"Marse Henry"

An Autobiography

By

Henry Watterson

Volume II

Illustrated

Contents

Chapter the Thirteenth

 Charles Eames and Charles Sumner-Schurzand Lamar--I Go to Congress--A Heroic Kentuckian--Stephen Foster and His Songs--Music and Theodore Thomas

Chapter the Fourteenth

 Henry Adams and the Adams Family--John Hay and Frank Mason--The Three _Mousquetaires_ of Culture--Paris--"The Frenchman"--The South of France

Chapter the Fifteenth

 Still the Gay Capital of France--Its Environs--Walewska and De Morny--Thackeray in Paris--A _Pension_ Adventure

Chapter the Sixteenth

 Monte Carlo--The European Shrine of Sport and Fashion--Apocryphal Gambling Stories--Leopold, King of the Belgians--An Able and Picturesque Man of Business

Chapter the Seventeenth

 A Parisian _Pension_--The Widow of Walewska--Napoleon's Daughter-in-Law--The Changeless--A Moral and Orderly City

Chapter the Eighteenth

 The Grover Cleveland Period--President Arthur and Mr. Blaine--John Chamberlin--The Decrees of Destiny

Chapter the Nineteenth

 Mr. Cleveland in the White House--Mr. Bayard in the Department of State--Queer Appointments to Office--The One-Party Power--The End of North and South Sectionalism

Chapter the Twentieth

 The Real Grover Cleveland--Two Clevelands Before and After Marriage--A Correspondence and a Break of Personal Relations

Chapter the Twenty-First

 Stephen Foster, the Song-Writer--A Friend Comes to the Rescu His Originality--"My Old Kentucky Home" and the "Old Folks at Home"--General Sherman and "Marching Through Georgia"

Chapter the Twenty-Second

 Theodore Roosevelt--His Problematic Character--He Offers Me an Appointment--His _Bonhomie_ and Chivalry--Proud of His Rebel Kin

Chapter the Twenty-Third

 The Actor and the Journalist--The Newspaper and the State--Joseph Jefferson--His Personal and Artistic Career--Modest Character and Religious Belief

Chapter the Twenty-Fourth

 The Writing of Memoirs--Some Characteristics of Carl Shurz--Sam Bowles--Horace White and the Mugwumps

Chapter the Twenty-Fifth

 Every Trade Has Its Tricks--I Play One on William McKinley--Far Away Party Politics and Political Issues

Chapter the Twenty-Sixth

 A Libel on Mr. Cleveland--His Fondness for Cards--Some Poker Stories--The "Senate Game"--Tom Ochiltree, Senator Allison and General Schenck

Chapter the Twenty-Seventh

 The Profession of Journalism--Newspapers and Editors in America--Bennett, Greeley and Raymond--Forney and Dana--The Education of a Journalist

Chapter the Twenty-Eighth

 Bullies and Braggarts--Some Kentucky Illustrations--The Old Galt House--The Throckmortons--A Famous Sugeon--"Old Hell's Delight"

Chapter the Twenty-Ninth

 About Political Conventions, State and National--"Old Ben Butler"--His Appearance as a Trouble-Maker in the Democratic National Convention of 1892--Tarifa and the Tariff--Spain as a Frightful Example

Chapter the Thirtieth

 The Makers of the Republic--Lincoln, Jefferson, Clay and Webster--The Proposed League of Nations--The Wilsonian Incertitude--The "New Freedom"

Chapter the Thirty-First

 The Age of Miracles--A Story of Franklin Pierce--Simon Suggs Billy Sunday--Jefferson Davis and Aaron Burr--Certain Constitutional Shortcomings

Chapter the Thirty-Second

 A War Episode--I Meet my Fater--I Marry and Make a Home--The Ups and Downs of Life Lead to a Happy Old Age

Illustrations

Henry Watterson--Fifty Years Ago

Henry Woodfire Grady--One of Mr. Watterson's "Boys"

Mr. Watterson's Library at "Mansfield"

A Corner of "Mansfield"--Home of Mr. Watterson

Henry Watterson (Photograph Taken in Florida)

Henry Watterson. From a painting by Louis Mark in the Manhattan Club, NewYork

"MARSE HENRY"

Chapter the Thirteenth

 Charles Eames and Charles Sumner-Schurzand Lamar--I Go to Congress--A Heroic Kentuckian--Stephen Foster and His Songs--Music and Theodore Thomas

I

Swift's definition of "conversation" did not preside over or direct thedaily intercourse between Charles Sumner, Charles Eames and Robert J. Walker in the old days in the National Capital. They did not converse. Theydiscoursed. They talked sententiously in portentous essays and learneddissertations. I used to think it great, though I nursed no little dislikeof Sumner. 

Charles Eames was at the outset of his career a ne'er-do-well NewEnglander--a Yankee Jack-of-all-trades--kept at the front by an exceedinglyclever wife. Through the favor she enjoyed at court he received from Pierceand Buchanan unimportant diplomatic appointments. During their sojourns inWashington their home was a kind of political and literary headquarters. Mrs. Eames had established a salon--the first attempt of the kind madethere; and it was altogether a success. Her Sundays evenings were notable, indeed. Whoever was worth seeing, if in town, might usually be found there. Charles Sumner led the procession. He was a most imposing person. Bothhandsome and distinguished in appearance, he possessed in an eminent degreethe Harvard pragmatism--or, shall I say, affectation?--and seemed neverhappy except on exhibition. He had made a profitable political and personalissue of the Preston Brooks attack. Brooks was an exceeding light weight, but he did for Sumner more than Sumner could ever have done for himself. 

In the Charles Eames days Sumner was exceedingly disagreeable to me. Manypeople, indeed, thought him so. Many years later, in the Greeley campaignof 1872, Schurz brought us together--they had become as very brothers inthe Senate--and I found him the reverse of my boyish ill conceptions. 

He was a great old man. He was a delightful old man, every inch astatesman, much of a scholar, and something of a hero. I grew in time to beactually fond of him, passed with him entire afternoons and evenings in hislibrary, mourned sincerely when he died, and went with Schurz to Boston, onthe occasion when that great German-American delivered the memorial addressin honor of the dead Abolitionist. 

Of all the public men of that period Carl Schurz most captivated me. Whenwe first came into personal relations, at the Liberal Convention, whichassembled at Cincinnati and nominated Greeley and Brown as a presidentialticket, he was just turned forty-three; I, two and thirty. The closestintimacy followed. Our tastes were much alike. Both of us had been educatedin music. He played the piano with intelligence and feeling--especiallySchumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, neither of us ever having quite reachedthe "high jinks" of Wagner. 

To me his oratory was wonderful. He spoke to an audience of five or tenthousand as he would have talked to a party of three or six. His style wassimple, natural, unstrained; the lucid statement and cogent argument nowand again irradiated by a salient passage of satire or a burst of not tooeloquent rhetoric. 

He was quite knocked out by the nomination of Horace Greeley. For a longtime he could not reconcile himself to support the ticket. Horace White andI addressed ourselves to the task of "fetching him into camp"--there beingin point of fact nowhere else for him to go--though we had to get up whatwas called The Fifth Avenue Conference to make a bridge. 

Truth to say, Schurz never wholly adjusted himself to political conditionsin the United States. He once said to me in one of the querulous moods thatsometimes overcame him: "If I should live a hundred years my enemies wouldstill call me a--Dutchman!"

It was Schurz, as I have said, who brought Lamar and me together. TheMississippian had been a Secession Member of Congress when I was a Unionistscribe in the reporters' gallery. I was a furious partisan in thosedays and disliked the Secessionists intensely. Of them, Lamar was mostaggressive. I later learned that he was very many-sided and accomplished, the most interesting and lovable of men. He and Schurz "froze together, "as, brought together by Schurz, he and I "froze together. " On one side hewas a sentimentalist and on the other a philosopher, but on all sides afighter. 

They called him a dreamer. He sprang from a race of chevaliers andscholars. Oddly enough, albeit in his moods a recluse, he was a man ofthe world; a favorite in society; very much at home in European courts, especially in that of England; the friend of Thackeray, at whose house, when in London, he made his abode. Lady Ritchie--Anne Thackeray--told memany amusing stories of his whimsies. He was a man among brainy men and alion among clever women. 

We had already come to be good friends and constant comrades when thewhirligig of time threw us together for a little while in the lower houseof Congress. One day he beckoned me over to his seat. He was leaningbackward with his hands crossed behind his head. 

As I stood in front of him he said: "On the eighth of February, 1858, Mrs. Gwin, of California, gave a fancy dress ball. Mr. Lamar, of Mississippi, a member of Congress, was there. Also a glorious young woman--a vision ofbeauty and grace--with whom the handsome and distinguished young statesmandanced--danced once, twice, thrice, taking her likewise down to supper. He went to bed, turned his face to the wall and dreamed of her. That wastwenty years ago. To-day this same Mr. Lamar, after an obscure interregnum, was with Mrs. Lamar looking over Washington for an apartment. In quest ofcheap lodging they came to a mean house in a mean quarter, where a poor, wizened, ill-clad woman showed them through the meanly furnished rooms. Ofcourse they would not suffice. 

"As they were coming away the great Mr. Lamar said to the poor landlady, 'Madam, have you lived long in Washington?' She said all her life. 'Madam, 'he continued, 'were you at a fancy dress ball given by Mrs. Senator Gwinof California, the eighth of February, 1858?' She said she was. 'Do youremember, ' the statesman, soldier and orator continued, 'a young andhandsome Mississippian, a member of Congress, by the name of Lamar?' Shesaid she didn't. "

I rather think that Lamar was the biggest brained of all the men I have metin Washington. He possessed the courage of his convictions. A doctrinaire, there was nothing of the typical doctrinaire, or theorist, about him. Hereally believed that cotton was king and would compel England to espousethe cause of the South. 

Despite his wealth of experience and travel he was not overmuch of araconteur, but he once told me a good story about his friend Thackeray. Thetwo were driving to a banquet of the Literary Fund, where Dickens was topreside. "Lamar, " said Thackeray, "they say I can't speak. But if I want toI can speak. I can speak every bit as good as Dickens, and I am going toshow you to-night that I can speak almost as good as you. " When the momentarrived Thackeray said never a word. Returning in the cab, both silent, Thackeray suddenly broke forth. "Lamar, " he exclaimed, "don't you think youhave heard the greatest speech to-night that was never delivered?"

II

Holding office, especially going to Congress, had never entered any wishor scheme of mine. Office seemed to me ever a badge of bondage. I knew toomuch of the national capital to be allured by its evanescent and lightsomehonors. When the opportunity sought me out none of its illusions appealedto me. But after a long uphill fight for personal and political recognitionin Kentucky an election put a kind of seal upon the victory I had won andenabled me in a way to triumph over my enemies. I knew that if I acceptedthe nomination offered me I would get a big popular vote--as I did--and so, one full term, and half a term, incident to the death of the sitting memberfor the Louisville district being open to me, I took the short term, refusing the long term. 

Though it was midsummer and Congress was about to adjourn I went toWashington and was sworn in. A friend of mine, Col. Wake Holman, had madea bet with one of our pals I would be under arrest before I had beentwenty-four hours in town, and won it. It happened in this wise: The nightof the day when I took my seat there was an all-night session. I knew toowell what that meant, and, just from a long tiresome journey, I went to bedand slept soundly till sunrise. Just as I was up and dressing for a strollabout the old, familiar, dearly loved quarter of the town there came animperative rap upon the door and a voice said: "Get up, colonel, quick!This is a sergeant at arms. There has been a call of the House and I amafter you. Everybody is drunk, more or less, and they are noisy to havesome fun with you. "

It was even as he said. Everybody, more or less, was drunk--especially theprovisional speaker whom Mr. Randall had placed in the chair--and when wearrived and I was led a prisoner down the center aisle pandemonium brokeloose. 

They had all sorts of fun with me, such as it was. It was moved that Ibe fined the full amount of my mileage. Then a resolution was offeredsuspending my membership and sending me under guard to the old Capitolprison. Finally two or three of my friends rescued me and business wasallowed to proceed. It was the last day of a very long session and thosewho were not drunk were worn out. 

When I returned home there was a celebration in honor of the bet WakeHolman had won at my expense. Wake was the most attractive and lovable ofmen, by nature a hero, by profession a "filibuster" and soldier of fortune. At two and twenty he was a private in Col. Humphrey Marshall's Regimentof Kentucky Riflemen, which reached the scene of hostilities upon the RioGrande in the midsummer of 1846. He had enlisted from Owen county--"SweetOwen, " as it used to be called--and came of good stock, his father, Col. Harry Holman, in the days of aboriginal fighting and journalism, a frontiercelebrity. Wake's company, out on a scout, was picked off by the Mexicans, and the distinction between United States soldiers and Texan rebels notbeing yet clearly established, a drumhead court-martial ordered "thedecimation. "

This was a decree that one of every ten of the Yankee captives should beshot. There being a hundred of Marshall's men, one hundred beans--ninetywhite and ten black--were put in a hat. Then the company was mustered as ondress parade. Whoso drew a white bean was to be held prisoner of war; whosodrew a black bean was to die. 

In the early part of the drawing Wake drew a white bean. Toward the closethe turn of a neighbor and comrade from Owen county who had left a wife andbaby at home was called. He and Wake were standing together, Holman brushedhim aside, walked out in his place and drew his bean. It turned out to be awhite one. Twice within the half hour death had looked him in the eye andfound no blinking there. 

I have seen quite a deal of hardihood, endurance, suffering, in both womenand men; splendid courage on the field of action; perfect self-possessionin the face of danger; but I rather think that Wake Holman's exploit thatday--next to actually dying for a friend, what can be nobler than beingwilling to die for him?--is the bravest thing I know or have ever been toldof mortal man. 

Wake Holman went to Cuba in the Lopez Rebellion of 1851, and fought underPickett at the Battle of Cardenas. In 1855-56 he was in Nicaragua, withWalker. He commanded a Kentucky regiment of cavalry on the Union side inour War of Sections. After the war he lived the life of a hunter and fisherat his home in Kentucky; a cheery, unambitious, big-brained and big-heartedcherub, whom it would not do to "projeck" with, albeit with entire safetyyou could pick his pocket; the soul of simplicity and amiability. 

To have known him was an education in primal manhood. To sit at hishospitable board, with him at the head of the table, was an inspiration inthe genius of life and the art of living. One of his familiars started thejoke that when Wake drew the second white bean "he got a peep. " He tookit kindly; though in my intimacy with him, extending over thirty years, Inever heard him refer to any of his adventures as a soldier. 

It was not possible that such a man should provide for his old age. He hadlittle forecast. He knew not the value of money. He had humor, affectionand courage. I held him in real love and honor. When the Mexican WarPension Act was passed by Congress I took his papers to General Black, theCommissioner of Pensions, and related this story. 

"I have promised Gen. Cerro Gordo Williams, " said General Black, referringto the then senior United States Senator from Kentucky, "that his nameshall go first on the roll of these Mexican pensioners. But"--and theGeneral looked beamingly in my face, a bit tearful, and says he: "WakeHolman's name shall come right after. " And there it is. 

III

I was very carefully and for those times not ignorantly taught in music. Schell, his name was, and they called him "Professor. " He lived over inGeorgetown, where he had organized a little group of Prussian refugees intoa German club, and from my tenth to my fifteenth year--at first regularly, and then in a desultory way as I came back to Washington City from myschool in Philadelphia, he hammered Bach and Handel and Mozart--nothing somodern as Mendelssohn--into my not unwilling nor unreceptive mind, for mybent was in the beginning to compose dramas, and in the end operas. 

Adelina Patti was among my child companions. Once in the national capital, when I was 12 years old and Adelina 9, we played together at a charityconcert. She had sung "The Last Rose of Summer, " and I had played herbrother-in-law's variation upon "Home, Sweet Home. " The audience wasenthusiastic. We were called out again and again. Then we came on the stagetogether, and the applause increasing I sat down at the keyboard and playedan accompaniment with my own interpolations upon "Old Folks At Home, " whichI had taught Adelina, and she sang the words. Then they fairly took theroof off. 

Once during a sojourn in Paris I was thrown with Christine Nilsson. She wasin the heyday of her success at the Theater Lyrique under the patronage ofMadame Miolan-Carvalho. One day I said to her: "The time may come when youwill be giving concerts. " She was indignant. "Nevertheless, " I continued, "let me teach you a sure encore. " I played her Stephen Foster's immortalditty. She was delighted. The sequel was that it served her even a betterturn than it had served Adelina Patti. 

I played and transposed for the piano most of the melodies of Foster asthey were published, they being first produced in public by Christy'sMinstrels. 

IV

Stephen Foster was the ne'er-do-well of a good Pennsylvania family. Asister of his had married a brother of James Buchanan. There were twodaughters of this marriage, nieces of the President, and when they werevisiting the White House we had--shall I dare write it?--high jinks withour nigger-minstrel concerts on the sly. 

Will S. Hays, the rival of Foster as a song writer and one of my reporterson the Courier-Journal, told me this story: "Foster, " said he, "was a gooddeal of what you might call a barroom loafer. He possessed a sweet tenorvoice before it was spoiled by drink, and was fond of music, thoughtechnically he knew nothing about it. He had a German friend who whenhe died left him a musical scrapbook, of all sorts of odds and ends oforiginal text. There is where Foster got his melodies. When the scrapbookgave out he gave out. "

I took it as merely the spleen of a rival composer. But many years afterin Vienna I heard a concert given over exclusively to the performance ofcertain posthumous manuscripts of Schubert. Among the rest were selectionsfrom an unfinished opera--"Rosemonde, " I think it was called--in which thewhole rhythm and movements and parts of the score of Old Folks at Home werethe feature. 

It was something to have grown up contemporary, as it were, with thesesongs. Many of them were written in the old Rowan homestead, just outsideof Bardstown, Ky. , where Louis Philippe lived and taught, and for a seasonTalleyrand made his abode. The Rowans were notable people. John Rowan, the elder, head of the house, was a famous lawyer, who divided oratoricalhonors with Henry Clay, and like Clay, was a Senator in Congress; his son, "young John, " as he was called, Stephen Foster's pal, went as minister toNaples, and fought duels, and was as Bob Acres wanted to be, "a devil of afellow. " He once told me he had been intimate with Thackeray when they werewild young men in Paris, and that they had both of them known the womanwhom Thackeray had taken for the original of Becky Sharp. 

The Foster songs quite captivated my boyhood. I could sing a little, aswell as play, and learned each of them--especially Old Folks at Home andMy Old Kentucky Home--as they appeared. Their contemporary vogue wastremendous. Nothing has since rivalled the popular impression they made, except perhaps the Arthur Sullivan melodies. 

Among my ambitions to be a great historian, dramatist, soldier and writerof romance I desired also to be a great musician, especially a greatpianist. The bone-felon did the business for this later. But all my life Ihave been able to thumb the keyboard at least for the children to dance, and it has been a recourse and solace sometimes during intervals ofembittered journalism and unprosperous statesmanship. 

V

Theodore Thomas and I used to play duos together. He was a master of theviolin before he took to orchestration. We remained the best of friends tothe end of his days. 

On the slightest provocation, or none, we passed entire nights together. Once after a concert he suddenly exclaimed: "Don't you think Wagner was a---- fraud?"

A little surprised even by one of his outbreaks, I said: "Wagner may havewritten some trick music but I hardly think that he was a fraud. "

He reflected a moment. "Well, " he continued, "it may not lie in my mouth tosay it--and perhaps I ought not to say it--I know I am most responsible forthe Wagner craze--but I consider him a ---- fraud. "

He had just come from a long "classic entertainment, " was worn out withtravel and worry, and meant nothing of the sort. 

After a very tiresome concert when he was railing at the hard lines of aperipatetic musician I said: "Come with me and I will give you a soothingquail and as dry a glass of champagne as you ever had in your life. "

The wine was poured out and he took a sip. 

"I don't call that dry wine, " he crossly said, and took another sip. "MyGod, " without a pause he continued, "isn't that great?"

Of course he was impulsive, even impetuous. Beneath his seeming coldexterior and admirable self-control--the discipline of the masterartist--lay the moods and tenses of the musical temperament. He knew littleor nothing outside of music and did not care to learn. I tried to interesthim in politics. It was of no use. First he laughed my suggestions to scornand then swore like a trooper. German he was, through and through. Itwas well that he passed away before the world war. Pat Gilmore--"PatrickSarsfield, " we always called him--was a born politician, and if he had notbeen a musician he would have been a statesman. I kept the peace betweenhim and Theodore Thomas by an ingenious system of telling all kinds of kindthings each had said of the other, my "repetitions" being pure inventionsof my own. 

Chapter the Fourteenth

 Henry Adams and the Adams Family--John Hay and Frank Mason--The Three _Mousquetaires_ of Culture--Paris--"The Frenchman"--The South of France

I

I have been of late reading The Education of Henry Adams, and it recallsmany persons and incidents belonging to the period about which I am nowwriting. I knew Henry Adams well; first in London, then in Boston andfinally throughout his prolonged residence in Washington City. He was anAdams; very definitely an Adams, but, though his ghost may revisit theglimpses of the moon and chide me for saying so, with an English "cut tohis jib. "

No three brothers could be more unlike than Charles Francis, John Quincyand Henry Adams. Brooks Adams I did not know. They represented the fourthgeneration of the brainiest pedigree--that is in continuous line--known toour family history. Henry thought he was a philosopher and tried to be one. He thought he was a man of the world and wanted to be one. He was, in spiteof himself, a provincial. 

Provincialism is not necessarily rustic, even suburban. There is noprovincial quite so provincial as he who has passed his life in greatcities. The Parisian boulevardier taken away from the asphalt, the cockneya little off Clapham Common and the Strand, is lost. Henry Adams knewhis London and his Paris, his Boston and his Quincy--we must not forgetQuincy--well. But he had been born, and had grown up, between the lids ofhistory, and for all his learning and travel he never got very far outsidethem. 

In manner and manners, tone and cast of thought he wasEnglish--delightfully English--though he cultivated the cosmopolite. His house in the national capital, facing the Executive Mansion acrossLafayette Square--especially during the life of his wife, an adorablewoman, who made up in sweetness and tact for some of the qualities lackingin her husband--was an intellectual and high-bred center, a rendezvous forthe best ton and the most accepted people. The Adamses may be said tohave succeeded the Eameses as leaders in semi-social, semi-literary andsemi-political society. 

There was a trio--I used to call them the Three Musketeers of Culture--JohnHay, Henry Cabot Lodge and Henry Adams. They made an interesting andinseparable trinity--Caleb Cushing, Robert J. Walker and Charles Sumner notmore so--and it was worth while to let them have the floor and to hear themtalk; Lodge, cool and wary as a politician should be; Hay, helterskelter, the real man of the world crossed on a Western stock; and Adams, somethingof a litératteur, a statesman and a cynic. 

John Randolph Tucker, who when he was in Congress often met Henry atdinners and the like, said to him on the appearance of the early volumes ofhis History of the United States: "I am not disappointed, for how could anAdams be expected to do justice to a Randolph?"

While he was writing this history Adams said to me: "There is an oldvillain--next to Andrew Jackson the greatest villain of his time--aKentuckian--don't say he was a kinsman of yours!--whose papers, if heleft any, I want to see. "

"To whom are you referring?" I asked with mock dignity. 

"To John Adair, " he answered. 

"Well, " said I, "John Adair married my grandmother's sister and I can putyou in the way of getting whatever you require. "

I have spoken of John Hay as Master of the Revels in the oldSutherland-Delmonico days. Even earlier than that--in London and Paris--anintimacy had been established between us. He married in Cleveland, Ohio, and many years passed before I came up with him again. One day in WhitelawReid's den in the Tribune Building he reappeared, strangely changed--nolonger the rosy-cheeked, buoyant boy--an overserious, prematurely old man. I was shocked, and when he had gone Reid, observing this, said: "Oh, Haywill come round all right. He is just now in one of his moods. I picked himup in Piccadilly the other day and by sheer force brought him over. "

When we recall the story of Hay's life--one weird tragedy after another, from the murder of Lincoln to the murder of McKinley, including the tragicend of two members of his immediate family--there rises in spite of thegrandeur that pursued him a single exclamation: "The pity of it!"

This is accentuated by Henry Adams' Education. Yet the silent courage withwhich Hay met disaster after disaster must increase both the sympathyand the respect of those who peruse the melancholy pages of that vividnarrative. Toward the end, meeting him on a public occasion, I said: "Youwork too hard--you are not looking well. "

"I am dying, " said he. 

"Yes, " I replied in the way of banter, "you are dying of fame and fortune. "

But I went no further. He was in no mood for the old verbal horseplay. 

He looked wan and wizened. Yet there were still several years before him. When he came from Mannheim to Paris it was clear that the end was nigh. Idid not see him--he was too ill to see any one--but Frank Mason kept meadvised from day to day, and when, a month or two later, having reachedhome, the news came to us that he was dead we were nowise surprised, andalmost consoled by the thought that rest had come at last. 

Frank Mason and his wife--"the Masons, " they were commonly called, for Mrs. Mason made a wondrous second to her husband--were from Cleveland, Ohio, shea daughter of Judge Birchard--Jennie Birchard--he a rising young journalistcaught in the late seventies by the glitter of a foreign appointment. Theyran the gamut of the consular service, beginning with Basel and Marseillesand ending with Frankfurt, Berlin and Paris. Wherever they were theirhouse was a very home--a kind of Yankee shrine--of visiting Americans andmilitant Americanism. 

Years before he was made consul general--in point of fact when he was plainconsul at Marseilles--he ran over to Paris for a lark. One day he said tome, "A rich old hayseed uncle of mine has come to town. He has money toburn and he wants to meet you. I have arranged for us to dine with him atthe Anglaise to-night and we are to order the dinner--carte blanche. " Therich old uncle to whom I was presented did not have the appearance of ahayseed. On the contrary he was a most distinguished-looking old gentleman. The dinner we ordered was "stunning"--especially the wines. When the billwas presented our host scanned it carefully, scrutinizing each item andmaking his own addition, altogether "like a thoroughbred. " Frank and Iwatched him not without a bit of anxiety mixed with contrition. When he hadpaid the score he said with a smile: "That was rather a steep bill, but wehave had rather a good dinner, and now, if you boys know of as good a dancehall we'll go there and I'll buy the outfit. "

II

First and last I have lived much in the erstwhile gay capital of France. Itwas gayest when the Duke de Morny flourished as King of the Bourse. He wasreputed the Emperor's natural half-brother. The breakdown of the Mexicanadventure, which was mostly his, contributed not a little to the finalNapoleonic fall. He died of dissipation and disappointment, and under thepseudonym of the Duke de Morra, Daudet celebrated him in "The Nabob. "

De Morny did not live to see the tumble of the house of cards he had built. Next after I saw Paris it was a pitiful wreck indeed; the Hotel de Villeand the Tuileries in flames; the Column gone from the Place Vendôme; butlater the rise of the Third Republic saw the revival of the unquenchablespirit of the irrepressible French. 

Nevertheless I should scarcely be taken for a Parisian. Once, whenwandering aimlessly, as one so often does through the Paris streets, one ofthe touts hanging round the Cafe de la Paix to catch the unwary strangerbeing a little more importunate than usual, I ordered him to go about hisbusiness. 

"This is my business, " he impudently answered. 

"Get away, I tell you!" I thundered, "I am a Parisian myself!"

He drew a little out of reach of the umbrella I held in my hand, and witha drawl of supreme and very American contempt, exclaimed, "Well, you don'tlook it, " and scampered off. 

Paris, however, is not all of France. Sometimes I have thought not thebest part of it. There is the south of France, with Avignon, the heart ofProvence, seat of the French papacy six hundred years ago, the metropolisof Christendom before the Midi was a region--Paris yet a village, and Romestruggling out of the debris of the ages--with Arles and Nîmes, and, aboveall, Tarascon, the home of the immortal Tartarin, for next-door neighbors. They are all hard by Marseilles. But Avignon ever most caught my fancy, forthere the nights seem peopled with the ghosts of warriors and cardinals, and there on festal mornings the spirits of Petrarch and his Laura walkabroad, the ramparts, which bade defiance to Goth and Vandal and Saracenhordes, now giving shelter to bats and owls, but the atmosphere laden withlegend

 _"... Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance and Provençal song and sun-burnt mirth. "_

Something too much of this! Let me not yield to the spell of thepicturesque. To recur to matters of fact and get down to prose and thetimes we live in let us halt a moment on this southerly journey and have alook in upon Lyons, the industrial capital of France, which is directly onthe way. 

The idiosyncrasy of Lyons is silk. There are two schools of introduction inthe art of silk weaving, one of them free to any lad in the city, the otherrequiring a trifle of matriculation. The first of these witnesses the wholeprocess of fabrication from the reeling of threads to the finishing ofdress goods, and the loom painting of pictures. It is most interesting ofcourse, the painstaking its most obvious feature, the individual weaverliving with his family upon a wage representing the cost of the barestnecessities of life. Again, and ever and ever again, the inequalities offortune! Where will it end?

The world has tried revolution and it has tried anarchy. Always thesurvival of the strong, nicknamed by Spencer and his ilk the "fittest. " Tenthousand heads were chopped off during the Terror in France to make roomfor whom? Not for the many, but the few; though it must be allowed that insome ways the conditions were improved. 

Yet here after a hundred years, here in Lyons, faithful, intelligent menstruggle for sixty, for forty cents a day, with never a hope beyond! Whatis to be done about it? Suppose the wealth of the universe were divided percapita, how long would it remain out of the clutches of the Napoleons offinance, only a percentage of whom find ultimately their Waterloo, littleto the profit of the poor who spin and delve, who fight and die, in theGrand Army of the Wretched!

III

We read a deal that is amusing about the southerly Frenchman. He is indeed_sui generis_. Some five and twenty years ago there appeared inLouisville a dapper gentleman, who declared himself a Marseillais, and whosubsequently came to be known variously as The Major and The Frenchman. Ishall not mention him otherwise in this veracious chronicle, but, lookingthrough the city directory of Marseilles I found an entire page devoted tohis name, though all the entries may not have been members of his family. There is no doubt that he was a Marseillais. 

Wandering through the streets of the old city, now in a café of LaCannebière and now along a quay of the Old Port, his ghost has oftencrossed my path and dogged my footsteps, though he has lain in his gravethis many a day. I grew to know him very well, to be first amused by him, then to be interested, and in the end to entertain an affection for him. 

The Major was a delightful composite of Tartarin of Tarascon and theBrigadier Gerard, with a dash of the Count of Monte Cristo; for when he wasflush--which by some odd coincidence happened exactly four times a year--hewas as liberal a spendthrift as one could wish to meet anywhere between thelittle principality of Monaco and the headwaters of the Nile; transparentas a child; idiosyncratic to a degree. 

I understand Marseilles better and it has always seemed nearer to me sincehe was born there and lived there when a boy, and, I much fear me, wasdriven away, the scapegrace of excellent and wealthy people; not, I feelsure, for any offense that touched the essential parts of his manhood. Agentler, a more upright and harmless creature I never knew in all my life. 

I very well recall when he first arrived in the Kentucky metropolis. Hisattire and raiment were faultless. He wore a rose in his coat, he carrieda delicate cane, and a most beautiful woman hung upon his arm. She was hiswife. It was a circumstance connected with this lady which led to the afterintimacy between him and me. She fell dangerously ill. I had casually mether husband as an all-round man-about-town, and by this token, seekingsympathy on lines of least resistance, he came to me with his sorrow. 

I have never seen grief more real and fervid. He swore, on his knees andwith tears in his eyes, that if she recovered, if God would give her backto him, he would never again touch a card; for gambling was his passion, and even among amateurs he would have been accounted the softest of softthings. His prayer was answered, she did recover, and he proceeded tofulfill his vow. 

But what was he to do? He had been taught, or at least he had learned, to do nothing, not even to play poker! I suggested that as running arestaurant was a French prerogative and that as he knew less about cookingthan about anything else--we had had a contest or two over the mysteries ofa pair of chafing dishes--and as there was not a really good eating placein Louisville, he should set up a restaurant. It was said rather in jestthan in earnest; but I was prepared to lend him the money. The next thing Iknew, and without asking for a dollar, he had opened The Brunswick. 

In those days I saw the Courier-Journal to press, turning night into day, and during a dozen years I took my twelve o'clock supper there. It was thusand from these beginnings that the casual acquaintance between us ripenedinto intimacy, and that I gradually came into a knowledge of the reservesbehind The Major's buoyant optimism and occasional gasconnade. 

He ate and drank sparingly; but he was not proof against the seductionof good company, and he had plenty of it, from William Preston to JosephJefferson, with such side lights as Stoddard Johnston, Boyd Winchester, Isaac Caldwell and Proctor Knott, of the Home Guard--very nearly all thecelebrities of the day among the outsiders--myself the humble witnessand chronicler. He secured an excellent chef, and of course we livedexceedingly well. 

The Major's most obvious peculiarity was that he knew everything and hadbeen everywhere. If pirates were mentioned he flowered out at once into anadventure upon the sea; if bandits, on the land. If it was Wall Streethe had a reminiscence and a scheme; if gambling, a hard-luck story anda system. There was no quarter of the globe of which he had not been aninhabitant. 

Once the timbered riches of Africa being mentioned, at once the Major gaveus a most graphic account of how "the old house"--for thus he designatedsome commercial establishment, which either had no existence or which hehad some reason for not more particularly indicating--had sent him incharge of a rosewood saw mill on the Ganges, and, after many ups and downs, of how the floods had come and swept the plant away; and Rudolph Fink, whowas of the party, immediately said, "I can attest the truth of The Major'sstory, because my brother Albert and I were in charge of some fishing campsat the mouth of the Ganges at the exact date of the floods, and we caughtmany of those rosewood logs in our nets as they floated out to sea. "

Augustine's Terrapin came to be for a while the rage in Philadelphia, andeven got as far as New York and Washington, and straightway, The Majordeclared he could and would make Augustine and his terrapin look "like amonkey. " He proposed to give a dinner. 

There were great preparations and expectancy. None of us ate much atluncheon that day. At the appointed hour, we assembled at The Brunswick. Iwill dismiss the decorations and the preludes except to say that they wereParisian. After a while in full regalia The Major appeared, a train ofservants following with a silver tureen. The lid was lifted. 

"_Voilà!_" says he. 

The vision disclosed to our startled eyes was an ocean that looked likebean soup flecked by a few strands of black crape!

The explosion duly arrived from the assembled gourmets, I, myself, I amsorry to say, leading the rebellion. 

"I put seeks terrapin in zat soup!" exclaimed The Frenchman, quite losinghis usual good English in his excitement. 

We reproached him. We denounced him. He was driven from the field. But hebore us no malice. Ten days later he invited us again, and this time SamWard himself could have found no fault with the terrapin. 

Next afternoon, when I knew The Major was asleep, I slipped back into thekitchen and said to Louis Garnier, the chef: "Is there any of that terrapinleft over from last night?"

All unconscious of his treason Louis took me into the pantry andtriumphantly showed me three jars bearing the Augustine label and thePhiladelphia express tags!

On another occasion a friend of The Major's, passing The Brunswick andobserving some diamond-back shells in the window said, "Major, have you anyreal live terrapins?"

[Illustration: Henry Woodfin Grady One of Mr. Watterson's "Boys". ]

"Live!" cried The Frenchman. "Only this morning I open the ice box and theywere all dancing the cancan. "

"Major, " persisted the friend, "I'll go you a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, youcannot show me an actual living terrapin. "

"What do you take me for--confidence man?" The Major retorted. "How youexpect an old sport like me to bet upon a certainty?"

"Never mind your ethics. The wager is drink, not money. In any event weshall have the wine. "

"Oh, well, " says The Frenchman, with a shrug and a droll grimace, "if youinsist on paying for a bottle of wine come with me. "

He took a lighted candle, and together they went back to the ice box. Itwas literally filled with diamond backs, and my friend thought he was gonefor sure. 

"Là!" says The Major with triumph, rummaging among the mass of shells withhis cane as he held the candle aloft. 

"But, " says my friend, ready to surrender, yet taking a last chance, "youtold me they were dancing the cancan!"

The Major picked up a terrapin and turned it over in his hand. Quite numband frozen, the animal within made no sign. Then he stirred the shellsabout in the box with his cane. Still not a show of life. Of a sudden hestopped, reflected a moment, then looked at his watch. 

"Ah, " he murmured. "I quite forget. The terrapin, they are asleep. It isten-thirty, and the terrapin he regularly go to sleep at ten o'clock bythe watch every night. " And without another word he reached for the VeuveCliquot!

For all his volubility in matters of romance and sentiment The Major wasexceeding reticent about his immediate self and his own affairs. Hislegends referred to the distant of time and place. A certain dignity couldnot be denied him, and, on occasion, a proper reserve; he rarely mentionedhis business--though he worked like a slave, and could not have been makingmuch or any profit--so that there rose the query how he contrived to makeboth ends meet. Little by little I came into the knowledge that there wasa money supply from somewhere; finally, it matters not how, that he had anannuity of forty thousand francs, paid in quarterly installments of tenthousand francs each. 

Occasionally he mentioned "the Old House, " and in relating the famousSophonisba episode late at night, and only in the very fastnesses ofthe wine cellar, as it were, at the most lachrymose passage he spoke of"l'Oncle Célestin, " with the deepest feeling. 

"Did you ever hear The Frenchman tell that story about Sophonisba?" DoctorStoic, whom on account of his affectation of insensibility we were wont tocall Old Adamant, once asked me. "Well, sir, the other night he told it tome, and he was drunk, and he cried, sir; and I was drunk, and I cried too!"

I had known The Frenchman now ten or a dozen years. That he camefrom Marseilles, that he had served on the Confederate side in theTrans-Mississippi, that he possessed an annuity, that he must have beenwell-born and reared, that he was simple, yet canny, and in his moneydealings scrupulously honest--was all I could be sure of. What had he doneto be ashamed about or wish to conceal? In what was he a black sheep, forthat he had been one seemed certain? Had the beautiful woman, his wife--atireless church and charity worker, who lived the life of a recluse and asaint--had she reclaimed him from his former self? I knew that she hadbeen the immediate occasion of his turning over a new leaf. But before hertime what had he been, what had he done?

Late one night, when the rain was falling and the streets were empty, Ientered The Brunswick. It was empty too. In the farthest corner of thelittle dining room The Major, his face buried in his hands, laid upon thetable in front of him, sat silently weeping. He did not observe my entranceand I seated myself on the opposite side of the table. Presently he lookedup, and seeing me, without a word passed me a letter which, all blisteredwith tears, had brought him to this distressful state. It was a formalFrench burial summons, with its long list of family names--his among therest--the envelope, addressed in a lady's hand--his sister's, the wife ofa nobleman in high military command--the postmark "Lyon. " Uncle Celestinwas dead. 

Thereafter The Frenchman told me much which I may not recall and must notrepeat; for, included in that funeral list were some of the best names inFrance, Uncle Célestin himself not the least of them. 

At last he died, and as mysteriously as he had come his body was takenaway, nobody knew when, nobody where, and with it went the beautiful woman, his wife, of whom from that day to this I have never heard a word. 

Chapter the Fifteenth

 Still the Gay Capital of France--Its Environs--Walewska and De Morny--Thackeray in Paris--A _Pension_ Adventure

I

Each of the generations thinks itself commonplace. Familiarity breedsequally indifference and contempt. Yet no age of the world has witnessed somuch of the drama of life--of the romantic and picturesque--as the agewe live in. The years betwixt Agincourt and Waterloo were not moredelightfully tragic than the years between Serajevo and Senlis. 

The gay capital of France remains the center of the stage and retains theinterest of the onlooking universe. All roads lead to Paris as all roadsled to Rome. In Dickens' day "a tale of two cities" could only mean Londonand Paris then, and ever so unalike. To be brought to date the title wouldhave now to read "three, " or even "four, " cities, New York and Chicagoputting in their claims for mundane recognition. 

I have been not only something of a traveller, but a diligent studentof history and a voracious novel reader, and, once-in-a-while, I get myhistory and my fiction mixed. This has been especially the case when thehum-drum of the Boulevards has driven me from the fascinations of the BeauQuartier into the by-ways of the Marais and the fastnesses of what was oncethe Latin Quarter. More than fifty years of intimacy have enabled me tolearn many things not commonly known, among them that Paris is the mostorderly and moral city in the world, except when, on rare and briefoccasions, it has been stirred to its depths. 

I have crossed the ocean many times--have lived, not sojourned, on thebanks of the Seine, and, as I shall never see the other side again--donot want to see it in its time of sorrow and garb of mourning--I may beforgiven a retrospective pause in this egotistic chronicle. Or, shall I notsay, a word or two of affectionate retrogression, though perchance it leadsme after the manner of Silas Wegg to drop into poetry and take a turn witha few ghosts into certain of their haunts, when you, dear sir, or madame, or miss, as the case may be, and I were living that "other life, " whereofwe remember so little that we cannot recall who we were, or what name wewent by, howbeit now-and-then we get a glimpse in dreams, or a "hunch" fromthe world of spirits, or spirts-and-water, which makes us fancy we mighthave been Julius Caesar, or Cleopatra--as maybe we were!--or at least Joanof Arc, or Jean Valjean!

II

Let me repeat that upon no spot of earth has the fable we call existencehad so rare a setting and rung up its curtain upon such a succession ofperformances; has so concentrated human attention upon mundane affairs; hascalled such a muster roll of stage favorites; has contributed to romance somany heroes and heroines, to history so many signal episodes and personalexploits, to philosophy so much to kindle the craving for vital knowledge, to stir sympathy and to awaken reflection. 

Greece and Rome seem but myths of an Age of Fable. They live for us aspictures live, as statues live. What was it I was saying about statues--that they all look alike to me? There are too many of them. They bring theancients down to us in marble and bronze, not in flesh and blood. We do notreally laugh with Terence and Horace, nor weep with Æschylus and Homer. Thevery nomenclature has a ticket air like tags on a collection of curios inan auction room, droning the dull iteration of a catalogue. There is aslittle to awaken and inspire in the system of religion and ethics of thepagan world they lived in as in the eyes of the stone effigies that stareblankly upon us in the British Museum, the Uffizi and the Louvre. 

We walk the streets of the Eternal City with wonderment, not with pity, thehuman side quite lost in the archaic. What is Cæsar to us, or we to Cæsar?Jove's thunder no longer terrifies, and we look elsewhere than the MediciVenus for the lights o' love. 

Not so with Paris. There the unbroken line of five hundredyears--semi-modern years, marking a longer period than we commonly ascribeto Athens or Rome--beginning with the exit of this our own world from thedark ages into the partial light of the middle ages, and continuing thencethrough the struggle of man toward achievement--tells us a tale moreconsecutive and thrilling, more varied and instructive, than may be foundin all the pages of all the chroniclers and poets of the civilizationswhich vibrated between the Bosphorus and the Tiber, to yield at last totriumphant Barbarism swooping down from Tyrol crag and Alpine height, fromthe fastnesses of the Rhine and the Rhone, to swallow luxury and culture. Refinement had done its perfect work. It had emasculated man and unsexedwoman and brought her to the front as a political force, even as it istrying to do now. 

The Paris of Balzac and Dumas, of De Musset and Hugo--even ofThackeray--could still be seen when I first went there. Though our age isas full of all that makes for the future of poetry and romance, it does notcontemporaneously lend itself to sentimental abstraction. Yet it is hard toseparate fact and fiction here; to decide between the true and thefalse; to pluck from the haze with which time has enveloped them, and todistinguish the puppets of actual flesh and blood who lived and moved andhad their being, and the phantoms of imagination called into life andgiven each its local habitation and its name by the poet's pen working itsimmemorial spell upon the reader's credulity. 

To me D'Artagnan is rather more vital than Richelieu. Hugo's impsand Balzac's bullies dance down the stage and shut from the view thetax-collectors and the court favorites. The mousquetaires crowd the fieldmarshals off the scene. There is something real in Quasimodo, in Cæsar deBirotteau, in Robert Macaire, something mythical in Mazarin, in the Regentand in Jean Lass. Even here, in faraway Kentucky, I can shut my eyes andsee the Lady of Dreams as plainly as if she were coming out of the Bristolor the Ritz to step into her automobile, while the Grande Mademoiselle ismerely a cloud of clothes and words that for me mean nothing at all. 

I once passed a week, day by day, roaming through the Musee Carnavalet. Madame de Sevigne had an apartment and held her salon there for nearlytwenty years. Hard by is the house where the Marquise de Brinvilliers--agentle, blue-eyed thing they tell us--a poor, insane creature she must havebeen--disseminated poison and death, and, just across and beyond the Placedes Vosges, the Hotel de Sens, whither Queen Margot took her doll-rags anddid her spriting after she and Henri Quatre had agreed no longer to slidedown the same cellar door. There is in the Museum a death-mask, colored andexceeding life-like, taken the day after Ravaillac delivered the finishingknife-thrust in the Rue de Ferronnerie, which represents the Bèarnais asanything but a tamer of hearts. He was a fighter, however, from Wayback, and I dare say Dumas' narrative is quite as authentic as any. 

One can scarce wonder that men like Hugo and Balzac chose this quarterof the town to live in--and Rachael, too!--it having given such frequentshelter to so many of their fantastic creations, having been the real abodeof a train of gallants and bravos, of saints and harlots from the days ofDiane de Poitiers to the days of Pompadour and du Barry, and of statesmenand prelates likewise from Sully to Necker, from Colbert to Turgot. 

III

I speak of the Marais as I might speak of Madison Square, or Hyde Park--asa well-known local section--yet how few Americans who have gone to Parishave ever heard of it. It is in the eastern division of the town. One findsit a curious circumstance that so many if not most of the great citiessomehow started with the rising, gradually to migrate toward the settingsun. 

When I first wandered about Paris there was little west of the Arch ofStars except groves and meadows. Neuilly and Passy were distant villages. Auteuil was a safe retreat for lovers and debtors, with comic opera villasnestled in high-walled gardens. To Auteuil Armand Duval and his Camillehied away for their short-lived idyl. In those days there was a lovely lanecalled Marguerite Gautier, with a dovecote pointed out as the very "rusticdwelling" so pathetically sung in Verdi's tuneful score and tenderlydescribed in the original Dumas text. The Boulevard Montmorenci long agoplowed the shrines of romance out of the knowledge of the living, and apart of the Longchamps racecourse occupies the spot whither impecuniouspoets and adventure-seeking wives repaired to escape the insistence ofcruel bailiffs and the spies of suspicious and monotonous husbands. 

Tempus fugit! I used to read Thackeray's Paris Sketches with a kind of awe. The Thirties and the Forties, reincarnated and inspired by his glowingspirit, seemed clad in translucent garments, like the figures in theNibelungenlied, weird, remote, glorified. I once lived in the street "forwhich no rhyme our language yields, " next door to a pastry shopthat claimed to have furnished the mise en scène for the "Ballad ofBouillabaisse, " and I often followed the trail of Louis Dominic Cartouche"down that lonely and crooked byway that, setting forth from a palace yard, led finally to the rear gate of a den of thieves. " Ah, well-a-day! I haveknown my Paris now twice as long as Thackeray knew his Paris, and my Parishas been as interesting as his Paris, for it includes the Empire, the Siegeand the Republic. 

I knew and sat for months at table with Comtesse Walewska, widow of thebastard son of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Duke de Morny was rather a person inhis way and Gambetta was no slouch, as Titmarsh would himself agree. I knewthem both. The Mexican scheme, which was going to make every Frenchmanrich, was even more picturesque and tragical than the Mississippi bubble. There were lively times round about the last of the Sixties and the earlySeventies. The Terror lasted longer, but it was not much more lurid thanthe Commune; the Hotel de Ville and the Tuileries in flames, the columngone from the Place Vendôme, when I got there just after the siege. Theregions of the beautiful Opera House and of the venerable Notre Dame theytold me had been but yesterday running streams of blood. At the corner ofthe Rue de la Paix and the Rue Dannou (they called it then the Rue St. Augustine) thirty men, women, and boys were one forenoon stood againstthe wall and shot, volley upon volley, to death. In the Sacristy of theCathedral over against the Morgue and the Hotel Dieu, they exhibit thegore-stained vestments of three archbishops of Paris murdered within asmany decades. 

IV

Thackeray came to Paris when a very young man. He was for paintingpictures, not for writing books, and he retained his artistic yearnings ifnot ambitions long after he had become a great and famous man of letters. It was in Paris that he married his wife, and in Paris that the melancholyfinale came to pass; one of the most heartbreaking chapters in literaryhistory. 

His little girls lived here with their grandparents. The elder of themrelates how she was once taken up some flights of stairs by the Countess Xto the apartment of a frail young man to whom the Countess was carrying abasket of fruit; and how the frail young man insisted, against the protestof the Countess, upon sitting at the piano and playing; and of how theycame out again, the eyes of the Countess streaming with tears, and of hersaying, as they drove away, "Never, never forget, my child, as long asyou live, that you have heard Chopin play. " It was in one of the lubberlyhouses of the Place Vendôme that the poet of the keyboard died a few dayslater. Just around the corner, in the Rue du Mont Thabor, died Alfred deMusset. A brass plate marks the house. 

May I not here transcribe that verse of the famous "Ballad ofBouillabaisse, " which I have never been able to recite, or read aloud, andpart of which I may at length take to myself:

 _"Ah me, how quick the days are flitting! I mind me of a time that's gone, When here I'd sit, as now I'm sitting In this same place--but not alone-- A fair young form was nestled near me, A dear, dear face looked fondly up, And sweetly spoke and smiled to hear me, There's no one now to share my cup. "_

The writer of these lines a cynic! Nonsense. When will the world learn todiscriminate?

V

It is impossible to speak of Paris without giving a foremost place in thememorial retrospect to the Bois de Boulogne, the Parisian's Coney Island. I recall that I passed the final Sunday of my last Parisian sojourn justbefore the outbreak of the World War with a beloved family party in thejoyous old Common. There is none like it in the world, uniting the urbanto the rural with such surpassing grace as perpetually to convey a doublesensation of pleasure; primal in its simplicity, superb in its setting; inthe variety and brilliancy of the life which, upon sunny afternoons, takespossession of it and makes it a cross between a parade and a paradise. 

There was a time when, rather far away for foot travel, the Bois mightbe considered a driving park for the rich. It fairly blazed with theostentatious splendor of the Second Empire; the shoddy Duke with his shadyretinue, in gilded coach-and-four; the world-famous courtesan, bedizenedwith costly jewels and quite as well known as the Empress; the favoritesof the Tuileries, the Comédie Française, the Opera, the Jardin Mabille, forming an unceasing and dazzling line of many-sided frivolity from thePort de Ville to the Port St. Cloud, circling round La Bagatelle andranging about the Cafe Cascade, a human tiara of diamonds, a moving bouquetof laces and rubies, of silks and satins and emeralds and sapphires. Thosewere the days when the Due de Morny, half if not full brother of theEmperor, ruled as king of the Bourse, and Cora Pearl, a clever and not atall good-looking Irish girl gone wrong, reigned as Queen of the Demimonde. 

All this went by the board years ago. Everywhere, more or less, electricityhas obliterated distinctions of rank and wealth. It has circumvented loversand annihilated romance. The Republic ousted the bogus nobility. Thesubways and the tram cars connect the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois deVincennes so closely that the poorest may make himself at home in either orboth. 

The automobile, too, oddly enough, is proving a very leveller. The crowdrecognizes nobody amid the hurly-burly of coupes, pony-carts, and taxicabs, each trying to pass the other. The conglomeration of personalities effacesthe identity alike of the statesman and the artist, the savant and thecyprian. No six-inch rules hedge the shade of the trees and limit the gloryof the grass. The _ouvrier_ can bring his brood and his basket andhave his picnic where he pleases. The pastry cook and his chére amie, the coiffeur and his grisette can spoon by the lake-side as long as themoonlight lasts, and longer if they list, with never a gendarme to say themnay, or a rude voice out of the depths hoarsely to declaim, "allez!" TheBois de Boulogne is literally and absolutely a playground, the playgroundof the people, and this last Sunday of mine, not fewer than half a millionof Parisians were making it their own. 

Half of these encircled the Longchamps racecourse. The other half wereshared by the boats upon the lagoons and the bosky dells under the summersky and the cafés and the restaurants with which the Bois abounds. Ourparty, having exhausted the humors of the drive, repaired to Pré Catalan. Aside from the "two old brides" who are always in evidence on suchoccasions, there was a veritable "young couple, " exceedingly pretty to lookat, and delightfully in love! That sort of thing is not so uncommon inParis as cynics affect to think. 

If it be true, as the witty Frenchman observes, that "gambling is therecreation of gentlemen and the passion of fools, " it is equally true thatlove is a game where every player wins if he sticks to it and is loyal toit. Just as credit is the foundation of business is love both the assetand the trade-mark of happiness. To see it is to believe it, and--though alittle cash in hand is needful to both--where either is wanting, look outfor sheriffs and scandals. 

Pré Catalan, once a pasture for cows with a pretty kiosk for the saleof milk, has latterly had a tea-room big enough to seat a thousand, notcounting the groves which I have seen grow up about it thickly dotted withbooths and tables, where some thousands more may regale themselves. ThatSunday it was never so glowing with animation and color. As it makes onehappy to see others happy it makes one adore his own land to witness thatwhich makes other lands great. 

I have not loved Paris as a Parisian, but as an American; perhaps it is astretch of words to say I love Paris at all. I used to love to go there andto behold the majesty of France. I have always liked to mark the startlingcontrasts of light and shade. I have always known what all the world nowknows, that beneath the gayety of the French there burns a patrioticand consuming fire, a high sense of public honor; a fine spirit ofself-sacrifice along with the sometimes too aggressive spirit of freedom. In 1873 I saw them two blocks long and three files deep upon the Rue St. Honore press up to the Bank of France, old women and old men with theirlittle all tied in handkerchiefs and stockings to take up the tributerequired by Bismarck to rid the soil of the detested German. They did it. Alone they did it--the French people--the hard-working, frugal, loyalcommonalty of France--without asking the loan of a sou from the worldoutside. 

VI

Writing of that last Sunday in the Bois de Boulogne, I find by recurringto the record that I said: "There is a deal more of good than bad in everyNation. I take off my hat to the French. But, I have had my fling and I amquite ready to go home. Even amid the gayety and the glare, the splendor ofcolor and light, the Hungarian band wafting to the greenery and the starsthe strains of the delicious waltz, La Veuve Joyeuse her very self--yea, many of her--tapping the time at many adjacent tables, the song that fillsmy heart is 'Hame, Hame, Hame!--Hame to my ain countree. ' Yet, to comeagain, d'ye mind? I should be loath to say good-by forever to the Boisde Boulogne. I want to come back to Paris. I always want to come back toParis. One needs not to make an apology or give a reason. 

"We turn rather sadly away from Pré Catalan and the Café Cascade. Weglide adown the flower-bordered path and out from the clusters of Chineselanterns, and leave the twinkling groves to their music and merry-making. Yonder behind us, like a sentinel, rises Mont Valerien. Before us glimmerthe lamps of uncountable coaches, as our own, veering toward the city, the moon just topping the tower of St. Jacques de la Boucherie andsilver-plating the bronze figures upon the Arch of Stars. 

"We enter the Port Maillot. We turn into the Avenue du Bois. Presently weshall sweep with the rest through the Champs Èlysées and on to the ocean ofthe infinite, the heart of the mystery we call Life, nowhere so condensed, so palpable, so appealing. Roll the screen away! The shades of Clovis andGenevieve may be seen hand-in-hand with the shades of Martel and Pepin, taking the round of the ghost-walk between St. Denis and St. Germain, nowle Balafré and again Navarre, now the assassins of the Ligue and now theassassins of the Terror, to keep them company. Nor yet quite all on murderbent, some on pleasure; the Knights and Ladies of the Cloth of Gold and thehosts of the Renaissance: Cyrano de Bergerac and François Villon leadingthe ragamuffin procession; the jades of the Fronde, Longueville, Chevreuseand fair-haired Anne of Austria; and Ninon, too, and Manon; and thenever-to-be-forgotten Four, 'one for all and all for one;' Cagliostro andMonte Cristo; on the side, Rabelais taking notes and laughing under hiscowl. Catherine de Medici and Robespierre slinking away, poor, guiltythings, into the pale twilight of the Dawn!

"Names! Names! Only names? I am not just so sure about that. In any event, what a roll call! We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our littlelife is rounded by a sleep; the selfsame sleep which these, our living deadmen and women in steel armor and gauzy muslins, in silken hose and sock andbuskin, epaulettes and top boots, brocades and buff facings, have enduredso long and know so well!

"If I should die in Paris I should expect them--or some of them--to meet meat the barriers and to say, 'Behold, the wickedness that was done in theworld, the cruelty and the wrong, dwelt in the body, not in the soul ofman, which freed from its foul incasement, purified and made eternal by thehand of death, shall see both the glory and the hand of God!'"

It was not to be. I shall not die in Paris. I shall never come again. Neither shall I make apology for this long quotation by myself from myself, for am I not inditing an autobiography, so called?

Chapter the Sixteenth

 Monte Carlo--The European Shrine of Sport and Fashion--Apocryphal Gambling Stories--Leopold, King of the Belgians--An Able and Picturesque Man of Business

I

Having disported ourselves in and about Paris, next in order comes ajourney to the South of France--that is to the Riviera--by geography themain circle of the Mediterranean Sea, by proclamation Cannes, Nice, andMentone, by actual fact and count, Monte Carlo--even the swells adopting acertain hypocrisy as due to virtue. 

Whilst Monte Carlo is chiefly, I might say exclusively, identified in thegeneral mind with gambling, and was indeed at the outset but a gamblingresort, it long ago outgrew the limits of the Casino, becoming a Meccaof the world of fashion as well as the world of sport. Half the rulingsovereigns of Europe and all the leaders of European swelldom, the moreprosperous of the demi-mondaines and no end of the merely rich of everyland, congregate there and thereabouts. At the top of the season the showof opulence and impudence is bewildering. 

The little principality of Monaco is hardly bigger than the Cabbage Patchof the renowned Mrs. Wiggs. It is, however, more happily situate. Nestledunder the heights of La Condamine and Tête de Chien and looking acrossa sheltered bay upon the wide and blue Mediterranean, it has betterprotection against the winds of the North than Nice, or Cannes, or Mentone. It is an appanage--in point of fact the only estate--remaining to the oncepowerful Grimaldi family. 

In the early days of land-piracy Old Man Grimaldi held his own with Old ManHohenzollern and Old Man Hapsburg. The Savoys and the Bourbons were kithand kin. But in the long run of Freebooting the Grimaldis did not keepup with the procession. How they retained even this remnant of inheritedbrigandage and self-appointed royalty, I do not know. They are here underleave of the Powers and the especial protection, strange to say, of theFrench Republic. 

Something over fifty years ago, being hard-up for cash, the Grimaldi of theperiod fell under the wiles of an ingenious Alsatian gambler, Guerlac byname, who foresaw that Baden-Baden and Hombourg were approaching theirfinish and that the sports must look elsewhere for their living, the idlerich for their sport. This tiny "enclave" in French territory presentedmany advantages over the German Dukedoms. It was an independent sovereigntyissuing its own coins and postage stamps. It was in proud possession ofa half-dozen policemen which it called its "army. " It was paradisaic inbeauty and climate. Its "ruler" was as poor as Job's turkey, but by nomeans as proud as Lucifer. 

The bargain was struck. The gambler smote the rock of Monte Carlo as with awand of enchantment and a stream of plenty burst forth. The mountain-sideresponded to the touch. It chortled in its glee and blossomed as the rose. 

II

The region known as the Riviera comprises, as I have said, the wholeland-circle of the Mediterranean Sea. But, as generally written andunderstood, it stands for the shoreline between Marseilles and Genoa. Thetwo cities are connected by the Corniche Road, built by the First Napoleon, who learned the need of it when he made his Italian campaign, and themodern railway, the distance 260 miles, two-thirds of the way throughFrance, the residue through Italy, and all of it surpassing fine. 

The climate is very like that of Southern Florida. But as in Florida theyhave the "Nor'westers" and the "Nor'easters, " on the Riviera they have the"mistral. " In Europe there is no perfect winter weather north of Spain, asin the United States none north of Cuba. 

I have often thought that Havana might be made a dangerous rival of MonteCarlo under the one-man power, exercising its despotism with benignantintelligence and spending its income honestly upon the development of boththe city and the island. The motley populace would probably be none theworse for it. The Government could upon a liberal tariff collect not lessthan thirty-five millions of annual revenue. Twenty-five of these millionswould suffice for its own support. Ten millions a year laid out uponharbors, roadways and internal improvements in general would within tenyears make the Queen of the Antilles the garden spot and playground ofChristendom. They would build a Casino to outshine even the architecturalmiracles of Charles Garnier. Then would Havana put Cairo out of businessand give the Prince of Monaco a run for his money. 

With the opening of every Monte Carlo season the newspapers used to tell ofthe colossal winnings of purely imaginary players. Sometimes the favoredchild of chance was a Russian, sometimes an Englishman, sometimes anAmerican. He was usually a myth, of course. As Mrs. Prig observed to Mrs. Camp, "there never was no sich person. "

III

Charles Garnier, the Parisian architect, came and built the Casino, next tothe Library of Congress at Washington and the Grand Opera House at Paristhe most beautiful building in the world, with incomparable gardens andcommanding esplanades to set it off and display it. Around it palatialhotels and private mansions and villas sprang into existence. Within it agold-making wheel of fortune fabricated the wherewithal. Old Man Grimaldiin his wildest dreams of land-piracy--even Old Man Hohenzollern, or Old ManHapsburg--never conceived the like. 

There is no poverty, no want, no taxes--not any sign of dilapidation orsqualor anywhere in the principality of Monaco. Yet the "people, " socalled, have been known to lapse into a state of discontent. They sometimes"yearned for freedom. " Too well fed and cared for, too rid of dirt anddebt, too flourishing, they "riz. " Prosperity grew monotonous. They evenhad the nerve to demand a "Constitution. "

The reigning Prince was what Yellowplush would call "a scientific gent. "His son and heir, however, had not his head in the clouds, being in pointof fact of the earth earthly, and, of consequence, more popular than hisfather. He came down from the Castle on the hill to the marketplace in thetown and says he: "What do you galoots want, anyhow?"

First, their "rights. " Then a change in the commander-in-chief of the army, which had grown from six to sixteen. Finally, a Board of Aldermen and aCommon Council. 

"Is that all?" says his Royal Highness. They said it was. "Then, " says he, "take it, mes enfants, and bless you!"

So, all went well again. The toy sovereignty began to rattle around in itsown conceit, the "people" regarded themselves, and wished to be regarded, as a chartered Democracy. The little gim-crack economic system experiencedthe joys of reform. A "New Nationalism" was established in the brewery downby the railway station and a reciprocity treaty was negotiated between theCasino and Vanity Fair, witnessing the introduction of two roulette tablesand an extra brazier for cigar stumps. 

But the Prince of Monaco stood on one point. He would have no Committee onCredentials. He told me once that he had heard of Tom Reed and Champ Clarkand Uncle Joe Cannon, but that he preferred Uncle Joe. He would, and hedid, name his own committees both in the Board of Aldermen and the CommonCouncil. Thus, for the time being, "insurgency" was quelled. And once moreserenely sat the Castle on the hill hard by the Cathedral. Calmly againflowed the waters in the harbor. More and more the autos honked outside theCasino. Within "the little ball ever goes merrily round, " and according tothe croupiers and the society reporters "the gentleman wins and the poorgambler loses!"

IV

To illustrate, I recall when on a certain season the lucky sport of printand fancy was an Englishman. In one of those farragos of stupidity andinaccuracy which are syndicated and sent from abroad to America, I foundthe following piece with the stuff and nonsense habitually worked off onthe American press as "foreign correspondence":

"Now and then the newspapers report authentic instances of large sumshaving been won at the gaming tables at Monte Carlo. One of the mostfortunate players at Monte Carlo for a long time past has been a Mr. Darnbrough, an Englishman, whose remarkable run of luck had furnished themorsels of gossip in the capitals of Continental Europe recently. 

"If reports are true, he left the place with the snug sum of more than1, 000, 000 francs to the good as the result of a month's play. But this, Ihear, did not represent all of Mr. Darnbrough's winnings. The story goesthat on the opening day of his play he staked 24, 000 francs, winning allalong the line. Emboldened by his success, he continued playing, winningagain and again with marvelous luck. At one period, it is said, his creditbalance amounted to no less than 1, 850, 000 francs; but from that momentDame Fortune ceased to smile upon him. He lost steadily from 200, 000 to300, 000 francs a day, until, recognizing that luck had turned against him, he had sufficient strength of will to turn his back on the tables andstrike for home with the very substantial winnings that still remained. 

"On another occasion a well-known London stock broker walked off withlittle short of £40, 000. This remarkable performance occasioned no smallamount of excitement in the gambling rooms, as such an unusual incidentdoes invariably. 

"Bent on making a 'plunge, ' he went from one table to another, placing themaximum stake on the same number. Strange to relate, at each table the samenumber won, and it was his number. Recognizing that this perhaps might behis lucky day, the player wended his way to the trente-et-quarante roomand put the maximum on three of the tables there. To his amazement, hediscovered that there also he had been so fortunate as to select thewinning number. 

"The head croupier confided to a friend of the writer who happened to bepresent that that day had been the worst in the history of the Monaco bankfor years. He it was also who mentioned the amount won by the fortunateLondoner, as given above. "

It is prudent of the space-writers to ascribe such "information" as thisto "the head croupier, " because it is precisely the like that such anauthority would give out. People upon the spot know that nothing of thekind happened, and that no person of that name had appeared upon the scene. The story on the face of it bears to the knowing its own refutation, beingabsurd in every detail. As if conscious of this, the author proceeds toquality it in the following:

"It is a well-known fact that one of the most successful players at theMonte Carlo tables was Wells, who as the once popular music-hall song putit, 'broke the bank' there. He was at the zenith of his fame, about twentyyears ago, when his escapades--and winnings--were talked about widely andenvied in European sporting circles and among the demi-monde. 

"In ten days, it was said, he made upward of £35, 000 clear winnings atthe tables after starting with the modest capital of £400. It must not beforgotten, however, that at his trial later Wells denied this, statingthat all he had made was £7, 000 at four consecutive sittings. He made thestatement that, even so, he had been a loser in the end. 

"The reader may take his choice of the two statements, but amongfrequenters of the rooms at Monte Carlo it is generally consideredimpossible to amass large winnings without risking large stakes. Even thenthe chances are 1, 000 to 1 in favor of the bank. Yet occasionally thereare winnings running into four or five figures, and to human beings thepossibility of chance constitutes an irresistible fascination. 

"Only a few years ago a young American was credited with having risen fromthe tables $75, 000 richer than when first he had sat down. It was his firstvisit to Monte Carlo and he had not come with any system to break the bankor with any 'get-rich-quick' idea. For the novelty of the thing he riskedabout $4, 000, and lost it all in one fell swoop without turning a hair. Then he 'plunged' with double that amount, but the best part of that, too, went the same way. Nothing daunted, he next ventured $10, 000. This timefickle fortune favored him. He played on with growing confidence and whenhis winnings amounted to the respectable sum of $75, 000 he had the goodsense to quit and to leave the place despite the temptation to continue. "

V

The "man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo, " and gave occasion for thesong, was not named "Wells" and he was not an Englishman. He was anAmerican. I knew him well and soon after the event had from his own lipsthe whole story. 

He came to Monte Carlo with a good deal of money won at draw-poker in aclub at Paris and went away richer by some 100, 000 francs (about $20, 000)than he came. 

The catch-line of the song is misleading. There is no such thing as"breaking the bank at Monte Carlo. " This particular player won so fast upontwo or three "spins" that the table at which he played had to suspend untilit could be replenished by another "bank, " perhaps ten minutes in point oftime. There used to be some twenty tables. Just how one man could play atmore than one of them at one time a "foreign correspondent, " but onlya "foreign correspondent, " might explain to the satisfaction of thehorse-marines. 

I very much doubt whether any player ever won more than 100, 000 francs at asingle sitting. To do even that he must plunge like a ship in a hurricane. There is, of course, a saving limit set by the Casino Company upon theplay. It is to the interest of the Casino to cultivate the idea, and theletter writers are willing tools. Not only at Monte Carlo, but everywhere, in dearth of news, gambling stories come cheap and easy. And the cheaperthe story the bigger the play. "The Jedge raised him two thousand dollars. The Colonel raised him back ten thousand more. Both of 'em stood pat. TheJedge bet him a hundred thousand. The Colonel called. 'What you got?' sayshe. 'Ace high, ' says the Jedge; 'what you got?' 'Pair o' deuces, ' says theColonel. "

Assuredly the "play" in the Casino is entirely fair. It could hardly beotherwise with such crowds of players at the tables, often covering thewhole "layout. " But there is no such thing as "honest gambling. " The"house" must have "the best of it. " A famous American gambler, when I hadreferred to one of his guild, lately deceased, as "an honest gambler, " saidto me: "What do you mean by 'an honest gambler'?"

"A gambler who will not take unfair advantage!" I answered. 

"Well, " said he, "the gambler must have his advantage, because gambling ishis livelihood. He must fit himself for its profitable pursuit by learningall the tricks of trade like other artists and artificers. With him it iswin or starve. "

Among the variegate crowds that thronged the highways and byways of MonteCarlo in those days there was no single figure more observed and strikingthan that of Leopold the Second, King of the Belgians. He had a bungalowoverlooking the sea where he lived three months of the year like a countrygentleman. Although I have made it a rule to avoid courts and courtiers, an event brought me into acquaintance with this best abused man in Europe, enabling me to form my own estimate of his very interesting personality. 

He was not at all what his enemies represented him to be, a sot, a gamblerand a roué. In appearance a benignant burgomaster, tall and stalwart; inmanner and voice very gentle, he should be described as first of all a manof business. His weakness was rather for money than women. Speaking ofthe most famous of the Parisian dancers with whom his name had beenscandalously associated, he told me that he had never met her but once inhis life, and that after the newspaper gossips had been busy for years withtheir alleged love affair. "I kissed her hand, " he related, "and bade heradieu, saying, 'Ah, ma'mselle, you and I have indeed reason to congratulateourselves. '"

It was the Congo business that lay at the bottom of the abuse of Leopold. Henry Stanley had put him up to this. It turned out a gold mine, and thentwo streams of defamation were let loose; one from the covetous commercialstandpoint and the other from the humanitarian. Between them, seeking todrive him out, they depicted him as a monster of cruelty and depravity. 

A King must be an anchorite to escape calumny, and Leopold was not ananchorite. I asked him why I never saw him in the Casino. "Play, " heanswered, "does not interest me. Besides, I do not enjoy being talkedabout. Nor do I think the game they play there quite fair. "

"In what way do you consider it unfair, your Majesty?" I asked. 

"In the zero, " he replied. "At the Brussels Casino I do not allow them tohave a zero. Come and see me and I will show you a perfectly equal chancefor your money, to win or lose. "

Years after I was in Brussels. Leopold had gone to his account and hisnephew, Albert, had come to the throne. There was not a roulette table inthe Casino, but there was one conveniently adjacent thereto, managed by aclique of New York gamblers, which had both a single "and a double O, "and, as appeared when the municipality made a descent upon the place, wasingeniously wired to throw the ball wherever the presiding coupier wantedit to go. 

I do not believe, however, that Leopold was a party to this, or could havehad any knowledge of it. He was a skillful, not a dishonest, business man, who showed his foresight when he listened to Stanley and took him under hiswing. If the Congo had turned out worthless nobody would ever have heard ofthe delinquencies of the King of the Belgians. 

Chapter the Seventeenth

 A Parisian _Pension_--The Widow of Walewska--Napoleon's Daughter-in-Law--The Changeless--A Moral and Orderly City

I

I have said that I knew the widow of Walewska, the natural son of NapoleonBonaparte by the Polish countess he picked up in Warsaw, who followed himto Paris; and thereby hangs a tale which may not be without interest. 

In each of our many sojourns in Paris my wife and I had taken an apartment, living the while in the restaurants, at first the cheaper, like the Café deProgress and the Duval places; then the Boeuf à la Mode, the Café Voisinand the Café Anglais, with Champoux's, in the Place de la Bourse, for aregular luncheon resort. 

At length, the children something more than half grown, I said: "We havenever tried a Paris _pension_. "

So with a half dozen recommended addresses we set out on a house hunt. Wehad not gone far when our search was rewarded by a veritable find. Thiswas on the Avenue de Courcelles, not far from the Pare Monceau; newlyfurnished; reasonable charges; the lady manager a beautiful well-manneredwoman, half Scotch and half French. 

We moved in. When dinner was called the boarders assembled in the veryelegant drawing-room. Madame presented us to Baron ----. Then followedintroductions to Madame la Duchesse and Madame la Princesse and Madame laComtesse. Then the folding doors opened and dinner was announced. 

The baron sat at the center of the table. The meal consisted of eight orten courses, served as if at a private house, and of surpassing quality. During the three months that we remained there was no evidence of aboarding house. It appeared an aristocratic family into which we had beenhospitably admitted. The baron was a delightful person. Madame la Duchessewas the mother of Madame la Princesse, and both were charming. TheComtesse, the Napoleonic widow, was at first a little formal, but she cameround after we had got acquainted, and, when we took our departure, it waslike leaving a veritable domestic circle. 

Years after we had the sequel. The baron, a poor young nobleman, had comeinto a little money. He thought to make it breed. He had an equally poorScotch cousin, who undertook to play hostess. Both the Duchess and theCountess were his kinswomen. How could such a ménage last?

He lost his all. What became of our fellow-lodgers I never learned, but theventure coming to naught, the last I heard of the beautiful high-bredlady manager, she was serving as a stewardess on an ocean liner. Nothing, however, could exceed the luxury, the felicity and the good companyof those memorable three months _chez l'Avenue de Courcelles, PareMonceau_. 

We never tried a _pension_ again. We chose a delightful hotel in theRue de Castiglione off the Rue de Rivoli, and remained there as fixturesuntil we were reckoned the oldest inhabitants. But we never deserted thedear old Boeuf à la Mode, which we lived to see one of the most flourishingand popular places in Paris. 

II

In the old days there was a little hotel on the Rue Dannou, midway betweenthe Rue de la Paix and what later along became the Avenue de l'Opéra, called the Hôtel d'Orient. It was conducted by a certain Madame Hougenin, whose family had held the lease for more than a hundred years, and wastypical of what the comfort-seeking visitor, somewhat initiate, might findbefore the modern tourist onrush overflowed all bounds and effaced theancient landmarks--or should I say townmarks?--making a resort instead of ahome of the gay French capital. The d'Orient was delightfully comfortableand fabulously cheap. 

The wayfarer entered a darksome passage that led to an inner court. Therewere on the four sides of this seven or eight stories pierced by manywindows. There was never a lift, or what we Americans call an elevator. Ifyou wanted to go up you walked up; and after dark your single illuminantwas candlelight. The service could hardly be recommended, but cleanlinessherself could find no fault with the beds and bedding; nor any queer peopleabout; changeless; as still and stationary as a nook in the Rockies. 

A young girl might dwell there year in and year out in perfect safety--manyyoung girls did so--madame a kind of duenna. The food--for it was a_pension_--was all a gourmet could desire. And the wine!

I was lunching with an old Parisian friend. 

"What do you think of this vintage?" says he. 

"Very good, " I answered. "Come and dine with me to-morrow and I will giveyou the mate to it. "

"What--at the d'Orient?"

"Yes, at the d'Orient. "

"Preposterous!"

Nevertheless, he came. When the wine was poured out he took a sip. 

"By ----!" he exclaimed. "That is good, isn't it? I wonder where they gotit? And how?"

During the week after we had it every day. Then no more. The headwaiter, with many apologies, explained that he had found those few bottles in aforgotten bin, where they had lain for years, and he begged a thousandpardons of monsieur, but we had drunk them all--_rien du plus_--nomore. I might add that precisely the same thing happened to me at the HôtelContinental. Indeed, it is not uncommon with the French caravansariesto keep a little extra good wine in stock for those who can distinguishbetween an _ordinaire_ and a _supérieur_, and are willing to paythe price. 

III

"See Naples and die, " say the Italians. "See Paris and live, " say theFrench. Old friends, who have been over and back, have been of late tellingme that Paris, having woefully suffered, is nowise the Paris it was, andas the provisional offspring of four years of desolating war I can wellbelieve them. But a year or two of peace, and the city will rise again, as after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, which laid upon it asufficiently blighting hand. In spite of fickle fortune and its many upsand downs it is, and will ever remain, "Paris, the Changeless. "

I never saw the town so much itself as just before the beginning of theworld war. I took my departure in the early summer of that fateful year andleft all things booming--not a sign or trace that there had ever been aughtbut boundless happiness and prosperity. It is hard, the saying has it, to keep a squirrel on the ground, and surely Paris is the squirrel amongcities. The season just ended had been, everybody declared, uncommonlysuccessful from the standpoints alike of the hotels and cafés, the shopfolk and their patrons, not to mention the purely pleasure-seeking throng. People seemed loaded with money and giddy to spend it. 

The headwaiter at Voisin's told me this: "Mr. Barnes, of New York, ordereda dinner, carte blanche, for twelve. 

"'Now, ' says he, 'garçon, have everything bang up, and here's seventy-fivefrancs for a starter. '

"The dinner was bang up. Everybody hilarious. Mr. Barnes immensely pleased. When he came to pay his bill, which was a corker, he made no objection. 

"'Garçon, ' says he, 'if I ask you a question will you tell me the truth?'

"'_Oui, monsieur; certainement. _'

"Well, how much was the largest tip you ever received?"

"Seventy-five francs, monsieur. "

"'Very well; here are 100 francs. '

"Then, after a pause for the waiter to digest his joy and express a propersense of gratitude and wonder, Mr. Barnes came to time with: 'Do youremember who was the idiot that paid you the seventy-five francs?'

"'Oh, yes, monsieur. It was you. '"

IV

It has occurred to me that of late years--I mean the years immediatelybefore 1914--Paris has been rather more bent upon adapting itself to humanand moral as well as scientific progress. There has certainly been lessdebauchery visible to the naked eye. I was assured that the patronage hadso fallen away from the Moulin Rouge that they were planning to turn itinto a decent theater. Nor during my sojourn did anybody in my hearing somuch as mention the Dead Rat. I doubt whether it is still in existence. 

The last time I was in Maxim's--quite a dozen years ago now--a young womansat next to me whose story could be read in her face. She was a prettything not five and twenty, still blooming, with iron-gray hair. It hadturned in a night, I was told. She had recently come from Baltimore andknew no more what she was doing or whither she was drifting than a baby. The old, old story: a comfortable home and a good husband; even a child ortwo; a scoundrel, a scandal, an elopement, and the inevitable desertion. Left without a dollar in the streets of Paris. She was under convoy of anoted procuress. 

"A duke or the morgue, " she whimpered, "in six months. "

Three months sufficed. They dragged all that remained of her out of theSeine, and then the whole of the pitiful disgrace and tragedy came out. 

V

If ever I indite a volume to be entitled Adventures in Paris it willcontain not a line to feed any prurient fancy, but will embrace the recordof many little journeys between the Coiffeur and the Marché des Fleurs, with maybe an excursion among the cemeteries and the restaurants. 

Each city is as one makes it for himself. Paris has contributed greatly tomy appreciation, and perhaps my knowledge, of history and literature andart and life. I have seen it in all its aspects; under the empire, when theDue de Morny was king of the Bourse and Mexico was to make every Frenchmanrich; after the commune and the siege, when the Hôtel de Ville was inruins, the palace of the Tuileries still aflame, the column gone from thePlace Vendôme, and everything a blight and waste; and I have marked it risefrom its ashes, grandly, proudly, and like a queen come to her own again, resume its primacy as the only complete metropolis in all the universe. 

There is no denying it. No city can approach Paris in structural unity andregality, in things brilliant and beautiful, in buoyancy, variety, charmand creature comfort. Drunkenness, of the kind familiar to London and NewYork, is invisible to Paris. The brandy and absinthe habit has been greatlyexaggerated. In truth, everywhere in Europe the use of intoxicants is onthe decline. They are, for the first time in France, stimulated partlyby the alarming adulteration of French wines, rigorously applying andenforcing the pure-food laws. 

As a consequence, there is a palpable and decided improvement of thevintage of the Garonne and the Champagne country. One may get a good glassof wine now without impoverishing himself. As men drink wine, and as thewine is pure, they fall away from stronger drink. I have always considered, with Jefferson, the brewery in America an excellent temperance society. That which works otherwise is the dive which too often the brewery fathers. They are drinking more beer in France--even making a fairly good beer. Andthen--

But gracious, this is getting upon things controversial, and if there isanything in this world that I do hybominate, it is controversy!

Few of the wondrous changes which the Age of Miracles has wrought in my dayand generation exceeded those of ocean travel. The modern liner is but amoving palace. Between the ports of the Old World and the ports of thenew the transit is so uneventful as to grow monotonous. There are no moreadventures on the high seas. The ocean is a thoroughfare, the crossing aferry. My experience forty years ago upon one of the ancient tubs whichhave been supplanted by these liners would make queer reading to thelatter-day tourist, taking, let us say, any one of the steamers of any oneof the leading transatlantic companies. The difference in the appointmentsof the William Penn of 1865 and the star boats of 1914 is indescribable. It seems a fairy tale to think of a palm garden where the ladies dress fordinner, a Hungarian band which plays for them whilst they dine, and a skyparlor where they go after dinner for their coffee and what not; a tea-roomfor the five-o'clockers; and except in excessive weather scarcely anymotion at all. It is this palm garden which most appeals to a certain ladyof my very intimate acquaintance who had made many crossings and never goneto her meals--sick from shore to shore--until the gods ordained for her awatery, winery, flowery paradise--where the billows ceased from troublingand a woman could appear at her best. Since then she has sailed many times, lodged à la Waldorf-Astoria to eat her victuals and sip her wine withperfect contentment. Coming ashore from our last crossing a friend foundher in the Red Room of that hostel just as she had been sitting the eveningbefore on shipboard. 

"Seems hardly any motion at all, " she said, looking about her and fancyingherself still at sea, as well she might. 

Chapter the Eighteenth

 The Grover Cleveland Period--President Arthur and Mr. Blaine--John Chamberlin--The Decrees of Destiny

I

What may be called the Grover Cleveland period of American politics beganwith the election of that extraordinary person--another man of destiny--tothe governorship of New York. Nominated, as it were, by chance, he carriedthe State by an unprecedented majority. That was not because of hispopularity, but that an incredible number of Republican voters refusedto support their party ticket and stayed away from the polls. TheBlaine-Conkling feud, inflamed by the murder of Garfield, had rent theparty of Lincoln and Grant asunder. Arthur, a Conkling leader, hadsucceeded to the presidency. 

If any human agency could have sealed the breach he might have done it. Noman, however, can achieve the impossible. The case was hopeless. 

Arthur was a man of surpassing sweetness and grace. As handsome as Pierce, as affable as McKinley, he was a more experienced and dextrous politicianthan either. He had been put on the ticket with Garfield to placateConkling. All sorts of stories to his discredit were told during theensuing campaign. The Democrats made him out a tricky and typical "New Yorkpolitician. " In point of fact he was a many-sided, accomplished man whohad a taking way of adjusting all conditions and adapting himself to allcompanies. 

With a sister as charming and tactful as he for head of his domesticfabric, the White House bloomed again. He possessed the knack ofsurrounding himself with all sorts of agreeable people. FrederickFrelinghuysen was Secretary of State and Robert Lincoln, continued from theGarfield Cabinet, Secretary of War. Then there were three irresistibles:Walter Gresham, Frank Hatton and "Ben" Brewster. His homecontingent--"Clint" Wheeler, "Steve" French, and "Jake" Hess--pictured as"ward heelers"--were, in reality, efficient and all-around, companionablemen, capable and loyal. 

I was sent by the Associated Press to Washington on a fool's errand--thatis, to get an act of Congress extending copyright to the news of theassociation--and, remaining the entire session, my business to meet theofficial great and to make myself acceptable, I came into a certainintimacy with the Administration circle, having long had friendly relationswith the President. In all my life I have never passed so delightful anduseless a winter. 

Very early in the action I found that my mission involved a serious andvexed question--nothing less than the creation of a new property--and Iproceeded warily. Through my uncle, Stanley Matthews, I interested themembers of the Supreme Court. The Attorney General, a great lawyer andan old Philadelphia friend, was at my call and elbow. The Joint LibraryCommittee of Congress, to which the measure must go, was with me. Yetsomehow the scheme lagged. 

I could not account for this. One evening at a dinner Mr. Blaineenlightened me. We sat together at table and suddenly he turned and said:"How are you getting on with your bill?" And my reply being rather halting, he continued, "You won't get a vote in either House, " and he proceededvery humorously to improvise the average member's argument against it asa dangerous power, a perquisite to the great newspapers and an impositionupon the little ones. To my mind this was something more than thepost-prandial levity it was meant to be. 

Not long after a learned but dissolute old lawyer said to me, "You need noact of Congress to protect your news service. There are at least two, and Ithink four or five, English rulings that cover the case. Let me show themto you. " He did so and I went no further with the business, quite agreeingwith Mr. Blaine, and nothing further came of it. To a recent date theAssociated Press has relied on these decisions under the common law ofEngland. Curiously enough, quite a number of newspapers in whose actualservice I was engaged, opened fire upon me and roundly abused me. 

II

There appeared upon the scene in Washington toward the middle of theseventies one of those problematical characters the fiction-mongers delightin. This was John Chamberlin. During two decades "Chamberlin's, " halfclubhouse and half chophouse, was all a rendezvous. 

"John" had been a gambler; first an underling and then a partner of thefamous Morrissy-McGrath racing combination at Saratoga and Long Branch. There was a time when he was literally rolling in wealth. Then he wentbroke--dead broke. Black Friday began it and the panic of '73 finishedit. He came over to Washington and his friends got him the restaurantprivileges of the House of Representatives. With this for a starting point, he was able to take the Fernando Wood residence, in the heart of thefashionable quarter, to add to it presently the adjoining dwelling ofGovernor Swann, of Maryland, and next to that, finally, the Blainemansion, making a suite, as it were, elegant yet cozy. "Welcker's, " erst afashionable resort, and long the best eating-place in town, had been ruinedby a scandal, and "Chamberlin's" succeeded it, having the field to itself, though, mindful of the "scandal" which had made its opportunity, ladieswere barred. 

There was a famous cook--Emeline Simmons--a mulatto woman, who was equallyat home in French dishes and Maryland-Virginia kitchen mysteries--a verywonder with canvasback and terrapin--who later refused a great money offerto he chef at the White House--whom John was able to secure. Nothing couldsurpass--could equal--her preparations. The charges, like the victuals, were sky-high and tip-top. The service was handled by three "coloredgentlemen, " as distinguished in manners as in appearance, who were knownfar and wide by name and who dominated all about them, including John andhis patrons. 

No such place ever existed before, or will ever exist again. It was thepersonality of John Chamberlin, pervasive yet invisible, exhaling a silent, welcoming radiance. General Grant once said to me, "During my eight yearsin the White House, John Chamberlin once in a while--once in a greatwhile--came over. He did not ask for anything. He just told me what to do, and I did it. " I mentioned this to President Arthur. "Well, " he laughinglysaid, "that has been my experience with John Chamberlin. It never crossesmy mind to say him 'nay. ' Often I have turned this over in my thoughtto reach the conclusion that being a man of sound judgment and worldlyknowledge, he has fully considered the case--his case and my case--leavingme no reasonable objection to interpose. "

John obtained an act of Congress authorizing him to build a hotel on theGovernment reservation at Fortress Monroe, and another of the VirginiaLegislature confirming this for the State. Then he came to me. It was atthe moment when I was flourishing as "a Wall Street magnate. " He said: "Iwant to sell this franchise to some man, or company, rich enough to carryit through. All I expect is a nest egg for Emily and the girls"--he hadmarried the beautiful Emily Thorn, widow of George Jordan, the actor, andthere were two daughters--"you are hand-and-glove with the millionaires. Won't you manage it for me?" Like Grant and Arthur, I never thought ofrefusing. Upon the understanding that I was to receive no commission, Iagreed, first ascertaining that it was really a most valuable franchise. 

I began with the Willards, in whose hotel I had grown up. They were richand going out of business. Then I laid it before Hitchcock and Darling, ofthe Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. They, rich like the Willards, werealso retiring. Then a bright thought occurred to me. I went to the PrinceImperial of Standard Oil. "Mr. Flagler, " I said, "you have hotels at St. Augustine and you have hotels at Palm Beach. Here is a halfway pointbetween New York and Florida, " and more of the same sort. "My dear friend, "he answered, "every man has the right to make a fool of himself once in hislife. This I have already done. Never again for me. I have put up mylast dollar south of the Potomac. " Then I went to the King of thetranscontinental railways. "Mr. Huntington, " I said, "you own a roadextending from St. Louis to Newport News, having a terminal in a cornfieldjust out of Hampton Roads. Here is a franchise which gives you amagnificent site at Hampton Roads itself. Why not?" He gazed upon me witha blank stare--such I fancy as he usually turned upon his suppliants--andslowly replied: "I would not spend another dollar in Virginia if the Lordcommanded me. In the event that some supernatural power should take theChesapeake & Ohio Railway by the nape of the neck and the seat of thebreeches and pitch it out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean it would bedoing me a favor. "

So I returned John his franchise marked "nothing doing. " Afterward he putit in the hands of a very near friend, a great capitalist, who had nobetter luck with it. Finally, here and there, literally by piecemeal, hegot together money enough to build and furnish the Hotel Chamberlin, had anotable opening with half of Congress there to see, and gently laid himselfdown and died, leaving little other than friends and debts. 

III

Macaulay tells us that the dinner-table is a wondrous peacemaker, miracleworker, social solvent; and many were the quarrels composed and the plansperfected under the Chamberlin roof. It became a kind of CongressionalExchange with a close White House connection. If those old walls, which bythe way are still standing, could speak, what tales they might tell, whattestimonies refute, what new lights throw into the vacant corners and darkplaces of history!

Coming away from Chamberlin's with Mr. Blaine for an after-dinner strollduring the winter of 1883-4, referring to the approaching NationalRepublican Convention, he said: "I do not want the nomination. In myopinion there is but one nominee the Republicans can elect this year andthat is General Sherman. I have written him to tell him so and urge it uponhim. In default of him the time of you people has come. " He subsequentlyshowed me this letter and General Sherman's reply. My recollection is thatthe General declared that he would not take the presidency if it wereoffered him, earnestly invoking Mr. Elaine to support his brother, JohnSherman. 

This would seem clear refutation that Mr. Blaine was party to his ownnomination that year. It assuredly reveals keen political instinct andforesight. The capital prize in the national lottery was not for him. 

I did not meet him until two years later, when he gave me a minute accountof what had happened immediately thereafter; the swing around the circle;Belshazzar's feast, as a fatal New York banquet was called; the far-famedBurchard incident. "I did not hear the words, 'Rum, Romanism andRebellion, '" he told me, "else, as you must know, I would have fittinglydisposed of them. "

I said: "Mr. Blaine, you may as well give it up. The doom of Webster, Clay, and Douglas is upon you. If you are nominated again, with an assuredelection, you will die before the day of election. If you survive the dayand are elected, you'll die before the 4th of March. " He smiled grimly andreplied: "It really looks that way. "

My own opinion has always been that if the Republicans had nominatedMr. Arthur in 1884 they would have elected him. The New York vote wouldscarcely have been so close. In the count of the vote the Arthur end ofit would have had some advantage--certainly no disadvantage. Cleveland'snearly 200, 000 majority had dwindled to the claim of a beggarly fewhundred, and it was charged that votes which belonged to Butler, who ran asan independent labor candidate, were actually counted for Cleveland. 

When it was over an old Republican friend of mine said: "Now we are even. History will attest that we stole it once and you stole it once. Turn aboutmay be fair play; but, all the same, neither of us likes it. "

So Grover Cleveland, unheard of outside of Buffalo two years before, was tobe President of the United States. The night preceding his nomination forthe governorship of New York, General Slocum seemed in the State conventionsure of that nomination. Had he received it he would have carried the Stateas Cleveland did, and Slocum, not Cleveland, would have been the ChiefMagistrate. It cost Providence a supreme effort to pull Cleveand through. But in his case, as in many another, Providence "got there" in fulfilmentof a decree of Destiny. 

Chapter the Nineteenth

 Mr. Cleveland in the White House--Mr. Bayard in the Department of State--Queer Appointments to Office--The One-Party Power--The End of North and South Sectionalism

I

The futility of political as well as of other human reckoning was setforth by the result of the presidential election of 1884. With a kindof prescience, as I have related, Mr. Blaine had foreseen it. He wasa sagacious as well as a lovable and brilliant man. He looked backaffectionately upon the days he had passed in Kentucky, when a poorschool-teacher, and was especially cordial to the Kentuckians. In the Househe and Beck were sworn friends, and they continued their friendship whenboth of them had reached the Senate. 

I inherited Mr. Blaine's desk in the Ways and Means Committee room. In oneof the drawers of this he had left a parcel of forgotten papers, whichI returned to him. He made a joke of the secrets they covered and thefortunate circumstance that they had fallen into the hands of a friend andnot of an enemy. 

No man of his time could hold a candle to Mr. Blaine in what we callmagnetism--that is, in manly charm, supported by facility and brain power. Clay and Douglas had set the standard of party leadership before his time. He made a good third to them. I never knew Mr. Clay, but with Judge DouglasI was well acquainted, and the difference between him and Mr. Blaine inleadership might be called negligible. 

Both were intellectually aggressive and individually amiable. They at leastseemed to love their fellow men. Each had been tried by many adventures. Each had gone, as it were, "through the flint mill. " Born to goodconditions--Mr. Blaine sprang from aristocratic forebears--each knew byearly albeit brief experience the seamy side of life; as each, like Clay, nursed a consuming passion for the presidency. Neither had been made fora subaltern, and they chafed under the subaltern yoke to which fate hadcondemned them. 

II

In Grover Cleveland a total stranger had arrived at the front of affairs. The Democrats, after a rule of more than half a century, had been out ofpower twenty-four years. They could scarce realize at first that they wereagain in power. The new chieftain proved more of an unknown quantity thanhad been suspected. William Dorsheimer, a life-long crony, had brought thetwo of us together before Cleveland's election to the governorship of theEmpire State as one of a group of attractive Buffalo men, most of whommight be said to have been cronies of mine, Buffalo being a delightfulhalfway stop-over in my frequent migrations between Kentucky and theEastern seaboard. As in the end we came to a parting of the ways I want towrite of Mr. Cleveland as a historian and not as a critic. 

He said to Mr. Carlisle after one of our occasional tiffs: "Henry willnever like me until God makes me over again. " The next time we met, referring to this, I said: "Mr. President, I like you very much--very muchindeed--but sometimes I don't like some of your ways. "

There were in point of fact two Clevelands--before marriage and aftermarriage--the intermediate Cleveland rather unequal and indeterminate. Assuredly no one of his predecessors had entered the White House so whollyignorant of public men and national affairs. Stories used to be toldassigning to Zachary Taylor this equivocal distinction. But General Taylorhad grown up in the army and advanced in the military service to a chiefcommand, was more or less familiar with the party leaders of his time, and was by heredity a gentleman. The same was measurably true of Grant. Cleveland confessed himself to have had no social training, and heliterally knew nobody. 

Five or six weeks after his inauguration I went to Washington to ask adiplomatic appointment for my friend, Boyd Winchester. Ill health had cutshort a promising career in Congress, but Mr. Winchester was now well on torecovery, and there seemed no reason why he should not and did not stand inthe line of preferment. My experience may be worth recording because it isillustrative. 

In my quest I had not thought of going beyond Mr. Bayard, the new Secretaryof State. I did go to him, but the matter seemed to make no headway. Thereappeared a hitch somewhere. It had not crossed my mind that it might bethe President himself. What did the President know or care about foreignappointments?

He said to me on a Saturday when I was introducing a party of Kentuckyfriends: "Come up to-morrow for luncheon. Come early, for Rose"--hissister, for the time being mistress of the White House--"will be at churchand we can have an old-fashioned talk-it-out. "

The next day we passed the forenoon together. He was full of homely andoften whimsical talk. He told me he had not yet realized what had happenedto him. 

"Sometimes, " he said, "I wake at night and rub my eyes and wonder if it isnot all a dream. "

He asked an infinite number of questions about this, that and the otherDemocratic politician. He was having trouble with the Kentucky Congressmen. He had appointed a most unlikely scion of a well-known family to a foreignmission, and another young Kentuckian, the son of a New York magnate, to aleading consul generalship, without consultation with any one. He asked meabout these. In a way one of them was one of my boys, and I was glad to seehim get what he wanted, though he aspired to nothing so high. He was indeedall sorts of a boy, and his elevation to such a post was so grotesque thatthe nomination, like that of his mate, was rejected by the Senate. Igave the President a serio-comic but kindly account, at which he laughedheartily, and ended by my asking how he had chanced to make two suchappointments. 

"Hewitt came over here, " he answered, "and then Dorsheimer. The father isthe only Democrat we have in that great corporation. As to the other, hestruck me as a likely fellow. It seemed good politics to gratify them andtheir friends. "

I suggested that such backing was far afield and not very safe to go by, when suddenly he said: "I have been told over and over again by you and byothers that you will not take office. Too much of a lady, I suppose! Whatare you hanging round Washington for anyhow? What do you want?"

Here was my opportunity to speak of Winchester, and I did so. 

When I had finished he said: "What are you doing about Winchester?"

"Relying on the Secretary of State, who served in Congress with him andknows him well. "

Then he asked: "What do you want for Winchester?"

I answered: "Belgium or Switzerland. "

He said: "I promised Switzerland for a friend of Corning's. He broughthim over here yesterday and he is an out-and-out Republican who voted forBlaine, and I shall not appoint him. If you want the place for Winchester, Winchester it is. "

Next day, much to Mr. Bayard's surprise, the commission was made out. 

Mr. Cleveland had a way of sudden fancies to new and sometimes queerpeople. Many of his appointments were eccentric and fell like bombshellsupon the Senate, taking the appointee's home people completely by surprise. 

The recommendation of influential politicians seemed to have little if anyweight with him. 

There came to Washington from Richmond a gentleman by the name of Keiley, backed by the Virginia delegation for a minor consulship. The President atonce fell in love with him. 

[Illustration: Mr. Watterson's Library at "Mansfield"]

"Consul be damned, " he said. "He is worth more than that, " and named himAmbassador to Vienna. 

It turned out that Mrs. Keiley was a Jewess and would not be received atcourt. Then he named him Ambassador to Italy, when it appeared that Keileywas an intense Roman Catholic, who had made at least one ultramontanespeech, and would be _persona non grata_ at the Quirinal. ThenCleveland dropped him. Meanwhile poor Keiley had closed out bag and baggageat Richmond and was at his wit's end. After much ado the President wasbrought to a realizing sense and a place was found for Keiley as consulgeneral and diplomatic agent at Cairo, whither he repaired. At the endof the four years he came to Paris and one day, crossing the Place de laConcorde, he was run over by a truck and killed. He deserved a longercareer and a better fate, for he was a man of real capacity. 

III

Taken to task by thick and thin Democratic partisans for my criticism ofthe only two Democratic Presidents we have had since the War of Sections, Cleveland and Wilson, I have answered by asserting the right and duty ofthe journalist to talk out in meeting, flatly repudiating the claims aswell as the obligations of the organ grinder they had sought to put uponme, and closing with the knife grinder's retort--

 _Things have come to a hell of a pass When a man can't wallop his own jackass_. 

In the case of Mr. Cleveland the break had come over the tariff issue. Reading me his first message to Congress the day before he sent it in, hehad said: "I know nothing about the tariff, and I thought I had best leaveit where you and Morrison had put it in the platform. "

We had indeed had a time in the Platform Committee of the Chicagoconvention of 1884. After an unbroken session of fifty hours a straddlewas all that the committee could be brought to agree upon. The leadingrecalcitrant had been General Butler, who was there to make trouble and wholater along bolted the ticket and ran as an independent candidate. 

One aim of the Democrats was to get away from the bloody shirt as an issue. Yet, as the sequel proved, it was long after Cleveland's day before thebloody shirt was laid finally to rest. It required a patriot and a herolike William McKinley to do this. When he signed the commissions of JosephWheeler and Fitzhugh Lee, Confederate generals and graduates of the WestPoint Military Academy, to be generals in the Army of the United States, he made official announcement that the War of Sections was over and gavecomplete amnesty to the people and the soldiers of the South. 

Yet the bloody shirt lingered long as a troublemaker, and was invoked byboth parties. 

IV

That chance gathering of heedless persons, stirred by the bombast ofself-exploiting orators eager for notoriety or display--loose mobs oflocal nondescripts led by pension sharks so aptly described by the gallantGeneral Bragg, of Wisconsin, as coffee coolers and camp followers--shouldtear their passion to tatters with the thought that Virginia, exercising anindisputable right and violating no reasonable sensibility, should electto send memorials of Washington and Lee for the Hall of Statues in thenation's Capitol, came in the accustomed way of bloody-shirt agitation. Itmerely proved how easily men are led when taken in droves and stirred bypartyism. Such men either bore no part in the fighting when fighting wasthe order of the time, or else they were too ignorant and therefore toounpatriotic to comprehend the meaning of the intervening years and theglory these had brought with the expanse of national progress and prowess. In spite of their lack of representative character it was not easy torepress impatience at ebullitions of misguided zeal so ignoble; and ofcourse it was not possible to dissuade or placate them. 

All the while never a people more eager to get together than the people ofthe United States after the War of Sections, as never a people so averse togetting into that war. A very small group of extremists and doctrinaireshad in the beginning made a War of Sections possible. Enough of thesesurvived in the days of Cleveland and McKinley to keep sectionalism alive. 

It was mainly sectional clamor out for partisan advantage. But it madethe presidential campaigns lurid in certain quarters. There was no end ofobjurgation, though it would seem that even the most embittered Northernerand ultra Republican who could couple the names of Robert E. Lee andBenedict Arnold, as was often done in campaign lingo, would not hesitate, if his passions were roused or if he fancied he saw in it some profit tohimself or his party, to liken George Washington to Judas Iscariot. 

The placing of Lee's statue in the Capitol at Washington made the occasionfor this. 

It is true that long before Confederate officers had sat in both Houses ofCongress and in Republican and Democratic cabinets and upon the bench ofthe Supreme Court, and had served as ambassadors and envoys extraordinaryin foreign lands. But McKinley's doing was the crowning stroke of union andpeace. 

There had been a weary and varied interim. Sectionalism proved a sturdyplant. It died hard. We may waive the reconstruction period as ancienthistory. There followed it intense party spirit. Yet, in spite ofextremists and malignants on both sides of the line, the South ralliedequally with the North to the nation's drumbeat after the Maine went downin the harbor of Havana. It fought as bravely and as loyally at Santiagoand Manila. Finally, by the vote of the North, there came into the ChiefMagistracy one who gloried in the circumstance that on the maternal sidehe came of fighting Southern stock; who, amid universal applause, declaredthat no Southerner could he prouder than he of Robert E. Lee and StonewallJackson, apotheosizing an uncle, his mother's brother, who had stood at thehead of the Confederate naval establishment in Europe and had fitted outthe Confederate cruisers, as the noblest and purest man he had ever known, a composite of Colonel Newcome and Henry Esmond. 

Meanwhile the process of oblivion had gone on. The graven effigy ofJefferson Davis at length appeared upon the silver service of an Americanbattleship. This told the Mississippi's guests, wherever and whenever theymight meet round her hospitable board, of national unification and peace, giving the lie to sectional malignancy. In the most famous and conspicuousof the national cemeteries now stands the monument of a Confederate generalnot only placed there by consent of the Government, but dedicated withfitting ceremonies supervised by the Department of War, which sent as itsofficial representative the son of Grant, himself an army officer of rankand distinction. 

The world has looked on, incredulous and amazed, whilst our country hasrisen to each successive act in the drama of reconciliation with increasingenthusiasm. 

I have been all my life a Constitutional Nationalist; first the nation andthen the state. The episode of the Confederacy seems already far away. Itwas an interlude, even as matters stood in the Sixties and Seventies, andnow he who would thwart the unification of the country on the lines ofoblivion, of mutual and reciprocal forgiveness, throws himself across thehighway of his country's future, and is a traitor equally to the essentialprinciples of free government and the spirit of the age. 

If sectionalism be not dead it should have no place in popularconsideration. The country seems happily at last one with itself. TheSouth, like the East and the West, has come to be the merest geographicexpression. Each of its states is in the Union, precisely like the statesof the East and the West, all in one and one in all. Interchanges of everysort exist. 

These exchanges underlie and interlace our social, domestic and businessfabric. That the arrangement and relation after half a century of strifethus established should continue through all time is the hope and prayerof every thoughtful, patriotic American. There is no greater dissonanceto that sentiment in the South than in the North. To what end, therefore, except ignominious recrimination and ruinous dissension, could a revival ofold sectional and partisan passions--if it were possible--be expected toreach?

V

Humor has played no small part in our politics. It was Col. MulberrySellers, Mark Twain's hero, who gave currency to the conceit and enunciatedthe principle of "the old flag and an appropriation. " He did not claim theformula as his own, however. He got it, he said, of Senator Dillworthy, hispatriotic file leader and ideal of Christian statesmanship. 

The original of Senator Dillworthy was recognized the country over asSenator Pomeroy, of Kansas, "Old Pom, " as he had come to be called, whoseoleaginous piety and noisy patriotism, adjusting themselves with equalfacility to the purloining of subsidies and the roasting of rebels, toprayer and land grants, had impressed themselves upon the Satirist ofthe Gilded Age as upon his immediate colleagues in Congress. He was aruffle-shirted Pharisee, who affected the airs of a bishop, and resembledCruikshank's pictures of Pecksniff. 

There have not been many "Old Poms" in our public life; or, for that matterAaron Burrs either, and but one Benedict Arnold. That the chosen people ofGod did not dwell amid the twilight of the ages and in far-away Judea, butwere reserved to a later time, and a region then undiscovered of men, andthat the American republic was ordained of God to illustrate upon thetheater of the New World the possibilities of free government in contrastwith the failures and tyrannies and corruptions of the Old, I do trulybelieve. That is the first article in my confession of faith. And thesecond is like unto it, that Washington was raised up by God to create it, and that Lincoln was raised up by God to save it; else why the militiacolonel of Virginia and the rail splitter of Illinois, for no reason thatwas obvious at the time, before all other men? God moves in a mysteriousway his wonders to perform. The star of the sublime destiny that hung overthe manager of our blessed Savior hung over the cradle of our blessedUnion. 

Thus far it has weathered each historic danger which has gone before tomark the decline and fall of nations; the struggle for existence; theforeign invasion; the internecine strife; the disputed succession;religious bigotry and racial conflict. One other peril confrontsit--the demoralization of wealth and luxury; too great prosperity; theconcentration and the abuse of power. Shall we survive the lures with whichthe spirit of evil, playing upon our self-love, seeks to trip our waywardfootsteps, purse-pride and party spirit, mistaken zeal and pervertedreligion, fanaticism seeking to abridge liberty and liberty running tolicense, greed masquerading as a patriot and ambition making a commodity ofglory--or under the process of a divine evolution shall we be able to mountand ride the waves which swallowed the tribes of Israel, which engulfed thephalanxes of Greece and the legions of Rome, and which still beat the sidesand sweep the decks of Europe?

The one-party power we have escaped; the one-man power we have escaped. Thestars in their courses fight for us; the virtue and intelligence of thepeople are still watchful and alert. Truth is mightier than ever, andjustice, mounting guard even in the Hall of Statues, walks everywhere thebattlements of freedom!

Chapter the Twentieth

 The Real Grover Cleveland--Two Clevelands Before and After Marriage--A Correspondence and a Break of Personal Relations

I

There were, as I have said, two Grover Clevelands--before and aftermarriage--and, it might be added, between his defeat in 1888 and hiselection in 1892. He was so sure of his election in 1888 that he could notbe induced to see the danger of the situation in his own State of New York, where David Bennett Hill, who had succeeded him in the governorship, was acandidate for reelection, and whom he personally detested, had become theruling party force. He lost the State, and with it the election, while Hillwon, and thereby arose an ugly faction fight. 

I did not believe as the quadrennial period approached in 1892 that Mr. Cleveland could be elected. I still think he owed his election, andHarrison his defeat, to the Homestead riots of the midsummer, whichtransferred the labor vote bodily from the Republicans to the Democrats. Mainly on account of this belief I opposed his nomination that year. 

In the Kentucky State Convention I made my opposition resonant, if noteffective. "I understand, " I said in an address to the assembled delegates, "that you are all for Grover Cleveland?"

There came an affirmative roar. 

"Well, " I continued, "I am not, and if you send me to the NationalConvention I will not vote for his nomination, if his be the only namepresented, because I firmly believe that his nomination will mean themarching through a slaughter-house to an open grave, and I refuse to beparty to such a folly. "

The answer of the convention was my appointment by acclamation, but it wasmany a day before I heard the last of my unlucky figure of speech. 

Notwithstanding this splendid indorsement, I went to the NationalConvention feeling very like the traditional "poor boy at a frolic. " Allseemed to me lost save honor and conviction. I had become the embodimentof my own epigram, "a tariff for revenue only. " Mr. Cleveland, in thebeginning very much taken by it, had grown first lukewarm and thenfrightened. His "Free Trade" message of 1887 had been regarded by the partyas an answering voice. But I knew better. 

In the national platform, over the protest of Whitney, his organizer, andVilas, his spokesman, I had forced him to stand on that gospel. He flewinto a rage and threatened to modify, if not to repudiate, the plank in hisletter of acceptance. We were still on friendly terms and, upon reachinghome, I wrote him the following letter. It reads like ancient history, but, as the quarrel which followed cut a certain figure in the politicalchronicle of the time, the correspondence may not be historically out ofdate, or biographically uninteresting:

II

MR. WATTERSON TO MR. CLEVELAND

Courier-Journal Office, Louisville, July 9, 1892. --My Dear Mr. President:I inclose you two editorial articles from the Courier-Journal, and, thattheir spirit and purpose may not be misunderstood by you, I wish to add aword or two of a kind directly and entirely personal. 

To a man of your robust understanding and strong will, opposition andcriticism are apt to be taken as more or less unfriendly; and, as you areat present advised, I can hardly expect that any words of mine will bereceived by you with sentiments either of confidence or favor. 

I was admonished by a certain distrust, if not disdain, visited upon thehonest challenge I ventured to offer your Civil Service policy, when youwere actually in office, that you did not differ from some other great menI have known in an unwillingness, or at least an inability, to accept, without resentment, the question of your infallibility. Nevertheless, I wasthen, as I am now, your friend, and not your enemy, animated by thesingle purpose to serve the country, through you, as, wanting your greatopportunities, I could not serve it through myself. 

During the four years when you were President, I asked you but for onething that lay near my heart. You granted that handsomely; and, if youhad given me all you had to give beside, you could not have laid me undergreater obligation. It is a gratification to me to know, and it ought to besome warrant both of my intelligence and fidelity for you to remember thatthat matter resulted in credit to the Administration and benefit to thepublic service. 

But to the point; I had at St. Louis in 1888 and at Chicago, the presentyear, to oppose what was represented as your judgment and desire in theadoption of a tariff plank in our national platform; successfully in bothcases. The inclosed articles set forth the reasons forcing upon me adifferent conclusion from yours, in terms that may appear to you bluntlyspecific, but I hope not personally offensive; certainly not by intention, for, whilst I would not suppress the truth to please you or any man, Ihave a decent regard for the sensibilities and the rights of all men, particularly of men so eminent as to be beyond the reach of anything exceptinsolence and injustice. Assuredly in your case, I am incapable of even somuch as the covert thought of either, entertaining for you absolute respectand regard. But, my dear Mr. President, I do not think that you appreciatethe overwhelming force of the revenue reform issue, which has made you itsidol. 

[Illustration: A Corner of "Mansfield"--Home of Henry Watterson]

If you will allow me to say so, in perfect frankness and without intendingto be rude or unkind, the gentlemen immediately about you, gentlemen uponwhom you rely for material aid and energetic party management, are not, asto the Tariff, Democrats at all; and have little conception of the place inthe popular mind and heart held by the Revenue Reform idea, or, indeed ofany idea, except that of organization and money. 

Of the need of these latter, no man has a more realizing sense, or largerinformation and experience, than I have. But they are merely the brakes andwheels of the engine, to which principles and inspirations are, and mustalways be, the elements of life and motion. It is to entreat you therefore, in your coming letter and address, not to underestimate the tremendousdriving power of this Tariff issue, and to beg you, not even to seem toqualify it, or to abridge its terms in a mistaken attempt to seem to beconservative. 

You cannot escape your great message of 1887 if you would. I know it byheart, and I think that I perfectly apprehend its scope and tenor. Take itas your guiding star. Stand upon it. Reiterate it. Emphasize it, amplifyit, but do not subtract a thought, do not erase a word. For every votewhich a bold front may lose you in the East you will gain two votes in theWest. In the East, particularly in New York, enemies lurk in your verycupboard, and strike at you from behind your chair at table. There is morethan a fighting chance for Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota, and next toa certainty in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana, if you put yourselfpersonally at the head of the column which is moving in your name, supposing it to be another name for reduced taxes and freer exchanges. 

Discouraged as I was by the condition of things in New York and Indianaprior to the Chicago Convention, depressed and almost hopeless by yournomination, I can see daylight, if you will relax your grip somewhat uponthe East and throw yourself confidently upon the West. 

I write warmly because I feel warmly. If you again occupy the White House, and it is my most constant and earnest prayer that you may, be sure thatyou will not be troubled by me. I cannot hope that my motives in opposingyour nomination, consistent as you know them to have been, or that myconduct during the post-convention discussion and canvass, free as I knowit to have been of ill-feeling, or distemper, has escaped misrepresentationand misconception. I could not, without the loss of my self-respect, approach you on any private matter whatever; though it may not be amissfor me to say to you, that three weeks before the meeting of the NationalConvention, I wrote to Mr. Gorman and Mr. Brice urging the withdrawal ofany opposition, and declaring that I would be a party to no movement towork the two-thirds rule to defeat the will of the majority. 

This is all I have to say, Mr. President, and you can believe it or not, asyou please; though you ought to know that I would write you nothing exceptin sincere conviction, nor speak to you, or of you, except in a candid andkindly spirit. Trusting that this will find you hale, hearty, and happy, Iam, dear sir, your fellow democrat and most faithful friend, HENRY WATTERSON. 

The Honorable Grover Cleveland. 

III

MR. CLEVELAND TO MR. WATTERSON

By return mail I received this answer:

Gray Gables, Buzzards Bay, Mass. , July 15, 1892. 

MY DEAR MR. WATTERSON:

I have received your letter and the clippings you inclosed. 

I am not sure that I understand perfectly all that they mean. One thingthey demonstrate beyond any doubt, to-wit: that you have not--I think I maysay--the slightest conception of my disposition. It may be that I knowas little about yours. I am surprised by the last paragraph of TheCourier-Journal article of July 8 and amazed to read the statementscontained in your letter, that you know the message of 1887 by heart. Itis a matter of very small importance, but I hope you will allow me to say, that in all the platform smashing you ever did, you never injured norinspired me that I have ever seen or heard of, except that of 1888. Iexcept that, so I may be exactly correct when I write, "seen or heardof, "--for I use the words literally. 

I would like very much to present some views to you relating to the tariffposition, but I am afraid to do so. 

I will, however, venture to say this: If we are defeated this year, Ipredict a Democratic wandering in the dark wilds of discouragement fortwenty-five years. I do not purpose to be at all responsible for such aresult. I hope all others upon whom rests the least responsibility willfully appreciate it. 

The world will move on when both of us are dead. While we stay, andespecially while we are in any way concerned in political affairs and whilewe are members of the same political brotherhood, let us both resolve to bejust and modest and amiable. Yours very sincerely, GROVER CLEVELAND. 

Hon. Henry Watterson, Louisville, Ky. 

IV

MR. WATTERSON TO MR. CLEVELAND

I said in answer:

Louisville, July 22, 1892. --My Dear Sir: I do not see how you couldmisunderstand the spirit in which I wrote, or be offended by my plainwords. They were addressed as from one friend to another, as from oneDemocrat to another. If you entertain the idea that this is a false viewof our relative positions, and that your eminence lifts you above bothcomradeship and counsels, I have nothing to say except to regret that, inunderestimating your breadth of character I exposed myself too contumely. 

You do, indeed, ride a wave of fortune and favor. You are quite beyondthe reach of insult, real or fancied. You could well afford to be moretolerant. 

In answer to the ignorance of my service to the Democratic party, which youare at such pains to indicate--and, particularly, with reference to thesectional issue and the issue of tariff reform--I might, if I wanted to beunamiable, suggest to you a more attentive perusal of the proceedings ofthe three national conventions which nominated you for President. 

But I purpose nothing of the sort. In the last five national conventions myefforts were decisive in framing the platform of the party. In each of themI closed the debate, moved the previous question and was sustained by theconvention. In all of them, except the last, I was a maker, not a smasher. Touching what happened at Chicago, the present year, I had a right, incommon with good Democrats, to be anxious; and out of that sense of anxietyalone I wrote you. I am sorry that my temerity was deemed by you intrusiveand, entering a respectful protest against a ban which I cannot believe tobe deserved by me, and assuring you that I shall not again trouble you inthat way, I am, your obedient servant, HENRY WATTERSON. 

The Hon. Grover Cleveland. 

V

This ended my personal relations with Mr. Cleveland. Thereafter we did notspeak as we passed by. He was a hard man to get on with. Overcredulous, though by no means excessive, in his likes, very tenacious in his dislikes, suspicious withal, he grew during his second term in the White House, exceedingly "high and mighty, " suggesting somewhat the "stuffed prophet, "of Mr. Dana's relentless lambasting and verifying my insistence that heposed rather as an idol to be worshiped, than a leader to be trusted andloved. He was in truth a strong man, who, sufficiently mindful of hislimitations in the beginning, grew by unexampled and continued successoverconfident and overconscious in his own conceit. He had a real desire toserve the country. But he was apt to think that he alone could effectivelyserve it. In one of our spats I remember saying to him, "You seem, Mr. President, to think you are the only pebble on the beach--the one honestand brave man in the party--hut let me assure you of my own knowledge thatthere are others. " His answer was, "Oh, you go to ----!"

He split his party wide open. The ostensible cause was the money issue. But, underlying this, there was a deal of personal embitterment. Had hebeen a man of foresight--or even of ordinary discernment--he might haveheld it together and with it behind him have carried the gold standard. 

I had contended for a sound currency from the outset of the fiscalcontention, fighting first the green-back craze and then the free silvercraze against an overwhelming majority in the West and South, nowhere moreradically relentless than in Kentucky. Both movements had their origin oneconomic fallacies and found their backing in dishonest purpose to escapehonest indebtedness. 

Through Mr. Cleveland the party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Tilden wasconverted from a Democrat into a Populist, falling into the arms of Mr. Bryan, whose domination proved as baleful in one way as Mr. Cleveland's hadbeen in another, the final result shipwreck, with the extinguishment of allbut the label. 

Mr. Bryan was a young man of notable gifts of speech and boundlessself-assertion. When he found himself well in the saddle he began to ruledespotically and to ride furiously. A party leader more short-sighted couldhardly be imagined. None of his judgments came true. As a consequence theRepublicans for a long time had everything their own way, and, save forthe Taft-Roosevelt quarrel, might have held their power indefinitely. Allhistory tells us that the personal equation must be reckoned with inpublic life. Assuredly it cuts no mean figure in human affairs. And, whenpoliticians fall out--well--the other side comes in. 

Chapter the Twenty-First

 Stephen Foster, the Song-Writer--A Friend Comes to the Rescu His Originality--"My Old Kentucky Home" and the "Old Folks at Home"--General Sherman and "Marching Through Georgia"

I have received many letters touching what I said a little while ago ofStephen Collins Foster, the song writer. In that matter I had, and couldhave had, no unkindly thought or purpose. The story of the musicalscrapbook rested not with me, but as I stated, upon the averment of Will S. Hays, a rival song writer. But that the melody of Old Folks at Home may befound in Schubert's posthumous Rosemonde admits not of contradiction forthere it is, and this would seem to be in some sort corroborative evidenceof the truth of Hays' story. 

Among these letters comes one from Young E. Allison which is entitled toserious consideration. Mr. Allison is a gentleman of the first order ofcharacter and culture, an editor and a musician, and what he writes cannotfail to carry with it very great weight. I need make no apology for quotinghim at length. 

"I have long been collecting material about Foster from his birth to hisdeath, " says Mr. Allison, "and aside from his weak and fatal love of drink, which developed after he was twenty-five, and had married, his life was onecontinuous devotion to the study of music, of painting, of poetry and oflanguages; in point of fact, of all the arts that appeal to one who feelswithin him the stir of the creative. He was, quite singularly enough, afine mathematician, which undoubtedly aided him in the study of music as ascience, to which time and balance play such an important part. In fact, Ibelieve it was the mathematical devil in his brain that came to hold himwithin such bare and primitive forms of composition and so, to some extent, to delimit the wider development of his genius. 

"Now as to Foster's drinking habits, however unfortunate they proved to himthey did not affect the quality of his art as he bequeathed it to us. No one cares to recall the unhappy fortunes of Burns, De Musset, Chopinor--even in our own time--of O. Henry, and others who might be named. Innone of their productions does the hectic fever of over-stimulation showitself. No purer, gentler or simpler aspirations were ever expressed in thevarying forms of music and verse than flowed from Foster's pen, even aspenetrating benevolence came from the pen of O. Henry, embittered andsolitary as his life had been. Indeed when we come to regard what thedrinkers of history have done for the world in spite of the artificialstimulus they craved, we may say with Lincoln as Lincoln said of Grant, 'Send the other generals some of the same brand. '

"Foster was an aristocrat of aristocrats, both by birth and gifts. Heinherited the blood of Richard Steele and of the Kemble family, noted inEnglish letters and dramatic annals. To these artistic strains headded undoubtedly the musical temperament of an Italian grandmother orgreat-grand-mother. He was a cousin of John Rowan, the distinguishedKentucky lawyer and senator. Of Foster's family, his father, his brothers, his sisters were all notable as patriots, as pioneers in engineering, incommerce and in society. One of his brothers designed and built the earlyPennsylvania Railroad system and died executive vice-president of thatgreat corporation. Thus he was born to the arts and to social distinction. But, like many men of the creative temperament, he was born a solitary, destined to live in a land of dreams. The singular beauty and grace of hisperson and countenance, the charm of his voice, manner and conversation, were for the most part familiar to the limited circle of his immediatefamily and friends. To others he was reticent, with a certain hauteur oftimidity, avoiding society and public appearances to the day of his death. 

"Now those are the facts about Foster. They certainly do not describe the'ne'er-do-well of a good family' who hung round barrooms, colored-minstrelhaunts and theater entrances. I can find only one incident to show thatFoster ever went to hear his own songs sung in public. He was essentially asolitary, who, while keenly observant of and entering sympathizingly intothe facts of life, held himself aloof from immediate contact with itscrowded stream. He was solitary from sensitivity, not from bitterness orindifference. He made a large fortune for his day with his songs and was apopular idol. 

"Let us come now to the gravamen of my complaint. You charge on theauthority of mere gossip from the late Will S. Hays, that Foster did notcompose his own music, but that he had obtained a collection of unpublishedmanuscripts by an unnamed old 'German musician and thus dishonestly, by pilfering and suppression' palmed off upon the public themes andcompositions which he could not himself have originated. Something likethis has been said about every composer and writer, big and little, whosepersonality and habits did not impress his immediate neighbors as implyingthe possession of genius. The world usually expects direct inheritance anda theatric impressiveness of genius in its next-door neighbor before itaccepts the proof of his works alone. For that reason Napoleon's paternityin Corsica was ascribed to General Maboeuf, and Henry Clay's in earlyKentucky to Patrick Henry. That legend of the 'poor, unknown Germanmusician' who composed in poverty and secrecy the deathless songs thathave obsessed the world of music lovers, has been told of numberless youngcomposers on their way to fame, but died out in the blaze of their laterwork. I have no doubt they told it of Foster, as they did also of Hays. And Colonel Hays doubtless repeated it to you as the intimate gossip aboutFoster. 

"I have an article written by Colonel Hays and published in and cut fromThe Courier-Journal some twelve years after the composer's death, in whichhe sketches the life and work of Stephen Collins Foster. In that article helays especial stress upon the surprising originality of the Foster themesand of their musical setting. He praises their distinct American or rathernative inspiration and flavor, and describes from his own knowledge ofFoster how they were 'written from his heart. ' No mention or suggestion init of any German or other origin for any of those melodies that the worldthen and now cherishes as American in costume, but universal in appeal. While you may have heard something in Schubert's compositions thatsuggested something in Foster's most famous song, still I venture to say itwas only a suggestion, such as often arises from the works of composers ofthe same general type. Schubert and Foster were both young sentimentalistsand dreamers who must have had similar dreams that found expression intheir similar progressions. 

"The German musicians from whom Foster got inspiration to work wereBeethoven, Glück, Weber, Mozart. He was a student of all of them and of theItalian school also, as some of his songs show. Foster's first and onlymusic teacher--except in the 'do-re-mi' exercises in his schoolboylife--testifies that Foster's musical apprehension was so quick, hisintuitive grasp of its science so complete that after a short time therewas nothing he could teach him of the theory of composition; that hispupil went straight to the masters and got illustration and discipline forhimself. 

"This was to be expected of a precocious genius who had written a concertedpiece for flutes at thirteen, who was trying his wings on love songs atsixteen, and before he was twenty-one had composed several of the mostfamous of his American melodies, among them Oh Susannah, Old Dog Tray andOld Uncle Ned. As in other things he taught himself music, but he studiedit ardently at the shrines of the masters. He became a master of the art ofsong writing. If anybody cares to hunt up the piano scores that Verdi madeof songs from his operas in the days of Foster he will find that the greatItalian composer's settings were quite as thin as Foster's and exhibitednot much greater art. It was the fault of the times on the piano, not ofthe composers. It was not till long afterward that the color capacitiesof the piano were developed. As Foster was no pianist, but rather a puremelodist, he could not be expected to surpass his times in the managementof the piano, the only 'orchestra' he had. It will not do to regard Fosteras a crude musician. His own scores reveal him as the most artful of'artless' composers. 

"It is not even presumption to speak of him in the same breath with Verdi. The breadth and poignancy of Foster's melodies entitle them to the highestcritical respect, as they have received worldwide appreciation from greatmusicians and plain music lovers. Wherever he has gone he has reached thepopular heart. Here in the United States he has quickened the pulse beatsof four generations. But this master creator of a country's only nativesongs has invariably here at home been apologized for as a sort of'cornfield musician, ' a mere banjo strummer, a hanger-on at barrooms whereminstrel quartets rendered his songs and sent the hat round. The reflectionwill react upon his country; it will not detract from the real Foster whenthe constructive critic appears to write his brief and unfortunate life. Iam not contending that he was a genius of the highest rank, although he hadthe distinction that great genius nearly always achieves, of creating aschool that produced many imitators and established a place apart foritself in the world's estimation. In ballad writing he did for the UnitedStates what Watteau did for painting in France. As Watteau found a Flemishschool in France and left a French school stamped forever, so Foster foundthe United States a home for imitations of English, Irish, German andItalian songs, and left a native ballad form and melodic strain foreverimpressed upon it as pure American. 

"He was like Watteau in more than that. Watteau took the elegancies andfripperies of the corrupt French court and fixed them in art immortal, asif the moment had been arrested and held in actual motion. Foster tookthe curious and melancholy spectacle of African slavery at its height, superimposed by the most elegant and picturesque social manners thiscountry has known, at the moment the institution was at its zenith. Hesaw the glamor, the humor, the tragedy, the contrasts, the emotionaldepths--that lay unplumbed beneath it all. He fixed it there for all time, for all hearts and minds everywhere. His songs are not only the pictorialcanvas of that time, they are the emotional history of the times. It wasdone by a boy who was not prophet enough to foresee the end, or philosopherenough to demonstrate the conditions, but who was born with the intuitionto feel it all and set it forth deeply and truly from every aspect. 

"While Foster wrote many comic songs there is ever in them something ofthe melancholy undercurrent that has been detected under the laces andarabesques of Chopin's nominally frivolous dances. Foster's ballad form wasextremely attenuated, but the melodic content filled it so completely thatit seems to strain at the bounds and must be repeated and repeated tofurnish full gratification to the ear. His form when compared withthe modern ballad's amplitude seems like a Tanagra figurine beside aMichelangelo statue--but the figurine is as fine in its scope as the statueis in the greater. 

"I hope you will think Foster over and revise him 'upward. '"

All of us need to be admonished to speak no evil of the dead. I am tryingin Looking Backward to square the adjuration with the truth. Perhaps Ishould speak only of that which is known directly to myself. It costs menothing to accept this statement of Mr. Allison and to incorporate it as anessential part of the record as far as it relates to the most famous and inhis day the most beloved of American song writers. 

Once at a Grand Army encampment General Sherman and I were seated togetheron the platform when the band began to play Marching Through Georgia, whenthe general said rather impatiently: "I wish I had a dollar for every timeI have had to listen to that blasted tune. "

And I answered: "Well, there is another tune about which I might say thesame thing, " meaning My Old Kentucky Home. 

Neither of us was quite sincere. Both were unconsciously pleased to hearthe familiar strains. At an open-air fiesta in Barcelona some Americanfriends who made their home there put the bandmaster up to breaking forthwith the dear old melody as I came down the aisle, and I was mightilypleased. Again at a concert in Lucerne, the band, playing a potpourri ofSwiss songs, interpolated Kentucky's national anthem and the group of usstood up and sang the chorus. 

I do not wonder that men march joyously to battle and death to drum andfife squeaking and rattling The Girl I Left Behind Me. It may be a longway to Tipperary, but it is longer to the end of the tether that binds theheart of man to the cradle songs of his nativity. With the cradle songs ofAmerica the name of Stephen Collins Foster "is immortal bound, " and I wouldno more dishonor his memory than that of Robert Burns or the author of TheStar-Spangled Banner. 

Chapter the Twenty-Second

 Theodore Roosevelt--His Problematic Character--He Offers Me an Appointment--His _Bonhomie_ and Chivalry--Proud of His Rebel Kin

I

It is not an easy nor yet a wholly congenial task to write--truthfully, intelligently and frankly to write--about Theodore Roosevelt. He belongedto the category of problematical characters. A born aristocrat, he at notime took the trouble to pose as a special friend of the people; a bornleader, he led with a rough unsparing hand. He was the soul of controversy. To one who knew him from his childhood as I did, always loving him andrarely agreeing with him, it was plain to see how his most obvious faultscommended him to the multitude and made for a popularity that never quitedeserted him. 

As poorly as I rate the reign of majorities I prefer it to the one-manpower, either elective or dynastic. The scheme of a third term in thepresidency for General Grant seemed to me a conspiracy though with many ofits leaders I was on terms of affectionate intimacy. I fought and helpedto kill in 1896 the unborn scheme to give Mr. Cleveland a third term. Inevitably as the movement for the retention of Theodore Roosevelt beyondthe time already fixed began to show itself in 1907, my pen was primedagainst it and I wrote variously and voluminously. 

There appeared in one of the periodicals for January, 1908, a sketch ofmine which but for a statement issued concurrently from the White Housewould have attracted more attention than it did. In this I related how atWashington just before the War of Sections I had a musical pal--the nieceof a Southern senator--who had studied in Paris, been a protégée of theEmpress Eugénie and become an out-and-out imperialist. Louis Napoleon washer ideal statesman. She not only hated the North but accepted as gospeltruth all the misleading theories of the South: that cotton was king; thatslavery was a divine institution; that in any enterprise one Southern manwas a match for six Northern men. 

On these points we had many contentions. When the break came she wentSouth with her family. The last I saw of her was crossing Long Bridge in alumbering family carriage waving a tiny Confederate flag. 

Forty-five years intervened. I had heard of her from time to time wanderingaimlessly over Europe, but had not met her until the preceding winter in afamous Southern homestead. There she led me into a rose garden, and seatedbeneath its clustered greeneries she said with an air of triumph, "Now yousee, my dear old friend, that I was right and you were wrong all the time. "

Startled, and altogether forgetful, I asked in what way. 

"Why, " she answered, "at last the South is coming to its own. "

Still out of rapport with her thought I said something about theobliteration of sectionalism and the arrival of political freedom andgeneral prosperity. She would none of this. 

[Illustration: Henry Watterson (Photograph taken in Florida)]

"I mean, " she abruptly interposed, "that the son of Martha Bullock has cometo his own and he will rescue us from the mudsills of the North. "

She spoke as if our former discussions had been but yesterday. Then I gaveher the right of way, interjecting a query now and then to give emphasis toher theme, while she unfolded the plan which seemed to her so simple andeasy; God's own will; the national destiny, first a third term, and thenlife tenure à la Louis Napoleone for Theodore Roosevelt, the son of MarthaBullock, the nephew of our great admiral, who was to redress all the wrongsof the South and bring the Yankees to their just deserts at last. 

"If, " I ended my sketch, "out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, why notout of the brain of this crazed old woman of the South?"

Early in the following April I came from my winter home in Florida to thenational capital, and the next day was called by the President to the WhiteHouse. 

"The first thing I want to ask, " said he, "is whether that old woman was areal person or a figment of your imagination?"

"She was a figment of my imagination, " I answered, "but you put her out ofbusiness with a single punch. Why didn't you hold back your statement abit? If you had done so there was room for lots of sport ahead. "

He was in no mood for joking. "Henry Watterson, " he said, "I want to talkto you seriously about this third-term business. I will not deny that Ihave thought of the thing--thought of it a great deal. " Then he proceededto relate from his point of view the state of the country and the immediatesituation. He spoke without reserve of his relations to the nearestassociated public men, of what were and what were not his personal andparty obligations, his attitude toward the political questions of themoment, and ended by saying, "What do you make of all this?"

"Mr. President, " I replied, "you know that I am your friend, and as yourfriend I tell you that if you go out of here the fourth of next Marchplacing your friend Taft in your place you will make a good third toWashington and Lincoln; but if you allow these wild fellows willy-nillyto induce you, in spite of your declaration, to accept the nomination, substantially for a third term, all issues will be merged in that issue, and in my judgment you will not carry a state in the Union. "

As if much impressed and with a show of feeling he said: "It may be so. Atany rate I will not do it. If the convention nominates me I will promptlysend my declination. If it nominates me and adjourns I will call ittogether again and it will have to name somebody else. "

As an illustration of the implacability which pursued him I may mentionthat among many leading Republicans to whom I related the incident mostof them discredited his sincerity, one of them--a man of nationalimportance--expressing the opinion that all along he was artfully playingfor the nomination. This I do not believe. Perhaps he was never quite fixedin his mind. The presidency is a wondrous lure. Once out of the WhiteHouse--what else and what----?

II

Upon his return from one of his several foreign journeys a party of somehundred or more of his immediate personal friends gave him a private dinnerat a famous uptown restaurant. I was placed next him at table. It goeswithout saying that we had all sorts of a good time--he Cæsar and IBrutus--the prevailing joke the entente between the two. 

"I think, " he began his very happy speech, "that I am the bravest manthat ever lived, for here I have been sitting three hours by the side ofBrutus--have repeatedly seen him clutch his knife--without the blink of aneye or the turn of a feature. "

To which in response when my turn came I said: "You gentlemen seem to besurprised that there should be so perfect an understanding between ourguest and myself. But there is nothing new or strange in that. It goesback, indeed, to his cradle and has never been disturbed throughout theintervening years of political discussion--sometimes acrimonious. At thetop of the acclivity of his amazing career--in the very plenitude of hiseminence and power--let me tell you that he offered me one of the mosthonorable and distinguished appointments within his gift. "

"Tell them about that, Marse Henry, " said he. 

"With your permission, Mr. President, I will, " I said, and continued: "Thecentenary of the West Point Military Academy was approaching. I was atdinner with my family at a hotel in Washington when General Corbin joinedus. 'Will you, ' he abruptly interjected, 'accept the chairmanship of theboard of visitors to the academy this coming June?'

"'What do you want of me?' I asked. 

"'It is the academy's centenary, which we propose to celebrate, and we wantan orator. '

"'General Corbin, ' said I, 'you are coming at me in a most enticing way. I know all about West Point. Here at Washington I grew up with it. I havebeen fighting legislative battles for the Army all my life. That youYankees should come to a ragged old rebel like me for such a service is adistinction indeed, and I feel immensely honored. But which page of thecourt calendar made you a plural? Whom do you mean by "we"?'

"'Why, ' he replied in serio-comic vein, 'the President, the Secretary ofWar and Me, myself. '

"I promised him to think it over and give him an answer. Next day Ireceived a letter from the President, making the formal official tender andexpressing the hope that I would not decline it. Yet how could I accept itwith the work ahead of me? It was certain that if I became a part of thepresidential junket and passed a week in the delightful company promisedme, I would be unfit for the loyal duty I owed my belongings and my party, and so reluctantly--more reluctantly than I can tell you--I declined, obliging them to send for Gen. Horace Porter and bring him over from acrossthe ocean, where he was ably serving as Ambassador to France. I neednot add how well that gifted and versatile gentleman discharged thedistinguished and pleasing duty. "

III

The last time I met Theodore Roosevelt was but a little while before hisdeath. A small party of us, Editor Moore, of Pittsburgh, and Mr. Riggs, of the New York Central, at his invitation had a jolly midday breakfast, extending far into the afternoon. I never knew him happier or heartier. His jocund spirit rarely failed him. He enjoyed life and wasted no time ontrivial worries, hit-or-miss, the keynote to his thought. 

The Dutch blood of Holland and the cavalier blood of England mingled inhis veins in fair proportion. He was especially proud of the uncle, hismother's brother, the Southern admiral, head of the Confederate navalorganization in Europe, who had fitted out the rebel cruisers and sent themto sea. And well he might be, for a nobler American never lived. At theclose of the War of Sections Admiral Bullock had in his possession somehalf million dollars of Confederate money. Instead of appropriating this tohis own use, as without remark or hindrance he might have done, he turnedit over to the Government of the United States, and died a poor man. 

The inconsistencies and quarrels in which Theodore Roosevelt was now andagain involved were largely temperamental. His mind was of that order whichis prone to believe what it wants to believe. He did not take much time tothink. He leaped at conclusions, and from his premise his conclusion wasusually sound. His tastes were domestic, his pastime, when not at hisbooks, field sports. 

He was not what might be called convivial, though fond of goodcompany--very little wine affecting him--so that a certain self-controlbecame second nature to him. 

To be sure, he had no conscientious or doctrinal scruples about a thirdterm. He had found the White House a congenial abode, had accepted theliteral theory that his election in 1908 would not imply a third but asecond term, and he wanted to remain. In point of fact I have an impressionthat, barring Jackson and Polk, most of those who have got there were loathto give it up. We know that Grant was, and I am sure that Cleveland was. Weowe a great debt to Washington, because if a third why not a fourth term?And then life tenure after the manner of the Caesars and Cromwells ofhistory, and especially the Latin-Americans--Bolivar, Rosas and Diaz?

Away back in 1873, after a dinner, Mr. Blaine took me into his den and toldme that it was no longer a surmise but a fact that the group about GeneralGrant, who had just been reflected by an overwhelming majority, wasmaneuvering for a third term. To me this was startling, incredible. Returning to my hotel I saw a light still burning in the room of SenatorMorton, of Indiana, and rapping at the door I was bidden to enter. Without mentioning how it had reached me, I put the proposition to him. "Certainly, " he said, "it is true. "

The next day, in a letter to the Courier-Journal, I reduced what I hadheard to writing. Reading this over it seemed so sensational that I added aclosing paragraph, meant to qualify what I had written and to imply that Ihad not gone quite daft. 

"These things, " I wrote, "may sound queer to the ear of the country. Theymay have visited me in my dreams; they may, indeed, have come to me betwixtthe sherry and the champagne, but nevertheless I do aver that they arebuzzing about here in the minds of many very serious and not unimportantpersons. "

Never was a well-intentioned scribe so berated and ridiculed as I, never asimple news gatherer so discredited. Democratic and Republican newspapersvied with one another which could say crossest things and laugh loudest. One sentence especially caught the newspaper risibilities of the time, andit was many a year before the phrase "between the sherry and the champagne"ceased to pursue me. That any patriotic American, twice elevated to thepresidency, could want a third term, could have the hardihood to seek onewas inconceivable. My letter was an insult to General Grant and proof of myown lack of intelligence and restraint. They lammed me, laughed at me, goodand strong. On each successive occasion of recurrence I have encounteredthe same criticism. 

Chapter the Twenty-Third

 The Actor and the Journalist--The Newspaper and the State--Joseph Jefferson--His Personal and Artistic Career--Modest Character and Religious Belief

I

The journalist and the player have some things in common. Each turns nightinto day. I have known rather intimately all the eminent English-speakingactors of my time from Henry Irving and Charles Wyndham to Edwin Booth andJoseph Jefferson, from Charlotte Cushman to Helena Modjeska. No people arequite so interesting as stage people. 

During nearly fifty years my life and the life of Joseph Jefferson ranclose upon parallel lines. He was eleven years my senior; but afterthe desultory acquaintance of a man and a boy we came together undercircumstances which obliterated the disparity of age and establishedbetween us a lasting bond of affection. His wife, Margaret, had died, andhe was passing through Washington with the little brood of children she hadleft him. 

It made the saddest spectacle I had ever seen. As I recall it after morethan sixty years, the scene of silent grief, of unutterable helplessness, has still a haunting power over me, the oldest lad not eight years of age, the youngest a girl baby in arms, the young father aghast before the suddentragedy which had come upon him. There must have been something in mysympathy which drew him toward me, for on his return a few months laterhe sought me out and we fell into the easy intercourse of establishedrelations. 

I was recovering from an illness, and every day he would come and read bymy bedside. I had not then lost the action of one of my hands, putting anend to a course of musical study I had hoped to develop into a career. Hewas infinitely fond of music and sufficiently familiar with the old mastersto understand and enjoy them. He was an artist through and through, possessing a sweet nor yet an uncultivated voice--a blend between a lowtenor and a high baritone--I was almost about to write a "contralto, " itwas so soft and liquid. Its tones in speech retained to the last theircharm. Who that heard them shall ever forget them?

Early in 1861 my friend Jefferson came to me and said: "There is going tobe a war of the sections. I am not a warrior. I am neither a Northernernor a Southerner. I cannot bring myself to engage in bloodshed, or to takesides. I have near and dear ones North and South. I am going away and Ishall stay away until the storm blows over. It may seem to you unpatriotic, and it is, I know, unheroic. I am not a hero; I am, I hope, an artist. Myworld is the world of art, and I must be true to that; it is my patriotism, my religion. I can do no manner of good here, and I am going away. "

II

At that moment statesmen were hopefully estimating the chances of apeaceful adjustment and solution of the sectional controversy. With theprophet instinct of the artist he knew better. Though at no time taking anactive interest in politics or giving expression to party bias of any kind, his personal associations led him into a familiar knowledge of the trend ofpolitical opinion and the portent of public affairs, and I can truly saythat during the fifty years that passed thereafter I never discussed anytopic of current interest or moment with him that he did not throw uponit the side lights of a luminous understanding, and at the same time animpartial and intelligent judgment. 

His mind was both reflective and radiating. His humor though perennial wassubdued; his wit keen and spontaneous, never acrid or wounding. His speechabounded with unconscious epigram. He had his beliefs and stood by them;but he was never aggressive. Cleaner speech never fell from the lips ofman. I never heard him use a profanity. We once agreed between ourselves todraw a line across the salacious stories so much in vogue during our day;the wit must exceed the dirt; where the dirt exceeded the wit we would noneof it. 

He was a singularly self-respecting man; genuinely a modest man. Theactor is supposed to be so familiar with the pubic as to be proof againstsurprises. Before his audience he must be master of himself, holding thesituation and his art by the firmest grip. He must simulate, not experienceemotion, the effect referable to the seeming, never to the actualityinvolving the realization. 

Mr. Jefferson held to this doctrine and applied it rigorously. On a certainoccasion he was playing Caleb Plummer. In the scene between the oldtoy-maker and his blind daughter, when the father discovers the dreadfulresult of his dissimulation--an awkward hitch; and, the climax quitethwarted, the curtain came down. I was standing at the wings. 

"Did you see that?" he said as he brushed by me, going to hisdressing-room. 

"No, " said I, following him. "What was it?"

He turned, his eyes still wet and his voice choked. "I broke down, " saidhe; "completely broke down. I turned away from the audience to recovermyself. But I failed and had the curtain rung. "

The scene had been spoiled because the actor had been overcome by a suddenflood of real feeling, whereas he was to render by his art the feeling ofa fictitious character and so to communicate this to his audience. Caleb'scue was tears, but not Jefferson's. 

On another occasion I saw his self-possession tried in a different way. Wewere dining with a gentleman who had overpartaken of his own hospitality. Mr. Murat Halstead was of the company. There was also a German ofdistinction, whose knowledge of English was limited. The Rip Van Winklecraze was at its height. After sufficiently impressing the German with therare opportunity he was having in meeting a man so famous as Mr. Jefferson, our host, encouraged by Mr. Halstead, and I am afraid not discouraged byme, began to urge Mr. Jefferson to give us, as he said, "a touch of hismettle, " and failing to draw the great comedian out he undertook himself togive a few descriptive passages from the drama which was carrying thetown by storm. Poor Jefferson! He sat like an awkward boy, helpless andblushing, the German wholly unconscious of the fun or even comprehendingjust what was happening--Halstead and I maliciously, mercilessly enjoyingit. 

III

I never heard Mr. Jefferson make a recitation or, except in the singing ofa song before his voice began to break, make himself a part of any privateentertainment other than that of a spectator and guest. 

He shrank from personal displays of every sort. Even in his younger days herarely "gagged, " or interpolated, upon the stage. Yet he did not lack fora ready wit. One time during the final act of Rip Van Winkle, a youngcountryman in the gallery was so carried away that he quite lost hisbearings and seemed to be about to climb over the outer railing. Theaudience, spellbound by the actor, nevertheless saw the rustic, and itsattention was being divided between the two when Jefferson reached thatpoint in the action of the piece where Rip is amazed by the docility of hiswife under the ill usage of her second husband. He took in the situation ata glance. 

Casting his eye directly upon the youth in the gallery, he uttered thelines as if addressing them directly to him, "Well, I would never havebelieved it if I had not seen it. "

The poor fellow, startled, drew back from his perilous position, and theaudience broke into a storm of applause. 

Joseph Jefferson was a Swedenborgian in his religious belief. At onetime too extreme a belief in spiritualism threatened to cloud his sound, wholesome understanding. As he grew older and happier and passed outfrom the shadow of his early tragedy he fell away from the more sinisterinfluence the supernatural had attained over his imagination. One time inWashington I had him to breakfast to meet the Chief Justice and Mr. JusticeMatthews and Mr. Carlisle, the newly-elected Speaker of the House. It was arainy Sunday, and it was in my mind to warn him that our company was madeup of hard-headed lawyers not apt to be impressed by fairy tales andghost stories, and to suggest that he cut the spiritualism in case theconversation fell, as was likely, into the speculative. I forgot, orsomething hindered, and, sure enough, the question of second sight and mindreading came up, and I said to myself: "Lord, now we'll have it. " But itwas my kinsman, Stanley Matthews, who led off with a clairvoyant experiencein his law practice. I began to be reassured. Mr. Carlisle followed with amost mathematical account of some hobgoblins he had encountered in hislaw practice. Finally the Chief Justice, Mr. Waite, related a series ofincidents so fantastic and incredible, yet detailed with the precision andlucidity of a master of plain statement, as fairly to stagger the mostbelieving ghostseer. Then I said to myself again: "Let her go, Joe, nomatter what you tell now you will fall below the standard set by theseprofessional perfecters of pure reason, and are safe to do your best, oryour worst. " I think he held his own, however. 

IV

Joseph Jefferson came to his artistic spurs slowly but surely, being nearlythirty years of age when he got his chance, and therefore wholly equal toit and prepared for it. 

William E. Burton stood and had stood for twenty-five years the recognized, the reigning king of comedy in America. He was a master of his craft aswell as a leader in society and letters. To look at him when he cameupon the stage was to laugh; yet he commanded tears almost as readily aslaughter. In New York City particularly he ruled the roost, and could anddid do that which had cost another his place. He began to take too manyliberties with the public favor and, truth to say, was beginning to be bothcoarse and careless. People were growing restive under ministrations whichwere at times little less than impositions upon their forbearance. Theywanted something if possible as strong, but more refined, and in the personof the leading comedy man of Laura Keene's company, a young actor by thename of Jefferson, they got it. 

Both Mr. Sothern and Mr. Jefferson have told the story of Tom Taylor'sextravaganza, "Our American Cousin, " in which the one as Dundreary, theother as Asa Trenchard, rose to almost instant popularity and fame. I shallnot repeat it except to say that Jefferson's Asa Trenchard was unlike anyother the English or American stage has known. He played the raw Yankeeboy, not in low comedy at all, but made him innocent and ignorant as awell-born Green Mountain lad might be, never a bumpkin; and in the scenewhen Asa tells his sweetheart the bear story and whilst pretending to lighthis cigar burns the will, he left not a dry eye in the house. 

New York had never witnessed, never divined anything in pathos and humorso exquisite. Burton and his friends struggled for a season, but Jeffersoncompletely knocked them out. Even had Burton lived, and had there been nodiverting war of sections to drown all else, Jefferson would have come tohis growth and taken his place as the first serio-comic actor of his time. 

Rip Van Winkle was an evolution. Jefferson's half-brother, Charles Burke, had put together a sketchy melodrama in two acts and had played in it, wasplaying in it when he died. After his Trenchard, Jefferson turned himselfloose in all sorts of parts, from Diggory to Mazeppa, a famous burlesque, which he did to a turn, imitating the mock heroics of the feminine horsemarines, so popular in the equestrian drama of the period, Adah IsaacsMenken, the beautiful and ill-fated, at their head. Then he produceda version of Nicholas Nickleby, in which his Newman Noggs took a moreambitious flight. These, however, were but the avant-couriers of theimmortal Rip. 

Charles Burke's piece held close to the lines of Irving's legend. When thevagabond returns from the mountains after the twenty years' sleep Gretchenis dead. The apex is reached when the old man, sitting dazed at a table infront of the tavern in the village of Falling Water, asks after Derrick VanBeekman and Nick Vedder and other of his cronies. At last, half twinkle ofhumor and half glimmer of dread, he gets himself to the point of askingafter Dame Van Winkle, and is told that she has been dead these ten years. Then like a flash came that wonderful Jeffersonian change of facialexpression, and as the white head drops upon the arms stretched before himon the table he says: "Well, she led me a hard life, a hard life, but shewas the wife of my bosom, she was _meine frau!_"

I did not see the revised, or rather the newly-created and written, RipVan Winkle until Mr. Jefferson brought it to America and was playing it atNiblo's Garden in New York. Between himself and Dion Boucicault a dramacarrying all the possibilities, all the lights and shadows of his geniushad been constructed. In the first act he sang a drinking song to a wingaccompaniment delightfully, adding much to the tone and color of thesituation. The exact reversal of the Lear suggestion in the last act was aninspiration, his own and not Boucicault's. The weird scene in the mountainsfell in admirably with a certain weird note in the Jefferson genius, andsupplied the needed element of variety. 

I always thought it a good acting play under any circumstances, but, inhis hands, matchless. He thought himself that the piece, as a piece, andregardless of his own acting, deserved better of the critics than they werealways willing to give it. Assuredly, no drama that ever was written, as heplayed it, ever took such a hold upon the public. He rendered it to threegenerations, and to a rising, not a falling, popularity, drawing to thevery last undiminished audiences. 

Because of this unexampled run he was sometimes described by unthinkingpeople as a one-part actor. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Hepossessed uncommon versatility. That after twenty years of the new Rip VanWinkle, when he was past fifty years of age, he could come back to suchparts as Caleb Plummer and Acres is proof of this. He need not have done soat all. Carrying a pension roll of dependents aggregating fifteen or twentythousand a year for more than a quarter of a century, Rip would still havesufficed his requirements. It was his love for his art that took him to TheCricket and The Rivals, and at no inconsiderable cost to himself. 

I have heard ill-natured persons, some of them envious actors, say that hedid nothing for the stage. 

He certainly did not make many contributions to its upholstery. He was inno position to emulate Sir Henry Irving in forcing and directing the publictaste. But he did in America quite as much as Sir Charles Wyndham andSir Henry Irving in England to elevate the personality, the social andintellectual standing of the actor and the stage, effecting in a lifetime arevolution in the attitude of the people and the clergy of both countriesto the theater and all things in it. This was surely enough for one man inany craft or country. 

He was always a good stage speaker. Late in life he began to speakelsewhere, and finally to lecture. His success pleased him immensely. Thenight of the Sunday afternoon charity for the Newsboys' Home in Louisville, when the promise of a talk from him had filled the house to overflowing, he was like a boy who had come off from a college occasion with all thehonors. Indeed, the degrees of Harvard and Yale, which had reached him bothunexpectedly and unsolicited, gave him a pleasure quite apart from thevanity they might have gratified in another; he regarded them, and justly, as the recognition at once of his profession and of his personal character. 

I never knew a man whose moral sensibilities were more acute. He loved therespectable. He detested the unclean. He was just as attractive off thestage as upon it, because he was as unaffected and real in his personalityas he was sincere and conscientious in his public representations, hislovely nature showing through his art in spite of him. His purpose was tofill the scene and forget himself. 

V

The English newspapers accompanied the tidings of Mr. Jefferson's deathwith rather sparing estimates of his eminence and his genius, though hissuccess in London, where he was well known, had been unequivocal. Indeed, himself, alone with Edwin Booth and Mary Anderson, may be said to completethe list of those Americans who have attained any real recognition in theBritish metropolis. The Times spoke of him as "an able if not a greatactor. " If Joseph Jefferson was not a great actor I should like somecompetent person to tell me what actor of our time could be so described. 

Two or three of the journals of Paris referred to him as "the AmericanCoquelin. " It had been apter to describe Coquelin as the French Jefferson. I never saw Frederic Lemaître. But, him apart, I have seen all theeccentric comedians, the character actors of the last fifty years, and, inspell power, in precision and deftness of touch, in acute, penetrating, all-embracing and all-embodying intelligence and grasp, I should placeJoseph Jefferson easily at their head. 

Shakespeare was his Bible. The stage had been his cradle. He continued allhis days a student. In him met the meditative and the observing faculties. In his love of fishing, his love of painting, his love of music we see thebrooding, contemplative spirit joined to the alert in mental force andforesight when he addressed himself to the activities and the objectivesof the theater. He was a thorough stage manager, skillful, patient andupright. His company was his family. He was not gentler with the childrenand grandchildren he ultimately drew about him than he had been with theyoung men and young women who had preceded them in his employment andinstruction. 

He was nowise ashamed of his calling. On the contrary, he was proud of it. His mother had lived and died an actress. He preferred that his progenyshould follow in the footsteps of their forebears even as he had done. It is beside the purpose to inquire, as was often done, what might havehappened had he undertaken the highest flights of tragedy; one might aswell discuss the relation of a Dickens to a Shakespeare. Sir HenryIrving and Sir Charles Wyndham in England, M. Coquelin in France, hiscontemporaries--each had his _métier_. They were perfect in their artand unalike in their art. No comparison between them can be justly drawn. I was witness to the rise of all three of them, and have followed themin their greatest parts throughout their most brilliant and eminent andsuccessful careers, and can say of each as of Mr. Jefferson:

 _More than King can no man be--Whether he rule in Cyprus or in Dreams. _

There shall be Kings of Thule after kings are gone. The actor dies andleaves no copy; his deeds are writ in water, only his name survives upontradition's tongue, and yet, from Betterton and Garrick to Irving, fromMacklin and Quin to Wyndham and Jefferson, how few!

Chapter the Twenty-Fourth

 The Writing of Memoirs--Some Characteristics of Carl Shurz--Sam Bowles--Horace White and the Mugwumps

I

Talleyrand was so impressed by the world-compelling character of thememoirs he had prepared for posterity that he fixed an interdict of morethan fifty years upon the date set for their publication, and when atlast the bulky tomes made their appearance, they excited no especialinterest--certainly created no sensation--and lie for the most part dustyupon the shelves of the libraries that contain them. For a differentreason, Henry Ward Beecher put a time limit upon the volume, or volumes, which will tell us, among other things, all about one of the greatestscandals of modern times; and yet how few people now recall it or careanything about the dramatis personæ and the actual facts! Metternich, nextafter Napoleon and Talleyrand, was an important figure in a stirring epoch. He, too, indicted an autobiography, which is equally neglected among thebooks that are sometimes quoted and extolled, but rarely read. Rousseau, the half insane, and Barras, the wholly vicious, have twenty readers whereTalleyrand and Metternich have one. 

From this point of view, the writing of memoirs, excepting those of thetrivial French School or gossiping letters and diaries of the Pepys-Walpolevariety, would seem an unprofitable task for a great man's undertaking. Boswell certainly did for Johnson what the thunderous old doctor could nothave done for himself. Nevertheless, from the days of Cæsar to the daysof Sherman and Lee, the captains of military and senatorial and literaryindustry have regaled themselves, if they have not edified the public, bythe narration of their own stories; and, I dare say, to the end of time, interest in one's self, and the mortal desire to linger yet a little longeron the scene--now and again, as in the case of General Grant, the assuranceof honorable remuneration making needful provision for others--will movethose who have cut some figure in the world to follow the wandering Celt inthe wistful hope--

 _Around my fire an evening group to draw, And tell of all I felt and all I saw. _

Something like this occurs to me upon a reperusal of the unfinished memoirsof my old and dear friend, Carl Schurz. Assuredly few men had betterwarrant for writing about themselves or a livelier tale to tell than thefamous German-American, who died leaving that tale unfinished. No man inlife was more misunderstood and maligned. There was nothing either erraticor conceited about Schurz, nor was he more pragmatic than is common tothe possessor of positive opinions along with the power to make theirexpression effectual. 

The actual facts of his public life do not anywhere show that his politicsshifted with his own interests. On the contrary, he was singularlyregardless of his interests where his convictions interposed. Though analien, and always an alien, he possessed none of the shifty traits of thesoldier of fortune. Never in his career did he crook the pregnant hinges ofthe knee before any worldly throne of grace or flatter any mob that placemight follow fawning. His great talents had only to lend themselves toparty uses to get their full requital. He refused them equally to Grant inthe White House and the multitude in Missouri, going his own gait, whichcould be called erratic only by the conventional, to whom regularity iseverything and individuality nothing. 

Schurz was first of all and above all an orator. His achievements on theplatform and in the Senate were undeniable. He was unsurpassed in debate. He had no need to exploit himself. The single chapter in his life on whichlight was desirable was the military episode. The cruel and false saying, "I fight mit Sigel und runs mit Schurz, " obviously the offspring ofmalignity, did mislead many people, reënforced by the knowledge that Schurzwas not an educated soldier. How thoroughly he disposes of this calumny hismemoirs attest. Fuller, more convincing vindication could not be asked ofany man; albeit by those familiar with the man himself it could not bedoubted that he had both courage and aptitude for military employment. 

II

A philosopher and an artist, he was drawn by circumstance into the vortexof affairs. Except for the stirring events of 1848, he might have livedand died a professor at Bonn or Heidelberg. If he had pursued his musicalstudies at Leipsic he must have become a master of the piano keyboard. Asit was, he played Schumann and Chopin creditably. The rescue of Kinkel, the flight from the fatherland, the mild Bohemianizing in Paris and Londonawakened within him the spirit of action rather than of adventure. 

There was nothing of the Dalgetty about him; too reflective and tooaccomplished. His early marriage attests a domestic trend, from which henever departed; though an idealist in his public aspirations and aims hewas a sentimentalist in his home life and affections. Genial in temperamentand disposition, his personal habit was moderation itself. 

He was a German. Never did a man live so long in a foreign country and takeon so few of its thoughts and ways. He threw himself into the anti-slaverymovement upon the crest of the wave; the flowing sea carried him quicklyfrom one distinction to another; the ebb tide, which found him in theSenate of the United States, revealed to his startled senses the creeping, crawling things beneath the surface; partyism rampant, tyrannous andcorrupt; a self-willed soldier in the White House; a Blaine, a Butler and aGarfield leading the Representatives, a Cameron and a Conkling leading theSenate; single-minded disinterestedness, pure unadulterated conviction, nowhere. 

Jobs and jobbing flourished on every side. An impossible scheme ofreconstruction was trailing its slow, putrescent length along. The revenueservice was thick with thieves, the committees of Congress were packed withmercenaries. Money-making in high places had become the order of the day. Was it for this that oceans of patriotism, of treasure and of blood hadbeen poured out? Was it for this that he had fought with tongue and pen andsword?

There was Sumner--the great Sumner--who had quarreled with Grant and Fish, to keep him company and urge him on. There was the Tribune, the puissantTribune--two of them, one in New York and the other in Chicago--to givehim countenance. There was need of liberalizing and loosening things inMissouri, for which he sat in the Senate--they could not go on forever halfthe best elements in the State disfranchised. 

Thus the Liberal Movement of 1872. 

Schurz went to Cincinnati elate with hope. He was an idealist--not quiteyet a philosopher. He had his friends about him. Sam Bowles--the firstnewspaper politician of his day, with none of the handicaps carried byRaymond and Forney--a man keen of insight and foresight, fertile ofresources, and not afraid--stood foremost among them. Next came HoraceWhite. Doric in his simplicity like a marble shaft, and to the outer eyeas cold as marble, but below a man of feeling, conviction and tenacity, aworking journalist and a doughty doctrinaire. A little group of such menformed itself about Schurz--then only forty-three years old--to what end?Why, Greeley, Horace Greeley, the bellwether of abolitionism, the king beeof protectionism, the man of fads and isms and the famous "old white hat. "

To some of us it was laughable. To Schurz it was tragical. A bridge had tobe constructed for him to pass--for retrace his steps he could not--and, as it were, blindfolded, he had to be backed upon this like a mule aboarda train of cars. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if Schurz hadthen and there resigned his seat in the Senate, got his brood together andreturned to Germany. I dare say he would have been welcomed by Bismarck. 

Certainly there was no lodgment for him thenceforward in American politics. The exigencies of 1876-77 made him a provisional place in the HayesAdministration; but, precisely as the Democrats of Missouri could put sucha man to no use, the Republicans at large could find no use for him. Heseemed a bull in a china shop to the political organization he honored witha preference wholly intellectual, and having no stomach for either extreme, he became a Mugwump. 

III

He was a German. He was an artist. By nature a doctrinaire, he had becomea philosopher. He could never wholly adjust himself to his environment. He lectured Lincoln, and Lincoln, perceiving his earnest truthfulness andgenuine qualities, forgave him his impertinence, nor ceased to regard himwith the enduring affection one might have for an ardent, aspiring andlovable boy. He was repellant to Grant, who could not and perhaps didnot desire to understand him.... To him the Southerners were always thered-faced, swashbuckling slave-drivers he had fancied and pictured them inthe days of his abolition oratory. More and more he lived in a rut of hisown fancies, wise in books and counsels, gentle in his relations with thefew who enjoyed his confidence; to the last a most captivating personality. 

Though fastidious, Schurz was not intolerant. Yet he was hard toconvince--tenacious of his opinions--courteous but insistent in debate. Hewas a German; a German Herr Doktor of Music, of Letters and of Common Law. During an intimacy of more than thirty years we scarcely ever wholly agreedabout any public matter; differing about even the civil service and thetariff. But I admired him hugely and loved him heartily. 

I had once a rather amusing encounter with him. There was a dinner atDelmonico's, from whose program of post-prandial oratory I had purposelycaused my own name to be omitted. Indeed, I had had with a lady a wager Ivery much wished to win that I would not speak. General Grant and I went intogether, and during the repast he said that the only five human beings inthe world whom he detested were actually here at table. 

Of course, Schurz was one of these. He was the last on the list of speakersand, curiously enough--the occasion being the consideration of certainways and means for the development of the South--and many leadingSoutherners present--he composed his speech out of an editorial tour deforce he was making in the Evening Post on The Homicidal Side of SouthernLife. Before he had proceeded half through General Grant, who knew of mywager, said, "You'll lose your bet, " and, it being one o'clock in themorning, I thought so too, and did not care whether I won or lost it. Whenhe finished, the call on me was spontaneous and universal. "Now give it tohim good, " said General Grant. 

And I did; I declared--the reporters were long since gone--that there hadnot been a man killed amiss in Kentucky since the war; that where one hadbeen killed two should have been; and, amid roars of laughter which gave metime to frame some fresh absurdity, I delivered a prose paean to murder. 

Nobody seemed more pleased than Schurz himself, and as we cameaway--General Grant having disappeared--he put his arm about me like aschoolboy and said: "Well, well, I had no idea you were so bloody-minded. "

Chapter the Twenty-Fifth

 Every Trade Has Its Tricks--I Play One on William McKinley--Far Away Party Politics and Political Issues

I

There are tricks in every trade. The tariff being the paramount issue ofthe day, I received a tempting money offer from Philadelphia to present myside of the question, but when the time fixed was about to arrive I foundmyself billed for a debate with no less an adversary than William McKinley, protectionist leader in the Lower House of Congress. We were the best offriends and I much objected to a joint meeting. The parties, however, wouldtake no denial, and it was arranged that we should be given alternatedates. Then it appeared that the designated thesis read: "Which politicalparty offers for the workingman the best solution of the tariff problem?"

Here was a poser. It required special preparation, for which I had not theleisure. I wanted the stipend, but was not willing--scarcely able--to payso much for it. I was about to throw the engagement over when a luckythought struck me. I had a cast-off lecture entitled Money and Morals. Ithad been rather popular. Why might I not put a head and tail to this--aforeword and a few words in conclusion--and make it meet the purpose andserve the occasion?

When the evening arrived there was a great audience. Half of the people hadcome to applaud, the other half to antagonize. I was received, however, with what seemed a united acclaim. When the cheering had ceased, with theblandest air I began:

"In that chapter of the history of Ireland which was reserved for theconsideration of snakes, the historian, true to the solecism as well as thebrevity of Irish wit, informs us that 'there are no snakes in Ireland. '

"I am afraid that on the present occasion I shall have to emulate thisflight of the Celtic imagination. I find myself billed to speak from aDemocratic standpoint as to which party offers the best practical means forthe benefit of the workingmen of the country. If I am to discharge withfidelity the duty thus assigned me, I must begin by repudiating the text intoto, because the Democratic Party recognizes no political agency for oneclass which is not equally open to all classes. The bulwark and belltowerof its faith, the source and resource of its strength are laid in thedeclaration, 'Freedom for all, special privileges to none, ' which appliedto practical affairs would deny to self-styled workingmen, organized intoa coöperative society, any political means not enjoyed by every otherorganized coöperative society, and by each and every citizen, individually, to himself and his heirs and assigns, forever. 

"But in a country like ours, what right has any body of men to get togetherand, labelling themselves workingmen, to talk about political means andpractical ends exclusive to themselves? Who among us has the singleright to claim for himself, and the likes of him, the divine title of aworkingman? We are all workingmen, the earnest plodding scholar in hislibrary, surrounded by the luxury and comfort which his learning and hislabor have earned for him, no less than the poor collier in the mine, withdarkness and squalor closing him round about, and want maybe staring him inthe face, yet--if he be a true man--with a little bird singing ever in hisheart the song of hope and cheer which cradled the genius of Stephenson andArkwright and the long procession of inventors, lowly born, to whomthe world owes the glorious achievements of this, the greatest of thecenturies. We are all workingmen--the banker, the minister, the lawyer, thedoctor--toiling from day to day, and it may be we are well paid for ourtoil, to represent and to minister to the wants of the time no less thanthe farmer and the farmer's boy, rising with the lark to drive the teamafield, and to dally with land so rich it needs to be but tickled with ahoe to laugh a harvest. 

"Having somewhat of an audacious fancy, I have sometimes in moments ofexuberance ventured upon the conceit that our Jupiter Tonans, the Americaneditor, seated upon his three-legged throne and enveloped by the majestyand the mystery of his pretentious 'we, ' is a workingman no less than thepoor reporter, who year in and year out braves the perils of the midnightrounds through the slums of the city, yea in the more perilous temptationsof the town, yet carries with him into the darkest dens the love of work, the hope of reward and the fear only of dishonor. 

"Why, the poor officeseeker at Washington begging a bit of that pie, which, having got his own slice, a cruel, hard-hearted President would eliminatefrom the bill of fare, he likewise is a workingman, and I can tell you avery hard-working man with a tough job of work, and were better breakingrock upon a turnpike in Dixie or splitting rails on a quarter section outin the wild and woolly West. 

"It is true that, as stated on the program, I am a Democrat--as ArtemusWard once said of the horses in his panorama, I can conceal it nolonger--at least I am as good a Democrat as they have nowadays. But firstof all, I am an American, and in America every man who is not a policemanor a dude is a workingman. So, by your leave, my friends, instead ofsticking very closely to the text, and treating it from a purely partypoint of view, I propose to take a ramble through the highways and bywaysof life and thought in our beloved country and to cast a balance if I canfrom an American point of view. 

"I want to say in the beginning that no party can save any man or any setof men from the daily toil by which all of us live and move and have ourbeing. "

Then I worked in my old lecture. 

It went like hot cakes. When next I met William McKinley he said jocosely:"You are a mean man, Henry Watterson!"

"How so?" I asked. 

"I accepted the invitation to answer you because I wanted and needed themoney. Of course I had no time to prepare a special address. My idea was tomake my fee by ripping you up the back. But when I read the verbatim reportwhich had been prepared for me there was not a word with which I could takeissue, and that completely threw me out. "

Then I told him how it had happened and we had a hearty laugh. He was themost lovable of men. That such a man should have fallen a victim to theblow of an assassin defies explanation, as did the murders of Lincoln andGarfield, like McKinley, amiable, kindly men giving never cause of personaloffense. 

II

The murderer is past finding out. In one way and another I fancy that I amwell acquainted with the assassins of history. Of those who slew Cæsar Ilearned in my schooldays, and between Ravaillac, who did the business forHenry of Navarre, and Booth and Guiteau, my familiar knowledge seems almostat first hand. One night at Chamberlin's, in Washington, George Corkhill, the district attorney who was prosecuting the murderer of Garfield, saidto me: "You will never fully understand this case until you have sat by methrough one day's proceedings in court. " Next day I did this. 

Never have I passed five hours in a theater so filled with thrills. Ioccupied a seat betwixt Corkhill and Scoville, Guiteau's brother-in-lawand voluntary attorney. I say "voluntary" because from the first Guiteaurejected him and vilely abused him, vociferously insisting upon being hisown lawyer. 

From the moment Guiteau entered the trial room it was a theatricalextravaganza. He was in irons, sandwiched between two deputy sheriffs, camein shouting like a madman, and began at once railing at the judge, the juryand the audience. A very necessary rule had been established that when heinterposed, whatever was being said or done automatically stopped. Then, when he ceased, the case went on again as if nothing had happened. 

Only Scoville intervened between me and Guiteau and I had an excellentopportunity to see, hear and size him up. In visage and voice he was themeanest creature I have, either in life or in dreams, encountered. He hadthe face and intonations of a demon. Everything about him was loathsome. I cannot doubt that his criminal colleagues of history were of the samedescription. 

Charlotte Corday was surely a lunatic. Wilkes Booth I knew. He was drunk, had been drunk all that winter, completely muddled and perverted by brandy, the inheritant of mad blood. Czolgosz, the slayer of McKinley, and theassassin of the Empress Elizabeth were clearly insane. 

III

McKinley and Protectionism, Cleveland, Carlisle and Free Trade--how faraway they seem!

With the passing of the old issues that divided parties new issues havecome upon the scene. The alignment of the future will turn upon these. Butunderlying all issues of all time are fundamental ideas which live foreverand aye, and may not be forgotten or ignored. 

It used to be claimed by the followers of Jefferson that Democracy wasa fixed quantity, rising out of the bedrock of the Constitution, whileFederalism, Whiggism and Republicanism were but the chimeras of someprevailing fancy drawing their sustenance rather from temporizingexpediency and current sentiment than from basic principles and profoundconviction. To make haste slowly, to look before leaping, to take counselof experience--were Democratic axioms. Thus the fathers of Democracy, whilefully conceiving the imperfections of government and meeting as eventsrequired the need alike of movement and reform, put the visionary andexperimental behind them to aim at things visible, attainable, tangible, the written Constitution the one safe precedent, the morning star and theevening star of their faith and hope. 

What havoc the parties and the politicians have made of all these loftypretenses! Where must an old-line Democrat go to find himself? Two issues, however, have come upon the scene which for the time being are paramountand which seem organic. They are set for the determination of the twentiethcentury: The sex question and the drink question. 

I wonder if it be possible to consider them in a catholic spirit from aphilosophic standpoint. I can truly say that the enactment of prohibitionlaws, state or national, is personally nothing to me. I long ago reached anage when the convivialism of life ceased to cut any figure in the equationof my desires and habits. It is the never-failing recourse of theintolerant, however, to ascribe an individual, and, of course, an unworthy, motive to contrariwise opinions, and I have not escaped that kind ofcriticism. 

The challenge underlying prohibition is twofold: Does prohibition prohibit, and, if it does, may it not generate evils peculiarly its own?

The question hinges on what are called "sumptuary laws"; that is, statutesregulating the food and drink, the habits and apparel of the individualcitizen. This in turn harks back to the issue of paternal government. That, once admitted and established, becomes in time all-embracing. 

Bigotry is a disease. The bigot pursuing his narrow round is like thebedridden possessed by his disordered fancy. Bigotry sees nothing butitself, which it mistakes for wisdom and virtue. But Bigotry begetshypocrisy. When this spreads over a sufficient area and counts a votingmajority it sends its agents abroad, and thus we acquire canting apostlesand legislators at once corrupt and despotic. 

They are now largely in evidence in the national capital and in the variousstate capitals, where the poor-dog, professional politicians most docongregate and disport themselves. 

The worst of it is that there seems nowhere any popularrealization--certainly any popular outcry. Do the people grow degenerate?Are they willfully dense?

Chapter the Twenty-Sixth

 A Libel on Mr. Cleveland--His Fondness for Cards--Some Poker Stories--The "Senate Game"--Tom Ochiltree, Senator Allison and General Schenck

I

Not long after Mr. Cleveland's marriage, being in Washington, I made a boxparty embracing Mrs. Cleveland, and the Speaker and Mrs. Carlisle, at oneof the theaters where Madame Modjeska was appearing. The ladies expressinga desire to meet the famous Polish actress who had so charmed them, I tookthem after the play behind the scenes. Thereafter we returned to the WhiteHouse where supper was awaiting us, the President amused and pleased whentold of the agreeable incident. 

The next day there began to buzz reports to the contrary. At first covert, they gained in volume and currency until a distinguished Republican partyleader put his imprint upon them in an after-dinner speech, going thelength of saying the newly-wedded Chief Magistrate had actually struck hiswife and forbidden me the Executive Mansion, though I had been there everyday during the week that followed. 

Mr. Cleveland believed the matter too preposterous to be given any credenceand took it rather stoically. But naturally Mrs. Cleveland was shocked andoutraged, and I made haste to stigmatize it as a lie out of whole cloth. Yet though this was sent away by the Associated Press and publishedbroadcast I have occasionally seen it referred to by persons over eager toassail a man incapable of an act of rudeness to a woman. 

II

Mr. Cleveland was fond--not overfond--of cards. He liked to play the noblegame at, say, a dollar limit--even once in a while for a little more--butnot much more. And as Dr. Norvin Green was wont to observe of CommodoreVanderbilt, "he held them exceeding close to his boo-som. "

Mr. Whitney, Secretary of the Navy in his first administration, equallyrich and hospitable, had often "the road gang, " as a certain group, mainlysenators, was called, to dine, with the inevitable after-dinner soirée orséance. I was, when in Washington, invited to these parties. At one ofthem I chanced to sit between the President and Senator Don Cameron. Mr. Carlisle, at the time Speaker of the House--who handled his cards likea child and, as we all knew, couldn't play a little--was seated on theopposite side of the table. 

After a while Mr. Cameron and I began "bluffing" the game--I recall thatthe limit was five dollars--that is, raising and back-raising each other, and whoever else happened to be in, without much or any regard to the cardswe held. 

It chanced on a deal that I picked up a pat flush, Mr. Cleveland a patfull. The Pennsylvania senator and I went to the extreme, the President ofcourse willing enough for us to play his hand for him. But the Speaker ofthe House persistently stayed with us and could not be driven out. 

When it came to a draw Senator Cameron drew one card. Mr. Cleveland and Istood pat. But Mr. Carlisle drew four cards. At length, after much banterand betting, it reached a show-down and, _mirabile dictu_, the Speakerheld four kings!

"Take the money, Carlisle; take the money, " exclaimed the President. "Ifever I am President again you shall be Secretary of the Treasury. But don'tyou make that four-card draw too often. "

He was President again, and Mr. Carlisle was Secretary of the Treasury. 

III

There had arisen a disagreeable misunderstanding between General Schenckand myself during the period when the general was Minister at the Court ofSt. James. In consequence of this we did not personally meet. One eveningat Chamberlin's years after, a party of us--mainly the Ohio statesman'sold colleagues in Congress--were playing poker. He came in and joined us. Neither of us knew the other even by sight and there was no presentationwhen he sat in. 

At length a direct play between the newcomer and me arose. There was amoment's pause. Obviously we were strangers. Then it was that SenatorAllison, of Iowa, who had in his goodness of heart purposely brought aboutthis very situation, introduced us. The general reddened. I was takenaback. But there was no escape, and carrying it off amiably we shook hands. It is needless to say that then and there we dropped our groundless feudand remained the rest of his life very good friends. 

In this connection still another poker story. Sam Bugg, the Nashvillegambler, was on a Mississippi steamer bound for New Orleans. He came upona party of Tennesseeans whom a famous card sharp had inveigled and wasflagrantly robbing. Sam went away, obtained a pack of cards, and stackedthem to give the gambler four kings and the brightest one of the Nashvilleboys four aces. After two or three failures to bring the cold deck intoaction Sam Bugg brushed a spider--an imaginary spider, of course--from thegambler's coat collar, for an instant distracting his attention--and inthe momentary confusion the stacked cards were duly dealt and the bettingbegan, the gambler confident and aggressive. Finally, all the money up, the four aces beat the four kings, and for a greater amount than theNashvillians had lost and the gambler had won. Whereupon, without changeof muscle, the gambler drawled: "Mr. Bugg, the next time you see a spiderbiting me let him bite on!"

I was told that the Senate Game had been played during the War of Sectionsand directly after for large sums. With the arrival of the rebel brigadiersit was perforce reduced to a reasonable limit. 

The "road gang" was not unknown at the White House. Sometimes it assembledat private houses, but its accustomed place of meeting was first Welcker'sand then Chamberlin's. I do not know whether it continues to have abidingplace or even an existence. In spite of the reputation given me by thepert paragraphers I have not been on a race course or seen a horse race orplayed for other than immaterial stakes for more than thirty years. 

IV

As an all-round newspaper writer and reporter many sorts of people, highand low, little and big, queer and commonplace, fell in my way; statesmenand politicians, artists and athletes, circus riders and prize fighters;the riffraff and the élite; the professional and dilettante of the worldpolite and the underworld. 

I knew Mike Walsh and Tim Campbell. I knew John Morrissey. I have seenHeenan--one of the handsomest men of his time--and likewise Adah IsaacsMenken, his inamorata--many said his wife--who went into mourning for himand thereafter hied away to Paris, where she lived under the protectionof Alexandre Dumas, the elder, who buried her in Père Lachaise under ahandsome monument bearing two words, "Thou knowest, " beneath a carved handpointed to heaven. 

I did draw the line, however, at Cora Pearl and Marcus Cicero Stanley. 

The Parisian courtesan was at the zenith of her extraordinary celebritywhen I became a rustic boulevardier. She could be seen everywhere and onall occasions. Her gowns were the showiest, her equipage the smartest; herentourage, loud though it was and vulgar, yet in its way was undeniable. She reigned for a long time the recognized queen of the demi-monde. Ihave beheld her in her glory on her throne--her two thrones, for she hadtwo--one on the south side of the river, the other at the east end--not tomention the race course--surrounded by a retinue of the disreputable. Shedid not awaken in me the least curiosity, and I declined many opportunitiesto meet her. 

Marcus Cicero Stanley was sprung from an aristocratic, even adistinguished, North Carolina family. He came to New York and set up for aswell. How he lived I never cared to find out, though he was believed tobe what the police call a "fence. " He seemed a cross between a "con" anda "beat. " Yet for a while he flourished at Delmonico's, which he made hisheadquarters, and cut a kind of dash with the unknowing. He was a handsome, mannerly brute who knew how to dress and carry himself like a gentleman. 

Later there came to New York another Southerner--a Far Southerner of avery different quality--who attracted no little attention. This was TomOchiltree. He, too, was well born, his father an eminent jurist of Texas;he, himself, a wit, _bon homme_ and raconteur. Travers once said: "Wehave three professional liars in America--Tom Ochiltree is one and GeorgeAlfred Townsend is the other two. "

The stories told of Tom would fill a book. He denied none, howeverpreposterous--was indeed the author of many of the most amusing--of how, when the old judge proposed to take him into law partnership he caused tobe painted an office sign: Thomas P. Ochiltree and Father; of his reply toGeneral Grant, who had made him United States Marshal of Texas, and latersuggested that it would be well for Tom to pay less attention to the racecourse: "Why, Mr. President, all that turf publicity relates to a horsenamed after me, not to me, " it being that the horse of the day had been socalled; and of General Grant's reply: "Nevertheless, it would be well, Tom, for you to look in upon Texas once in a while"--in short, of hismany sayings and exploits while a member of Congress from the Galvestondistrict; among the rest, that having brought in a resolution tenderingsympathy to the German Empire on the death of Herr Laska, the most advancedand distinguished of Radical Socialists, which became for the moment a_cause célébre_. Tom remarked, "Not that I care a damn about it, except for the prominence it gives to Bismarck. "

He lived when in Washington at Chamberlin's. He and John Chamberlin wereclose friends. Once when he was breakfasting with John a mutual friend camein. He was in doubt what to order. Tom suggested beefsteak and onions. 

"But, " objected the newcomer, "I am about to call on some ladies, and thesmell of onions on my breath, you know!"

"Don't let that trouble you, " said Tom; "you have the steak and onions andwhen you get your bill that will take your breath away!"

Under an unpromising exterior--a stocky build and fiery red head--thereglowed a brave, generous and tender spirit. The man was a _preuxchevalier_. He was a knight-errant. All women--especially all good anddiscerning women who knew him and who could intuitively read beneath thatclumsy personality his fine sense of respect--even of adoration--loved TomOchiltree. 

The equivocal celebrity he enjoyed was largely fostered by himself, hisstories mostly at his own expense. His education had been but casual. Buthe had a great deal of it and a varied assortment. He knew everybody onboth sides of the Atlantic, his friends ranging from the Prince of Wales, afterward Edward VII, Gladstone and Disraeli, Gambetta and Thiers, tothe bucks of the jockey clubs. There were two of Tom--Tom the noisy onexhibition, and Tom the courtier in society. 

How he lived when out of office was the subject of unflattering conjecture. Many thought him the stipendiary of Mr. Mackay, the multimillionaire, withwhom he was intimate, who told me he could never induce Tom to take moneyexcept for service rendered. Among his familiars was Colonel North, theEnglish money magnate, who said the same thing. He had a widowed sisterin Texas to whom he regularly sent an income sufficient for herself andfamily. And when he died, to the surprise of every one, he left his sisterquite an accumulation. He had never been wholly a spendthrift. Though helived well at Chamberlin's in Washington and the Waldorf in New York he wascareful of his credit and his money. I dare say he was not unfortunate inthe stock market. He never married and when he died, still a youngish manas modern ages go, all sorts of stories were told of him, and the spacewriters, having a congenial subject, disported themselves voluminously. Inevitably most of their stories were apocryphal. 

I wonder shall we ever get any real truth out of what is called history?There are so many sides to it and such a confusing din of voices. How muchdoes old Sam Johnson owe of the fine figure he cuts to Boswell, and, minusBoswell, how much would be left of him? For nearly a century the EmpressJosephine was pictured as the effigy of the faithful and suffering wifesacrificed upon the altar of unprincipled and selfish ambition--lovelorn, deserted, heartbroken. It was Napoleon, not Josephine, except in her pride, who suffered. Who shall tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing butthe truth, about Hamilton; about Burr; about Cæsar, Caligula and Cleopatra?Did Washington, when he was angry, swear like a trooper? What was thematter with Nero?

IV

One evening Edward King and I were dining in the Champs Elysées whenhe said: "There is a new coon--a literary coon--come to town. He is aScotchman and his name is Robert Louis Stevenson. " Then he told me of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At that moment the subject of our talk was living ina kind of self-imposed penury not half a mile away. Had we known this wecould have ended the poor fellow's struggle with his pride and ambitionthen and there; have put him in the way of sure work and plenty of it;perhaps have lengthened, certainly have sweetened, his days, unless it betrue that he was one of the impossibles, as he may easily be conceived tohave been from reading his wayward biography and voluminous correspondence. 

To a young Kentuckian, one of "my boys, " was given the opportunity to seethe last of him and to bury him in far-away Samoa, whither he had takenhimself for the final adventure and where he died, having attained somemeasure of the dreams he had cherished, and, let us hope, happy in theconsciousness of the achievement. 

I rather think Stevenson should be placed at the head of the latter-dayfictionists. But fashions in literature as in dress are ever changing. Washington Irving was the first of our men of letters to obtain foreignrecognition. While the fires of hate between Great Britain and America werestill burning he wrote kindly and elegantly of England and the English, andwas accepted on both sides of the ocean. Taking his style from Addison andGoldsmith, he emulated their charity and humor; he went to Spain and in thesame deft way he pictured the then unknown byways of the land of dreams;and coming home again he peopled the region of the Hudson with the beingsof legend and fancy which are dear to us. 

He became our national man of letters. He stood quite at the head of ourliterature, giving the lie to the scornful query, "Who reads an Americanbook?" As a pioneer he will always be considered; as a simple and vividwriter of things familiar and entertaining he will probably always be read;but as an originator literary history will hardly place him very high. There Bret Harte surely led him. The Tales of the Argonauts as works ofcreative fancy exceed the Sketches of Washington Irving alike in wealth ofcolor and humor, in pathos and dramatic action. 

Some writers make an exception of the famous Sleepy Hollow story. But theyhave in mind the Rip Van Winkle of Jefferson and Boucicault, not therather attenuated story of Irving, which--as far as the twenty years ofsleep went--was borrowed from an old German legend. 

Mark Twain and Bret Harte, however, will always be bracketed withWashington Irving. Of the three I incline to the opinion that Mark Twaindid the broadest and strongest work. His imagination had wider reach thanIrving's. There is nowhere, as there is in Harte, the suspicion either ofinsincerity or of artificiality. Irving's humor was the humor of Sir Rogerde Coverley and the Vicar of Wakefield. It is old English. Mark Twain's ishis own--American through and through to the bone. I am not unmindful ofCooper and Hawthorne, of Longfellow, of Lowell and of Poe, but speak ofIrving as the pioneer American man of letters, and of Mark Twain andBret Harte as American literature's most conspicuous and original modernexamples. 

Chapter the Twenty-Seventh

 The Profession of Journalism--Newspapers and Editors in America--Bennett, Greeley and Raymond--Forney and Dana--The Education of a Journalist

I

The American newspaper has had, even in my time, three separate anddistinct epochs; the thick-and-thin, more or less servile party organ; thepersonal, one-man-controlled, rather blatant and would-be independent; andthe timorous, corporation, or family-owned billboard of such news as theever-increasing censorship of a constantly centralizing Federal Governmentwill allow. 

This latter appears to be its present state. Neither its individuality norits self-exploitation, scarcely its grandiose pretension, remains. Therecontinues to be printed in large type an amount of shallow stuff that wouldnot be missed if it were omitted altogether. But, except as a bulletin ofyesterday's doings, limited, the daily newspaper counts for little, thesingle advantage of the editor--in case there is an editor--that is, oneclothed with supervising authority who "edits"--being that he reaches thepublic with his lucubrations first, the sanctity that once hedged theeditorial "we" long since departed. 

The editor dies, even as the actor, and leaves no copy. Editorialreputations have been as ephemeral as the publications which gave themcontemporary importance. Without going as far back as the Freneaus andthe Callenders, who recalls the names of Mordecai Mannasseh Noah, of EdwinCrosswell and of James Watson Webb? In their day and generation they wereinfluential and distinguished journalists. There are dozens of other namesonce famous but now forgotten; George Wilkins Kendall; Gerard Hallock;Erastus Brooks; Alexander Bullitt; Barnwell Rhett; Morton McMichael; GeorgeWilliam Childs, even Thomas Ritchie, Duff Green and Amos Kendall. "Galesand Seaton" sounds like a trade-mark; but it stood for not a little andlasted a long time in the National Capital, where newspaper vassalage andthe public printing went hand-in-hand. 

For a time the duello flourished. There were frequent "affairs ofhonor"--notably about Richmond in Virginia and Charleston in SouthCarolina--sometimes fatal meetings, as in the case of John H. Pleasants andone of the sons of Thomas Ritchie in which Pleasants was killed, and theyet more celebrated affair between Graves, of Kentucky, and Cilley, ofMaine, in which Cilley was killed; Bladensburg the scene, and the refusalof Cilley to recognize James Watson Webb the occasion. 

I once had an intimate account of this duel with all the cruel incidentsfrom Henry A. Wise, a party to it, and a blood-curdling narrative it made. They fought with rifles at thirty paces, and Cilley fell on the third fire. It did much to discredit duelling in the South. The story, however, thatGraves was so much affected that thereafter he could never sleep in adarkened chamber had no foundation whatever, a fact I learned from myassociate in the old Louisville Journal and later in The Courier-Journal, Mr. Isham Henderson, who was a brother-in-law of Mr. Graves, his sister, Mrs. Graves, being still alive. The duello died at length. There wasnever sufficient reason for its being. It was both a vanity and a fad. InHopkinson Smith's "Col. Carter of Cartersville, " its real character is hitoff to the life. 

II

When very early, rather too early, I found myself in the saddle, Bennettand Greeley and Raymond in New York, and Medill and Storey in Chicago, wereyet alive and conspicuous figures in the newspaper life of the time. JohnBigelow, who had retired from the New York Evening Post, was Minister toFrance. Halstead was coming on, but, except as a correspondent, WhitelawReid had not "arrived. " The like was true of "Joe" McCullagh, who, in thesame character, divided the newspaper reading attention of the country withGeorge Alfred Townsend and Donn Piatt. Joseph Medill was withdrawing fromthe Chicago Tribune in favor of Horace White, presently to return and diein harness--a man of sterling intellect and character--and Wilbur F. Storey, his local rival, who was beginning to show signs of the mentalmalady that, developed into monomania, ultimately ended his life in gloomand despair, wrecking one of the finest newspaper properties outside of NewYork. William R. Nelson, who was to establish a really great newspaper inKansas City, was still a citizen of Ft. Wayne. 

James Gordon Bennett, the elder, seemed then to me, and has alwaysseemed, the real founder of the modern newspaper as a vehicle of popularinformation, and, in point of apprehension, at least, James Gordon Bennett, the younger, did not fall behind his father. What was, and might have beenregarded and dismissed as a trivial slander drove him out of New York andmade him the greater part of his life a resident of Paris, where I was wontto meet and know much of him. 

The New York Herald, under father and son, attained enormous prosperity, prestige and real power. It suffered chiefly from what they call in Ireland"absentee landlordism. " Its "proprietor, " for he never described himselfas its "editor, " was a man of exquisite sensibilities--a "despot" ofcourse--whom nature created for a good citizen, a good husband and the headof a happy domestic fabric. He should have married the woman of his choice, for he was deeply in love with her and never ceased to love her, fortyyears later leaving her in his will a handsome legacy. 

Crossing the ocean with the "Commodore, " as he was called by his familiars, not long after he had taken up his residence abroad, naturally we felloccasionally into shop talk. "What would you do, " he once said, "if youowned the Herald?" "Why, " I answered, "I would stay in New York and editit;" and then I proceeded, "but you mean to ask me what I think you oughtto do with it?" "Yes, " he said, "that is about the size of it. "

"Well, Commodore, " I answered, "if I were you, when we get in I would sendfor John Cockerill and make him managing editor, and for John Young, andput him in charge of the editorial page, and then I would go and losemyself in the wilds of Africa. "

He adopted the first two of these suggestions. John A. Cockerill was stillunder contract with Joseph Pulitzer and could not accept for a year ormore. He finally did accept and died in the Bennett service. John RussellYoung took the editorial page and was making it "hum" when a mostunaccountable thing happened. I was amazed to receive an invitation to adinner he had tendered and was about to give to the quondam Virginian andjust elected New York Justice Roger A. Pryor. "Is Young gone mad, " I saidto myself, "or can he have forgotten that the one man of all the world whomthe House of Bennett can never forget, or forgive, is Roger A. Pryor?"

The Bennett-Pry or quarrel had been a _cause célèbre_ when John Youngwas night editor of the Philadelphia Press and I was one of its Washingtoncorrespondents. Nothing so virulent had ever passed between an editor and aCongressman. In one of his speeches Pryor had actually gone the length ofrudely referring to Mrs. James Gordon Bennett. 

The dinner was duly given. But it ended John's connection with the Heraldand his friendly relations with the owner of the Herald. The incident mightbe cited as among "The Curiosities of Journalism, " if ever a book with thattitle is written. John's "break" was so bad that I never had the heart toask him how he could have perpetrated it. 

III

The making of an editor is a complex affair. Poets and painters are said tobe born. Editors and orators are made. Many essential elements enter intothe editorial fabrication; need to be concentrated upon and embodied by asingle individual, and even, with these, environment is left to supply theopportunity and give the final touch. 

Aptitude, as the first ingredient, goes without saying of every line ofhuman endeavor. We have the authority of the adage for the belief that itis not possible to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Yet have I knownsome unpromising tyros mature into very capable workmen. 

The modern newspaper, as we know it, may be fairly said to have beenthe invention of James Gordon Bennett, the elder. Before him there werejournals, not newspapers. When he died he had developed the news scheme inkind, though not in the degree that we see so elaborate and resplendent inNew York and other of the leading centers of population. Mr. Bennett hadled a vagrant and varied life when he started the Herald. He had been manythings by turns, including a writer of verses and stories, but nothing verysuccessful nor very long. At length he struck a central idea--a reallygreat, original idea--the idea of printing the news of the day, comprisingthe History of Yesterday, fully and fairly, without fear or favor. He wasfollowed by Greeley and Raymond--making a curious and very dissimilartriumvirate--and, at longer range, by Prentice and Forney, by Bowles andDana, Storey, Medill and Halstead. All were marked men; Greeley a writerand propagandist; Raymond a writer, declaimer and politician; Prentice awit and partisan; Dana a scholar and an organizer; Bowles a man both ofletters and affairs. The others were men of all work, writing and fightingtheir way to the front, but possessing the "nose for news, " using theBennett formula and rescript as the basis of their serious efforts, andnever losing sight of it. Forney had been a printer. Medill and Storey werecaught young by the lure of printer's ink. Bowles was born and rearedin the office of the Springfield Republican, founded by his father, andHalstead, a cross betwixt a pack horse and a race horse, was broken toharness before he was out of his teens. 

Assuming journalism, equally with medicine and law, to be a profession, it is the only profession in which versatility is not a disadvantage. Specialism at the bar, or by the bedside, leads to perfection andattains results. The great doctor is the great surgeon or the greatprescriptionist--he cannot be great in both--and the great lawyer is rarelygreat, if ever, as counselor and orator. 

[Illustration: Henry Watterson--From a painting by Louis Mark in theManhattan Club, New York]

The great editor is by no means the great writer. But he ought to be ableto write and must be a judge of writing. The newspaper office is a littlekingdom. The great editor needs to know and does know every range of itbetween the editorial room, the composing room and the pressroom. He musthold well in hand everybody and every function, having risen, as it were, step-by-step from the ground floor to the roof. He should be level-headed, yet impressionable; sympathetic, yet self-possessed; able quickly to sift, detect and discriminate; of various knowledge, experience and interest; thecackle of the adjacent barnyard the noise of the world to his eager mindand pliant ear. Nothing too small for him to tackle, nothing too great, he should keep to the middle of the road and well in rear of the movingcolumns; loving his art--for such it is--for art's sake; getting hissufficiency, along with its independence, in the public approval andpatronage, seeking never anything further for himself. Disinterestednessbeing the soul of successful journalism, unselfish devotion to every noblepurpose in public and private life, he should say to preferment, as tobribers, "get behind me, Satan. " Whitelaw Reid, to take a ready andconspicuous example, was a great journalist, but rather early in lifehe abandoned journalism for office and became a figure in politics anddiplomacy so that, as in the case of Franklin, whose example and footstepsin the main he followed, he will be remembered rather as the Ambassadorthan as the Editor. 

More and more must these requirements be fulfilled by the aspiringjournalist. As the world passes from the Rule of Force--force of prowess, force of habit, force of convention--to the Rule of Numbers, the dailyjournal is destined, if it survives as a power, to become the teacher--thevery Bible--of the people. The people are already beginning to distinguishbetween the wholesome and the meretricious in their newspapers. Newspaperowners, likewise, are beginning to realize the value of character. Instances might be cited where the public, discerning some sinisterbut unseen power behind its press, has slowly yet surely withdrawn itsconfidence and support. However impersonal it pretends to be, with whateverof mystery it affects to envelop itself, the public insists upon somevisible presence. In some States the law requires it. Thus "personaljournalism" cannot be escaped, and whether the "one-man power" emanatesfrom the Counting Room or the Editorial Room, as they are called, it mustbe clear and answerable, responsive to the common weal, and, above all, trustworthy. 

IV

John Weiss Forney was among the most conspicuous men of his time. He waslikewise one of the handsomest. By nature and training a journalist, heplayed an active, not to say an equivocal, part in public life-at theoutset a Democratic and then a Republican leader. 

Born in the little town of Lancaster, it was his mischance to have attachedhimself early in life to the fortunes of Mr. Buchanan, whom he long servedwith fidelity and effect. But when Mr. Buchanan came to the Presidency, Forney, who aspired first to a place in the Cabinet, which was denied him, and then to a seat in the Senate, for which he was beaten--through flagrantbribery, as the story ran--was left out in the cold. Thereafter he becamesomething of a political adventurer. 

The days of the newspaper "organ" aproached their end. Forney's occupation, like Othello's, was gone, for he was nothing if not an organ grinder. Facile with pen and tongue, he seemed a born courtier--a veritableDalgetty, whose loyal devotion to his knight-at-arms deserved betterrecognition than the cold and wary Pennsylvania chieftain was willing togive. It is only fair to say that Forney's character furnished reasonableexcuse for this neglect and apparent ingratitude. The row between them, however, was party splitting. As the friend and backer of Douglas, andlater along a brilliant journalistic soldier of fortune, Forney did as muchas any other man to lay the Democratic party low. 

I can speak of him with a certain familiarity and authority, for I was oneof his "boys. " I admired him greatly and loved him dearly. Most of theyoung newspaper men about Philadelphia and Washington did so. He was anall-around modern journalist of the first class. Both as a newspaper writerand creator and manager, he stood upon the front line, rating with Bennettand Greeley and Raymond. He first entertained and then cultivated thethirst for office, which proved the undoing of Greeley and Raymond, and itproved his undoing. He had a passion for politics. He would shine in publiclife. If he could not play first fiddle he would take any other instrument. Thus failing of a Senatorship, he was glad to get the Secretaryship of theSenate, having been Clerk of the House. 

He was bound to be in the orchestra. In those days newspaper independencewas little known. Mr. Greeley was willing to play bottle-holder to Mr. Seward, Mr. Prentice to Mr. Clay. James Gordon Bennett, the elder, andlater his son, James Gordon Bennett, the younger, challenged this kind ofservility. The Herald stood at the outset of its career manfully in theface of unspeakable obloquy against it. The public understood it and roseto it. The time came when the elder Bennett was to attain official as wellas popular recognition. Mr. Lincoln offered him the French mission and Mr. Bennett declined it. He was rich and famous, and to another it might haveseemed a kind of crowning glory. To him it seemed only a coming down--abadge of servitude--a lowering of the flag of independent journalism underwhich, and under which alone, he had fought all his life. 

Charles A. Dana was not far behind the Bennetts in his independence. He well knew what parties and politicians are. The most scholarly andaccomplished of American journalists, he made the Sun "shine for all, " and, during the years of his active management, a most prosperous property. Ithappened that whilst I was penny-a-lining in New York I took a piece ofspace work--not very common in those days--to the Tribune and received afew dollars for it. Ten years later, meeting Mr. Dana at dinner, I recalledthe circumstance, and thenceforward we became the best of friends. Twiceindeed we had runabouts together in foreign lands. His house in town, andthe island home called Dorsoris, which he had made for himself, might notinaptly be described as very shrines of hospitality and art, the master ofthe house a virtuoso in music and painting no less than in letters. Onemight meet under his roof the most diverse people, but always interestingand agreeable people. Perhaps at times he carried his aversions a littletoo far. But he had reasons for them, and a man of robust temperament andhabit, it was not in him to sit down under an injury, or fancied injury. I never knew a more efficient journalist. What he did not know about anewspaper, was scarcely worth knowing. 

In my day Journalism has made great strides. It has become a recognizedprofession. Schools of special training are springing up here and there. Several of the universities have each its College of Journalism. Thetendency to discredit these, which was general and pronounced at the start, lowers its tone and grows less confident. 

Assuredly there is room for special training toward the making of aneditor. Too often the newspaper subaltern obtaining promotion throughaptitudes peculiarly his own, has failed to acquire even the mostrudimentary knowledge of his art. He has been too busy seeking "scoops" anddoing "stunts" to concern himself about perspectives, principles, causesand effects, probable impressions and consequences, or even to master thetechnical details which make such a difference in the preparation of matterintended for publication and popular perusal. The School of Journalism maynot be always able to give him the needful instruction. But it can set himin the right direction and better prepare him to think and act for himself. 

Chapter the Twenty-Eighth

 Bullies and Braggarts--Some Kentucky Illustrations--The Old Galt House--The Throckmortons--A Famous Sugeon--"Old Hell's Delight"

I

I do not believe that the bully and braggart is more in evidence inKentucky and Texas than in other Commonwealths of the Union, except thateach is by the space writers made the favorite arena of his exploitsand adopted as the scene of the comic stories told at his expense. Theson-of-a-gun from Bitter Creek, like the "elegant gentleman" from the Darkand Bloody Ground, represents a certain type to be found more or lessdeveloped in each and every State of the Union. He is not always a coward. Driven, as it were, to the wall, he will often make good. 

He is as a rule in quest of adventures. He enters the village from thecountryside and approaches the mêlée. "Is it a free fight?" says he. Assured that it is, "Count me in, " says he. Ten minutes later, "Is it stilla free fight?" he says, and, again assured in the affirmative, says he, "Count me out. "

Once the greatest of bullies provoked old Aaron Pennington, "the strongestman in the world, " who struck out from the shoulder and landed his victimin the middle of the street. Here he lay in a helpless heap until theycarted him off to the hospital, where for a day or two he flickered betweenlife and death. "Foh God, " said Pennington, "I barely teched him. "

This same bully threatened that when a certain mountain man came to townhe would "finish him. " The mountain man came. He was enveloped in anold-fashioned cloak, presumably concealing his armament, and walked aboutostentatiously in the proximity of his boastful foeman, who remained aspassive as a lamb. When, having failed to provoke a fight, he had takenhimself off, an onlooker said: "Bill, I thought you were going to do himup?"

"But, " says Bill, "did you see him?"

"Yes, I saw him. What of that?"

"Why, " exclaimed the bully, "that man was a walking arsenal. "

Aaron Pennington, the strong man just mentioned, was, in his youngerdays, a river pilot. Billy Hite, a mite of a man, was clerk. They had adisagreement, when Aaron told Billy that if he caught him on "the harricandeck, " he would pitch him overboard. The next day Billy appeared whilstAaron, off duty, was strolling up and down outside the pilot-house, andstrolled offensively in his wake. Never a hostile glance or a word fromAaron. At last, tired of dumb show, Billy broke forth with a torrent ofimprecation closing with "When are you going to pitch me off the boat, youblankety-blank son-of-a-gun and coward?"

Aaron Pennington was a brave man. He was both fearless and self-possessed. He paused, gazed quizzically at his little tormentor, and says he: "Billy, you got a pistol, and you want to get a pretext to shoot me, and I ain'tgoing to give it to you. "

II

Among the hostels of Christendom the Galt House, of Louisville, for a longtime occupied a foremost place and held its own. It was burned to theground fifty years ago and a new Galt House was erected, not upon theoriginal site, but upon the same street, a block above, and, although oneof the most imposing buildings in the world, it could never be made tothrive. It stands now a rather useless encumbrance--a whited sepulchre--amarble memorial of the Solid South and the Kentucky that was, on whoseportal might truthfully appear the legend:

 "_A jolly place it was in days of old, But something ails it now_"

Aris Throckmorton, its manager in the Thirties, the Forties and theFifties, was a personality and a personage. The handsomest of men and themost illiterate, he exemplified the characteristics and peculiarities ofthe days of the river steamer and the stage coach, when "mine host" felt ithis duty to make the individual acquaintance of his patrons and eachand severally to look after their comfort. Many stories are told at hisexpense; of how he made a formal call upon Dickens--it was, in point offact, Marryatt--in his apartment, to be coolly told that when its occupantwanted him he would ring for him; and of how, investigating a strange boxwhich had newly arrived from Florida, the prevailing opinion being that thelive animal within was an alligator, he exclaimed, "Alligator, hell; it'sa scorponicum. " He died at length, to be succeeded by his son John, a verydifferent character. And thereby hangs a tale. 

John Throckmorton, like Aris, his father, was one of the handsomest of men. Perhaps because he was so he became the victim of one of the strangest offeminine whimsies and human freaks. There was a young girl in Louisville, named Ellen Godwin. Meeting him at a public ball she fell violently in lovewith him. As Throckmorton did not reciprocate this, and refused to pursuethe acquaintance, she began to dog his footsteps. She dressed herself indeep black and took up a position in front of the Galt House, and whenhe came out and wherever he went she followed him. No matter how long hestayed, when he reappeared she was on the spot and watch. He took himselfaway to San Francisco. It was but the matter of a few weeks when she wasthere, too. He hied him thence to Liverpool, and as he stepped upon thedock there she was. She had got wind of his going and, having caught anearlier steamer, preceded him. 

Finally the War of Sections arrived. John Throckmorton hecame a Confederateofficer, and, being able to keep her out of the lines, he had a rest offour years. But, when after the war he returned to Louisville, the quarrybegan again. 

He was wont to call her "Old Hell's Delight. " Finally, one night, as he waspassing the market, she rushed out and rained upon him blow after blow witha frozen rabbit. 

Then the authorities took a hand. She was arraigned for disorderly conductand brought before the Court of Police. Then the town, which knew nothingof the case and accepted her goings on as proof of wrong, rose; and she hada veritable ovation, coming away with flying colors. This, however, servedto satisfy her. Thenceforward she desisted and left poor John Throckmortonin peace. 

I knew her well. She used once in a while to come and see me, having somestory or other to tell. On one occasion I said to her: "Ellen, why do youpursue this man in this cruel way? What possible good can it do you?" Shelooked me straight in the eye and slowly replied: "Because I love him. "

I investigated the case closely and thoroughly and was assured, as he hadassured me, that he had never done her the slightest wrong. She had, onoccasion, told me the same thing, and this I fully believed. 

He was a man, every inch of him, and a gentleman through and through--thevery soul of honor in his transactions of every sort--most highly respectedand esteemed wherever he was known--yet his life was made half a failureand wholly unhappy by this "crazy Jane, " the general public takingappearances for granted and willing to believe nothing good of one who, albeit proud and honorable, held defiantly aloof, disdaining self-defense. 

On the whole I have not known many men more unfortunate than JohnThrockmorton, who, but for "Old Hell's Delight, " would have encounteredlittle obstacle to the pursuit of prosperity and happiness. 

III

Another interesting Kentuckian of this period was John Thompson Gray. He was a Harvard man--a wit, a scholar, and, according to old Southernstandards, a chevalier. Handsome and gifted, he had the disastrousmisfortune just after leaving college to kill his friend in a duel--amortal affair growing, as was usual in those days, out of a trivialcause--and this not only saddened his life, but, in its ambitious aims, shadowed and defeated it. His university comrades had fully counted on hismaking a great career. Being a man of fortune, he was able to live likea gentleman without public preferment, and this he did, except to hisfamiliars aloof and sensitive to the last. 

William Preston, the whilom Minister to Spain and Confederate General, andDavid Yandell, the eminent surgeon, were his devoted friends, and a notabletrio they made. Stoddard Johnston, Boyd Winchester and I--very much youngermen--sat at their feet and immensely enjoyed their brilliant conversation. 

Dr. Yandell was not only as proclaimed by Dr. Gross and Dr. Sayre theablest surgeon of his day, but he was also a gentleman of varied experienceand great social distinction. He had studied long in Paris and was the palof John Howard Payne, the familiar friend of Lamartine, Dumas and Lemaître. He knew Béranger, Hugo and Balzac. It would be hard to find threeKentuckians less provincial, more unaffected, scintillant and worldly wisethan he and William Preston and John Thompson Gray. 

Indeed the list of my acquaintances--many of them intimates--some of themfriends--would be, if recounted, a long one, not mentioning the foreigners, embracing a diverse company all the way from Chunkey Towles to GroverCleveland, from Wake Holman to John Pierpont Morgan, from John Chamberlinto Thomas Edison. I once served as honorary pall-bearer to a professionalgambler who was given a public funeral; a man who had been a gallantConfederate soldier; whom nature intended for an artist, and circumstancediverted into a sport; but who retained to the last the poetic fancyand the spirit of the gallant, leaving behind him, when he died, like averitable cavalier, chiefly debts and friends. He was not a bad sort inbusiness, as the English say, nor in conviviality. But in fighting he was"a dandy. " The goody-goody philosophy of the namby-pamby takes an extremeand unreal view of life. It flies to extremes. There are middle men. Travers used to describe one of these, whom he did not wish particularly toemphasize, as "a fairly clever son-of-a-gun. "

Chapter the Twenty-Ninth

 About Political Conventions, State and National--"Old Ben Butler"--His Appearance as a Trouble-Maker in the Democratic National Convention of 1892--Tarifa and the Tariff--Spain as a Frightful Example

I

I have had a liberal education in party convocations, State and national. In those of 1860 I served as an all-around newspaper reporter. A member ofeach National Democratic Convention from 1876 to 1892, presiding over thefirst, and in those of 1880 and 1888 chosen chairman of the ResolutionsCommittee, I wrote many of the platforms and had a decisive voice in all ofthem. 

In 1880 I had stood for the renomination of "the Old Ticket, " that is, Tilden and Hendricks, making the eight-to-seven action of the ElectoralTribunal of 1877 in favor of Hayes and Wheeler the paramount issue. Itseems strange now that any one should have contested this. Yet it wasstoutly contested. Mr. Tilden settled all dispute by sending a letter tothe convention declining to be a candidate. In answer to this I prepared aresolution of regret to be incorporated in the platform. It raised stubbornopposition. David A. Wells and Joseph Pulitzer, who were fellow members ofthe committee, were with me in my contention, but the objection to makingit a part of the platform grew so pronounced that they thought I had bestnot insist upon it. 

The day wore on and the latent opposition seemed to increase. I had beennamed chairman of the committee and had at a single sitting that morningwritten a completed platform. Each plank of this was severally and closelyscrutinized. It was well into the afternoon before we reached the plank Ichiefly cared about. When I read this the storm broke. Half the committeerose against it. At the close, with more heat than was either courteous ortactful, I said: "Gentlemen, I wish to do no more than bid farewell to aleader who four years ago took the Democratic party at its lowest fortunesand made it a power again. He is well on his way to the grave. I wouldplace a wreath of flowers on that grave. I ask only this of you. Refuse me, and by God, I will go to that mob yonder and, dead or alive, nominate him, and you will be powerless to prevent!"

Mr. Barksdale, of Mississippi, a suave gentleman, who had led thedissenters, said, "We do not refuse you. But you say that we 'regret' Mr. Tilden's withdrawal. Now I do not regret it, nor do those who agree withme. Could you not substitute some other expression?"

"I don't stand on words, " I answered. "What would you suggest?"

Mr. Barksdale said: "Would not the words 'We have received with the deepestsensibility Mr. Tilden's letter of withdrawal, ' answer your purpose?"

"Certainly, " said I, and the plank in the platform, as it was amended, wasadopted unanimously. 

Mr. Tilden did not die. He outlived all his immediate rivals. Four yearslater, in 1884, his party stood ready again to put him at its head. In nominating Mr. Cleveland it thought it was accepting his dictationreënforced by the enormous majority--nearly 200, 000--by which Mr. Cleveland, as candidate for Governor, had carried New York in the precedingState election. Yet, when the votes in the presidential election came to becounted, he carried it, if indeed he carried it at all, by less than 1, 100majority, the result hanging in the balance for nearly a week. 

II

In the convention of 1884, which met at Chicago, we had a veritablemonkey-and-parrot time. It was next after the schism in Congress betweenthe Democratic factions led respectively by Carlisle and Randall, Carlislehaving been chosen Speaker of the House over Randall. 

Converse, of Ohio, appeared in the Platform Committee representing Randall, and Morrison, of Illinois, and myself, representing Carlisle. I was bentupon making Morrison chairman of the committee. But it was agreed thatthe chairmanship should be held in abeyance until the platform had beenformulated and adopted. The subcommittee to whom the task was delegatedsat fifty-one hours without a break before its work was completed. ThenMorrison was named chairman. It was arranged thereafter between Converse, Morrison and myself that when the agreed report was made, Converse andI should have each what time he required to say what was desired inexplanation, I to close the debate and move the previous question. At thispoint General Butler sidled up. "Where do I come in?" he asked. 

"You don't get in at all, you blasted old sinner, " said Morrison. 

"I have scriptural warrant, " General Butler said. "Thou shalt not muzzlethe ox that treadeth the corn. "

"All right, old man, " said Morrison, good-humoredly, "take all the time youwant. "

In his speech before the convention General Butler was not at his happiest, and in closing he gave me a particularly good opening. "If you adopt thisplatform of my friend Watterson, " he said, "God may help you, but I can't. "

I was standing by his side, and, it being my turn, he made way for me, andI said: "During the last few days and nights of agreeable, though ratherirksome, intercourse, I have learned to love General Butler, but I mustdeclare that in an option between him and the Almighty I have a prejudicein favor of God. "

In his personal intercourse, General Butler was the most genial of men. Thesubcommittee in charge of the preparation of a platform held its meetingsin the drawing-room of his hotel apartment, and he had constituted himselfour host as well as our colleague. I had not previously met him. It wasnot long after we came together before he began to call me by my Christianname. At one stage of the proceedings when by substituting one word foranother it looked as though we might reach an agreement, he said to me:"Henry, what is the difference between 'exclusively for public purposes'and 'a tariff for revenue only'?"

"I know of none, " I answered. 

"Do you think that the committee have found you out?"

"No, I scarcely think so. "

"Then I will see that they do, " and he proceeded in his peculiarly subtleway to undo all that we had done, prolonging the session twenty-four hours. 

He was an able man and a lovable man. The missing ingredient was seriousbelief. Just after the nomination of the Breckinridge and Lane Presidentialticket in 1860, I heard him make an ultra-Southern speech from Mr. Breckinridge's doorway. "What do you think of that?" I asked AndrewJohnson, who stood by me, and Johnson answered sharply, with an oath: "Inever like a man to be for me more than I am for myself. " I have been toldthat even at home General Butler could never acquire the public confidence. In spite of his conceded mentality and manliness he gave the impression ofbeing something of an intellectual sharper. 

He was charitable, generous and amiable. The famous New Orleans order whichhad made him odious to the women of the South he had issued to warnbad women and protect good women. Assuredly he did not foresee theinterpretation that would be put upon it. He was personally popular inCongress. When he came to Washington he dispensed a lavish hospitality. Such radical Democrats as Beck and Knott did not disdain his company, became, indeed, his familiars. Yet, curious to relate, a KentuckyCongressman of the period lost his seat because it was charged and proventhat he had ridden in a carriage to the White House with the YankeeBoanerges on a public occasion. 

III

Mere party issues never counted with me. I have read too much and seen toomuch. At my present time of life they count not at all. I used to thinkthat there was a principle involved between the dogmas of Free Trade andProtection as they were preached by their respective attorneys. Yet whatwas either except the ancient, everlasting scheme--

 --"_The good old rôle--the simple plan, That they should take who have the power And they should keep who can_. "

How little wisdom one man may get from another man's counsels, one nationmay get from another nation's history, can be partly computed when wereflect how often our personal experience has failed in warning admonition. 

Temperament and circumstance do indeed cut a prodigious figure in life. Traversing the older countries, especially Spain, the most illustrative, the wayfarer is met at all points by what seems not merely the logic ofevents, but the common law of the inevitable. The Latin of the Sixteenthcentury was a recrudescence of the Roman of the First. He had not, like theMongolian, lived long enough to become a stoic. He was mainly a cynic andan adventurer. Thence he flowered into a sybarite. Coming to great wealthwith the discoveries of Columbus and the conquests of Pizarro and Cortes, he proceeded to enjoy its fruits according to his fancy and the fashion ofthe times. 

He erected massive shrines to his deities. He reared noble palaces. Hebuilt about his cathedrals and his castles what were then thought to begreat cities, walled and fortified. He was, for all his self-sufficiencyand pride, short-sighted; and yet, until they arrived, how could he foreseethe developments of artillery? They were as hidden from him as threecenturies later the wonders of electricity were hidden from us. 

I was never a Free Trader. I stood for a tariff for revenue as the leastoppressive and safest support of Government. The protective system in theUnited States, responsible for our unequal distribution of wealth, took atleast its name from Spain, and the Robber Barons, as I used to call theProtectionists of Pennsylvania, were not of immediate German origin. 

Truth to say, both on land and water Spain has made a deal of history, andthe front betwixt Gibraltar and the Isle of San Fernando--Tangier on oneside and the Straits of Tarifa on the other--Cape Trafalgar, where Nelsonfought the famous battle, midway between them--has had its share. 

Tarifa! What memories it invokes! In the olden and golden days of primitiveman, before corporation lawyers had learned how to frame pillagingstatutes, and rascally politicians to bamboozle confidingconstituencies--thus I used to put it--the gentle pirates of Tarifa laidbroad and deep the foundations for the Protective System in the UnitedStates. 

It was a fruitful as well as a congenial theme, and I rang all the changeson it. To take by law from one man what is his and give it to another manwho has not earned it and has no right to it, I showed to be an inventionof the Moors, copied by the Spaniards and elevated thence into politicaleconomy by the Americans. Tarifa took its name from Tarif-Ben-Malik, themost enterprising Robber Baron of his day, and thus the Lords of Tarifawere the progenitors of the Robber Barons of the Black Forest, New Englandand Pittsburgh. Tribute was the name the Moors gave their robbery, whichwas open and aboveboard. The Coal Kings, the Steel Kings and the Oil Kingsof the modern world have contrived to hide the process; but in Spain thepalaces of their forefathers rise in lonely and solemn grandeur just as athousand years hence the palaces upon the Fifth Avenue side of Central Parkand along Riverside Drive, not to mention those of the Schuylkill and theDelaware, may become but roosts for bats and owls, and the chronicler ofthe Anthropophagi, "whose heads do reach the skies, " may tell how thevoters of the Great Republic were bought and sold with their own money, until "Heaven released the legions north of the North Pole, and theyswooped down and crushed the pulpy mass beneath their avenging snowshoes. "

The gold that was gathered by the Spaniards and fought over so valiantlyis scattered to the four ends of the earth. It may be as potent to-day asthen; but it does not seem nearly so heroic. A good deal of it has foundits way to London, which a short century and a half ago "had not, "according to Adam Smith, "sufficient wealth to compete with Cadiz. " We havehad our full share without fighting for it. Thus all things come to him whocontrives and waits. 

Meanwhile, there are "groups" and "rings. " And, likewise, "leaders" and"bosses. " What do they know or care about the origins of wealth; aboutVenice; about Cadiz; about what is said of Wall Street? The Spanish Mainwas long ago stripped of its pillage. The buccaneers took themselves off tokeep company with the Vikings. Yet, away down in those money chests, oncefilled with what were pieces of eight and ducats and doubloons, who shallsay that spirits may not lurk and ghosts walk, one old freebooter wheezingto another old freebooter: "They order these things better in the'States. '"

IV

I have enjoyed hugely my several sojourns in Spain. The Spaniard is unlikeany other European. He may not make you love him. But you are bound torespect him. 

There is a mansion in Seville known as The House of Pontius Pilate becausepart of the remains of the abode of the Roman Governor was brought fromJerusalem and used in a building suited to the dignity of a Spanish grandeewho was also a Lord of Tarifa. The Duke of Medina Celi, its present owner, is a lineal scion of the old piratical crew. The mansion is filled with thefruits of many a foray. There are plunder from Naples, where one ancestorwas Viceroy, and treasures from the temples of the Aztecs and the Incas, where two other ancestors ruled. Every coping stone and pillar cost somemariner of the Tarifa Straits a pot of money. 

Its owner is a pauper. A carekeeper shows it for a peseta a head. To suchbase uses may we come at last. Yet Seville basks in the sun and smiles onthe flashing waters of the Guadalquivir, and Cadiz sits serene upon thegreen hillsides of San Sebastian, just as if nothing had ever happened;neither the Barber and Carmen, nor Nelson and Byron; the past but aphantom; the present the prosiest of prose-poems. 

There are canny Spaniards even as there are canny Scots, who grow rich andprosper; but there is never a Spaniard who does not regard the politicalfabric, and the laws, as fair game, the rule being always "devil take thehindmost, " community of interests nowhere. "The good old vices of Spain, "that is, the robbing of the lesser rogue by the greater in regulatedgradations all the way from the King to the beggar, are as prevalent and asvital as ever they were. Curiously enough, a tiny stream of Hebraic bloodand Moorish blood still trickles through the Spanish coast towns. It may betraced through the nomenclature in spite of its Castilian prefigurationsand appendices, which would account for some of the enterprise and activitythat show themselves, albeit only by fits and starts. 

Chapter the Thirtieth

 The Makers of the Republic--Lincoln, Jefferson, Clay and Webster--The Proposed League of Nations--The Wilsonian Incertitude--The "New Freedom"

I

The makers of the American Republic range themselves in twogroups--Washington, Franklin and Jefferson--Clay, Webster and Lincoln--eachof whom, having a genius peculiarly his own, gave himself and his best tothe cause of national unity and independence. 

In a general way it may be said that Washington created and Lincoln savedthe Union. But along with Washington and Lincoln, Clay makes a goodhistoric third, for it was the masterful Kentuckian who, joining rareforesight to surpassing eloquence and leading many eminent men, includingWebster, was able to hold the legions of unrest at bay during the formativeperiod. 

There are those who call these great men "back numbers, " who tell us wehave left the past behind us and entered an epoch of more enlightenedprogress--who would displace the example of the simple lives they led andthe homely truths they told, to set up a school of philosophy which hadmade Athens stare and Rome howl, and, I dare say, is causing the OldContinentals to turn over in their graves. The self-exploiting spectacleand bizarre teaching of this school passes the wit of man to fathom. Professing the ideal and proposing to recreate the Universe, the NewFreedom, as it calls itself, would standardize it. The effect of that wouldbe to desiccate the human species in human conceit. It would cheapen thevery harps and halos in Heaven and convert the Day of Judgment into amoving picture show. 

I protest that I am not of its kidney. In point of fact, its platitudes"stick in my gizzard. " I belong the rather to those old-fashioned ones--

 "Who love their land because it is their own, And scorn to give aught other reason why; Who'd shake hands with a king upon his throne, And think it kindness to his majesty. "

I have many rights--birthrights--to speak of Kentucky as a Kentuckian, beside that of more than fifty years' service upon what may be fairlycalled the battle-line of the Dark and Bloody Ground. 

My grandmother's father, William Mitchell Morrison, had raised a companyof riflemen in the War of the Revolution, and, after the War, marched itwestward. He commanded the troops in the old fort at Harrodsburg, wheremy grandmother was born in 1784. He died a general. My grandfather, James Black's father, the Rev. James Black, was chaplain of the fort. Heremembered the birth of the baby girl who was to become his wife. He was anoble stalwart--a perfect type of the hunters of Kentucky--who could bringdown a squirrel from the highest bough and hit a bull's eye at a hundredyards after he was three score and ten. 

It was he who delighted my childhood with bear stories and properly luridnarrations of the braves in buckskin and the bucks in paint and feathers, with now and then a red-coat to give pungency and variety to the tale. Hewould sing me to sleep with hunting songs. He would take me with him afieldto carry the game bag, and I was the only one of many grandchildren to benamed in his will. In my thoughts and in my dreams he has been with me allmy life, a memory and an example, and an ever glorious inspiration. 

Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton were among my earliest heroes. 

II

Born in a Democratic camp, and growing to manhood on the Democratic side ofa political battlefield, I did not accept, as I came later to realize, thetranscendent personal merit and public service of Henry Clay. Being ofTennessee parentage, perhaps the figure of Andrew Jackson came between;perhaps the rhetoric of Daniel Webster. Once hearing me make some slightingremark of the Great Commoner, my father, a life-long Democrat, who, onopposing sides, had served in Congress with Mr. Clay, gently rebuked me. "Do not express such opinions, my son, " he said, "they discredit yourself. Mr. Clay was a very great man--a born leader of men. "

It was certainly he, more than any other man, who held the Union togetheruntil the time arrived for Lincoln to save it. 

I made no such mistake, however, with respect to Abraham Lincoln. From thefirst he appeared to me a great man, a born leader of men. His death proveda blow to the whole country--most of all to the Southern section of it. If he had lived there would have been no Era of Reconstruction, with itsrepressive agencies and oppressive legislation; there would have beenwanting to the extremism of the time the bloody cue of his taking off tomount the steeds and spur the flanks of vengeance. For Lincoln entertained, with respect to the rehabilitation of the Union, the single wish that theSouthern States--to use his homely phraseology--"should come back homeand behave themselves, " and if he had lived he would have made this wisheffectual as he made everything else effectual to which he addressedhimself. 

His was the genius of common sense. Of perfect intellectual acuteness andaplomb, he sprang from a Virginia pedigree and was born in Kentucky. He knew all about the South, its institutions, its traditions and itspeculiarities. He was an old-line Whig of the school of Henry Clay, withstrong Emancipation leaning, never an Abolitionist. "If slavery be notwrong, " he said, "nothing is wrong, " but he also said and reiterated ittime and again, "I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They arejust what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now existamong them they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, wewould not instantly give it up. "

From first to last throughout the angry debates preceding the War ofSections, amid the passions of the War itself, not one vindictive, prescriptive word fell from his tongue or pen, whilst during its progressthere was scarcely a day when he did not project his great personalitybetween some Southern man or woman and danger. 

III

There has been much discussion about what did and what did not occur at thefamous Hampton Roads Conference. That Mr. Lincoln met and conferred withthe official representatives of the Confederate Government, led by the VicePresident of the Confederate States, when it must have been known to himthat the Confederacy was nearing the end of its resources, is sufficientproof of the breadth both of his humanity and his patriotism. Yet he wentto Fortress Monroe prepared not only to make whatever concessions towardthe restoration of Union and Peace he had the lawful authority to make, but to offer some concessions which could in the nature of the case go nofurther at that time than his personal assurance. His constitutional powerswere limited. But he was in himself the embodiment of great moral power. 

The story that he offered payment for the slaves--so often affirmed anddenied--is in either case but a quibble with the actual facts. He could nothave made such an offer except tentatively, lacking the means to carry itout. He was not given the opportunity to make it, because the ConfederateCommissioners were under instructions to treat solely on the basis of therecognition of the independence of the Confederacy. The conference came tonought. It ended where it began. But there is ample evidence that he wentto Hampton Roads resolved to commit himself to that proposition. He did, according to the official reports, refer to it in specific terms, havingalready formulated a plan of procedure. This plan exists and may be seen inhis own handwriting. It embraced a joint resolution to be submitted by thePresident to the two Houses of Congress appropriating $400, 000, 000 to bedistributed among the Southern States on the basis of the slave populationof each according to the Census of 1860, and a proclamation to be issuedby himself, as President, when the joint resolution had been passed byCongress. 

There can be no controversy among honest students of history on this point. That Mr. Lincoln said to Mr. Stephens, "Let me write Union at the topof this page and you may write below it whatever else you please, " isreferable to Mr. Stephens' statement made to many friends and attested by anumber of reliable persons. But that he meditated the most liberal terms, including payment for the slaves, rests neither upon conjecture norhearsay, but on documentary proof. It may be argued that he could nothave secured the adoption of any such plan; but of his purpose, andits genuineness, there can be no question and there ought to be noequivocation. 

Indeed, payment for the slaves had been all along in his mind. He believedthe North equally guilty with the South for the original existence ofslavery. He clearly understood that the Irrepressible Conflict was aConflict of systems, not a merely sectional and partisan quarrel. He was ajust man, abhorring proscription: an old Conscience Whig, indeed, who stoodin awe of the Constitution and his oath of office. He wanted to leave theSouth no right to claim that the North, finding slave labor unremunerative, had sold its negroes to the South and then turned about and by force ofarms confiscated what it had unloaded at a profit. He fully recognizedslavery as property. The Proclamation of Emancipation was issued as a warmeasure. In his message to Congress of December, 1862, he proposed paymentfor the slaves, elaborating a scheme in detail and urging it with copiousand cogent argument. "The people of the South, " said he, addressing aCongress at that moment in the throes of a bloody war with the South, "arenot more responsible for the original introduction of this property thanare the people of the North, and, when it is remembered how unhesitatinglywe all use cotton and sugar and share the profits of dealing in them, itmay not be quite safe to say that the South has been more responsible thanthe North for its continuance. "

IV

It has been my rule, aim and effort in my newspaper career to print nothingof a man which I would not say to his face; to print nothing of a man inmalice; to look well and think twice before consigning a suspect to theruin of printer's ink; to respect the old and defend the weak; and, lastly, at work and at play, daytime and nighttime, to be good to the girls andsquare with the boys, for hath it not been written of such is the kingdomof Heaven?

There will always be in a democracy two or more sets of rival leaders totwo or more differing groups of followers. Hitherto history has classifiedthese as conservatives and radicals. But as society has become more andmore complex the groups have had their subdivisions. As a consequencespeculative doctrinaries and adventurous politicians are enabled to get intheir work of confusing the issues and exploiting themselves. 

"'What are these fireworks for?' asks the rustic in the parable. 'To blindthe eyes of the people, ' answers the cynic. "

I would not say aught in a spirit of hostility to the President of theUnited States. Woodrow Wilson is a clever speaker and writer. Yet the usualtrend and phrase of his observations seem to be those of a special pleader, rather than those of a statesman. Every man, each of the nations, is forpeace as an abstract proposition. That much goes without saying. But Mr. Wilson proposes to bind the hands of a giant and take lottery chances onthe future. This, I think, the country will contest. 

He is obsessed by the idea of a League of Nations. If not his own discoveryhe has yet made himself its leader. He talks flippantly about "Americanideals" that have won the war against Germany, as if there were no Englishideals and French ideals. 

"In all that he does we can descry the school-master who arrived at thefront rather late in life. One needs only to go over the record andmark how often he has reversed himself to detect a certain mental andtemperamental instability clearly indicating a lack of fixed or resoluteintellectual purpose. This is characteristic of an excess in education; ofthe half baked mind overtrained. The overeducated mind fancies himself adoctrinaire when he is in point of fact only a disciple. "

Woodrow Wilson was born to the rather sophisticated culture of the too, toosolid South. Had he grown up in England a hundred years ago he would havebeen a follower of the Della Cruscans. He has what is called a facile pen, though it sometimes runs away with him. It seems to have done so in thematter of the League of Nations. Inevitably such a scheme would catch thefancy of one ever on the alert for the fanciful. 

I cannot too often repeat that the world we inhabit is a world of sin, disease and death. Men will fight whenever they want to fight, and noartificial scheme or process is likely to restrain them. It is mainly thecostliness of war that makes most against it. But, as we have seen the lastfour years, it will not quell the passions of men or dull national andracial ambitions. 

All that Mr. Wilson and his proposed League of Nations can do will be torevamp, and maybe for a while to reimpress the minds of the rank and file, until the bellowing followers of Bellona are ready to spring. 

Eternal peace, universal peace, was not the purpose of the Deity in thecreation of the universe. 

Nevertheless, it would seem to be the duty of men in great place, as ofus all, to proclaim the gospel of good will and cultivate the arts offraternity. I have no quarrel with the President on this score. What Icontest is the self-exploitation to which he is prone, so lacking indignity and open to animadversion. 

V

Thus it was that instant upon the appearance of the proposed League ofNations I made bold to challenge it, as but a pretty conceit having no realvalue, a serious assault upon our national sovereignty. 

Its argument seemed to me full of copybook maxims, easier recited thanapplied. As what I wrote preceded the debates and events of the last sixmonths, I may not improperly make the following quotation from a screed ofmine appearing in The Courier-Journal of the 5th of March, 1919:

"The League of Nations is a fad. Politics, like society and letters, hasits fads. In society they call them fashion and in literature originality. Politics gives the name of 'issues' to its fads. A taking issue is as astunning gown, or 'a best seller. ' The President's mind wears a coat ofmany colors, and he can change it at will, his mood being the objectivepoint, not always too far ahead, or clear of vision. Carl Schurz was wontto speak of Gratz Brown as 'a man of thoughts rather than of ideas. ' Iwonder if that can be justly said of the President? 'Gentlemen will pleasenot shoot at the pianiste, ' adjured the superscription over the music standin the Dakota dive; 'she is doing the best that she knows how. '

"Already it is being proclaimed that Woodrow Wilson can have a thirdnomination for the presidency if he wants it, and nobody seems shocked byit, which proves that the people grow degenerate and foreshadows that oneof these nights some fool with a spyglass will break into Mars and letloose the myriads of warlike gyascutes who inhabit that freak luminary, thence to slide down the willing moonbeam and swallow us every one!

"In a sense the Monroe Doctrine was a fad. Oblivious to Canada, and BritishColumbia and the Spanish provinces, it warned the despots of Europe off thegrass in America. We actually went to war with Mexico, having enjoyed twowars with England, and again and again we threatened to annex the Dominion. Everything betwixt hell and Halifax was Yankee preëmpted. 

"Truth to say, your Uncle Samuel was ever a jingo. But your Cousin Woodrow, enlarging on the original plan, would stretch our spiritual boundaries tothe ends of the earth and make of us the moral custodian of the universe. This much, no less, he got of the school of sweetness and light in which hegrew up. 

"I am a jingo myself. But a wicked material jingo, who wants facts, nottheories. If I thought it possible and that it would pay, I would annex theNorth Pole and colonize the Equator. It is, after the manner of the lady inthe play, that the President 'doth protest too much, ' which displeases meand where, in point of fact, I 'get off the reservation. '

"That, being a politician and maybe a candidate, he is keenly alive tovotes goes without saying. On the surface this League of Nations having theword 'peace' in big letters emblazoned both upon its forehead and theseat of its trousers--or, should I say, woven into the hem of itspetticoat?--seems an appeal for votes. I do not believe it will beardiscussion. In a way, it tickles the ear without convincing the sense. There is nothing sentimental about the actualities of Government, muchas public men seek to profit by arousing the passions of the people. Government is a hard and fast and dry reality. At best statesmanship canonly half do the things it would. Its aims are most assured when tending alittle landward; its footing safest on its native heath. We have plentyto do on our own continent without seeking to right things onother continents. Too many of us--the President among the rest, Ifear--miscalculate the distance between contingency and desire. 

 "'We figure to ourselves The thing we like: and then we build it up: As chance will have it on the rock or sand-- When thought grows tired of wandering o'er the world, And homebound Fancy runs her bark ashore. '"

I am sorry to see the New York World fly off at a tangent about this latestof the Wilsonian hobbies. Frank Irving Cobb, the editor of the World, is, as I have often said, the strongest writer on the New York press sinceHorace Greeley. But he can hardly be called a sentimentalist, as Greeleywas, and there is nothing but sentiment--gush and gammon--in the proposedLeague of Nations. 

It may be all right for England. There are certainly no flies on it forFrance. But we don't need it. Its effects can only be to tie our hands, notkeep the dogs away, and even at the worst, in stress of weather, we arestrong enough to keep the dogs away ourselves. 

We should say to Europe: "Shinny on your own side of the water and we willshinny on our side. " It may be that Napoleon's opinion will come true thatultimately Europe will be "all Cossack or all republican. " Part of it hascome true already. Meanwhile it looks as though the United States, havingexhausted the reasonable possibilities of democracy, is beginning to turncrank. Look at woman suffrage by Federal edict; look at prohibition byact of Congress and constitutional amendment; tobacco next to walk on theplank; and then!--Lord, how glad I feel that I am nearly a hundred yearsold and shall not live to see it!

Chapter the Thirty-First

 The Age of Miracles--A Story of Franklin Pierce--Simon Suggs Billy Sunday--Jefferson Davis and Aaron Burr--Certain Constitutional Shortcomings

I

The years intervening between 1865 and 1919 may be accounted the mostmomentous in all the cycles of the ages. The bells that something more thanhalf a century ago rang forth to welcome peace in America have been fromthat day to this jangled out of tune and harsh with the sounding of war'salarms in every other part of the world. We flatter ourselves with thethought that our tragedy lies behind us. Whether this be true or not, thetragedy of Europe is at hand and ahead. The miracles of modern invention, surpassing those of old, have made for strife, not for peace. Civilizationhas gone backward, not forward. Rulers, intoxicated by the lust of powerand conquest, have lost their reason, and nations, following after, likecattle led to slaughter, seem as the bereft of Heaven "that knew not God. "

We read the story of our yesterdays as it unfolds itself in the currentchronicle; the ascent to the bank-house, the descent to the mad-house, and, over the glittering paraphernalia that follows to the tomb, we reflect uponthe money-zealot's progress; the dizzy height, the dazzling array, thecraze for more and more and more; then the temptation and fall, millionsgone, honor gone, reason gone--the innocent and the gentle, with theguilty, dragged through the mire of the prison, and the court--and we drawback aghast. Yet, if we speak of these things we are called pessimists. 

I have always counted myself an optimist. I know that I do not lie awakenights musing on the ingratitude either of my stars or my countrymen. Ipity the man who does. Looking backward, I have sincere compassion forWebster and for Clay! What boots it to them, now that they lie beneath themold, and that the drums and tramplings of nearly seventy years of theworld's strifes and follies and sordid ambitions and mean repinings, andlongings, and laughter, and tears, have passed over their graves, whatboots it to them, now, that they failed to get all they wanted? There isindeed snug lying in the churchyard; but the flowers smell as sweet andthe birds sing as merry, and the stars look down as loving upon theGod-hallowed mounds of the lowly and the poor, as upon the man-bedeckedmonuments of the Kings of men. All of us, the least with the greatest, letus hope and believe shall attain immortal life at last. What was there forWebster, what was there for Clay to quibble about? I read with a kind ofwonder, and a sickening sense of the littleness of great things, thosepassages in the story of their lives where it is told how they stormedand swore, when tidings reached them that they had been balked of theirdesires. 

Yet they might have been so happy; so happy in their daily toil, with itslofty aims and fair surroundings; so happy in the sense of duty done;so happy, above all, in their own Heaven-sent genius, with its nobleopportunities and splendid achievements. They should have emulated thesatisfaction told of Franklin Pierce. It is related that an enemy wasinveighing against him, when an alleged friend spoke up and said: "Youshould not talk so about the President, I assure you that he is not at allthe man you describe him to be. On the contrary, he is a man of the rarestgifts and virtues. He has long been regarded as the greatest orator in NewEngland, and the greatest lawyer in New England, and surely no one of hispredecessors ever sent such state papers to Congress. "

"How are you going to prove it, " angrily retorted the first speaker. 

"I don't need to prove it, " coolly replied the second. "He admits it. "

I cannot tell just how I should feel if I were President, though, on thewhole, I fancy fairly comfortable, but I am quite certain that I would notexchange places with any of the men who have been President, and I haveknown quite a number of them. 

II

I am myself accused sometimes of being a "pessimist. " Assuredly I amno optimist of the Billy Sunday sort, who fancies the adoption of theprohibition amendment the coming of "de jubilo. " Early in life, while yeta recognized baseball authority, Mr. Sunday discovered "pay dirt" in whatCol. Mulberry Sellers called "piousness. " He made it an asset and beganto issue celestial notes, countersigned by himself and made redeemablein Heaven. From that day to this he has been following the lead of therenowned Simon Suggs, who, having in true camp meeting style acquired"the grace of God, " turned loose as an exhorter shouting "Step up to themourner's bench, my brethering, step up lively, and be saved! I come in onna 'er par, an' see what I draw'd! Religion's the only game whar you can'tlose. Him that trusts the Lord holds fo' aces!"

The Billy Sunday game has made Billy Sunday rich. Having exhaustedHell-fire-and-brimstone, the evangel turns to the Demon Rum. Satan, withhide and horns, has had his day. Prohibition is now the trick card. 

The fanatic is never either very discriminating or very particular. Asa rule, for him any taking "ism" will suffice. To-day, it happens to be"whisky. " To-morrow it will be tobacco. Finally, having established the spysystem and made house-to-house espionage a rule of conventicle, it willbecome a misdemeanor for a man to kiss his wife. 

From fakers who have cards up their sleeves, not to mention snakes in theirboots, we hear a great deal about "the people, " pronounced by them as if itwere spelled "pee-pul. " It is the unfailing recourse of the professionalpolitician in quest of place. Yet scarcely any reference, or referee, werefaultier. 

The people en masse constitute what we call the mob. Mobs have rarely beenright--never except when capably led. It was the mob of Jerusalem that didthe unoffending Jesus of Nazareth to death. It was the mob in Paris thatmade the Reign of Terror. Mobs have seldom been tempted, even had a chanceto go wrong, that they have not gone wrong. 

The "people" is a fetish. It was the people, misled, who precipitated theSouth into the madness of secession and the ruin of a hopelessly unequalwar of sections. It was the people backing if not compelling the Kaiser, who committed hari-kari for themselves and their empire in Germany. It isthe people leaderless who are making havoc in Russia. Throughout the lengthand breadth of Christendom, in all lands and ages, the people, when turnedloose, have raised every inch of hell to the square foot they were able toraise, often upon the slightest pretext, or no pretext at all. 

This is merely to note the mortal fallibility of man, most fallible whenherded in groups and prone to do in the aggregate what he would hesitate todo when left to himself and his individual accountability. 

Under a wise dispensation of power, despotism, we are told embodies thebest of all government. The trouble is that despotism is seldom, if ever, wise. It is its nature to be inconsiderate, being essentially selfish, grasping and tyrannous. As a rule therefore revolution--usually offorce--has been required to change or reform it. Perfectibility was notdesigned for mortal man. That indeed furnishes the strongest argument infavor of the immortality of the soul, life on earth but the ante-chamber ofeternal life. It would be a cruel Deity that condemned man to the brief andvexed span of human existence with nothing beyond the grave. 

We know not whence we came, or whither we go; but it is a fair guess thatwe shall in the end get better than we have known. 

III

Historic democracy is dead. 

This is not to say that a Democratic party organization has ceased toexist. Nor does it mean that there are no more Democrats and that theDemocratic party is dead in the sense that the Federalist party is dead orthe Whig party is dead, or the Greenback party is dead, or the Populistparty is dead. That which has died is the Democratic party of Jefferson andJackson and Tilden. The principles of government which they laid downand advocated have been for the most part obliterated. What slavery andsecession were unable to accomplish has been brought about by nationalizingsumptuary laws and suffrage. 

The death-blow to Jeffersonian democracy was delivered by the DemocraticSenators and Representatives from the South and West who carried throughthe prohibition amendment. The _coup de grâce_ was administered by aPresident of the United States elected as a Democrat when he approved theFederal suffrage amendment to the Constitution. 

The kind of government for which the Jeffersonian democracy successfullybattled for more than a century was thus repudiated; centralization wasinvited; State rights were assassinated in the very citadel of Staterights. The charter of local self-government become a scrap of paper, theway is open for the obliteration of the States in all their essentialfunctions and the erection of a Federal Government more powerful thananything of which Alexander Hamilton dared to dream. 

When the history of these times comes to be written it may be said ofWoodrow Wilson: he rose to world celebrity by circumstance rather than bycharacter. He was favored of the gods. He possessed a bright, forcefulmind. His achievements were thrust upon him. Though it sometimes ran awaywith him, his pen possessed extraordinary facility. Thus he was ever ableto put his best foot foremost. Never in the larger sense a leader of men aswere Chatham and Fox, as were Washington, Clay and Lincoln; nor of ideas aswere Rousseau, Voltaire and Franklin, he had the subtle tenacity of Louisthe Eleventh of France, the keen foresight of Richelieu with a talent forthe surprising which would have raised him to eminence in journalism. In short he was an opportunist void of conviction and indifferent toconsistency. 

The pen is mightier than the sword only when it has behind it a heart aswell as a brain. He who wields it must be brave, upright and steadfast. We are giving our Chief Executive enormous powers. As a rule his wishesprevail. His name becomes the symbol of party loyalty. Yet it is after alla figure of speech not a personality that appeals to our sense of dutywithout necessarily engaging our affection. 

Historic Republicanism is likewise dead, as dead as historic Democracy, only in both cases the labels surviving. 

IV

We are told by Herbert Spencer that the political superstition of the pasthaving been the divine right of kings, the political superstition of thepresent is the divine right of parliaments and he might have said ofpeoples. The oil of anointing seems unawares, he thinks, to have drippedfrom the head of the one upon the heads of the many, and given sacrednessto them also, and to their decrees. 

That the Proletariat, the Bolsheviki, the People are on the way seems plainenough. How far they will go, and where they will end, is not so clear. With a kind of education--most men taught to read, very few to think--themasses are likely to demand yet more and more for themselves. They willcontinue strenuously and effectively to resent the startling contrastsof fortune which aptitude and opportunity have created in a social andpolitical structure claiming to rest upon the formula "equality for all, special privilege for none. "

The law of force will yield to the rule of numbers. Socialism, disappointedof its Utopia, may then repeat the familiar lesson and reproduce theman-on-horseback, or the world may drop into another abyss, and, after theensuing "dark ages, " like those that swallowed Babylon and Tyre, Greece andRome, emerge with a new civilization and religion. 

"Man never is, but always to be blessed. " We know not whence we came, orwhither we go. Hope that springs eternal in the human breast tells usnothing. History seems, as Napoleon said, a series of lies agreed upon, yetnot without dispute. 

V

I read in an ultra-sectional non-partisan diatribe that "Jefferson Davismade Aaron Burr respectable, " a sentence which clearly indicates that thewriter knew nothing either of Jefferson Davis or Aaron Burr. 

Both have been subjected to unmeasured abuse. They are variouslymisunderstood. Their chief sin was failure; the one to establish animpossible confederacy laid in human slavery, the other to achieve certainvague schemes of empire in Mexico and the far Southwest, which, if notvisionary, were premature. 

The final collapse of the Southern Confederacy can be laid at the door ofno man. It was doomed the day of its birth. The wonder is that sane leaderscould invoke such odds against them and that a sane people could be inducedto follow. The single glory of the South is that it was able to stand outso long against such odds. 

Jefferson Davis was a high-minded and well-intentioned man. He was chosento lead the South because he was, in addition, an accomplished soldier. Asone who consistently opposed him in his public policies, I can specify noact to the discredit of his character, his one serious mistake being hisfailiure to secure the peace offered by Abraham Lincoln two short monthsbefore Appomattox. 

Taking account of their personalities and the lives they led, there islittle to suggest comparison, except that they were soldiers and Senators, who, each in his day, filled a foremost place in public affairs. 

Aaron Burr, though well born and highly educated, was perhaps arudely-minded man. But he was no traitor. If the lovely woman, TheodosiaPrevost, whom he married, had lived, there is reason to believe that thewhole course and tenor of his career would have been altered. Her death wasan irreparable blow, as it were, a prelude to the series of mischancesthat followed. The death of their daughter, the lovely Theodosia Alston, completed the tragedy of his checkered life. 

Born a gentleman and attaining soldierly distinction and high place, hefell a victim to the lure of a soaring ambition and the devious experienceof a man about town. 

The object of political proscription for all his intellectual and personalresources, he could not successfully meet and stand against it. There wasnothing in the affair with Hamilton actually to damn and ruin him. Neithermorally nor politically was Hamilton the better man of the two. Nor wasthere treason in his Mexican scheme. He meant no more with universalacclaim than Houston did three decades later. To couple his name with thatof Benedict Arnold is historic sacrilege. 

Jefferson pursued him relentlessly. But even Jefferson could not havedestroyed him. When, after an absence of four years abroad, he returned toAmerica, there was still a future for him had he stood up like a man, but, instead, like one confessing defeat, he sank down, whilst the wave ofobloquy rolled over him. 

His is one of the few pathetic figures in our national history. Mr. Davishas had plenty of defenders. Poor Burr has had scarcely an apologist. Hisoffense, whatever it was, has been overpaid. Even the War of Sectionsbegins to fade into the mist and become dreamlike even to those who bore anactual part in it. 

The years are gliding swiftly by. Only a little while, and there shall notbe one man living who saw service on either side of that great struggle ofsystems and ideas. Its passions long ago vanished from manly bosoms. Thathas come to pass within a single generation in America which in Europerequired ages to accomplish. 

There is no disputing the verdict of events. Let us relate them truly andinterpret them fairly. If the South would have the North do justice to itsheroes, the South must do justice to the heroes of the North. Each mustrender unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's even as each would renderunto God the things that are God's. As living men, standing erect in thepresence of Heaven and the world, the men of the South have grown graywithout being ashamed; and they need not fear that History will fail tovindicate their integrity. 

When those are gone that fought the battle, and Posterity comes to strikethe balance, it will be shown that the makers of the Constitution leftthe relation of the States to the Federal Government and of the FederalGovernment to the States open to a double construction. It will be toldhow the mistaken notion that slave labor was requisite to the profitablecultivation of sugar, rice and cotton, raised a paramount property interestin the Southern section of the Union, whilst in the Northern section, responding to the trend of modern thought and the outer movements ofmankind, there arose a great moral sentiment against slavery. The conflictthus established, gradually but surely sectionalizing party lines, was asinevitable as it was irrepressible. It was fought out to its bitterand logical conclusion at Appomattox. It found us a huddle of pettysovereignties, held together by a rope of sand. It made and it left us aNation. 

Chapter the Thirty-Second

 A War Episode--I Meet my Fater--I Marry and Make a Home--The Ups and Downs of Life Lead to a Happy Old Age

I

In bringing these desultory--perhaps too fragmentary--recollections to aclose the writer may not be denied his final word. This shall neither beself-confident nor overstated; the rather a confession of faith somewhat inrejection of political and religious pragmatism. In both his experience hasbeen ample if not exhaustive. During the period of their serial publicationhe has received many letters--suggestive, informatory and critical--now andagain querulous--which he has not failed to consider, and, where occasionseemed to require, to pursue to original sources in quest of accuracy. Inno instance has he found any essential error in his narrative. Sometimes hehas been charged with omissions--as if he were writing a history of his owntimes--whereas he has been only, and he fears, most imperfectly, relatinghis immediate personal experience. 

I was born in the Presbyterian Church, baptized in the Roman CatholicChurch, educated in the Church of England in America and married into theChurch of the Disciples. The Roman Catholic baptism happened in this way:It was my second summer; my parents were sojourning in the household of adevout Catholic family; my nurse was a fond, affectionate Irish Catholic;the little life was almost despaired of, so one sunny day, to rescue mefrom that form of theologic controversy known as infant damnation, the babycarriage was trundled round the corner to Saint Matthew's Church--it was inthe national capital--and the baby brow was touched with holy water out ofa font blessed of the Virgin Mary. Surely I have never felt or been theworse for it. 

Whilst I was yet too young to understand I witnessed an old-fashionedbaptism of the countryside. A person who had borne a very bad character inthe neighborhood was being immersed. Some one, more humorous than reverent, standing near me, said as the man came to the surface, "There go his sins, men and brethren, there go his sins"; and having but poor eyesight Ithought I saw them passing down the stream never to trouble him, oranybody, more. I can see them still floating, floating down the stream, outand away from the sight of men. Does this make me a Baptist, I wonder?

I fear not, I fear not; because I am unable to rid myself of the impressionthat there are many roads leading to heaven, and I have never believed inwhat is called close communion. I have not hated and am unable to hate anyman because either in political or in religious opinion he differs fromme and insists upon voting his party ticket and worshiping his Creatoraccording to his conscience. Perfect freedom of conscience and thought hasbeen my lifelong contention. 

I suppose I must have been born an insurrecto. Pursuing the story of thedark ages when men were burnt at the stake for the heresy of refusing tobow to the will of the majority, it is not the voice of the Protestant orthe Catholic that issues from the flames and reaches my heart, but the cryof suffering man, my brother. To me a saint is a saint whether he wearswooden shoes or goes barefoot, whether he gets his baptism silently outof a font of consecrated water or comes dripping from the depths ofthe nearest brook, shouting, "Glory hallelujah!" From my boyhood thepersecution of man for opinion's sake--and no matter for what opinion'ssake--has roused within me the only devil I have ever personally known. 

My reading has embraced not a few works which seek or which affect to dealwith the mystery of life and death. Each and every one of them leaves amystery still. For all their learning and research--their positivity andcontradiction--none of the writers know more than I think I know myself, and all that I think I know myself may be abridged to the simple rescript, I know nothing. The wisest of us reck not whence we came or whither we go;the human mind is unable to conceive the eternal in either direction; thesoul of man inscrutable even to himself. 

 _The night has a thousand eyes, The day but one; Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun. _

 _The mind has a thousand eyes, The heart but one; Yet the light of a whole life dies When love is done. _

All that there is to religion, therefore, is faith; not much more inpolitics. We are variously told that the church is losing its hold uponmen. If it be true it is either that it gives itself over to theology--thepride of opinion--or yields itself to the celebration of the mammon ofunrighteousness. 

I do not believe that it is true. Never in the history of the world wasJesus of Nazareth so interesting and predominant. Between Buddha, teachingthe blessing of eternal sleep, and Christ, teaching the blessing of eternallife, mankind has been long divided, but slowly, surely, the influence ofthe Christ has overtaken that of the Buddha until that portion of the worldwhich has advanced most by process of evolution from the primal state ofman now worships at the shrine of Christ and him risen from the dead, notat the sign of Buddha and total oblivion. 

The blessed birthright from God, the glory of heaven, the teaching andexample of the Prince of Peace--have been engulfed beneath oceans ofignorance and superstition through two thousand years of embitteredcontroversy. During the dark ages coming down even to our own time the verylight of truth was shut out from the eyes and hearts and minds of men. Theblood of the martyrs we were assured in those early days was the seed ofthe church. The blood of the martyrs was the blood of man--weak, cruel, fallible man, who, whether he got his inspiration from the Tiber or theRhine, from Geneva, from Edinburgh or from Rome, did equally the devil'swork in God's name. None of the viceregents of heaven, as they claimed tobe, knew much or seemed to care much about the word of the Gentle One ofBethlehem, whom they had adopted as their titular divinity much as men incommerce adopt a trade-mark. 

II

It was knock-down and drag-out theology, the ruthless machinery oforganized churchism--the rank materialism of things temporal--not theteachings of Christ and the spirit of the Christian religion--which so longfilled the world with blood and tears. 

I have often in talking with intelligent Jews expressed a wonder that theyshould stigmatize the most illustrious Jew as an impostor, saying to them:"What matters it whether Jesus was of divine or human parentage--a humanbeing or an immortal spirit? He was a Jew: a glorious, unoffending Jew, done to death by a mob of hoodlums in Jerusalem. Why should not you and Icall him Master and kneel together in love and pity at his feet?"

Never have I received any satisfying answer. Partyism--churchism--willever stick to its fetish. Too many churches--or, shall I say, churchfabrics--breeding controversy where there should be agreement, each sectand subdivision fighting phantoms of its fancy. In the city that onceproclaimed itself eternal there is war between the Quirinal and theVatican, the government of Italy and the papal hierarchy. In France thegovernment of the republic and the Church of Rome are at daggers-drawn. Before the world-war England and Germany--each claiming to beProtestant--were looking on askance, irresolute, not as to which side mightbe right and which wrong, but on which side "is my bread to be buttered?"In America, where it was said by the witty Frenchmen we have fiftyreligions and only one soup, there are people who think we should beginto organize to stop the threatened coming of the Pope, and such like! "OLiberty, " cried Madame Roland, "how many crimes are committed in thy name!""O Churchism, " may I not say, "how much nonsense is trolled off in thyname!"

I would think twice before trusting the wisest and best of men withabsolute power; but I would trust never any body of men--never anySanhedrim, consistory, church congress or party convention--with absolutepower. Honest men are often led to do or to assent, in association, whatthey would disdain upon their conscience and responsibility as individuals. _En masse_ extremism generally prevails, and extremism is alwayswrong; it is the more wrong and the more dangerous because it is rarelywanting for plausible sophistries, furnishing congenial and convincingargument to the mind of the unthinking for whatever it has to propose. 

III

Too many churches and too much partyism! It is love--love through grace ofGod--truth where we can find it--which shall irradiate the life that is. If when we have prepared ourselves for the life to come love be wanting, nothing else is much worth while. Not alone the love of man for woman, but the love of woman for woman and of man for man; the divine fraternitytaught us by the Sermon on the Mount; the religion of giving, not ofgetting; of whole-hearted giving; of joy in the love and the joy of others. 

 _Who giveth himself with his alms feeds three-- Himself, his hungering neighbor and Me_. 

For myself I can truthfully subscribe to the formula: "I believe in God theFather Almighty; Maker of heaven and earth. And Jesus Christ, his only Son, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, sufferedunder Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried; He descended intohell, the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty; from thence Heshall come to judge the quick and the dead. "

That is my faith. It is my religion. It was my cradle song. It may not be, dear ones of contrariwise beliefs, your cradle song or your belief, or yourreligion. What boots it? Can you discover another in word and deed, inluminous, far-reaching power of speech and example, to walk by the side ofthis the Anointed One of your race and of my belief?

As the Irish priest said to the British prelate touching the doctrine ofpurgatory: "You may go further and fare worse, my lord, " so may I say to myJewish friends--"Though the stars in their courses lied to the Wise Men ofthe desert, the bloody history of your Judea, altogether equal in atrocityto the bloody history of our Christendom, has yet to fulfill the promiseof a Messiah--and were it not well for those who proclaim themselves God'speople to pause and ask, 'Has He not arisen already?'"

I would not inveigh against either the church or its ministry; I would notstigmatize temporal preaching; I would have ministers of religion as freeto discuss the things of this world as the statesmen and the journalists;but with this difference: That the objective point with them shall be theregeneration of man through grace of God and not the winning of office orthe exploitation of parties and newspapers. Journalism is yet too unripe todo more than guess at truth from a single side. The statesman stands mainlyfor political organism. Until he dies he is suspect. The pulpit remainstherefore still the moral hope of the universe and the spiritual light ofmankind. 

It must be nonpartisan. It must be nonprofessional. It must be manly andindependent. But it must also be worldy-wise, not artificial, sympathetic, broad-minded and many-sided, equally ready to smite wrong in high placesand to kneel by the bedside of the lowly and the poor. 

I have so found most of the clergymen I have known, the exceptions too fewto remember. In spite of the opulence we see about us let us not take toourselves too much conceit. May every pastor emulate the virtues of thatvillage preacher of whom it was written that:

 _Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway, And fools who came to scoff, remained to pray. _

 * * * * *

 _A man he was to all the country dear, And passing rich with forty pounds a year. _

 * * * * *

 _His house was known to all the vagrant train, He chid their wanderings, but relieved their pain; The long-remembered beggar was his guest, Whose beard descending swept his aged breast; The ruined spendthrift, now no longer proud, Claimed kindred there, and had his claims allowed; The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay, Sate by the fire, and talked the night away; Wept o'er his wounds, or, tales of sorrow done, Shouldered his crutch, and showed how fields were won. Pleased with his guests, the good man learned to glow, And quite forgot their vices in their woe; Careless their merits or their faults to scan, His pity gave ere charity began. _

IV

I have lived a long life--rather a happy and a busy than a merryone--enjoying where I might, but, let me hope I may fairly claim, shirkingno needful labor or duty. The result is some accretions to my credit. Itwere, however, ingratitude and vanity in me to set up exclusive ownershipof these. They are the joint products and property of my dear wife andmyself. 

I do not know just what had befallen if love had failed me, for as far backas I can remember love has been to me the bedrock of all that is worthliving for, striving for or possessing in this cross-patch of a world ofours. 

I had realized the meaning of it in the beautiful concert of affectionbetween my father and mother, who lived to celebrate their goldenwedding. My wife and I have enjoyed now the like conjugal felicityfifty-four--counted to include two years of betrothal, fifty-six years. Never was a young fellow more in love than I--never has love been morerichly rewarded--yet not without some heartbreaking bereavements. 

I met the woman who was to become my wife during the War of Sections--amidits turmoil and peril--and when at its close we were married, at Nashville, Tennessee, all about us was in mourning, the future an adventure. It wasat Chattanooga, the winter of 1862-63, that fate brought us together andriveted our destinies. She had a fine contralto voice and led the churchchoir. Doctor Palmer, of New Orleans, was on a certain Sunday well into thelong prayer of the Presbyterian service. Bragg's army was still in middleTennessee. There was no thought of an attack. Bang! Bang! Then the burstingof a shell too close for comfort. Bang! Bang! Then the rattle of shellfragments on the roof. On the other side of the river the Yankees were uponus. 

The man of God gave no sign that anything unusual was happening. He did nothurry. He did not vary the tones of his voice. He kept on praying. Nor wasthere panic in the congregation, which did not budge. 

That was the longest long prayer I ever heard. When it was finally ended, and still without changing a note the preacher delivered the benediction, the crowded church in the most orderly manner moved to the severaldoorways. 

I was quick to go for my girl. By the time we reached the street the firinghad become general. We had to traverse quite half a mile of it beforeattaining a place of safety. Two weeks later we were separated for nearlytwo years, when, the war over, we found ourselves at home again. 

In the meantime her father had fallen in the fight, and in the far SouthI had buried him. He was one of the most eminent and distinguished andaltogether the best beloved of the Tennesseeans of his day, Andrew Ewing, who, though a Democrat, had in high party times represented the WhigNashville district in Congress and in the face of assured election declinedthe Democratic nomination for governor of the state. A foremost Unionleader in the antecedent debate, upon the advent of actual war he hadreluctantly but resolutely gone with his state and section. 

V

The intractable Abolitionists of the North and the radical Secessionists ofthe South have much historically to answer for. The racial warp and woof inthe United States were at the outset of our national being substantiallyhomogeneous. That the country should have been geographically divided andsectionally set by the ears over the institution of African slavery wasthe work of agitation that might have attained its ends by less costlyagencies. 

How often human nature seeking its bent prefers the crooked to the straightway ahead! The North, having in its ships brought the negroes from Africaand sold them to the planters of the South, putting the money it got forthem in its pocket, turned philanthropist. The South, having bought itsslaves from the slave traders of the North under the belief that slavelabor was requisite to the profitable production of sugar, rice and cotton, stood by property-rights lawfully acquired, recognized and guaranteed bythe Constitution. Thence arose an irrepressible conflict of economic forcesand moral ideas whose doubtful adjustment was scarcely worth what it costthe two sections in treasure and blood. 

On the Northern side the issue was made to read freedom, on the Southernside, self-defense. Neither side had any sure law to coerce the other. Upon the simple right and wrong of it each was able to establish a caseconvincing to itself. Thus the War of Sections, fought to a finish sogallantly by the soldiers of both sides, was in its origination largely agame of party politics. 

The extremists and doctrinaires who started the agitation that brought itabout were relatively few in number. The South was at least defending itsown. That what it considered its rights in the Union and the Territoriesbeing assailed it should fight for aggressively lay in the nature of thesituation and the character of the people. Aggression begot aggression, theunoffending negro, the provoking cause, a passive agent. Slavery is gone. The negro we still have with us. To what end?

Life indeed is a mystery--a hopelessly unsolved problem. Could there bea stronger argument in favor of a world to come than may be found in thebrevity and incertitude of the world that is? Where this side of heavenshall we look for the court of last resort? Who this side of the graveshall be sure of anything?

At this moment the world having reached what seems the apex of humanachievement is topsy-turvy and all agog. Yet have we the record of anymoment when it was not so? That to keep what we call the middle of the roadis safest most of us believe. But which among us keeps or has ever kept themiddle of the road? What else and what next? It is with nations as withmen. Are we on the way to another terrestrial collapse, and so on adinfinitum to the end of time?

VI

The home which I pictured in my dreams and projected in my hopes came to meat last. It arrived with my marriage. Then children to bless it. But itwas not made complete and final--a veritable Kentucky home--until theall-round, all-night work which had kept my nose to the grindstone had beenshifted to younger shoulders I was able to buy a few acres of arable landfar out in the county--the County of Jefferson!--and some ancient brickwalls, which the feminine genius to which I owe so much could convert toitself and tear apart and make over again. Here "the sun shines bright" asin the song, and--

 _The corn tops ripe and the meadows in the bloom The birds make music all the day. _

They waken with the dawn--a feathered orchestra--incessant, fearless--foreach of its pieces--from the sweet trombone of the dove to the shrillclarionet of the jay--knows that it is safe. There are no guns about. Wehave with us, and have had for five and twenty years, a family of coloredpeople who know our ways and meet them intelligently and faithfully. When we go away--as we do each winter and sometimes during the otherseasons--and come again--dinner is on the table, and everybody--even toTigue and Bijou, the dogs--is glad to see us. Could mortal ask for more?And so let me close with the wish of my father's old song come true--thewords sufficiently descriptive of the reality:

 _In the downhill of life when I find I'm declining, May my fate no less fortunate be Than a snug elbow chair can afford for reclining And a cot that o'erlooks the wide sea-- A cow for my dairy, a dog for my game. And a purse when my friend needs to borrow; I'll envy no nabob his riches, nor fame, Nor the honors that wait him to-morrow. _

 _And when at the close I throw off this frail cov'ring Which I've worn for three-score years and ten-- On the brink of the grave I'll not seek to keep hov'ring Nor my thread wish to spin o'er again. But my face in the glass I'll serenely survey, And with smiles count each wrinkle and furrow-- That this worn-out old stuff which is thread-bare to-day