Presented to the

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY

by the

ONTARIO LEGISLATIVE LIBRARY

1980

GREATER BRITAIN:

A RECORD OF TRAVEL

IN

ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

LONDON - BOMBAY - CALCUTTA MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK - BOSTON • CHICAGO ATLANTA - SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

TORONTO

A RECORD OF TRAVEL

ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES.

WITH ADDITIONAL CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH INFLUENCE

IN JAPAN AND CHINA, AND ON HONG KONG

AND THE STRAITS SETTLEMENTS

BY

SIR CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE, BART.

AUTHOR OF " THE FALL OF PRINCE FLORESTAN OF MONACO/' AND EDITOR (IF " PAPERS OF A CRITIC1 "'

MA.CMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1907

411 rights rtser-ved.

FIRST EDITION PRINTED (2 VOLS., 8vo.) 1868; REPRINTED MARCH 1869; NEW EDITION (i VOL., CROWN 8vo.) JUNE 1869;

REPRINTED OCTOBER 1869, 1870, 1872, 1880 ;

NEW EDITION 1885; REPRINTED 1888, 1890, 1894; 1905;

REISSUED 1907.,

.1 ' M'l

PREFACE TO THE NEW (8TH) EDITION.

IN adding to this book two chapters which form the record of one of my later journeys, I have not changed the earlier portions of the work otherwise than by striking out some statements which had obviously ceased to be true, and by adding a few notes. My title has become hackneyed, and my stories have become stale ; but I could hardly abandon the former, and my publishers tell me of the latter that the public like old friends.

C. W. D.

76, SLOANE STREET, CHELSEA. 1885.

PREFACE TO FIRST ORIGINAL EDITION.

IN 1866 and 1867, I followed England round the world: everywhere I was in English-speaking, or in English-governed lands. If I remarked that climate, soil, manners of life, that mixture with other peoples had modified the blood, I saw, too, that in essentials the race was always one.

The idea which in all the length of my travels has been at once my fellow and my guide — a key wherewith to unlock the hidden things of strange new lands — is a conception, however imperfect, of the grandeur of our race, already girdling the earth, which it is destined, perhaps, eventually to overspread.

In America, the peoples of the world are being fused together, but they are run into an English mould : Alfred's laws and Chaucer's tongue are theirs whether they would or no. There are men who say that Britain in her age will claim the glory of having planted greater Englands across the seas. They fail to

nu PREFACE.

perceive that she has done more than found plantations of hei own — that she has imposed her institutions upon the offshoots of Germany, of Ireland, of Scandinavia, and of Spain. Through America, England is speaking to the world.

Sketches of Saxondom may be of interest even upon humblei grounds : the development of the England of Elizabeth is to be found, not in the Britain of Victoria, but in half the habitable globe. If two small islands are by courtesy styled " Great," America, Australia, India, must form a " Greater Britain."

C. W, D.

76. SLOANE STREET, CHELSEA, 1868.

CONTENTS.

PART I.

CMAP. PAIR	CHAP. FAGH
I. — VIRGINIA	7	XIV. — BRIG II AM YOUNG..	00
II. — THE NEGRO		XV. — MORMONDOM	lOd.
HI. — THE SOUTH	2T>	XVI. — WESTERN EDITORS	IO7
IV. — THE EMPIRE STATE..	28	XVII. — UTAH	TlS
V. — CAMBRIDGE COM-		XVIII. — NAMELESS ALPS....	125
MENCEMENT	36	XIX. — VIRGINIA CITY	i?S
VI. — CANADA	46	XX. — EL DORADO	MS
VII — UNIVFRSITY OF MI-		XXI. — LYNCH LAW	ICQ
CHIGAN	$7	XXII.— GOLDEN CITY	172
VIII.— THE PACIFIC RAIL-		XXIII. — LITTLE CHINA	I S3
ROAD	64	XXIV. — CALIFORNIA.	I Sn
IX. — OMPIIALISM	70	XXV. — MEXICO	104
X. — LETTER FROM DEN- VER	7J.	XXVI.— REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT	IOQ
XI. — RED INDIA	8"?	XXVII. — BROTHERS	"OS
XII. — COLORADO	So	\XVIII. — AMERICA	216
xni. — ROCKY MOUNTAINS...	93
	PART II.
I.— PITCAIRN ISLAND	227 ', V. — THE MAORIES	267
II. — HOKITIKA	211	VI. — THE TWO FLIES. .	27.1
III. — POLYNESIANS	24. C	VII. — THE PACIFIC	279
IV. — PARE WAN UI PAH	250

CONTENTS.

PART IIL

CHAP. I SYDNEY ....	PAGE 285 291 297 323 PAR' 395 4°5 411 419 425 436 444 456 462 470 479 483 488 498	CHAP. 1	'Ac 6 339 342 345 356 359 368 379 3^5 5'5 523 529 535 542 553 55S 564 566 59i
II. — RIVAL COLONIES	IX. — VICTORIAN PORTS... X. — TASMANIA
III. — VICTORIA .
IV.— SQUATTER ARISTO- CRACY...	"** XI. — CONFEDERATION \II. — ADELAIDE
* V.— COLONIAL DEMO- CRACY .	XIII. — TRANSPORTATION ... \IV. — AUSTRALI\
VI — PROTECTION	XV — COLONIFS
VII.— LMiOUR	r iv.
I — MARITIME CFYION...
11, — KANDY ... . .	XVI.— OVERLAND ROU 1 ES.. \VII. — BOMBAY
Ill — MADRAS TO C A I •
CUTTA ,	XVIII. — THE MOHURRUM XIX — ENGLISH 1 EARNING
IV BENARES . , ,
V CASTEi > .. ....	XX — INDIA ..
VI. — MOHAMEDAN CITIES.. VII SIMLA . .... .	XXI. — DEPENDENCIES XXII — THE SECOND EMPIRE
V\II - — COLONIZATION . . . .	IN THE EAST
IX — THE " GAZETTK "	XXIII THE ENG' ISH .
X — UMRITSUR. ...	XXIV — ENGLISH INFLUENCF
XI. — LAHORE	IN JAPAN ...
XII. — OUR INDIAN ARMY... JCIII. — RUSSIA	XXV. — ENGLISH INFLUENCE IN CHIN\ .<>
XIV — NATIVE STATES

INDEX 609

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

TAG*

PORTER ROCKWELL • • • .127

VIEW ON THE AMERICAN RIVER— THE TIACE WHERE GOLD WAS

FIRST FOUND ......... 149

GOVERNOR DAVEY'S PROCLAMATION ...... 347

PART L

AMERICA.

GREATER BRITAIN.

CHAPTER I. VIRGINIA.

FROM the bows of the steamer Saratoga, on the 2oth June, 1866, I caught sight of the low works of Fort Monroe, as, threading her way between the sandbanks of Capes Charles and Henry, the ship pressed on, under sail and steam, to enter Chesapeake Bay.

Our sudden arrival amid shoals of sharks and kingfish, the keeping watch for flocks of canvas-back ducks, gave us enough and to spare of idle work till we fully sighted the Yorktown peninsula, overgrown with ancient memories — ancient for America, Three towns of lost grandeur, or their ruins, stand there still. Williamsburg, the former capital, graced even to our time by the palaces where once the royal governors held more than regal state; Yorktown, where Cornwallis surren- dered to the Continental troops ; Jamestown, the earliest settlement, founded in 1607, thirteen years before old Governor Winthrop fixed the site of Plymouth, Massachusetts.

A bump against the pier of Fort Monroe soon roused us from our musings, and we found ourselves invaded by a swarm of stalwart negro troopers, clothed in the cavalry uniform of the United States, who boarded us for the mails. Not a white man save those we brought was to be seen upon the pier, and the blazing sun made me thankful that I had declined an offered letter to "Jeff. Davis."

Pushing off again into the stream, we ran the gauntlet cf the Kip-Raps passage, and made for Norfolk, having on our left

B *

4 GREATER XRTTAIN. LCHAP. i.

the many exits of the Dismal Swamp Canal. Crossing Hampton Roads — a grand bay with pleasant grassy shores, destined one day to become the best known, as by nature it is the noblest, of Atlantic ports — we nearly ran upon the wrecks of the Federal frigates Cumberland and Congress, sunk by the rebel ram Merri- mac in the first great naval action of the war ; but soon after, by a sort of poetic justice, .we almost drifted into the black hull of the Merrimac herself. Great gangs of negroes were labour- ing laughingly at the removal, by blasting, of the sunken ships.

When we were securely moored at Norfolk pier, I set off upon an inspection of the second city of Virginia. Again not a white man was to be seen, but hundreds of negroes were working in the heat, building, repairing, road-making, and happily chattering the while. At last, turning a corner, I came on an hotel, and, as a consequence, on a bar and its crowd of swaggering whites — " Johnny Rebs " all, you might see by the breadth of their brims, for across the Atlantic a broad-brim denotes less the man of peace than the ex-member of a Southern guerilla band, Morgan's, Mosby's, or Stuart's. No Southerner will wear the Yankee " stove-pipe " hat ; a Panama or Palmetto for him, he says, though he keeps to the long black coat that rules from Maine to the Rio Grande.

These Southerners were all alike — all were upright, tall, and heavily moustached ; all had long black hair and glittering eyes, and I looked instinctively for the baldric and the rapier. It needed no second glance to assure me that, as far as the men of Norfolk were concerned, the saying of our Yankee skipper was not far from truth : " The last idea that enters the mind of a Southerner is that of doing work."

Strangers are scarce in Norfolk, and it was not long before I found an excuse for entering into conversation with the " citizens." My first question was not received with much cordiality by my new acquaintance. "How do the negroes work? Wall, we spells nigger with two 'g's,' I reckon." Virginians, I must explain, are used to " reckon" as much as are New Englanders to ' ' guess," while Western men " calcu- late " as often as they cease to swear.) " How does the niggers work? Wall, niggers is darned fools, certain, but they ain't quite sich fools as to work while the Yanks will feed 'em. No,

CHAP, i.] VIRGINIA. §

sir, not quite sich fools as that." Hardly deeming it wise to point to the negroes working in the sun-blaze within a hundred yards, while we sat rocking ourselves in the verandah of the inn, I changed my tack, and asked whether things were settling down in Norfolk. This query soon led my friends upon the line I wanted them to take, and in five minutes we were well through politics, and plunging into the very war. "You're from England. Now, all that they tell you's darned lies. We're just as secesh as we ever was, only so many's killed that we can't fight — that's all, I reckon." "We ain't going to fight the North and West again," said an ex-colonel of rebel in- fantry ; " next time we fight, 'twill be us and the West against the Yanks. We'll keep the old flag then, and be darned to them." " If it hadn't been for the politicians, we shouldn't have seceded at all, I reckon : we should just have kept the old flag and the constitution, and the Yanks would have seceded from u?. Reckon we'd have let'em go." "Wall, boys, s'pose we liquor," closed in the colonel, shooting out his old quid, and filling in with another. " We'd have fought for a lifetime if the cussed Southerners hadn't deserted like they did." I asked who these " Southerners " were to whom such dis- respect was being shown. " You didn't think Virginia was a Southern State over in Britain, did you ? 'cause Virginia's a border State, sir. We didn't go to secede at all ; it was them blasted Southerners that brought it on us. First, they wouldn't give a command to General Robert E. Lee, then they made us do all the fighting for 'em, and then, when the pinch came, they left us in the lurch. Why, sir, I saw three Mississippi regiments surrender without a blow — yes, sir. That's right down good whisky ; jess you sample it." Here the steam- whistle of the Saratoga sounded with its deep bray. "Reckon you'll have to hurry up to make connexions," said one of my new friends, and I hurried off, not without a fear lest some of the group should shoot after me, to avenge the affront of my quitting them before the mixing of the drinks. They were but a pack of " mean whites," " North Carolina crackers," but their views were those which I found dominant in all ranks at Rich- mond, and up tne country in Virginia.

After all, the Southern planters are not " The South,': which

6 GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. i.

for political purposes is composed of the " mean whites," of the Irish of the towns, and of the South-Western men — • Missourians, Kentuckians, and Texans — fiercely anti-Northern, without being in sentiment what we should call Southern : certainly not representatives of the "Southern Chivalry." The " mean whites," or " poor trash," are the whites who are not planters — members of the slave-holding race who never held a slave — white men looked down upon by the negroes. It is a necessary result of the despotic government of one race by another that the poor members of the dominant people are universally despised : the " destitute Europeans " of Bombay, the " white loafers " of the Punjaub, are familiar cases. Where slavery exists, the " poor trash " class must inevitably be both large and wretched : primogeniture is necessary to keep the plantations sufficiently great to allow for the payment of over- seers and the supporting in luxury of the planter family, and younger sons and their descendants are not only left destitute, but debarred from earning their bread by honest industry, for in a slave country labour is degrading.

The Southern planters were gentlemen, possessed of many aristocratic virtues, along with every aristocratic vice; but to each planter there were nine "mean whites," who, though grossly ignorant, full of insolence, given to the use of the knife and pistol upon the slightest provocation, were, until the election of Lincoln to the presidency, as completely the rulers of America a^> they were afterwards the leaders of the re- bellion.

At sunset we started up the James on our way to City Point and Richmond, sailing almost between the very masts of the famous rebel privateer the Florida, and seeing her as she lay under the still, grey waters. She was cut out from a Brazilian port, and when claimed by the imperial government was to have been at once surrendered. While the despatches were on their way to Norfolk, she was run into at her moorings by a Federal gunboat, and filled and sank directly. Friends of the confederacy have hinted that the collision was strangely oppor- tune ; nevertheless, the fact remains that the commander of the gunboat was dismissed the navy for his carelessness.

The twilight was beyond description lovely. The change

CHAP, i.] VISQINIA. 7

rrom the auks and ice-birds of the Atlantic to the blue-birds and robins of Virginia was not more sudden than that from winter to tropical warmth and sensuous indolence; but the scenery, too, of the river is beautiful in its very changelessness. Those who can see no beauty but in boldness, might call the James as monotonous as the lower Loire.

After weeks of bitter cold, warm evenings favour meditation. The soft air, the antiquity of the forest, the languor of the sun- set breeze, all dispose to day-dream or to sleep. That oak has seen Powhdtan ; the founders of Jamestown may have pointed at that grand old sycamore. In this drowsy humour, we sighted the far-famed batteries of Newport News, and turning-in to berth or hammock, lay all night at City Point, near Petersburg.

A little before sunrise, we weighed again, and sought a passage through the tremendous Confederate "obstructions." Rows of iron skeletons, the frameworks of the wheels of sunken steamers, showed above the stream, casting gaunt shadows westward, and varied only by here and there a battered smoke- stack or a spar. The whole of the steamers that had plied upon the James and the canals before the war were lying here in rows, sunk lengthwise along the stream. Two in the middle of each row had been raised to let the Government vessels pass, but in the heat-mist and faint light the navigation was most difficult. For five-and-twenty miles the rebel forts were as thick as the hills and points allowed ; yet in spite of booms and bars, of sunken ships, of batteries and torpedoes, the Federal Monitors once forced their way to Fort Darling in the outer works of Richmond. I remembered thsse things a few weeks later, when General Grant's first words to me at Wash- ington were : " Glad to meet you. What have you seen ? The Capitol ? Go at once and see the Monitors." He after- wards said to me, in words that photograph not only the Monitors, but Grant : " You can batter away at those things for a month, and do no good."

At Dutch Gap, we came suddenly upon a curious scent. The river flowed towards us down a long straight reach, bounded by a lofty hill crowned with tremendous earthworks : but through a deep trench or cleft, hardly fifty yards in length, upon our right, we could see the sJream running with violence

8 GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP, z,

in a direction parallel with our course. The hills about the gull) were hollowed out into caves and bomb-proofs, evidently meant as shelters from vertical fire, but the rough graves of a vast cemetery showed that the protection was sought in vain. Forests of crosses of unpainted wood rose upon every acre of flat ground. On the peninsula, all but made an island by the cleft, was a grove of giant trees, leafless, barkless, dead, and blanched by a double change in the level of the stream. There is no sight so sad as that of a drowned forest, with a turkey- buzzard on each bough. On the bank upon our left was an iron scaffold, eight or ten stories high — "Butler's Look-out," as the cleft was " Butler's Dutch Gap Canal." The canal, un- finished in war, is now to be completed at State expense for purposes of trade.

As we rounded the extremity of the peninsula, an eagle was seen to light upon a tree. From every portion of the ship — main deck, hurricane deck, lower deck ports — revolvers ready capped and loaded were brought to bear upon the bird, who sheered off unharmed amid a storm of bullets. After this incident, I was careful in my political discussions with my shipmates; disarmament in the Confederacy had clearly not been extended to private weapons.

The outer and inner lines of fortifications passed, we came in view of a many-steepled town with domes and spires re- calling Oxford, hanging on a bank above a crimson-coloured foaming stream. In ten minutes we were alongside the wharf at Richmond, and in half an hour safely housed in the " Exchange " Hotel, kept by the Messrs. Carrington, of whom the father was a private, the son a colonel, in the rebel Volunteers.

The next day, while the works and obstructions on the James were still fresh in my mind, I took train to Petersburg, the city the capture of which by Grant was the last blow struck by the North at the melting forces of the Confederacy.

The line showed the war : here and there the track, torn up in Northern raids, had barely been repaired ; the bridges were burnt and broken ; the rails worn down to an iron thread. The joke on " board," as they say here for " in the train," was that the engine drivers down the line are tolerably 'cute men,

i.J VIRGINIA. q

who, when the rails are altogether worn away, understand how to "go it on the bare wood," and who at all times " kno\v where to jump."

From the window of the car we could see that in the country there were left no mules, no horses, no roads, no men. The solitude is not all owing to the war : in the whole five- and-twenty miles from Richmond to Petersburg there was before the war but a single station; in New England your passage-card often gives a station in every two miles. A careful look at the underwood on either side the line showed that this forest is not primeval, that all this country had once been ploughed.

Virginia stands first among the States for natural advan- tages : in climate she is unequalled ; her soil is fertile ; her mineral wealth in coal, copper, gold, and iron, enormous and well placed; her rivers good, and her great harbour one of the best in the world. Virginia has been planted more than 250 years, and is as large as England, yet has a free popula- tion of only a million. In every kind of production she is miserably inferior to Missouri or Ohio, in most inferior also to the infant States of Michigan and Illinois. Only a quarter of her soil is under cultivation, to half that of poor starved New England, and the mines are deserted which were worked by the very Indians who were driven from the land as savages a hundred years ago.

There is no surer test of the condition of a country than the state of its highways. In driving on the main roads round Richmond, in visiting the scene of McClellan's great defeat on the Chickahominy at Mechanicsville and Malvern Hill, I myself and an American gentleman who was with me had to get out and lay the planks upon the bridges, and then sit upon them, to keep them down while the black coachman drove across. The best roads in Virginia are but ill-kept " corduroys ;" but, bad as are these, " plank roads," over which artillery have passed, knocking out every other plank, are worse by far ; yet such is the main road from Richmond towards the West.

There is not only a scarcity of roads, but of railroads. A comparison of the railway system of Illinois and Indiana with the two lines of Kentucky or the one of Western Virginia 01

ic GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. l.

Louisiana, is a comparison of the South with the North, of slavery with freedom. Virginia shows already the decay of age, but is blasted by slavery rather than by war.

Passing through Petersburg, the streets of which were gay with the feathery-brown blooms of the Venetian shumach, but almost deserted by human beings, who have not returned to the city since they were driven out by the shot and shell, of which their houses show the scars, we were soon in the rebel works. There are sixty miles of these works in all, line within line, three deep : alternations of sand-pits and sand-heaps, with here and there a tree-trunk pierced for riflemen, and everywhere a double row of cfievaux de frise. The forts nearest this point were named by their rebel occupants Fort Hell and Fort Damnation. Tremendous works, but it needed no long in- terview with Grant to understand their capture. I had not been ten minutes in his office at Washington before I saw that the secret of his unvarying success lay in his unflinching determination : there is pith in the American conceit which reads in his initials, " U. S. G.," " unconditional-surrender Grant."

The works defending Richmond, hardly so strong as those of Petersburg, were attacked in a novel manner in the third year of the war. A strong body of Federal cavalry on a raid, unsupported by infantry or guns, came suddenly by night upon the outer lines of Richmond. Something had led them to believe that the rebels were not in force, and with the strange aimless daring that animated both parties during the rebellion, they rode straight in along the winding road, unchallenged, and came up to the inner lines. There they were met by a volley which emptied a few saddles, and retired without even stopping to spike the guns in the Outer works. Had they known enough of the troops opposed to them to have con- tinued to advance, they might have taken Richmond, and held it long enough to have captured the rebel president and senate, and burned the great iron-works and ships. The whole of the rebel army had gone north, and even the home guard was camped out on the Chickahominy. The troops who fired the volley were a company of the " iron-works battalion," boys employed at the foundries, not one of whom had ever fired a

CHAP, i.] VIRGINIA. ix

i irle before this night. They confessed themselves that "one minute more, and they'd have run ;" but the volley just stopped the enemy in time.

The spot where we first struck the rebel lines was that known as the Crater — the funnel-shaped cavity formed when Grant sprang his famous mine. One thousand five hundred men are buried in the hollow itself, and the bones of those smothered by the falling earth are working through the soil. Five thousand negro troops were killed in this attack, and are buried round the hollow where they died, fighting as gallantly as they fought everywhere throughout the war. It is a singular testimony to the continuousness of the fire, that the still re- maining subterranean passages show that in countermining the rebels came once within three feet of the mine, yet failed to hear the working parties. Thousands of old army shoes were lying on the earth, and negro boys were digging up bullets for old lead.

Within eighty yards of the Crater are the Federal investing lines, on which the trumpet flower of our gardens was growing wild in deep rich masses. The negroes told me not to gather it, because they believe it scalds the hand. They call it " poison plant," or " blister weed." The blue-birds and scarlet tannagers were playing about the horn-shaped flowers.

Just within Grant's earthworks are the ruins of an ancient church, built, it is said, with bricks that were brought by the first colonists from England. About Norfolk, about Petersburg, and in the Shenandoah Valley, you cannot ride twenty miles through the Virginian forest without bursting in upon some glade containing a quaint old church, or a creeper-covered roofless palace of the Culpeppers. the Randolphs, or the Scotts. The county names have in them all a history. Taking the letter " B " alone we have Barbour, Bath, Bedford, Berkeley, Boone, Bote- tourt, Braxton, Brooke, Brunswick, Buchanan, Buckingham. A dozen counties in the State are named from kings or princes. The slave-owning cavaliers whose names the remainder bear are the men most truly guilty of the late attempt made by their descen- dants to create an empire founded on disloyalty and oppression; but within sight of this old church of theirs at Petersburg, thirty- three miles of Federal outworks stand as a monument of how

it GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. i.

the attempt was crushed by the children of their New England brother-colonists.

The naraes of streams and hamlets in Virginia have often a quaint English ring. On the Potomac, near Harper's Ferry, I once came upon " Sir John's Run." Upon my asking a tall gaunt fellow who was fishing, whether this was the spot on which the Knight of Windsor " larded the lea.n earth," I got for sole answer: " Wall, don't know 'bout that, but it's a mighty fine spot for yellow-fin trout." The entry to Virginia is characteristic. You sail between capes named from the sons of James I., and have fronting you the estuaries of two rivers called after Charles II. and the Duke of York.

The old " F. F. V's," the first families of Virginia, whose founders gave these monarchic names to the rivers and counties of the State, are far off now in Texas and California — those, that is, which were not extinct before the war. The tenth Lord Fairfax keeps a tiny ranch near San Francisco ; some of the chief Denmans are also to be found in California. In all such cases of which I heard, the emigration took place before the war; northern conquest could not be made use of as a plea whereby to escape the reproaches due to the slave-owning system. There is a stroke of justice in the fact that the Virginian oligarchy have ruined themselves in ruining their State ; but the gaming hells of Farobankopolis, as Richmond once was called, have much for which to answer.

When the " burnt district " comes to be rebuilt, Richmond will be the most beautiful of all the Atlantic cities ; while the water-power of the rapids of the James, and a situation at the junction of canal and river, secure for it a prosperous future.

The superb position of the State House (which formed the rebel capitol), on the brow of a long hill, whence it overhangs the city and the James, has in it something of satire. The Parliament-house of George Washington's own State, the State House contains the famed statue set up by the general assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia to the hero's memory. With- out the building stands the still more noteworthy bronze statue ol the first President, erected jointly by all tne States in the then Union. That such monuments should overlook the battle-fields

OBAP. i/j VIRGINIA. 13

of the war provoked by the secession from the Union of Washing- ton's loved Virginia, is a fact full of the grim irony of history.

Hollywood, the cemetery of Richmond, is a place full of touching sad suggestion, and very beautiful, with deep shades and rippling streams. During the war there were hospitals in Richmond for 20,000 men, and "always full," they say. The Richmond men who were killed in battle were buried where they fell, but 8000 who died in hospital are buried here, and over them is placed a wooden cross, with the inscription in black paint, "Dead, but not forgotten." In another spot lie the Union dead, under the shadow of the flag for which they died.

From Monroe's tomb the evening view is singularly soft and calm; the quieter and calmer for the drone in which are mingled the trills of the mocking-bird, the hoarse croaking of the bull-frog, the hum of the myriad fire-flies, that glow like summer light- ning among the trees, the distant roar of the river, of which the rich red water can still be seen, beaten on the rocks into a rosy foam.

With the moment's chillness of the sunset breeze, the golden glory of the heavens fades into grey, and there comes quickly over them the solemn blueness of the Southern night. Thoughts are springing up of the many thousand unnamed graves, where the rebel soldiers lie unknown, when the Federal drums ir Richmond begin sharply beating the rappe!.

14 GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. 11

.CHAPTER IL

THE NEGRO.

IN the back country of Virginia, and on the borders of Nortl Carolina, it becomes clear that our common English notions of the negro and of slavery are nearer the truth than common notions often are. The London Christy Minstrels are not more given to bursts of laughter of the form " Yah ! Yah ! " than are the plantation hands. The negroes upon the Virginian farms are not maligned by those who represent them as delight- ing in the contrast of crimson and yellow, or emerald and sky- blue. I have seen them on a Sunday afternoon, dressed in scarlet waistcoats and gold-laced cravats, returning hurriedly from "meetin'," to dance break-downs, and grin from ear to ear for hours at a time. What better should we expect from men to whom until just now it was forbidden, under tremendous penalties, to teach their letters ?

Nothing can force the planters to treat negro freedom save from the comic side. To them the thing is too new for thought, too strange for argument; the ridiculous lies on the surface, and to this they turn as a relief. When I asked a planter how the blacks prospered under freedom, his answer was, " Ours don't much like it. You see, it necessitates monogamy. If I talk about the 'responsibilities of freedom,' Sambo says, 'Dunno 'bout that; please, mass' George, me want two wife.' " Another planter tells me, that the only change that he can see in the condition of the negroes since they have been free, is that formerly the supervision of the overseer forced them occasionally to be clean, whereas now nothing on earth can make them wash. He says that, writing lately to his agent, he received an answer to which there was the following postscript : " You ain't sent no

CHAP, n.] THE NEGRO. IS

sope. You had better sent sope : niggers is certainly needing sope."

It is easy to treat the negro question in this way ; easy, on the other hand, to assert that since history fails us as a guide to the future of the emancipated blacks, we should see what time will bring, and meanwhile set down negroes as a monster class of which nothing is yet known, and, like the compilers of the Catalan map, say of places of which we have no knowledge, " Here be giants, cannibals, and negroes." As long as we possess Jamaica, and are masters upon the African west coast, the negro question is one of moment to ourselves. It is one, too, of mightier import, for it is bound up with the future of the English in America. It is by no means a question to be passed over as a joke. There are five millions of negroes in the United States ; juries throughout ten States of the Union are mainly chosen from the black race. The matter is not only serious, but full of interest, political, ethnological, historic.

In the South you must take nothing upon trust; believe nothing you are told. Nowhere in the world do " facts " appear so differently to those who view them through spectacles of yellow or of rose. The old planters tell you that all is ruin — that they have but half the hands they need, and from each hand but a half-day's work : the new men, with Northern energy and Northern capital, tell you that they get on very well.

The old Southern planters find it hard to rid themselves of their traditions ; they cannot understand free blacks, and slavery makes not only the slaves but the masters shiftless. They have no cash, and the Metayer system gives rise to the suspicion of some fraud, for the negroes are very distrustful of the honesty of their former masters.

The worst of the evils that must inevitably grow out of the sudden emancipation of millions of slaves have not shown themselves as yet, in consequence of the great amount of work that has to be done in the cities of the South, in repairing the ruin caused during the war by fire and want of care, and in building places of business for the Northern capitalists. The negroes of Virginia and North Carolina have flocked down to the towns and ports by the thousand, and find in Norfolk,

16 GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP n

Richmond, Wilmington, and Fort Monroe employment for the moment. Their absence from the plantations makes labour dear up country, and this in itself tempts the negroes who runiain on land to work sturdily for wages. Seven dollars a month — at the then rate equal to one pound — with board and lodging, were being paid to black field-hands on the corn and tobacco farms near Richmond. It is when the city works are over that pressure will come upon the South.

Already the negroes are beginning to ask for land, and they complain loudly that none of the confiscated lands have been assigned to them. " Ef yer dun gib us de land, reckon de ole massas '11 starb de niggahs," was a plain, straightforward sum- mary of the negro view of the negro question, given me by a white-bearded old " uncle " in Richmond, and backed by every black man within hearing in a chorus of " Dat's true, for shore ;" but I found up the country, that the planters are afraid to let the negroes own or farm for themselves the smallest plot of land, for fear that they should sell ten times as much as they grew, stealing their " crop " from the granaries of their em- ployers.

At a farm near Petersburg, owned by a Northern capitalist, 1000 acres, which before emancipation had been tilled by 100 slaves, now needed, I was told, but forty freedmen for their cultivation ; but when I reached the place, I found that the former number included old people and women, while the forty were all hale men. The men were paid upon the tally system. A card was given them for each day's work, which was accepted at the plantation store in payment for goods supplied, and at the end of the month money was paid for the remaining tickets. The planters say that the field hands will not support their old people ; but this means only that, like white folk, they try to make as much money as they can, and know that if they plead the wants of their wives and children, the whites will keep their aged folk.

That the negro slaves were lazy, thriftless, unchaste, and thieves, is true ; but it is as slaves, and not as negroes, that they were all these things ; and, after all, the effects of slavery upon the slave are less terrible than its effects upon the master. The moral condition to which the planter class had been

CHAI-. li.J TBE NE6&0. 1 j

brought by slavery, shows out plainly in the speeches of the rebel leaders. Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, declared in 1861 that " Slavery is the natural and moral condition of the negro. ... I cannot permit myself to doubt," he went on, " the ultimate success of a full recognition of this principle throughout the civilized and enlightened world .... negro slavery is in its infancy."

There is reason to believe that the American negroes will justify the hopes of their friends : they have made the best of every chance that has been given them as yet ; they were good soldiers, they are eager to learn their letters, they are steady at their work : — in Barbadoes they are industrious and well-con- ducted ; in La Plata they are exemplary citizens. In America the coloured labourer has had no motive to be industrious.

General Grant assured me of the great aptness at soldiering shown by the negro troops. In battle they displayed extraor- dinary courage, but if their officers were picked off they could not stand a charge ; no more, he said, could their Southern masters. The power of standing firm after the loss of leaders is possessed only by regiments where every private is as good as his captain and colonel, such as the North-western and New England volunteers.

Before I left Richmond, I had one morning found my way into a school for the younger blacks. There were as many present as the forms would hold — sixty, perhaps, in all — and three wounded New England soldiers, with pale thin faces, were patiently teaching them to write. The boys seemed quick and apt enough, but they were very raw — only a week or two in the school. Since the time when Oberlin first pro- claimed the potential equality of the race, by admitting negroes as freely as white men and women to the college, the negroes have never been backward to learn.

It must not be supposed that the negro is wanting in abilities of a certain kind. Even in the imbecility of the Congo dance we note his unrivalled mimetic power. The religious side of the negio character is full of weird suggestiveness ; but super- stition, everywhere the handmaid of ignorance, is rife among the black plantation-hands. It is thought that the punishment with which the shameful rites of Obi-worship have been visited

c

rfl QttEA TEtt XtolTAltt. [CHAP. it.

has proved, even in the city of New Orleans, insufficient to prevent them. Charges of witchcraft aie <is common in Vir- ginia as in Orissa : in the Carolinas, as in Central India, the use of poison is often sought to work out the events foretold by some noted sorceress. In no direction can the matter be followed out to its conclusions without bringing us face to face with the sad fact, that the faults of the plantation negro are every one of them traceable to the vices of the slavery system, and that the Americans of to-day are suffering beyond measure foi evils for which our forefathers are responsible. We our- selves are not guiltless of wrong-doing in this matter : if it is still impossible openly to advocate slavery in England, it has at least become a habit persistently to write down freedom. We are no longer told that God made the blacks to be slaves, but we arc bade remember that they cannot prosper under emanci- pation. All mention of Barbadoes is suppressed, but we have daily homilies on the condition of Jamaica. The negro ques- tion in America is briefly this : is there, on the one hand, reason to fear that, dollars applied to land decreasing while black mouths to be fed increase, the Southern States will become an American Jamaica? is there, on the other hand, ground for the hope that the negroes may be found not incap- able of the citizenship of the United States ? The former of these two questions is the more difficult, and to some extent involves the latter : can cotton, can sugar, can rice, can coffee, can tobacco, be raised by white field-hands? If not, can they be raised with profit by black free labour ? Can co-operative planting, directed by negro overlookers, possibly succeed, or must the farm be ruled by white capitalists, agents, and over- seers ?

It is asserted that the negro will not work without compul- sion ; but the same may be said of the European. There is compulsion of many kinds. The emancipated negro may still be forced to work — forced as the white man is forced in this and other lands, by the alternative, work or starve ! This forcing, however, may not be confined to that which the laws of natural increase lead us to expect ; it may be stimulated by bounties on immigration.

Tie negro is not, it would seem, to have a monopoly of

OMAP. n.] THE NEGRO. 19

Southern labour in this continent This week we hear of three shiploads of Chinese coolies as just landed in Louisiana ; and the air is thick with rumours of labour from Bombay, from Calcutta, from the Pacific islands — of Eastern labour in its hundred shapes — not to speak of competition with the whites, now commencing with the German immigration into Tennessee.

The berries of this country are so large, so many, so full ot juice, that alone they form a never-failing source of nourishment to an idle population. Three kinds of cranberries, American, pied, and English ; two blackberries, huckleberries, high-bush and low-bush blueberries — the latter being the English bilberry — are among the best known of the native fruits. No one in this country, however idle he be, need starve. If he goes farther south, he has the banana, the true staff of life.

The terrible results of the plentiful possession of this tree are seen in Ceylon, at Panama, in the coast-lands of Mexico, in the South Sea Archipelago. At Pitcairn's Island the plantain grove has beaten the missionary from the field ; there is much lip-Christianity, but no practice to be got from a people who possess the fatal plant. The much abused cocoa-nut cannot come near it as a devil's agent. The cocoa-palm is confined to a few islands and coast tracts — confined, too, to the tropics and sea-level ; the plantain and banana extend over seventy degrees of latitude, down to Botany Bay and King George's Sound, and up as far north as the Khyber Pass. The palm asks labour — not much, it is true ; but still a few days' hard work in the year in trenching, and climbing after the nuts. The plantain grows as a weed, and hangs down its bunches of ripe tempting fruit into your lap, as you lie in its cool shade. The cocoa-nut tree has a hundred uses, and urges man to work to make spirit from its juice ; ropes, clothes, matting, bags, from its fibre ; oil from the pulp ; it creates an export trade which appeals to almost all men by their weakest side, in offering large and quick returns for little work. John Ross's " Isle of Cocoas," to the west of Java and south of Ceylon, yields him heavy gains ; there are profits to be made upon the Liberian coast, and even in Southern India and Ceylon. The plantain will make nothing ; you can eat it raw or fried, and that is all ; you can eat it every day of your life without becoming tired of its taste ; without suffering

c a

ao GREATER BRrTAIS. [CHAP. 11.

in your health, jou can live on it exclusively. In the banana groves of Florida and Louisiana there lurk much trouble and danger to the American free States.

The negroes have hardly much chance in Virginia against the Northern capitalists, provided with white labour; but the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, and South Carolina, promise to be wholly theirs. Already they are flocking to places in which they have a majority of the people, and can control the municipalities and defend themselves, if necessary, by force ; but even if the Southerners of the coast desert their country, the negroes will not have it to themselves, unless nature declares that they shall. New Englanders will pour in with capital and energy, and cultivate the land by free black or by coolie labour, if either will pay. If they do pay, competi- tion will force the remaining blacks to work or starve.

The friends of the negro are not without a fear that the labourers will be too many for their work ; for, while the older cotton States appear to be worn out, the new, such as Texas and Tennessee, will be reserved by public opinion to the whites. For the present the negroes will be masters in seven of the rebel States ; but in Texas, white men — English, Germans, and Danes — are growing cotton with success ; and in Georgia and North Carolina, which contain mountain districts, the negro power is not likely to be permanent

We may, perhaps, lay it down as a general principle that, when the negro can fight his way through opposition, and stand alone as a farmer or labourer, without the aid of private or State charity, then he should be protected in the position he has shown himself worthy to hold, that of a free citizen of an enlightened and labouring community. Where it is found that when his circumstances have ceased to be exceptional the negro cannot live unassisted, there the Federal Government may fairly and wisely step in and say, " We will not keep you ; but we will carry you to Liberia or to Hayti, if you will."

It is clear that the Southern negroes must be given a decisive voice in the appointment of the legislatures by which they are to be ruled, or that the North must be prepared to back up by force of opinion, or, if need be, by force of arms, the Federal Executive, when it insists on the Civil Rights Bill being set in

CHAP 0/j THE NEGSO. 1«

action at the South. Government through the negroes is the only way to avoid government through an army, which would be dangerous to the freedom of the North.

A reading and writing basis for the suffrage in the Southern States is an absurdity. Coupled with pardons to the rebels, it would allow the " boys-in-grey " — the soldiers of the Confederacy — to control nine States of the Union; it would render the education of the freedmen hopeless. For the moment, it would entirely disfranchise the negroes in six States, whereas it is exactly for the moment that negro suffrage is in these States necessary ; while, if the rebels were admitted to vote, and the negroes excluded from the poll, the Southern representatives, united with the Copperhead wing of the democratic party, might prove to be strong enough to repudiate the Federal debt This is one of a dozen dangers.

An education basis for the suffrage, though pretended to be impartial, would be manifestly aimed against the negroes, and would perpetuate the antipathy of colour to which the war is supposed to have put an end. To education such a provision would be a death blow. If the negroes were to vote as soot as they could read, it is certain that the planters would take good care that they never should read at all.

That men should be able to examine into the details of politics is not entirely necessary to the working of repre- sentative government. It is sufficient that they should be competent to select men to do it for them. In the highest form of representative government, where all the electors are both intelligent, educated, and alive to the politics of the time, then the member returned must tend more and more to be a delegate. That has always been the case with the Northern and Western members in America, but never with those returned by the Southern States ; and so it will continue, whether the Southern elections be decided by negroes or by " mean whites."

In Warren county, Mississippi, near Vicksburg, is a plantation which belongs to Joseph Davis, the brother of the rebel Presi dent. This he has leased to Mr. Montgomery — once his slave— • in order that an association of blacks may be formed to cultivate the plantation on co-operative principles. It is to be managed by a council elected by the community at large, and a voluntary

*a GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. n.

poor-rate and embankment rate are to be levied on the people by themselves.

It is only a year since the termination of the war, and the negroes are already in possession of schools, village corporations, of the Metayer system, of co-operative farms ; all this tells ot rapid advance, and the conduct and circulation of the New Orleans Tribune, edited and published by negroes, and selling 10,000 copies daily, and another 10,000 of the weekly issue, speaks well for the progress of the blacks. If the Montgomery experiment succeeds, their future is secure.

CHAPTER 111. THE SOUTH.

THE political forecasts and opinions which were given me upon plantations, were, in a great measure, those indicated in my talk with the Norfolk " loafers." On the history of the commencement of the rebellion there was singular unanimity. " Virginia never meant to quit the Union ; we were cheated by those rascals of the South. When we did go out, we were left to do all the fighting. Why, sir, I've seen a Mississippian division run away from a single Yankee regiment."

As I heard much the same story from the North Carolinans that I met, it would seem as though there was little union among the seceding States. The legend upon the first of all the secession flags that were hoisted, was typical of this devotion to the fortunes of the State : " Death to abolitionists ; South Carolina goes it alone ;" and during the whole war, it was not the rebel colours, but the palmetto emblem, or other State devices, that the ladies wore.

About the war itself but little is said, though here and there I met a man who would tell camp stories in the Northern style. One planter who had been " out " himself, went so far as to say to me : " Our officers were good, but considering that our rank and file were just ' white-trash,' and that they had to fight regiments of New England Yankee volunteers, with all their best blood in the ranks, and Western sharpshooters together, it's only wonderful how we weren't whipped sooner."

As for the future, the planters' policy is a simple one : " Reckon we're whipped, so we go in now for the old flag ; only those Yankee rogues must give us the control of our own people," The one result of the war has been, as they believe, the

>4 GREATER BRITAIN. [CHA*. m.

abolition of slavery ; otherwise the situation is unchanged. The war is over, the doctrine of secession is allowed to fall into the background, and the ex-rebels claim to step once more into their former place, if, indeed, they admit that they ever left it.

Every day that you are in the South, you come more and more to see that the " mean whites " are the controlling power. The landowners are not only few in number, but their apathy during the present crisis is surprising. The men who demand their re-admission to the government of eleven states are un- kempt, fierce-eyed fellows, not one whit better than the brancos of Brazil ; the very men, strangely enough, who themselves, in their " Leavenworth constitution," first began disfranchisement, declaring that the qualification for electors in the new State of Kansas should be the taking oath to uphold the infamous Fugitive Slave Law.

These " mean whites " were the men who brought about secession. The planters are guiltless of everything but criminal indifference to the deeds that were committed in their name. Secession was the act of a pack of noisy demagogues ; but a false idea of honour brought round a majority of the Southern people, and the infection of enthusiasm carried over the remainder.

When the war sprang up, the old Southern contempt for the Yankees broke out into a fierce burst of joy, that the day had come for paying off old scores. " We hate them, sir," said an old planter to me. " I wish to God that the Mayflower had sunk with all hands in Plymouth Bay!"

Along with this violence of language, there is a singular kind of cringing to the conquerors. Time after time I heard the complaint, " The Yanks treat us shamefully, I reckon. We come back to the Union, and give in on every point ; we renounce slavery ; we consent to forget the past ; and yet they won't restore us to our rights." Whenever I came to ask what they meant by " rights," I found the same haziness that every- where surrounds that word. The Southerners seem to think that men may rebel and fight to the death against their country, and then, being beaten, lay down their arms and walk quietly to the polls along with law-abiding citizeps, secure in th«

OH A i- in/) THE SOUTH. 3$

protection of the Constitution which for years they have fought to subvert.

At Richmond I had a conversation which may serve as a specimen of what one hears each moment from the planters. An old gentleman with whom I was talking politics opened at me suddenly : " The Radicals are going to give the ballot to our niggers to strengthen their party, but they know better than to give it to their Northern niggers."

D. — " But surely there's a difference in the cases."

The Planter. — " You're right — there is ; but not your way The difference is, that the Northern niggers can read and write and even lie with consistency, and ours can't."

D. — " But there's the wider difference, that negro suffrage down here is a necessity, unless you are to rule the country that's just beaten you."

The Planter. — "Well, there of course we differ. We rebs say we fought to take our States out of the Union. The Yanks beat us ; so our States must still be in the Union. If so, why shouldn't our representatives be unconditionally admitted ?"

Nearer to a conclusion we of course did not come, he declaring that no man ought to vote who had not education enough to understand the constitution ; I, that this was good prima facie evidence against letting him vote, but that it might be rebutted by the proof of a higher necessity for his voting. As a planter said to me, " The Southerners prefer soldier rule to nigger rule ;" but it is not a question of what they prefer, but of what course is necessary for the safety of the Union which they fought to destroy.

Nowhere in the Southern States did I find any expectation of a fresh rebellion. It is. only Englishmen who ask whether " the South " will not fight " once more." The South is dead and gone ; there can never be a " South " again, but only so many Southern States. " The South " meant simply the slave country ; and slavery being dead, it is dead. Slavery gave us but two classes besides the negroes — planters and "mean whites." The great planters were but a few thousand in number : they are gone to Canada, England, Jamaica, California, Colo- rado, Texas. The "mean whites" — the true South — are im- possible in the fuce of free labour; they must work or starve-

J6 GREATER BRITAIN. ' [CHAP, in,

If they work, they will no longer be "mean whites," but essentially Northerners — that is, citizens of a democratic re- public, and not oligarchists.

As the Southerners admit that there can be no further war, it would be better even for themselves that they should allow the sad record of their rising to fade away. Their newspapers continue to make use of language which nothing could excuse, and which, in the face of the magnanimity of the conquerors, is disgraceful. In a Mobile paper I have seen a leader which describes with hideous minuteness, Lincoln. Lane, John Brown, and Dostie playing whist in hell. A Texas cutting which I have is less blasphemous, but not less vile : " The English language no longer affords terms in which to curse a snivelling weazen-faced piece of humanity generally denominated a Yankee. We see some about here sometimes, but they skulk around, like sheep-killing dogs, and associate mostly with niggers. They whine and prate, and talk about the judgment of God, as if God had anything to do with them." The Southerners have not even the wit or grace to admit that the men who beat them were good soldiers ; " blackguards and braggarts," "cravens and thieves," are common names for the men of the Union army. I have in my possession an Alabama paper in which General Sheridan, at that time the commander of the military division which included the State, is styled " a short-tailed slimy tadpole of the later spawn, the blathering disgrace of an honest father, and everlasting libel on his Irish blood, the synonym of infamy, and scorn of all brave men." While I was in Virginia, one of the Richmond papers said : " This thing of ' loyalty ' will not do for the Southern man."

The very day that I landed in the South, a dinner was given at Richmond by the " Greys " — a volunteer corps which had fought through the rebellion. After the roll of honour, or list of men killed in battle, had been read, there were given as toasts, by rebel officers: "Jeff. Davis — the caged eagle; the bars confine his person, but his great spirit soars ;" and " The conquered banner, may its resurrection at last be as bright and as glorious as theirs — the dead."

It is in the face of such words as these that Mr. Johnson, the most unteachable of mortals, asks men who have sacrificed

CHAP, ni/1 THE SOUTH. 37

their sons to restore the Union, to admit the ex-rebels to a considerable share in the government of the nation, even if they are not to monopolize it, as they did before the war. His conduct seems to need the Western editor's defence : " He must be kinder honest-like, he aire sich a tarnation foolish critter."

It is clear from the occurrence of such dinners, the publica- tion of such paragraphs and leaders as those of which I have spoken, that there is no military tyranny existing in the South. The country is indeed administered by military commanders, but it is not ruled by troops.* Before we can give ear to the stories that are afloat in Europe of the " government of major- generals," we must believe that five millions of Englishmen inhabiting a country as large as Europe are crushed down by some ten thousand men — about as many as are needed to keep order in the single town of Warsaw. The Southerners are allowed to rule themselves ; the question now at issue is merely whether they shall also rule their former slaves, the negroes.

I hardly felt myself out of the reach of slavery and rebellion till, steaming up the Potomac from Acquia Creek, by the grey dawn, I caught sight of a grand pile towering over a city from a magnificent situation on the brow of a long rolling hill. Just at the moment, the sun, invisible as yet to us below, struck the marble dome and cupola, and threw the bright gilding into a golden blaze, till the Greek shape stood out upon the blue sky, glowing like a second sun. The city was Washington ; the palace with the burnished cupola, the Capitol ; and within two hours I was present at the "hot-weather sitting" of the 39th Congress of the United States.

* Civil government is now restored throughout the greater portion of tht South.— 1869.

28 GREATER BRITAIN. ciu* rv.

CHAPTER IV.

THE EMPIRE STATE.

AT the far south of New York City, where the Hudson and East River meet to form the inner bay, is an ill-kept park that might be made the loveliest garden in the world. Nowhere do the features that have caused New York to take rank as the first port of America stand forth more clearly. The soft evening breeze tells of a climate as good as the world can show ; the setting sun floods with light a harbour secure and vast, formed by the confluence of noble streams, and girt with quays at which huge ships jostle ; the rows of 5oo-pounder Rodmans at " The Narrows " are tokens of the nations strength and wealth ; and the yachts, as well handled as our own, racing into port from an ocean regatta, give evidence that there are Saxons in the land. At the back is the city, teeming with life, humming with trade, muttering with the thunder of passage. Opposite, in Jersey City, people say : " Every New Yorker has come a good half-hour late into the world, and is trying all his life to make it up." The bustle is immense.

All is so un-English, so foreign, that hearing men speaking what Czar Nicholas was used to call " the American tongue," I wheel round, crying — " Dear me I if here are not some English folk !" astonished as though I had heard French in Australia or Italian in Timbuctoo.

The Englishman who, coining to America, expects to find cities that smell of home, soon learns that Baker Street itself, or Portland Place, would not look English in the dry air of a continent four thousand miles across. New York, however, is still less English than is Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago — her people are as little Saxon as her streets. Once Southern, with

CHAP, iv.] THE EMPIRE STATE. 39

the brand of slavery deeply printed in the foreheads of her foremost men, since the defeat of the rebellion New York has to the eye been cosmopolitan as any city of the Levant. All nationless towns are not alike : Alexandria has a Greek or an Italian tinge : San Francisco an English tone, with something of the heartiness of our Elizabethan times ; New York has a deep Latin shade, and the democracy of the empire-state is of the French, not of the American or English type.

At the back, here, on the city side, are .tall gaunt houses, painted red, like those on the quay at Dort or on the Boompjes at Rotterdam, the former dwellings of the " Knickerbockers " of New Amsterdam, the founders of New York, but now for- gotten. There may be a few square yards of painting, red or blue, upon the houses in Broadway ; there may be here and there a pagoda summer-house overhanging a canal ; once in a year you may run across a worthy descendant of the old Nether- landish families ; but in the main the Hollanders in America are as though they had never been : to find the memorials of lost Dutch empire, we must search Cape Colony or Ceylon. The New York un-English tone is not Batavian. Neither the sons of the men who once lived in these houses, nor the Germans whose names are now upon the doors, nor, for the matter of that, we English, who claim New York as the second of our towns, are the to-day's New Yorkers.

Here, on the water's edge, is a rickety hall, where Jenny Lind sang when first she landed — now the spot where strangers of another kind are welcomed to America. Every true republican has in his heart the notion that his country is pointed out by God as a refuge for the distressed of all the nations. He has himself sprung from men who came to seek a sanctuary — from the Quakers, or the Catholics, or the pilgrims of the Mayflower. Even though they come to take the bread from his mouth, or to destroy his peace, it is his duty, he believes, to aid the immi- grants. Within the last twenty years there have landed at New York alone four million strangers. Of these two-thirds were Irish.

While the Celtic men are pouring.into New York and Boston the New Englanders and New Yorkers, too, are moving. They are not dying. Facts are opposed to this portentous theory,

jo GREATER B&ITATN. {CHAP. vr.

They are going west. The unrest of the Celt is mainly caused by discontent with his country's present, that of the Saxon by hope for his private future. The Irishman flies to New York because it lies away from Ireland ; the Englishman takes it upon his road to California.

Where one race is dominant, immigrants of another blood soon lose their nationality. In New York and Boston the Irish continue to be Celts, for these are Irish cities. In Pittsburg, in Chicago, still more in the country districts, a few years make the veriest Paddy English. On the other hand, the Saxons are disappearing from the Atlantic cities, as the Spaniards have gone from Mexico. The Irish here are beating down the English, as the English have crushed out the Dutch. The Hollander's descendants in New York are English now ; it bids fair that the Saxon's should be Irish.

As it is, though the Celtic immigration has lasted only twenty years, the results are already clear : if you see a Saxon face upon the Broadway, you may be sure it belongs to a traveller, or to some raw English lad bound west, just landed from a Plymouth ship. We need not lay much stress upon the fact that all New Yorkers have black hair and beard : men may be swarthy and ' yet English. The ancestors of the Londoners of to-day, we are told, were yellow-headed roysterers ; yet not one man in fifty that you meet in Fleet Street or on Tower Hill is as fair as the average Saxon peasant. Doubtless, our English eastern counties were peopled in the main by low-Dutch and Flemings : the Sussex eyes and hair are rarely seen in Suffolk. The Puritans of New England are sprung from those of the "associated counties," but the victors of Marston Moor may have been cousins to those no less sturdy Protestants, the Hollanders who defended Leyden. It may be that they were our ancestors, those Dutchmen that we English crowded out of New Amsterdam — the very place where we are sharing the fate we dealt. The fiery temper of the new people of the American coast towns, their impatience of free government, are better proofs of Celtic blood than are the colour of their eyes and beard.

Year by year the towns grow more and more intensely Irish. Already of every four births in Boston, one only is American. There are 120,000 foreign to 70,000 native voters in NewYorfc

.1 THE fiMPr&E STATE. )j

and Brooklyn. Montreal and Richmond are fast becoming Celtic ; Philadelphia-— shades of Penn ! — can only be saved by the aid of its Bavarians. Saxon Protestantism is departing with the Saxons : the revenues of the empire-state are spent upon Catholic asylums ; plots of city land are sold at nominal rates for the sites of Catholic cathedrals, by the " city j/<^>-fathers," as they are called. Not even in the West does the Latin Church gain ground more rapidly than in New York city : there are 80,000 professing Catholics in Boston.

When is this drama, of which the first scene is played in Castle Gardens, to have its close ? The matter is grave enough already. Ten years ago, the third and fourth cities of the world, New York and Philadelphia, were as English as our London : the one is Irish now ; the other all but German. Not that the Quaker city will remain Teutonic : the Germans, too, are going out upon the land ; the Irish alone pour in unceasingly. All great American towns will soon be Celtic, while the country continues English : a fierce and easily-roused people will throng the cities, while the law-abiding Saxons who till the land will cease to rule it. Our relations with America are matters of small moment by the side of the one great question : Who are the Americans to be ?

Our kinsmen are by no means blind to the dangers that hang over them. The " know-nothing " movement failed, but Pro- tection speaks the same voice in its opposition to commercial centres. If you ask a Western man why he, whose interest is clearly in Free Trade, should advocate Protection, he fires out : " Free Trade is good for our American pockets, but it's death to us Americans. All your Bastiats and Mills won't touch the fact that to us Free Trade must mean salt-water despotism, and the ascendency of New York and Boston. Which is better for the country — one New York, or ten contented Pittsburgs and ten industrious Lowells ?"

The danger to our race and to the world from Irish ascendency is perhaps less imminent than that to the republic. In January 1862, the Mayor, Fernando Wood, the elect of the " Mozart" democracy, deliberately proposed the secession from the Union of New York City. Of all the Northern States, New York alone was a dead weight upon the loyal people during the war of the

}* GREATER KRTTATy. [dttAP. vr.

rebellion. The constituents of Wood were the very Fenians whom in our ignorance we call " American." It is America that Fenianism invades from Ireland — not England from America.

It is no unfair attack upon the Irish to represent them as somewhat dangerous inhabitants for mighty cities. Of the sixty thousand persons arrested yearly in New York, three- fourths are alien born : two-thirds of these are Irish. Nowhere else in all America are the Celts at present masters of a city government — nowhere is there such corruption. The purity of the government of Melbourne — a city more democratic than New York — proves that the fault does not lie in democracy : it is the universal opinion of Americans that the Irish are alone responsible.

The State legislature is falling into the hands of the men who control the city council. They tell a story of a traveller on the Hudson River Railroad, who, as the train neared Albany — the capital of New York — said to a somewhat gloomy neighbour, " Going to the State legislatur' ?" getting for answer, " No, sir ! It's not come to that with me yet. Only to the State prison !"

Americans are never slow to ridicule the denationalization of New York. They tell you that during the war the colonel of one of the city regiments said : " I've the best blood of eight nations in the ranks." " How's that ?" " I've English, Irish, Welsh, Scotch, French, Italians, Germans." " Guess that's only seven." " Swedes," suggested some one. " No, no Swedes," said the colonel. " Ah ! I have it : I've some Americans." Stories such as this the rich New Yorkers are nothing loath to tell ; but they take no steps to check the denationalization they lament. Instead of entering upon a reform of their municipal institutions, they affect to despise free government ; instead of giving, as the oldest New England families have dene, their tone to the State schools, they keep entirely aloof from school and State alike. Sending their boys to Oxford, Berlin, Heidelberg, anywhere rather than to the colleges of their native land, they leave it to learned pious Boston to supply the West with teachers, and to keep up Yale and Harvard. Indignant if they are pointed at as " no Americans," they seem to sepa- rate themselves from everything that is American : they spend

CHAP. IV.] THE EMPIRE STATE. 33

summers in England, winters in Algeria, springs in Rome, and Coloradans say with a sneer, " Good New-Yorkers go to Paris when they die."

Apart from nationality, there is danger to free government both in the growth of New York city, and in the gigantic fortunes of New-Yorkers. The income, they tell me, of one of my merchant friends is larger than the combined salaries of the President, the Governors, and the whole of the members of the legislatures of all the forty-five States and territories. As my informant said, M He could keep the governments of half-a- dozen States as easily as I can support my half-dozen children."

There is something, no doubt, of the exaggeration of political jealousy about the accounts of New York vice given in New England and down South, in the shape of terrible philippics. It is to be hoped that the over-statement is enormous, for sober men are to be found even in New York who will tell you that this city outdoes Paris in every form of profligacy as completely as the French capital outherods imperial Rome. There is here no concealment about the matter ; each inhabitant at once admits the truth of accusations directed against his neighbour. If the new-men, the "petroleum aristocracy," are second to none in their denunciations of the Irish, these in their turn unite with the oldest families in thundering against "Shoddy."

New York life shows but badly in the summer-time; it is seen at its worst when studied at Saratoga. With ourselves, men have hardly ceased to run from business and pleasures worse than toil to the comparative quiet of the country house. Among New-Yorkers there is not even the affectation of a search for rest ; the flight is from the drives and restaurants of New York to the gambling halls of Saratoga; from winning piles of greenbacks to losing heaps of gold ; from cotton gambling to roulette or faro. Long Branch is still more vulgar in its vice ; it is the Margate, Saratoga the Homburg, of America.

"Shoddy" is blamed beyond what xt deserves when the follies of New York society are laid in a body at its door. If it be true that the New York drawing-rooms are the best guarded in the world, it is also true that entrance is denied as rigidly to intellect and eminence as to wealth. If exclusiveness

D

34 GREATER BRITAIN. fCHAP. t».

be needed, affectation can at least do nothing towards sub- duing " Shoddy." Mere clique-ism, disgusting everywhere, is ridiculous in a democratic town ; its rules of conduct are as out of place as kid gloves in the New Zealand bush, or gold scabbards on a battle-field.

Good meat, and drink, and air give strength to the men and beauty to the women of a moneyed class ; but in America these things are the inheritance of every boy and girl, and give their owners no advantage in the world. During the rebellion, the ablest generals and bravest soldiers of the North sprang, not from the merchant families, but from the farmer folk. Without special merit of some kind, there can be no such thing as aristo- cracy.

Many American men arid women, who have too little nobility of soul to be patriots, and too little understanding to see that theirs is already, in many points, the master country of the globe, come to you, and bewail the fate which has caused them to be born citizens of a republic, and dwellers in a country where men call vices by their names. The least educated of their countrymen, the only grossly vulgar .class that America brings forth, they fly to Europe " to escape democracy," and pass their lives in Paris, Pau, or Nice, living libels on the country they are believed to represent.

Out of these discordant elements, Cubans, Knickerbockers, Germans, Irish, " first families," " Petroleum," and " Shoddy," we are forced to construct our composite idea — New York. The Irish numerically predominate, but we have no experience as to what should be the moral features of an Irish city, for Dublin has alway been in English hands ; possibly that which in New York appears to be cosmopolitan is merely Celtic. However it may be, this much is clear, that the humblest town- ship of New England reflects more truly the America of the past, the most chaotic village of Nebraska portrays more fully the hopes and tendencies of the America of the present, than do this huge State and city.

If the political figure of New York is not encouraging, its natural beauty is singularly great. Those who say that America has no scenery, forget the Hudson, while they can never have explored Lake George, Lake Champlain, and the Mohawk

. iv.] tffE EMPIRE STATE. #

That Poole's exquisite scene from the " Decameron," " Philo- mela's Song," could have been realized on earth I never dreamt until I saw the singers at a New-Yorker's villa on the Hudson grouped in the deep shades of a glen, from which there was an outlook upon the basaltic palisades and lake-like Tappan Zee. It was in some such spot that De Tocqueville wrote the brightest of his brilliant letters — that dated "Sing Sing" — in which he speaks of himself as lying on a hill that overhung the Hudson, watching the white sails gleaming in the hot sun, and trying in vain to fancy what became of the river where it dis- appeared in the blue "highlands."

That New York city itself is full of beauty the view from Castle Garden would suffice to show ; and by night it is not less lovely than by day. The harbour is illuminated by the coloured lanterns of a thousand boats, and the steam-whistles tell of a life that never sleeps. The paddles of the steamers seem not only to beat the water, but to stir the languid air and so piovoke a breeze, and the lime-lights at the Fulton and Wall Street ferries burn so brightly that in the warm glare the eye reaches through the still night to the feathery acacias in the streets of Brooklyn. The view is as southern as the people : we have not yet found America.

0 t

|<5HA1>. V.

CHAPTER V.

CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT.

*OLD CAMBRIDGE! Long may she flourish!" proposed by a professor in the University of Cambridge, in America, and drunk standing, with three cheers, by the graduates and under- graduates of Harvard, is a toast that sets one thinking.

Cambridge in America is not by any means a University of to-day. Harvard College, which, being the only " house," has engrossed the privileges, funds, and titles of the University, was founded at Cambridge, Mass., in 1636, only ninety years later than the greatest and wealthiest college of our Cambridge in old England. Puritan Harvard was the sister rather than the daughter of our own Puritan Emmanuel. Harvard himself, and Dunster, the first president of Harvard's College, were among the earliest of the scholars of Emmanuel.

A toast from the Cambridge of new to the Cambridge of old England is one from younger to elder sister ; and Dr. Wendell Holmes, " The Autocrat," said as much in proposing it at the Harvard alumni celebration of 1866.

Like other old institutions, Harvard needs a ten days' revo- lution : academic abuses flourish as luxuriantly upon American as on English soil, and University difficulties are much the same in either country. Here, as at home, the complaint is, that the men come up to the University untaught. To all of them their college is forced for a time to play the high-school ; to some she is never anything more than school. At Harvard this is worse than with ourselves : the average age of entry, though of late much risen, is still considerably under eighteen.

The college is now aiming at raising gradually the standard of entry : when once all are excluded save men, and thinking

CHAP. V.] CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 37

men, real students, such as those by whom some of the new Western Universities are attended, then Harvard hopes to leave drill-teaching entirely to the schools, and to permit the widest freedom in the choice of studies to her students.

Harvard is not blameless in this matter. Like other Univer- sities, she is conservative of bad things as well as good ; indeed, ten minutes within her walls would suffice to convince even an Englishman that Harvard clings to the times before the Revo- lution.

Her conservatism is shown in many trivial things — in the dress of her janitors, in the cut of the grass-plots and college gates, in the conduct of the Commencement orations in the chapel. For the dainty little dames from Boston who came to hear their friends and brothers recite their disquisitions, none but Latin programmes were provided ; and the poor ladies were condemned to find such names as Bush, Maurice, Benjamin, Humphrey, and Underwood among the graduating youths, distorted into Bvsh, Mavritivs, Beniamin, Hvmphredvs, Vnder- wood.

This conservatism of the New England Universities had just received a sharp attack. In the Commencement oration, Dr. Hedges, one of the leaders of the Unitarian Church, had strongly pressed the necessity for a complete freedom of study after entry, a liberty to take up what line the student would, to be examined and to graduate in what he chose. He had instanced the success of Michigan University consequent upon the adoption of this plan ; he had pointed to the fact that of all the Universities in America, Michigan alone drew her students from every State. President Hill and ex-President Walker had endorsed his views.

There is a special fitness in the reformers coming forward at this time. This year is the commencement of a new era at Harvard ; for at the request of the college staff, the connexion of the University with the commonwealth of Massachusetts has just been dissolved, and the members of the Board of overseers are in future to be elected by the University, instead of being nominated by the State. This being so, the question had been raised as to whether the Governor would come in state to Commencement, but he yielded to the wishes of the

{8 GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. v.

graduates, and came with the traditional pomp, attended by a staff in uniform, and escorted by a troop of Volunteer Lancers, whose scarlet coats and Polish caps recalled the times before the Revolution.

While the ceremony was still in progress, I had been intro- duced to several of the foremost rowing men among the younger graduates of Harvard, and at its conclusion I accom- panied them to their river. They were in strict training for their University race with Yale, which was to come off in a week ; and as Cambridge had been beaten twice running, and this year had a better crew, they were wishful for criticisms on their style. Such an opinion as a stranger could offer was soon given ; they were dashing, fast, long in their stroke ; strong, considering their light weights, but terribly overworked. They have taken for a rule the old English notions as to training which have long since disappeared at home, and, looked upon as fanatics by their friends and tutors, they have all the fanatic's excess of zeal.

Rowing and other athletics, with the exceptions of skating and base-ball, are both neglected and despised in America. When the smallest sign of a reaction appears in the New Eng- land colleges, there comes at once a cry from Boston that brains are being postponed to brawn. If New Englanders would look about them, they would see that their climate has of itself developed brains at the expense of brawn, and that, if national degeneracy is to be long prevented, brawn must in some way be fostered. The high shoulder, head-voice, and pallor of the Boston men are not incompatible with the posses- sion of the most powerful brain, the keenest wit ; but it is not probable that energy and talent will be continued in future generations sprung from the worn-out men and women of to-day.

The prospect at present is not bright; year by year Americans grow thinner, lighter, and shorter-lived. Elian's Athenians, we may remember, though they were greatly superior to the Greeks in stature, were inferior to them in length of life. The women show even greater signs of weak- ness than the men, and the high, undulating tones which are affectation in the French are natural to the ladies of America ;

CHAP, r.] CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. &

little can be expected of women whose only exercise is excessive dancing in over-heated rooms.

The American summer, often tropical in its heat, has much to answer for, but it is the winter which makes the saddest havoc among the younger people, and the boys and girls at school. Cooped up all day in the close air of the heated schoolhouse, the poor children are at night made to run straight back to the furnace-dried atmosphere of home. The ther- mometer is commonly raised indoors to 80 degrees Fahr. The child is not only baked into paleness and sweated bit by bit to its death, but fed meantime, out of mistaken kindness, upon the most indigestible of dainties — pastry, hot dough-nuts, and sweetmeats taking the place of bread, and milk, and meat — and is not allowed to take the slightest exercise, except its daily run to school. Who can wonder that spinal diseases should prevail ?

One reason why Americans are pale and aguish is that, as a people, they are hewers of primeval forest and tillers of virgin soil. These are the unhealthiest employments in the world ; the sun darts down upon the hitherto unreached mould, and sets free malarious gases, against which the new settlers have no antidote.

The rowing men of Harvard tell me that their clubs are still looked on somewhat coldly by a majority of the professors, who obstinately refuse to see that improved physical type is not an end, but a means, towards improvement of the mental faculties, if not in the present, at least in the next generation. As for the moral training in the virtues of obedience and com- mand, for which a boat's crew is the best of schools, that is not yet understood at Harvard, where rowing is confined to the half-dozen men who are to represent the college in the annual race, and the three or four more who are being trained to succeed them in the crew. Rowing in America is what it was till ten years since at old Cambridge, and is still at Oxford — not an exercise for the majority of the students, but a pursuit for a small number. Physical culture is, however, said to be making some small progress in the older States, and I myself saw signs of the tendency in Philadelphia. The war has done some good in this respect, and so has the influx of Canadians

40 GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. ?

to Chicago. Cricket is still almost an unknown thing, except in some few cities. When I was coming in to Baltimore by train, we passed a meadow in which a match was being played. A Southerner to whom I was talking at the time, looked at the players, and said with surprise : " Reckon they've got a wounded man ther', front o' them sticks, sah." I found that he meant the batsman, who was wearing pads.

One of the most brilliant of Harvard's thinkers has taken to carpentry as a relief to his mental toil; her most famed professor is often to be found working in his garden or his farm ; but such change of work for work is possible only to certain men. The generality of Americans need not only exercise, but relaxation ; still, with less physical, they possess greater mental vitality than ourselves.

On the day that follows Commencement — the chief ceremony 5f the academic year — is held once in three summers the " Alumni Celebration," or meeting of the past graduates of Harvard — a touching gathering always, but peculiarly so in these times that follow on the losses of the war.

The American college informal organizations rest upon the unit of the "class." The "class" is what in England is called "men of the same year " — men who enter together and graduate together at the end of the regular course. Each class of a large New England College, such as Harvard, will often possess an association of its own ; its members will dine to- gether once in five years or ten — men returning from Europe and from the Far West to be present at the gathering.

Harvard is strong in the affections of the New England people — her faults are theirs ; they love her for them, and keep her advantages to themselves, for in the whole list of graduates for this year I could find only two Irish names.

Here, at the Alumni Celebration, a procession was marshalled in the library in which the order was by classes ; the oldest class of which there were living members being called the first. "Class of 1797 !" and two old white-haired gentlemen tottered from the crowd, and started on their march down the central aisle, arid out bareheaded into the blaze of one of the hottest days that America had ever known. " Class of 1800 !" missing two years, in which all the graduates were dead ; and out came

CHAP, v.] CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 4l

one, the sole survivor. Then came " 1803," and so on, to the stalwart company of the present year. When the classes of 1859 and 1860, and of the war-years were called, those who marched oat showed many an empty sleeve.

The present triennial celebration is noteworthy not only for the efforts of the University reformers, but also for the founda- tion of the Memorial Hall dedicated as a monument to those sons of Harvard who fell while serving their country in the suppression of the late rebellion. The purity of their patriotism hardly needed illustration by the fire of young Everett, or the graceful speech of Dr. Holmes. Even the splendid oratory of Governor Bullock could do little more than force us to read for ourselves the Roll of Honour, and see how many of Harvard's most distinguished younger men died for their country as privates of Massachusetts Volunteers.

There was a time, as England knows, when the thinking mer of Boston, and the Cambridge professors, Emerson, Russel Lowell, Asa Gray, and a dozen more of almost equal fame morally seceded from their country's councils, and were followed in their secession by the younger men. " The best men in America stand aloof from politics," it was said.

The country from which these men seceded was not the America of to-day : it was the union which South Carolina ruled. From it the Cambridge professors " came out," not because they feared to vex their nerves with the shock of public argument and action, but because the course of the slaveholders was not their course. Hating the wrongs they saw but could not remedy, they separated themselves from the wrong-doers ; — another matter, this, from the " hating hatred " of our culture class in England.

In 1863 and 1864, there came the reckoning. When America was first brought to see the things that had been done in her name, and at her cost, and, rising in her hitherto unknown strength, struck the noblest blow for freedom that the world has seen, the men who had been urging on the movement from without at once re-entered the national ranks, and marched to victory. Of the men who sat beneath Longfellow, and Agassiz, and Emerson, whole battalions went forth to war. From Oberlin almost every male student and professor marched, and the uni-

41 GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. v.

versity teaching was left in the women's hands. Out of 8000 school teachers in Pennsylvania, of whom 300 alone were draughted, 3000 volunteered for the war. Everywhere the students were foremost among the Volunteers, and from that time forward America and her thinkers were at one.

The fierce passions of this day of wakening have not been suffered to disturb the quiet of the academic town. Our Eng- lish Universities have not about them the classic repose, the air of study, that belong to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Those who have seen the lanes of Leyden, and compared them with the noisy Oxford High Street, will understand what I mean when I say that our Cambridge comes nearest to her daughter-town ; but even the English Cambridge has a bustling street or two, and a weekly market-day, while Cambridge in New England is one great academic grove, buried in a philosophic calm which our University towns can never rival so long as men resort to them for other purposes than work.

It is not only in the Harvard precincts that the oldness of New England is to be remarked. Although her people are everywhere in the vanguard of all progress, their country has a look of gable-ends and steeple-hats, while their laws seem fresh from the hands of Alfred, In all England there is no city which has suburbs so grey and venerable as are the elm-shaded towns round Boston : — Dorchester, Chelsea, Nahant, and Salem, each seems more ancient than its fellow ; the people speak the Eng- lish of Elizabeth, and joke about us, " — — speaks good English for an Englishman."

In the country districts, the winsome villages that nestle in the dells seem to have been there for ten centuries at least ; and it gives one a shock to light on such a spot as Bloody Brook, and to be told that only one hundred and ninety years ago Captain Lathrop was slain there by Red Indians, with eighty youths, " the flower of Essex county," as the Puritan history says.

The warnings of Dr. Hedges, in reference to the strides of Michigan, have taken the New Englanders by surprise. Secure, as they believed, in their intellectual supremacy, they forgot that in a federal union the moral and physical primacy Mall generally both reside in the same State. The commonwealth

CHAP, v.] CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT. 43

of Massachusetts, at one time the foremost upholder of the doctrine of State rights, will soon be seen once more acting as its champion — this time on behalf of herself and her five sister States.

Were the six New England commonwealths grouped together in a single State, it would still have only three-fourths of the population of New York, and about an equal number of inha- bitants with Pennsylvania. The State of Rhode Island is one- fourth the size of many a single Californian county. Such facts as these will not be long lost sight of in the West ; and when a divergence of interests springs up, Ohio will not suffer her voice in the senate to continue to be neutralised by that of Connec- ticut or Rhode Island. Even if the senate be allowed to remain untouched, it is certain that the redistribution of seats conse- quent upon the census of 1870 will completely transfer political power to the central States. That New England will by this change inevitably lose her hold upon the destinies of the whole Union is not so clear. The influence for good of New England upon the West has been chiefly seminal ; but not for that the less enormous. Go into a State such as Michigan, where half the people are immigrants — where, of the remaining moiety, the greater part are born Westerners, and apparently in no way of New England — and you will find that the inhabitants are earnest, God-fearing men, with a New England tone of profound manliness and conviction running through everything they say and do. The colleges in which they have been reared are directed, you will find, by New England professors, men trained in the classic schools of Harvard, Yale, or Amherst; the ministers under whom they sit are, for the most part, Boston men ; the books they read are of New England, or old English of the class from which the writers of the Puritan States them- selves have drawn their inspiration. To New England is chiefly due, in short, the making of America a godly nation.

It -is something in this age to come across a people who believe strongly in anything, and consistently act upon their beliefs : the New Englanders are such a race. Thoroughly God-fearing States are not so common that we can afford to despise them when found ; and nowhere does religion entel more into daily life than in Vermont or Massachusetts.

44 GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. v.

The States of the Union owe so large a debt of gratitude to New England, that on this score alone they may refrain from touching her with sacrilegious hands. Not to name her previ- ous sacrifices, the single little State of Massachusetts — one-fourth the size of Scotland, and but half as populous as Paris — sent during the rebellion a hundred and fifty regiments to the field.

It was to Boston that Lincoln telegraphed when, in 1861, at a minute's notice, he needed men for the defence of Washing- ton. So entirely were Southerners of the opinion that the New Englanders were the true supporters of the old flag, that " Yankee " became a general term for loyalists of any State. America can never forget the steady heroism of New England during the great struggle for national existence.

The unity that has been the chief cause of the strength of the New England influence is in some measure sprung from the fact that these six States are completely shut off from all America by the single State of New York, alien from them in political and moral life. Every Yankee feels his country bounded by the British, the Irish, and the sea.

In addition to the homogeneousness of isolation, the New Englanders, like the Northern Scotch, have the advantages of a bad climate and a miserable soil. These have been the true agents in the development of the energy, the skill, and fortitude of the Yankee people. In the war, for instance, it was plain that the children of the poor and rugged North-Eastern States were not the men to be beaten by the lotus-eaters of Louisiana when they were doing battle for what they believed to be a righteous cause.

One effect of the poverty of soil with which New England is afflicted has been that her sons have wandered from end to end of the known world, engaging in every trade, and suc- ceeding in all. Sometimes there is in their migrations a re- ligious side. Mormonism, although it now draws its forces from Great Britain, was founded in New England. At Brindisi, on my way home, I met three Yankees returning from a Maine colony lately founded at Jaffa, in expectation of the fulfilment of prophecy, and destruction of the Mohamedan rule. For the moment they are intriguing for a firman from the very Govern- ment upon the coming fall of which all their expectations hav«

«Ut». V.] CAM&&IDGE COMMENCEMENT. 4|

been based ; and these fierce fanatics are making money by managing an hotel. One of them told me that the Jaffa colony is a " religio-commercial speculation."

New England Yankees are not always so filled with the Puritan spirit as to reject unlawful means of money-making. Even the Massachusetts common schools and prim Connecticut meeting-houses turn out their black sheep into the world. At Centre Harbour, in New Hampshire, I met with an example of the " Yankee spawn " in a Maine man — a shrewd, sailor-looking fellow. He was sitting next me at the ordinary, and asked me to take a glass of his champagne. I declined, but chatted, and let out that I was English.

" I was subject to your Government once for sixteen months," my neighbour said.

" Really ! Where ?"

" Sierra Leone. I was a prisoner there. And very lucky too."

"Why so?" I asked.

" Because, if the American Government had caught me, they would have hanged me for a pirate. But / wasn't a pirate."

With over great energy I struck in, " Of course not."

My Neighbour — "No; I was a slaver"

Idling among the hills of New Hampshire and the lakes of Maine, it is impossible for a stranger starting free from pre- judice, not to end by loving the pious people of New England, for he will see that there could be no severer blow to the cause of freedom throughout the world than the loss by them of an influence upon American life and thought which has been one of unmixed good, Still, New England is not America.

46 GREATER BRITAIN. (G&J&.

CHAPTER VI. CANADA.

THERE is not in the world a nobler outlook than that from off the terrace at Quebec. You stand upon a rock overhanging city and river, and look down upon the guardship's masts. Acre upon acre of timber comes floating down the stream above the city, the Canadian songs just reaching you upon the heights ; and beneath you are fleets of great ships, English, German, French, and Dutch, embarking the timber from the floating-docks. The Stars and Stripes are nowhere to be seen. Such are the distances in North America, that here, farther from the sea thar. is any city in Europe west of Moscow, we have a seaport town, with gunboats and three-decker ; morning and evening guns, and bars of " God save the Queen," to mark the opening and closing of the port.

The St. Lawrence runs in a chasm in aflat table-land, through which some earlier Niagara seems to have cut for it a way. Some of the tributaries are in sight, all falling from a cliff into the deep still river. In the distance, seawards, a silver ribbon on the rock represents the falls of Montmorenci. Long villages of white tiny cots straggle along the roads that radiate from the city ; the great black cross of the French parish church showing reverently from all.

On the north, the eye ranges to the rugged outlines of the Laurentian chain, composed of the oldest mountains in the world, at the foot of which is Lake St. Charles, full of fiord-like northern beauty, where at a later time I learnt to paddle the Indian canoe of birch bark.

Leaving the citadel, we are at once in the European middle ages. Gates and posterns, cranky steps that lead up to lofty

OLU». Vi.] CANADA. 47

gabled houses with sharp French roofs of burnished tin, like those of Liege; processions of the Host; altars decked with flowers ; statues of the Virgin ; sabots ; blouses ; and the scarlet of the British linesman — all these are seen in narrow streets and markets, that are graced with many a Cotentin lace cap, and all within forty miles of the down-east Yankee State of Maine. It is not far from New England to old France.

Quebec Lower Town is very like St. Peter Port in Guernsey. Norman-French inhabitants, guarded by British troops, step- built streets, thronged fruit-market, and citadel upon a rock, frowning down upon the quays, are alike in each. A slight knowledge of the Upper Normandy patois is not without its use ; it procured me an offer of a pinch of snuff from an old habitante on board one of the river boats. Her gesture was worthy of the ancien regime.

There has been no dying-out of the race among the French Canadians. They number twenty times the thousands that they did a hundred years ago. The American soil has left their physical type, religion, language, laws, and habits abso- lutely untouched. They herd together in their rambling vil- lages, dance to the fiddle after mass on Sundays, as gaily as once did their Norman sires, and keep up the fleur-de-lys and the memory of Montcalm. More French than the French are the Lower Canadian habitants.

Not only here, but everywhere, a French "dependency" is France transported ; not a double of the France of to-day, but a mummy of the France of the time of the " colony's " founda- tion. In Saigon, you find Imperial France ; here the France Df Louis Quatorze. The Englishman founds everywhere a New England — new in thought as in soil ; the Frenchman carries with him to California, to Japan, an undying recollection of the Palais Royal. In San Francisco there lives* a great French capitalist, who, since 1849, has been the originator of every successful Californian speculation. He cannot speak a word of English, and his greatest pleasure, in a country of fruits and wine is to bid his old French servant assure him, upon honour, that his whole dessert, from his claret to his olives, has been brought for him from France. There is much in the colonizing instinct of our race, but something, perhaps, in the consideration that

• Nov. (1884) deceased

4« GREATER BRITAIN. fau?. tl.

the English exiles were hardly happy enough at home to be always looking back to what they have left in the old country.

There is about this old France something of Dutch sleepiness and content. There is, indeed, some bustle in the market- place, where the grand old dames in snowy caps sit selling plums and pears ; there is much singing made over the lading of the timber ships ; there are rafts in hundreds gliding down the river; old French carts in dozens, creaking and wheezing on their lumbering way to town, with much clacking of whips and clappering of wooden shoes. All these things there are, but then there are these and more in Dol, and Quimper, and Morlaix — in all those towns which in Europe come nearest to old France. There is quiet bustle, subdued trade, prosperity deep, not noisy ; but the life is sleepy ; the rafts float, and are not tugged nor rowed ; the old Norman horses seem to draw the still older carts without an effort, and the very boys wear noisy shoes against their will, and make a clatter simply because they cannot help it.

In such a scene it is impossible to forget that British troops are here employed as guardians of the only true French colony in the world against the inroads of the English race. " Nos •nstitutions, notre langue, nos lois," is the motto of the habitants, Their newspapers are filled with church celebrations, village fetes, " speech of M. le Cure at the harvest home," announce- ments by the " scherif," " address of M. Carder at the conse- cration of Monseigneur Laroque," blessings of bells, of ships ; but of life, nothing — of mention of what is passing in America, not a word. One corner is given to the world outside America : " Emprunt Pontifical, Emission Americaine, quatre millions de piastres," heads a solid column of holy finance. The pulse- beat of the Continent finds no echo here.

It is not only in political affairs that there is a want of energy in French or Lower Canada : in journeying from Portland to Quebec, the moment the frontier was passed, we seemed to have come from a land of life to one of death. No more bust- ling villages, no more keen-eyed farmers : a fog of unenterprise hung over the land ; roads were wanting, houses rude, swamps undrained, fields unweeded, plains untilled.

If the Eastern Townships are a wilderness, they are not a

CRAP. vi.J CANADA. 49

desert. The country on the Saguenay is both. At Quebec in summer it is hot — mosquitoes are not unknown : even at Tadousac, where the Saguenay flows into the St. Lawrence, there is sunlight as strong as that of Paris. Once in the northern river, all is cold, gloomy, arctic — no house, no boat,; no sign of man's existence, no beasts, no birds, although the St. Lawrence swarms with ducks and loons. The river is a straight, cold, black fiord, walled-in by tremendous cliffs, which go sheer down into depths to which their height above water is as nothing ; two walls of rock, and a path of ice-cold, inky water. Fish there are, seal and salmon — that is all. The " whales and porpoises," which are advertised by the Tadousac folk as certain to " disport themselves daily in front of the hotel," are never to be seen in this earth-crack of the Saguenay.

The cold for summer was intense ; nowhere in the world does the limit of ever-frozen ground come so far south as in the longitude of the Saguenay. At night we had a wonderful display of northern lights. A white column, towering to the mid-skies, rose, died away, and was succeeded by broad white clouds, stretching from east to west, and sending streamers northwards. Suddenly there shot up three fresh silvery columns in the north, north-west, and north-east, on which all the colours of the rainbow danced and played. After moonrise, the whole seemed gradually to fade away.

At Ha Ha Bay, the head of navigation, I found a fur-buying station of the Hudson Bay Company ; but that association has enough to answer for without being charged with the desolation of the Saguenay. The company has not here, as upon the Red River, sacrificed colonists to minks and silver-foxes. There is something more blighting than a monopoly that op- presses Lower Canada. As I returned to Quebec, the boat that I was aboard touched at St. Paschal, now called Riviere du Loup, the St. Lawrence terminus of the Grand Trunk Line : we found there immense wharves, and plenty of bells and crosses, but not a single ship, great or small. Even in Virginia I had seen nothing more disheartening.

North of the St. Lawrence, religion is made to play as active a part in politics as in the landscape. Lower Canada, as we have seen, is French and Catholic ; Upper Canada is Scotch

50 GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. n.

and Presbyterian, though the Episcopalians are strong in wealth and the Irish Catholics in numbers.

Had the Catholics been united, they might, since the fusion of the two Canadas, have governed the whole country : as it is, the Irish and French neither worship nor vote together, and of late the Scotch have had nearly their own way.

Finding themselves steadily losing ground, the French threw in their lot with the scheme for the confederation of the provinces, and their clergy took up the cause with a zeal which they justi- fied to their flocks by pointing out that the alternative was annex- ation to America, and possible confiscation of the Church lands.

Confederation of the provinces means separation of the Canadas, which 'regain each its Parliament ; and the French Catholics begin to hope that the Irish of Upper Canada, now that they are less completely overshadowed by the more nu- merous French, will again act with their co-religionists : the Catholic vote in the new confederation will be nearly half the whole. In Toronto, however, the Fenians are strong, and even in Montreal their presence is not unknown : it is a question whether the whole of the Canadian Irish are not disaffected. The Irish of the chief city have their Irish priests, their Cathe- dral of St. Patrick, while the French have theirs upon the Place d'Armes. The want of union may save the dominion from the establishment of Catholicism as a State Church.

The confederation of our provinces was necessary, if British North America was to have a chance for life ; but it cannot be olid to be accomplished while British Columbia and the Red River tract are not included.* To give Canada an outlet on one side is something, but communication with the Atlantic is a small matter by the side of communication at once with Atlantic and Pacific through British territory. We shall soon have railways from Halifax to Lake Superior, and thence to the Pacific is but 1600 miles. It is true that the line is far north, and exposed to heavy snows and bitter cold ; but, on the other hand, it is well supplied with wood, and if it possess no such fertile tracts as that of Kansas, it at least escapes the frightful wilds of Bitter Creek and Mirage Plains.

We are now evea left in doubt how long we shall continue • Now done. Other statements in Chap. VI. have become untrue.

CHAP. vi. J CANADA. $i

to have so much as a route across the continent on paper. Since the cession of Russian America to the United States, a map of North America has been published in which the name of the Great Republic sprawls across the continent from Behring Straits to Mexico, with the " E " in " United " ominously near Vancouver Island, and the " T " actually planted upon British territory. If we take up the British Columbian, we find the citizens of the main-land portion of the province proposing to sell the island for twenty million dollars to the States.

Settled chiefly by Americans from Oregon and California, and situated, for purposes of reinforcement, immigration, and supply, at a distance of not less than twenty thousand miles from home, the British Pacific colonies can hardly be considered strong in their allegiance to the Crown : we have here the re- ductio ad absurdum of home government.

Our hindering trade by tolerating the presence of two sets ot custom-houses, and two sets of coins between Halifax and Lake Superior, was less absurd than our altogether preventing its ex- tension now. Under a so-called confederation of our American possessions, we have left a country the size of civilized Europe, and nearly as large as the United States — lying, too, upon the track of commerce and high road to China — to be despotically governed by a company of traders in skins and peltries, and to remain as long as it so pleases them in the dead stillness and desertion needed to ensure the presence of fur-bearing beasts.

" Red River " should be a second Minnesota, Halifax a second Liverpool, Esquimault a second San Francisco ; but double government has done its work, and the outposts of the line of trade are already in American, not British hands. The gold mines of Nova Scotia, the coal mines and forests of British Columbia, are owned in New England and New York, and the Californians are expecting the proclamation of an American territorial government in the capital of Vancouver Island.

As Montana becomes peopled up, we shall hear of the " co- lonization " of Red River by citizens of the United States, such as preceded the hoisting of the " lone star " in Texas, and the " bear flag " in California, by Fremont ; and resistance by the Hudson Bay Company will neither be possible, nor, in the in- f crests of civilization, desirable.

E 2

5 a GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. n.

Even supposing a great popular awakening upon Colonial questions, and the destruction of the Hudson Bay monopoly, we could never make the Canadian dominion strong. With the addition of Columbia and Red River, British America would hardly be as powerful or populous as the two north- western states of Ohio and Illinois, or the single state of New York — one out of forty-five. " Help us for ten years, and then we'll help ourselves," the Canadians say ; " help us to become ten millions, and then we will stand alone ;" but this becoming ten millions is not such an easy thing.

The ideas of most of us as to the size of the British territories are derived from maps of North America, made upon Merca- tor's projection, which are grossly out in high latitudes, though correct at the equator. The Canadas are made to appear at least twice their proper size, and such gigantic proportions are given to the northern parts of the Hudson territory that we are tempted to believe that in a country so vast there must be some little value. The true size is no more shown upon the map than is the nine-months' winter.

To Upper Canada, which is no bad country, it is not for lack of asking that population fails to come. Admirably-executed gazettes give the fullest information about the British posses- sions in the most glowing of terms ; offices and agencies are established in Liverpool, London, Cork, Londonderry, and a dozen other cities ; Government immigration agents and infor- mation-offices are to be found in every town in Canada ; the Government emigrant is looked after in health, comfort, and religion ; directions of the fullest kind are given him in the matters of money, clothes, tools, baggage ; Canada, he is told by the Government papers, possesses perfect religious, political, and social freedom ; British subjects step at once into the exer- cise of political rights ; the winter is but bracing, the climate the healthiest in the world. Millions of acres of surveyed Crown lands are continually in the market. To one who knows what the northern forests are, there is perhaps something of satire in the statement that " thero is generally on Crown lands an unlimited supply of the best fuel." What of that, however ? The intending emigrant knows nothing of the struggle with the woods, and fuel is fuel in Old England. The

CHAP. Vl/J CANADA. 5)

mining of the precious metals, the fisheries, petroleum, all are open to the settler — let him but come. Reading these docu- ments, we can only rub our eyes, and wonder how it is that human selfishness allows the Canadian officials to disclose the wonders of their El Dorado to the outer world, and invite all men to share blessings which we should have expected them to keep as a close preserve for themselves and their nearest and dearest friends. Taxation in the States, the immigrants are told, is five and a half times what it is in Canada, two and a half times the English rate. Labourers by the thousand, mer- chants and farmers by the score, are said to be flocking into Canada to avoid the taxation of the Radicals. The average duration of life in Canada is 37 per cent, higher than in the States. Yet, in the face of all these facts, only twenty or two and twenty thousand immigrants come to Canada for three hundred thousand that flock annually to the States, and of the former many thousands do but pass through on their way to the Great West. Of the twenty thousand who land at Quebec in each year, but four and a half thousand remain a year in Canada ; and there are a quarter of a million of persons born in British America now naturalized in the United States.

The passage of the immigrants to the Western States is not for want of warning. The Canadian Government advertise every Coloradan duel, every lynching in Montana, every Oppo- sition speech in Kansas, by way of teaching the immigrants to respect the country of which they are about to become free citizens.

It is an unfortunate fact that these strange statements are not harmless — not harmless to Canada, I mean. The Provincial Government by these publications seems to confess to the world that Canada can live only by running down the great republic. Canadian sympathy for the rebellion tends to make us think that these Northern statesmen must not only share in our old-world confusion of the notions of right and wrong, but must be sadly short-sighted into the bargain. It is only by their position that they are blinded, for few countries have abler men than Sir James Macdonald, or sounder statesmen than Cartier or Gait ; but, like men standing on the edge of a cliff, Canadian statesmen are always wanting to jump off. Had

54 GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. vi.

Great Bntian left them to their own devices, we should have had war with America in the spring of 1866.

The position of Canada is in many ways anomalous : of the two chief sections of our race — that in Britain and that in America — the latter is again split in twain, and one division governed from across the Atlantic. For such government there is no pretext, except the wishes of the governed, who by the connexion gain men for their defence, and the opportunity of gratifying their spite for their neighbours at our expense. Those who ask why a connexion so one-sided, so opposed to the best interests of our race, should be suffered to continue, are answered, now that the argument of " prestige " is given up, that the Canadians are loyal, and that they hate the Americans, to whom, were it not for us, they must inevitably fall. That the Canadians hate the Americans can be no reason why we should spend blood and treasure in protecting them against the consequences of their hate. The world should have passed the time when local dislikes can be suffered to affect our policy towards the other sections of our race ; but even were it other- wise, it is hard to see how twelve thousand British troops, or a royal standard hoisted at Ottawa, can protect a frontier of two thousand miles in length from a nation of five and thirty millions. Canada, perhaps, can defend herself, but we most certainly cannot defend her : we provoke much more than we assist.

As for Canadian " loyalty," it appears to consist largely of hatred towards America, for while we were fighting China and conquering Japan, that we might spread free trade, our loyal colonists of Canada set upon our goods protective duties of 20 per cent., which they have now in some degree removed onry that they may get into their hands the smuggling trade carried on in breach of the laws of our ally, their neighbour. We. might, at least, fairly insist that the connexion should cease, unless Canada will remove her duties.

At bottom it would seem as though no one gained by the retention of our hold on Canada. Were she independent, her borders would never again be wasted by Fenian hordes, and she would escape the terrible danger of being the battle-field in which European quarrels are fought out. Canada once repub

CHAP, vi.] CANADA. H

lican, the Monroe doctrine would be satisfied, and its most violent partisans would cease to advocate the adoption of other than moral means to merge her territories in the Union. An independent Canada would not long delay the railway across the continent to Puget Sound, which a British bureau calls im- possible. England would be relieved from the fear of a certain defeat by America in the event of war — a fear always harmful, even when war seems most unlikely ; — relieved, too, from the cost of such panics as those of 1861 and 1866.

Did Canada stand alone, no offence that she could give America would be likely to unite all sections of that country in an attempt to conquer her ; while, on the other hand, such an attempt would be resisted to the death by an armed and brave people, four millions strong. As it is, any offence towards America committed by our agents, at any place or time, or arising out of the continual changes of policy and of ministry in Great Britain, united to the standing offence of maintainkig the monarchical principle in North America, will bring upon un- happy Canada the whole American nation, indignant in sonic cause, just, or seeming just, and to be met by a people deceived into putting their trust in a few regiments of British troops, sufficient at the most to hold Quebec, and to be backed by reinforcements which could never come in time, did public opinion in Great Britain so much as permit their sailing. In all history there is nothing stranger than the narrowness 01 mind that has led us to see in Canada a piece of England, and in America a hostile country. There are more sons of British subjects in America than in Canada, by far ; and the American looks upon the old country with a pride that cannot be shared by a man who looks to her to pay his soldiers.

The independence of Canada would put an immediate end to much of the American jealousy of Great Britain — a con- sideration which of itself should outweigh any claim to protec- tion which the Canadians can have. The position which we have to set before us in our external dealings is, that we are no more fellow-countrymen of the Canadians than of the Americans of the North or West

The capital of the new dominion is to be Ottawa, known as " Hole in the Woods " among the friends of Toronto and

56 GREATER BRITAIN: TCHAP. vi.

Montreal, and once called Bytown. It consists of the huge Par- liament House, the Government printing-office, some houseless wildernesses meant for streets, and the hotel where the members of the Legislature "board." Such was the senatorial throng at the moment of my visit, that we were thrust into a detached building made of half-inch planks, with wide openings between the boards ; and as the French Canadian members were ex- cited about the resignation of Mr. Gait, indescribable chattering and bawling filled the house.

The view from the Parliament House is even more thoroughly Canadian than that from the terrace at Quebec — a view of a land of rapids, of pine forests, and of lumberers' homes, full of character, but somewhat bleak and dreary ; even on the hottest summer's day, it tells of winter storms past and to come. On the far left are the island-filled reaches of the Upper Ottawa : nearer, the roaring Chaudiere Falls, a mile across — a mile of walls of water, of sudden shoots, of jets, of spray. From the " cauldron " itself, into which we can hardly see, rises a column of rainbow-tinted mist, backed by distant ranges and black woods, now fast falling before the settler's axe. Below you is the river, swift, and covered with cream-like foam ; on the right, a gorge — the mouth of the Rideau Canal.

When surveyed from the fittest points, the Chaudiere is but little behind Niagara ; but it may be doubted whether in any fall there is that which can be called sublimity. Natural causes are too evident : water, rushing to find its level, falls from a ledge of rock. How different from a storm upon the coast, or from a September sunset, where the natural causes are so remote that you can bring yourself almost to see the immediate hand of God. It is excusable in Americans, who have no sea- coast worthy of the name, to talk of Niagara as the perfection of the sublime ; but it is strange that a people who have Birling Gap and Bantry Bay should allow themselves to be led by such a cry.

Niagara has one beauty in which it is unapproached by the great Chaudiere : the awesome slowness with which the deep- green flood, in the centre of the Horseshoe Fall, rolls rathei than plunges into the gulf.

CHAPTER VII.

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN.

FROM the gloom of Buffalo, the smoke of Cincinnati, and the dirt of Pittsburg, I should have been glad to escape as soon as might be, even had not the death from cholera of 240 persons in a single day of my visit to the " Queen City " warned me to fly north. From a stricken town, with its gutters full of chloride of lime, and fires burning in the public streets, to green Michi- gan, was a grateful change ; but I was full of sorrow at leaving that richest and most lovely of all States — Ohio. There is a charm in the park-like beauty of the Monongahela valley, dotted with vines and orchards, that nothing in Eastern America can rival. The absence at once of stumps in the corn-fields, and of untilled or unfenced land, gives the " buckeye State " a look of age that none of the " old Eastern States " can show. In corn, in meadow, in timber-land, Ohio stands alone. Her Indian corn exceeds in richness that of any other State ; she has ample stores of iron, and coal is worked upon the surface in every Alleghany valley. Wool, wine, hops, tobacco, all are raised ; her Catawba has inspired poems. Every river side is clothed with groves of oak, of hickory, of sugar-maple, of syca- more, of poplar, and of buckeye. Yet, as I said, the change to the Michigan prairie was full of a delightful relief; it was Hol- .and after the Rhine, London after Paris.

Where men grow tall there will maize grow tall, is a good sound rule : limestone makes both bone and straw. The North-western States, inhabited by giant men, are the chosen home of the most useful and beautiful of plants, the maize — in America called "corn." For hundreds of miles the railway track, protected not even by a fence or hedge, runs through the towering plants, which hide all prospect save that of their own

$8 GREATER BRIT AT f, [CHAP. vn.

green pyramids. Maize feeds the people, it feeds the cattle and the hogs that they export to feed the cities of the East ; from it is made yearly, as an Ohio farmer told me, " whisky enough to float the ark." Rice is not more the support of the Chinese than maize of the English in America.

In the great corn-field of the North-western States dwells a people without a history, without tradition, busy at hewing out of the forest-trunks codes and social usages of its own. The Kansas men have set themselves to emancipating women ; the " Wolverines," as the people of Michigan are called, have turned their heads to education, and are teaching the teachers upon this point.

The rapidity with which intellectual activity is awakened in the West is inexplicable to the people of New England. While you are admiring the laws of Minnesota and Wisconsin, Boston men tell you that the resemblance of the code of Kansas to that of Connecticut is consequent only on the fact, that the framers of the former possessed a copy of this one New England code, while they had never set eyes upon the code of any other country in the world. While Yale and Harvard are trying in vain to keep pace with the State universities of Michigan and Kansas, you will meet in Lowell and New Haven men who apply an old Russian story to the Western colleges, and tell you that their professors of languages, when asked where they have studied, reply that they guess they learned to read and write in Springfield.

One of the difficulties of the New England colleges has been to reconcile university traditions with democracy ; but in the Western States there is neither reconciliation nor tradition, though Universities are plenty. Probably the most democratic school in the whole world is the State University of Michigan, situate at Ann Arbor, near Detroit. It is cheap, large, prac- tical ; twelve hundred students, paying only the ten dollars' entrance fee, and five dollars a year during residence, and living where they can in the little town, attend the university to be prepared to enter with knowledge and resolution upon the affairs of their future life. A few only are educated by having their minds unfolded that they may become many-sided men ; but all work with spirit, and with that earnestness which is seen in the Scotch universities at home. The war with crime, the

CHAP. vit.J UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. 59

war with sin, the war with death — Law, Theology, Medicine — these are the three foremost of man's employments ; to these, accordingly, the University affords her chiefest care, and to one of these the student, his entrance examination passed, often gives his entire time.

These things are democratic, but it is not in them that the essential democracy of the University is to be seen. There are at Michigan no honour-lists, no classes in our sense, no orders of merit, no competition. A man takes, or does not take, a certain degree. The University is governed, not by its mem- bers, not by its professors, but by a parliament of " regents " appointed by the inhabitants of the State. Such are the two great principles of the democratic University of the West.

It might be supposed that these two strange departures from the systems of older universities were irregularities, in- troduced to meet the temporary embarrassments incidental to educational establishments in young States. So far is this from being the case, that, as I saw at Cambridge, the clearest- sighted men of the older colleges of America are trying to assimilate their teaching system to that of Michigan — at least, in the one point of the absence of competition. They assert that toil performed under the excitement of a fierce struggle between man and man is unhealthy work, different in nature and in results from the loving labour of men whose hearts are really in what they do : toil, in short, not very easily distin- guishable from slave-labour.

In the matter of the absence of competition, Michigan is probably but returning to the system of the European universi- ties of the Middle Ages, but the government by other than the members of the University is a still stranger scheme. It is explained when we look to the source whence the funds of the University are drawn — namely, from the pockets of the tax- payers of the State. The men who have set up this corporation in their midst, and who tax themselves for its support, cannot be called on, they say, to renounce its government to their nominees, Professors from New England, unconnected with the State, men of one idea, often quarrelsome, sometimes " irreli- gious." There is much truth in these statements of the case, but it is to be hoped that the men chosen to serve as " regents

60 GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. Ttt,

are of a higher intellectual stamp than those appointed to edu- cational offices in the Canadian backwoods. A report was put into my hands at Ottawa, in which a Superintendent of Instruc- tion writes to the Minister of Education, that he had advised the ratepayers of Victoria county not in future to elect as school trustees men who cannot read or write. As Michigan grows older, she will, perhaps, seek to conform to the practice of other universities in this matter of her government, but in the point of absence of competition she is likely to continue firm.

Even here some difficulty is found in getting competent school directors; one of them reported 31^ children attending school. Of another district its superintendent writes : — " Conduct of scholars about the same as that of ' Young America' in general." Some of the superintendents aim at jocosity, and show no want of talent in themselves, while their efforts are to demonstrate its deficiency among the boys. The superintendent of Grattan says, in answer to some numbered questions : — " Condition good, improvement fair ; for ^ of ^ of the year in school, and fifteen-sixteenths of the time at play. Male teachers most successful with the birch; female, with Cupid's darts. School-houses in fair whittling order. Appa- ratus : — Shovel, none ; tongs, ditto ; poker, one. Conduct of scholars like that of parents — good, bad, and indifferent. No minister in town — sorry ; no lawyer — good !" The superin- tendents of Manlius township report that Districts i and 2 have buildings " fit (in winter) only for the polar bear, walrus, reindeer, Russian sable, or Siberian bat ;" and they go on to say, " Our children read everything, from Mr. Noodle's Essays on Matrimony to Artemus Ward's Lecture on First Principles of American Government." Another report from a very new county runs : — " Sunday-schools afford a little reading-matter to the children. Character of matter most read — battle, murder, and sudden death." A third states that the teachers are meanly paid, and goes on : — " If the teaching is no better than the pay, it must be like the soup that the rebels gave the prisoners." A superintendent, reporting that the success of the teachers is greater than their qualifications warrant, says : — "The reason is to be found in the Yankeeish adaptability of even Wolverines."

CHAP, vii.] UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. 61

After all, it is hard to pass jokes at the expense of the North-western people. A population who could maintain schools and universities under difficulties apparently over- whelming was the source from which to draw Union Volunteers such as those who, after the war, returned to their Northern homes, I have been told, shocked and astonished at the igno- rance and debasement of the Southern whites.

The system of elective studies pursued at Michigan is one to which we are year by year tending in the English univer- sities. As sciences multiply and deepen, it becomes more and more impossible that a " general course " scheme can produce men fit to take their places in the world. Cambridge has attempted to set up both systems, and, giving her students the choice, bids them pursue one branch of study with a view to honours, or take a less-valued degree requiring some slight proficiency in many things. Michigan denies that the stimulus of honour examinations should be connected with the elective system. With her, men first graduate in science, or in an arts degree, which bears a close resemblance to the English " poll," and then pursue their elected study in a course which leads to no university distinction, and which is free from the struggle for place and honours. The objections to "honours" rest upon a more solid foundation than a mere democratic hatred of inequality of man and man. Repute as a writer, as a practitioner, is valued by the Ann Arbor man, and the Wol- verines do not follow the Ephesians, and tell men who excel among them to go and excel elsewhere. The Michigan Pro- fessors say, and Dr. Hedges bears them out, that a far higher average of real knowledge is obtained under this system of independent work than is dreamt of in colleges where com- petition rules. "A higher average" is all they say, and they acknowledge frankly that there is here and there a student to be found to whom competition would do good. As a rule, they tell us, this is not the case. Unlimited battle between man and man for place is sufficiently the bane of the world not to be made the curse of schools. Competition breeds every evil which it is the aim of education, the duty of a university, to suppress : pale faces caused by excessive toil, feverish ex- citement that prevents true work, a hatred of the subject on

6i GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. m.

which the toil is spent, jealousy of best friends, systematic depreciation of men's talents, rejection of all reading that will not " pay," extreme and unhealthy cultivation of the memory, general degradation of labour — all these evils, and many more, are charged upon the system. Everything that our Professors have to say of " cram " these American thinkers apply to com- petition. Strange doctrines these for Young America !

Of the practical turn which we should naturally expect to discover in the University of a brand-new State I found evidence in the regulation which prescribes that the degree of Master of Arts shall not be conferred as a matter of course upon graduates of three years' standing, but only upon such as have pursued professional or general scientific studies during that period. Even in these cases an examination before some one of the faculties is required for the Master's degree. I was told that for the Medical degree " four years of reputable practice" is received instead of certain courses.

In her special and selected studies, Michigan is as merely practical as Swift's University of Brobdignag; but, standing far above the ordinary arts or science courses, there is a " University course " designed for those who have already taken the Bachelor's degree. It is harder to say what this course includes than what it does not. The twenty heads range over philology, philosophy, art, and science ; there is a branch of " criticism," one of " arts of design," one of " fine arts." Astro- nomy, ethics, and Oriental languages are all embraced in a scheme brought into working order within ten years of the time when Michigan was a wilderness, and the college-yard an Indian hunting-ground.

Michigan entered upon education-work very early in her history as a State. In 1850, her legislature commissioned the Hon. Ira Mayhew to prepare a work on education for circula- tion throughout America. Her progress has been as rapid as her start was good; her natural history collection is already one of the best in America ; her medical school is almost un equalled, and students flow to her even from New England and from California, while from New York she draws a hundred men a year. In only one point is Ann Arbor anywhere but in the van : she has hitherto followed the New England college?

OTAT-. vn.J UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN. Sj

in excluding women from her degrees. The SteJ. e University of Kansas has not shown the same exclusiveness that has charac- terised the conduct of the rulers of Michigan : women are ad- mitted not only to the classes, but to the professorships at Lawrence.

This North-western institution at Ann Arbor was not behind even Harvard in the war : it supplied the Union army with 1000 men. The i;th regiment of Michigan Volunteers, mainly composed of teachers and Ann Arbor students, has no cause to fear the rivalry of any other " record ;" and such was the effect of the war, that in 1860 there were in Michigan 2600 male to 5350 female teachers, whereas now there are but 1300 men to 7500 women.

So proud are Michigan men of their roll of honour, that they publish it at full length in the calendar of the University. Every " class " from the foundation of the schools shows some graduates distinguished in their country's service during the suppression of the rebellion. The Hon. Oramel Hosford, Superintendent of Public Instruction in Michigan, reports that, owing to the presence of crowds of returned soldiers, the schools of the State are filled almost to the limit of their capacity, while some are compelled to close their doors against the thronging crowds. Captains, colonels, generals are among the students now humbly learning in the Ann Arbor University Schools.

The State of Michigan is peculiar in the form that she has given to her higher teaching ; but in no way peculiar in the attention she bestows on education. Teaching, high and low, is a passion in the West, and each of these young States has established a University of the highest order, and placed in every township not only schools, but public libraries, supported from the rates, and managed by the people.

Not only have the appropriations for educational purposes by each State been large, but those of the Federal Government have been upon the most splendid scale. What has been done in the Eastern and the Central States no man can tell, but ever, west of the Mississippi twenty-two million acres have already been granted for such purposes, while fifty-six million more are set aside for similar gifts.

The Americans are not forgetful of their Puritan traditions.

QREATFR BRITAIN. TCHAP. vm

CHAPTER VIII. THE PACIFIC RAILROAD.

WHEN the companions of the explorer Cartier found that the rapids at Montreal were not the end of all navigation, as they had feared, but that above them there began a second and bound- less reach of deep, still waters, they fancied they had found the long-looked-for route to China, and cried, " La Chine !" So the story goes, and the name has stuck to the place.

Up to 1 86 1, the Canadians remained in the belief that they were at least the potential possessors of the only possible road for the China trade of the future, for in that year a Canadian government paper declared that the Rocky Mountains, south of British territory, were impassable for railroads. Maps showed that from St. Louis to San Francisco the distance was twice that from the head of navigation on Lake Superior to the British Pacific ports.

America has gone through a five years' agony since that time; but now, in the first days of peace, we find that the American Pacific Railroad, growing at the average rate of two miles a day at one end, and one mile a day at the other, will stretch from sea to sea in 1869 or 1870, while the British line remains a dream.

Not only are the mountains passable, but the engineers have found themselves compelled to decide on the conflicting claims of passes without number. Wall-like and frowning as the Rocky Mountains are when seen from the plains, the rolling gaps are many, and they are easier crossed by railway lines than the less lofty chains of Europe. From the heat of the country, the snow-line lies high ; the chosen pass is in the latitude of Constantinople or Oporto. The dryness of the

CHAP. Tin.] THE PACIFIC RAILROAD 65

air of the centre of a vast continent prevents the fall of heavy snows or rains in winter. At eight or nine thousand feet above the sea, in the Black Hills, or Eastern Piedmont, the drivers on the Pacific line will have slighter snow-drifts to encounter than their brothers on the Grand Trunk or the Camden and Amboy at the sea-level. On the other hand, fuel and water are scarce, and there is an endless succession of smaller snowy chains which have to be crossed,* upon the Grand Plateau, or basin of the Great Salt Lake. Whatever the difficulties, in 1870 the line will be an accomplished fact

In the Act creating the Pacific Railroad Company, passed in 1862, the company were bound to complete their line at the rate of a hundred miles a year. They are completing it at more than three times that rate.

When the Act is examined, it ceases to be strange that the road should be pushed with extraordinary energy and speed, so numerous are the baits offered to the companies to hasten its completion. Money is to be advanced them ; land is to be given them for every mile they finish — on a generous scale while the line is on the plains, on three times the scale when it reaches the more rugged tracts. These grants alone are estimated at twenty millions of acres. Besides the alternate sections, a width of 400 feet, with additional room for works and stations, is granted for the line. The Californian Com- pany is tempted by similar offers to a race with the Union Pacific, and each company is struggling to get the most land upon the basin. It is the interest of the Eastern Company that the junction should be as far as possible to the west ; of the Western, that it should be as far as possible to the east. The result is an average laying of three, and an occasional construction of four, miles a day. If we look to the progress at both ends, we find as much sometimes laid in a day as a bullock train could travel. So fast do the head-quarters " cities" keep moving forwards, that at the Californian end the super- intendent wished me to believe, that whenever his chickens heard a wagon pass, they threw themselves upon their backs, and held UD their legs, that they might be tied, and thrown

* They have been avoided by the Northern route through Humboldt Valley.

66 GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP, vm-

into the cart for a fresh move. "They are true birds-of- passage," he said.

When the iron trains are at the front, the laying will for a short time go on at the rate of nine yards in every fifteen seconds ; but three or four hundred tons of rails have to be brought up every day upon the single track, and it is in this process that the time is lost

The advance carriages of the construction-train are well supplied with rifles hung from the roofs ; but even when the Indians forget their amaze, and attack the " city upon wheels," or tear up the track, they are incapable of destroying the line so fast as the machinery can lay it down. " Soon," as a Denver paper said, during my stay in the Mountain City, " the iron horse will sniff the Alpine breeze upon the summit of the Black Hills, 9000 feet above the sea;" and upon the plateau, where deer are scarce and buffalo unknown, the Indians have all but disappeared. The worst Indian country is already crossed, and the red men have sullenly followed the buffalo to the South, and occupy the country South West of Kansas State, contenting themselves with preventing the construction of the Santa Fe route to California.

If the end to be kept in view in the construction of the first Pacific railroad line were merely the traffic from China and Japan to Europe, or the shortest route from San Francisco to Hampton Roads, the Kansas route through St. Louis, Denver, and the Berthoud Pass would be, perhaps, the best and shortest of those within the United States ; but the Saskatchewan line through British territory, with Halifax and Puget Sound for ports, would be still more advantageous for the former. As it is, the true question seems to be, not the trade between the Pacific and Great Britain, but between Asia and America ; for Pennsylvania and Ohio must be the manufacturing countries of the next fifty years.

Whatever our theory, the fact is plain enough: in 1870 we shall reach San Francisco from London in less time than by the severest travelling I could reach it from Denver in 1866.*

Wherever, in the States, North and South have met in con- flict, North has won. New York has beaten Norfolk ; Chicago, * In 1875 I reached San Francisco from London in eighteen days.

CHAP vm.] THE PACIFIC EAILROAD. 67

in spite of its inferior situation, has beaten the older St. Louis. In the same way, Omaha is carrying off the trade from Leaven- worth, Lawrence, and Kansas City. Ultimately Puget Sound may beat San Francisco in the race for the Pacific trade, and the Southern cities become still less able to keep their place than they have been hitherto. Time after time Chicago has thrown out intercepting lines, and diverted from St. Louis trade which seemed of necessity to belong to her ; and the success of the Union Pacific line, and failure of the Kansas road, is a fresh proof of the superior energy of the Northern to the Southern city. This time a fresh element enters into the calculation, and declares for Chicago. The great circle route, the true straight line, is in these great distances shorter by fifty or a hundred miles than the straight lines of the maps and charts, and the Platte route becomes not only the natural, but the shortest route from sea to sea.

Chicago has a great advantage over St Louis in her com- parative freedom from the cholera, which yearly attacks the Missourian city. During my stay in St. Louis, the deaths from cholera alone were known to have reached 200 a day, in a population diminished by flight to 180,000. A quarantine was established on the river ; the sale of fruit and vegetables pro- hibited ; prisoners released on condition that they should work at burying the dead; and funeral corteges were forbidden. Chicago, herself unreached by the plague, was scattering hand- bills on every Western railroad line, warning immigrants against St Louis.

One of the chief causes of the future wealth of America is to be found in the fact that all her "inland" towns are ports. The State of Michigan lies between 500 and 900 miles from the ocean, but that single State has upon the great lakes a coast of 1500 miles. From Fort Benton to the sea by water is nearly 4000 miles, but the post is a much-used steamboat port, though more distant, even in the air-line, from the nearest sea upon the same side the dividing range, than is the White Sea from the Persian Gulf. Put it in which way you would, Europe could not hold the Mississippi river.

A great American city is almost invariably placed at a point where an important railroad finds an outport on a lake or river.

r a

68 GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. vin.

This is no adaptation to railways of the Limerick saying about rivers, namely, that Providence has everywhere so placed them as to pass through the great towns ; for in America railways precede population, and when mapped out and laid, they are but tramways in the desert There is no great wonder in this when we remember that 158,000,000 acres of land have been up to this time granted to railroads in America.

One tendency of a costly railroad system is that few lines will be made, and trade being thus driven into certain unchanging routes, a small number of cities will flourish greatly, and, by acting as housing stations or as ports, will rise to enormous wealth and population. Where a system of cheap railways is adopted, there will be year by year a tendency to multiply lines of traffic, and consequently to multiply also ports and seats of trade — a tendency, however, which may be more than neutralised by any special circumstances which may cause the lines of transit to converge rather than run parallel to one another. Of the system of costly grand trunk lines we have an instance in India, where we see the creation of Umritsur and the prosperity of Calcutta alike due to our single great Bengal line ; of the converging system we have excellent instances in Chicago and Bombay ; while we see the plan of parallel lines in action here in Kansas, causing the comparative equality of progress manifested in Leavenworth, in Atchison, in Omaha. The coasts of India swarmed with ports till our trunk lines ruined Goa and Surat to advance Bombay, and a hundred village ports to push our factory at Calcutta, founded by Charnock as late as 1690, but now grown to be the third or fourth city of the empire.

Of the dozen chaotic cities which are struggling for the honour of becoming the future capital of the West, Leaven- worth, with 20,000 people, three daily papers, an opera house, and 200 drinking saloons, was, at the time of my visit in 1866, somewhat ahead of Omaha with its 12,000 t^vo papers, and a 44 one-horse " theatre, though the Northern city tied Leaven- worth in the point of " saloons."

Omaha, Leavenworth, Kansas City, Wyandotte, Atchison, Topeka, Lecompton, and Lawrence, each praises itself, and runs* down its neighbour. Leavenworth claims to be so healthy

CHAP, vm.] THE PACIFTG RAILROAD. 69

that when it lately became necessary to " inaugurate " the new graveyard, " they had to shoot a man on purpose " — a change since the days when the Southern " Border Ruffians " were in the habit of parading its streets, bearing the scalps of Abolitionists, stuck on poles. On the other hand, a Nebraska man, when asked whether the Kansas people were fairly honest, said : " Don't know 'bout honest ; but they do say as how the folk around take in their stone fences every night." Lawrence, the State capital, which is on the dried-up Kansas river, sneeringly says of all the new towns on the Missouri that the boats that ply between them are so dangerous that the fare is collected in instalments every five minutes throughout the trip. Next after the jealousy between two Australian colonies, there is nothing equal to the hatreds between cities competing for the same trade. Omaha has now the best chance of becoming the capital of the Far West, but Leavenworth will no doubt con- tinue to be the chief town of Kansas.

The progress of the smaller cities is amazing. Pistol-shots by day and night are frequent, but trade and development are little interfered with by such incidents as these ; and as the village-cities are peopled up, the pioneers, shunning their fellows, keep pushing westwards, seeking new "locations." " You're the second man I've seen this fall ! Darn me, ef 'tain't "bout time to varmose out westerly — y," is the standing joke of che frontier-bars against each other.

******

At St. Louis I had met my friend Mr. Hepworth Dixon, just out from England, and with him I visited the Kansas towns, and then pushed through Waumego to Manhattan, the terminus (for the day) of the Kansas Pacific line. Here we were thrust into what space remained between forty leathern mail-bags and the canvas roof of the mule-drawn ambulance, which was to be at once our prison fo • six nights, and our fort upon wheels against the Indians.

70 GREATER B&ITA1S. [CHAP, it

CHAPTER IX.

OMPHALISM.

DASHING through a grove of cottonwood trees draped in big- nonia and ivy, we came out suddenly upon a charming scene : a range of huts and forts crowning a long low hill seamed with many a timber-clothed ravine, while the clear stream of the Republican fork wreathed itself about the woods and bluffs, The block house, over which floated the Stars and Stripes, was Fort Riley, the Hyde Park Corner from which continents are to measure all their mile.s ; the " capital of the universe," or " centre of the world." Not that it has always been so. Geo- graphers will be glad to learn that not only does the earth gyrate, but that the centre of its crust also moves : within the last ten years it has removed westward into Kansas from Mis- souri— from Independence to Fort Riley. The contest for centreship is no new thing. Herodotus held that Greece was the very middle of the world, and that the unhappy Orientals were frozen, and the yet more unfortunate Atlantic Indians baked every afternoon of their poor lives in order that the sun might shine on Greece at noon; London plumes herself on being the " centre of the terrestrial globe ; " Boston is the " hub of the hull universe," though the latter claim is less physical than moral, I believe. In Fort Riley, the Western men seem to have found the physical centre of the United States, but they claim for the Great Plains the intellectual as well as the poli- tical leadership of the whole continent. These hitherto un- trodden tracks, they tell you, form the heart of the empire, from which the life-blood must be driven to the extremities. Geographical and political centres must ultimately coincide. Connected with this belief is another Western theory — that

OHAP. ix.] OMPHALISM. 71

the powers of the future must be " Continental." Germany, or else Russia, is to absorb all Asia and Europe, except Britain. North America is already cared for, as the gradual extinction of the Mexicans and absorption of the Canadians they consider certain. As for South America, the Califomians are planning an occupation of Western Brazil, on the ground that the con- tinental power of South America must start from the head waters of the great rivers, and spread seawards down the streams. Even in the Brazilian climate, they believe that the Anglo-Saxon is destined to become the dominant race.

The success of this omphalism, this government from the centre, will be brought about, in the Western belief, by the necessity under which the nations on the head waters of all streams will find themselves of having the outlets in their hands. Evtn if it be true that railways are beating rivers, still the rail- way: must also lead seawards to the ports, and the need for their control is still felt by the producers in the centre countries of the continent. The Upper States must everywhere com- mand "he Lower, and salt-water despotism find its end.

The Americans of the Valley States, who fought all the more heartily in the Federal cause from the fact that they were battling for the freedom of the Mississippi against the men who held its mouth, look forward to the time when they will have to assert, oeaceably but with firmness, their right to the freedom of their riilways through the Northern Atlantic States. What- ever their respect for New England, it cannot be expected that they are for ever to permit Illinois and Ohio to be neutralised in the Senae by Rhode Island and Vermont. If it goes hard with New Ingland, it will go still harder with New York ; and the Western men look forward to the day when Washington will be removed, Congress and all, to Columbus or Fort Riley.

The singukr wideness of Western thought, always verging on extravagance, is traceable to the width of Western land. The immensity of the continent produces a kind of intoxication ; there is moral dram-drinking in the contemplation of the map. No Fourth of july oration can come up to the plain facts con- tained in the Lmd Commissioner's report. The public domain of the United Sates still consists of one thousand five hundred millions of acns ; there are two hundred thousand squar*

71 GREATER BRITAIN. |CMAf rx.

miles of coal-lands in the country — ten times as much as in all the remaining world. In the Western territories not yet States, there is land sufficient to bear, at the English population rate, five hundred and fifty millions of human beings.

It is strange to see how the Western country dwarfs the Eastern States. Buffalo is called a " Western City; " yet from New York to Buffalo is only three hundred and fifty miles, and Buffalo is but seven hundred miles to the west of the most eastern point in all the United States. On the other hand, from Buffalo we can go two thousand five hundred miles west- wards without quitting the United States. " The West " is eigfa times as wide as the Atlantic States, and will soon be eiglt times as strong.

The conformation of North America is widely different to that of any other continent on the globe. In Europe, the glaciers of the Alps occupy the centre point, and shed the waters towards each of the surrounding seas : conflueice is almost unknown. So it is in Asia : there the Indus fowing into the Arabian Gulf, the Oxus into the Sea of Aral, tie Gan- ges into the Bay of Bengal, the Yangtse Kiang into the Pacific, and the Yenesei into the Arctic Ocean, all take their rise in the central tableland. In South America, the mountain? form a wall upon the west, whence the rivers flow eastwards h parallel lines. In North America alone are there mountairs on each coast, and a trough between, into which the rivers flov together, giving in a single valley 23,000 miles of navigable steam to be ploughed by steamships. The map proclaims tie essential unity of North America. Political geography miglt be a more interesting study than it has yet been made.

In reaching Leavenworth, I had crossed two of the five divisions of America : the other three lie before ne on my way to San Francisco. The eastern slopes of the jLlleghanies, or Atlantic coast j their western slopes; the Greit Plains; the Grand Plateau, and the Pacific coast — these aie the five divi- sions. Fort Riley, the centre of the United States, is upon the border of the third division, the Great Plahs. The Atlantic coast is poor and stony, but the slight altitude of the Alleghany chain has prevented it being a hindrance to the passage of population to the West : the second of the divisions is now the

. nc.] OMPHALTSM. 73

richest and most powerful of the five ; but the wave of immi- gration is crossing the Mississippi and Missouri into the Great Plains, and here at Fort Riley we are upon the limit of civilization.

This spot is not only the centre of the United States and of the continent, but, if Denver had contrived to carry the Pacific railroad by the Berthoud Pass, would have been the centre station upon what Governor Gilpin of Colorado calls the " Asiatic and European railway line." As it is, Columbus in Nebraska has somewhat a better chance of becoming the Washington of the future than has this blockhouse.

Quitting Fort Riley, we found ourselves at once upon the Plains. No more sycamore and white-oak and honey-locust ; no more of the rich deep green of the cottonwood ; but yellow earth, yellow flowers, yellow grass, and here and there groves of giant sunflowers with yellow blooms, but no more trees.

As the sun set, we came on a body of cavalry marching slowly from the Plains towards the Fort. Before them, at some little distance, walked a sad-faced man on foot. ;n sober riding- dress, with a repeating carbine slung across his back. It was Sh*mian returning from his expedition to Santa Fe.

74 GREATER BHITAIN. foBx*. x

CHAPTER X

LETTER FROM DENVER.

Monday, yd September.

MY EEAR ,

Here we are, scalps and all.

On Tuesday last, at sundown, we left Fort Riley and supped at Junction City,* the extreme point that "civilization" has reached upon the Plains. Civilization means whisky : post- offices don't count

It was here that it first dawned upon us that we were being charged 500 dollars to guard the United States' Californian mail, with the compensation of the chance of being ourselves able to rob it with impunity. It is at all events the case that we, well armed as the mail-officers of Leavenworth insisted on our being, sat inside with forty-two cwt. of mail, in open bags, and over a great portion of the route had only the driver with us, without whose knowledge we could have read all and stolen most of the letters, and with whose knowledge, but against whose will, we could have carried off the whole, leaving him gagged, bound, and at the mercy of the Indians. As it was, a mail-bag fell out one day, without the knowledge of either Dixou or the driver, who were outside, and I had to shout pretty freely before they would pull up.

On Wednesday we had our last " squar' meal " in the shape of a breakfast, at Fort Ellsworth, and soon were out upon the almost unknown Plains. In the morning we caught up and passed long wagon trains, each wagon drawn by eight oxen, and guarded by two drivers and one horseman, all arme'l with

* Burnt by the Indians in 1868.

CTUP. T.) LETTER FROM DENVER. 75

breech-loading rifles and revolvers, or with the new " repeaters," before which breech-loaders and revolvers must alike go down. All day we kept a sharp look-out for a party of seven American officers, who, in defiance of the scout's advice; had gone out from the fort to hunt buffalo upon the track. About sundown we came into the little station of Lost Creek. The ranchmen told us that they had, during the day, been driven in from their work by a party of Cheyennes, and that they had some doubts as to the wisdom of the officers in going out to hunt.

Just as we were leaving the station, one of the officers' horses dashed in riderless and was caught ; and about two miles from the station we passed another on its back, ripped up- either by a knife or buffalo horn. The saddle was gone, but there were no other marks of a fight. We believe that these officers were routed by buffaloes, not Cheyennes, but still we should be glad to hear of them.

The track is marked in many parts of the Plains by stakes, such as those from which the Llano Estacado takes its name ; but this evening we turned off into devious lines by way of precaution against ambuscades, coming round through the sandy beds of streams to the ranches for the change of mules. The ranchmen were always ready for us ; for while we were still a mile away, our driver would put his hand to his mouth and give a " How ! how ! how ! how — w !" the Cheyenne war- whoop.

In the weird glare that follows sunset, we came upon some rocks, admirably fitted for an ambush. As we neared them, the driver said : " It's 'bout an even chance thet we's sculp ther' !" We could not avoid them, as there was a gully ihat could only be crossed at this one point. We dashed down into the " creek " and up again past the rocks : there were no Indians, but the driver was most uneasy till we reached Big Creek.

Here they could give us nothing whatever to eat, the Indians having, on Tuesday, robbed them of everything they had, and ordered them to leave within fifteen days on pain of death.

For 250 miles westwards from Big Crtek, we found that every station had been warned (and most plundered) by bands of Cheyennes, on behalf of the forces of the Confederation

76 GREATER BE1TATN. [CHAP, l,

encamped near the creek itself. The warning was in all cases that of fire and death at the end of fifteen days, of which nine days have expired. We found the horse-keepers of the Com pany everywhere leaving their stations, and were, in conse- quence, very nearly starved, having been unsuccessful in our shots from the " coach," except, indeed, at the snakes.

On Thursday we passed Big Timber, the only spot on the Plains where there are trees ; and there the Indians had counted the trunks, and solemnly warned the men against cutting more : " Fifty-two tree. You no cut more tree — no more cut. Grass ! You cut grass ; grass make big fire, You good boy — you clear out. Fifteen day, we come : you no gone — ugh 1" The " ugh " accompanied by an expressive pantomime.

On Thursday evening we got a meal of buffalo and prairie dog, the former too strong for my failing stomach, the latter wholesome nourishment, and fit for kings — as like our rabbit in flavour as he is in shape. This was at the horse-station of " The Monuments," a natural temple of awesome grandeur, rising from the plains like a giant Stonehenge.

On Friday we " breakfasted " at Pond Creek Station, two miles from Fort Wallis. Here the people had applied for a guard, and had been answered : " Come into the fort ; we can't spare a man." So much for the value of the present forts ; and yet even these — Wallis and Ellsworth — are 200 miles apart.*

We were joined at breakfast by Bill Comstock,t interpreter to the fort — a long-haired, wild-eyed half-breed — who gave us, in an hour's talk, the full history of the Indian politics that have led to the present war.

The Indians, to the number of 20,000, have been in council with the Washington Commissioners all this summer at Fort Laramie ; and after being clothed, fed, and armed, lately con- cluded a treaty, allowing the running of the mail-roads. They now assert that this treaty was intended to apply to the Platte road (from Omaha and Atchison through Fort Kearney), and

• On the loth July, 1867, the Cheyennes attacked Fort Wallis. t Scalped by the Cheyennes at Pond Creek in 1868.

CHAP, x.] LETTER FROM DENVER. 7?

to the Aikansas road, but not to the Smoky Hill road, which lies between the others, and runs through the buffalo country ; but their real opposition is to the railroad. The Cheyennes (pronounced Shfans) have got the Comanches, Appaches, and Arapahoes from the south, and the Sioux and Kiowas from the north, to join them in a confederation under the leadership of Spotted Dog, the chief of the Little Dog Section of the Chey- ennes, and son of White Antelope — killed at Sand Creek battle by the Kansas and Colorado Volunteers — who has sworn to avenge his father.

Soon after leaving Pond Creek, we sighted at a distance three mounted " braves," leading some horses ; and when we reached the next station, we found that they had been there, openly proclaiming that their mounts had been stolen from a team.

All this day we sat with our revolvers laid upon the mail- bags in front of us, and our driver also had his armoury con- spicuously displayed, while we swept the Plains with many an anxious glance. We were on lofty rolling downs, and to the south the eye often ranged over much of the 130 miles which lay between us and Texas. To the north, the view was more bounded ; still, our chief danger lay near the boulders which here and there covered the Plains.

All Thursday and Friday we never lost sight of the buffalo, in herds of about 300, and the " antelope " — the prong-horn, a kind of gazelle — in flocks of six or seven. Prairie dogs were abundant, and wolves and black-tail deer in view at every turn.

The most singular of all the sights of the Plains is the constant presence of the skeletons of buffalo and of horse, of mule and of ox ; the former left by the hunters, who take but the skin, and the latter the losses of the mails and the wagon- trains through sunstroke and thirst. We killed a horse on the second day of our journey.

When we came upon oxen that had not long been dead, we found that the intense dryness of the air had made mummies of them : there was no stench, no putrefaction.

During the day, I made some practice at antelope with the driver's Ballard ; but an antelope at 500 yards is not an easy

7» GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. x.

target. The drivers shot repeatedly at buffalo at twenty yards, but this only to keep them away from the horses ; the revolver balls did not seem to go through their hair and skin, as they merely shambled on in their usual happy sort of way, aftei receiving a discharge or two.

The prairie dogs sat barking in thousands on the tops ol their mounds, but we were too grateful to them for their gaiety to dream of pistol-shots. They are no " dogs " at all, but rabbits that bark, with all the coney's tricks and turns, and the same odd way of rubbing their face with their paws while they con you from top to toe.

With wolves, buffalo, antelope, deer, skunks, marmots, plover, curlew, dottrel, herons, vultures, ravens, snakes, and locusts, we never seemed to be without a million companions in our loneliness.

From Cheyenne Wells, where we changed mules in the afternoon, we brought on the ranchman's wife, painfully making room for her at our own expense. Her husband had been warned by the Cheyennes that the place would be destroyed : he meant to stay, but was in fear for her.* The Cheyennes had made her cook for them, and our supper had gone down Chey- enne throats.

Soon after leaving the station, we encountered one of the great " dirt-storms " of the Plains. About five P.M. I saw a little white cloud growing into a column, which in half an hour turned black as night, and possessed itself of half the skies. We then saw what seemed to be a waterspout ; and though no rain reached us, I think it was one. When the storm burst on us, we took it for rain ; and, halting, drew down our canvas, and held it against the hurricane. We soon found that our eyes and mouths were full of dust ; and when I put out my hand, I felt that it was dirt, not rain, that was falling. In a few minutes it was pitch dark, and after the fall had continued for some time, there began a series of flashes of blinding lightning, in the very centre and midst of which we seemed to be. Notwithstanding this, there was no sound of thunder. The " norther " lasted some three or four hours ; and when it ceased, it left us total darkness, and a wind which froze our

* He was murdered the next week.

CHAP, x.] LETTER FROM DENVER. 79

marrow as we again started on our way. When Fremont ex- plored this route, he reported that the high ridge between the Platte and Arkansas was notorious among the Indfans for its tremendous dirt-storms. Sheet lightning without thunder accom- panies dust-storms in all great continents : it is as common in the Punjaub as in Australia, in South as in North America.

On Saturday morning, at Lake Station, we got beyond the Indians, and into a land of plenty, or at all events a land of something, for we obtained milk from the station cow, and pre- served fruits that had come round through Denver from Ohio and Kentucky. Not even on Saturday, however, could we get dinner ; and as I missed the only antelope that came within reach, our supper \vas-;not much heavier than our breakfast.

Rolling through the Arapahoe country, where it is proposed to make a reserve for thet Cheyennes, at eight -o'clock on Saturday morning we caught sight of the glittering snows of Pike's Peak, a hundred and fifty miles away, and all the day we were galloping towards it, through a country swarming with rattlesnakes and vultures. Late in the evening, when we were drawing near to the first of the Coloradan farms, we came on a white wolf unconcernedly taking his evening prowl about the stock-yards. He sneaked along without taking any notice of us, and continued his thief-like walk with a bravery that seemed only to show that he had never seen man before ; this might well be the case, if he came from the south, near the upper forks of the Arkansas.

All this, and the frequency of buffalo, I was unprepared for. I imagined that though the Plains were uninhabited, the game had all been killed. On the contrary, the " Smoky district " was never known so thronged with buffalo as it is this year The herds resort to it because there they are close to the water of the Platte river, and yet out of the reach of the traffic of the Platte road. The tracks they make in travelling to and fro across the Plains are visible for years after they have ceased to use them. I have seen them as broad and as straight as the finest of Roman roads.

On Sunday, at two in the morning, we dashed into Denver ; and as we reeled and staggered from our late prison, the ambulance, into the "cockroach corral" which does duty for

to GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP, x,

the bar-rooin of the " Planters' House," we managed to find strength and words to agree that we would fix no time for meeting the next day. We expected to sleep for thirty hours , as it was, we met at breakfast at seven A.M., less than five hours from the time we parted. It is to-day that we feel exhausted ; the exhilaration of the mountain air, and the excitement of frequent visits, carried us through yesterday. Dixon is suffering from strange blains and boils, caused by the unwholesome food.

We have been called upon here by Governor Gilpin and Governor Cummings, the opposition governors. The former is the elected governor of the State of Colorado which is to be, and would have been but for the fact that the President put his big toe (Western for veto) upon the bill ; the latter, the Washington-sent governor of the Territory. Gilpin is a typical pioneer man, and the descendant of a line of such. He comes of one of the original Quaker stocks of Maryland, and he and his ancestors have ever been engaged in founding States. He himself, after taking an active share in the foundation of Kansas, commanded a regiment of cavalry in the Mexican war. After this, he was at the head of the pioneer army which explored the pares of the Cordilleras and the Territory oi Nevada. .He it was who hit upon the glorious idea of placing Colorado half upon each side of the Sierra Madre. There never in the history of the world was a grander idea than this. Any ordinary pioneer or politician would have given Colorado the " natural " frontier, and have tried for the glory of the founda- tion of two States instead of one. The consequence would have been lasting disunion between the Pacific and Atlantic States, and a possible future break-up of the country. As it is, this commonwealth, little as it at present is, links sea to sea, and Liverpool to Hong Kong.

The city swarms with Indians of the bands commanded by the chiefs Nevara and Colloreyo. They are at war with the six confederate tribes, and with the Pawnees — with all the Plain Indians, in short. Now, as the Pawnees are also at war with the six tribes, there is a pretty triangular fight. They came in to buy arms, and fearful scoundrels they look. Short, flat-nosed, long-haired, painted in red and blue, and dressed

BUM.] LETTER FKOM DENVER. 81

in a gaudy costume, half Spanish, half Indian, which makes their filthiness appear more filthy by contrast, and themselves carrying only their Ballard and Smith-and-Wesson, but forcing the squaws to carry all their other goods, and papooses in addition, they present a spectacle of unmixed ruffianism which I never expect to see surpassed. Dixon and I, both of us, left London with " Lo ! the poor Indian," in all his dignity and hook-nosedness, elevated on a pedestal of nobility in our hearts. Our views were shaken in the East, but nothing revolu- tionised them so rapidly as our three days' risk of scalping in the Plains. John Howard and Mrs. Beecher Stowe themselves would go in for the Western " disarm at any price, and exter- minate if necessary " policy if they lived long in Denver. One of the braves of Nevara's command brought in the scalp of a Cheyenne chief taken by him last month, and to-day it hangs outside the door of a pawnbroker's shop, for sale, fingered by every passer-by.

Many of the band were engaged in putting on their paint, which was bright vermilion, with a little indigo round the eye. This, with the sort of pigtail which they wear, gives them the look of the gnomes in the introduction to a London pantomime. One of them — Nevara himself, I was told — wore a sombrero with three scarlet plumes, taken probably from a Mexican, a crimson jacket, a dark-blue shawl, worn round the loins and over the arm in Spanish dancer fashion, and embroidered mocassins. His squaw was a vermilion-faced bundle of rags, not more than four feet high, staggering under buffalo hides, bow and arrows, and papoose. They move everywhere on horseback, and in the evening withdraw in military order, with advance and rear guard, to a camp at some distance from the town.

I inclose some prairie flowers, gathered in my walks round the city. Their names are not suited to their beauty ; the large white one is " the morning blower," the most lovely of all, save one, of the flowers of the Plains. It grows with many branches to a height of some eighteen inches, and bears from thirty to fifty blooms. The blossoms are open up to a little after sunrise, when they close, seldom to open even after sunset. It is, therefore, peculiarly the early riser's flower ; and if it be true

G

8i GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. i.

that Nature doesn't make things in vain, it follows that Nature intended men— or, at all events, some men — to get up early, which is a point that I believe was doubtful hitherto.

For the one prairie flower which I think more beautiful than the blower, I cannot find a name. It rises to about six inches above ground, and spreads in a circle of a foot across. Its leaf is thin and spare; its flower-bloom a white cup, about two inches in diameter ; and its buds pink and pendulent.

All our garden annuals are to be found in masses acres in size upon the Plains. Pentstemon, coreopsis, persicaria, yucca, dwarf sumach, marigold, and sunflower, all are flowering here at once, till the country is ablaze with gold and red. The coreopsis of our gardens they call the " rosin-weed," and say that it forms excellent food for sheep.

The view of the " Cordillera della Sierra Madre," the Rocky Mountain main chain, from the outskirts of Denver is sublime ; that from the roof at Milan does not approach it. Twelve miles from the city the mountains rise abruptly from the Plains. Piled range above range with step-like regularity, they are topped by a long white line, sharply relieved against the indigo of the sky. Two hundred and fifty miles of the mother Sierra are in sight from our verandah ; to the south, Pike's Peak and Spanish Peak ; Long's Peak to the north ; Mount Lincoln towering above all. The views are limited only by the curva- ture of the earth, such is the marvellous purity of the Coloradan air, the effect at once of the distance from the sea and of the bed of limestone which underlies the Plains.

The site of Denver is heaven-blessed in climate as well as loveliness. The sky is brilliantly blue, and cloudless from dawn till noon. In the mid-day heats, cloud-making in the Sierra begins, and by sunset the snowy chain is multiplied a hundred times in curves of white and purple cumuli, while thunder rolls heavily along the range. " This is a great country, sir," said a Coloradan to me to-day. "We make clouds for the whole universe." At dark there is dust or thunder-storm at the moun- tain foot, and then the cold and brilliant night Summer and winter, it is the same.

CHAPTER XI

RED INDIA.

"THESE Red Indians are not red," \vas our first cry when ttre saw the Utes in the streets of Denver. They had come into town to be painted as English ladies go to London to shop ; and we saw them engaged within a short time after their arrival in daubing their cheeks with vermilion and blue, and referring to glasses which the squaws admiringly held. Still, when we met them with peaceful paintless cheeks, we had seen that their colour was brown, copper, dirt, anything you please except red.

The Hurons, with whom I had stayed at Lorette, were French in training if not in blood ; the Pottawatomies of St. Mary's Mission, the Delawares of Leavenworth, are tame Indians. It is true that they are not red, but I had expected to have found these wild prairie and mountain Indians of the colour from which they take their name. Save for paint, I found them of a colour wholly different from that which we call red.

Low in stature, yellow-skinned, small-eyed, and Tartar-faced, the Indians of the Plains are a distinct people from the tall, hook-nosed warriors of the Eastern States. It is impossible to set eyes on their women without being reminded of the dwarf skeletons found in the mounds of Missouri and Iowa ; but, men or women, the Utes bear no resemblance to the bright-eyed, graceful people with whom Penn traded and Standish fought. They are not less inferior in mind than in body. It was no Shoshore, no Ute, no Cheyenne who called the rainbow the " heaven of flowers," the moon the " night queen," or the stars " God's eyes." The Plain tribes are as deficient, too, in heroes as in poetry : they have never even produced a general, and White Antelope is their nearest approach to a Tecumseh. Their mode of life, the natural features of the country in which

G 3

»4 GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. xi.

they dwell, have nothing in them to suggest a reason for their debased condition. The reason must lie in the blood, the race.

All who have seen both the Indians and the Polynesians at home must have been struck with innumerable resemblances. The Maori and Reo. Indian wakes for the dead are identical : the Californian Indi; ns wear the Maori mat ; the " medicine " of the Mandan is b it the " tapu " of Polynesia ; the New Zealand dance-song, tr e Maori tribal sceptre, were found alike by Strachey in Virginia ind Drake in California : the canoes of the West Indies are the same as those of Polynesia. Hundreds of arguments, best touched from the farther side of the Pacific, concur to prove the Indians a Polynesian race. The canoes that brought to Easter Island the people who built their mounds and rock temples there, may as easily have been carried on by the Chilian breeze and current to the South American shore. The wave from Malaya would have spent itself upon the northern plains. The Utes would seem to be Kamskatkians, or men of the Amoor, who, fighting their way round by Behring Straits, and then down south, drove a wedge between the Poly- nesians of Appalachia and California. No theory but this will account for the sharp contrast between the civilization of ancient Peru and Mexico, and the degradation in which the Utes have lived from the earliest recorded times. Mounds, rock temples, worship, all are alike unknown to the Indians of the Plains ; to the Polynesian Indians, these were things that had come down to them from all time.

Curious as is the question of the descent of the American tribes, it has no bearing on the future of the country — unless, indeed, in the eyes of those who assert that Delawares and Utes, Hurons and Pawnees, are all one race, with features modified by soil and climate. If this were so, the handsome, rollicking, frank-faced Coloradan " boys " would have to look forward to the time when their sons' sons should be as like the Utes as many New Englanders of to-day are like the Indians they expelled — that, as the New Englanders are tall, taciturn, and hatchet-faced, the Coloradans of the next age should be flat-faced warriors, five feet high. Confidence in the future of America must be founded on a belief in the indestructible vitality of race.

THAT xi.] RED INDIA. 85

Kamskatkians or Polynesians, Malays or sons of the prairies on which they dwell, the Red Indians have no future. In twenty years there will scarcely be one of pure blood alive within the United States.

In La Plata, the Indians from the inland forests gradually mingle with the whiter inhabitants of the coast, and become indistinguishable from the remainder of the population. In Canada and Tahiti, the French intermingle with the native race : the Hurons are French in everything but name. In Kansas, in Colorado, in New Mexico, miscegenation will never be brought about. The pride of race, strong in the English everywhere, in America and Australia is an absolute bar to intermarriage, and even to lasting connexions with the aborigines. What has happened in Tasmania and Victoria is happening in New Zealand and on the Plains. When you ask a Western man his views on the Indian question, he says : — " Well, sir, we can destroy them by the laws of war, or thin 'em out by whisky ; but the thinning process is plaguy slow."

There are a good many Southerners out upon the Plains. One of them, describing to me how in Florida they had hunted down the Seminoles with bloodhounds, added, " And sarved the pesky sarpints right, sah ! " South-western volunteers, cam- paigning against the Indians, have been known to hang up in their tents the scalps of the slain, as we English used to- nail up the skins of the Danes.*

There is in these matters less hypocrisy among the Americans than with ourselves. In 1840, the British Government assumed the sovereignty of New Zealand in a proclamation which set forth with great precision that it did so for the sole purpose of protecting the aborigines in the possession of their lands. The Maories numbered 200,000 then : they number 20,000 now.

Among the Western men there is no difference of opinion on the Indian question. Rifle and revolver are their only policy. The New Englanders, who are all for Christianity and kindliness ;n their dealings with the red men, are not similarly united in one cry. Those who are ignorant of the nature of the Indian, call out for agricultural employment for the braves ; those who

* Even as late as my journey of 1875, I found by the comments of the Press on the scalping of a Shoshone1 by the Piocbe volunteer* (September 8th)t that the practice was still common.

86 GREATER BEITAIN. [CHAP, xi

know nothing of the Indian's life demand that " reserves " be set aside for him, forgetting that no " reserve " can be large enough to hold the buffalo, and that without the buffalo the red men must plough or starve.

Indian civilization through the means of agriculture is all but a total failure. The Shawnees are thriving near Kansas City, the Pottawatomies living at St. Mary's Mission, the Delawares existing at Leavenworth ; but in all these cases there is a large infusion of white blood. The Canadian Hurons are completely civilized ; but then they are completely French. If you succeed with an Indian to all appearance, he will suddenly return to his untamed state. • An Indian girl, one of the most orderly of the pupils at a ladies' school, has been known, on feeling herself aggrieved, to withdraw to her room, let down her back hair, paint her face, and howl. The same tendency showed itself in the case of the Delaware chief who built himself a white man's house, and lived in it thirty years, but then suddenly set up his old wigwam in the dining-room in disgust Another bad case is that of the Pawnee who visited Buchanan, and behaved so well that when a young Englishman, who came out soon after, told the President he was going West, he gave him a letter to the chief, then with his tribe in Northern Kansas. The Pawnee read the note, offered a pipe, gravely protested eternal friendship, slept upon it, and next morning scalped his visitor with his own hand.

The English everywhere attempt to introduce civilization, or to modify that which exists, in a rough-and-ready manner which invariably ends in failure or in the destruction of the native race. A hundred years of absolute rule, mostly peaceable, have not, under every advantage, seen the success of our repeated attempts to establish trial by jury in Bengal. For twenty years the Maories have mixed with the New Zealand colonists on nearly equal terms, have almost universally professed them- selves Christians, have attended English schools, and learnt to speak the English language, and to read and write their own ; in spite of all this, a few weeks of fanatic outburst were enough to reduce almost the whole race to a condition of degraded savagery. The Indians of America have within the last few years been caught and caged, given acres where they once had leagues, and told to plough where once they hunted. A pastoral race, with no conception of property in land, they have

CHAP. xi. | RBD INDIA. 87

been manufactured into freeholders and tenant farmers ; Western Ishmaelites, sprung of a race which has wandered since its legendary life begins, they have been subjected U homestead laws and title registration. If our experiments in 'New Zealand, in India, and on the African coast have failed, cautious and costly as they were, there can be no great wonder in the unsuccess that has attended the hurried American experi- ments. It is not for us, who have the past of Tasmania and the present of Queensland to account for, to do more than record the fact that the Americans are not more successful with the red men of Kansas than we with the black men of Australia. •The Bosjesman is not a more unpromising subject for civili- zation than the red man ; the Ute is not even gifted with the birthright of most savages, the mimetic power. The black man in his dress, his farming, his religion, his family life, is always trying to imitate the white. In the Indian there is none ot this : his ancestors roamed over the Plains — he will roain ; his ancestors hunted — why should not he hunt ? The American savage, like his Asiatic cousins, is conservative ; the African changeable, and strong in imitative faculties of the mind. Just as the Indian is less versatile than the negro, so, if it were possible gradually to change his mode of life, and slowly to bring him to the agricultural state, he would probably become a skilful and laborious cultivator, and worthy inhabitant of the western soil ; as it is, he is exterminated before he has time to learn. " Sculp 'em fust, and then talk to 'em," the Coloradans say. Peace Commissioners are yearly sent from Washington to treat with hostile tribes upon the Plains. The Indians invari- ably continue to fight and rcb till winter is at hand ; but when the snows appear, they send in runners to announce that they are prepared to make submission. The Commissioners appoint a place, and the tribe, their relatives, allies, and friends come down thousands strong, and enter upon debates which are pur- posely prolonged till spring. All this time the Indians are kept in food and drink ; whisky, even, is illegally provided them, with the cognizance of the authorities, under the name of "hatchets." Blankets and, it is said, powder and revolvers, are supplied to them as necessary to their existence on the Plains ; but when the first of the spring flowers begin to peep

88 GREATER BRfTAIX. [CHAP. XI,

up through the snow drifts on the prairies, they take their leave, and in a few weeks are out again upon the war-path, plundering and scalping all the whites.

Judging from English experience in the north, and Spanish in Mexico and South America, it would seem as though the white man and the red cannot exist on the same soil. Step by step the English have driven back the braves, till New Englanders now remember that there were Indians once in Massachusetts, as we remember that once there were bears in Hampshire. King Philip's defeat by the Connecticut Volunteers seems to form part of the early legendary history of our race; yet there is still standing, and in good repair, in Dorchester^a suburb of Boston, a frame-house, which in its time has been successfully defended against Red Indians. On the other hand, step by step since the days of Cortez, the Indians and half- bloods have driven out the Spaniards from Mexico and South America. White men, Spaniards, received Maximilian at Vera Cruz, but he was shot by full-blood Indians at Queretaro.

If any attempt is to be made to save the Indians that remain, ft must be worked out in the Eastern States. Hitherto the whites have but pushed back the Indians westward : if they would rescue the remnant from starvation, they must bring them East, away from Western men, and Western hunting grounds, and let them intermingle with the whites, living, farm- ing along with them, intermarrying if possible. The hunting' Indian is too costly a being for our age ; but we are bound to remember that ours is the blame of having failed to teach him to be something better.

After all, if the Indian is mentally, morally, and physically inferior to the white man, it is in every way for the advantage of the world that the next generation that inhabits Colorado should consist of whites instead of reds. That this result should not be brought about by cruelty or fraud upon the now-existing Indians, is all that we need require. The gradual extinction of the inferior races is not only a law of nature, but a blessing to mankind.

The Indian question is not likely to be one much longer : before I reached England again, I learnt that the Coloradan capital had offered " twenty dollars apiece for Indian scalps with ears on."

CHAPTER XII.

COLORADO.

WHEN you have once set eyes upon the never-ending sweep of the Great Plains, you no longer wonder that America rejects Malthusianism. As Strachey says of Virginia, " Here is ground enough to satisfy the most covetous and wide affection." The freedom of these grand countries was worth the tremendous con- flict in which it was, in reality, the foremost question ; their future is of enormous moment to America.

Travellers soon learn, when making estimates of a country's value, to despise no feature of the landscape ; that of the Plains is full of life, full of charm — lonely, indeed, but never wearisome. Now great rolling uplands of enormous sweep, now boundless grassy plains ; there is all the grandeur of monotony, and yet continual change. Sometimes the distances are broken by blue buttes or rugged bluffs. Over all there is a sparkling atmo- sphere and never-failing breeze ; the air is bracing even when most hot ; the sky is cloudless, and no rain falls. A solitude which no words can paint, and the boundless prairie swell, convey an idea of vastness which is the overpowering feature of the Plains.

Maps do not remove the impression produced by views. The Arkansas river, which is born and dies within the limit of the Plains, is two thousand miles in length, and is navigable for eight hundred miles. The Platte and Yellowstone are each of them as long. Into the Plains and Plateau you could put all India twice. The impression is not merely one of size. There is perfect beauty, wondrous fertility, in the lonely steppe ; no patriotism, no love of home, can prevent the traveler wishing nexe to end his days.

90 GREATER BRITAIN. CHAP, xu,

To thase who love the sea, there is a double cliarm. Not only is the roll of the prairie as grand as that of the Atlantic, but the crispness of the wind, the absence of trees, the multi- tude of tiny bloom' jpon the sod, all conspire to give a feeling of nearness to the ocean, the effect of which is that we are always expecting to hail it from off the top of the next hillock.

The resemblance to the Tartar Plains has been remarked by Coloradan writers ; it may be traced much further than they have carried it. Not only are the earth, air, and water much alike, but in Colorado, as in Bokhara, there are oil-wells and mud volcanoes. The colour of the landscape is, in summer, green and flowers ; in fall-time, yellow and flowers, but flowers ever.

The eastern and western portions of the Plains are not alike. In Kansas the grass is tall and rank ; the ravines are filled with cottonwood, hickory, and black walnut ; here and there are square miles of sunflowers, from seven to nine feet high. As we came west, we found that the sunflowers dwindled, and at Denver they are from three to nine inches in height, the oddest little plants in nature, but thorough sunflowers for all their smallness. We found the buffalo in the eastern plains in the long bunch- grass, but in the winter they work to the west in search of the sweet and juicy " blue grass," which they rub out from under the snow in the Coloradan plains. This grass is crisp as hair, and so short that, as the story goes, you must lather before you mow it. The " blue grass " has high vitality : if a wagon train is camped for a single night among the sunflowers or tall weeds, this crisp turf at once springs up, and holds the ground for ever.

The most astounding feature of these plains is their capacity to receive millions, and, swallowing them up, to wait open- mouthed for more. Vast and silent, fertile yet waste, field-like yet untilled, they have room for the Huns, the Goths, the Vandals, for all the teeming multitudes, that have poured and can pour from the plains of Asia and of Central Europe. Twice as large as Hindostan, more temperate, more habitable, nature has placed them here hedgeless, gateless, free to all — a green field for the support of half the human race, unclaimed, untouched, awaiting, smiling, hands and plough.

There are two curses upon this land. Here, as in India, the

CHAT', xii.l COLORADO. <»i

rivers depend on the melting of distant snows for their sup- plies, and in the hot weather are represented by beds of parched white sand. So hot and dry is a great portion of the land, that crops require irrigation. Water for drinking purposes is scarce ; artesian bores succeed, but they are somewhat costly for the Coloradan purse, and the supply from common wells is brackish. This, perhaps, may be in part accounted for by the Western mode of " prospecting " after water, under which it is agreed that if none be found at ten feet, a trial shall be made at a fresh spot. The thriftless ranchman would sooner find bad water at nine feet than good at eleven.

Irrigation by means of dams and reservoirs, such as those we are building in Victoria, is but a question of cost and time. The never-failing breezes of the Plains may be utilized for water-raising,* and with water all is possible. Even in the mountain plateau, overspread as it is with soda, it has been found, as by French farmers in Algeria, that, under irrigation, the more alkali the better corn-crop.

When fires are held in check by special enactments, such as those which have been passed in Victoria and South Australia, and the waters of the winter streams retained for summer use by tanks and dams ; when artesian wells are frequent and irri- gation general, belts of timber will become possible upon the Plains. Once planted, these will in their turn mitigate the extremes of climate, and keep alike in check the forces of evaporation, sun, and wind. Cultivation itself brings rain, and steam will soon be available for pumping water out of wells, for there is a great natural store of brown coal and of oil-bearing shale near Denver, so that the future would be bright were it not for the locusts — the scourge of the Plains — the second curse. The coming of the chirping hordes is a real calamity in these far-western countries. Their departure, whenever it occurs, is officially announced by the governor of the State.

I have seen a field of Indian corn stripped bare of every leaf and cob by the " crickets ; " but the owner told me that he found consolation in the fact that they ate up the weeds as well. For the locusts there is no cure. The plovers may eat a few billions,

• This has new been Uuno.

«j» GREATER BRITAIN. [CHAP. xn.

but, as a rule, Coloradans must learn to expect that the locusts will increase with the increase of the crops on which they feed. The more corn, the more locusts — the more plovers, perhaps ; a clear gain to the locusts and plovers, but a dead loss to the farmers and ranchmen.

The Coloradan "boys" are a handsome, intelligent race. The mixture of Celtic and Saxon blood has here produced a generous and noble manhood ; and the absence of forest, and consequent exposure to wind and sun, has exterminated ague, and driven away the hatchet-face ; but for all this, the Coloradans may have to succumb to the locusts. At present they affect to despise them. " How may you get on in Colorado ?" said a Missourian one day to a "boy" that was up at St. Louis. " Purty well, guess, if it warn't for the insects." " What insects ? Crickets ?" " Crickets ! Wall, guess not — jess insects like : rattlesnakes, panther, bar, catamount, and sich like."

" The march of empire stopped by a grasshopper " would be a good heading for a Denver paper, but would not represent a fact. The locusts may alter the step, but not cause a halt. If corn is impossible, cattle are not ; already thousands are pas- tured round Denver on the natural grass. For horses, for merino sheep, these rolling table-lands are peculiarly adapted. The New Zealand paddock system may be applied to the whole of this vast region — Dutch clover, French lucern, could replace the Indian grasses, and four sheep to the acre would seem no extravagant estimate of the carrying capability of the lands. The world must come here for its tallow, its wool, its hides, its food.

In this seemingly happy conclusion there lurks a danger, Flocks and herds are the main props of great farming, the natural supporters of an aristocracy. Cattle breeding is incon- sistent, if not with republicanism, at least with pure democracy. There are dangerous classes of two kinds — those who have too many acres, as well as those who have too few. The danger at least is real. Nothing short of violence or special legislation can prevent the Plains from continuing to be for ever that which under nature's farming they have ever been — the feedirg ground for mighty flocks, the cattle pasture of the world.

93

CHAPTER XIII

ROCKY MOUNTAINS.

*• WHAT will I do for you if you stop here among us ? Why, I'll name that peak after you in the next survey," said Governor Gilpin, pointing to a snowy mountain towering to its 15,000 feet in the direction of Mount Lincoln. I was not to be tempted, however ; and as for Dixon, there is already a county named after him in Nebraska : so off we went along the foot of the hi!!s on our road to the Great Salt Lake, following the " Cherokee Trail"

Striking north from Denver by Vasquez Fork and Cache la Poudre — called " Cash le Powder," just as Mont Royal has be- come Montreal, and Sault de Ste. Marie, Soo — we entered the Black Mountains, or Eastern foot-hills, at Beaver Creek. On the second day, at two in the afternoon, we reached Virginia Dale for breakfast, without adventure, unless it were the shooting of a monster rattlesnake that lay " coiled in our path upon the mountain side." Had we been but a few minutes later, we should have made it a halt for " supper " instead of breakfast, as the drivers had but these two names for our daily meals, at whatever hour they took place. Our " breakfasts " varied from 3.30 A.M. to 2 P.M. • our suppers from 3 P.M. to 2 A.M.

Here we found the weird red rocks that give to the river and the territory their name of Colorado, and came upon the moun- tain plateau at the spot where last year the Utes scalped seven men only three hours after Speaker Colfax and a Congressional party had passed with their escort.

While trundling over the sandy wastes of Laramie Plains, we sighted the Wind river chain drawn by Bierstadt in his great picture of the " Rocky Mountains," The painter has caught

94 GREATER JRRITAtN, [CHAP. Xltt

the forms, but missed the atmosphere of the range : the clouds and mists are those of Maine and Massachusetts ; there is colour more vivid, darkness more lurid, in the storms of Colorado.

This was our first sight of the main range since we entered the Rlrfck Hills, although we passed through the gorges at the very foot of Long's Peak. It was not till we had reached the rolling hills of Medecine Bow — a hundred miles beyond the peak — that we once more caught sight of it shining in the rear.

In the night between the second and third days, the frost was so bitter, at the great altitude to which we had attained, that we resorted to every expedient to keep out the cold. While I was trying to peg down one of the leathern flaps of our ambulance with the pencil from my note-book, my eye caught the moonlight on the ground, and I drew back saying " We are on the snow." The next time we halted, I found that what I had seen was an impalpable white dust, the much dreaded alkali.

In the morning of the third day we found ourselves in a country of dazzling white, dotted with here and there a tuft of sage-brush — an Artemisia akin to that of the Algerian highlands. At last we were in the "American desert" — the "Mauvaises ferres."

Once only did we escape for a time from alkali and sage to sweet waters and sweet grass. Near Bridger's Pass and the " divide " between Atlantic and Pacific floods, we came on a long valley swept by chilly breezes, and almost unfit for human habitation from the rarefaction of the air, but blessed with pasture ground on which domesticated herds of Himalayan yak should one day feed. Settlers in Utah will find out that this animal, which would flourish here at altitudes of from 4000 to 14,000 feet, and which bears the most useful of all furs, re- quires less herbage in proportion to its weight and size than almost any animal we know.

This Bridger's Pass route is that by which the telegraph lint