ‘lowest depth’ there can be a ‘deeper still,’ is the thieves' quarter; a district running in and out of more respectable quarters with a rare indifference as to social forms. In the thieves' quarter it is well to have a guide and escort, 0272 266 for the Chinese criminal has curious ways, and your ramble in his purlieus should be made at night.

All round Bartlett Alley lie the thieves' yards and cribs; foul attics, falling balconies, underground kennels; with a few spikes of joss-wood burning at every door. Rags rot on the ground and garbage poisons the air. Slush squirts at you from under every plank, and where the planks fail you, the earth appears to be nothing but a running sore. Rag-shops and receiving-houses hide in old pits and hollows under the plank floors. In all these damp and loathsome holes a swarm of Asiatics wallow in the filth, their pale and ghastly faces rendered visible by the flicker of a reeking lamp. Pah!

Fear lurks in every Mongol eye, and desperation glowers from every Mongol face. In passing from yard to yard you catch the slam of doors, the shot of bolts, and feel by instinct that every ruffian standing behind these planks, alarmed by strange footsteps and loud voices in the dead of night, is listening at his door, with hatchet raised to strike or rifle poised to fire. 0273 267 ‘Open the door!’ cries your guide, in a peremptory tone, stopping in front of a log cabin—‘open the door!’

‘You foolee me? You foolee me?’

‘No, no. Open the door!’

The voice is recognised within; the door is slowly opened, and you peep into the crib; a cupboard as to size, but occupied by five or six men and women. Heaps of stolen goods are on the floor; but neither blade nor gun is visible. At another crib we are repulsed. To the enquiry ‘How? you foolee me?’ we answer, as before, ‘No, no;’ but, instead of seeing the door open, we catch a rapid exchange of whispers inside.

‘Go; you not foolee me!’ cries a voice, accompanied by the click of a rifle.

‘Dip and slide,’ whispers our companion, and we instantly dip and slide.

In Stout's Alley, and in the yards around this sink of squalor and iniquity, lodge the partners of these thieves and murderers—the female slaves.

Let us get out into the open streets!

‘You have now seen a little of our Chinese 0274 268 quarter,’ says my companion, as we enter Lock Sin's tea-house about two o'clock, and order a refreshing cup.

‘What you have seen in San Francisco you may see in Sacramento, Stockton, San Jose, and other towns. Wherever John plants his foot, he builds a China Town, and peoples it with harlots, criminals, and slaves. We get some very cheap labour, and our financiers say they need cheap labour ‘to develop the country.’ What think you of the price we have to pay for our development?’

While we are sipping tea on Lock Sin's balcony, a yell comes up from the street below. A Chinese fight is on. Ah King, a Chinese scamp, employed by the city officers, and, in the slang of his Asiatic countrymen, such a spy is called a ghost. Of late this ghost has been too busy, his celestial countrymen think, even for a paid spy; and two Asiatics, who have just come out of jail, are setting on him, one moon-face with a hatchet, the second moon-face with a knife. From every door in the street swarms out a crowd, and in an instant fifty Chinese lanterns heave and drop along the flags.

‘Excuse me!’ says my escort, and before I can 0275 269 reply, he is gone from my side. King vanishes—like a ghost. Moon-face with the knife escapes, just as my escort swoops into the murderous circle; but the fellow with the hatchet is arrested on the spot and carried to the city ward. His weapon, when examined, proves to be a long blade, sheathed in a layer of fine cloth, so that, in case of a fatal plunge, the blood might have been at once removed, and the stainless knife replaced under the white smock, as clean and innocent in appearance as the soft-eyed Asiatic who had plunged it into his neighbour's heart!

‘ At length!’ exclaims a Senator in Sacramento, laying down his copy of the President's new Message to Congress, in which there is a short paragraph devoted to the Chinese immigration. ‘Our master in the White House has spared one moment from the contemplation of his Black Agony on the Gulf to a consideration of our Yellow Agony on the Slope!’

No one will say that President Grant has spoken either too soon or in too loud a voice. Opinion runs the other way. In Washington men may talk; in Sacramento they must act. The Mongol invaders have put republican principles to a strain which they were never meant to bear, and under this burthen, republican principles and institutions have broken down.

Face to face with a gigantic evil, the Californians have passed a dozen laws in self-defence; and these 0277 271 defensive laws of California violate the most sacred principles embodied in the common Constitution of the United States!

The American Constitution opens American ports to all the world; the laws of California limit and control the entry of Asiatics into San Francisco. The American Connstitution gives to every man who lands a right of citizenship on easy terms; the laws of California deny a Chinese immigrant the right of citizenship on any terms.

Under the new conditions created by the influx of these Asiatics, San Francisco has ceased to be a free port in the sense in which New York is a free port. New York is open: San Francisco is not open. If he lands in New York a Mongol may be naturalized in a year; but if he lands in San Francisco a Mongol cannot be naturalized in twenty years. This conflict of principles leads to much confusion in practice. No one in Oregon, California, and Nevada, can be sure of what is legal or illegal. A Court, administering the local law, rules one thing; a second Court, administering the general law, rules another thing. They clash alike in maxims, methods, and results. 0278 272 A case occurred some weeks ago. In the belief that a certain vessel coming from Hong-Kong was laden with paupers, convicts, and rebels, transported from the country by sagacious mandarins, the authorities of San Francisco tried to send these undesirable settlers back to China. Taking the mail steamer in charge, they prevented either man or woman from landing, and required the company to carry their cargo back to Hong-Kong. The company refused. The San Francisco courts affirmed the right of the mayor and sheriffs to reject this cargo: but they were overruled by the Circuit Courts, acting in the name, interpreting the principles, of the United States.

Nearly every woman who obtains a licence to leave Hong-Kong comes over as a slave, the property of masters, who sell her in the city very much as a planter used to sell his quadroon in New Orleans. A case is now before the courts which proves so much, if not a great deal more.

Ah Lee, a man of good repute and decent means, lived with Low Yow, a woman who was erroneously supposed to be his wife. They had some words and parted company, on which Ah Lee 0279 273 requested Low Yow to pay him back a sum of more than four hundred dollars, which he had placed in her hands while they were passing as man and wife. Low Yow refused.

‘I will be even with you,’ hissed Ah Lee, with menacing gesture towards the woman.

Going before a magistrate, Ah Lee deposed that the Chinese woman, called Low Yow, had sold a Chinese girl, named Choy Ming, only thirteen years of age, for two hundred dollars, and he implored the magistrate to have that female slave-dealer seized and sent to jail. A witness, called Ah Sing, who said he was a brother of Choy Ming, sustained the evidence given and sworn by Ah Lee. On these statements, warrants were issued, and not only Low Yow but Choy Ming were taken into charge. Counsel was engaged for Choy Ming, but the trial mainly turned on her own evidence. She was a slave, she said. She was brought from China to San Francisco as a slave, and there sold to Low Yow, who afterwards sold her again to the keeper of a bad house. She handed to the judge a bill of sale, which had been given to her, according to the custom of her country, by Low Yow. VOL. II. T 0280 274 The counsel for Low Yow denounced the whole proceeding as a conspiracy on the part of Ah Lee and Ah Sing to get his client into trouble. Two elderly Chinese, living in Stout's Alley, swore that Choy Ming was their child. She had been lured, they said, from their lodgings, and had been kept away from them some time. They had never sold her to Low Yow, and Low Yow could not have sold her to anyone else. Several Chinese witnesses gave evidence of having seen Choy Ming with the two old people, both when they were landing from the ship and afterwards in going about the streets.

Choy Ming was recalled. Asked by the judge to look in the witness box, and say whether the man and woman were not her parents, she declared they were not. She had never seen them in her life. In saying they were her parents, the old man and woman were forsworn. Ah Sing, her brother, would confirm her story. Ah Sing was called. Was Choy Ming his sister? Yes, Choy Ming, he answered, was his sister. Were the old man and woman his parents? By the bones of his ancestors—no! He had never seen those old people before, and he was certain they were not the parents of Choy Ming. 0281 275 Unable to believe a word of the evidence on either side, the magistrate dismissed the case.

Choy Ming went home with Ah Sing and Ah Lee, and nothing more was heard about her till yesterday, when she appeared in Stout's Alley and claimed a refuge with the old couple as their child. On being asked about her evidence in the court, she says she went home with Ah Lee, and stayed with him some time, because Ah Sing frightened her by his threats. She has been living on a ranch in the country, but has now left the two men. Ah Sing, she says, is not her brother, and she likes the old folks better than the two men. Ah Lee and Ah Sing both ill-use her, and she is tired of being their wife.

Choy Ming, I learn, is scarcely thirteen years of age!

Another case is that of a disputed cargo of female slaves—a case still pending in the higher Courts.

About the Chinese women who are brought to San Francisco there is unhappily no more mystery than about the Circassian girls who used to be exposed for sale in the markets of Cairo and Damascus. They are slaves. On coming to San Francisco with T 2 0282 276 their owners, they pay no landing-fee to the Sixth Company; for these women, having no place in the Chinese system of family worship, require no sending back to China after death. Like beasts that perish, these female slaves are hidden out of sight.

The stories of these girls are often very sad. Some of them are sold by their fathers, for the poorer class of Mongol peasants always sell their girls, just as the Indian savages always sell their squaws. Many are stolen children, trapped and carried off by scoundrels who beset the hamlets near the coast. In every Chinese port there is a market for such wares. At Hong Kong they have to be passed by an official, but this official is too often satisfied with a form. One dealer passes three or four girls as his daughters; a second dealer tries to bring out five or six as his wives. A consul scrupulous on the score of polygamy, may refuse to pass so large a household; but the rascal has only to go to one of the lodging-houses, where emigrants are waiting, and bestow a wife on each moon-face—for the voyage. Under these arrangements the girls arrive in San Francisco, and are here sold, like Choy Ming, to anyone who happens to want a female slave. 0283 277 Eager to meet a practical evil by practical remedies, the Californians have passed a law empowering the port authorities to inspect all vessels coming in from Asia, and when they find a cargo of females on board suspected of being slaves, and obviously brought over for immoral purposes, to require the company to carry them back.

A cargo soon arrived, for many merchants are engaged in this abominable trade. ‘You cannot land these women,’ said the port officials. ‘We shall see,’ replied the merchants, who had bought the girls on speculation and were anxious for a profit on their wares. They went to law. The first Court at San Francisco justified the authorities, on which the merchants carried an appeal to Chief-Justice Wallace, in the Supreme Court at Sacramento, who sustained the verdict of the local Court. Foiled in their design, they went into the Circuit Court of the United States, pleading that the laws of California are in open conflict with the American Constitution, and are therefore void in San Francisco, part of the territory of the United States. The Judges of the Circuit Court adopted this view.

Fretted by this verdict in the Circuit Court, the 0284 278 people of California are carrying an appeal to the Supreme Court in Washington; but while Chief-Justice Waite and his venerable brethren are straining over points of law the female slaves are coming in, and a free American State is not at liberty to protect her streets against this moral leprosy. What have the Californians done that they are hindered from shutting their gates on these importers of female slaves?

The Judges say the soil is free. A female slave becomes a free woman the moment she sets her foot on Californian ground. But who is to tell such a creature as a Chinese slave that she is free? Who is to explain to her poor intelligence what is meant by free soil? A slave in her own country, she has never heard of women of her class being free. In San Francisco she is neither more nor less a slave than she was in Canton or in Pekin. And yet no power can hinder the slave-dealers from pouring their abominable cargoes through the Golden Gate!

‘Just listen to this drivel,’ pleads the Senator; ‘the President treats this Asiatic Question as though it were a question of the minor morals!’

Here are the President's words: ‘I call the 0285 279 attention of Congress to the generally-conceded fact that the great proportion of Chinese immigrants who come to our shores do not come ostensibly to make their homes with us and their labour productive of general prosperity, but they come under a contract with head-men, who own them almost absolutely. In a worse form does this apply to Chinese women. Hardly a perceptible percentage of them perform honourable labour; they are brought for shameful purposes, to the disgrace of the community where settled, and to the great demoralization of the youth of those localities. If this evil practice can be legislated against, it will be my pleasure as well as duty to enforce any regulation to ensure so desirable an end.’

In Californian eyes, such words seem poor and weak. ‘If you compare this Message with the actual facts, what can you call such words but drivel?’ the Senator proceeds: ‘Here, in Sacramento, we have no illusion on the subject of this coming in of Asiatic scum. The mandarins are emptying all their cesspools on our coast. You doubt! I tell you China is an overcrowded country, where people 0286 280 swarm beyond the means of life. They fill the land with crimes. Millions are paupers, millions more are slaves. In California the mandarins have found a penal colony, to which, through our cupidity and folly, they are now transporting their vagabonds, criminals, and harlots. They are mighty smart, those mandarins, for they not only rid themselves of social filth, but make these outcasts bear the cost of their removal from the interior to Hong-Kong. With all your cleverness, you English have not yet been able to persuade an Australian colony to receive your malefactors. We, too, are clever fellows; but we Californians have found no means of emptying San Quentin and the Mexican quarter of San Francisco into the suburbs of Pekin. These heathens beat us from the field. What is the President's remedy for these enormous evils? The Chinese come under head-men, who own them almost absolutely; the women come as slaves, for shameful practices. If these evils can be legislated against, he will try to help us to administer the law!’

‘Your President is busy in the South.’

‘The South! I tell you, Sir, that Negro trouble in the South will pale ere long before this Mongol 0287 281 trouble in the West. In all our battles for the soil this contest is the hardest and most dangerous. In New Orleans you see the best and worst of African Sam. He stands in front of you; so many rank and file; behind him no reserves. But Asiatic John is a mystery. You cannot count him, in and out, or march about him, back and front. He comes across the sea in thousands; nay, in tens of thousands; yet these thousands and tens of thousands are but heralds of the mighty host. Millions may come where thousands came, and tens of millions whence the tens of thousands came.’

Is it mere frenzy to imagine such a swarm of Asiatics arriving at the Golden Gate? In former days America was fed from Asia? Why not be fed again? The men are on the other side. The sea lies open to their ships. The transport pays.

‘We are little more than thirty millions of White people,’ adds the Senator; ‘they are upwards of three-hundred-and-sixty millions of Yellow people. So, to spare us fifty millions would be nothing to them, while the gift would be death to us.’

The Senator is right. A drain of fifty millions from the Five Provinces would leave those provinces 0288 282 as densely crowded as Ireland was before the famine. It would pay the Government of Pekin to hire ships and send these fifty millions out. Spread about the United States, as labourers for wages always spread themselves about, fifty millions of Mongols would yield a safe majority in every ballot-box from Oregon to the. Gulf of Mexico.

Who says they will never come? Who knows what men will dare when pressed by want? Hunger has broken through stone walls and braved tempestuous seas. Failure of a root transferred a third part of the Irish people to America; though an Irish kerne is just as fond of his native soil as a Mongolian peasant. Who knows the future of the tea-plant? We have had a vine disease and a potato-blight Suppose the tea-plant were to fail? If such a disaster should convert China into another Ireland, the people would have to leave it in millions. If a seventh part of the Chinese people came over to America, they would swamp the ballot-boxes, and under a Republican Constitution they might assume the ruling power.

Under the menace of such an invasion from China, threatening at no distant date to swallow up the civilization of Europe in the barbarism of Asia, has not the time arrived for White men of all sections in America to review the situation?

White conquest in America has been so rapid and so uniform that men are not unlikely to be careless of the future, fancying that their work is done, their tenure of the land secured. When Hancock and his comrades signed the Declaration of Independence, Thirteen Colonies were represented at the Congress in Philadelphia; Thirteen Colonies, covering less than five hundred thousand square miles of surface, peopled by something under two million five hundred thousand souls, of whom nearly five hundred thousand were Africans, held in slavery. At the end of a century those Thirteen Colonies 0290 284 have grown into Thirty Nine States and Eight Territories, covering more than three million square miles of surface, counting upwards of forty millions of free inhabitants, without numbering the Kickapoos, who cannot be caught, and the Comanches and Cheyennes, who cannot be taxed.

A mere fringe of sea-board, the young Republic lay along the shores and inlets of a narrow mountain slope. From Penobscot river in Maine to Attamaha river in Georgia the inhabitable land was seldom more than a hundred miles in depth. Here and there a fertile valley ran up two or three hundred miles, but the foot of the Alleghannies usually came down within a hundred miles of the sea. At one point only had these mountain barriers been crossed; an opening in the Blue Ridge, through which a few adventurous planters had passed into the plains, now covered by West Virginia and Kentucky; and these stragglers from their kind had to live at the mercy of Red savages, who from time to time burned the homesteads, scalped the men, and carried the women to their camps. In patriotic talk the setting sun was called the western boundary; but the sun was then supposed to set, not in the 0291 285 Pacific Ocean, over towards Japan, but on the peaks and summits stretching from the Adirondack to the Blue Ridge. Pittsburg, a village only nine years old, stood in the desert. A man who ventured down the Ohio in a canoe was honoured as an explorer. On the spots where Wheeling and Cincinnati stand to-day, with their schools and churches, railways and manufactories, the adventurer saw the smoke of Indian fires, and heard the war-whoop of Indian camps. Red men hunted buffalo on the plains of Indiana, paddled canoes down the Ohio, and snared fish in the tributaries of the Big Drink.

South of the young Republic stood a watchful and suspicious enemy, who was all the more difficult to treat since she had formerly been a friend. France held the mouth of the Mississippi, and, in her ignorance of true political science, she had practically closed that artery of commerce to Americans. In a country without canals, and with hardly any roads, free use of the great river was a first condition of settlement in the Mississippi Valley, and nothing like a free use of that river could be obtained from the French viceroys reigning at New Orleans. By nature and events alike the young Republic seemed 0292 286 confined to her original seat, the shores and inlets running down from Maine to Georgia.

When the War of Independence closed, not a few good men were saddened by the out-look. The nobler passions, called into activity by the war, were spent, and nothing but the ordinary waste and wreck of civil strife was left. Even Washington's steadfast nerves were shaken. As he rode about the settlements, thinking of what was yet to come, his mind gave way to doubts and fears. The country lay waste. Homesteads, abandoned by their owners, were choked with mud and over-run by vermin. Towns had been destroyed by the contending armies. Bridges were gone, mills burnt, reservoirs emptied. The roads and tracks were injured. Every man in the States was poorer than he had been in the Colonies, and moody with the loss of many comforts which use had made a second nature. Every hamlet was beset by wounded men, often by wretches in rags pretending to be wounded men. One soldier in seven was supposed to be a cripple, with a claim on his compatriots for bread. The people were unsettled and in debt. After a life of danger and excitement, no one had a mind to settle 0293 287 down. All works of peace had fallen back. All noble efforts had relaxed. There is no leveller like war; and the levelling done by war is always downward, crushing the higher and the lower things together; as in the Holy City, in the hurry of defence, the porphyry shaft and ornamented frieze were cast in to a common wall, along with clay and pebbles, earth and unhewn stones.

Love of drink, a habit of the young Norse gods, had grown under the hardships and privations of war. A habit of cursing and swearing, also a custom of the young Norse gods, had crept, under the same malific influence, into every colony, almost into every household. Education, once the first thought in every town, had fallen into neglect; and teachers and professors, finding no field for their abilities in the Republic, sailed to Europe, where their talents might hope to meet with some reward. Personal vice had grown into a fashion, and the fine ladies of Boston and Richmond thought it an accomplishment to prattle in the jargon of Voltaire.

‘The spirit of freedom,’ said Washington, seven years after the Declaration of Independence, ‘has long since subsided, and every selfish passion has 0294 288 taken its place.’ But, in the same high spirit, Washington set himself to heal the wounds and repair the miseries caused by war. And see with what results!

France has been bought off; the outlets of the Mississippi are in American hands. Spain has been ousted from Florida, and Mexico driven from California, Arizona, and Texas. Nearly all the temperate, and some of the semi-tropical, zones of America have been brought under the rule of English idioms and American laws. Thirty States and Territories, each about the size of Spain, have been added to the Republic in a hundred years. In these States and Territories there are forty millions of free citizens, sixty three thousand churches, with twenty-one million sittings; a hundred and forty-one thousand schools, two hundred and seventy thousand teachers, and more than seven million boys and girls attending school. Spread about these States and Territories are fifty-six thousand public libraries, containing nearly twenty million volumes; a hundred thousand private libraries, containing nearly twenty-six million volumes. The States and Territories produce five thousand eight hundred newspapers, with a yearly issue of fifteen thousand 0295 289 million copies. They are covered by four hundred millions of farms, and these farms are valued at two thousand million pounds sterling. There are seven million five hundred thousand separate families, with seven million separate houses, so that, with a few exceptions, every head of a family in this Republic has a separate home.

During the hundred years of her young life the United States may claim their share in the inventions which have done the most to serve mankind. Setting aside, as open to dispute, their claim to the invention of steam-ships and electric wires, the list of inventions and improvements on inventions is a long and curious document. An American invented the cotton-gin. An American invented the rotatory printing-press. The apple-parer and the knife-cleaner are American. The grass-cutter, the steam-mower, and the planing-machine are all American. Is not the hot-air-engine American? Is not the whole India-rubber business American? One American taught us how to make wool-cards, another to make horse-shoes by machinery. The sand-blast is American, the grain-elevator is American. Americans claim the electro-magnet and the artificial VOL. II. U 0296 290 manufacture of ice. The land is rich in genius, and especially in suggesting and contriving genius. America has the biggest cataract and the broadest mountain range in the world; but she has known how to throw a bridge over that cataract and to carry a railway over that mountain range.

More obvious, perhaps, though not more striking, is the growth of her several capitals. New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, and San Francisco have been noticed by strangers more than others; yet it is doubtful whether the growth of either New York or Chicago has been so striking as that of Philadelphia.

Philadelphia is the best example of White progress in America, because nothing accidental, nothing temporary, rules the conditions of her growth. She has not been made a Royal residence, like Rome; the centre of a new imperial system, like Berlin. No great discovery of mineral wealth has drawn to her the daring spirits of all nations, like San Francisco. She is not the chief entry of immigrants from Europe, like New York. She has not sprung into fashion like Brighton and Saratoga. She owes no part of her fortune to having been made a free port, like Livorno, or to her having taken the fancy of a Cæsar, like Madrid. Her growth is natural: Accidental growth is seen in many towns. A railway bridge secures prosperity to Omaha; a line of docks makes Birkenhead; a spring of oil gives life to Petrolia. But Philadelphia owes her wealth to U 2 0298 292 general causes, and her greatness is not jeopardized by the failure of a dozen industries.

Men now living in Walnut Street remember a time when Philadelphia was not so large as Croydon. She is now bigger than Berlin—nearly as big as New York. Only fifty years ago she was about the size of Edinburgh. Ten years later she was as big as Dublin. In another ten years she had outgrown Manchester. Fifteen years ago she was ahead of Liverpool. At the present moment Philadelphia is more than equal to Manchester, Liverpool, and Sheffield combined. If the population of Dublin and Edinburgh, York, Lancaster, and Chester were counted in one list they would hardly make up half the number of people who house in Philadelphia at this present day. If size is but another name for power the City of Brotherly Love is metropolitan.

Leaving out Chinese cities, Philadelphia claims to be the fourth city in the world, admitting no superiors save London, Paris, and New York. She over-caps all other rivals. She is bigger than Moscow and St. Petersburg, the two capitals of Russia, put together. The three capitals of the Austro-Magyar Monarchy, Vienna, Pesth, and Prague, fall 0299 293 far below her numbers. She has left behind her the four capitals of United Italy—Rome, Florence, Naples, and Turin. She claims to have at the present hour a population somewhat exceeding eleven hundred thousand souls.

The growth of modern Rome, the splendour of Berlin, are not so singular as the growth and splendour of Philadelphia. No city in our time has thriven so much as Rome has done since she became the capital of Italy; yet in point of population Rome is but a sixth-rate town. In three years London adds to her numbers more people than cluster on the Seven Hills. In four years Philadelphia does the same. No one supposes that Rome will grow for ever as she is growing now. A Government, a Court, an army, and a Parliament, cannot enter her gates every year. Berlin has grown with an amazing swiftness, and the capital of Imperial Germany may feel the impulse of events longer than Rome; for Germany is a bigger country than Italy, her state system is less parochial, and more of her chief citizens, both civil and military, find their interest in living near the Emperor's court. Yet in Berlin, as in Washington, Madrid, and other artificial capitals, 0300 294 the limit of this accidental growth must soon be reached. Berlin is not, like London and like Philadelphia, a great commercial centre, with a port sufficiently near the sea for purpose of trade. Berlin is land-locked, like Madrid. Few things are more certain than that the future capitals of the world will stand on both elements, accessible, as Constantine said of Byzantium, by sea and land. We hear so rarely of this silently-growing city on the Delaware that four persons in every five will be amazed to hear that, like New York, Philadelphia has left such ancient and historic capitals as Vienna and Constantinople far behind.

And yet her growth seems no less sound in bole than high in branch and rich in foliage. On coming back into the city after some years' absence you are caught by a surprise at every turn. You may not like to say you left the city clay and find it marble, yet the saying would not seem a great perversion of the facts. Eight years ago I left many of my friends in brick houses, who are now dwelling in marble palaces. The thoroughfares are rising into pomp and show. I do not speak just now of public buildings of exceptional character and excellence 0301 295 —such edifices as Girard's College, the most perfect classical building in America, or of the new Girard bridge, over the Schuylkill River—the widest, perhaps the handsomest, iron roadway in the world—but of ordinary structures—clubs and banks, churches and law-courts, masonic halls, hotels, and newspaper offices. Two or three of the new banks are equal to the best things lately done in Lombard Street, while the great Masonic Temple puts the residence of our own Grand Lodge to shame. The new churches are mostly in good style and rich material, nearly all being faced with either rough green-stone or polished white marble. The new buildings of the University of Pennsylvania—partly completed—are fine in exterior, built of the rough green-stone peculiar to the place, faced with red sand-stone, as well as rich in apparatus and collections, the department of physics being particularly good.

Broad Street is not yet a rival of Pall Mall, but Penn Square is both larger and better built than St. James's Square. Market Street is not yet equal to the Strand, but Chestnut Street is not unworthy to rank with Cheapside; and in a few years the business 0302 296 quarters of Philadelphia will vie in architectural effect with that of the best parts of London, even Queen Victoria Street and Ludgate Hill.

But banks are banks, and clubs are clubs. A special beauty may be gained in one part of a city at the expense of others, as we have seen in Bloomsbury and Belgravia, when thousands on thousands of the poor were routed out of ricketty old lodgings to make room for New Oxford Street and Grosvenor Gardens. Such things occur in great cities without being signs of growth. The pulling-down of Paris, under Louis Napoleon, was no evidence of public health, but rather of a hectic glow and morbid appetite for change. How are the ordinary houses in a city built? How are the masses lodged? These are the questions which a statesman and a moralist ought to ask. It is not enough to ask whether, behind these banks and palaces, lie Field Lanes and Fox Courts; it is of more importance to see how the average classes of mankind are housed.

In no place, either in America or out of it, have I seen such solid work—such means of purity and comfort—in the ordinary private houses, as in Philadelphia. There seem to be no sheds, no hovels, 0303 297 no impurities. In almost every house I find a bathroom. Let no reader think the presence of a bathroom in a house a little thing. It is a sign. A bath means cleanliness, and cleanliness means health. In Oriental countries we see the baths of sultans and pashas; basins of marble, in the midst of shady trees, with jets of flashing water; luxuries for the rich, not necessaries for the poor. Here we have baths for everyone who likes to pay for water; and I read in the Water Company's report that more than forty thousand heads of families in Philadelphia pay that company a water-rate for household baths. That record is a greater honour to the city—as implying many other things, the thousand virtues that depend on personal cleanliness—than even the beauties of Fairmont Park.

Yet Fairmont Park, containing three thousand five hundred acres, and lying along the Schuylkill River and Wissahickon Creek, is a wonder of the earth. Think of a park in which Hyde Park, with its four hundred acres (the Ring, the Serpentine, and the Ladies' Mile) would be lost! Central Park, New York, is more than double the size of Hyde Park, yet Central Park would lie in a mere corner 0304 298 of Fairmont Park. All the seven London Parks thrown into one—Victoria, Greenwich, Finsbury, Battersea, St. James's, Hyde, and Regent's—would not make one Fairmont Park.

Nor is the loveliness of Fairmont Park less striking than the size. Neither the Prater in Vienna, nor Las Delicias in Seville, nor the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, though bright and varied, can compare in physical beauty with Fairmont. The drive along the Guadalquiver on a summer evening is delicious; and the views of Sèvres and St. Cloud are always charming; but the Schuylkill is a more picturesque river than either the Guadalquiver near Seville or the Seine near Paris. The view from George Hill combines the several beauties of the view from Richmond Hill and Greenwich Hill. There is a wooded country rolling backwards into space. There is the wide and winding river at your feet, and, just beyond the river, camps of spires and steeples, towers and domes; and, rising over all, like a new Parthenon, the noble pile called Girard's College. Seen on a sunny day, in the Indian summer, when the forest leaves are burning into gold and crimson, and the shining marble flashes through the 0305 299 air, this view from George Hill is one of the things which, ‘seen, become a part of sight.’

Yet, in this proud story of American growth, there is some drawback. May one hint that in the halls of victory there is a sad, if not a serious, writing on the wall?

Apart from that Conflict of Race which is her permanent tragedy, America has many campaigns to carry on; campaigns in the civil order, and on both her moral and material sides. She has to recover her fair proportion of the female sex. She has to restore a true balance of the sexes on her soil. She has to cure her people of that love of strong drinks which they get from their English ancestors, but which is quickened by a climate rich in extremes of heat and cold. She has to meet a vast amount of that illiteracy which is not only the bane of nations but, as Shakespeare says, ‘the curse of God.’

Among the evils which impede White growth in America, that poverty in the female sex, which is caused by separate male adventure in the outset, is the first and worse. No riches in the soil, no beauty in the landscape, no salubrity in the climate, can 0307 301 make up to a colony for the paucity of women. Women are the other halves of men.

The absence of White women at San Diego and San Carlos, was the chief, if not the only, reason for the waste and failure of the first White Conquest on the Slope. If Don Rivera had allowed each of his troopers to bring an Andalusian wife to Monterey, the first people in California would have been Spanish, Catholic and civilized, instead of being mongrel, pagan, and semi-savage. If the Yankee Boys and Sydney Ducks had brought American and English wives to San Francisco, there would have been less drinking, shooting, suicide, and divorce in that delightful city of the Golden Gate. If the trapper and the miner in the Rocky Mountains, could obtain their natural mates, there would be no Jem Bakers, living in cabins with five or six squaws a piece, provoking Shoshones to attack White ranches and Cheyennes to steal White women from the emigrant trains. If America stood in her natural order as regards the sexes, there would be an end of buying and selling Indian girls, and the irruption of an Asiatic horde of female slaves would be less appalling to the moral sense.

Domestic trouble in America would cease for want of aliment. Most of this trouble may be traced directly to the disproportion of the sexes. If the males and females were so fairly mixed, that every man who felt inclined to marry could find a wife, he would be likely to leave his neighbour's wife alone. If every woman had the chance given to her by nature of securing one man's preference, and no more, she would be less dreamy and ideal, less exercised about her rights and wrongs, less moved about her place in creation. A woman with one mate, and no visible temptation to change her partner for another, and still another, would pay scant heed to those quacks of either sex, who come to her with their jargon about affinities and passionals. She would want no higher laws, and seek no greater freedom than her English mothers have enjoyed in wedded love.

But how is moral order to be kept in regions where there are two males to each female, as in Oregon, three males to each female as in Nevada and Arizona, four males to every female as in Idabo, Wyoming, and Montana?

No other civilised and independent commonwealth shows the same phenomena as America.

In 1871, the United Kingdom had, in round numbers, a population of thirty-one million six hundred and seventeen thousand souls. Of this total, fifteen million three hundred and sixty thousand were masculine souls; sixteen million two hundred and fifty-seven thousand feminine souls: excess of females over males in the United Kingdom, eight hundred and ninety-seven thousand souls.

In 1870, the United States had also, in round numbers, a White population of thirty-three million five hundred and eighty-nine thousand souls. Of this total, seventeen million and twenty-nine thousand were masculine souls; sixteen million five hundred and sixty thousand feminine souls: excess of males over females in the United States and Territories, four hundred and sixty-nine thousand souls.

The mischief springs from the immigration of single men, or married men who leave their wives behind in Europe. Taking the country all in all, nothing in the air of America seems to foster male growth at the expense of female growth. Among the Red men there is about the same excess of females as prevails in Europe. Black men show a larger proportion of females; and among their bastard brethren, the 0310 304 Mulattoes, this proportion rises to the figure of ten females to seven males. Mixture of blood seems unfavourable to the natural rule of female births. The White people in America follow the same laws of growth as White people in Europe.

Take the case of Prussia, as a country in which the White race has always grown, and is still growing, in the natural order. Prussia is a staid and prosperous country, where the peasant is well-taught, well-governed and well-drilled. The movement in her population has been very slight. Where Prussia has sent out one emigrant, the United Kingdom has sent out more than fifty emigrants. During the forty years in which the tides of population were rolling at the flood from Europe to America, Prussia only lost a hundred thousand souls. Her people, therefore, may be taken as a sample of the White race in Europe, in their normal state.

In 1871, Prussia had a population of twenty-four million six hundred and ninety-three thousand souls. Of this total, twelve million one hundred and seventy-four thousand were masculine souls; twelve million five hundred and eighteen feminine souls: 0311 305 excess of females over males in Prussia, three hundred and forty three thousand.

These figures give an average for Prussia of thirteen more females than males in every thousand souls: an average which is exactly that of Maryland, and very nearly that of New York and Connecticut.

England and Germany owe to America more than eight hundred thousand females; a debt in face of which all other claims for compensation are the merest bagatelles.

Who can say how much America suffers from this loss? It used to be said, that every man landing in New York was worth a thousand dollars to the republic. Women are worth as much as men; in some parts of America more than men. Suppose each female landing in New York is worth a thousand dollars. What is the value, even on the lowest ground of money, of those eight hundred thousand women who are owing by England and Germany to the United States? Eight hundred million of dollars: two hundred million pounds sterling!

But America is suffering, morally and socially, not only from her absolute and general paucity in VOL. II. X 0312 306 female life, but from her partial and unhappy distribution of what she has. In England, France and Germany the sexes find a natural level. One county or one province is no richer than another. Essex has about the same average as Cheshire; Normandie the same average as Provence; Brandenburg the same average as the Rhine. In every region there is a slight excess of female life. Not so in the United States. While the republic as a whole is poor, nearly half the States are rich, some of them over-rich. In seventeen states, and in the district of Columbia, there are more women than men. In some of these states the difference is slight. For instance, in the great State of Pennsylvania, counting more than three million five hundred thousand souls, there is a difference in the sexes of only one in the thousand souls. Maine and Mississippi show the same result. In Louisiana there is a difference of three; in New Jersey of seven; in Tennessee of nine, in each thousand souls. But in several of the older states, the excess of female numbers runs very high; in some beyond that of Great Britain and Ireland. In every thousand souls of the United Kingdom, there are four hundred and eighty-six 0313 307 males to five hundred and fourteen females; a difference in the thousand of twenty-eight, where Prussia shows a difference of thirteen. In every thousand souls of Massachusetts there are four hundred and eighty-three males to five hundred and seventeen females; a difference in the thousand of thirty-four, where Great Britain and Ireland show a difference of only twenty-eight. North Carolina has a greater excess of females than any country in Europe except Sweden, and the old Puritan State of Rhode Island overtops her Puritan neighbour Massachusetts.

The most crowded female region in the civilised world is the district of Columbia, in the centre of which Washington stands. In this purgatory of women, there are, in every thousand souls, five hundred and twenty-eight females to four hundred and seventy-two males. No one appears to understand the causes of this singular phenomenon. We know the reason why Great Britain shows a larger excess of females than Prussia. During the present generation Great Britain has sent out half a million more emigrants than Prussia, and a vast majority of these emigrants have been males. A similar explanation covers the cases of Massachusetts and Rhode Island; X 2 0314 308 but the district of Columbia is not an ancient colony, from which the sons go out into the western plains, leaving their sisters in the old homesteads. Columbia means Washington, a city of art; of fashion and of pleasure; a city in which it is easy to drink and dice, to dance and flirt. Women are drawn to Washington, because Washington is the capital; the seat of government; a place in which there are many single men; and in which more money is spent than earned.

In all the other states and territories, there is excess of male life. In some, as Vermont, Delaware, and Kentucky, the excess is slight—not more than seven in each thousand souls. In others, such as Utah, Indiana, Arkansas, and New Mexico, the surplus male life is not excessive. In California, Kansas, and Minnesota, the excess is striking; and in Arizona, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, it is enormous—three to one, and even four to one. Does any one need evidence as to the moral and social aspects of a region in which there is only one White woman to four White men?

Physical loss appears to follow closely in the wake of this moral loss. For many years, nobody paid 0315 309 attention to such facts; but since the publication of ‘New America,’ an enquirer here and there has looked at such returns as he could get—always to be disheartened, often to be appalled.

Catharine E. Beecher, an advocate for woman's freedom, has made enquiries into the physical health of American females, and the result is, that among her ‘immense circle of friends and acquaintance all over the Union,’ she is ‘unable to recall so many as ten married ladies, in this century and country, who are perfectly sound, healthy, and vigorous.’ Passing beyond her own large circle, Catharine Beecher goes into twenty-six towns, and takes ten average cases in each town. Of two hundred and sixty ladies, only thirty-eight are found in a fair state of health. Sixty other towns are tested, with a similar result. If these returns are good for anything (and they are quoted with approval by government officials) they prove that only one American woman in ten is physically fit for the sacred duties of wife and mother!

Three years ago, the Bureau of Education printed a paper on the Vital Statistics of America, which passed like an ice-bolt through the hearts of 0316 310 patriotic Americans. This paper showed that the birth-rate is declining in America from year to year; not in one State only, but in every State. The decline is constant and universal; the same in Arkansas and Alabama as in Massachusetts and Connecticut, in Michigan and Indiana as in Pennsylvania and New York. The rate was higher in 1800 than in 1820; higher in 1820 than in 1840; higher in 1840 than in 1860. The birth-rate is admitted to be larger among the immigrants than among the natives; yet the average, thus increased by strangers, is lower than that of any country in Europe, not excepting the birth-rate of France in the worst days of Louis Napoleon.

Some of the ablest statists and physicians of Boston have come to the conclusion that the White race cannot live on the American soil! Nothing has been done by law to mitigate this curse of an unequal distribution of the sexes. What has been done is the result of accident—as statesmen think of ‘accidents.’ In 1860 America counted no less than seven hundred and fifty thousand more males than females on her soil. Ten years later this enormous balance was reduced by three hundred 0317 311 thousand. Inequality began with immigration, and will cease when immigration stops. America can readily account for the disturbance in her social system; the whole excess of male life in America being due to the fact that, in the ten years from 1860–70, four hundred and fifty thousand more males than females entered the ports of Boston and New York.

Her surplus male population is four hundred and sixty-nine thousand. If during the ten years, from 1860 to 1870, no immigrants had come in—or if the male and female arrivals had been equal in numbers—she would have shown a total of only nineteen thousand males over females. Thus her balance of the sexes would have been partially restored. With the stoppage of immigration the curse will die down. But is not such a cure as bad as the disease?

Great is the evil, wild are the efforts made by Americans to cure the evil of intemperance.

Springing from English and German fathers, the Americans come of a race among whom free tippling was a pious rite and social courtesy, as well as the gratification of a physical appetite. Our gods were hard drinkers as well as strong fighters; and the lovely shield-maidens and wish maidens who enchanted our fallen heroes, had the duty of pouring out horns of mead and ale. We denizens of earth were quick to follow the example of our gods and heroes in their House of Joy. Teutonic love of ale and mead survived the fall of Odin and his wish-maidens; taking shape under the new faith as church-ales and grace-cups. We have our God-speeds and stirrup-cups; our Lent ales, Lammas ales, and Christmas ales. We drink at christenings, at weddings, 0319 313 and at funerals. Our marriage feasts are bride-ales. We pledge the new-born babe in strong liquors, and renew our memory of the dead in wine. We Teutons are the poets of good cheer. A Saxon princess left us the phrase, ‘Liever Kyning wass heal—Dear King, your health’—the origin of our present Wassail. An English damsel gave us the Toast. To us belong the loving cup and the parting glass. Ours among nations are those fines and footings which are levied on the tradesman and artisan, to be spent by good fellows in drink. In truth, we have a craving for strong waters which no religious precepts, no municipal regulations have ever yet been able to subdue.

Americans have our virtues and our appetites. They drink a great deal more than Gauls Italians, and Iberians drink; on the other side, they work harder and fight fiercer than Gauls, Italians, and Iberians work and fight. Alike in what they do, and what they fail to do, the emphasis of a strong original character comes out in them.

Alike in England and America, we have tried a hundred methods of repression. We have tried fines in money; we have tried exposure in the 0320 314 stocks; we have tried imprisonment in jails. Our American cousins have gone farther in the way of repression than ourselves. In some States they have forbidden the sale of intoxicating drinks; in others they have placed the traffic under regulations which are almost as stringent as prohibition. In several States they have made the drink-seller responsible for the injuries done by drunken men and women, and in many more they have allowed the plea of habitual drunkenness as ground for a divorce.

In America, as in England, the results are so far doubtful that the efficacy of such measures can be plausibly denied. Taken as a whole, America consumes more whisky than ever. In the most sober of her States the convictions for drunkenness are increasing. Maine, in spite of her rigid system, has more offenders and more fines this year than she has had for any other year since prohibition was adopted as her rule. Massachusetts, after trying the policy of prohibition for more than twenty years, has recently repealed the law, and come back to the system of recognising the sale of drink, and regulating that sale by licences. In Ohio, they have tried State laws, police inspection, and private enthusiasm. Judges and police 0321 315 have failed; preachers and missionaries have also failed. They have tried crusaders of both sexes, not only preaching men but singing women. In all these efforts they have failed, yet not so signally as to discourage new attempts. The singing movement, though abated by the magistrates as a public nuisance, is regarded by pious people as having left behind it in Ohio some exceedingly precious fruits.

Few subjects are more tempting to an artist than the comic side presented by Mother Carey and her female troop of singers; but I feel too much respect for women, even when I cannot go all lengths with them, to treat these ladies otherwise than with the reverence due to spotless motives and noble aims. These singing women were good and decent females, members of various churches, and especially of the Wesleyan Churches. Watching the temperance societies, and noting what they thought the causes of their failure, these ladies came to the conclusion that as moral agents, men are played out, and that women must set their shoulders to the wheel. With feminine ways of thought, they put the matter in this light before themselves. The thirst for strong 0322 316 drink is not only a natural passion, but a universal and abiding passion; while the efforts made by men to put it down are fitful and empirical—paper pledges, social orders, public meetings, and prohibitive laws. No man has dreamt of an appeal to God. These women saw that a field lay open to their enterprise. It was the field of prayer, and they resolved to try the power of prayer.

They entered on a crusade of prayer against intoxicating drinks, and took on themselves the duty of crusaderesses. They prayed at church. They prayed in their own rooms. They called meetings for prayer. When they were ripe for bolder things, they stept into the streets, and stood in front of drinking-bars, praying for the whisky-drinkers, praying for the whisky-vendors, wrestling with the potent and evil spirit. Their work began in Fourth Street. First meeting in church, and asking the Divine blessing on their trial, the ladies fell into ranks, two and two, and then passed into the street singing their hymns. Near the Exchange stands a famous drinking-bar, to which merchants repair for a free lunch, and wash that free lunch down with copious draughts of whisky and water. Here the 0323 317 ladies halted, formed a half-circle round the door, closed up the side-walk, began to sing the Rock of Ages, after which they knelt down on the stones to pray.

Men came out of the bar to look at these visitors. Still more stopped in the street, arrested by the sacred sounds. A crowd soon blocked the street. Cars could not pass, and waggons had to turn another way. Some persons joked and mocked, others threw copper cents into the circle. Many looked at them with pity, not unmixed with wonder, for the masculine brain is slow to see a chance of moral progress in proceedings which resemble a row, and may easily end in a riot. Yet the women held the side-walk, finished their prayer, got up and sang more hymns. Americans are fond of hymns, and there are few Americans who will not doff their caps and join in singing such pieces as the Rock of Ages and There is a Fountain. After holding the whisky-bar in siege for about an hour, the ladies formed ranks, and marched back to their church, followed by a crowd of men and boys—some of whom, it is supposed, had hardly ever been inside a church before. A short service ended the day.

For several weeks these scenes went on. Some bar-keepers opened their doors and bade the ladies come in. They entered, filling the bar, and hustling the men away. Other dealers gave in and closed their bars. A few of the whisky-vendors, chiefly Jews, insulted the ladies, giving free drinks to any rough who would join in chanting jovial and indecent choruses; yet the ladies persevered until a thousand bars had been closed by their appeals and interruptions. But the movement could not be allowed to spread. The ladies blocked the streets, traffic got deranged, and when the novelty was over, the great merchants and bankers of Cincinnati forced the civic authorities to interfere. Reform was sacrificed to trade.

‘Our public officers,’ says to me a Good Templar, ‘are all elected by the liquor interest, and the Police Commissioners dare not raise a hand against the keepers of saloons and bars.’

The trade in strong drink is so profitable in Ohio that bar-keepers can afford to stand many drinks and pay many fines; yet a judge who knows his work can always carry his point against dishonest citizens. A Hebrew dealer was brought 0325 319 before a magistrate on a charge of selling whisky without a permit. ‘You are fined ten dollars,’ said the judge. ‘Ten dollars!’ sneered the Jew. ‘I pay him—shell agen.’ Next time the offender was fined twenty dollars. ‘Twenty dollars!’ he snapt; ‘pay him, and shell agen.’ Brought up a third time and fined a hundred dollars, he looked blank and beaten. ‘Eh! a hundred dollars? a hundred! Den I schtop.’

But magistrates are lenient—perhaps too lenient with offenders. By the Adair Law any barkeeper in Ohio who supplies a man with drink is answerable for that man's misdeeds; answerable whether he supplies the whole or only part of what his customer may have drunk. Thus a man may come into a bar and drink a cocktail. He may go to a second house and have a mint-julep. Later on, he may take an eye-opener, and after that a whisky-smash. By this time he may be tipsy, quarrelsome and disorderly, and the landlords who have each supplied him with sixpenny worth of liquor, are each and all responsible for his misdeeds. Such a law needs to be wisely read and cautiously applied. The crusaders and crusaderesses say it is not applied at all.

‘Guess now, you'll say it's good fun and turns a few cents pretty well, to invest in liquor,’ my Good Templar observes. ‘At a cost of twenty-five cents a fellow gets drunk. He may then disturb the street and break a man's head. Taken before the judge he gets a night's lodging and a square meal—all for the original twenty-five cents.’

‘And how would you prevent such incidents?’

‘Well, I guess the sale of liquor should be made penal.’

‘Surely it is nowhere in America penal to sell such wines and spirits as are freely sold in every town of Europe?’

‘No, not quite, yet very near. Have you ever been to St. Johnsbury, in Vermont? No! Then you should see St. Johnsbury, in Vermont; a sober place, where nobody can get a drop of drink!’

‘What is St. Johnsbury?’

‘Sir, St. Johnsbury is a Working-man's Paradise.’

Vermont , in which St. Johnsbury nestles, is a New England State, which in its origin and population had very little to do with Old England. The names are French. Vermont is derived from the Green Mountain of our idiom; St. Johnsbury from Monsieur St. Jean de Crevecœur, once a fussy little French consul in New York.

Eye of man has seldom rested on natural loveliness more perfect than the scenery amidst which St. Johnsbury stands. On passing White River Junction, a spot which recalls a favourite nook in the Neckar valley, we push into a gorge of singular beauty; a reach of the Connecticut River, lying under high and wooded hills, of various form and more than metallic brightness. Oak and chestnut, pine and maple, clothe the slopes. White houses he about you; some in secret places, utterly alone VOL. II. Y 0328 322 with Nature; others again, in groups and villages, with gardens, fruit trees, and patches of maize, among which the great red gourds lie ripening in the sun. At times the hills roll back, giving up margin and meadow to the grazier. Here you have herds of cattle, there droves of horses, feeding on the hillsides, or sauntering to the stream. Yet the main charm of this valley is the water—first of the Connecticut River, then of the Passumpsic River; each of these water-courses having the beauty common to flowing rivers and mountain streams. A pause. We mount a slope, and we are in the leaf-strewn avenue known as St. Johnsbury; the proper crown and citadel of that river-bed.

A ridge of hills divides Passumspic River from Sleeper's Creek. Uplands start from the farther bank of these two streams, and shut us in with green and purple heights, on which the sunrise and the sunset play with wondrous harmonies of light and shade.

When George the Third was king, the countries lying about Sleeper's Creek and Passumpsic River, were the unhappy hunting-grounds of Indian braves; unhappy, since they lay between the lodges of two 0329 323 warlike tribes, neither of whom was strong enough to drive the other from these woods and streams. Each fall the battle was renewed. Many a scalp was taken on the site now occupied by an Academy, many a war-dance held on the sward now covered by an Athenæum. A poor attempt was made to plant the place, and several thrifty Scots built cabins near the ridge; but Indian hatchets made it difficult for even these tenacious strangers to maintain a foothold in the land.

Vermont was still a wild country when the Thirteen Colonies declared themselves independent. She was admitted to the Union under French impulses and French sentiments. Monsieur St. Jean was good enough to offer his name to the Scotch settlers on Sleeper's Creek. Now St. Jean is in France a common, not to say a rustic name, like Hodge in England, and the colonists, though anxious to pay a compliment to Monsieur St. Jean, proposed to alter his name so far as to call their place St. Johns; a form which looks poetic in English eyes, and drops sonorously from English lips. Monsieur was hurt. He loved America so well that he named his daughter Amerique. Y 2 0330 324 Why should not America call one of her towns after him? The matter was not easy to arrange. Monsieur St. Jean sailed for France, where he asserted he could do the settlers service. So they called their place St. Jean. But when the fussy little consul got to Paris, he found people too busy with their revolution to pay much attention to the graziers and bushmen on Sleeper's Creek. Thinking the consul false, the Scots changed their name to St. Johns. But then, there are several St. Johns in the neighbourhood; notably one on the Richlieu River; so by way of difference, they took the name of St. Johnsbury, a form in which the Gallic origin is completely lost

In spite of much natural beauty, and a vast supply of water power, the place made little progress. Roads were bad and markets distant. Here and there some farmer built a hut, some grazier fenced a field. A fall of water tempted families into the lumber trade. A hostelry crowned the ridge, St. Johnsbury House, kept by a hard drinking and harder fighting Captain Barney, who made the rafters crack with his jokes, and the hill-side noisy with his quarrels. St. Johnsbury, peopled by 0331 325 whisky-loving Scots, was anything but a sober place under Captain Barney's rule. Yet life was dull and progress slow, till Thadeus Fairbanks, improver of the platform scale, gave the impetus which has made St. Johnsburg one of the most curious spots in the United States.

St. Johnsbury is a garden, yet the physical beauty of the place is less engaging than the moral order. No loafer hangs about the kerbstones. Not a beggar can be seen. No drunkard reels along the street. You find no dirty nooks, and smell no hidden filth. There seem to be no poor. In two days' wandering up and down I have not seen one child in rags, one woman looking like a slut. The men are at work, the boys and girls at school. Each cottage stands apart, with grass and space; each painted either white or brown. White, the costlier and more cheery colour, is the test of order and prosperity. Few of the cottages are brown. I see no broken panes of glass, no shingles hanging from the roof. No yard is left in an untidy state.

The men who live in these cottages send their children to the grammar-school in Main Street, a public school, in which they are educated free of 0332 326 cost. The school is an attractive place, the teaching good, the playground large. If a man wants an elementary training for his boys and girls this public school will give it, and will send them at an early age into the world equipped for any walk in life, except that of the professional man.

St. Johnsbury is a working village; the people in it are mainly working men. It is a village such as we are striving after in our Shaftesbury Parks and other experiments in providing wholesome lodgings for our labouring classes, in the hope that they may be persuaded, first to save their money and then to put it into real estate by purchasing the houses in which they live. Here the problem has been solved; a working-class proprietary secured. In many cases—I have reason to infer in most—the craftsmen own the cottages in which they live. Inside, each cottage is a model of its kind, with all appliances for cleanliness and comfort; in short, a neat and well-arranged domestic shrine.

What are the secrets of this Workman's Paradise? Why is the place so clean, the people so well housed and fed? Why are the little folks so hale in face, so neat in dress? All voices answer me that these unusual, though most desirable, conditions in a village, 0333 327 spring from a strict enforcement of the law prohibiting the sale of drink.

The men of Vermont have adopted that Act which is known to English jesters as the Maine Liquor Law. The adversaries of ‘jolly good ale’ command a large majority of votes. They wish to drink water, and will not let other men drink beer. They come of a stout old border stock, with great capacities for self-denial, and a rage for saving their weaker brethren from the whisky-jug. Being virtuous, they abolish cakes and ale, and will not suffer ginger to be hot in the mouth. ‘We live,’ they say, ‘in a commonwealth where every man is free; but we have only one law for all, and what we like to do you shall be bound to do!’ Hurrah for a majority of votes!

The Maine Liquor Law is carried out with all the rigour of an Arctic frost. Not a public-house now exists in St. Johnsbury, nor can a mug of beer or glass of wine be purchased openly by a guest to whom wine and beer are portions of his daily food. No citizen is allowed to vend intoxicating drink on any pretext or to any person. In the village we have two guest-houses for the entertainment of such as come and go our way—St. Johnsbury House and Avenue House. We avoid 0334 328 the words tavern and hotel, as savouring of bad old times, when every man might drink himself into a mad-house and his children into a jail. Our tavern is a house. I use the form guest-house from the close resemblance of my lodgings, in the way of meat and drink, to a guest-house on the Dwina and the Nile. It is a water-drinking house. Among the merits of the place, put out on cards to catch the eyes of tourists in the Vermont uplands, these two virtues are set forth: first there is dry air to breathe, and next there is good water to drink. Elsewhere one hostelry is famous for trout, a second for terrapin, a third for madeira, a fourth for champagne. Down South no hostelry has ever yet thought of advertising the quality of its pump. But in St. Johnsbury the well-spirits reign. An American poet of another mind has sung:

If ere I kneel me down to pray My face shall turn towards St. Peray.

But such a poet would persuade no man to follow his lead on Sleepers' Creek. Though lodging in the rooms which echoed to the mirth of Captain Barney, we are now the votaries of a severer saint than St. Peray.

No bar, no dram-shop, no saloon defiles St. Johnsbury; nor is there, I am told, a single gaming-hell or house of ill-repute. So far as meets the eye this boast is true. Once, in my walks, I fancy there may be an opening in the armour of these Good Templars. Turning from the foreign street, where Jacques is somewhat careless of his fence, and Pat is tolerant of the cess-pool at his door, I read a notice calling on the passer-by to enter ‘the sporting and smoking bazaar.’ Here, surely, there must lurk some spice of dissipation. Passing down the steps into this ‘sporting and smoking bazaar,’ I see a large vault, running below Avenue House, and conjure up visions of Göthe's wine cellar in Leipzig, the Heiliger Geist in Mainz, and our own supper-rooms in Covent Garden; but on dropping down the steps of this ‘smoking and sporting bazaar,’ I find 0336 330 myself in a big empty room; the floor clean, the walls bright, and a small kiosk in one corner for the sale of cigars and cigarettes, at which a nice-looking matron waits for customers, who are slow to come.

‘They suffer you to sell tobacco, madam?’

‘Yes, Sir, for the present,’ sighs the patient creature; ‘some of them want to put down the sale of tobacco and snuff, as they have put down that of beer and gin; a lecturer was here last week; and in a year or so they may get a majority of votes.’

‘Your trade will then be gone?’

‘Yes, clearly.’

‘You may be the last of all your race?’

‘Well, some one must be last in everything, I guess.’

I leave her with the full conviction that there lurks no large amount of wickedness in this sporting and smoking bazaar.

The case seems hard to men who have not helped to pass the Bill. So much depends on your consent! A necklace is a pretty thing to wear; but not a necklace such as Gurth, the Saxon, wore—fixed round his throat by force.

For my part, I have passed through many countries 0337 331 and been broken to the ways of many men. I have eaten ice with a Druse of Lebanon, and sucked a water-melon with a Kirghiz chief; drunk quass with the Archimandrite of Pechersk, and gulped the dregs of a tank with an Arab Sheikh; tasted, unwittingly, the saltness of the Dead Sea, and shrunk with loathing from the nauseous ooze of Bitter Creek. I have lapped the Nile, and lingered by the fountains of Loja. In the absence of wine I can drink water with a Good Templar, and live in comfort on tea and milk. But an Oxonian near me, reared on foot-ball ground and cricket-field, asks for beer.

‘Can you get me a pint of bitter ale?’

It is a crucial test, and I regard the waiter's face while seeming not to notice him.

‘Well, Sir, it may be got.’

‘Then bring me some at once.’

‘Yes, Sir, but not at once. The thing will take some time. I have to send for it.’

‘To send for it—where from?’

‘From the Commissioner's.’

‘Pray, who is this Commissioner?’

‘Who is this Commissioner!’

‘Yes, yes, excuse me for the question; I am but a stranger in these parts.’

‘Why, Sir, the Commissioner is the town officer appointed by law to sell poisons, as I hear druggists are licensed in London to sell aconite and arsenic.’

‘Then get me a pint bottle of the poison called Bass's Pale Ale.’

The waiter disappears; a moment afterwards he returns with pen and paper in his hand.

‘You must be kind enough to write an order for the ale, and sign your name to it for record.’

‘Sign my name for what?’

‘For record; the Commissioner is bound to enter the name and address of every person to whom he sells a bottle of beer.’

‘Then I shall have a place in the archives of St. Johnsbury for my sins?’

‘The ale will certainly be posted against you,’ he rejoins; saying which he pops out of doors. Dinner is nearly done when he comes back, laden with a couple of pint bottles.

‘You've been long in coming, but your Commissioner seems to be a liberal fellow. We require a pint; he sends a quart.’

‘The fact is, Sir,’ the waiter answers with a leer, ‘it's my doing. There are two of you; a pint is little enough for one; and our Commissioner dare not serve you a second time to-day. I told him the order meant one pint for each.’

My own enquiries satisfy me that the man is right. Intoxicating drinks are classed with poisons, such as laudanum and arsenic; but as poisons may be needed in a civilized country, under a scientific system of medicine, laudanum and arsenic are permitted to be sold in every civilized city. Such is here the case with brandy, beer, and wine, which are all carefully registered in books and kept under lock and key. These poisons are doled out, at the discretion of this officer, in small quantities, very much as deadly-nightshade and nux vomica are doled out by a London druggist.

‘Cannot you get a bottle of cognac for your private use?’ I ask Colonel Fairbanks, manager of the scale factories.

‘I can write my order for a pint of cognac; it will be sent to me, of course; but my order for it will be filed, and the delivery entered on the public books for everyone to see.’

‘You find that system rather inquisitorial, eh?’

‘Well, no; it is intended for the common good, and everyone submits to what is for the good of all. We freely vote the law, and freely keep the law. But for myself the rule is a dead letter, as no intoxicating drink ever enters my house.’

In going through the scale mills I notice several classes of artisans. Five hundred men are toiling in the various rooms. The work is mostly hard; in some departments very hard. The heat is often great. From seven fill twelve, from one till seven, the men are at their posts. The range of heat and cold is trying; for the summer sun is fierce, the winter frost is keen. Your ordinary citizen cannot live through the summer heats without a trip to Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountains. Yet the men engaged in these manufactories are said to drink no beer, no whisky, and no gin. Drinking and smoking are not allowed on the premises. Such orders might be meant for discipline; but I am told that these five hundred workmen never taste a drop of either beer or gin. Their drink is water, their delight is tea. Yet everyone assures me that they work well, enjoy good health, 0341 335 and live as long as persons of their class who are engaged on farms.

‘These men,’ I ask, ‘who rake the furnaces, carry the burning metals, and stand about the crucibles—can they go on all day without beer?’

‘They never taste a drop, and never ask to have a drop. There is a can of water near them; they like the taste of water better than the fume of ale, and do their work more steadily without such fume.’

In fact, I find that these mechanics are the warmest advocates of a prohibitive liquor law. They voted for it in the outset; they have voted for it ever since. Each year of trial makes them more fanatical. Since the Act came into force, many new clauses have been added by the State Legislature. Party questions turn on this liquor law, and these intelligent workmen always vote for those who promise to extend its operations. They would gladly crush the sale of intoxicating liquors once for all, and I am led to fancy with my friend, the Good Templar of Cincinnati, that some of them would not hesitate to make the sale a capital offence.

‘You see,’ says Colonel Fairbanks, ‘we are a nervous and vehement race. Our air is dry and 0342 336 quick; our life an eager and unsleeping chase. When we work, we work hard; when we drink, we drink deep. It is natural that when we abstain, we should abstain with rigour.’

‘Are there no protests on the part of moderate men?’

‘None, or next to none. As year and year go by, more persons come to see the benefits of our rule. The men who formerly drank the most, are now the staunchest friends of our reform. These men, who used to dress in rags, are growing rich. Many of them live in their own houses. They all attend church, and send their boys and girls to school.’

Such facts are not to be suppressed by shrugs and sneers. It is an easy thing to sneer, and some unconscious comedy turns up at every corner to provoke a laugh.

‘Oblige me,’ I entreat the sober successor of Captain Barney, when going to bed, ‘with a glass of soda-water.’

‘Sorry, Sir, we have no soda water in the house.’

‘Then a glass of Selzer-water or Congresswater?’

‘Sorry, Sir; none in the house.’

‘Why not? Are these intoxicating drinks prohibited by law?’

‘Oh, no, they sell them at the druggists' shops.’

‘Then please to get me some from the druggist's shop.’

‘Excuse me, Sir, it is too late. The druggist's shop is closed.’

The fact is so. I ask my host why he does not keep such things as soda-water and selzer-water for sale.

‘We have no customers for them. Guess it's people who drink brandy that ask for soda-water!’

Should a tipsy stranger be taken in the street (as sometimes happens) he is seized like a stray donkey, run into a pound, and kept apart till he has slept away his dram. An officer then enquires where he got his drink. On telling, he is set free, and the person who sold the liquor is arrested, tried, and punished for the man's offence. The vendor, not the buyer, is responsible for this breach of moral order. It is just the same, whether the person supplying the liquor sells it or gives it; so that a man who entertains his friends at dinner has to stand VOL. II. Z 0344 338 before the magistrate and answer for the conduct of his guests. Imagine how this rule is likely to promote good fellowship round the mahogany-tree!

Such drawbacks may be taken off the sum of public benefits conferred on Vermont by the Liquor Law. What remains? The Workman's Paradise remains: a village which has all the aspect of a garden; a village in which many of the workmen are owners of real estate; a village of five thousand inhabitants, in which the moral order is even more conspicuous than the material prosperity; a village in which every man accounts it his highest duty and his personal interest to observe the law. No authority is visible in St. Johnsbury. No policeman walks the streets—on ordinary days there is nothing for a policeman to do. Six constables are enrolled for duty, but the men are all at work in the factories, and only don their uniforms on special days to. make a little show.

Some part of these beneficent results must be assigned to the platform scale, a special industry which seeks out quick and steady men, and by rewarding them beyond the ordinary rate of wages helps them to grow rich. A house and garden 0345 339 steadies a man as if by magic. But the law of abstinence comes in to harden and complete the work.

On looking up and down the streets, so lovely in the moonlight, weighing the visible results against my lack of soda-water, I sip my bit of broken ice, and go to bed with a not unkindly feeling towards the principle of the Vermont Law. Z 2

In Europe we hear so much about the public schools of America, that people are apt to fall into three distinct mistakes about American education. In the first place, they are apt to think there is an American school system, as there is an English school system; in the second place, they are apt to assume that American boys and girls are all at school, like Swiss boys and girls; in the third place, they are apt to conclude that American boys and girls are well taught as German boys and girls are well taught.

All these conclusions are erroneous, There is no American school system, as in England. Children are nowhere forced to be at school, as in Switzerland. Education is not universal and efficient, as in Germany.

With two exceptions, the republic, as a republic, pays no attention to the training of her 0347 341 citizens. These two exceptions are the military and naval academies; the first at West Point in New York, the second at Annapolis in Maryland. These schools are small in size, and only touch the upper ranks of the public service. Training for the ordinary citizen is left by the republic to her several States, by each State to her several counties, and by each county, as a rule, to her several townships. Where a township has a city within her limits, she mostly leaves the training of that city to the citizens. So far from there being an American school system in America, it is not true to say there is a Pennsylvanian school system in Pennsylvania, or a New York school system in New York. There is an Excelsior system, and a Deadly Swamp system. On the Gulf of Mexico they have one system, in the Rocky Mountains a second system, in the New England region a third system. It is hardly an abuse of words to say there are as many school systems as there are townships in the United States.

In only five States out of thirty-nine is there a law in favour of compulsory attendance at school. These five States are New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Michigan, and New York; but even in 0348 342 these States the law is nowhere carried out with rigour, and the story of illiteracy in these five States is very dark.

In New Hampshire seven thousand persons are unable to read, nearly ten thousand persons are unable to write. In Connecticut twenty thousand persons cannot read, thirty thousand persons cannot write. In Michigan thirty-four thousand persons cannot read, fifty-three thousand persons cannot write. In New York State there are a hundred and sixty-three thousand persons who cannot read, nearly two hundred and forty thousand persons who cannot write!

These ignorant folks are not all strangers; Irish labourers, German boors, and African riff-raff Many of them are natives of the soil, born under the Republic, in a land of public schools. In New York, with her compulsory law of school attendance, more than seventy thousand of the natives cannot sign their names. In Massachusetts and Connecticut the tables of illiteracy are not so swollen as in New York: yet in Connecticut more than five thousand, in Massachusetts nearly eight thousand of the natives cannot write. In Michigan, a newly-settled State, 0349 343 the two classes, natives and foreigners, are nearly equal in ignorance, there being twenty-two thousand natives to thirty thousand foreigners who cannot sign their names. One of the New Haven inspectors says that forty-one children in a hundred fail to attend school; so that nearly half the people in that noble city—one of the leading lights of civilization—are growing up in the moral darkness of Nigerines and Kickapoos. Texas has tried the compulsory system; but, having failed to get her lads and lasses into school by force, has gone back to her old plan of letting everybody do as he likes.

No other State or Territory in the Union cares. to try a scheme of public teaching which requires the vigour of New England teachers and superintendents to conduct, and which three of the six New England States have either never adopted or have set aside. Some States require certificates of training, to be produced by parents and guardians, but these testimonials of proficiency are said to be hardly worth a straw. Americans who know their country as I know my house and garden tell me that the young generation of Americans are growing up more ignorant than their fathers thirty years ago.

In 1870 the number of persons in America who could not read was reported as more than four millions five hundred thousand; of those who could not write more than five million six hundred thousand souls.

Such facts are not explained by the theory of a great rush of illiterates from Europe or even from Asia.

Some illiterates come from Liverpool, Hamburg, and Hong-Kong, no doubt, but they are not enough to darken the tables of illiteracy very much. The German immigrants, as a rule, can read and write. The Mongol immigrants, as a rule, can read and write. I have never seen a male Chinese who could not read, and very few who could not write—in their own tongue. Out of sixty-three thousand Chinese reported in the census, six thousand are returned as illiterate, but in many towns, probably in most towns, illiteracy was taken by the census marshals to mean inability to read and write English—a rule under which Victor Hugo and Father Secchi would be classed as illiterate. Of course the poorer class of Irish help to swell the list. Pat is the ‘bad lot’ of American statists; for with 0351 345 all his mirth and fire—his poetry, his sentiment, and his humour—he has few of the mechanical advantages of education. He can only make his mark, and swell the black list of the marshal's returns. Yet a vast majority of the illiterates in the census are American-born.

Out of the five million six hundred thousand persons in the Republic who cannot read and write only three quarters of a million are of foreign birth.

Of course, again, the Negroes count in these black lists; but Negroes are now citizens, with political rights. They count two millions and three-fourths. Red men and Yellow men add a little to the dark totals; yet, when all the Red, Yellow, and Black ignorance is deducted, there remain, as representing pure White ignorance, gross and pagan ignorance, no less than two million eight hundred thousand souls. Of this army of White barbarians in America, the census shows that more than two millions are American-born!

Such figures stun the mind. On looking into details, the enquirer is staggered to perceive that the older and richer States are no better educated than the rest. Nobody would expect to 0352 346 find a shining literary light in Texas or New Mexico; but almost everyone would fancy that New York and Pennsylvania would in point of common schools hold their heads extremely high. Yet New York and Pennsylvania rank among the lowest of the pure White States. In New York there are nearly two hundred and forty thousand persons who cannot read and write, and Pennsylvania follows closely on her neighbour's heels. Virginia is, however, the greatest sinner. In a population of one million and a quarter she numbers nearly half-a-million of illiterates. Georgia, Tennessee, and the two Carolinas follow in her wake; Virginia, being the recognised leader of her Southern sisters. Whether she goes right or wrong, these States seem ready to go with Virginia into right or wrong.

To sum up all. The native Americans who cannot read and write amount to nearly five millions!

Some measures have been taken to check an evil which is threatening to reduce White settlers to the level of Creeks and Cherokees, and to convert the Potomac and Savannah into American Nigers and Senegals. These measures are partly general, partly local; partly inquisitorial, partly remedial; but in every case they have improvement as their aim and end.

Four years ago, Americans were living in a dream. They knew that here and there a blotch defiled the fair face of their country, but they fancied that on the whole their ‘model republic’ was a shining light in popular education. Seven or eight years ago, some earnest watchers over American progress hinted that through the ravages of war, and through the poverty brought on several of the States, America had not only ceased 0354 348 to make way, but was actually falling back in the race. Enquiry was provoked. The facts produced led to fresh enquiry. Every one was struck, and not a few were stunned.

That a republic pre-supposes an instructed people is not only a truism in politics, but is understood to be so by every writer and speaker in the United States.

‘Republics can only stand on the education and enlightenment of the people,’ says President Grant.

‘The stability and welfare of our institutions must necessarily depend for their perpetuity on education,’ says Columbus Delano, Secretary of the Interior.

‘The existence of a republic, unless all its citizens are educated, is an admitted impossibility,’ says General Eaton, Commissioner of Education.

Congress passed a bill, establishing a Bureau of Education at Washington, for the purpose of collecting facts and letting the people know the truth. General Eaton was placed at the head of this Bureau, and for four years he had made an annual report; each year with safer data, each year also with a sharper note of warning. For the moment, he can do no more than publish facts. America is 0355 349 not yet prepared for a great and general act; and General Eaton has to leave his theory and his facts to speak.

His theory is—that a republic cannot live unless the whole of her citizens are instructed men.

His fact is—that in the United States, five million six hundred thousand persons are unable to read and write.

More has been done by states and counties to arrest the downward motion. But the case was always bad, and the war made it everywhere worse. In some States, the school system became a wreck; in every State it suffered from the strife. This wreck is being repaired, but many years will pass away before the country can recover from the ravages of her civil war.

In the States lying north of the Potomac, the wreck was less than in those lying south of that river. New York and the six New England States are doing better than the rest; doing as well as England and Belgium, if not so well as Switzerland and Germany. Pennsylvania lags behind her northern rival, though she shows a good record in comparison with her Southern neighbours, Maryland 0356 350 and Delaware. Maryland has never been in love with public schools, and she is taking to them now under a sense of shame. Her coloured schools are few in number and poor in quality. Delaware refuses, as a State, to recognise the duty of public instruction. She has neither State provision, nor County provision, for coloured schools. Such teaching as she gets, is gotten from her priests. Knowing these facts, need any one marvel that Delaware is one of the darkest corners of the United States?

In the Lake regions, the young States of Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, have a more uniform system, which is every year in course of improvement. These States have elementary schools in every township, with a secondary school in almost every county, crowned by a State university, with classical and scientific chairs. Ohio and Illinois have a system of their own.

On the Pacific slope, with the exception of California, public training is much neglected. Oregon, Dacota, and Nevada scarcely enter into the civilised system; Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico stand beyond it. In the River States, Nebraska, 0357 351 Kansas, and Missouri, there are common schools, leading up through secondary schools to State universities, as in Iowa and Michigan. In all these sections, there is close and constant effort on the part of some, weakened by indifference on the part of many, to give the people that aliment, without which, according to President Grant and Secretary Delano, the republic cannot live.

Yet, after all, the main interest in this intellectual struggle lies in the South, so long neglected by the ruling race; and in the Southern States, the chief scene of conflict is Virginia.

The new race of Virginians are facing the demon of Illiteracy with the same high spirit as they showed in fronting the great material power of their enemies in the war.

Ten years ago there were no such public schools in Richmond as there were in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. A lady of the First Families could not send her boys and girls to an institution where they might have to mingle with ‘white trash.’ It is the sentiment of a ruling class, common to all countries, not more obvious in Richmond and Raleigh than in Geneva and Lausanne, in Brighton and 0358 352 Harrogate. A society of gentry tends by habit to become a caste. No teachers of the higher grades found welcome in Virginia, and the science of pedagogy was abandoned to the Thwackums and Squeers. A private school, the lowest type of boarding-school, was the only school thought good enough for the girls and boys of White citizens in Richmond. But for the higher culture found in the domestic circle, where the men were mostly gentlemen, the women mostly ladies, the state of learning in Virginia would have fallen to the level of Italy and Spain.

Four years ago the Massachusetts plan was introduced. Two able officers, Virginia-born, Colonel Binford and the Hon. W. W. Ruffner, are placed in charge of this new system. Many schools have been erected, and many teachers found. A free system, seeking to impart a sound, uniform, and general education to all classes, the Massachusetts plan has become so popular and acceptable that the private schools are everywhere dying out. The teachers in the public schools are good, not only better, as a class, than any we can get in London, but better than I find in Vermont and New Hampshire. 0359 353 For these teachers in Virginia are nearly all ladies, not in sex only, but in birth and training; with the grace and accent, manner and appearance, of women whose mothers were ladies. Poverty at first, patriotism afterwards, disposed these women to adopt the art of teaching as a profession. They are fairly paid, and, once the false shame of taking honest money for honest work is overcome, everything goes well with them at school and home.

The system works by an internal force. A real lady, daughter of a gentleman, ranking with the First Families, accepts a teacher's desk, and asks her friends to send their girls to school. No one now objects. Where Minnie teaches, Minnie's younger sisters, cousins, and acquaintance can attend the class. A better sentiment comes in; class sentiment, it may be; but the social forces here begin to act for good instead of evil. Free schools have become a fashion, and some of the best culture in Virginia is being devoted to the task of teaching in these Richmond schools.

The schools are mixed, not as to colour, but as to sex. Boys and girls learn together, with a young lady for instructress. In one excellent school we find Grace Alston, a delicate girl, beautiful as a VOL. II. A A 0360 354 seraph, with a pure English accent and a sweet English manner, teaching a class of boys and girls, the boys as tall and some of them nearly as old as herself.

‘Do you like the method of mixed classes—having boys and girls in the same room, competing in the same lessons?’

‘Yes,’ replies the young lady, ‘I find the mixed system better for both sexes than the separate system. The boys strengthen the girls, and the girls soften the boys.’

‘Have you no trouble with these big fellows?’

‘No; the bigger boys are easier to control than the lesser ones; they have more sense at fifteen than at ten, and feel more shame in doing wrong; especially in the presence of a lady. The sense of chivalry comes in.’

From New York to San Francisco, from Chicago to New Orleans, every town and hamlet in America is suffering from panic; a loose, unscientific term, explaining nothing, and raising false hopes. A panic is supposed to be an accident. Accidents come and go, and, like the winds and waves, are treated as phenomena beyond control. What cannot be cured, we say, must be endured.

In what respects our personal good we act on wiser instincts. No one talks of gout as an accident, of surfeit as an accident. When Nature checks our excesses by a twinge of pain, we know that we have done wrong, and take her warning as a guide. Suppose this panic in America is no other than a natural pause and stop?

What are the secrets of American growth? People and Land. Up to this date there have been A A 2 0362 356 unfailing supplies of settlers and homesteads; settlers apparently beyond number; homesteads apparently beyond limit. Europe sends the people, America gives the land. Are these two sources of supply inexhaustible?

First, take the People.

Since the War of Independence closed, Europe has poured into America more than seven million souls. When the people were counted in 1870, five million five hundred thousand persons were returned as born on foreign soil, and nearly eleven millions confessed to having either father or mother born on foreign soil. One in seven was therefore a stranger by birth, nearly one in three a stranger by blood. No other foreign country has so many strangers on her soil.

Out of an aggregate approaching eight millions, who have come from all quarters of the globe into America, more than five millions have come from the British Islands and British America; nearly two millions and a half from Germany, including Prussia and Austria, but excluding Hungary and Poland. France and Sweden follow at a distance. Of the non-European nations, China has supplied the largest 0363 357 number; after her come the West Indies and Mexico. But the supplies of settlers from Asia, Africa, Australia, and America (excluding men of English race) do not amount to one man in every dozen men. Thus, the planting of America has been mainly done by persons sailing from English and German ports.

Are these migrations from English and German ports likely to go forward on the same grand scale? No one dreams of such a thing. By many signs—some general and matter of record, others particular and matter of inference—we see an end of these enormous supplies of English and German settlers in America.

For forty years (1820–60) the rate of emigration from English ports rose from decade to decade. In the first decade, one hundred and fifty-two thousand persons entered the Republic from these ports. In the next decade, the numbers swelled to nearly six hundred thousand. In the third decade, they reached seventeen hundred thousand. In the fourth decade, they rose to two millions and a half. Then came a check. For two years the numbers fell; not only on the old rate of increase, but in the 0364 358 actual figures of the list. When war broke out, high bounties and good. rations tempted many a poor fellow to come out; and while the Republic kept on spending a million of dollars every day on men and powder, swarms of the more jovial and reckless Irish flocked into New York. Yet, even under war excitement, the old number of arrivals at New York was never reached. The springs from which the increase came were drying up.

Nothing was then done, and nothing is now done, by English law, to check this movement of our people towards America. A right to emigrate is treated by our magistrates as one of the indefeasible rights of mail. Science and policy have combined to favour emigration from our shores. Steam has made the passage cheap and swift. A better class of vessels and a closer system of inspection have reduced the perils of a voyage across the Atlantic to a bagatelle. Societies help the poor to get away. The last legal restraint on the free movement of English-born persons—the old law of nationality (once a Briton, always a Briton)—is abolished; so that Saxon and Celt may now become American citizens, and side with their adopted country against 0365 359 their native land, without fear of being regarded as traitors. Yet, in spite of all that science, policy and charity can do, the movement slackens. More than one experienced skipper tells me the tide has turned. Shoals of emigrants are going back to Europe, and still greater shoals would go back if they had the means. From Portland to New Orleans our consulates are besieged by applicants for free passage, which our consuls have no moneys to provide. The St. George Societies, which exist in almost every city in America, keeping alive the good old English sentiment, are pestered day and night by persons eager to return. At every port of departure for Liverpool, men may be seen imploring leave to work their passage over the Atlantic. Almost every vessel has her steerage full.

Whether as many persons go back as come out, we cannot learn; for no report is published of the departing masses. But my eyes and cars inform me that the men who are seeking to get home again are men of all trades and districts, rural folk and urban folk—hedgers and ditchers, skilled mechanics, small farmers, Irish labourers, domestic servants, and bankers' clerks. Our Government does nothing 0366 360 to promote this reflux of the tide. An emigrant, as such, receives no help in getting back; yet thousands and tens of thousands are now fighting their way home to Liverpool and Cork. Ten years ago you never met a Munster peasant or an Essex labourer who had been in America. America was a paradise from which no Munster peasant, no Essex labourer, ever dreamt of coming back. To-day there is another tale to tell. In every hamlet round Cork you find peasants who have tried Chicago and St. Louis. In the neighbourhood of Ongar and Brentwood you hear labourers talk of the Kansas crickets. They have trod the land of promise, and have slipt away to their ancient homes.

Germany appears to offer no richer crop of future settlers than the British Isles. Indeed, she offers less; for Prince von Bismarck is directing his attention to the cause of this Teutonic movement—so important to the Fatherland—and seeking to remove that cause.

Like England, Germany made her supreme effort of emigration in one decade, after which her movements seemed to dwindle of themselves. In the first ten years of the same period (1820–60), Germany, including 0367 361 Prussia and Austria, sent out less than eight thousand souls; in the second ten years she sent out a hundred and fifty thousand souls; in the third ten years she sent out four hundred and thirty thousand souls; and in the fourth ten years she sent out nine hundred and fifty thousand souls. Then came her check. During the next three years her contributions fell. The civil war called new forces into play; and for a time the German emigration swelled. Yet, here again, even under the temptation of high bounties and big rations, the figures of 1853 and 1854 were never reached. The springs appeared to be drying up.

The new Germany is not old Germany, and Prussia, as her leader, is not looking on this movement of her people with the old Austrian helplessness. Bismarck has no mind to see his men of strong limbs and active brains transferred to other soils. Too many, he perceives, are gone. ‘Tell me,’ said a great Pomeranian land-owner to Bancroft, the historian, ‘about your country; for next to my own province, I am more concerned about it than any other part of the earth; since out of every hundred persons born on my estate, twenty-five are now in America.’ That Pomeranian 0368 362 district is not far from Varzin, where the German Chancellor lives. Yet Prussia has not fed the tide of emigration much; her contribution for the whole forty years (1820–60) being less than a hundred thousand souls. The floods have come from Hessen, Baden, and the badly-governed duchies, where Fritz and Karl had each a prince of his own to rule over him. These things are gone, and with them some of the pests which drove brave men and true patriots from their native land.

Bismarck, as the American Minister in Berlin reports, is looking at this question with a statesman's eye. He sees the people moving, but he also sees that they are stirred by causes not to be removed by passports and police.

‘We have no right to interfere with a man's liberty to seek his bread elsewhere. A strong desire has seized the minds of many persons to seek a new home, where they can get more food and better shelter for themselves. We may regret, we cannot condemn, this wish. The right to a free change of domicile is sacred, and we cannot say the principle is wrong because a man chooses to exchange his domicile on the Rhine for a domicile on the 0369 363 Missouri.’ Yet the Prince is not a man to leave such things alone. He deals with emigration as with other matters.

‘We must begin,’ his Home Minister lately said in Parliament, ‘by passing laws which will make the people's homesteads more like home. We must improve our mills, our roads, our railways, our canals. We must build better cottages, open up industries, and set up savings-banks. We want to stop emigration, and we shall do so, not by limiting the right of free movement, but by a whole system of measures for raising the condition of our labouring classes.’

Under such a system Germany is not likely to send out many more millions to America.

Next take the Land.

If we can trust the facts and figures in General Hazen's Reports, the supply of land is no more inexhaustible than the supply of settlers. Old and venerable fictions, such as Irving painted and Bryant sang, are swept away by engineers and surveyors. When Louisiana was purchased from France, the district then acquired by the Republic was described as practically boundless. No one knew how far it ran 0370 364 out west, hardly how far it ran up north; yet every acre of that region is now owned, and under such cultivation as suits a poor and swampy soil. So, when Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas were incorporated. No one had drawn a line about Kansas and Nebraska. These regions were supposed to offer homes to any number of inhabitants, thirty millions each at least, with a farm for every family. In these four states the land is already taken up; at least such land as anybody cares to fence and register. The greater part of Kansas and Nebraska, and enormous sections of Dakota and Colorado, are unfit for settlement. Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah are mountain plateaus, high and barren for the greater part, suited, as a rule, for nothing more than cattle-runs, conducted on a large scale, too vast for anyone but a great capitalist to occupy. On the Pacific Slope, from Washington to Upper California, no ‘wild land,’ remains, and not a great deal of available public land. According to Hazen's Report, the same rule holds good in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Near the Mississippi, the lands are damp enough; but as you march towards the Pacific they become high and arid. Water and wood are scarce, the 0371 365 winter is severe. A valley here and there is fertile, and oases in the desert may be found, as at St. George on the Rio Virgen, but the country as a whole is parched and bleak. In Utah and Colorado nature is less forbidding, but the surface of land fit for ordinary industry is small; while to the north of these regions the soil is poor, the rainfall light, the herbage scanty, and the cold severe.

General Hazen's conclusion is that the Republic has very little land, of the kind that tempts good settlers to remove, now left within her frontiers.

If this officer is right in his facts—and high authorities tell me he is right—the end of an exceptional state of things is nigh. America must lean in future on her own staff and stand by her own strength; expecting no more help from Europe than England expects from Germany, or Italy expects from France.

Is there no writing on the wall?

The wounds inflicted on America by the civil war were fresh and bleeding, even before they were reopened by the grave events in New Orleans. The two sides seem as bitter as they were a month before the fall of Richmond. Cincinnati, where I write these words, is a great city, chief market of a Free State, looking across the Ohio river into the streets and squares of Covington, her sister of Kentucky. These cities lie as close together as Brooklyn and New York, as Lambeth and Westminster. They are connected by a bridge and by a dozen ferries. Trains and street cars cross the river night and day; the citizens buy and sell, dine and house, marry and live with each other, like neighbours and Christians; yet a plague like the Black Death has broken out between Covington and Cincinnati, and the fanatics 0373 367 on both sides of the Ohio river hate their neighbours with the dark and strained malignity which springs from no other source but fratricidal war. Not many minutes since, an aged and respected minister of the Gospel called on me to gloat over the prospect of a new war in the South. When I tried to rouse in him some sense of proportion, so that, in seeking full justice for his African brother, he might not wholly forget the rights of his European brother, he expressed his hope and conviction that the White race would never again prevail against the Black.

‘The coloured people of the South,’ said this minister of the gospel, in amazing ignorance of the facts in Richmond and Raleigh, Charlestown and New Orleans, ‘are saving their money, putting their children to school, and doing the duties of good citizens; while their old tyrants are wallowing in riot and drunkenness, threatening our country with a new secession, and lifting up their heads against the will of God. It never will be well with America until these gentle and pious coloured people have obtained a fixed and lasting mastery in the Southern States.’

Yet there are signs that this bad state of feeling 0374 368 is becoming more and more confined to circles, coteries, and clubs. Massachusetts has invited deputations from Charleston, Atlanta, and New Orleans to Boston, and the Southern soldiers have been heartily received throughout the North. The women, more tenacious and conservative than men, have seized the occasion of this visit to hold out hands to their Southern sisters. A meeting has been called in Boston. A thousand ladies of Massachusetts, including nearly all the best and highest ornaments of the State, have agreed to purchase and present mementoes of this visit of the Southern chivalry to Boston, as a peace offering, to a thousand ladies in the South, whose fathers and husbands played a part in the war.

Americans begin to cry—‘close ranks!’

The tale of a Hundred Years of White Progress is a marvellous history.

The European races are spreading over every continent, and mastering the isles and islets of every sea. During those hundred years, some powers have shot ahead, and some have slipt into the second rank. Austria, a hundred years ago the leading power in Europe, has been rent asunder 0375 369 and has forfeited her throne in Germany. Spain, a hundred years ago the first colonial empire in the world, has lost her colonies and conquests, and has sunk into a third-rate power. France, which, little more than a hundred years ago, possessed Canada, Louisiana, the Mississippi valley, the island of Mauritius, and a stronghold in Hindoostan, has lost all these possessions and exchanged her vineyards and cornfields on the Rhine for the snows of Savoy and the sands of Algiers. Piedmont and Prussia, on the other hand, have sprung into the foremost rank of nations. Piedmont has become Italy, with a capital in Milan and Venice, Florence and Naples, as well as in Rome. Still more striking and more glorious has been the growth of Prussia. A hundred years ago Prussia was just emerging into notice as a small but well-governed and hard-fighting country, with a territory no larger than Michigan, and a population considerably less than Ohio. In a hundred years this small but well-governed and hard-fighting Prussia has become the first military power on earth. Russia, during these hundred years, has carried her arms into Finland, Crim Tartary, the Caucasus and the Mohammedan Khanates, VOL. II. B B 0376 370 extending the White empire on the Caspian and the Euxine, and along the Oxus and Jaxartes into Central Asia. Vaster still have been the marches and the conquests of Great Britain, her command of the ocean giving her facilities which are not possessed by any other power. Within a hundred years, or thereabouts, she has grown from a kingdom of ten millions of people into an empire of two hundred and twenty millions, with a territory covering nearly one-third of the earth. Hardly less striking than the progress of Russia and England has been that of the United States. Starting with a population no larger than that of Greece, the Republic has advanced so rapidly that in a hundred years she has become the third power as to size of territory, the fourth as to wealth of population, in the world.

Soil and population are the two prime elements of power. Climate and fertility count for much; nationality and compactness count for more; but, still, the natural basis of growth is land, the natural basis of strength is population. Taking these two elements together, the Chinese were, a hundred years ago, the foremost family of mankind. They 0377 371 held a territory covering three millions of square miles, and a population counting more than four hundred million souls. But what a change has taken place! China has been standing still, while England, Russia, and America have been conquering, planting, and annexing lands. Look at the group of powers which occupy areas of surface counting above a million square miles each:—

The British Empire has a larger territory than Russia, a population second only to that of China. America is treading in the footsteps of her parent, taking up her own, as a loadstone takes up its own. The greater draws, annexes, and absorbs the less. Some months ago, Lord Dufferin, Governor-General of Canada, annexed the whole region, known and unknown, stretching from the recognised frontier of British America towards the North Pole; and, some months hence, either President Grant or his successor at the White House, will annex the great provinces of Lower California, Sonora, and Chihuahua, with 0378 372 parts of Cinaloa, Cohahiula, and Nueva Leon, to the United States. The present boundaries of the Republic will be enlarged by land enough to form six or seven new States, each State as big as New York.

The surface of the earth is passing into Anglo-Saxon hands.

Yet, glorious and inspiring as this story of White Conquest is, the warning on the wall is brief and stem. The end is not yet come. The peril of the fight is not yet past, and the White successors of the Creeks and Cherokees are unhappily still wasting some of their best strength and noblest passion on internal feuds.

Disaster in the past, menace in the future, warn us to stand by our common race; our blood, law, language, science. We are strong, but we are not immortal. A house divided against itself must fall. If we desire to see our free institutions perish, it is right that we should take the part of Red men, Blackmen, and Yellow men against our White brethren. If we wish to see order and freedom, science and civilization preserved, we shall give our first thought 0379 373 to what improves the White man's growth and increases the White man's strength.

So many foes are still afield that every White man's cry should be ‘Close ranks!’ and when the ranks are closed, but not till then—‘Right in front—march!’

THE END.

LONDON: PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE AND PARLIAMENT STREET

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