Society life in the big cities of America in 1886 had become a strange nightmare of extravagance and late hours. It was developing a queer race of people. Temporarily, the Lenten season stopped the rustle and flash of toilettes, chained the dancers, and put away the tempting chalice of social excitement. When Lent came in the society of the big cities of America was an exhausted multitude. It seemed to me as though two or three winters of germans and cotillions would be enough to ruin the best of health. The victims of these strange exhaustions were countless. No man or woman could endure the wear and tear of social life in America without sickness and depletion of health. The demands were at war with the natural laws of the human race.
Even the hour set for the average assembling of a "society event" in 1886 was an outrage. Once it was eight o'clock at night, soon it was adjourned to nine-thirty, and then to ten, and there were threats that it would soon be eleven. A gentleman wrote me this way for advice about his social burden:
"What shall I do? We have many friends, and I am invited out perpetually. I am on a salary in a large business house in New York. I am obliged to arise in the morning at seven o'clock, but I cannot get home from those parties till one in the morning. The late supper and the excitement leave me sleepless. I must either give up society or give up business, which is my living. My wife is not willing that I should give up society, because she is very popular. My health is breaking down. What shall I do?"
It was not the idle class that wasted their nights at these parties; it was the business men dragged into the fashions and foibles of the idle, which made that strange and unique thing we call society in America.
I should have replied to that man that his wife was a fool. If she were willing to sacrifice his health, and with it her support, for the greeting and applause of these midnight functions, I pitied him. Let him lose his health, his business, and his home, and no one would want to invite him anywhere. All the diamond-backed terrapins at fifty dollars a dozen which he might be invited to enjoy after that would do him no harm. Society would drop him so suddenly that it would knock the breath out of him. The recipe for a man in this predicament, a man tired of life, and who desired to get out of it without the reputation of a suicide, was very simple. He only had to take chicken salad regularly at midnight, in large quantities, and to wash it down with bumpers of wine, reaching his pillow about 2 a.m. If the third winter of this did not bring his obituary, it would be because that man was proof against that which had slain a host larger than any other that fell on any battle-field of the ages. The Scandinavian warriors believed that in the next world they would sit in the Hall of Odin, and drink wine from the skulls of their enemies. But society, by its requirements of late hours and conviviality, demanded that a man should drink out of his own skull, having rendered it brainless first. I had great admiration for the suavities and graces of life, but it is beyond any human capacity to endure what society imposes upon many in America. Drinking other people's health to the disadvantage of one's own health is a poor courtesy at best. Our entertainments grew more and more extravagant, more and more demoralising. I wondered if our society was not swinging around to become akin to the worst days of Roman society. The princely banquet-rooms of the Romans had revolving ceilings representing the firmament; fictitious clouds rained perfumed essences upon the guests, who were seated on gold benches, at tables made of ivory and tortoise-shell. Each course of food, as it was brought into the banquet room, was preceded by flutes and trumpets. There was no wise man or woman to stand up from the elaborate banquet tables of American society at this time and cry "Halt!" It might have been done in Washington, or in New York, or in Brooklyn, but it was not.
The way American society was moving in 1886 was the way to death. The great majority, the major key in the weird symphony of American life, was not of society.
We had no masses really, although we borrowed the term from Europe and used it busily to describe our working people, who were massive enough as a body of men, but they were not the masses. Neither were they the mob, which was a term some were fond of using in describing the destruction of property on railroads in the spring of 1886. The labouring men had nothing to do with these injuries. They were done by the desperadoes who lurked in all big cities. I made a Western trip during this strike, and I found the labouring men quiet, peaceful, but idle. The depôts were filled with them, the streets were filled with them, but they were in suspense, and it lasted twenty-five days. Then followed the darkness and squalor—less bread, less comfort, less civilisation of heart and mind. It was hard on the women and children. Senator Manderson, the son of my old friend in Philadelphia, introduced a bill into the United States Senate for the arbitration of strikes. It proposed a national board of mediation between capital and labour.
Jay Gould was the most abused of men just then. He was denounced by both contestants in this American conflict most uselessly. The knights of Labour came in for an equal amount of abuse. We were excited and could not reason. The men had just as much right to band together for mutual benefit as Jay Gould had a right to get rich. It was believed by many that Mr. Gould made his fortune out of the labouring classes. Mr. Gould made it out of the capitalists. His regular diet was a capitalist per diem, not a poor man—capitalist stewed, broiled, roasted, panned, fricaseed, devilled, on the half shell. He was personally, as I knew him, a man of such kindness that he would not hurt a fly, but he played ten pins on Wall Street. A great many adventurers went there to play with him, and if their ball rolled down the side of the financial alley while he made a ten strike or two or three spares, the fellows who were beaten howled. That was about all there really was in the denunciation of Jay Gould.
I couldn't help thinking sometimes, when the United States seemed to change its smile of prosperity to a sudden smile of anger or petulance, that we were a spoiled nation, too much pampered by divine blessings. If we had not been our own rulers, but had been ruled—what would America have been then? We were like Ireland crying for liberty and abusing liberty the more we got of it.
Mr. Gladstone's policy of Home Rule for Ireland, announced in April, 1886, proposed an Irish Parliament and the Viceroy. It should remain, however, a part of England. I fully believed then that Ireland would have Home Rule some day, and in another century I believed that Ireland would stand to England as the United States stands to England, a friendly and neighbouring power. I believed that Ireland would some day write her own Declaration of Independence. Liberty, the fundamental instinct of the most primitive living thing, would be the world's everlasting conflict.
Our exclusion of the Chinese, which came up in the spring of 1886, when an Ambassador from China was roughly handled in San Francisco, was a disgrace to our own instincts of liberty. A great many people did not want them because they did not like the way they dressed. They objected to the Chinaman's queue. George Washington wore one, so did Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock. The Chinese dress was not worse than some American clothes I have seen. Some may remember the crinoline monstrosities of '65, as I do—the coal-scuttle bonnets, the silver knee-buckles! The headgear of the fair sex has never ceased to be a mystery and a shock during all my lifetime. I remember being asked by a lady-reporter in Brooklyn if I thought ladies should remove their hats in the theatre, and I told her to tell them to keep them on, because in obstructing the stage they were accomplishing something worth while. Any fine afternoon the spring fashions of 1886, displayed in Madison Square between two and four o'clock, were absurdities of costume that eclipsed anything then worn by the Chinese.
The Joss House of the Chinese was entitled to as much respect in the United States, under the constitution, as the Roman Catholic church, or the Quaker Meeting house, or any other religious temple. A new path was made for the Chinese into America via Mexico, when 600,000 were to be imported for work on Mexican territory. In the discussion it aroused it was urged that Mexico ought to be blocked because the Chinese would not spend their money in America. In one year, in San Francisco, the Chinese paid $2,400,000 in rent for residences and warehouses. Our higher civilisation was already threatened with that style of man who spends three times more money than he makes, and yet we did not want the thrifty unassuming religious Chinaman to counteract our mania for extravagance. This entire agitation emanated from corrupt politics. The Republican and Democratic parties both wanted the electoral votes of California in the forthcoming Presidential election, and, in order to get that vote, it was necessary to oppose the Chinese. Whenever these Asiatic men obtain equal suffrage in America the Republican party will fondle them, and the Democrats will try to prove that they always had a deep affection for them, and some of the political bosses will go around with an opium pipe sticking out of their pockets and their hair coiled into a suggestion of a queue.
The ship of state was in an awful mess. No sooner was the good man in power than politics struggled to pull him down to make room for the knaves. When Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated, the Sentinel of Boston wrote the obituary of the American nation. I quote it as a literary scrap of the past:
"Monumental Inscription—expired yesterday, regretted by all good men, The Federal Administration Of The Government Of The United States, aged 12 years. This Monumental Inscription to the virtues and the services of the deceased is raised by the Sentinel of Boston."
It might have been a recent editorial. Van Buren was always cartooned as a fox or a rat. Horace Greeley told me once that he had not had a sound sleep for fifteen years, and he was finally put to death by American politics. The cartoons of Mr. Blaine and Mr. Cleveland during their election battle, as compared to those of fifty years before, were seraphic as the themes of Raphael. It was not necessary to go so far back for precedent. The game had not changed. The building of our new Raymond Street jail in Brooklyn, in 1886, was a game which the politicians played, called "money, money, who has got the money?" Suddenly there was an arraignment in the courts. Mr. Jaehne was incarcerated in Sing Sing for bribery. Twenty-five New York aldermen were accused. Nineteen of them were saloon keepers. There was a fearful indifference to the illiteracy of our leaders in 1886. It threatened the national intelligence of the future.
In the rhapsody of May, however, in the resurrection of the superlative beauties of spring, we forgot our human deficiencies. In the first week of lilacs, the Americanised flower of Persia, we aspired to the breadth and height and the heaven of our gardens. The generous lilac, like a great purple sea of loveliness, swept over us in the full tide of spring. It was the forerunner of joy; joy of fish in the brooks, of insects in the air, of cattle in the fields, of wings to the sky. Sunshine, shaken from the sacred robes of God! Spring, the spiritual essence of heaven and physical beauty come to earth in many forms—in the rose, in the hawthorn white and scarlet, in the passion flower. In this season of transition we hear the murmurings of heaven. There were spring poets in 1886, as there had been in all ages.
Love and marriage came over the country like a divine opiate, inspired, I believe, by that love story in the White House, which culminated on June 2, 1886, in the wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland. Never in my knowledge were there so many weddings all over the United States as during the week when this official wedding took place in the White House. The representatives of the foreign Governments in Washington were not invited to Mr. Cleveland's wedding. We all hoped that they would not make such fools of themselves as to protest—but they did. They were displeased at the President's omission to invite them. It was always a wish of Mr. Cleveland's to separate the happiness of his private life from that of his public career, so as to protect Mrs. Cleveland from the glare to which he himself was exposed. His wedding was an intimate, private matter to him, and if there is any time in a man's life when he ought to do as he pleases it is when he gets married. It was a remarkable wedding in some respects, remarkable for its love story, for its distinguished character, its American privacy, its independent spirit. The whole country was rapturously happy over it. The foreign ministers who growled might have benefited by the example of Americanism in the affair. Even the reporters, none of whom were invited, were happy over it, and gave a more vivid account of the joyous scene than they could have given had they been present.
The difference in the ages of the President and his beautiful bride was widely discussed. Into the garland of bridal roses let no one ever twist a sprig of night-shade. If 49 would marry 22, if summer is fascinated with spring, whose business is it but their own? Both May and August are old enough to take care of themselves, and their marriage is the most noteworthy moment of their too short season of life. Some day her voice is silenced, and the end of the world has come for him—the morning dead, the night dead, the air dead, the world dead. For his sake, for her sake, do not spoil their radiance with an impious regret. They will endure the thorns of life when they are stronger in each other's love.
That June wedding at the White House was the nucleus of happiness, from which grew a great wave of matrimony. The speed of God's will was increasing in America. Most of the things managed by divine instinct are characterised by speed—rapid currents, swift lightnings, swift coming and going of lives. In the old-fashioned days a man got a notion that there was sanctity in tardiness. It was a great mistake. In America we had arrived at that state of mind when we wanted everything fast—first and fast. Fast horses, fast boats, fast runners are all good things for the human race.
The great yacht races of September 7, 1886, in which the "May Flower" distanced the "Galatea" by two miles and a half, was a spanking race. Our sporting blood was roused to fighting pitch, and we became more active in every way of outdoor sports. Lawn tennis tournaments were epidemic all over the country. There were good and bad effects from all of them. Those romping sports developed a much finer physical condition in our American women. Lawn tennis and croquet were hardening and beautifying the race. From the English and German women we adopted athletics for our own women. Our girls began to travel more frequently in Europe. It looked as though many of the young ladies who prided themselves upon their bewitching languors and fashionable dreaminess, would be neglected by young men in favour of the more athletic types. It had been decided, in the social channels of our life, that doll babies were not of much use in the struggle, that women must have the capacity and the strength to sweep out a room without fainting; that to make an eatable loaf of bread was more important than the satin cheek or the colour of hair that one strong fever could uproot. I was accused of being ambitious that Americans should have a race of Amazons. I was not. I did want them to have bodies to fit their great souls. What I did wish to avoid, in this natural transition, was a misdirected use of its advantages. There is dissipation in outdoor life, as well as indoors, and this was to be deplored. I wanted everything American to come out ahead.
In science we were still far behind. The Charleston earthquake in September, 1886, proved this. Our philosophers were disgusted that the ministers and churches down there devoted their time to praying and moralising about the earthquake, when only natural phenomena were the cause. Science had no information or comfort to give, however. The only thing the scientist did was to predict a great tidal wave which would come and destroy all that was left of the previous calamity. Science lied again. The tidal wave did not come; the September rains stopped, and Charleston began to rebuild. That is one of the wonderful things about America; we are not only able to restore our damages, but we have a mania for rebuilding. Our chief fault lies in the fact that we rebuild for profit rather than for beauty of character or moral strength.
There had been a time during my pastorate when Brooklyn promised to be the greatest watering place in America. We were in a fair way of becoming the summer capital of the United States. It was destroyed by the loafers and the dissoluteness of Coney Island. In the autumn of 1886, Brooklyn was more indignant than I had ever seen it before, and I knew it intimately for a quarter of a century. Our trade was damaged, our residences were depreciated, because the gamblers and liquor dealers were in power. Part of the summer people were too busy looking for a sea serpent reported to be in the East River or up the Hudson to observe that a Dragon of Evil was twining about the neck and waist and body of the two great cities by the sea.
In contrast to all this political treachery in the North there developed a peculiar symbol of political sincerity in Tennesee. Two brothers, Robert and Alfred Taylor, were running for Governor of that State—one on the Republican and the other on the Democratic ticket. At night they occupied the same room together. On the same platform they uttered sentiments directly opposite in meaning. And yet, Robert said to a crowd about to hoot his brother Alfred, "When you insult my brother you insult me." This was a symbol of political decency that we needed. One of the great wants of the world, however, was a better example in "high life." We were shocked by the moral downfall of Sir Charles Dilke in England, by the dissolute conduct of an American official in Mexico, by the dissipations of a Senator who attempted to address the United States Senate in a state of intoxication.
Mr. Cleveland's frequent exercise of the President's right of veto was a hopeful policy in national affairs. The habit of voting away thousands of dollars of other people's money in Congress needed a check. The popular means of accomplishing this out of the national treasury was in bills introduced by Congressmen for public buildings. Each Congressman wanted to favour the other. The President's veto was the only cure. This prodigality of the National Legislature grew out of an enormous surplus in the Treasury. It was too great a temptation to the law-makers. $70,000,000 in a pile added to a reserve of $100,000,000 was an infamous lure. I urged that this money should be turned back to the people to whom it belonged. The Government had no more right to it than I had to five dollars of overpay, and yet, by over-taxation, the Government had done the same sort of thing. This money did not belong to the Government, but to the people from whom they had taken it. From private sources in Washington I learned that officials were overwhelmed with demands for pensions from first-class loafers who had never been of any service to their country before or since the war. They were too lazy or cranky to work for themselves. Grover Cleveland vetoed them by the hundred. We needed the veto power in America as much as the Roman Government had required it in their tribunes. Poland had recognised it. The Kings of Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands had used it. With the exception of two states in the Union, all the American Governors had the privilege. Because a railroad company buys up a majority of the legislature there is no reason why a Governor should sign the charter. There was no reason why the President should make appointments upon indiscriminate claims because the ante-room of the White House was filled with applicants, as they were in Cleveland's first administration. My sympathies were with the grand army men against these pretenders.
What a waste of money it seemed to me there was in keeping up useless American embassies abroad. They had been established when it took six weeks to go to Liverpool and six months to China, so that it was necessary to have representation at the foreign courts. As far back as 1866 it was only half an hour from Washington to London, to Berlin, to Madrid. I have seen no crisis in any of these foreign cities which made our ambassadors a necessity there. International business could be managed by the State Department. The foreign embassy was merely a good excuse to get rid of some competent rival for the Presidency. The cable was enough Minister Plenipotentiary for the United States, and always should be. I regarded it as humiliating to the constitution of the United States that we should be complimenting foreign despotism in this way.
The war rage of Europe was destined to make a market for our bread stuff in 1886, but at the cost of further suffering and disaster. I have no sentimentality about the conflicts of life, because the Bible is a history of battles and hand to hand struggles, but war is no longer needed in the world. War is a system of political greed where men are hired at starvation wages to kill each other. Could there be anything more savage? It is the inoffensive who are killed, while the principals in the quarrel sit snugly at home on throne chairs.
A private letter, I think it was, written during the Crimean war by a sailor to his wife, describing his sensations after having killed a man for the first time, is a unique demonstration of the psychology of the soldier's fate.
The letter said:—
"We were ordered to fire, and I took steady aim and fired on my man at a distance of sixty yards. He dropped like a stone, at the same instant a broadside from the ship scattered among the trees, and the enemy vanished, we could scarcely tell how. I felt as though I must go up to the man I had fired upon to see if he were dead or alive. I found him quite still, and I was more afraid of him when I saw him lying so than when he stood facing me a few minutes before. It is a strange feeling that comes over you all at once when you have killed a man. He had unfastened his jacket, and was pressing his hand against his chest where the wound was. He breathed hard, and the blood poured from the wound and his mouth at every breath. His face was white as death, and his eyes looked big and bright as he turned them staring up at me. I shall never forget it. He was a fine young fellow, not over five and twenty. I knelt beside him and I felt as though my heart would burst. He had an English face and did not look like my enemy. If my life could have saved his I would have given it. I held his head on my knee and he tried to speak, but his voice was gone. I could not understand a word that he said. I am not ashamed to say that I was worse than he, for he never shed a tear and I did. I was wondering how I could bear to leave him to die alone, when he had some sort of convulsions, then his head rolled over and with a sigh he was gone. I laid his head gently on the grass and left him. It seemed so strange when I looked at him for the last time. I somehow thought of everything I had ever read about the Turks and the Russians, and the rest of them, but all that seemed so far off, and the dead man so near."
This was the secret tragedy of the common fraternity of manhood driven by custom into a sham battle of death. The European war of 1886 was a conflict of Slav and Teuton. France will never forgive Germany for taking Alsace and Lorraine. It was a surrender to Germany of what in the United States would be equal to the surrender of Philadelphia and Boston, with vast harvest fields in addition. France wanted to blot out Sedan. England desired to keep out of the fight upon a naval report that she was unprepared for war. The Danes were ready for insurrection against their own Government. Only 3,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean and great wisdom of Washington kept us out of the fight. The world's statesmanship at this time was the greatest it had ever known. There was enough of it in St. Petersburg, Berlin, Rome, Paris, and London to have achieved a great progress for peace by arbitration and treaty, but there was no precedent by which to judge the effect of such a plan. The nations had never before had such vast populations to change into armies. The temptations of war were irresistible.
In America, remotely luxurious in our own prosperity from the rest of the world, we became self-absorbed. The fashions, designed and inspired in Europe, became the chief element of attraction among the ladies. It was particularly noticeable in the autumn of 1886 for the brilliancy and grandeur of bird feathers. The taxidermist's art was adapted to women's gowns and hats to a degree that amazed the country. A precious group of French actresses, some of them divorced two or three times, with a system of morals entirely independent of the ten commandments, were responsible for this outbreak of bird millinery in America. From one village alone 70,000 birds were sent to New York for feminine adornment.
The whole sky full of birds was swept into the millinery shops. A three months foraging trip in South Carolina furnished 11,000 birds for the market of feathers. One sportsman supplied 10,000 aigrettes. The music of the heavens was being destroyed. Paris was supplied by contracts made in New York. In one month a million bobolinks were killed near Philadelphia. Species of birds became extinct. In February of this year I saw in one establishment 2,000,000 bird skins. One auction room alone, in three months, sold 3,000,000 East India bird skins, and 1,000,000 West India and Brazilian feathers.
A newspaper description of a lady's hat in 1886 was to me savage in the extreme. I quote one of many:
"She had a whole nest of sparkling, scintillating birds in her hat, which would have puzzled an ornithologist to classify."
Here is another one I quote:
"Her gown of unrelieved black was looped up with blackbirds and a winged creature so dusky that it could have been intended for nothing but a crow reposed among the strands of her hair."
Public sentiment in American womanhood eventually rescued the songsters of the world—in part, at any rate. The heavenly orchestra, with its exquisite prelude of dawn and its tremulous evensong, was spared.
Many years ago Thomas Carlyle described us as "forty million Americans, mostly fools." He declared we would flounder on the ballot-box, and that the right of suffrage would be the ruin of this Government. The "forty million of fools" had done tolerably well for the small amount of brain Carlyle permitted them.
Better and better did America become to me as the years went by. I never wanted to live anywhere else. Many believed that Christ was about to return to His reign on earth, and I felt confident that if such a divine descent could be, it would come from American skies. I did not believe that Christ would descend from European skies, amidst alien thrones. I foresaw the time when the Democracy of Americans would be lifted so that the President's chair could be set aside as a relic; when penitentiaries would be broken-down ruins; almshouses forsaken, because all would be rich, and hospitals abandoned, because all would be well.
If Christ were really coming, as many believed, the moment of earthly paradise was at hand.
The balance of power in Brooklyn and New York during my lifetime had always been with the pulpit. I was in my fifty-fourth year, and had shared honours with the most devout and fearless ministers of the Gospel so long that when two monster receptions were proposed, in celebration of the services of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and Rev. R.S. Storrs, D.D., I became almost wickedly proud of the privileges of my associations. These two eminent men were in the seventies. Dr. Storrs had been installed pastor of the Church of Pilgrims in 1846; Mr. Beecher pastor of Plymouth Church in 1847. They were both stalwart in body then, both New Englanders, both Congregationalists, mighty men, genial as a morning in June. Both world-renowned, but different. Different in stature, in temperament, in theology. They had reached the fortieth year of pastoral service. No movement for the welfare of Brooklyn in all these years was without the benediction of their names.
The pulpit had accomplished wonders. In Brooklyn alone look at the pulpit-builders. There were Rev. George W. Bethune of the Dutch Reformed Church, Rev. Dr. Samuel H. Cox, Rev. W. Ichabod Spencer, Rev. Dr. Samuel Thayer Speer of the Presbyterian Church, Dr. John Summerfield and Dr. Kennedy of the Methodist Church, Rev. Dr. Stone and Rev. Dr. Vinton of the Episcopal Church—all denominations pouring their elements of divine splendour upon the community. Who can estimate the power which emanated from the pulpits of Dr. McElroy, or Dr. DeWitt, or Dr. Spring, or Dr. Krebs? Their work will go on in New York though their churches be demolished. Large-hearted men were these pulpit apostles, apart from the clerical obligations of their denominations. No proverb in the world is so abused as the one which declares that the children of ministers never turn out well. They hold the highest places in the nation. Grover Cleveland was the son of a Presbyterian clergyman, Governor Pattison of Pennsylvania, Governor Taylor of Tennessee, were sons of Methodist preachers. In congressional and legislative halls they are scattered everywhere.
Of all the metaphysical discourses that Mr. Beecher delivered, none are so well remembered as those giving his illustrations of life, his anecdotes. Much of his pulpit utterance was devoted to telling what things were like. So the Sermon on the Mount was written, full of similitudes. Like a man who built his house on a rock, like a candle in a candle-stick, like a hen gathering her chickens under her wing, like a net, like salt, like a city on a hill. And you hear the song birds, and you smell the flowers. Mr. Beecher's grandest effects were wrought by his illustrations, and he ransacked the universe for them. We need in our pulpits just such irresistible illustrations, just such holy vivacity. His was a victory of similitudes.
Towards the end of November, 1886, one of the most distinguished sons of a Baptist preacher, Chester A. Arthur, died. He had arisen to the highest point of national honour, and preserved the simplicities of true character. When I was lecturing in Lexington, Kentucky, one summer, I remember with what cordiality he accosted me in a crowd.
"Are you here?" he said; "why, it makes me feel very much at home."
Mr. Arthur aged fifteen years in the brief span of his administration. He was very tired. Almost his last words were, "Life is not worth living." Our public men need sympathy, not criticism. Macaulay, after all his brilliant career in Parliament, after being world-renowned among all who could admire fine writing, wrote this:
"Every friendship which a man may have becomes precarious as soon as he engages in politics."
Political life is a graveyard of broken hearts. Daniel Webster died of a broken heart at Marshfield. Under the highest monument in Kentucky lies Henry Clay, dead of a broken heart. So died Henry Wilson, at Natick, Mass.; William H. Seward at Auburn, N.Y.; Salmon P. Chase, in Cincinnati. So died Chester A. Arthur, honoured, but worried.
The election of Abram S. Hewitt as mayor of New York in 1886 restored the confidence of the best people. Behind him was a record absolutely beyond criticism, before him a great Christian opportunity. We made the mistake, however, of ignoring the great influence upon our civic prosperity of the business impulse of the West. We in New York and Brooklyn were a self-satisfied community, unmindful of our dependence upon the rest of the American continent. My Western trips were my recreation. An occasional lecture tour accomplished for me what yachting or baseball does for others. My congregation understood this, and never complained of my absence. They realised that all things for me turned into sermons. No man sufficiently appreciates his home unless sometimes he goes away from it. It made me realise what a number of splendid men and women there were in the world Man as a whole is a great success; woman, taking her all in all, is a great achievement, and the reason children die is because they are too lovely to stay out of paradise.
Three weeks in the West brought me back to Brooklyn supremely optimistic. There was more business in the markets than men could attend to. Times had changed. In Cincinnati once I was perplexed by the difference in clock time. They have city time and railroad time there. I asked a gentleman about it.
"Tell me, how many kinds of time have you here?" I asked. "Three kinds," he replied, "city time, railroad time, and hard time."
There was no "hard time" at the close of 1886. The small rate of interest we had been compelled to take for money had been a good thing. It had enlivened investments in building factories and starting great enterprises. The 2 per cent. per month interest was dead. The fact that a few small fish dared to swim through Wall Street, only to be gobbled up, did not stop the rising tide of national welfare. We were going ahead, gaining, profiting even by the lives of those who were leaving us behind.
The loss of the Rev. J. Hyatt Smith restored the symbol and triumph of self-sacrifice. In the most exact sense of the word he was a genius. He wasted no time in his study that he could devote to others, he was always busy raising money to pay house rent for some poor woman, exhausting his energies in trying to keep people out of trouble, answering the call of every school, of every reformatory, every philanthropic institution. Had he given more time to study, he would hardly have had an equal in the American pulpit. He depended always upon the inspiration of the moment. Sometimes he failed on this account. I have heard him when he had the pathos of a Summerfield, the wit of a Sidney Smith, and the wondrous thundering phraseology of a Thomas Carlyle. He had been everywhere, seen everything, experienced great variety of gladness, grief, and betrayal. If you had lost a child, he was the first man at your side to console you. If you had a great joy, his was the first telegram to congratulate you. For two years he was in Congress. His Sundays in Washington were spent preaching in pulpits of all denominations. The first time I ever saw him was when he came to my house in Philadelphia, ringing the door bell, that he might assuage a great sorrow that had come to me. He was always in the shadowed home. How much the world owes to such a nature is beyond the world's gift to return. His wit was of the kind that, like the dew, refreshes. He never laughed at anything but that which ought to be laughed at. He never dealt in innuendoes that tipped both ways. We were old friends of many vicissitudes. Together we wept and laughed and planned. He had such subtle ways of encouragement—as when he told me that he had read a lecture of mine to his dying daughter, and described how it had comforted her. His was a life of profound self-sacrifice, but "weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning."
The new year of 1887 began with a controversy that filled the air with unpleasant confusion. A small river of ink was poured upon it, a vast amount of talk was made about it. A priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Father McGlynn, was arraigned by Archbishop Corrigan for putting his hand in the hot water of politics. In various ways I was asked my opinion of it all. My most decided opinion was that outsiders had better keep their hands out of the trouble. The interference of people outside of a church with its internal affairs only makes things worse. The policy of any church is best known by its own members. The controversy was not a matter into which I could consistently enter.
The earth began its new year in hard luck. The earthquake in Constantinople, in February, was only one of a series of similar shakes elsewhere. The scientists were always giving us a lot of trouble. Electric showers in the sun disturbed our climate. Comets had been shooting about the sky with enough fire in their tails to obliterate us. Caracas was shaken, Lisbon buried, Java very badly cracked. It is a shaky, rheumatic, epileptic old world, and in one of its stupendous convulsions it will die. It's a poor place in which to make permanent investments. It was quite as insecure in its human standards as in its scientific incompetence.
Our laws were moral earthquakes that destroyed our standards. We were opposed to sneak thieves, but we admired the two million dollar rascals. Why not a tax of five or ten thousand dollars to license the business of theft, so that we might put an end to the small scoundrels who had genius enough only to steal door mats, or postage stamps, or chocolate drops, and confine the business to genteel robbery? A robber paying a privilege of ten thousand dollars would then be able legally to abscond with fifty thousand dollars from a bank; or, by watering the stock of a railroad, he would be entitled to steal two hundred thousand dollars at a clip. The thief's licence ought to be high, because he would so soon make it up.
A licence on blasphemy might have been equally advantageous. It could be made high enough so that we could sweep aside all those who swear on a small scale, those who never get beyond "By George!" "My stars!" or "Darn it!" Then, again, the only way to put an end to murder in America is by high licenced murderers. Put a few men in to manage the business of murder. The common assassins who do their work with car hooks, dull knives or Paris green, should be abolished by law. Let the few experts do it who can accomplish murder without pain: by chloroform or bulldog revolvers. Give these men all the business. The licence in these cases should be twenty thousand dollars, because the perquisites in gold watches, money safes, and plethoric pocket-books would soon offset the licence.
High licences in rum-selling had always been urged, and always resulted in dead failures; therefore the whole method of legal restraint in crime can be dismissed with irony. The overcrowding in the East was crushing our ethical and practical ambition. That is why the trains going westward were so crowded that there was hardly room enough to stand in them. We were restoring ourselves in Kansas and Missouri. After lecturing, in the spring of 1887, in fifteen Western cities, including Chicago, St. Louis, and westward to the extreme boundaries of Kansas, I returned a Westerner to convert the Easterner. In the West they called this prosperity a boom, but I never liked the word, for a boom having swung one way is sure to swing the other. It was a revival of enterprise which, starting in Birmingham, Ala., advanced through Tennessee, and spread to Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri. My forecast at this time was that the men who went West then would be the successes in the next twenty years. The centre of American population, which two years before had been a little west of Cincinnati, had moved to Kansas, the heart of the continent. The national Capital should have been midway between the Atlantic and the Pacific, in which case the great white buildings in Washington could have been turned into art academies, and museums and libraries.
Prohibition in Kansas and Iowa was making honest men. I did not see an intoxicated man in either of these States. All the young men in Kansas and Iowa were either prohibitionists or loafers. The West had lost the song plaintive and adopted the song jubilant.
In the spring of this year, 1887, Brooklyn was examined by an investigating committee. Even when Mayor Low was in power, three years before, the city was denounced by Democratic critics, so Mayor Whitney, of course, was the victim of Republican critics. The whole thing was mere partisan hypocrisy. If anyone asked me whether I was a Republican or a Democrat, I told them that I had tried both, and got out of them both. I hope always to vote, but the title of the ticket at the top will not influence me. Outside of heaven Brooklyn was the quietest place on Sunday. The Packer and the Polytechnic institutes took care of our boys and girls. Our judiciary at this time included remarkable men: Judge Neilson, Judge Gilbert, and Judge Reynolds. We had enough surplus doctors to endow a medical college for fifty other cities.
It looked as though our grandchildren would be very happy. We were only in the early morning of development. The cities would be multiplied a hundredfold, and yet we were groaning because a few politicians were conducting an investigation for lack of something better to do. From time immemorial we had prayed for the President and Congress, but I never heard of any prayers for the State Legislatures, and they needed them most of all. They brought about the groans of the nation, and we were constantly in complaint of them. I remember a great mass meeting in the Academy of Music in Brooklyn, at which I was present, to protest against the passage of the Gambling Pool Bill, as it was called. I was accused of being over-confident because I said the State Senate would not pass it without a public hearing. A public hearing was given, however, and my faith in the legislators of the State increased. We ministers of Brooklyn had to do a good deal of work outside of our pulpits, outside of our churches, on the street and in the crowds.
When the Ives Gambling Pool Bill was passed I urged that the Legislature should adjourn. The race track men went to Albany and triumphed. Brooklyn was disgraced before the world by our race tracks at Coney Island, which were a public shame!
All the money in the world, however, was not abused. Philanthropists were helping the Church. Miss Wolfe bequeathed a million dollars to evangelisation in New York; Mr. Depau, of Illinois, bequeathed five million dollars to religion, and the remaining three million of his fortune only to his family. There were others—Cyrus McCormick, James Lenox, Mr. Slater, Asa D. Packer. They, with others, were men of great deeds. We were just about ready to appreciate these progressive events.
In the summer of 1887 I urged a great World's Fair, because I thought it was due in our country, to the inventors, the artists, the industries of America. How to set the idea of a World's Fair agoing? It only needed enthusiasm among the prominent merchants and the rich men. All great things first start in one brain, in one heart. I proposed that a World's Fair should be held in the great acreage between Prospect Park and the sea.
In 1853 there was a World's Fair in New York. In the same year the dismemberment of the Republic was expected, and a book of several volumes was advertised in London, entitled "History of the Federal Government from the Foundation to the Dissipation of the United States." Only one volume was ever published. The other volumes were never printed. What a difference in New York city then, when it opened its Crystal Palace, and thirty-four years later—in 1887! That Crystal Palace was the beginning of World's Fairs in this country.
In the presence of the epauleted representatives of foreign nations, before a vast multitude, Franklin Pierce, President of the United States, declared it open, and as he did so Julien, the inspired musical leader of his day, raised his baton for an orchestra of three thousand instruments, while thousands of trained voices sang "God Save the Queen," "The Marseillaise," "Bonnie Doon," "The Harp that once through Tara's Halls," and "Hail Columbia." What that Crystal Palace, opened in New York in 1853, did for art, for science, for civilisation, is beyond record. The generation that built it has for the most part vanished but future generations will be inspired by them.
The summer of 1887 opened the baseball season of America, and I deplored an element of roughness and loaferism that attached itself to the greatest game of our country. One of the national events of this season of that year was a proposal to remove the battle-flag of the late war. Good sense prevailed, and the controversy was satisfactorily settled; otherwise the whole country would have been aflame. It was not merely an agitation over a few bits of bunting. The most arousing, thrilling, blood-stirring thing on earth is a battle-flag. Better let the old battle-flags of our three wars hang where they are. Only one circumstance could disturb them, and that would be the invasion of a foreign power and the downfall of the Republic. The strongest passions of men are those of patriotism.
The best things that a man does in the world usually take a lifetime to make. A career is a life job, and no one is sure whether it was worthy or not till it is over. I except doctors from this rule, of whom Homer says:—
Some may remember the stalwart figure of Dr. Joseph Hutchinson, one of the best American surgeons. For some years, in the streets of Brooklyn, he was a familiar and impressive figure on horseback. He rode superbly, and it was his custom to make his calls in that way. He died in this year. Daniel Curry was another significant, superior man of a different sort, who also died in the summer of 1887. He was an editor and writer of the Methodist Church. At his death he told one thing that will go into the classics of the Church; and five hundred years beyond, when evangelists quote the last words of this inspired man, they will recall the dying vision that came to Daniel Curry. He saw himself in the final judgment before the throne, and knew not what to do on account of his sins. He felt that he was lost, when suddenly Christ saw him and said, "I will answer for Daniel Curry." In this world of vast population it is wonderful to find only a few men who have helped to carry the burden of others with distinction for themselves. Most of us are driven.
In the two years and a half that our Democratic party had been in power, our taxes had paid in a surplus to the United States treasury of $125,000,000. The whole country was groaning under an infamous taxation. Most of it was spent by the Republican party, three or four years before, to improve navigation on rivers with about two feet of water in them in the winter, and dry in summer. In the State of Virginia I saw one of these dry creeks that was to be improved. Taxation caused the war of the Revolution. It had become a grinding wheel of government that rolled over all our public interests. Politicians were afraid to touch the subject for fear they might offend their party. I touch upon it here because those who live after me may understand, by their own experience, the infamy of political piracy practised in the name of government taxation.
We had our school for scandal in America over-developed. A certain amount of exposure is good for the soul, but our newspaper headlines over-reached this ideal purpose. They cultivated liars and encouraged their lies. The peculiarity of lies is their great longevity. They are a productive species and would have overwhelmed the country and destroyed George Washington except for his hatchet. Once born, the lie may live twenty, thirty, or forty years. At the end of a man's life sometimes it is healthier than he ever was. Lies have attacked every occupant of the White House, have irritated every man since Adam, and every good woman since Eve. Today the lie is after your neighbour; to-morrow it is after you. It travels so fast that a million people can see it the next morning. It listens at keyholes, it can hear whispers: it has one ear to the East, the other to the West. An old-fashioned tea-table is its jubilee, and a political campaign is its heaven. Avoid it you may not, but meet it with calmness and without fear. It is always an outrage, a persecution.
Nothing more offensive to public sentiment could have occurred than the attempt made in New York in the autumn of 1887 to hinder the appointment of a new pastor of Trinity Church, on the plea that he came from a foreign country, and therefore was an ally to foreign labour. It was an outrage on religion, on the Church, on common sense. As a nation, however, we were safe. There was not another place in the world where its chief ruler could travel five thousand miles, for three weeks, unprotected by bayonets, as Mr. Cleveland did on his Presidential tour of the country. It was a universal huzzah, from Mugwumps, Republicans, and Democrats. We were a safe nation because we destroyed Communism.
The execution of the anarchists in Chicago, in November, 1887, was a disgusting exhibition of the gallows. It took ten minutes for some of them to die by strangulation. Nothing could have been more barbaric than this method of hanging human life. I was among the first to publicly propose execution by electricity. Mr. Edison, upon a request from the government, could easily have arranged it. I was particularly horrified with the blunders of the hangman's methods, because I was in a friend's office in New York, when the telegraph wires gave instantaneous reports of the executions in Chicago. I made notes of these flashes of death.
"Now the prisoners leave the cells," said the wire; "now they are ascending the stairs"; "now the rope is being adjusted"; "now the cap is being drawn"; "now they fall." Had I been there I would probably have felt thankful that I was brought up to obey the law, and could understand the majesty of restraining powers. One of these men was naturally kind and generous, I was told, but was embittered by one who had robbed him of everything; and so he became an enemy to all mankind. One of them got his antipathy for all prosperous people from the fact that his father was a profligate nobleman, and his mother a poor, maltreated, peasant woman. The impulse of anarchy starts high up in society. Chief among our blessings was an American instinct for lawfulness in the midst of lawless temptation. We were often reminded of this supreme advantage as we saw passing into shadowland the robed figure of an upright man.
The death of Judge Greenwood of Brooklyn, in November, 1887, was a reminder of such matters. He had seen the nineteenth century in its youth and in its old age. From first to last, he had been on the right side of all its questions of public welfare. We could, appropriately, hang his portrait in our court rooms and city halls. The artist's brush would be tame indeed compared with the living, glowing, beaming face of dear old Judge Greenwood in the portrait gallery of my recollections.
The national event of this autumn was President Cleveland's message to Congress, which put squarely before us the matter of our having a protective tariff. It was the great question of our national problem, and called for oratory and statesmanship to answer it. The whole of Europe was interested in the subject. I advocated free trade as the best understanding of international trading, because I had talked with the leaders of political thought in Europe, and I understood both sides, as far as my capacity could compass them. In America we were frequently compared to the citizens of the French Republic because of our nervous force, our restlessness, but we were more patient. In 1887, the resignation of President Grévy in France re-established this fact. Though an American President becomes offensive to the people, we wait patiently till his four years are out, even if we are not very quiet about it. We are safest when we keep our hands off the Constitution. The demonstration in Paris emphasised our Republican wisdom. Public service is an altar of sacrifice for all who worship there.
The death of Daniel Manning, ex-Secretary of the Treasury, in December, 1887, was another proof of this. He fell prostrate on the steps of his office, in a sickness that no medical aid could relieve. Four years before no one realised the strength that was in him. He threw body and soul into the whirlpool of his work, and was left in the rapids of celebrity. In the closing notes of 1887, I find recorded the death of Mrs. William Astor. What a sublime lifetime of charity and kindness was hers! Mrs. Astor's will read like a poem. It had a beauty and a pathos, and a power entirely independent of rhythmical cadence. The document was published to the world on a cold December morning, with its bequests of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the poor and needy, the invalids and the churches. It put a warm glow over the tired and grizzled face of the old year. It was a benediction upon the coming years.