CHAPTER I.

THEIR COUNTRY. Then I said, "Now assuredly I seeMy lady is perfect, and transfigurethAll sin, and sorrow, and death,Making them fair as her own eyelids be."

A Ballad of Life , SWINBURNE.

SUPPOSE a country on the western coast of the North American continent, roughly comparable to Italy in climate, area, shape, and position, relative to the parallels and meridians; suppose it--this relative position being still maintained--to be the length of itself nearer the equator than Italy is; suppose it to have its central ridge of mountains not called the Apennines, but the Coast Range, and to have behind it for a western boundary, instead of the Adriatic 12 2 Sea, another range of mountains called the Sierra Nevada, and there will be called up a clear enough idea of Alta California, as its old Spanish owners used to call it, or, as it is now known to the people of the United States--its present masters--the State of California. The most trustworthy estimates give it an area of 155,000 square miles, and a present population of three-quarters of a million people, of whom a quarter of a million inhabit its principal city, San Francisco. The whole State may be described as a diagonal band, 800 miles long and 190 miles broad, lying across an oriented parallelogram on the map, with ten degrees of longitude for a base, and ten degrees of latitude for a perpendicular. The climate is, on the whole, Italian; varying from extreme winter cold in the mountainous districts to a wonderful mildness at all seasons on the coast and in the more favoured valleys. It has its "rainy seasons;" the man who leaves his house then without an umbrella is likely to fare rather worse than if he did so in London. During the other six months of the year, the summer and autumn months, rain is phenomenal; when not irrigated the soil hardens like iron, the grass becomes like a threadbare faded carpet. The dust on every road gathers 13 3 and drifts into banks as if it were snow; the earth becomes, in fact, a dust-bin, and the air in stormy weather a dust-bin in transitu . It might be supposed that all this made the dry season very unpleasant. The opposite is, however, true, at least for those who are not forced to travel much. The dust is usually quiet enough when not violently stirred up by wheels or by horses' hoofs. In the cities, such as San Francisco, Sacramento, Oakland, watering-carts and scavengers keep the unpleasant element in practical subjection. The wind, except on the immediate coast, is not generally able, either in its mid-day form of the sea breeze or its night form of the land breeze, to do more than ripple the great lakes and rivers of dust, while it prevents the heat, even in mid-summer, from being oppressive. Taken all in all, from January till December, the climate of California seems bright, mild, equable, and invigorating, above most climates with which we are acquainted by experience or description. Nice has a mistral as keen and dangerous as the stiletto; Naples becomes a kind of Niflheimer in winter; the bright Seven Hills can be dank enough with malaria at times; and even the City of the Violet Crown has its own troubles with fever. 14 4 Perhaps the climate of the valley of the Nile and that of the valley of the Sacramento are as pleasantly alike in winter as is possible, but in summer California has the advantage. Mr. Hubert Bancroft, the historian, has expressed the ruling sentiment on this subject with his usual happiness: "That there is something indescribably fascinating about California, a peculiar play of light and shadow on the hills and in the heart, an atmosphere aerially alcoholic, we, who have felt its subtle influence, well know. Said one of the expatriated by the Vigilance Committee to the captain of the steamer on reaching Panama:

"`Captain, this is no place for me; you must take me back to San Francisco.'

"`But they will hang you higher than Haman if I do.'"

"`Captain,' whined the evildoer, `I would rather hang in Californian air than be lord of the soil of another country.'"

So again, "the judge," in Mr. Joaquin Miller's "First Fam'lies of the Sierra," is perpetually finding in "this glorious climate of Californy" the promise and potency of as many forms of virtue as Professor Tyndall, or even Dr. Bastian, can in 15 5 matter. Less biassed critics of the Golden State, or critics biassed possibly in an opposite direction, have still, like Mr. Hepworth Dixon, at least a good word to say for her climate: "From month to month the seasons come and go in one soft round of spring. In winter it is May, in summer it is only June."

The prevailing sunlight of California is indeed a pleasant thing. It fills every nerve and sense with the heat and the strength, the glory and the excellency of life. With us, in northern Europe, one is obliged most part of the year "to buy one's sun," as M. Souvestre's delightful philosophe puts it. With the Californians there are few hours of the day and few days of the year when the light of the sun is absent. That "life in the sunshine," so dear to the poet's heart, may there be always the lot of the humblest--except in the worst days of the rainy season.

These long periods of perfectly dry weather, separated by sharply-defined seasons of heavy rain, this re´gime of sunshine, tempered by the deluge, is not quite so attractive to farmers as to poets. Mr. John Hittell, a Californian, who has written, as far as plain facts and figures are 16 6 concerned, a most complete and trustworthy book about his adopted State, says: "Every other year, on an average, brings either a drought or a flood." Between 1872 and 1875, inclusive, there were we believe two droughts and one flood. In the flood, Sacramento, Marysville, and other towns suffered to the extent of the ruin of hundreds of families. In the droughts the main crops of the State were in many places shrivelled to shadowy proportions, and great herds of cattle perished of hunger and thirst. Apart from all this, in the excessively dry seasons, one's own blood begins to remind one of that of St. Januarius in its bottle, and the first little cloud rising "out of the sea like a man's hand" is as joyfully and earnestly watched as the priestly hand that liquefies the sacred fluid of Naples. On the other side, long before the weather finally clears up again, everyone is ready to welcome back the dusk and the mosquito. The mosquito--"Cheerful little cuss," cries some one, with irrepressible enthusiasm, "he sings while he works." And that song! ah, Englishmen who live at home at ease, you will never wholly know the power of music till you have thrilled some long night through to the low and simple note of this 17 7 Timotheus of the shadow. Like some poets, and in too much the same sense, mosquitos "learn in suffering what they teach in song."

Wierus, Milton, and European authorities generally, have disagreed as to the comparative rank and precise titles of Beelzebub and that other arch-enemy proverbially known as the father of those who should have good memories; but, however all this may be in the old world, Beelzebub, "the god of flies," is in the new world much more widely feared than Satan. And this may well be an inducement to possible settlers from other countries--to people of the Master Smith type who are always bickering at home with oldfashioned Farmer Weathersky. And there is another point of view from which the mosquito may be considered as a potential blessing slightly disguised. Saint Macarius of Alexandria thought it to his interest to sleep in a marsh, exposing his naked body to the stings of venomous insects. He seems to have become involved with the Prince of the Power of the Air, to have fallen hopelessly into his aerial highness's debt, and to have taken this heroic, creditable way to make restitution in paying as much to the pound of flesh was as possible to 18 8 mortal man. There are people living in England who might perhaps follow his example with advantage. True enough it is not given to many nowadays to reach that dizzy fame in the sword-dance of iniquity which seems to have been a main qualification for saintship in the good old times, and whose inevitable consequences of physical and mental hamstringedness do indeed help one to sit quietly on the stool of repentance; still, we have some passable transgressors, to whom a summer's night or two of perspiring remorse behind a torn mosquito bar in the Sacramento valley might do a world of good. It would be worth their while, at any rate, to try the remedy; and this, with the present state of the Extradition Treaty, should give America extraordinary attractions for such people.

There are, however, parts of California, and there are times when heat and its attendant insects are not the main troubles of the resident or traveller. The following notes, reprinted from a paper by the present writer in the Overland Monthly will give a detailed account of certain places and aspects of the State, hardly touched upon in print by any preceding observer. These 19 9 notes will, as far as necessary, explain themselves:

"We leave San Francisco on the 23rd of December, 1875, at four o'clock in the evening, to examine the new branch-line of the Central Pacific Railway, laid through the valley of the San Joaquin. We set out in a dense fog, almost thick enough to fish in, and run on, with no stoppages to speak of through the night, to Bakersfield, 300 miles south of San Francisco, where we wake up at seven o'clock on the morning of the 24th, to find that the line as yet goes no farther. Bakersfield proper seems to lie about a mile to the west of us, on a sage-brush level, where the hoar-frost glitteres and snaps with a viciousness that makes one shiver at leaving one's berth and blankets. But it is the inevitable; what is to be done were well done quickly, if we do not wish to miss our Christmas dinner on the morrow at home. Bismillah ! then--let us wash and dress and go. Friends await us by the platform with buggies and horses; the thin tongue of the telegraph has ordered breakfast for our party at the French Hotel. Very welcome are the great wood fire and 20 10 the rude plenty of this country tavern's rickety table, though those who taste its `liquors' affirm them distilled from the snakes' fangs and rattles hung so plentifully round the bar.

"The town, with its 200 or 300 wooden and adobe houses, looks lively, considering the arctic weather. A few women move about, tricked out fine as their surroundings permit--`Roman falls,' `Grecian bends,' top-heavy coiffures , and jaunty if somewhat crumpled hats of the latest fashion but one or two. At one door two gentlemen in blanket coats are preparing for a journey, probably toward Panamint. A pack-mule loaded and two horses saddled stand at the door. The blanket coat with a fur cap is loading with scrupulous care a heavy double-barrelled gun; the blanket coat wearing a wide-awake hat is fondling a revolver with an oily rag. The charge going into the gun is something to astonish an artilleryman; powder enough for a blunderbuss, and handfuls of BB shot and pistol-balls a quarter-inch in diameter. To an irrepressible inquiry as to what kind of game he was going about to destroy, the fur cap replied, suspiciously and premonitorily, as if addressing a probable Vasquez or Dick Turpin: `Two-legged 21 11 game, Mister, as can't mind their own business. Ready to start, Hank?' Hank was ready, and so was the questioner.

"We see here signs of the future prosperity of a fine grazing country. Irrigating canals intersect the district in many directions; drainage in the abounding swamp-lands begins to be better understood and practised--lessening the ague, which once in awhile drives all Bakersfield to quinine and profanity. Cotton does not seem to be a success here, a thing not to be wondered at if the weather be often as it is to-day; but alfalfa clover is the present salvation of the rancheros . The stories told on all hands, and credited by the agricultural experts of our party, concerning its hardiness and unfailingly enormous yield on lands no matter how dry, where by irrigation for the first year or so it had been prevailed upon to take hold of the bottom soil with its deep roots, are too long and wonderful for the writer to repeat. It is enough to say that the evident easy circumstances and even wealth of its cultivators tell a tale that may be read by those that run.

"But the sun climbs rapidly over the mist-robed, snow-topped Sierra Nevada to the east; 22 12 our horses' heads are turned toward the shining locomotive where it lies-to in a heavy sea of sage-brush. The wind from Mount Taheechaypah freezes the very marrow in our bones, as the sand flies like spray under flying hoofs and the silk cracks overhead. At 10.45 A.M. we stand on the platform of our moving and solitarily gorgeous railroad car, bidding the frosty but kindly Bakersfield adieu. In about three minutes we cross the Kern River, say sixty yards broad, slow-flowing, full of little low islets where willows and cottonwoods grow. The Sierra, seemingly forty or fifty miles away on the east, shoots up above the mist like a strong wall between us and the ugly Death Valley beyond it. Here, and all day long, we are running through a low-lying flat country. Away to the east a hawk flies level and steady against a white cloud on the horizon; clumps of dun sage-brush like bits of degraded cloud come up to the feet of the gray telegraph-poles that lean forward, one after one, in endless malignant file, threatening with their wires as if they were soldiers armed with knouts and we wretches running the gauntlet. On the long reaches of grassland occasional great herds of kine, black, white, 23 13 brindled, with horns like black elephant-tusks, huddle together at the snort and rush of our engine.

"All this while the fog has been rising and falling in a confusing way like water about the lips of some Tantalus. At eleven o'clock we pass, without stopping, Lerdo Station--a platform, a few white tents, and a puddle or two edged with thin ice. Another station shoots past at half-past eleven o'clock; it has a name and local habitation, but neither is distinguishable for engine smoke--we are `firing up' heavily. Snipe spring in scared wisps from the pools and puddles illuminated through the fog by the fiery rain that our big cloudy funnel pours down like a judgment on their little cities of the plain, and escape toward the mountains for their life. Flocks of small twittering birds, like linnets, follow, their slower flight leaving them far in the rear.

"Our lonely car, insulting with its warm splendour the cold and naked land, rushes on. Two engineers sit in front in their little pent-house, both keeping a sharp look-out, one with hand on a long lever by the furnace-door, the other holding the ready shovel and tolling his bell from time to 24 14 time, as an occasional squatter's shanty appears through the mist. Beside the stove in our car nods, in fitful dozes, a quick-eyed young breakman, face and garments charged with lamp-oil to the saturation point.

"There is a sharp whistle from the alert engineer; the oily breakman springs to his feet, to the door, to his break, and breathless, black in the face, twirls it as if he had suddenly found himself in an exhausted receiver, and was boring for air and dear life. It is ten minutes to twelve o'clock just as we stop; the fog is nearly gone; we are to take in water here, and this is Delano Station--a corral--a few wooden houses--a person of tender years with blue nose, blue cloak, blue trousers, small horse and extravagantly large Mexican saddle--heaps of cattle-bones, live cattle, and sheep in multitudes, all the way out to the horizon, with lonely herders standing or riding here and there at immense distances apart--a train of canvas-covered emigrant waggons--and, `Good-bye, Delano!' we are off.

"Hardly is steam got up, hardly has the faithful breakman laid down his weary limbs, when, sharp 11.45 A.M., the engine whistles again sudden and 25 15 shrill; sheep on the line, crossing it--millions apparently, and bound to get across just there and just then, all because a leading miscreant of an old ram has led the way. Break hard, then, O oily one! hard and swiftly, or much flesh will become protoplasm and primordial atom, to the loss of sheep-owners and the bewilderment of undertakers. We are clear again, and go ahead, `slowing up' from time to time, as other innumerable sheep and cattle persist in getting in our way. Surely never was land like this for flocks and herds.

"At 12.20 P.M. we shake the corral and half-a-dozen shanties of Tipton to their muddy foundations as we roar through, greeted by the frantic howls of a score of tow-headed children and dogs. It is 12.27 P.M., the fog has gone west, and the peaks of the Sierra on the east shoot out clear, snow-tipped, split, shattered, filled with shadows and lights, among which rise the creeks and rivulets we have been passing at short intervals all the way up. Along these creeks we shall henceforth be able to see the occasional settlers' huts, with hay-ricks and corrals, and the clumps and belts of cotton-wood, willow, and live-oak that line their low banks. At 12.36 P.M. we stop a moment at 26 16 Tulare town. Here are a hotel and a flour-mill, one or two hundred houses, a photographic gallery, lots of loungers in coarse raiment, and at least one tavern, in the bar-room of which two ready pistols were the principal item of furnishing, with several bottles of vitriol, labelled respectively whisky, gin, rum, sherry, &c., and lastly, a stable-keeper's advertisement in which `feed' was spelt `feede'--the schoolmaster being abroad.

"Leaving Tulare, we begin to see fenced fields; magpies, that might have dropped from their nests in any English ash, chatter impudently; great patches of live-oak, with a few specimens of the stinging poison-oak, appear and disappear. As the watch ticks 12.58 P.M. we pass a pretty brick house, before which children and a mother with her baby stand, while up from a slough beside it a pelican rises heavily, flying away with a weary-of-the-world-and-of-my-beak appearance. Then plover rise in thousands, split through by two wedges of geese, and a great white swan follows.

"It is 1.6 P.M., and we are at Goshen; to wit, a saloon, a tent or two, three mules, six white men, and a Chinaman. We leave the main line here to visit Visalia, seven miles off, starting at 1.20 P.M. 27 17 Running at first through some bad `alkali country,' we soon enter one of the prettiest districts of rolling lawn land to be seen anywhere, beautifully wooded, with level reaches of short thick grass, that make us long for a game of cricket on them. We might be in an English park, but that down a long windy curving road there rattles an unmistakable American waggon, filled with gailydressed girls in scarlet and blue, defying the cold.

"Visalia shines up through the trees at a quarter to two. We stop a little way from the town proper, mount a stage, and off we rattle at a break-neck speed, pulling up at a German tavern, in the barroom of which no pistols were kept in sight. This town is decidedly a pushing, lively place, with its population of 2,500; girls move about in becoming costumes; Indians dressed with serapes , Mexican fashion, lounge and ride through streets of pretty cottages and shops--streets in fact as well as in name, with jail, school-houses, churches, and public hall. It seems to an observer here (though no questions were asked on the subject) that the Visalia Indians have ousted the Chinese from the performance of those various lesser services that these latter monopolise so generally in California; 28 18 not a pigtail happened to be seen at any rate, and the absence was noticeable.

"At 3.30 P.M. we are back at Goshen on the main line, and resuming our journey north. It becomes monotonous to talk of these flat lands, all just alike, lying low and convenient for irrigation from King's River, and supplying plenty of grass for abounding herds of cattle. A month hence, we are told, the country will be one great flower-garden, far as the eye can see.

"Passing one or two low muddy rivers, we run on into the fog now settling down with the darkening evening, and gain Fresno at 4.30 P.M. Near the station to the east of the rails lies a Chinese settlement of fifteen or sixteen huts; to the west of the rails lies the town proper--fifty or sixty houses at a rough guess. Beside `the depoˆt' lie piled thirty-six bales of cotton of 500 lb. each, consigned to `Eisen,' of San Francisco, and reported grown on the farm of Dr. Brandt, six miles out from the city. This cotton is of fine quality, but rather short in the `staple.'

"At 5.50 P.M. we are off again from Fresno, running through mist and darkness, over various branches of the San Joaquin River, passing station 29 19 after station with a roar. Night and Erebus dominate all things save our fiery Cyclops dragon, rolling itself on and on in thunder over the shining rails; and San Joaquin Valley and mist and sky become one and indivisible to every eye.

"How, further, our travellers slept, and were torn from their berths by calls to visit various places during the night, possesses only a private interest. In the morning, all found themselves rapidly nearing home, traversing that part of central California, along the Central Pacific Railroad line from Lathrop west, already so well known and described in its fertility and high state of cultivation. The glorious scenery of the Livermore Valley, its wooded beetling cliffs, where great sycamores mingle their now yellow leaves with the green foliage of the live-oak, and with some evergreen shrub bearing red berries, that reminded us of the English holly so appropriate to that beautiful Christmas morning--all this passed rapidly before us: then was left behind, and at noon we saw the twin minarets of the Jewish synagogue among the hills and spires of San Francisco.

All over California thunder or lightning is so 30 20 rare, that till October, 1874, many people used to say that neither was known there, except, perhaps, in the mountains. But in that month, one of the grandest electric storms ever seen by the writer broke over the Golden Gate and San Francisco Bay. Working late at night, he found his gaslights darkened by a blaze as if some great fire had suddenly burst out in the city. In fact the whole heaven was on fire and burned steadily for hours. The gas extinguished, and the windows thrown fully open, he easily continued the reading of a blurred manuscript which had just taxed all the powers of a table argand to make legible. San Francisco is built on a number of hills--no one knows exactly how many--and from the summit of Telegraph Hill a sublime view was that night obtainable. There, alone, our observer found the bay almost below his feet, and saw beyond it the mountains Tamalpias and Diablo, and the land and water between, all clear as in the concentrated light of a hundred noons. Hardly a sound broke the stillness; it was an aurora borealis gone mad, rather than a thunderstorm. Looking at the water, one could well imagine another Vesuvius aflame, and another Pliny coasting along the Bay 31 21 of Naples, as a scared Italian fisherman missed stays again and again trying to put his boat and its big latteen sail about in the strong current of the Golden Gate.

Away overhead, in the commune of the stars, there was wild outbreak. All the petroleuses of the universe seemed at work; the blaze cascaded in torrents from cloud to cloud. There a barricade went up; there, the keen flash betrayed a sharp-shooter. One could almost smell blood through the heavy red air, or catch the thick breathing of dying men; and, at intervals, far off, the rumble of coming artillery. Then the celestial party of order began to get the upper hand; things gradually quieted down without the whiff of grape-shot; no damage to terrestrial property or loss of human life was reported. Indeed, we are informed that no person has ever been killed by lightning in the State, one Chinese excepted--a doubtful exception: Californian coroners' juries have a weakness for bringing in the deus ex machina whenever a red or yellow man is knocked on the head by a being of the superior race.

"We've got the best climate in the world, anyhow, though the derned place does seem shaky 32 22 on her pins," said a Californian after the great earthquake of 1868. But we cannot say that during the four years from 1872 to 1875, inclusive, this "shakiness" was either very noticeable or very alarming. The best way of showing this is by saying that, except on two or three occasions during the years mentioned, the public were indebted to scientific observers for the knowledge of twenty or thirty earthquakes not distinctly palpable to the unassisted senses. A slight bump or jar climbs up the legs of one's desk. Is it an earthquake--or a bale of goods dropped next door? One cannot tell, and one does not care. The two or three exceptions to this general mildness were, however, of an unpleasantly unmistakable character. The first of these occurring at night when our friend had been only a few days in the State, almost decided him to leave it by the next eastern-bound train. The inmates of his hotel were suddenly awakened by a rattling of glass and crockery, varied by an occasional crash. For a few seconds every bed had several characteristics in common with an Irish jaunting-car on a rocky road. An unheroic numbness took possession of every tongue and limb--but only for a moment. 33 23 Then there came a pattering of feet, and then, from the Rachels of the caravansary and their children, such a cry welled up as was heard in Rama, or as rose over Egypt, when in every house there was one dead. As a consequence of the first great shock, a quivering remained for several minutes, whether in the earth only, or in the legs and jaws of the observers, it was impossible to say. Excited persons filled the corridors, some seeking safety in instant flight, and that in the most orthodox manner, providing for their journey neither scrip nor staff--nor yet two coats. Indeed, every one was clothed pretty much as the ancient gymnosophists, and everyone was orthodox--pious vows abounded. One understood, then, what an acute student of human nature was that traveller in Central America who wrote: "Dieu n'a besoin que d'une petite secousse pour constater le nombre de ses fide`les ."

But the danger passed; "the derned place" became "steady on her pins," and the fluttered doves returned to their cots with as little confusion as was possible. Daylight and time showed that there was very little damage done, nobody hurt, and next to nothing lost or broken--except the pious vows. To produce any lasting good 34 24 result we are afraid the earthquakes must appear more frequently. It must be said, however, that California has not been much attended to; and it is possible that even under present conditions much excellent spiritual fruit might be gathered in proper hands from this sometimes shaky branch of our world-tree, Yggdrasil. For the information of such as may think of devoting themselves to the task, the following precise details on Californian earthquakes are subjoined from that living blue-book, Mr. Hittell:--"There is a possibility of death from them, but the possibility is so remote that it does not disturb the enjoyment of life here. In twenty years about forty deaths have been recorded in the State, and not one of these occurred in a strong house. The majority of the victims lived in walls of adobe, or dried mud, ready to topple over at a slight shock. In San Francisco, several thousand brick houses, many of them three, and some four stories high, have stood for fifteen years or more, not only without coming down, but without showing any mark of injury beyond slight cracks in the plastering. The deaths from earthquakes have been about two annually, or at the rate of one in a quarter of a million; while in the Eastern States, 35 25 lightning, sunstroke, and hurricanes, which kill nobody here, have each slain three times as many relatively."

Some or all of these things may seem excessively disagreeable to the reader. But the want of water in parts of the State at certain seasons may be remedied--and in many of the more thickly settled places is already remedied--by irrigation. The government engineers agree in reporting that this is in all places possible, either by using ditches to bring water from the larger rivers and lakes, or by the use of artesian wells; the latter, with their attendant windmill pumps, being already in profitable use in thousands of instances, their picturesque whirling vanes often suggesting a Hollandish landscape. As to the mosquito, he must be borne with. After all, he only becomes noxious in a high degree during a few of the summer months; and then only about dusk and at night, when all good people should be indoors behind a mosquito bar, or if out, wear a veil, use a fan, or smoke. The great god of flies and all his myrmidons have as strong objections to tobacco as the royal author of the "Counterblast." Lastly, as to the earthquake, it may be regarded as a light affliction and 36 26 but for a moment. The dangers are few and far between, and living in a properly built wooden house one might defy the worst shock that ever troubled America north of the Mexican line within historic times. To make up for these discomforts there are many special amenities. Prudent farmers who know how to keep a reserve, and make the year of plenty eke out the lean one, succeed as a general rule in having more time and money to spend or to save than they could win with the same exertion in Europe, or even in any other part of America. But readers must look elsewhere than in these pages for information on such points. Books like those by Mr. Hittell, Mr. Nordhoff, and Mr. Cronise, will give details of the marvellous beauty and luxuriance of the fruits and flowers of California--an exuberance of vegetable life at once tropical and of the temperate zone, a delight to all the senses in January hardly less than in June. We must sharply criticise much--may perhaps cavil at too much connected with our subject; but it always remains to be said that, considered in the light of the capacities and advantages bestowed by nature, we do not know and cannot very well imagine any more pleasant land 37 27 to live in than California--land of the lily and the myrtle and the rose, of wheat and the grape-vine, of the orange and the olive, of humming-birds and song-birds. When one thinks of these things--of the pleasant land, sunburnt, and yet fair, "black, but comely, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon;" when one thinks of many a golden day and moonlit night, rich with shadowed colour, heavy with perfume as the sweet "Song of Songs" itself, and thrilling with sweeter things than colour or perfume--one is almost persuaded to be a Californian, almost persuaded like the loyal sons of the Golden State to view their country much as the suitors of Clara Pelerina regarded that Baratarian doncella . Seen from the right, Clara was even as an oriental pearl, a flower of the field for beauty. What matter if on the left she was a little pock-pitted? Bah! the pits are not pits, "they are graves for the souls of her lovers!"

38

CHAPTER II.

THEIR PIONEERS. Liegt im Thal das elegante,Cauterets. Die weissen Ha¨uschenMit Balkonen; scho¨ne DamenStehn darauf und lachen herzlich.Herzlich lachend schaun sie niederAuf den wimmelnd bunten Marktplatz,Wo da tanzen Ba¨r und Ba¨rinn,Bei des Dudelsackes Kla¨ngen.

Atta Troll , HEINE. Clown : We are but plain fellows, sir. Autolycus : A lie--you are rough and hairy.

Winter's Tale , SHAKSPERE.

WHEN one comes to talk of people, of society, it is well to understand that California has at least as many faces as the philologically famous Etruscan dice, and that the markings on these faces have had as many and as conflicting interpretations in the one case as the other. After some study of the many hundred learned travellers and clever 39 29 writers who have devoted their energies to the subject, one rises with a vague impression that California may possibly be the answer to the famous ælia Laelia Crispus riddle: "Neither man, woman, nor hermaphrodite; neither sad nor glad; neither of the heavens above nor of the earth beneath, nor of the waters under the same; none of these, and all of them." Perhaps for this very reason the printed notes of travellers in this State seem to be on the whole as interesting as the literature of travel belonging to many a country whose human interest dates back almost as many centuries as that of California does years. There is such a Donnybrook fair of opinions here, such a healthy malice about the way in which each critic takes first his subject and then his fellow-critic by the beard, as is good to see in these dull days. Then there are the mistakes which every wandering stranger is liable to make; mistakes generally amusing, though not always so trivial and innocent as that of M. L. Simonin in describing cricket as le jeu pre´fere´ of mid-western American villages, and giving his readers an idyllic picture of boys and girls playing it together. The gulf between base-ball and cricket is not nearly so 40 30 wide as that which separates the California lying between 32° and 42° of north latitude from the California lying between page i. and page x. of the gifted Mr. John Doe's book of travels--or again, than the difference between the book of Mr. John Doe and that of the Honourable Richard Roe.

It is hard not to overestimate or to undervalue qualities, manners and morals, tendencies-- une race, un milieu, un moment --differing in many points from our own. If to augment this special difficulty--common to all men in dealing with a novelty, which either pleases or exasperates, but always puzzles them--if to augment this special difficulty preconceptions and prejudices come in, it becomes simply impossible to be just. It matters little whether the critic be a historian of the past or of the present, whether his prejudices take the Smelfungus shape or the opposite. The Germans of Tacitus, the Spartans of Plutarch, the primitive savages of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, owe their good fame very much less to their own virtues than to the vices of certain persons and societies that these three charming masters of historical romance condemned by contrast. For perhaps the best 41 31 examples--Asiatic literature excepted--of the opposite manner of regarding the peculiarities of aliens, one may turn with advantage to those pages of Spanish historians devoted to the delineation of the Moors. " Esta canalla ," begins one of the ablest and most independent writers of his day, the Rev. Father Juan de Mariana. "Rude, uncivilised, barbarous in language, ridiculous in dress, their breeches of common linen, their jackets short," such liveliness of expression does the grave Aznar permit himself. All this because these two gentlemen are Spaniards and because they are speaking of persons of Moorish race. This tone, if one can trust one's memory, is not exactly that of Sismondi, or of Humboldt, or even of Schlegel; this is not the way in which Gibbon, Hallam, Macaulay, Buckle, Mill, not to mention any living scholars, speak of the men and the culture that founded and illustrated such schools and libraries as once existed in Cordova, Seville, Granada. These Mahomedans actually held that the earth moves; into a European Zion, very sleepy, very much at ease in dirt and ignorance, they introduced that pagan besom, physical science. Besides, the misbelievers wore breeches, and linen 42 32 breeches! and short jackets! and preferred the study of Greek to that of a bastard Latin! Va´lgame Dios !

There is a mote in the eye of our worthy Spanish historian. It is the mote of provinciality. He has apparently mistaken "the rustic murmur of his burgh for the great wave that echoes round the world." He sees that the ways of the people he is describing are not as his ways, nor their thoughts as his thoughts: therefore these people are objectionable; therefore they are barbarians. Such seems his method of reasoning; starting from any wider premises, one should find it difficult to reach his conclusions. Now, a very slight knowledge of history, even a philological glance at the word "barbarian" and its equivalents, will show that however misleading this way of reasoning may appear to us, it is a kind of logic not confined to Castilian annalists. To come near home, and not to go very deep, a certain chauvinisme with decided opinions about "brass money and wooden shoes," has inspired at times the graver of Hogarth, and the prose alexandrines of Johnson, till a majority of our forefathers could see nothing across the channel but an abomination of desolation inhabited by frogs.

43 33

But Sterne's "Sentimental Journey" was as the face of a new king that knew not "brass money and wooden shoes;" and Larra's stinging wit behind the mask of "Figaro" made Spaniards uneasily conscious that possibly, to certain minds, cosas de Espan˜a" might be made as ridiculous as Moorish fashions. England is no longer the England of insularity; Spain is no longer the Spain so terribly handled by Buckle. Men are not brothers in the Cain and Abel sense so much as they once were. Even Mahound is seen to be not so much diabolic as he is black. Our bogies, as we grow up and examine them closely, are found to have a good deal in common with the proverbial singed cat--they are better than they look. The thousand and one little rude local weights and measures of character tend to give way before more scientific, because more universal standards. With a profound consciousness of all this, and at the same time of our own deficiencies and limitations, let us meekly turn the world round like a schoolboy's globe and examine California.Now, people have been perhaps too fond of bringing out the uncouth and savage, the "Bear-Flag" side of her development--of sealing their 44 34 impressions of her with the great grizzly bear that figures so prominently on her State seal--of depicting her as a kind of Atta Troll, a brute led about by Judge Lynch as bear-master, dancing for dollars--a very fair animal in its way, if one could only have it made to pull quietly in harness, or if not that, then shot and skinned. One could thus turn the fur, possibly into a golden fleece, possibly to some other useful purpose--present it for example to one's Juliette for a chamber-rug, as poor Heine pretended to have done with the hide of his Atta Troll.

Yet, as applied to a type of Californian now rapidly becoming extinct, it seems hard to deny that the term Atta (ancestor) Troll would have a happy applicableness. Heine used it as descriptive of a kind of coarse unintellectual democracy, as he believed it represented by a certain school of his contemporaries, which he ridiculed not because it was democratic, but because it was uncouth, obscurantist, Philistine. "Lay on my coffin a sword," he somewhere says, "for I was a brave soldier in the war of liberation of humanity." Yes, he believed in a democracy of men; what he laughed at and scourged was a democracy of bears, of trolls. Now, 45 35 the legendary troll is not a being to be angry with; he is a good creature up to his lights; he has certain shaggy virtues such as courage, endurance, and fidelity. To this day such phrases as tryggr sem tro¨ll , "trusty as a troll," are in use among the Icelanders. The trolls, we are told, occupied at one time the whole earth, but the gods have nearly got rid of them, and replaced them by man. And yet in lonely places away among the hills, especially where mineral treasures are to be found, a few of the old gigantic breed are said to remain. There, as the old fire-side So¨gur tell, they still revel and feast themselves full and snore out the night. They are accustomed to stick their knives indifferently into a man and into a sausage, not, as Dr. Dasent truly says, "from malignity, but because they know no better, because it is their nature, and because they have always done so." In reading of the trolls one is in fact constantly and comically reminded of the Californian gold-miners, as they are depicted in most of the literature that relates to them, and which after all cannot much exaggerate on its originals. Go back to "the flush times," to the year of "the gold rush," to 1849, or '49 as its diminutive of endearment runs. Imagine ten or 46 36 twenty thousand "picked men;" picked, that is to say, by the good old process that garrisoned the Cave of Adullam. Imagine these men by one stroke seizing, colonising, and governing a country. Imagine these men of all classes devoting themselves in a frenzied way to the trade of navvy--a nation of navvies born in a day; without wives; precariously housed, clothed, fed, paid; drinking when in luck their champagne from buckets, when out of luck dining with a friend, sometimes with an unwilling friend--an indiscretion apt to involve an after-dinner speech from Judge Lynch and a supper with Polonius. It was a wild, strolling navvy existence; each man went about with his fortune in the air if not in the earth, and his life in his hand; many with one or two lives on their conscience--the word being used in its strictly etymological sense. It was a life for the most part of excessive drudgery, under which men of fine fibre sank if not immediately favoured by fortune. The coarse, the horny-handed, the bull-throated, were most successful. They set the fashion, these great men of the pick-axe and the pistol, and a fine fire-eating, antediluvian, reckless fashion it was. But (with marked, brilliant, and honourable exceptions), 47 37 its followers were not the kind of people to develop and ornament the more civilised Californian society that was to come, and which is now founding, by a wholly different class of persons. Many indeed of these miners dug out gold enough to put them in the way of playing either the Prodigal Son or the Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Some tried with astonishing success a little of both roˆles at once, and kept up their parts during periods varying from one scene to the regular five acts. But as a class, and a few notable exceptions aside, these men are to-day the invalids, the Greenwich pensioners, the Struldbrugs of the land they inhabit. They are "survivals" of the past, which will become extinct with the wild grizzly bear. Already they are formed into a self-preservation society. They have their "Pioneers' Hall," where they meet in periodical trolla-thing . There they revel; there they put on their giant-mood, and permit themselves such vivacities of personal debate, such excessive hilarity, such extreme delirium of Ba¨renseligkeit , as shock the nerves even of the San Francisco newspaper reporter. A chairman of their own told them at "a regular meeting," as reported in The Call of July 6th, 1875, that their proceedings 48 38 would be "disgraceful to a Kearny Street den--would disgrace a brothel almost." But that referred mainly to what had happened in "regular meetings" in public, as it were; there are saturnalia and an arcanum that none but the initiate fully know. There the ursus ferox , the troll vulgaris celebrates with unmaimed rites the epiphany of his "glorious westering star." There those whose right it is to go within the veil are said to pour out libations before strange gods at the bar or altar of their temple, and even to become pythonic over the fumes of that cave where their Kentuckian Bacchus slumbers fitfully in very old wood. There the old adventurers liken themselves to Jason, to Ulysses, to the stern heroes of the May-Flower. In overpowering numbers, armed with the revolvers and the rifles of the nineteenth century, they seized an undefended country and practised the trade of navvy. They compare their achievements to those of Cortez and Pizarro--to the disadvantage of Pizarro and Cortez. Pity strives in them with scorn as they look down on such wretched creatures as did not cross "the plains," or enter the Golden Gate at the time of the bear hegira into California, the troll-era, '49. They lower their eyes almost with modesty at mention of the F.F.V's., the 49 39 Normans, the Heraclidæ; they say, You are speaking of us--and they believe it. They have no intention to deceive even themselves. But history is not their forte; they have never heard of these terms except as applied to themselves; and their professors of history lecture only once a year--we believe in July. "There is a height," says De Musset, "where the eagle loses breath, where the head whirls, where the air becomes fire, where the man must cease or become a god;" the pioneers have reached it. Sometimes, it is whispered, they remain long silent, gazing upon each other; memory is busy. Then suddenly they break down utterly, fall neck upon neck in a storm of sobs, and strewed like leaves below the table, weep because there are no more worlds to conquer. Whisper it lower still: sometimes, maddened by odes of apotheosis and by the smiles of adoring beauty, they give way to utter folly in the nets of Thai¨s.

Now, one need hardly say that the old man sowing wild oats is not a pleasing character. The Californian Struldbrug, like someone mentioned in the French proverb, may have been beautiful when he was young; but then that youth is so far off now; it belongs to such a distant aorist past. To-day he very generally abuses "that 50 40 privilege which men have of being ugly." Will certain tourists ever forget one typical face that met them in a lonely place among the "Foothills?" They inquired in vain of its owner touching various things desirable to be known of the natural history of the district in which he lived. He persisted in answering with a history of himself, and the assertion that he was "the yoldest Argynat" (Argonaut) "in all these yer parts," and that he had "wiped out more Injins an' greasers" than any other assassin of the locality. He had an interesting face, a sallow, expressionless, pimpled face; long wild black hair; the whole giving the impression of a bit of sandy beach, pitted and mounded, lying between reaches of kelp--for eyes, two dead jelly-fish; for nose, a purple and battered sea anemone. Mouth, shut like a steel trap, yet wrinkled and puckered as if closed like certain bags by an inside running string. Great Nature, who selects the fittest, who does all things well, who evolves the snout of the ichthyosaurus and the pouch of the pelican, has in this new typical mouth wrought a focus of wrinkling at one extremity, giving the lips as a whole the contour of a button-hole. To what end? Ah caviller! does nature sublimate her forces? does she work 51 41 through an age, a centennial age, in vain? Here, cynic, pessimist, railer, turn thy complexion here! for continence of tobacco, for secretion of the juice, for lightning-like sidewise emission of the same, the wide universe can show nothing equal to this--Europe has produced the Grecian head; Africa, the woolly crown; Asia, the melting eye, the languid and slanting lid; but on this tobacco-stained feature the Phidias of America shall some day linger lovingly as the triumph of his continent.

We have already had occasion, in a highly delicate and figurative manner, to liken to scars on a damsel's fair face some trifles that detract from the beauty of the Golden State. This simile, the fair face excepted, would apply, however, in the highest degree, only to California in her first avatar, as Atta Troll, the Pioneer. But let not even the worthy Troll be discouraged; the ages have their compensations, their consolations in store; let him drink into his ears this Slavonic scripture, so aphoristic and so touching: "In the other world every pock-mark shall become a pearl." Our hero will at least be worthy to serve as a matchless, priceless, shining pillar for one of the pearly gates.

52

CHAPTER III.

THEIR SPANISH CALIFORNIANS. Toda la vida es suen˜o.

Drama by CALDERON. J'attends,--quoi?--Je ne sais, mais j'attends.

Mademoiselle de Maupin , THE´OPHILE GAUTIER.

THOUGH it is something like impossible in the present condition of census returns to make any accurate estimate, we should imagine that there are about fifteen thousand persons of more or less purely Spanish blood in California. European settlements began to be established there in the middle of the eighteenth century, in 1769, by the Padres of the Franciscan Order. These settlements, "missions" as they were called, scattered here and there, from San Diego in the south to Sonoma in the north, consisted each of a few soldiers from Mexico, and of a few priests, who gathered as many native Indians round them as could either by 53 43 force or wile be induced to come into the fold in each district provided. In time the soldiers, Spanish or Spanish-Mexican, reared families, wives of their own race joining them sometimes, or, as it often happened, wives of Indian blood having been appropriated or bought. In 1822, Mexico revolted from Spain, and in 1836, following this example, the sub-colony of California, after a bloodless revolution, "a tearless victory," and a due issue of pronunciamientos , became virtually independent of Mexico. Ambitious native hidalgos followed each other in quick succession as chiefs of the new republic; but the country was in fact a wide Abbey of The´le`me, not exactly in the sense of being an educational establishment, but in that of being a place where every one did pretty much what was right in his own eyes. Foreign politics were discussed in a kind of Dover Court, where all spoke and none listened; and as to matters of internal government, every patriarchal hidalgo ruled his own servants and family as he listed, in his own private kingdom of Yvetoˆt. Even the traditional Iberian reverence for the clergy and for all that pertains to them seemed to die out of the blood of the western Don Fulano, and the republic confiscated to profane 54 44 uses and very often to private pockets the lands and property of the monks--"secularised the missions," as the happy phrase ran. Everything went cheerily as a marriage feast till the Yankees ("los Americanos," as they were from the first distinctively and prophetically named) spied out the land and descended upon it in twos and threes, the rifle on the shoulder, and that irresistible something in the soul which has been vaguely termed "manifest destiny." The new-comers were greasy trappers, half-savage hunters, Goths, as compared to the few most cultivated of the race they displaced; but Goths or not, "dear to the Eumenides and to all the heavenly brood." It was the old British story retold; the dark-haired race faded from their seats; the subtlety, the hardness, the audacity of the viking and the berserkr breed blighted or appropriated all things. In 1846, California became in effect United States territory; in 1849, the opening of the gold-diggings flooded the country with adventurers from the four quarters of heaven; in 1850, California was admitted to the Union as a Sovereign State. The old pastoral Spanish days were gone for ever; the Saxon oath and the Saxon pick resounded in glen and on hill-side. With a 55 45 gloomy brow, and his hand against the knife-hilt, the ranchero or caballero watched the storm from his verandah, glad if he could preserve his roof and protect his daughters and his wife. The meanest runaway English sailor, escaped Sydney convict, or American rowdy, despised without distinction the bluest blood of Castile, and the half-breeds descended from the Mexican garrison soldiery--habitually designating all who spoke Spanish by the offensive name "Greasers." "Insult," said M. Victor Hugo, over the grave of Fre´de´ric Lemaiˆtre--"insult is a kind of triumph." Of this sort of triumph the "Greasers" have had more than enough, and it has gone hard with them. They had grown up among simple priests and the most harmless, quiet race of Indians in the world. They were isolated, few in number, far removed from the experience and the rough turmoil of the age, gentle and mild in their manners, naturally averse to violence, sentimental, affectionate, and almost childlike; their very weaknesses and follies and little affections of self-importance are touching. We pity them, and take their part as that of the weak against the strong. As a collective people they remind us, in many points, of Oliver 56 46 Goldsmith, as he is lovingly depicted by a great and lovable critic. Among other things written almost to be applied to our purpose, Thackeray says, "The insults to which he had to submit are shocking to read of--slander, contumely, vulgar satire, brutal malignity, perverting his commonest motives and actions. He had his share of these, and one's anger is roused at reading of them--as it is at seeing a woman insulted or a child assaulted--at the notion that a creature so very gentle and weak, and full of love, should have had to suffer so. And he had worse than insult to undergo--to own to fault, and deprecate the anger of ruffians." Fault! ah, yes! Who is it has said that the Jesuits found Spain a nation of heroes and left her a nation of hens? Our Californianititos had faults; they suffered too much, they trusted too much. They did not know the world as he knows it--that king of men, whose stare goes throughout little Utopias and optimisms, and kills them: "Not what thou and I have promised to each other, but what the balance of our forces can make us perform to each other; that in so sinful a world as ours is the thing to be counted on." They did not count on this; and when they saw themselves tricked, spoliated, on the way to 57 47 being exterminated by armed squatters and queer laws, queerly administered, they might perhaps have stood up for their own; they might have remembered the days when Castilla la Vieja did not produce "hens;" they might have fallen across the hearths they have lost, clutching the broken knife, and with finger-nails of another colour than that left by the dull stain of the cigarrito --grievous faults, and grievously answered for! It is a pathetic chapter this of their ruin--a ruin partly caused by their own listlessness and want of soul-force; partly caused by the overpowering numbers and resources of their supplanters; and, above all, by the presence with the latter of a superior "smartness," which, as used in this connection, is mainly another name for incapacity to comprehend what is meant elsewhere by the two words, honour and conscience.

Our poor old patriarchs lived by their flocks and herds--mildest of feudal soil-lords--with their Indian serfs about them; simple and weak; at once meek and proud--as no race can be but the Castilian--living primitively, contentedly, slowly, long. Life at middle-age became a kind of siesta that dozed itself into evening death in the pleasantest 58 48 and most imperceptible manner possible. With such noble exceptions as General Don Mariano Vallejo, the Spanish-Californian boys and young men grew up merely hard riders and tireless sportsmen--"ymps" who could tame wild bulls and rob the she-bear of her whelps. But their mental culture was of the most childish kind, and they found (again an exception or two aside) no Una among the languid houris of their native glades, no maidens very well fitted to develop their minds or polish their tastes. So they had bear-fights and bull-fights, and bear and bull-fights; and they grew fat and lazy, and lay in the sun-- sombrero pulled low on the brow--and smoked, and chewed "jerked-beef," and soaked in their wine till the wits in four polls out of five of them grew dull and woolly as the meat of an addled egg. Their ease was not, and is not, without a certain dignity; it is hard to kill the caballero --the gentleman--out of veins where flows, no matter how dully, one drop of the old sangre azul . The worst and weakest of them has that indefinable something about him that lifts so immeasurably the beggar of Murillo above the beggar of Hogarth. Above all, there is in none of them any touch of volunteer familiarity, of intrusiveness, 59 49 of Paul Pryism. Their aesthetics are nil admirari , their policy is administrative nihilism, their religion Islam (subscribed with a cross). In philosophy they have reached the last word of modern thought as prophetically and as completely as Montaigne; and their habitual Quien sabe ? is only Que sc¸ais-je ? done into Spanish. Their fathers held the keys of two worlds once. To them remains only the rust and the dust of a lost power. The very sun draws insulting bars round them, where they move dreamfully under their fig-trees, as if enchanted by some baleful spirit. A race of Ignaros to-day, yesterday a race of Cids.

60

CHAPTER IV.

THEIR CHINESE. I cannot tell, good sir, for which of his virtues it was: but he was certainly whipped out of the court.

Winter's Tale , SHAKSPERE.

THE Chinese are, perhaps, the best servants and the worst masters Americans know.

Since Buddha Dharma cut his sleepy eyelids off and formed the first tea-plant, there never was such tea as slim Schu Wo used to brew for us in his restaurant, sign of the Fiery Flying Dragon, Jackson Street, San Francisco. Not every one dared come within the shadow of the Dragon's wings, least of all to that sacred upper room and balcony, where only the silkiest tunics and the glossiest pigtails were permitted to intrude upon a few white barbarians whom--or whose purses--our host celestial delighted to honour. Such 61 51 porcelain!--each cup delicate, fragrant, as if shaped from a white rose-leaf. Such sweetmeats!--with their delicious charm of forbidden fruit, for were they not made of one knew not what? coloured, as like as not, with barbarian blood? Such muskscented cigars! Such bended brazen tobacco-pipes! so big, and yet which held so little; to be refilled momentarily by automaton attendants, with a strange machinery of tubes and slides; and to be lit by a kind of slow match which kindled itself miraculously, being blown upon with a jugglery of the lips which no man may attain who can pronounce the letter r. And then the typical opium-pipe, modelled on the lines of an Irish shillelagh, with the addition of a mouthpiece at one end and of a pin-hole at the other to stick the opium-pea against--to addle a head from within, or to crack it from without, an incomparable tool. On us, strangely enough, at least as used in the first of these ways, it had no effect save that of producing an intense appetite for gargles; but up to a certain stage we used to watch with enjoyment the sons of the placid Orient as they, gradually losing their natural apathy--that indefinable expression of eyelid and mouth-corner peculiar to 62 52 them and to the flunkey of high degree, were caught up to the third heaven; the glow of the pipe-lamp on every face, and the glow too of a deeper glory as of those that hear unspeakable words not lawful for a man to utter. Up to this point all is attractive, perhaps seductive. But the lamps die out, the pipes fall heavily from nerveless fingers, the chins drop--Ho! here! Hop Ki, Wan Fo! open those windows; throw a cloth over that face! thick--one is almost tempted to add--as the last veil of Ben-hadad!

We have seen enough. Let us go. No opium-smoker can be a hero to his valet-de-chambre .

Following the latest average figures of the year 1875, as given by The San Francisco Chronicle , there are 130,000 Chinese in California--30,000 in the city of San Francisco alone. Saysthe same paper at the same time: "Whatever industry they have attacked they have captured; whatever they have attempted they have mastered; whenever there has been an encounter between them and our own people they have come off victorious. And these are said to be the very offscouring of the Chinese ports. If then such results come to us from contact with 130,000 of their lowest grade 63 53 of intellect, what shall be the measure of their success when free intercourse, open ports, and the attractions of foreign commerce pour upon our shores the numbers they can spare from their 400,000,000 of population?--when their leading men, with subtle intellects, come in conflict with our plodding minds?--who shall dare say which is the superior race until the conflict is over? Every contest between ourselves and the Chinese hitherto has been to them a victory."

This has no uncertain sound, and we give it as fairly characteristic of the present general tone of Californian newspapers on the subject--a few exceptions aside. Those whose business it has been to examine files of Western leading articles as far back as say 1862, must have observed a gradual change in their way of treating this matter. The original note of patronising contempt for the "yellow trash" is dying off into something between a cry of serious dissatisfaction and a quaver of even shriller emotion. And to those who must answer it "the Chinese question" does indeed loom up with something like a paralysing mystery. To comprehend one's adversary thoroughly is a most comfortable thing; but to meet a possible foe 64 54 whose weapons and tactics are of the dark and quiet sort, who fires no gun and shakes out no flag, but whose pick you can faintly hear as he works in the sunken mine, as he pushes forward what may be a torpedo, one's cry is then like that of Ajax--not for strength but for light. East has met West. The West is the stronger in open fight, but it is no part of the Eastern nature to decide any conflict in open fight. The East is the serpent become man, quiet, subtle, dust-swallowing--not strong but subtile, with a subtilety sometimes mightier than strength. The Turanian has struck his fangs into the Aryan at the Aryan's weakest point, in California; and two things turn all the white man's life and blood to fire: he can neither catch his adversary upon the hip nor avoid him; he can neither despise his adversary nor comprehend him. To the Irish or English-born peasant, to the German Bauer , to the native American teamster and miner--in short, to all those who make up the proletarian class in the Great West, the Chinese is not a man but an infernal puzzle and portent. What is to be done with men who have no beard to speak of, who plait their hair like women, whose skins are 65 55 yellow, who have five cardinal points in their compass, who consider the left hand the place of honour, whose code of politeness enforces the wearing of the hat in presence of those whom they delight to honour, whose books read from right to left, and whose virtues and vices stop and begin in most unheard-of manner? They live huddled together like herrings in a barrel, yet they are wonderfully given to the care of their hair and their teeth, and are miraculously proper in their persons, unless exception be taken to those long finger-nails against which the ingenious hidalgo warned Sancho as that " puerco y extraordinario abuso "--that beastly habit. With faces serene and cherubic they knock on the head or abandon to the cayotes every now and then some superannuated individual of their race; yet, as a class, they are pious towards the old in an extraordinary degree. More, perhaps, than any other laws and customs on earth, since the Roman patria potestas died of what was in a double sense its belle mort , does the Chinese code enforce "the commandment with promise"--promise, in this case, of the public bamboo, or worse, for breach of filial duty. They are industrious to the point of cruelty; they and 66 56 their gang-masters wring almost incredible hours of labour out of each other, and out of their miserable horses, in such rare instances as these are employed for Celestial purposes. Not even the horse can compete in "cheap labour" with the Chinese. They are not given to strong liquors, nor do they honour the "blue Monday" of European industry; but once or twice a month they may lie comatose with opium for a whole day--the cheapest of all ways of spending a holiday. They are patient beyond any ass that bears cross on back, patient to a degree which should entitle them to that citizenship in Uz which the courts try to refuse them in California. They are, under all ordinary temperatures of abuse, meek beyond Moses, "'umble" beyond Mr. Heep. Yet, do not imagine that the yellow blood cannot be made hot. You heap your unscriptural coals of fire about it, you heat the furnace seven times; still no dangerous change in the strange fluid. But beware! it has only recoiled upon itself, only taken the spheroidal form; another touch, the shock of an atom, and the explosion may come. Better have to do with a Malay when he runs the muck than a thoroughly infuriated Chinaman. His hate 67 57 hunts slow and sure. He can be strangely cruel and pertinacious as a sleuth-hound. If you prick us, do we not bleed? Yes, and by the Dragon! if you prick us you shall bleed!

"Fire and flame!" screamed the ogre in the Norse story.

"Fire and flame, yourself!" replied Shortshanks.

"Can you fight?" roared the ogre.

"If I can't I can learn," said Shortshanks.

Our Shortshanks in California has on several occasions shown his assailants that he "can learn," and the innocent-looking blue or white tunic of his now hides, six times in ten, the "toothpick" of Arkansas, the Pandean pipes of Connecticut. He shoots a little wildly just as yet, and with the knife he is too much inclined to slash instead of thrust; but there is no doubt that he "can learn," and is learning, to drop his man as prettily as if he were "'Melican" born. Recourse, however, to open fight is the last resort of the Chinese settlers. Their chief men understand tolerably well that their strength, for the present, is to sit still--or, rather, to go softly while pretending to sit still. Time seems to be their best weapon. Five 68 58 great companies or corporations exist in China to furnish them with recruits. These five have a permanent general committee stationed in San Francisco. Taken together, all these are commonly spoken of as "The Six Companies." As affairs go at present here lies the hopelessness of the fight waged against the yellow workmen by the white trades-unions; it is a fight like that in the story, with a "giant who had no heart in his body." No blow affected him, for his vital centre was hidden away across seas. The tawny giant in California has the Pacific Ocean between his heart and his enemies. Every Chinese coolie "ratanned"--assassinated--in California, The Six Companies replace by two within a month. They are rich--rich enough in money and credit almost to buy California in open market, and certainly rich enough in men to populate not California only, but the United States. In the latter country there cannot be to-day many more than 30,000,000 men of Aryan speech; to dilute or drown these thirty millions out of existence, how many monosyllabic persons could not China spare from her 400,000,000 Turanians? This is not a schoolman's question, a question of possibilities, it is a 69 59 question of the actual, of probabilities, for China heads the list of her inconsistencies by koutouing to the Zeit Geist. The most stay-at-home of nations pours out her people now into Australasia and America--perversely diregarding, however, the old Asiatic and European law of such movements--by going east instead of west. Always a riddle to the students of political ethology, she is going about again to defeat their calculations. A few generations ago it was fashionable in certain quarters to eulogise China as having "realised from the highest antiquity the type of a rational society, founded on equality, open competition, and an enlightened administration." The people were educated by the state, and no "bloated aristocracy" blighted the Flowery Land; merit, however obscure, was sought out and advanced by an elaborate system of inspectors; the emperor was a kind of glorified good boy set at the head of a great national class of good boys. He was devout--morning and evening and at noon the smoke of his joss-sticks went up to heaven; he was grave and simple in tastes and economical; his edicts and conversation were enlivened by excellent little maxims worthy of Benjamin Franklin. He occasionally composed verses of a 70 60 philosophy and beauty that would not misbecome the sublime muse of Mr. Martin Farquhar Tupper; and above all, he was accustomed to encourage the humblest industry by guiding at certain seasons the plough with his own imperial hands. What was not to be expected from such a fulfilment of so many conditions of good government? Surely, to use the impulsive words of the late Mr. Thomas Moore, "If there be an elysium on earth, it is this, it is this." Alas, not quite. The only thing certain about China, as about most attempts at the Utopia is that you are never certain of anything there resulting as it has been proved it must result. M. Ernest Renan, writing in 1858, considered the fruit of all the above-mentioned fine blossoms to be this: "A state of decrepitude without parallel in history, where an empire of--millions of men waits the coming of a few thousand barbarians to bring it masters and regenerators. What happened on the invasion of the Roman Empire by the Germanic bands will happen again with China." Perhaps; c'est possible . But what if China again deceives us? What if the Pacific should take the place of the Alps in quite a different sense from that prophesied by the famous orientalist? What if the Chinese 71 61 appropriate the roˆle of the bandes germaniques ? What if this mousing owl among nations should hawk at the eagle--should renew the history of the Huns? What if American pasture-land should become as obnoxious to the flat blue slipper as was European grass to the horse-hoofs of Attila? If, again, the Chinese cannot become such tall men of their hands as their cousins who followed Tamerlane, it will not be for want of courage, of that most dangerous courage which is made up of fatalism and sustained by endurance. The wood is piled, the tinder is ready, nothing is wanting but the spark. What in past times have been signs and conditions under which appeared great prophets and leaders?--If China should have her Mahomet?

It is an age of machinery; "things are in the saddle and ride mankind." Of all machines, in several important respects, Chinamen are the most perfect. It is because they are imagined to be nothing but machines that they are so little feared, so unjustly contemned. American employers of capital consider it profitable to use these machines to an already great and a constantly-increasing extent, shipping them into California in immense numbers--as many as 19,000 have arrived in 72 62 a single year. Even as far east as Massachusetts the advancing yellow wave is creating a "bore" in the mouth of some of the largest white rivers of trade. If the American capitalists involved should, as some people suspect, be making a mistake in encouraging this? Men laughed a long time at the ifs advanced regarding "the negro question." There came an answer, however, before which the laughter somehow died away; and that answer has not given its last word. The yellow comedy has now the boards as a kind of after-piece; there is a good deal of hissing in the pit and upper galleries, but it is too strongly supported for the present to be put down by cat-calls.

Bring on the play then; up with our decorations; up with these big Chinese lanterns--up among the folds of the Union flag! If the flag takes fire as it did in that unfortunate affair of the tar-barrels, no matter! In the meantime we shall make money. That is our business. Fire! that does not concern us others in Washington. Are we firemen? Ah, but these vulgar are so stupid! they learn nothing--not even political economy with the help of greenbacks; they forget 73 63 nothing--not even where the blood came from to put out that last fire!

Well, perhaps after all there is nothing in this alarm. There are so many ifs about it; and the pursuit of the if is so often an unprofitable and barren chase. If Cervantes had lost the right hand instead of the left at the battle of Lepanto? if young Shakspere had been knocked on the head some night by Sir Thomas Lucy's game-keeper? if Milton and Homer had been blind of only one eye? if Camoens had been blind of both eyes instead of one? if Dante had been married to Beatrice, and Petrarch to Laura? if Abelard had never married the niece of Fulbert?

Possibly enough our speculations in the matter of the Celestial migration are of as unpractical a character as any of these; but what is matter of fact is that where the yellow workman appears the white workman disappears with alarming celerity and certainty. The first step of the yellow workman in developing any branch of industry on which he fixes himself is to starve off his pale competitor. The Chinese have already in most parts of California secured a practical monopoly of such trades as woollen manufacturing, boot-making, public 74 64 laundry work, domestic service, cigar-making, navvy-work, fruit preserving, market gardening (hard run here by Italians), costermongering, and "placer" mining. They are pressing into watch-making. In fishing, especially in shell-fishing, and in farm labour their competition begins to be felt. While we are told, on the authority of that most trustworthy journal, the Sacramento Record-Union (December 1st, 1875), that even "the prison contractors have been latterly undersold in the market, despite the cheapness of convict labour, by the Chinese." "What then will you leave us, O conqueror?"--"Your lives!"

But the conquered, even with life left to them, take unkindly to their position. This is, of course, a violation of the divine law of Laissez-aller ; sinful and foolish, but, perhaps, under the circumstances, not wholly unnatural. The Chinese are the victims of frequent assassinations, incendiary crimes, riots--the latest of which, accompanied by their expulsion from a village called Antioch, with the burning of the entire quarter occupied by them, was reported the other day in London, by a telegram dated May 2nd, 1876. It is not, however, that California has not first tried legal 75 65 methods in this matter; she has again and again passed laws, which, by prohibitive capitation taxes and by even more direct methods might have effectually controlled Asiatic immigration: but the imperial powers at Washington, the Supreme Courts, have effectually vetoed these Californian laws, and the Pacific Mail steamers still empty their hives of Chinese on the quays of San Francisco. California persists in thinking this is not expedient. We are inclined to agree with her. As we have said, there are hardly more than 30,000,000 of white men in the United States; there are hardly less than 400,000,000 of yellow men in China. These latter are crowded together in such a fashion as few untravelled Europeans can guess at. They are half-starved. Nature has been practising on them, for centuries, much as that man who tried to train his horse to live on a single straw a day. The Heathen Chinee comes nearer by several straws to this ideal perfection than the Anglo-American to play him a game of straws of this kind for the possession of California.

As the game stands there is nothing finally 76 66 lost. It is the future which causes us to wonder and doubt. Mr. Hepworth Dixon, who has so ably dealt with this matter, asks, "What if the teaplant should fail, and what if such an exodus from China should ensue as the potato-blight caused from Ireland?" We venture to think that the exodus is not waiting for the failure of the tea-plant. The Chinese staff of life seems unable to support the numbers that cling to it already. The evil (or the good) is already more than sufficient for to-day, and to-morrow, and the day after.

We have said "or the good," for we are not bigoted in the belief that the Chinese, as admitted to the United States under present conditions, are a growing element of danger and of discord. We shall be heartily glad to have it proved that all our fears are groundless. Above all, we have no prejudice against the Chinese on account of colour, speech, or religion; and no personal ill-will against them on any account--only we prefer not to have their acquaintance forced upon us. The writer of this work has already risked--and would again, in like circumstances, risk--his limbs, to see Chinese, as individuals, get, at least, fair play when attacked with unfair weapons or by unfair odds. In that 77 67 sense, at least, we do believe in the maxim of the Antonine era, Omnes homines natura æquales sunt , and in the "All men are born free and equal" of another power little less imposing than the Roman. But, for all that (not that we love the stranger less, but that we love our brother more) we should have then thought it right, and we now do think it right, to cry "Beware of the barbarian!"

The clouds are black over California towards Hong-Kong. The sign may be auspicious, but, at least, it does not so appear to those immediately under it. Possibly it is a fertilising rain; possibly, on the other hand, it is the deluge. It has been said that the immediate evils connected with the new Mongolian movement are the same as those caused by the introduction of any metal or wooden labour-aiding machine. But there seems to be a difference, after all, between a machine of flesh and one of iron or hickory. There is a certain gray matter in every Chinese skull not to be found in any power-loom or steam-press. No known engine of mere wheel and axle has a habit of dismissing its engineers, running alone, and pocketing its profits. Between a duel with the most complete of automatic targets and a duel with a man, there always remains 78 68 the difference that the target cannot hold a pistol. The argument has again been varied so as to compare the Chinese in California to the Moors in Spain, the Huguenots in France, the Jews in various parts of Europe. And it is certain that the Chinese, if encouraged, will thoroughly develop the resources of California. It is also certain that nothing quite so amazingly develops the resources of the hedge-sparrow's nest as a cuckoo. In fine, there is an unwisdom of hospitality as well as an unwisdom of exclusiveness. The din in the Golden State may be merely the result of a rude tug at her area bell--a squabble in her servants' hall; it may be, however, the distant thunder of the gongs of the Golden Horde!

As Balzac said of a perhaps more serious subject: "This question bristles with so many ifs and buts that we bequeath it to our descendants; we must leave them something to do!" Let us hope then that our question may reach the next generation of Americans, he´risse´e with nothing worse than ifs and buts .

79

CHAPTER V.

THEIR REPROBATES.

Aude aliquid brevibus Gyaris et carcere dignum,Si vis esse aliquis.--JUVENAL, Sat .I.

Both in deed seeme to have received some hellish character (if there may be bodily representation) of that olde Serpent in these new fashions, striving who shall shape himselfe, neerest to that misse-shapen ugliness, wherein the Indian jagges himself out of humane lineaments, the other swaggers himselfe further out of all Civill and Christian ornaments.--SAMUEL PRUCHAS, His Pilgrimes .

If you'll take 'em as their fathers got 'em, so and well; if not, you must stay till they get a better generation.--DRYDEN.

CALIFORNIA shares with other very new countries the annoyance of being a kind of Alsatia. It is a sanctuary where the old-fashioned "king's writ runneth not," much frequented by persons who have not lived harmoniously with the higher powers belonging to certain "effete civilisations." Men of older lands who find themselves at home, cabined, 80 70 cribbed, confined, outcast, or out-lawed, drift thither by social currents as real, steady, and measurable as the Gulf Stream. These men have usually the courage of their position, and many other interesting qualities--among which, however, scrupulousness cannot be included. America must have time--time to filter and deodorise this turbid stream of life flowing constantly in on her; time to educate, if possible, her immigrants up to that great freedom to which they were not born; and meanwhile she must be patient, hopeful, and--like Aristophanes' groom of the muck-beetle--desirous of "an unperforated nose."

The helots from Europe stagger a little as they move through their New World arena, full of the strong wine of liberty. In the United States the political power and privilege of the lower classes is, for good or evil, undoubtedly a reality everywhere exercised and everywhere felt. Wherever that class of the people called "the people" sits, there is the head of the table; and on that table is spread no merely imaginary feast of the Barmecide, no merely tantalising banquet in Barataria. Sancho Panza is now governor of his island, without mistake. For universal 81 71 suffrage, as it has been again and again said, is government by a class--by the lowest class. In the great arc of manhood suffrage, the facial angle of Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson is reckoned precisely equal to that of Cudjoe Africanus or that of "Boss" Tweed; and Mr. Emerson is one out of millions, while Cudjoe and the Boss are many--and as many more as voting "early and often" can make them. This is a great sight, possibly a hopeful one; but not just yet a pretty sight. The beggar on horseback may be an excellent person, but he is not usually a graceful equestrian, and neither his own neck nor the horse's knees are as secure as might be wished.

Naturally enough, if there is one species of snobbishness which more than another characterises the man of poor mind with his pockets filled and the stirrups fitted to his instep, it is deference to wealth for wealth's simple sake, and contempt of poverty without regard to its conditions. Surely it was a Slavonic cavalier of this class who inspired the satire of the Russian proverb: "Poverty is no sin, but twice as bad." In California, as in all plutocracies of "self-made men," of men whose fathers did not find it convenient to afford them 82 72 culture, and who have not had leisure to plant and ripen for themselves that plant of slowest growth, the capacity for appreciating finer distinctions than a money one, is confined to a secluded and impuissant few. It is, indeed, hardly an exaggeration to say that the general temper of Western society tends to make its poorer members feel not only unfortunate but infamous. Readers must comprehend the full drift of this deliberate assertion before they can understand the terrible and exceptional force of the motives which here drive men who could be honest elsewhere, to soil themselves with abominable iniquity in business and in politics, well assured that "success" will justify almost all its measures with that lowest, most ignorant class of the people who are the majority, and whose coarse clamour is called "public opinion." Money here is the Rome to which all roads must tend that hope to secure travellers. But, after all, the number of those who can become rich, even with the help of dishonest means, is limited everywhere--the majority must fail in this attempt; and here, where such failure means so much--means everything indeed--that failure is saddest. San Francisco is full of social 83 73 wrecks--wrecks more complete and miserable than any possible in calmer seas. There is said to be a greater proportion of suicides here than anywhere else in the civilised world. No wonder. A society so new that its members are bound to each other by few and slight ties--a society that has in the general lost all old faith and found no new faith either in God or man--it foams on like a battle, like a riot towards its ends. Quarter is neither given nor expected. Victory! victory or nothing! victory or a mouthful of dust when the dead are trodden under foot! Woe to those that fall! woe to the incapable! That ghastly eternal slaughter, that grim war-game of the fates, called Selection-of-the-Fittest, goes on here like a frontier war, without convention, without checks, without mercy; not with circumstances of deliberate cruelty, but worse--amid panic. A generous deed is done here and there. People have not time to applaud, much less to imitate it. For in a new country the white-wash of civilisation is at once thinnest and most sorely tried.

From the causes above given, and from others, there results a dangerous and criminal "residuum" of extraordinary numbers and audacity. As has 84 74 been said, it may be divided into two classes: those who are in prison and those who ought to be--the latter by far the larger and more dangerous section. Those out of prison support themselves by begging and stealing, both by cosmopolitan methods and by such provincial forms of procedure as brigandage on a large scale, and highway robbery by one or two individuals. Mexico-Californian half-breeds, such as Vasques (captured and hanged in 1875) and Chavez (reported killed in the early part of 1876) gather from half-a-dozen to two dozen ruffians of their own stamp, and, well armed and mounted, capture and sack whole villages in the southern counties of the State; retreating across the Mexican line when opposed in earnest and in force. The "Greasers" thus monopolise the south; but in the middle and northern counties the "Throw up your hands!" of the Saxon "road-agent" is as familiar as "Stand and deliver!" was in England not many generations ago. These "road-agents" are generally recruited among the distressed miners and farm-labourers of the mountain and country districts. The general climate is so mild that the farmer is able to live, and as a rule does live, in a farm-house much inferior to corresponding 85 75 buildings in the Eastern United States or in Europe. He does not, in a majority of cases, house his field hands or employ them regularly. This system of agricultural economy results in leaving five-sixths of the farm-labourers to be vagrants--and under temptation to become dangerous vagabonds--during half the year. In fact the master--the farmer himself--is often as little settled and range´ as an Arab or a Tartar. These circumstances, if not soon got rid of, will involve serious misfortunes to the State. As they are just the matters which hasty travellers cannot well become acquainted with, and which the mere city Californian may be tempted to deny, we must be allowed to strengthen the evidence of our own observations by two extracts from leading articles in leading Californian newspapers: The Evening Bulletin of July 14th, 1875, says that "One cannot travel much through the farming districts of California without being struck with the shabby farm buildings seen in all directions... The house is little more than a shed, and the barn, if there is any, is a mere shelter for old waggons and harness, and perhaps for a few tons of hay. The `improvements' are unsightly and repulsive... Heretofore a large number of men engaged in 86 76 farming were mere nomads; they hired a tract of land, got the most out of it for two or three years, and then `moved on;' or if they bought land, it was with the intention of selling again after cropping awhile."

Says, again, The Morning Chronicle of September 5th, 1875: "The system of farm labour in California is undoubtedly the worst in the United States. It is bad for the farmers themselves, and worse, if possible, for those whom they employ. In many respects it is even worse than old-time slavery. That, at least, enabled the planter to know what labour he could depend upon in any emergency, and made the labourers certain at all times of shelter, clothing, food, and fire. Our system does neither. The farmer must take such help as he can get--hunting it up when most hurried and paying whatever is demanded. The labourers themselves, knowing that they cannot be permanently employed, demand high prices, do their work carelessly, and start out on a tramp for another job. Under our system large numbers of men are wanted for a short time; more than any ordinary farmhouse can accommodate, even if the employer dare trust so many strangers within 87 77 his walls or admit them into his family circle. The result is that labourers are compelled to sleep in barns, outhouses, or in the open fields. In this climate that is no hardship, it is true, but the practice leads to uncleanness, carelessness of appearance, and recklessness of conduct. Men seem thus to have been thrown outside of social influences, and even if at the outset possessing good impulses and habits, they become, in a short time, desperate, degraded, or criminal, and perhaps all three. The men are no worse than others would become under similar influences. They are shut out from all the purifying influences of society and home as effectually as so many sailors or soldiers. What wonder is it then, that five out of six of the class of farm-labourers, unemployed for half the year, become worthless, drunken, and dissolute tramps and outcasts? There is no condition in life more unfavourable to the morals of men than that which great numbers of our farm-labourers occupy. They annually squander in dissipation, and generally in a few weeks, all they have earned, and hang around the towns and cities the rest of the year, hunting odd jobs and living, pecuniarily, from hand to mouth, not seldom by charity. There 88 78 are exceptions, we know. Here and there a man having sterner stuff or more intelligence in him than the rest, will rise above the wretched position he holds and become a useful citizen. But that system is surely a bad one that subjects labouring men to such degrading and damaging influences. And yet, bad as it is, and as intelligent farmers admit it to be, we see no present remedy. When our farms become something else than wheat-fields, and are made to produce a greater variety of crops, requiring labour at all seasons, the owners can furnish steady employment to thousands who are now compelled to be mere tramps under the pressure of dire necessity. Until that time comes, we see no prospect of any improvement in the condition of farm labourers."

We think both these articles, especially the latter, slightly overstate their complaint, but on the whole their statements are sadly exact. Add to them the following advertisement in the ablest and oldest satirical and comic newspaper of California, in The News Letter of December 18th, 1875: "Wanted, work for a thousand starving immigrants:" add this--allowing for the licensed exaggeration of its source--and there is no 89 79 difficulty in accounting for the fact that a majority of rural Californians sleep with the rifle in the bedroom, and travel revolver in pocket; while the San Francisco Call of August 22nd, 1875, in view of "the great increase of highway robbery in this State," thought itself justified in advocating an amendment of the law so "as to make the crime a capital offence."

But the country districts have no monopoly of evil-doers. The towns are infested, not only by the ordinary full-grown roughs and scoundrels pertaining to all cities, but by a distinct class of armed juvenile blackguards, locally known as "hoodlums." What the derivation of the word "hoodlum" is we could never satisfactorily ascertain, though several derivations have been proposed; and it would appear that the word has not been very many years in use. But, however obscure the word may be, there is nothing mysterious about the thing; to use the much-abused phrase of M. Taine, this vice is as natural and simple a product as vitriol or sugar. The monopoly which the Chinese have of the lowest kinds of labour, and the uniform policy of the trades' unions which virtually excludes apprentices 90 80 from the more skilled trades--an almost inevitable policy, in view of the constant influx of highly-trained workmen and mechanics from Eastern America and Europe--all this makes hand-work of any kind for the native youth either despicable and unremunerative, or hard to get. Clerks and shopmen are, of course, only wanted in numbers relatively small. The result is idleness and "hoodlumism." Habitually armed to the teeth, the young scapegrace of this class lives, while yet in his teens, by the vices of cities, and by the folly or weakness of unwarlike citizens and inexperienced immigrants. In the words of a veteran Californian (Mr. Williams, in "Scribner's Monthly," July, 1875), the hoodlum "may be somewhat vaguely defined as a ruffian in embryo. Young in years, he is venerable in sin. He knows all the vices by heart. He drinks, gambles, steals, runs after lewd women, sets buildings on fire, rifles the pockets of inebriated citizens going home in the small hours, parades the streets at night, singing obscene songs, uttering horrid oaths, and striking terror to the heart of the timid generally. Occasionally he varies the programme of his evil-doings by perpetrating a highway robbery, blowing open 91 81 a safe, or braining an incautious critic of his conduct." Brief, he is what our street Arabs, our gamins , our Gassenbuben would be, their wits sharpened by a common-school education, their insolence heightened by the twaddle of e´galite´ , and their capacities for offence aided by the matter-of-course carriage and use of deadly weapons. To meet this evil, two "hoodlum ordinances" were adopted in 1875 by the principal Californian municipalities, the one making it a misdemeanour "for minors to congregate on the public streets after eight o'clock at night," the other prohibiting to all persons the carrying of concealed weapons without a special magisterial permit. This last order is much objected to in many respectable quarters, and has not, we believe, been adopted in Sacramento, the political capital of the State. The lawless classes, it is alleged, do not observe its provisions, while they are rendered bolder by the knowledge that the average good citizen is now defenceless in his goings. It may as well be observed, in passing, that the police hardly enter into the considerations of either party, which is, perhaps, the least harsh thing that can well be said of these functionaries. As a 92 82 consequence, "the dulcet note of the derringer" is to the San Franciscan what the bells of Bow are to the Cockney. In August, 1875, the San Francisco Call was able to refer, in a modest way, to the "two or three shooting encounters per week" which enlivened its columns; while in December of the same year things looked so dark that the correspondent of The Record-Union called aloud for "a long rope and a short shrift," affirming that "the prevalence of lawlessness is a reproach to our city; and if a stranger were to run through the columns of a local paper, and read the daily list of outrages upon persons and property, he would be pardonable in believing that San Francisco was a good place for a decent man to stay away from."

There is a hopeful side to all this, as there is to that darkest hour which precedes the morning. There is a point at which vaulting scoundrelism overleaps itself, and falls on the other side. Reputable, peaceable Californians are so busily engaged in the dollar trade--to them not so much the chief as the only end for which man was created--that nothing less than a little municipal pandemonium will distract their attention from the 93 83 till. Once roused, however, they will go far to restore peace and order in all their borders. Perplexed as they are in the extreme by new problems and conditions of life--old faiths and old traditions flapping in rags, and the new canvas working stiffly, and even coming down here and there by the run--they bear much, and hope the best from all the "institutions" under trial. But if they must, after all, interfere for the safety of their lives and property, there is more than one precedent to justify the opinion that that interference will be a stark and stern winding-up of accounts that have been allowed to run too long already, at once, with a generation of young Mohawks, and with a generation of political quacks whose government is one interminable vista of "magnificent distances" between sublime theory and perverse practice. According to the sublime theory--so sweet in the mouth and so bitter in the belly--there should now be no necessity for recourse to extra-judicial expedients. The united and persistent pressure of honest men, directed by legal methods, should be sufficient to make the law respect and enforce itself; but if not, so much the worse for the law.

94

CHAPTER VI.

THEIR WOMEN. Her figure.--Somewhat small and darling-like.Her face?--Well, singularly colourless.Attaining to the ends of prettiness,And somewhat more--suppose enough of soul.

">Red Cotton Night-cap Country , ROBERT BROWNING. It s a wonderful subduer, this need of love--this hunger of the heart--as peremptory as that other hunger by which nature forces us to submit to her yoke and change the face of the world.

-- The Mill on the Floss , GEORGE ELIOT. Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib, und Gesang,Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang. --MARTIN LUTHER. Ou` est elle alle´e demeurer?--Elle ne l'a pas dit. Quelle chose sombre de ne pas savoir l'adresse de son aˆme!

">Les Mise´rables , HUGO. Warum muss sich die Liebe nach dem Gegenstand sehnen nur der Hass nicht? -- Levana , JEAN PAUL RICHTER. Not for this Was common clay ta'en from the common earth,Moulded by God, and temper'd with the tearsOf angels to the perfect shape of man.

Prologue to The Palace of Art , TENNYSON.

95

Ob's ein Teufel oder Engel,Weiss ich nicht. Genau bei WeibernWeiss man niemals, wo der Engel,Aufho¨rt und der Teufel anfa¨ngt. -- Atta Troll , HEINE. THE first question to be asked about any living thing is the physiological question, "How is it organised?--how are the muscles, nerves, the life-machinery of it arranged?--and how does this machinery work?" The soul is the crown of life, but the body is the head that wears the crown; and greater mistakes have, on the whole, been made in the theological world than that by which orthodox Samoyedes pronounce soul and stomach to be identical. Dyspepsia should have a place among the cardinal sins. There has been a tendency in modern civilisation to over-develop the nerve at the expense of the muscle--a thing almost as fatal to the happiness and efficiency of our race as the complementary error of developing brawn at the expense of brain. Mankind tend to swing through centuries from falsehood of extreme to falsehood of extreme--the arc of oscillation, however, as, we dare to think, becoming constantly less and less. It is not so fashionable as it once was to view the flesh as the root of all evil--something 96 86 radically bad, desperately wicked, an abomination to its Creator, something that must consequently be mortified and kept out of His sight, so as to obliterate--kindly, if it might be--all trace of a mistake committed on "the sixth day." The only puzzle was to know, as a robust Latin Father has noticed, how the fleshless devil had managed to sin. The crimes committed against the body at present are not so much ascetic as modish, and as women are most affected and led by fashion, they suffer most. It is not damp cells, but hot ball-rooms that are to be feared; not hair shirts, but steel corsets; not weary pilgrimages and the bread of affliction and the water of affliction, but excessive delicacy in limb and palate. Anglo-American women are said to be weakening from these causes faster and more generally than their sisters in Europe. We think the balance of American medical authority inclines to this view. But California is too new, the race there is too lately and too largely mixed with European blood, to furnish much support to any such theory. Besides, the sunny climate along the Pacific makes out-door life so pleasant that it cannot well 97 87 encourage that hot-house life which seems to be at the bottom of so many feminine ailments in New England. Yet it is affirmed that the sickly circle is widening and worsening. The last United States census, that for 1870, reports that "No one can be familiar with life in the Eastern and Middle States generally, and in the Western cities, and not be aware that children are not born to American parents as they were in the early days of the country. Luxury, fashion, and the vice of `boarding,' combine to limit the increase of families to a degree that in some sections has threatened the perpetuation of our native stock. This tendency is not one that requires to be brought out by statistical comparison. It is patent, palpable, and needs no proof." This is a delicate branch of investigation, and we must be allowed to drop it here. Indeed, it may be rather a dangerous thing to venture on even a surface criticism of the sensitive sex in the Great Republic. De Tocqueville was able to assert with great exactness that in his day, just as it was characteristic of European writers to sprinkle their pages either with what has been called "polite banter," 98 88 or with satire concerning women, so the absence of this levity or malice, and the presence of an awful reverence, was characteristic of the sons of the Puritans. As poor M. Crevel would have said, "putting himself into position," there was nothing of the Regency, nothing Louis XV., nothing Abbe´ Dubois or Mare´chal de Richelieu about them, sacrebleu ! De Tocqueville, if we can trust to our memory, went on in his usual able fashion to show how, from the very essence and conditions de la de´mocratie en Ame´rique , this fact could not have been otherwise than it was. But alas! though the democracy still remains with all its conditions, its bashful literary reserve has disappeared, like the snows of last year, like the "barty" of Herr Breitmann. Blasphemy against the sacred sex has become shockingly common among the authors beyond the Atlantic, and we have not only to deplore their conduct in this respect, but also their fate. Whom the gods wish to destroy by inches, they bring down the lady writers on him. The Athena Promachos, sternly but not unbeautifully blue as to her stockings and her eyes (&ggr;&lgr;&agr;&ugr;&kgr;&ohgr;&pgr;&igr;&sfgr; &mgr;&egr;&ngr;&, &agr;&lgr;&lgr;&agr; &kgr;&ogr;&sgr;&mgr;&egr;&igr; &kgr;&agr;&igr; &tgr;&ogr;&ugr;&tgr;&ogr; &eegr; &kgr;&ogr;&rgr;&ugr;&sfgr;), shakes a dreadful dart in America, 99 89 potent for good or for evil. The pen is no longer of a sex there--nor anywhere. The generation that has stood by the open graves of the author of the "Drama of Exile," and "Aurora Leigh," and the author of "La Petite Fadette," and "La Mare au Diable," must know that womanliness and genius can run together into lives entirely great as well as entirely amiable. Hemisphere joins hemisphere; literature, that saw in part, begins to see the complement of the angles at which alone it once viewed life. The anatomy of woman by man reaches almost its last conceivable word in Balzac and Thackeray; the anatomy of man by woman begins, properly speaking, with George Sand and George Eliot: two sides of a science, not hostile but complementary, in which France and England lead. But English nature comes to American women from their ancestors; and events which belong to history have so thrown them into sympathy with France, that they have assimilated a Gallic quickness and pliancy of mind. This sympathy has taken curious shape in the familiar jest--an emotion too deep for seriousness, as there are sorrows too deep for tears--"Every good American will go to Paris when he (or she) 100 90 dies." All the world knows that every man has two countries--his own and France; but it has been reserved for regenerated citizens of the Great Republic to have two heavens. To return to worldly matters. The saddest thing we have to say about the Pilgrim Daughters of California is that they are too few. In the whole white population of this State, sixteen years old and upwards, the number of men is something more than double the number of women; and this proportion is not likely to be much bettered while the majority of immigrants continues as at present to be made up of single men. The average masculine age for marriage in Californi ais not, we venture, without statistics, to say much below forty; the average feminine age much above seventeen. One man in every two can never hope to marry. This situation is not a bright one, either on the side of mind or matter, on the side of the individual, the side of the family, the side of the church, or the side of the State. Was it not the acute Talleyrand who held that "the father of a family is capable of everything?" And is it not true in a very different sense that he to whom the family is forbidden is capable of anything? His 101 91 is the life of the Thebiade without its inspiration, the life of the convent without its restraints. In no real sense can he be said to have a home. His place is outside the golden domestic doors, in the gloomy vestibule of lost footsteps. Though his morals should not suffer his manners would. "A king's face," they used to say along the Scotch border, "gives grace;" but the right grace in any meaning of the word comes nowhere now but from a queen's face, in the sense that every true woman-child is born a princess, and fit to become a queen. Of her is the only eternal aristocracy; touches of delicacy, elegance, nobility, would remain with her even should man begin to develop the claws of the Yahoo. And it is this truth older than the Vedas, that Michelet translates by his, " Il n'y a pas de peuple chez elles ." No woman is a boor till she is unwomaned. Caught young no woman is a Philistine. One maiden to two swains! It has been not unwisely written in our Latin grammars, " Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus ," or in the vulgar tongue, "Love flies out at the window, when want comes in at the door;" but what is the plenty without the love? What are all the corn and wine 102 92 in the universe worth, when Aphrodite has not a hand in the heap and an arm round the wine-skin? Without the mistress of the Charites, the grace of the fashion of the world perisheth; the world ceases to go round. Labour and pleasure alike lose their motive to all men. None is unaffected, not even the calm philosopher, who, though he may know the world to be a merely passing illusive show, likes to make-believe-happy as well as he can, and as well as the rest of us. Even Socrates loved love through much tribulation; and one thing he did not teach Plato was to bottle that moonshine known as Platonic love. Even "large-brow'd Verulam," risked his brows and "gave hostages to fortune," and refused to obey that advice of the "wise men," as to when one should marry: "A young man not yet, and elder man not at all." Even sweet, grave Mr. Emerson commands us with a recklessness which can be qualified as nothing less than appalling, to-- Give all to love;Obey thy heart;Friends, kindred, days,Estate, good-fame,Plans, credit, and the Muse--Nothing refuse.

Even in the fateful gray eyes, beneath the shaggy 103 93 brows of immortal Teufelsdro¨ckh, there burns an almost unhallowed light, as he declares his passion for the "blooming warm Earth-angel, much more enchanting than your mere white Heaven-angels of women, in whose placid veins circulates too little naphtha-fire." Even the silver trumpet of Mr. Ruskin forgets its stern alarums and bids us court an amorous looking-glass; for "the soul's armour is never well set to the heart unless a woman's hand has braced it; and it is only when she braces it loosely that the honour of manhood fails." Even Mr. Max Mu¨ller, Admirable Crichton of pundits, looks up from his Vedas to ask thoughtfully, in the words of a Hindoo poet, "Say, is the abode of the lotus-eyed god sweeter than a dream on the shoulders of the beloved?" And, O dulcissimus et lucidissimus! Mr. Matthew Arnold even, in a sober theological work on "Saint Paul and Protestantism," finds place to enlarge with tender vivacity on the advantages of "the natural bent" that makes for "being in love"--of the advantages of the hominum divumque voluptas, alma Venus --the advantages of "this attractive aspect of the not ourselves ," towards which, as we are told by someone in another theological work, there is "a 104 94 natural bent in the authorities of the University of Cambridge, and in the Indo-European race to which they belong."

It is even so. And it is not to the Semite alone that the myrrh and the pomegranate and the pleasant fruits are nothing without the Shulamite. The Indo-European race (the authorities of the University of Oxford included) has a knack of drifting sooner or later into that particular garden which Maud frequents, and there singing its "Come into the garden" with astonishing fulness of throat, even in our foggy northern climates. Our race indignantly denies that "the household is," as Balzac has made one of his most infamous characters say, "the tomb of glory;" it believes, on the contrary, that household life is the condition and complement of glory--at least of any glory which brings happiness. Our scoffer within our gates may indeed deny it, but not with a clear voice; he stutters painfully, he stumbles hoarsely--the blood of Swift chokes him!

And in California? Ah! the gold of the Sacramento, the silver of the Nevada make no music when the hearth is loveless and silent, and the wife's place empty. The lonely soul goes out 105 95 to seek her, like the chariots of Amminadib. "Barkis is willin'," but Peggotty cannot be found. Alas for thee, our brother Barkis! how often in the days that are gone by hast thou poured thy woes into our ear at night, by the camp-fire, till even the cold pines shivered in their silver mail, and the very catamount, crouching to his bough, purred softly for his mate! Oh Barkis! better anything than this. It is indeed a brutal word, that thrice-battered verse of De Musset, "Love! what matters the object? drink! what matters the bottle, so long as it makes one drunk?" Aimer est le grand point, qu'importe la maiˆtresse?Qu'importe le flacon, pourvu qu'on ait l'ivresse?

We repeat, it is a brutal word (and a justification of "Elle et Lui"), but there is a still more brutal word, and it is "die of thirst." Sin and sorrow lie that way. Thousands have bruised their heels in love affairs, in ill-assorted marriages; the comedians of the world live by these things; but tens of thousands have bruised their heads in a lonely living death--and this is where the real tragedies begin. It was a pity the fates hindered Goethe of Fredericka, or of Lili, or of the Frau von Stein; but better even the vulgar Christiane Vulpius at the 106 96 head of his table than no one. Rousseau might have been a greater man had he won Julie; or, for awhile, a happier man had the De Warens married with him; but failing these, better The´re`se Levasseur, than a cold hearth and a homeless heart. Henry Fielding, Robert Southey, Tom Moore, Heinrich Heine, William Blake, were more fortunate in lowly marriages than most emperors have been with thrones to choose from. But the poor Californian has neither the throne to choose from nor the cottage.

On the other side, this misproportion of sex is quite as hurtful to the woman as to the man. Spoke Friar John: "I am no clerk, more's the pity! but I find in my breviary that in the Revelation it was accounted a great wonder to see in heaven a woman with the moon under her feet; because she (as Bigot has expounded the thing to me) was not as other women are, who, all on the contrary, have the moon in their heads, and consequently the brain always moon-struck." Now, the Maiˆtre Guillaume Bigot who imposed this abominable interpretation on the child-like faith of Friar John, was probably very directly referred to when Calvin wrote that "the study of the Apocalypse either finds a man mad, or 107 97 leaves him so," and his interpretation is not worth more than the kindred stuff which every day amazes historians and edifies old ladies of millenarian tendencies; but if anything ought to get the moon en teste of a woman, it is surely her position in California. She has to defend herself as it were against two moons, as the population is divided. There is no place left for the pagan sneer, " Casta est quam nemo rogavit ;" the sentence, if written at all, must take the form of a eulogium--" Casta est quam duo rogaverunt ."

Much sought for, much worshipped, our heroine tends to acquire certain unusual habits of self-assertion, and even of tyranny. The gray mare becomes not only the better horse, but a white elephant. Here, in very truth, What woman wills, God wills. Now, it is grand, of course, to have a giant's strength, but it is somewhat cruel to use it like a giant. The Pacific breezes give an Amazonian dash to the daughters of the Sierra; and the Spanish traditions of the soil seem to involve or suggest such a fatal solution of love misunderstandings as was sought by the Senorita Claudia Gero´nima, to the horror and heartfelt grief of kindly Sancho Panza. The western Aphrodite trusts no 108 98 longer to the kestos alone--she handles the thunderbolt as well. We remember at least half-a-dozen cases in which, weapon in hand, she appealed to the arbitrament of "villainous saltpetre," and marvellously quickened or dismissed for ever a tardy or a false lover. Our Californians in general consider themselves to be "The Coming Race," and certainly their fair gy-ei give, at not infrequent intervals, such exhibitions of feminine ability in the use of the local conductors of vril , as might justify this opinion, and as should at any rate make the Don-Juanesque Tish look well to his ways when among them. May we suggest to Mr. Tennyson the propriety of issuing a special edition of "The Letters," adapted to the latitude of San Francisco, something as follows: I turn'd and humm'd a bitter songThat mock'd the wholesome human heart,And then we met in wrath and wrong,We met, but only meant to part.Full cold her greeting was and dry;I faintly smil'd, then smil'd no more,Because I saw with half an eyeShe wore a Colt of "navy bore"And dallied softly with the lock.Then, slow, with thumb and lip comprest,With half a sigh she drew the cock,And drew a bead upon my vest.

109 99

"Heigh ho! well, there, sir, there! your ringsAnd gifts lie, ready when you please."As father looks on that son's thingsWho died of plague, I look'd on these."While if you wish to send," she said,"A message by the public wire,To any friend to say you're dead,I'll see it done when you--expire."She sobb'd; her words had heat and force,She shook my breast with vague alarms--Like torrents from a mountain sourceWe rush'd into each other's arms.We parted: sweetly smiling now,She wav'd her Colt in fond adieu,Low breezes fann'd my clammy brow,As homeward by the church I drew.The graves grinn'd question: "Orange or white?The bride-flowers or the immortelles?"The spire lean'd listening through the night--I gasp'd, "I choose the marriage-bells!"

The dark races of woman have a characteristic emotional swiftness and heat, but for a steady feminine audacity that is sweet-eyed, smooth like a dove, but at heart always ready-coiled serpent-wise for victory, and deadly even in defeat, one must go back to the heroines of the Vo¨lsunga Saga or follow the daughters of our fair-haired race where circumstances tend to develop la belle sauvage in their blood. In any case similar to that caricatured above, the man is terribly at a disadvantage. The pistol makes Delilah as tall as 110 100 Samson. Then, the modern Samson can hardly, as a man of honour, be conceived of as defending himself with firearms against a woman; and, secondly, the American Delilah will under no circumstances be punished for betraying her lover into the hands of that big black knave of a Philistine, death. Mark Twain and Mr. Dudley Warner are only stating a simple fact when they assert in "The Gilded Age," that "the woman who lays her hand on a man, without any exception whatever, is always acquitted by the jury;" and the most famous of all the modern trials of California, and one upon which, we believe, Mr. Clemens drew largely for the plot of the novel above mentioned, is that of Laura D. Fair. This person shot a famous lawyer dead, in open day, on board a Sacramento river-steamer, as he sat by the side of his wife and children. There was no defence, and nothing of what would be considered in Europe as extenuating circumstances. A certain intimacy had existed between the assassin and her victim; it being known on the one side that the woman was a mere devotee of Our Lady of Loretto, and on the other side that the man was married. He returned to his duty and his wife--and his mistress shot him. The whole case. 111 101 And the verdict--the Californian jury, as every one knew it would do, disagreed, and the prisoner was discharged. She may be seen to-day at any matine´e in the leading theatre of San Francisco. Her dress will brush the dress of wife or sister on your arm as you enter or leave the most fashionable restaurants on California Street or Kearney Street. It is not true that she is a fair type of Californian women; but it is true that she might be for all that the laws of the country have as yet had to say in the matter.

Now, there is a something far from unmanly or repulsive in that French gallantry which, in judging a murderess, almost invariably associates the verdict with "extenuating circumstances;" and the Californian spirit is very Gallic in at least this respect; but for the sake of the sex itself a limit should be drawn somewhere--it is inconvenient for example to have one's dress soiled with one's husband's brains. Women should indeed be judged mercifully. The wicked woman is only a kind of thorn, and thorns are but buds rendered abortive by a sudden stoppage of the sap. Still, thorns are after all thorns, and must not be handled exactly as if they were blossoms, even where blossoms are as 112 102 valuable and rare as in the great woman-wilderness West.

To tell the whole truth, there is, however, something even more obnoxious than the thorn--a kind of woman even more hurtful than the utterly passionate and openly depraved. It is she who keeps what is mysteriously called a "respectable" place in Californian society, who takes advantage of the fewness of her sex and the laxness of law to glide from divorce court to divorce court, sucking husband after husband dry by her extravagance, then throwing him aside, and stepping upon his body as upon swines' husks to gain a higher place. There is nothing coarse, nothing depraved about her. She is as incapable of violence and hatred as of love. She has not the virtues even of passion: " C'est une cre´ature vie`rge de toute vertu ." She is not a thorn; she is only a Venus's fly-trap. She has as much heart as a plant, as much gluttony as an animal. She is Vale´rie Marneffe, she is Vivien, she is Faustine, all the fulvid wild-beast beauty washed out of the satin skin, all the red blood turned ichor--something to chill the veins of an octopus. Manon Lescaut would be too faithful for this roˆle, and Becky Sharp would be too ingenuous. It would 113 103 require a Becky Sharp triumphant, helped and developed by success and the comparative absence of competition.

One turns away with delight from this type of lamia to talk of the genuine Californian girl. She is perfect, this young girl, perfect to a fault or two. Like the best of us, not so good as to be in danger of premature death, but good for all that. With no one is there more freedom, more self-possession in every sense; with no one more self-respect, with no one more capacity to enforce respect. Super-abundance of sun and outdoor life somewhat strengthen and enlarge the physique without affecting the typical mental decision and quickness of the Anglo-American woman. She is generally very fair to see, and when at its best her beauty and brightness are far from being wholly of the superficies. She is, however, above all, devoted to the culture of such qualities as show well at the surface. Why should she not be so, when she finds them "pay" best? She is Athena more than Minerva, her mind takes the Greek rather than the Latin form. There is nothing clumsy about it. She is Lady Mary Wortley Montague very much, and Hannah More very little.

114 104

Some of the ladies of the Golden State are devout, but they are inclined to mix an unusual coquetry in the singing of those rather sensational hymns just now much in favour in American churches and chapels. To be sure of this, one has but to watch them a little. In the choir, the stray ringlets almost brush the silky moustaches as the two lean over the same book. Be it said very reverently, but very deliberately and decidedly, "Jesus, lover of my soul," is as a rule rendered with the general action and effect of " Robert, toi que j' aime ." Hymn after hymn! How the notes whirl from the tall pipes! How the white keys dance and the buffeted stops stumble madly! "Sweeping through the gate of the New Jer-u-sa-lem!" How the very atmosphere pulses, how the singers thrill, how the white lace gives and quivers like good canvas in a gale! The hearer, the on-looker, is despite himself carried, rapt away in vision apocalyptic--"Sweeping through the gates!" And lo, the gates are opened; lo, the singers enter, their beautiful ruby lips shaped aright, as it were by pronouncing "besom"--there is the low bow of the polite Peter--the swish of the costly robes as the fair saints "sweep" in--the swift 115 105 celestial-coquettish glance around shot from under deceitfully-drooping lashes--one may even kill a heart among the loungers in the porch, as one "sweeps through the gates of the New Jerusalem!"

Do not mistake. It is not we who have any fault to find with a little vivacity and coquetry. We, O fair ones, have but one lament, that is that there are so few of you--that there are so many of our brothers, to whom is refused Steele's "liberal education," to whom is denied all knowledge of that "heaven-drawing, eternal womankindliness," to which Goethe owed so much, and which he unfortunately so much abused. The lonely lords of Californian creation are deprived of a means of grace, and that in a double sense--for the "eternal womanly" can drive as well as draw--

A Wyf is Goddes gifte verrayly. Peraventure she may be your purgatorie;She may be Goddes mene and Goddes whippe;That shal your soule up into heven skippeSwifter than doth an arow of a bow.

116

CHAPTER VII.

THEIR MEN.

Thou shalt not see a fierce people, a people of a deeper speech than thou canst perceive; of a stammering tongue, that thou canst not understand.-- Isaiah xxxiii. 19.

The punishment of one financial bankrupt would do much to clear the commercial atmosphere. One thing certain, we should have fewer failures, for people would have to be more cautious. But however this may be, the contrast between the way in which justice is administered in this country and in England is too broad and humiliating. We have presumably no aristocracy, but then there is for all that a more slavish deference paid to rich men than anywhere else in the world. We have gotten to such a pass in San Francisco, that a millionnaire cannot be punished, no matter what he may do. Acts that would send inferior men to the State Prison, are passed over as unworthy of notice, when committed by persons who are supposed to have a strong bank account.--Leading Article, San Francisco Evening Bulletin , August 13, 1875.

Above all things good policy is to be used, that the treasures and moneys in a state be not gathered into few hands. For, otherwise, a state may have a great stock, and yet starve. And money is like muck, not good except it be spread. This is done chiefly by suppressing, or, at the least, keeping a strait hand upon the devouring trades of usury, ingrossing, great pasturages, and the like.-- Of Seditions and Troubles , BACON.

117 107

Then, too, in spite of all that is said about the absorbing and brutalising influence of our passionate material progress, it seems to me indisputable that this progress is likely, though not certain, to lead in the end to an apparition of intellectual life, and that man, after he has made himself perfectly comfortable, and has now to determine what to do with himself next, may begin to remember that he has a mind, and that the mind may be made the source of great pleasure.-- The Function of Criticism , MATTHEW ARNOLD.

THE typical Californian is supremely a man of business, polite, eager, indefatigable in work, restless, speculative, and differing from a noble lecturer of the present day, in the fact that he does believe "in the gospel of getting on," and that quickly. The word "patience" does not occur in the bright lexicon either of his youth or of his old age: to him La patience est la vertu des aˆnes . In dress, in manners, in language, he will appear on first view to differ little from the average Londoner. His hat, boots, and trousers would bear inspection in the Row; he has Jean-Jacques Rousseau's passion for fine and white linen; and his English, if its idioms are not exactly the same, is at least as pure as that to be heard any day in front of the Royal Exchange; and is spoken without the nasal drawl peculiar to some parts of New England, and without the Hanoverian stutter peculiar to some parts of England the olden.

118 108

Californian men seem to be happy among themselves, and to be carried over reverses of all sorts by a kind of mental dash, something between steady cheerfulness and fitful excitement, a perpetual ever-present something which may be called simmering or sub-excitement. The "contagious weariness" which Mr. Nadal, the latest American critic of England, declares he can catch in the tones alike of London men of fashion and of the ague-tormented, saleratus-fed "agricultural population along the water-courses of Illinois and Missouri"--this is not to be found among these hearty sunburnt men exalted with corn and wine. These are people that Fielding would have understood. They are far from exemplary in all respects. "That complete banishment of profanity from the conversation of men of fashion," which it is so refreshing to be able to say (on Mr. Nadal's authority), now obtains in England, has no parallel among the leaders of the world in the Golden State. It is the same with regard to all manner of euphemism. A spade is still very emphatically named a spade in "the land where the sun goes down;" and though people may have little to say, they say it shortly, sharply, brightly. This last is on 119 109 the whole not to be regretted by those who believe that it is an unpardonable sin, the sin of dulness, the sin against esprit ; by those who believe that the world is sick and weary enough already, and that he who bores the least of God's creatures should be cast into the deep sea with the millstone of his own wits hanged about his neck. We have heard that "the treasure" is sometimes hid in an earthen vessel, but ( pace Diogenes) are unaware of any scripture to support the opinion that heavenly oracles have ever manifested themselves through the mouth of a wooden tub. If it were not for the wild touch of race, of originality, which distinguishes the manner of Californian conversation, its matter must assassinate a foreigner. The pedal of provinciality is always down, and the drone of it would be unbearable but for an occasional rattling fugue of novel and often witty idiom. The want of a social academy, remoteness from some generally respected centre of correct taste, from centres of literature and art, tends to establish the tyranny of the shop. The dollar jingles, the bill rustles, with every movement of the tongue; people speak as if they chewed wheat and mouthed nuggets. The books, the pictures, the statesmanship of the 120 110 great world, fade into insignificance before the question of how a new pump is going to work in the Hi-You-Bubble-Jock Mine, or whether San Muerto-Quebrado will issue bonds to build a new county-court house, a smart shower having washed away the former edifice. Man is like a certain kind of hollow india-rubber doll: if you compress him at one point he will bulge out at another; but you cannot have the bulge without the corresponding compression; you cannot have the bulge all round. If social forces unite in developing the talent for making money, that talent will be developed to an extraordinary extent. It is unjust to demand and silly to expect that under such circumstances there should be also a development of talent in the direction of morals and manners, of conversation, of art, or of science. The Californians prefer to study their belles lettres "upon the coin," as Chesterfield puts it; and in that "metallic learning" they can hardly be surpassed. They are not misers; they do not seek money for the love of money: they seek it because it is the only way of reaching distinction their state of society affords.

For it is a distinction. It was truer of no 121 111 Greek state in the time of Plato than it is true of California at this hour: the "State is not one, but contains at least two States: one composed of rich, the other of poor men." The scale runs more rarely than in Europe as low as the misery of absolute starvation; but the distinctions above this, the distinctions between various degrees of poverty and richness seem more sharply, and above all more irritatingly marked than in older civilisations. Wanting money in California there is no other support; the mud cracks, and the social inferno swallows its victim. Lazarus cannot find so much as a dog to lick his sores; but give Lazarus the purse of Dives, and society would render the presence of dogs unnecessary.

Silver and gold are said by Liebig to perform the same functions in the State as the "round discs" called blood-corpuscles perform in the body. It is an easy synecdoche to read "blood" instead of "blood-corpuscles." Money is the blood of society, and the blood is the life. No one dreams of denying this. It is still to be added, however, that the blood may be the death--has often been this. Without objecting to blood one may deprecate apoplexy. Spain had a fit of it after swallowing 122 112 the Mexican mines. Rome died of it. Everybody knows someone in private life who is purple in the face with it. We may have no fault to find with blood, and may yet dislike to see the mythical Norse custom revived of drinking it from skulls, either sucked out of the drinker's own brains, or from the skulls of his fellow men trodden down in unrighteous, because unnecessary, battle. There is no ground to doubt that the poor shall be always with us; that while the world lasts the great mass of men will never be fit for anything better than beasts of burden for the few; yet it may be possible that some day some society for the prevention of cruelty will see to it that these animals of burden are not abused more than is absolutely necessary--that they are not treated habitually worse than those beasts in the desert, whose blood is drunk by their masters only when the water-bottles give out. To get rid of an allegory which begins to oppress us: there is just now in the Californian body social too great a rush of blood to the head, and the extremities are frost-bitten--a natural result, by-the-bye, of turning the body upside down and making believe that such distinctions as head and lesser members no longer exist in 123 113 nature. None sees this more clearly than an American of education. Says Professor Charles Adams, of the University of Michigan, in his "Democracy and Monarchy in France": "Where there is the greatest amount of liberty, there must necessarily in the long run be the least amount of equality." And again: "Remove to the largest possible extent the restraints of law and of force--that is to say, give to all men the largest possible liberty, and what is the result? It is--and it will always be--that the able and the unscrupulous, by means of a combination of ability and perfidy, will rise, and rise rapidly, above their fellows."

"Liberty, equality, fraternity!" the bright and beautiful theory! and as thick with fallacies as a sunbeam with motes. Brother of low degree, let us lift your ear-flap and whisper this: Gnash our tusks as we may, the strongest creatures are the strongest, and will somehow or other show themselves so at our expense. Better then let them string round the neck such pearls of social and political distinction as may possibly bribe them to use their strength for our advantage than that we should trample these pearls under our feet, till even the vilest snout amongst us has had his sniff 124 114 at them--while the strong, defrauded of their bauble, quietly avenge and degrade themselves by robbing our trough.

Lazarus will hear of no "artificial distinctions of rank," will call no man master; wriggling himself into an almost erect posture he coughs the dust from his throat and declares his equality with all the world. Dives nods, steps on him, and with a good-humoured smile ascends to his simple golden Republican throne.

"Land grabs," "mining grabs," the manipulation of gangs of Chinese labourers, are enabling a few persons "to fill themselves with gold as a sponge fills itself with water"--a phrase from M. Hugo which, taken literally, would indicate a sad mistake on the part of Dives if the gospel narrative is to be depended upon to its very close.

It is a favourite boast of this kind of person that he is a self-made man;" he is continually repeating this; it seems to him what the syllable "om" is to a Brahmin--and at the word a shudder of awful reverence, a veritable doelololuovia;, thrills his admirers. Strangely enough, we have never been so impressed. So much depends on one's definition of a man; so little on how the man has 125 115 made himself, so much on what he has made himself.

To leave manners for morals. In the matter of such virtues as have a public aspect and so come under everyone's observation, the Californians take a creditable position. Adopting the convenient divisions of Mr. Lecky, we may first say that they have developed "industrial veracity" to a considerable extent. The laws of the State, says Mr. Hittell, "allow no imprisonment for debt, except in cases of fraud, which it is almost impossible to prove." Again: "Such laws may prevent much oppression of poor people, but they also protect and encourage much rascality." Now, it is obvious that under such conditions as these, in a country where business is to a great extent based on credit, that no business at all could be done were there not at the heart of society a good sound core of veracity, and of faith in the veracity of one's neighbours. Gigantic frauds are indeed constantly heard of here as elsewhere, but it is well to be on one's guard as to the inference one draws from these or from a comparison of modern with old-fashioned trade morality in general. Sir Henry Maine, in his chapter on "Contracts," lays 126 116 judicious stress on the fact that "the very character of these frauds shows clearly that, before they became possible, the moral obligations of which they are the breach must have been more than proportionately developed. It is the confidence reposed and deserved by the many which affords facilities for the bad faith of the few." It is unfortunately necessary to add that the administration of the Californian laws tends to increase these facilities, and that these are taken advantage of to an extent rapidly becoming unbearable.

As to "political veracity," it has acquired west of the Sierra Nevada the dimensions of a Big Tree, a moral Sequoia gigantea , with some of the properties of the upas. The man who "runs for office" will find it overshadowing, not only himself, but his children, his wife, his mother, his wife's relations and his own to the third or fourth generation back. His political opponents will tell "the whole truth" about him, not alone what they know, but what they can surmise. Anonymous and open assailants will be protected by law in publishing "in good faith" such tittle-tattle of the slums and stews, such back-stairs gossip, as would ruin elsewhere not the man against whom, but the man or the cause by or for 127 117 whom they were collected and used as a weapon. An election is a garden-party with a whole country dancing under the Sequoia gigantea above-mentioned, its branches hung with lanterns of the malodorous missile kind used by the pirates of the China Sea.

And as to "philosophical veracity," it will no doubt flourish in the future, but it must be said that the philosophy to be veracious about has not yet found its way westward over the Rocky Mountains. In brief, touching veracity on subjects with which he is acquainted, the word of a Californian is as good as that of the average European; we are all more or less liable to the seductions of the mythopoeic faculty. We know what crusty M. Graindorge says--forgetting, unfortunately, to tell us which "time" it is with him as he speaks: "Good men in Paris lie ten times a day, good women twenty times a day, fashionable men a hundred times a day, and no man has ever been able to calculate how often a day fashionable women lie."

We observe in The San Francisco Bulletin , June 4th, 1875, a notice that "Private Dalzell is going to lecture on `The Two American Institutions--Lying and Stealing.'" We frankly 128 118 acknowledge our ignorance as to who "Private Dalzell" may be, and as to whether or where he ever delivered his lecture, but it must be said that its title does a profound injustice to the un-American world. On veracity we have already touched, and as to the question of honesty, it may be disposed of, as far at least as it touches California, by noticing that there is higher authority than that of a "Private Dalzell," for saying "to be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand." That proportion applied to the population of seven hundred and fifty thousand of the State under discussion would give a quotient of seventy-five. Now, it will suffice for the present purpose to say that, despite difficulties and temptations unknown to Denmark, California may claim (her "politicians" not counted in) a somewhat higher ratio of honesty to dishonesty than these figures would indicate. More, we are inclined to believe that in certain towns and townships, such as Oakland, where women of beauty and men of letters predominate, Hamlet's ratio should be taken inversely.

Dishonesty! that calls to mind the Sons of Belial on California Street, the "stock-gamblers," 129 119 the "bulls" and "bears" of San Francisco mining speculation. These ferocious creatures are the cause efficient of terrible rents both in fortunes and in reputations. Last year the public press thundered with accusations of perfidy, criminations and recriminations, in the form of letters, between two clergymen (one of them a professor in a theological college), about some little "stock-dabbling" ventures they had made in common. The wisest and best lose their senses as well as their money, stunned by the clash of tusk and horn where the bulls and bears are gathered together. This arena is strewn with the shreds of petticoats and geneva gowns. It is no place for the good and pure and unsophisticated. Few such, venturing down into this Ephesus to fight "after the manner of men," are allowed to escape to tell of it. The older Ephesus, now that one mentions it, seems to have been just such another place, a place to pick up thorns in the flesh, a place not unconnected with silver-mining, and addicted to the worship of a rather peculiar Diana. There, too, sat the famous "Robber Council," probably the Lesser Asiatic name for "board of brokers." To the pure all things are pure, or may be, except a Western 130 120 stockboard. Anywhere over the doors of California Street any good mental eye may read the inscription that Tubal-cain wrote over his brazen city, " De´fense a` Dieu d'entrer !"--No admission for God! This is the new tabernacle in the wilderness; here is the latter-day Holy of Holies; behind this veil is ever hidden a smoky figure--not of the Most High. Here are deathly mysteries of ritual and language: "Buyer short," "seller thirty," "cinch," "squeal," "rings," "corners," "freeze-outs"--of such are not the kingdom of heaven. Passovers, between two suns, occur here oftener than once a year. Keep out of the way. The brokers' tabernacle and its Levites have a way of mistaking anybody for a paschal lamb. Its members are "a peculiar people"--"peculiar" generally in the sense in which this word has been applied to That Heathen Chinee, and not unfrequently "peculiar" in another sense. Wherever the carcase of financial speculation lies there will the birds of the Jewry, the eagles of the Ghetto be gathered together, as their great country-man has written: Bending forward, bending nearer,With long beaks like human noses.

131 121

Ah, where have I seen such noses?Where already! in what street of--Hamburg was it? or of Frankfort?Mournful dawns the reminiscence!

But really, as between Hebrew and Gentile, the eloquence of facts is with Saint Paul in deprecating all jealousy and contempt or pride of race one way or the other: "there is no difference." Somebody has said that "all white people behave much the same in a room;" it is certain that they become undistinguishable on 'Change. Shylock recites the Athanasian Creed as often as his bond; Antonio may be a pillar of the synagogue. Heredity is, it must be said, a more treacherous guide to the meaning of a man than etymology is to the meaning of a word. "Substance" and "understanding," interpreted etymologically, signify the same thing, practically, two things as different as can well be imagined. Richard Cromwell is supposed to have been ethnologically very closely related to Oliver Cromwell, but all the forces of the universe and of Mr. Francis Galton cannot discover one fibre of mind common to the two men. Viewed in the mass the inhabitants of California have to a surprising extent a peculiar and homogeneous 132 122 character, though they are made up of all races, and though, to be comprehended perfectly by all, their laws should be promulgated, as were the decrees of the Persian kings, in the leading Aryan, Semitic, and Turanian languages. Men are like pendulums, and set side by side they have a vulgar fraternal tendency to time their oscillations by each other and fall into an exact common rhythm. There is a spirit now abroad, a kind of Charles the Fifth, which amuses its declining years by trying to make all its clocks strike at the same moment. Some practical philosophers have hopes to see in the near future a very pretty monotony--a kind of phalansterial premature heaven, where every one shall have his hair cut and oiled to pattern, and shall employ his palm branch as a broom or other useful implement of industry during so many hours a day, the rest of the time being devoted to sitting in rows on plain benches of equal height, singing the praises of the new system in common metre. It would be possible, but for one thing. Somewhere outside this little cosmic monastery where Charles the Fifth is so busy, there swings another pendulum; and its vast beats affect every now and then some little dusty 133 123 clock--call it genius, inspiration, avatar of the devil or the deity, what you will, but there is no horology given among men fit to account for, to regulate, to stop, that rebellious clock, or to hinder its terribly disturbing power upon its neighbours.

We have spoken above of the Athanasian Creed and the synagogue. We used the terms for convenience, but without much local propriety. Copies of both these things are to be found in California, and in excellent preservation, not the least in danger of being worn-out by use. San Francisco resembles the Scriptural Athens in having many temples and in being the city of "The Unknown God;" it differs from Athens in the fact that it does not worship him, whether "ignorantly" or otherwise. As Miss Greenwood has noticed, the typical Californian is not a pious man. Exactly what he is, no one can tell better than our keen-witted friend, Mr. John W. Gally, who personifies him--as far as religion is concerned--in his "Big Jack Small." The following extract explains itself:

"Mr. Small, do not you believe in the overruling providence of God?"

"Which God?"

134 124

"There is but one God."

"I don't see it, parson. On this yere Pacific Coast gods is numerous--Chinee gods, Mormon gods, Injin gods, Christian gods, an' The Bank o' Californy ."

The Reverend Mr. Sighall rose quickly to his feet, and pulled down his vest at the waistband, like a warrior unconsciously feeling for the girding of his armour.

"Do you deny the truth of the sacred Scriptures, Mr. Small?"

"I don't deny nothin', 'cept what kin come before me to be recognised. What I say is I don't see it."

"You don't see it?"

"No, sir!"--emphasis on the sir.

"Perhaps not with the natural eyesight; but with the eye of faith, Mr. Small, you can see it, if you humbly and honestly make the effort."

"I hain't got but two eyes--no extra eye fer Sunday use. What I can't see, nor year, nor taste, nor smell, nor feel, or make up out o' reck'lection an' hitch together, hain't nothin' to me."

Jack Small is only a teamster; Mr. Sighall is an excellent and learned clergyman; but Jack could 135 125 fill a hundred churches in California almost as quickly as Mr. Sighall could empty one. M. Claudio Jannet, in a late work, affirms that America is going to the dogs, politically and socially--because of her indifference to religion--meaning to say, of course, the modern Roman religion. If M. Jannet is right, then the Golden State is above all others on the verge of ruin. For there, what Mr. John Morley would describe as the "old" impulses--faith in a personified divinity, devout obedience to the "supposed will" of this deity, and hope, grounded on that obedience, of receiving in a future state some ecstatic eternal reward--all these have been, as a general rule, forgotten, or left behind in the passes of the Rocky Mountains. And unfortunately Mr. Morley's "new" impulses do not seem to have reached the Golden Gate. It would be mere sarcasm to say that Californian society is as yet actuated by the new "religion of humanity," by "undivided love of our fellows, steadfast search after justice, firm aspiration towards improvement, and generous contentment in the hope that others may reap whatever reward may be." It appears to us, moreover, that these "new" impulses have in great part been applied before to 136 126 the world's progress, by various schools of philosophy, and that the examples of their incomplete success must be carefully studied to find the reasons of that comparative failure.

It may be well to wish that the slavish spirit of ignorant reverence should be eradicated, or resolved at least into intelligent reverence; it may be well that men should no longer oppress and torture each other with the weapons of a stone age before the altar of a Baal; but there is after all something more degrading than slavery--it is servility. As ugly a taunt as ever shaped itself on the lips of man, is that of Paul-Louis Courier: " Vous eˆtes, non le plus esclave, mais le plus valet de tous les peuples " --not the most enslaved, but the most flunkeyish of all nations. For, to be oppressed is not in itself degrading--to be servile is. The chains of Baal are as a decoration of nobility when compared with the livery of Mammon. The servility that licks a dollar out of the dirt, is the infinite bathos of all worship.

Yet, apart from its tendency to cringe, from its weakness at the knees, when a coin jingles, there are many estimable things about good Californian society. Here may be found to a considerable extent, that recognised and respectable 137 127 "Protestantism in social usages," which Mr. Herbert Spencer so earnestly desires for Europe. San Francisco has no brummagem first gentleman among footmen, no Nova-Scotian baronet even to set up as a pope infallible in matters of etiquette and dress--to differ from whom or whose "set" is heresy. From at least that kind of provincialism Californians are free. Touching matters and manners essentially pleasing or unpleasing much fault can hardly be found with them, wherever women of grace and character abound in sufficient numbers to give the tone; but touching nonessentials they do not "demand" liberty of private judgment--they take it. And, astonishing as it must seem to us, the man who, pluming himself on vestmental orthodoxy according to Snips, or ritualistic orthodoxy according to Jeames, should presume on "a certain condescension" to misbelievers, would find himself smiled at or caned according to the extent of his insolence.

So--in an atmosphere which is a strange mixture of courage and panic, of independence and servility, of the respectable and the contemptible--this young branch of the great world-tree develops itself. Will it become the shelter and delight 138 128 of a noble nation, or a retreat for doleful and obnoxious people and things? The latter is unlikely. Its rudest and ruggedest days must be past, or nearly past. It is so full of the sap of the blood of a race which no Jesuits have ever been able to turn into hens, the sun shines on it so brightly, that its steady growth should throw off the parasites which disfigure it. But for all that there will be no immediate change in the main conditions of its growth. When Macaulay's "twentieth century" comes we shall see; but in the meantime it is useless to talk commonplaces of regenerating, in a single generation, a green plutocracy, by the turn of any political or religious crank, by education, or by the tempering of democracy with aristocracy. These are matters for "evolution." These are things not created in one day or in six--they grow. People can, indeed, be taught, pretty nearly at once, to read, write, and cast accounts; but the ability to comprehend marks made on paper, or to make these marks for oneself, has just as much and as little to do with education as the babbling and the ideas of a baby have to do with the language and the genius of Shakspere. The two things are different, not only 139 129 in quantity but quality; and the loss of a future continent vocal only with such infants--even though there were two hundred millions of them--might be more easily suffered by the human race than the annihilation of the trained and develope style and genius of Shakspere, on the morning when he headed a sheet of paper with the part title, "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark." The stage of intellectual education which makes a Shakspere possible can only be attained by a country when some considerable number of its inhabitants have in some way found to them means and leisure for the thinking out and the investigation of subjects having no connection with the ledger; and have, secondly, acquired the habit of holding in respect the full contour of a brain as well as the full contour of a pocket. "Knowledge," says Hallam, "will be spread over the surface of a nation in proportion to the facilities of education, to the free circulation of books, to the emoluments and distinctions which literary attainments are found to produce, and still more to the reward which they meet in the general respect and applause of society."

As to having recourse to an aristocracy in California under present circumstances, nothing 140 130 is less possible and, perhaps, less desirable. Even were it desirable and possible, it might still be hard to find the real aristocrats. The Comte de Gobineau, in a late work of fiction highly praised by the deceased Lord Lytton, estimates the number in all Europe of nobly-minded persons, the number of "well-born heads and hearts," at not more than "three thousand five hundred," who "shine in their isolation as Pleiades"--a ratio, by the way, something like ten times more discouraging than Hamlet's proportion of honest men to rogues. We need all our good Pleiades at home; for, in the mass, what have been called "the upper ten thousand" seem to be in full retreat, with a Jenkins for their Xenophon. Some of them have already cried &thgr;&agr;&lgr;&agr;&sgr;&sgr;&agr; have already seen the sea, have even run "violently down a steep place" into it, after a fashion set long ago in the country of the Gadarenes. If these be our gods, then the sun is setting; the awful twilight, Ragna-ro¨kr, comes; the hour of the complete overthorow of the divine is creeping on. We do not fear it as some seem to do. It must be admitted that the old gods have degenerated. Balder the beautiful, the joy of all creatures, the pride of all, is dead long ago. 141 131 Odin is no longer what he was when he first faced the Frost Giants; he has somehow lost an eye and become a mere bogie of the nursery. The terrible hammer of Thor is either lost or broken. Bragi, the eloquent, is, indeed, remembered by the word "brag"--and there is no fear of his disappearing, even in America, just yet. But sweet Freyja--pray heaven it be only a slander of Loki!--is said to be willing to sell herself to a dwarf for a gold chain. The high gods seem going, the Frost Cubs seem coming. If this must be, it must be; and yet the future is not wholly hopeless. The myths tell of a great cow, Audhumbla, who can lick these ice-lumps into shape. It was her tongue that formed the fathers of the old gods long ago. Let us take courage. Very coarse our young cubs look, and even red ; but after all they are not half so red as they are painted, nor as they themselves think they are. Audhumbla's tongue will gradually change all that, and marvellously round the outlines. Let us remember what our great grand-parents looked like to the Romans, and let us take heart of grace for the civilisation of the future. After all, there is more hope of a healthy Frost Cub than of a decrepit god.

142

CHAPTER VIII.

THEIR POLITICIANS.

Cela prouve que les gamins sont nos maiˆtres en politique, et que pour apprendre a` s'e´lever sans glisser, il faut imiter ce qu'ils font en montant au maˆt de cocagne. Et que font-ils donc, docteur?Ils le frottent de boue!

">Le Maˆt de Cocagne , E´MILE SOUVESTRE.

The men who find words to grumble, to bewail, to curse, to do everything but denounce, who find time for business, pleasure, rest, idling, but none for active opposition to the disgrace which they deplore, are only less guilty in degree than the men whose villainies are making our name a hissing at home and abroad....Ten years ago we had wrung from the world an amazed respect and admiration for our courage, our constancy, our unlimited power of self-devotion and sacrifice. What have we added to ourselves in these ten years? Several new varieties of infamy. What is the name of America now in Europe?--A synonyme for low rascality.-- What is an American ? "Atlantic Monthly," May, 1875.

High wages here, under such circumstances, do not mean what they would elsewhere, since they do not at all add to the wealth of the receiver, but only to his power to exist in spite of a general system of public plunder, which he can by no possibility evade. For this reason, although wages may be nominally high, 143 133 they are really as low or lower than in Europe.--Leading Article, San Francisco Chronicle , July 7th, 1875.

Every person who pays taxes, may justly conclude that he is defrauded out of one-half the amount.--Leading Article, San Francisco Call , July 4th, 1875.

A community is said to be in a state of anarchy, when everybody does what he pleases. We are not far from such a condition. Great corporations and citizens, powerful by reason of their wealth, are above the law. They not only do what they please, but make the local government their confederate and accomplice. We do not think that the picture here presented is in the least overdrawn. If it were possible to soften it in any particular, local self-pride would suggest such a course. But in the existing state of affairs, any consideration of that kind would be weakness. There is nothing suitable for the case but actual cautery.--Leading Article, San Francisco Bulletin , August 14th, 1875.

The Report of the late Attorney-General for the years 1874 and 1875....While the laws are good enough, he thinks there should be more certainty of punishment. He adds: The administration of criminal justice in almost every county in the State (of California) is absolutely and unqualifiedly corrupt . This corruption generally lies with trial and grand jurors. He wants the crime of bribing jurors to be made particularly dangerous.-- Sacramento Record-Union , January 1st, 1876.

Theoretically, a democratic government affords a fine opportunity for the selection of the best man for the highest office, by the voice of a grateful, trusting, and admiring people. In fact, the best man never gets the highest office, and would never stoop to the low tricks and disgraceful compromises of personal dignity and political principle by which alone, under the present condition of things, the highest office can be secured."--Leading Article, "Scribner's Monthly," November, 1875.

The facility with which the legislature can be manipulated, and brought to sanction schemes fraught with injury to the people, is not a circumstance peculiar to California; although in several instances, heavy blows have in this way been struck at the prosperity of San Francisco. Distrust of the legislature 144 134 often leads the people to reject that which is good, from the fear that an undertaking which looks well at the start, may be so managed as to result in ruin. Thus it seems impossible to carry out any general system of irrigation, or of forest culture and preservation, desirable as these things may be, because the people have no confidence in anything which has to be managed by the legislature, or which can be interfered with by that body at any time, and diverted to the subservience of private ends.--Article "California," in the "Encyclopædia Britannica," Ninth Edition, 1876, J. D. WHITNEY. Nous ne pre´tendons pas que le portrait que nous faisons icisoit vraisemblable: nous nous bornons a` dire qu'il est ressemblant.

-- Les Mise´rables , HUGO.

MANY of us will volunteer on suitable occasions the statement that "we are miserable sinners." Few of us will bear to be taken at our word in this matter by others. There is a tall Byronic pride in asserting oneself naughty which breaks short off when echo heartily returns the charge. The owner of an hotel is quite willing to abuse his servants as the worst and most infamous the world can show, but the traveller who should make the same accusation would find himself hotly taken to task for it. When the traveller is a foreigner, the hotel a country, the hotel-keeper a nation, when the servants are its government officials, then the situation of the plaintive guest becomes supremely delicate and dangerous. Hard to please, disagreeable, peevish, insolent--these will naturally be 145 135 among the least harsh things said about himself in reply. One thing, however: if he is an outspoken person, and if the opportunity has presented itself, he will not be accused of having concealed his dissatisfaction till distance secured him from the unpleasant consequences of its expression. On this point the author of the present work may as well remark in passing that he is invulnerable. While no one can be more unwilling than himself to call attention to, or to withdraw even the ashes of his literary wild-oats from the oven, it must be quite permissible to note that during his residence in California, the articles which occasionally appeared under his signature, and the leading articles in the magazine of which he was the responsible editor, were habitually--too habitually--characterised by a sweeping severity of condemnation in dealing with Californian faults, which perhaps did not always halt far enough on this side the limits of charity and of good taste, and beside which, by contrast at least (though we hope also on better grounds), the tone of the present work must appear cautious, impartial, and sympathetic.

"Let bygones be bygones!" as someone said when dying and pressed hard on the subject of 146 136 his sinful life. In the fury of youth and the flush of battle we have hewed wildly at Dagon in his very temple, and fought with his priests foot to foot through every street in Ashdod; but now that the breath of the adversary is no longer hot against the face, now that the sun has gone down upon all wrath, now that distance and years and the cool airs of the larger world roll over the past the quiet as of a buried city, we may again turn to Dagon, may take him up with the tenderness of an Izaak Walton, "as if we loved him."

Dagon is at the root of government by universal suffrage; that is to say (theories aside), government by a class; that is to say (as the real world runs), government by the meanest, government by the most ignorant, government by those most liable to, and least able to cope with, temptations to evil. Dagon is the insane principle of mechanical rotation in office. Dagon is at the root of this, and in his flower and fruit he is the Old Anarch. We go on to show that we do not in a single point speak without book.

The judges of the Supreme Court of California are elected by "the people" for a term of ten years. The judges of the District Courts are elected 147 137 by "the people" for a term of six years. The officials of the County Courts are elected for terms of two or of four years. As to these county officers, to use the mildly sarcastic language of Mr. Hittell, "the term of service being brief, re-election doubtful, ejection for incompetency unheard of, and punishment for malfeasance--notwithstanding the frequency of the offence--very rare, there is no sufficient motive to stimulate the officials to study their duties, or to comply very strictly with them, so far as is known."

Members of the State Senate are elected for a term of four years. Members of the State Legislature are elected for a term of two years. Again Mr. Hittell, the democrat and Californian: These "members generally are men with little experience in business, and little character. Gross corruption is common among them."

Not an office, from that of the bench to that of the baton, but is kicked, and kicked frequently, like a football through the filth of a contested party election. Once more our Californian authority: "The Federal as well as the State offices are the subjects of scramble once in four years, or oftener, and success is not determined by the 148 138 public interests. The partisan system of the United States is corrupt and corrupting everywhere, and in few States has its influence been more corrupting than here."

In San Francisco alone there are over a hundred officials to be periodically elected by "the people." Practically, decent people have, and can have, little to say in the matter. The men already in office (and so controlling the funds necessary for bribery), a few low political clubs, made up of needy and disreputable persons who want to make money in their trade of "voting-early-and-often," together with those who need and are prepared to pay for their industry--these hold the keys of the political heaven. Few men with a reputation to lose and the means of earning an honest livelihood, are willing to soil the one in the crush at the gate, or to exchange the other for a precarious and "scaly" position--to win which one must pass under the Big Tree already mentioned in a former chapter, the Liberty Tree, the tree of the knowledge of evil, the Sequoia gigantea of the Great Republic, decorated with its peculiar kind of Chinese lantern, and clustering thick with Yahoos, who gibber and cast their filth at every one cleaner 149 139 than themselves. We cannot attempt to describe the sort of men who do present themselves as candidates, and who are necessarily elected in default of better. Putting aside the more disgusting elements of this farce, there is an infinitely ludicrous and an infinitely impudent side to it, before which even ridicule sits down helpless and silent: nature has done so much that there is nothing left for art to do. We doubt, for example, if the Londoner, Parisian, or Berliner exists who is perfectly capable of conceiving of the state of municipal things which can seriously produce, and cause to be seriously received, the following unexceptional and genuine "card," taken word for word, letter for letter, point for point, from The San Francisco Call of July 28th, 1876:

AN EQUAL RIGHTS CANDIDATE FOR CHIEF OF POLICE OF SAN FRANCISCO.--James Hall respectfully solicits the above office from all parties; he is the head of a numerous family; patient, persvering, active, industrious, with large experience in Police duties; twenty years a resident of this city; knows and is known generally and favorably; contributes largely to supoort city government; in favor of impartial selection of persons qualified for membership, and of each nationality in just proportion to the voters thereof.

We do not know whether the peculiar grammar, spelling, and punctuation of this document are the 150 140 product of the unaided industry of the "head of a numerous family," or whether the "numerous family" assisted him in its composition, or how much or how little it owes to the genius of his printer; but, for all its pathos Mr. Hall's friends did not appear at the poll early enough and often enough to serve his purpose, and he must content himself for the present with increasing his police experience in his old capacity of full private, with multiplying his "numerous family" claims, with knowing "generally and favorably," and with anything else that may occur to the logical mind of an equal rights candidate for a chieftainship . It is not such a bad thing after all to be a private in the ranks of the San Francisco police. There are beats in the Chinese Quarter and along "The Barbary Coast," Dupont Street, and other localities of ill-fame, where the constables levy an open blackmail of from two to five dollars per head per week on the unfortunates who tenant these places, and whom the chaos of law and the carelessness of public opinion leave wholly at their mercy. And it is a fact undeniable in San Francisco that the men on such beats are generally able to retire from active duty at the end of four years with a 151 141 comfortable competence for the rest of their lives. It is hardly then a matter for wonder that, in the words of The Bulletin (August 14th, 1875), the Chinese regard the local government "as an institution to be placated with backsheesh rather than an organisation for the maintenance of society," and "administer justice, such as it is, among themselves."

In 1875, one Miller, a well-known bigamist, and a man who defrauded the Central Pacific Railroad Company of immense sums, attempted to fly with his booty. But for the energy of the Company itself there is little doubt that they would never have seen again either Miller or their money. They seized him, however, constituted themselves his judges and jailors, and, for two months, the Californian law courts and government had the pleasure of looking on at the edifying spectacle of a public criminal privately confined, tried, and squeezed empty of his ill-gotten gains. At the end of the two months, and when the Company had recovered all that was possible, they allowed the government to take its man off their hands and to do with him as seemed good to them. But the Company took no more interest in the matter; they had their own 152 142 methods of doing themselves justice; they recognised no appeal to the inferior tribunals of the State of California. Again, to go no farther back than 1875, three grand juries practically declared that general official theft and the particular crime of receiving bribes to reduce assessment were not only not to be punished but not to be heard of or investigated, when committed by the tools and agents ( les aˆmes damne´es ) of certain wealthy men, "rings," and banks. No grand jury, for example, could be found to bring in a true bill against even such capital and notorious municipal swindlers as Marks, Buckley, Rosener. It was the latter who, as assessor, took bribes from the bankers and "ring-men" above alluded to--a thing publicly and arrogantly admitted on the part of the bribers. Such bribery is an indictable offence under the statutes of the State; but we need not add that no jury of merchants and citizens of "the free and independent" could be found to incur the slightest displeasure of, much less to indict, the lords on 'Change, the dispensers of banking favour, the directors of banking vengeance.

Thus the most unblushing frauds are perpetrated without even the pretence of concealment. Liberty 153 143 is no longer a fair goddess but a raddled hag, bought and sold. The roots of what Mr. Gladstone would probably call "a upas," have become entangled among such a compact mass of office-holders and friends of office-holders that they have come to be almost regarded as vested interests. Any attempt to interfere with them creates such indignant outcry among the disturbed as did in England the suppression of the rotten boroughs or the reform of rotten municipalities. How is all this to be cured? Not by sermons we are afraid, however unctuous, or by talk however "tall." Ah, how often one has to smile on hearing some Sunday-school philosopher of the extreme intuitional school treat of conscience as an eternal element of human nature, and picture the tortures of that "ayenbite of inwit" which is supposed to make Dead Sea apples of guilty gain! The sinner's unhappiness rarely begins so long as he is allowed to retain possession of his spoils; his grapes never sour so long as they are within reach. Conscience does not make so many cowards as the penitentiary. The Dead Sea apples of "inwit" are a simple quack medicine when left to themselves to cure the disease of sinfulness. Much better where crime 154 144 runs high is that rude old Pantagruelian herb, on whose merits and qualities the good physician of Meudon somewhere dilates. This plant, which the vulgar call hemp, is of a most sovereign and marvellous virtue to point a moral, or adorn a cart-tail, or even a gibbet. Applied in mild cases to the back as a rope's-end, or in the form of the harmless necessary cat, and in times of crisis to the neck, in the manner prescribed by the art of the harmful but necessary Ketch--it is a means for the restoration of political and social health, for which on the whole no equally efficient substitute has yet been found. The mills of the gods grind too slowly in California; they might go farther and fare worse than try the tread-mill. " Quid mores sine legibus ?" asks a parody on Horace; but badly administered laws are worse than none, for law as well as morality is profaned.

Is honesty the best policy? It has been said that the answer to this question depends very much on the efficiency of the police, which is true enough in a certain sense, but yet in the long run apt to mislead those who habitually mistake the second person of the possessive for the first. Thieves, both of the coarse-fingered and of the gloved class, 155 145 are so apt to imagine the policeman only as a person with a baton and a uniform; the fact being that every honest brave man is of the police, and that he of the baton is only the honest man's servant in livery. When able thieves have dodged the baton, or, as often happens, "on an equal rights" basis, when they bear it themselves, they imagine themselves safe, and with head stuck ostrich fashion in some bush of office, they attempt contumeliously to outbrave the wrath of plundered men. But this cannot go on. Honesty must be the best policy whatever the efficiency of the police with batons. Honest men must be the best off in the long run, must be and must show themselves the superiors in numbrs, intelligence, and courage to the dishonest, or even the thieves would starve. For roguery consumes always and produces nothing--not even a profitable leg-power for treadmills.

However good may be the abstract legislative meaning of the legal forms in Californian use, their concrete executive meaning is unmistakably not good. Justice is blind still and a little deaf too on the side of equity, but she has learnt a certain finger alphabet by which the worst and meanest can under given conditions come to a perfect 156 146 understanding with her. Have gold in your palm when you take her by the fingers. The ex-Governor of Salmigondin had learnt the secret: " Or c¸a, or c¸a, or c¸a!" De la`, je prins conjecture, comme pourrions francs et delivre´s eschaper, leur jectant or la`! "

Of course it is not meant to be even insinuated that all the holders of office in California, legal and political, are fairly represented by Chief-Justice Grippeminaud. We have the honour of the friendship of three or four, as perfect and as honest gentlemen as if they had never entered "public life." Others, again, though uncouth and springing from the lowest estate, give as much surprise by the display of good qualities in the exercise of their real authority as Sancho Panza did in the use of his imaginary power. But their resemblance to the honest peasant of La Mancha too often ends in the fact of their being illiterate and, when they enter their office, poor. Most of them can truly enough say, "Without a white cent I came to this government;" few can add, "and without a cent I leave it."

Corruption! The word has become a common-place; one is sick of repeating it, sick of illustrating it. From the black and bulky roll of 157 147 notes before us under this heading, we shall trouble the reader with but one extract, selected for its novelty. In the early part of 1875 it somehow slipped out that the local authorities in the matter of education had such connection with an under-waiter or dish-washer of the Grand Hotel in San Francisco, that applicants for positions as teachers in the public schools of the city could, by paying this sculleryman sums ranging from twenty dollars up to a hundred, secure assurance of appointment. The appointments were sold and the buyers installed as teachers on these terms and irrespective of mental qualifications, as was admitted under cross-examination by a considerable number of the persons concerned. The result of much clamour was that several teachers were dismissed, nominally for having bought their positions as described, really because they had given dangerous evidence and had admitted the purchase; but not one of the higher officials of the Board of Education, none of the responsible functionaries who had made and dealt out the appointments exactly as they had been retailed by the scullion, none of these was reached by any punishment other than that of public opinion. Under their honourable signatures, or by 158 148 speeches, in the English peculiar to Boards of Education in the Far West, they disposed of the case in their jaunty way as in effect a series of rather remarkable coincidences stretching over six months or a year.

The story runs that the ermine sometimes dies of grief when anything happens to soil or destroy the whiteness of its fur. The Mus candidatus of California has no such prejudices. He may enter his little hole of office white as an angel's wing; but when he comes out again he is generally too black for any fuller on earth to whiten him; still, he never dies of grief.

Though Saint Luke shows it plainly enough, it has not been noticed by commentators that when the Saviour said "It is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God," our Lord had his eyes fixed not on rich men in general (as has been up to this hour most unjustly taken for granted) but on a particular type of rich man, on an &agr;&rgr;&khgr;&ohgr;&ngr;, an office-holder, an elected official, a successful "politician" in a word. This and this only was the kind of rich man in question at the time, and it is a shame that it should devolve upon a layman to call attention to 159 149 the point. It is after all only by close study that truth and justice can be subserved, and it was for want of this that George Gordon Lord Byron, sent a Bible to his publisher and friend Mr. Murray with the pleasant but ungracious emendation that "Barabbas was a publisher." The popularity of Barabbas with the mob should surely indicate a quite different vocation, and when it is added that that "he was a robber" it becomes unnecessary for us to add another word on the subject. The early retirement of the noble lord from politics is, we believe, largely responsible for his rash exegesis in this matter.

Again, Judas, surnamed Iscariot, held fiscal office in the first Christian commonwealth, and it is to be regretted that his official successors in later republics have a habit of following his precedent of conduct too far--or not far enough.

As to judicial office, the virtuous and wise Pantagruel declined a place on the Bench of Paris, because "it was with too great difficulty that those who filled such places could save their souls." Then looking at the judges around him, he ventured the further opinion, that if the empty seats in heaven were not filled up by "another sort of 160 150 people" those seats would remain empty for an indefinite period. Positions of responsibility and authority have been, as we see, disgraced before to-day.

A glance into the upper legislative assembly the Senate of the State of California. On January 20, 1876, the Honourable Senator Laine offered the following resolution:

"Whereas--On the eighteenth day of January the Hon. J. W. Wilcox, a member of the Assembly of the State of California, immediately after a temporary adjournment of the Senate of the said State entered the Senate Chamber while the same was occupied by a large number of its members, officers, and attache´s , armed with a cane and pistol, and then and there made an angry and violent attack upon the person of one Somers, who was seated at his desk, upon the floor of the Senate, within its bar, engaged in the peaceful and quiet discharge of his duties as a reporter for a newspaper of the State, and under the protection of the Senate, and did then and there beat and wound said Somers with said cane, and draw and exhibit said pistol to the terror, dismay, and danger of all present.

"Whereas--In the judgment of the Senate the 161 151 conduct of said Wilcox was reprehensible, and tarnishing to the reputation of the Legislature and the people of the State, and was a contempt of the Senate; therefore be it Resolved--"

No matter what was resolved, for, by a vote of 23 as against 14, it was decided that "the conduct of said Wilcox was not reprehensible and tarnishing to the reputation of the Legislature," and the Hon. Senator Tuttle moved and carried "the indefinite postponement of the whole subject." It will be felt by those who know "the reputation of the Legislature" best, that the Hon. Senator Tuttle was right, that it would be as fit to talk of gilding refined gold, as to speak of "tarnishing" in this connection; and above all, it will be felt that the reporter who takes his seat "under the protection" of the Honourable Senate, and goes "within its bar," unprovided with his bludgeon and his pistol, simply deserves his fate.

Reprehensible examples of unparliamentary violence, bodily and verbal, occur rather frequently in the modern history of American legislative assemblies. It is not so very long since the late Mr. Sumner was clubbed half to death in his chair on the floor of "the House" at Washington; and 162 152 the knife and pistol point and adorn the political argument in California and in Nevada too often to be thought worthy of even a vote of censure. It is only due, however, to the honourable law-makers and law-breakers of the Great West to say that they are to a great extent exchanging steel for gold, as a weapon of debate, and that their real discussions are now generally carried on in a low voice in the lobby, while their public proceedings are incomparably milder and duller than those of, say, the last Œcumenical Council of the Holy Catholic Church, when an anti-infalliblist bishop was on his legs, or even a Brooklyn Council, with a Moulton to be hissed down, and threatened with weapons as he passes out; scenes both, reminiscent of the cheerful, youthful days of the primitive church, especially at the time of the "Robber Council" of Ephesus, when, apropos of a little "difficulty" about Nestorianism, His Lordship the Pontiff of Alexandria buffeted and "kicked like a wild ass," or caused to be kicked and buffeted, His Lordship the Pontiff of Byzantium, so that the latter lingered three days in mortal agony, and then passed away, let us hope to a place where pontiffs cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.

163 153

Neither must California be stigmatised as the only modern country unfortunate in its legislators. Kindred political systems tend to produce the same results in other places. A reference to the Melbourne papers of January, 1876, will show that the Legislative Assembly Chambers of that city is anything but a home of decency and decorum. And the following, from a London paper, is as it were a selection from the first chapter of a history whose end no one acquainted with American politics need be a prophet to foresee:

"A meeting of the Royal Colonial Society was held on Wednesday evening, 26th April, 1876, at the Pall Mall Restaurant, under the presidency of the Duke of Manchester, when the Bishop of Melbourne read a paper on the progress of the colony of Victoria. What was most to be deplored with regard to the character of the colonists was, he said, that there was no intelligent middle class, who could devote their time to the study and direction of the Administration, both legislative and municipal. The result of this was that, universal suffrage having been established, and the bulk of the uneducated men being led away by stump oratory, men became elected to the 164 154 governing bodies who were in no way fit to have a part in the active direction of affairs."

Closing this chapter, we wish to be distinctly understood as disavowing any intention to leave upon the mind of any reader the idea that the Californians are "rotting before they are ripe"--as to their "institutions" that is quite another matter. But we insist upon the exceptional necessity in this case of separating the people from their government. It is not as in Europe, where institutions have grown with and become part of a given nation, under mutual unconscious modifications and adaptations, going on for centuries. In California the system of government is an upstart muddle of raw theories and make-shifts, which certainly appears bearable only because the country is so large and the inhabitants comparatively so few that they can as yet manage to keep pretty well out of each other's way. The people as a people have neither made their government nor grown up with it. They have never even given its working the benefit of their serious attention. As it exists, it depends for its very life upon the vice of the vicious, the ignorance of the ignorant, and the sad or careless contempt of the honest and the educated. That 165 155 "respect for the parish constable" upon which Mr. Carlyle justly lays such stress, that dear, stubborn patience with things and forms which exist, so characteristic of the English race whereever found--this it is that keeps the honest Anglo-American from leading his knaves and fools in office to the lamp-post, as a Franco-American would probably have long since done. There is nearly enough for everybody to eat and to drink his fill, and the resolute private citizen can keep his house almost as if it were his castle. Why should he then trouble himself with the thieves who levy black-mail on him in a "smart," peaceful fashion, and swagger along the highways of government? The game he thinks is not just yet worth his while!

The extracts which introduce this chapter, show that no stranger can outdo in severity of criticism the Americans themselves. Take, again, the lately published "Gilded Age," of Mark Twain and Dudley Warner. No alien can hope to succeed in displaying and detailing the utter degradation of United States "politicianism," as this novel has. And a criticism of it, which we have somewhere read, by M. Th. Bentzon, is appreciative and just in all respects but one. The French critic does 166 156 not seem to notice, and certainly lays no stress on the fact, that such merciless tearing away of the last shred of illusion from an infamous system, such rude mockery of its ugliness and nakedness, cannot but have its effect on the object attacked. After all, how little root must the "corruption" of the Gilded Age have in the hearts of the people, how little support can it expect in the inevitable death-struggle with honesty, how ephemeral must be its pinchbeck glory, when that satirist who is the favourite, not alone of any little circle of cultivated people, but of the great masses, can make this "corruption" the profitable subject of his hisses and his jeers.

Everyone has read of a certain famous hunter, who, taking aim at a 'coon, was addressed by the animal:

"Hillo! who are you?"

"Martin Scott."

"Well, then, you needn't shoot; I'll come down. I'm a gone 'coon."

If the average Californian "politician" has only half the common sense of Captain Scott's racoon, Macaulay's "twentieth century," will be likely to see him "come down," without waiting for unpleasant formalities.

167

CHAPTER IX.

THEIR WRITERS.

Vie de patience et de courage, ou` l'on ne peut lutter que reveˆtu d'une forte cuirasse d'indiffe´rence a` l'e´preuve des sots et des envieux, ou` l'on ne doit pas, si l'on ne veut tre´bucher en chemin, quitter un seul moment l'orgueil de soi-meˆme, qui sert de baˆton d'appui; vie charmante et vie terrible, qui a ses victorieux et ses martyrs, et dans laquelle on ne doit entrer qu'en se re´signant d'avance a` subir l'impitoyable loi du væ victis !-- Sce`nes de la Boheˆme , HENRY MURGER.

Mari A. Eh bien! moi, j'admire les gens de lettres, mais de loin; je les trouve insupportables; ils ont une conversation despotique; je ne sais ce qui nous blesse le plus de leurs de´fauts ou de leurs qualite´s, car il semble vraiment que la superiorite´ de l'esprit ne serve qu'a` mettre en relief leurs de´fauts et leurs qualite´s.

">Femme B. Mais Monsieur A., vous eˆtes bien difficile! I1 me semble que les sots ont tout autant de de´fauts que les gens de talent, a` cette diffe´rence pre`s qu'ils ne savent pas se les faire pardonner!-- Physiologie du Mariage , BALZAC.

Malgre´ la re´serve que nous nous sommes toujours impose´e dans nos voyages, nous introduirons le lecteur avec nous chez Zichy, sans croire abuser de l'hospitalite´ offerte: si l'on doit s'arreˆter sur le seuil du foyer intime, on peut, ce nous semble, entre-baiˆller la porte de l'atelier.-- Voyage en Russie , tom. i. p. 293, THE´OPHILE GAUTIER.

">Cade . Be brave then; for your captain is brave, and vows 168 158 reformation. There shall be in England, seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny; the three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops; and I will make it felony to drink small beer: all the realm shall be in common, and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass.

[Enter some bringing in the Clerk of Chatham .]

Smith . The Clerk of Chatham; he can write and read and cast account.

Cade . O monstrous!

Smith . We took him setting of boys' copies.

Cade . Here's a villain!

Smith . H'as a book in his pocket, with red letters in't.

Cade . Nay, then he is a conjurer.

Dick . Nay, he can make obligations, and write court-hand.

Cade . I am sorry for't: the man is a proper man, on mine honour; unless I find him guilty, he shall not die.

--Second Part of King Henry VI., SHAKSPERE.

It may help us somewhat to understand Californian journalism, if we approach it not as a personification or being standing by itself, possessed of a moral or immoral nature, and responsible for its actions, but as a being living by and moving by certain external powers over which it has little control. In theoretic exactness of course all causes and effects are more or less reversible, interchangeable. Put a bit of red-hot iron into a horse-pond, and it will be open to philosophers to say that it has heated the pond. For all practical purposes, however, the result of the experiment may be described as a cooling of the iron. In California, newspapers do not so 169 159 much shape public opinion, as public opinion shapes the newspapers. They are made to sell, and to sell on the spot and at once; neither posterity nor people, a few hundred miles off, can affect them in any way; in face of a small population and immense competition, their very life depends on selecting and publishing daily, what tickles most and wounds least some effective majority of readers. If there were large numbers of these of all classes of intelligence and culture, the papers would have choice and independence between one and another; but this is not the case. It is therefore as unjust for anyone to attack the journal of the Western States for being provincial, for being one-sided, or for what not, as it would be to revile a country tailor for not cutting his clothes after some far-off metropolitan model. The poor tailor, though he makes the clothes, is perhaps the last man in the village who has anything to say as to their cut. Not a lapel, not a button, not a seam but is the product of a stage of evolution, for which no one man nor class of men can or should be made conspicuously responsible. An able critic ( pace M. de Pontmartin), the late The´ophile Gautier, presses this point, in terms indeed too 170 160 unqualified and too general; still, those who are deafened with the commonplaces of the opposite view, can bear to see the shield turned occasionally, even with a little violence.

"Books follow morals and manners; morals and manners do not follow books. The Regency has made Cre´billon, it is not Cre´billon who has made the Regency. The little shepherdesses of Boucher were rouged and low-bodiced because the little marchionesses were rouged and low-bodiced. Pictures copy their models and not the models the pictures. I know not who has said I know not where, that literature and the arts influence morals and manners. Whoever he may be, he is indubitably a great blockhead. It is just like saying, Green peas bring spring. Green peas come, on the contrary, because it is spring, and cherries because it is summer. Trees bear fruits; assuredly it is not the fruits that bear the trees--a law eternal and invariable in its variety. The centuries succeed each other and each bears its fruit, which is not that of the century preceding. Books are the fruits of morals and manners."

Now, though after all, there are exceptions to all this (after the manner of the odd clocks which 171 161 no Charles the Fifth can regulate) and though one is here, as so often elsewhere in this mixed world, forced to figure like the Landlord Snell of George Eliot, and say that "there's two opinions" and "they're both right," it must be said that Gautier's opinion is particularly the right one in the present instance. In Western American mining towns and agricultural districts where primeval manners and morals are as rough as the back of Esau's hand, the newspapers are rough--the paper is whity-brown, the types are blurred, the ink is dim, the style should drive a sensitive Times or De´bats editor mad, the grammar is enough to make Lindley Murray turn in his very shroud. An occasional article marked by correctness of expression or elevation of thought might be indeed hazarded by a popular editor; his subscribers might be willing to ascribe it to a moment of mental aberration induced by whisky; but the experiment would be a dangerous one. It was as much as one's life was worth in the old days of the plantation to speak in nasal tones among men with slit noses.

In the larger cities the newspapers mirror exactly, stage for stage, the larger culture and the better-founded opinions of the available readers. 172 162 If they also mirror the information and the ideas of their editors it is a convenient coincidence, and nothing more. This may be made more apparent by the statement of the fact that at least one-half of the writers on the San Francisco press are foreigners by birth and education, and that at least one quarter of them are still foreigners at law and in sentiment. They are merely the secretaries and echoes of public opinion, and their clients find them as laborious and accurate in this capacity as any to be found of native birth and training. The best Californian journals present really good and timely summaries of news, and even occasionally, as we have shown by extracts (all, as far as our knowledge goes, written by Americans), they venture, on the strength of their merits in this respect, to speak a wholesome truth without regard to its palatableness--especially when it can be connected with the shortcomings of some hostile man or party. They are far from perfect these papers, but they are as perfect as they can afford to be, and it is only the merest justice to say that their writers are in the main men far ahead, in all points, of the voting public, and that the general tone of their personal influence as far as 173 163 it is prudent to exert it is of an elevating character. They are like some statesmen, who, by dexterous action, can often contrive to lead where they seem to follow their constituents.

We are afraid to guess at the number of newspapers published in California. Every little district and village has its one, two, or three "organs," according to the number of separate political or business interests that can sum up one or two hundred subscribers. The functions of editor, leader writer, reporter, printer, and newsboy are often united in one person, who may be at the same time the schoolmaster, doctor, or lawyer of the hamlet. He must "look up" grocery advertisements, chronicle the raids of stray pigs, the "difficulties" between "prominent citizens," and at the same time be as much as possible in the tavern, which is always the prytaneum of the district, the centre of speech and action, the principal resort of the various "governors," "judges," and "colonels," who make up the local magnates, and who are surprisingly abundant among a people who despise the factitious distinctions of rank. He must know how to use the scissors and should know how to use the bowie-knife, unless, as many do, he prefers a sand-bag. 174 164 The country editor, in a lively growing place where subscriptions are paid only and paid precariously in corn, pumpkins, and bacon cannot afford to carry a pistol--at the present prices of ammunition. Where there are so many competitors, each man who would live must spice his articles till they burn, and burn somebody . Vague battles with the abstract do not suit men brought up to enjoy a dog-fight. The editor must provide the dog-fight, or something as good, and cannot always avoid taking a part as one of the combatants. This may account for the large proportion of young and healthy journalists in those quarters: a man has not time to grow old in the business or to starve in it.

San Francisco and Sacramento are getting away from this stage of development. Still, we are confident that a majority of their prominent newspaper writers have at one time or other each taken part, passive or active, in at least one murderous assault. We recall one scene out of several which we happened to see with our own eyes. Three clever brothers, whom we shall name the Brothers A--, controlled one of the leading morning papers of San Francisco.

An ex-employe´ of theirs, whom we shall call 175 165 B--, started an opposition "sheet" of more than usually scurrilous character; and one day all the city was set agog by an article in its columns devoted to affirming the existence of a bend sinister in the escutcheon of the A--s, broad and back and of modern date. As society went there was but one opinion as to what was necessary to rehabilate the honour of the house of A--s, and they showed themselves fully aware of and equal to the situation. Armed to the teeth they scoured the streets and stopped as far as possible the circulation of B--'s paper, and that with such success that ten dollars was in a few hours vainly offered for a copy of the issue containing the slander, and stalls were fitted up with lamps in the evening when such as chose could snatch, on payment of half-a-dollar, the fearful excitement of reading it. The A--s then "raided" upon B--'s office. Fortunately for himself the offending libeller was not to be found, but his furniture and "plant" were instantly destroyed. The law had also been applied to--maddened men will grasp at any weapon--and the offensive paper was put under an injunction while its editor was, as we understand, of his own motion and for safety, lodged in prison. When he appeared 176 166 before the "judge" (magistrate), one of the brothers attempted to use a pistol on him, and had to be disarmed in open court; but even with this warning the police were unable to protect their prisoner, and he was twice fired on in the street while in their custody. In a few days the storm seemed to blow over, the "case" at law on both sides was practically dead and buried. Everybody seemed to be satisfied, and to think the affair ended. A few days went by, till one morning as several men, among whom we were, sat in the printing-office of "The Overland Monthly," situated just across the street from the San Francisco General Post Office, a single pistol-shot was heard in the street, followed rapidly by others. We all rushed to the windows, and there, in the thick of a crowd, always large at that time and place, were B--and one of the A--s dodging each other among the pillars of the post-office portico, and emptying their revolvers as rapidly as possible, with that profound obliviousness of the presence of others liable to be hurt which peculiarly distinguishes people unaccustomed to the close air of civilisation. The "unpleasantness" lasted about a minute; six or eight shots were fired; till B--, whose pistol, as he explained 177 167 afterwards, "didn't work worth a cent," took to ignominious flight, and the grim but triumphant A--remained master for all time of the situation, but looking reproachfully at his weapon, whose stock he had lapped with cloth lest it should become slippery with the sweat inseparable from keeping the hand ready and gripped on it for many hours together. There was after all nobody shot dead--"only a small boy wounded," and a woman or two bruised in the rush. A--reimbursed the "small boy" handsomely and paid the surgeon's bill. B--"took water" and disappeared for the time-being into the Avernus of journalists who lose caste, not having quitted himself on this critical occasion as behoved a man of his high calling. And the law?--the libeller was not punished for his libel; the A--s were not punished for their repeated attempts to murder, or even for "contempt of court" in drawing and using a deadly weapon upon a disarmed and helpless prisoner in its actual custody. And the public regretted the bad shooting of the combatants; not perhaps so much from blood-thirsty motives as because it gave occasion for insult and irony, and invidious comparisons on the part of little contemptible places whose journalists 178 168 invariably dropped their man with the first or, at worst, the second shot. This natural irritation aside, everybody sympathised with the A--s for the outrage perpetrated upon their family; and indeed, if blame attaches anywhere it is certainly not to them, but to those responsible for the legal and social chaos which makes action like theirs possible and even necessary.

After this, it is not to be wondered at that on the passing of the Concealed Weapons Ordinance, in the summer of 1875, the first, or among the first of the applications to the Board of Police Commissioners for permission to carry hidden arms came from the "city editor" of a respectable evening paper in San Francisco. It ran: "The position which the journal with which I am connected has assumed in the present political campaign, and the character of aspirants for office, render it necessary for me to provide myself with a weapon of defence." There is something deliciously droll here in the applicant's use of the word "provide," much as if a licence had been required for stationery, and he had talked of "providing" himself with a pen.

The Californian people, as voiced by their 179 169 journals, have been accused of ill-feeling towards England, and have, again, been described as characterised by the most glowing affection for this country. To come at the truth, the reader may as well try the maiden's oracle of the flower as any other: "He loves me--a little--much--passionately--not at all!" Try it backwards and forwards, and stop anywhere, and you find the answer agree with one already given by someone somewhere. The fact is, that except when newly excited by a reproof or a flattery from some foreign book, traveller, or journal, the Californian is indifferent to all things outside his immediate horizon. It is certainly doubtful if he cares enough about the Eastern States of his own Continent to cherish any old historical grudges in the matter of the mother country's treatment of them a hundred years ago or since. There was a day, we suppose, when Parson Caldwell, of Springfield, who, according to Mr. Bret Harte, "loved the Lord God and hated King George," would have been a fair type of the New England journalistic temperament; but at any rate the last clause of this description is long ago gone out of fashion in Boston, and neither the first clause nor the last clause ever much troubled any 180 170 pen west of the Rocky Mountains, except in moments of exceptional excitement. California is not literary, and literature is, perhaps, the only subject on which Anglo-America is still willing to take lessons from Great Britain, or pay attention to her opinion, not paying, however, for her text-books. To London every writer in the United States, on subjects not local, looks for his final patent of literary nobility. There is a strong basis of truth, though it is much too offensively and extravagantly put in the following sentence from Dr. Nichol's "Forty Years of American Life": "A paragraph of praise of an American writer from an English review would go farther with the American public than the puffs of the whole American press, daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly, in all its seven thousand separate publications." Again, Mr. Griswold, in his "Prose Writers of America": "The noisiest demagogue who affects to despise England will scarcely open a book which was not written there. And if one of our countrymen wins some reputation among his fellows it is generally because he has been first praised abroad."

English misunderstandings with the Californian 181 171 journalist, though generally trivial, partake of the venomous nature of civil wars or family quarrels. In the words of the antique W. Rowley: "I would he were not so neere to us in kindred, then sure he would be neerer in kindnesse." From the sublime to the ridiculous in such matters there is but a step, and that step is often taken in San Francisco. On the "glorious fourth of July," 1875, an English actress, under engagement in the California Theatre, dropped, in private conversation, an injudicious æsthetic criticism on the profuse masses of striped and starred bunting everywhere--on the side-walks, in the shops, in the tram-cars, waved, draped, and flapped, principally by enthusiastic "hoodlums" and street-boys, with accompaniments of crackers and fireworks, hurled specially, not only in the direction of, but into the faces and against the persons of "Britishers" wherever they could be distinguished. Flags were waved, among all most proudly, above the clash of Fenian music by patriotic military bands--from Ireland. The girl's words were confidentially reported to some greenroom gallant of the note-book, who again whispered them into some capacious editorial ear. That "crack," as the Scotch would say, was the crack 182 172 of doom. Now, indeed, strangers understood the thrill that ran through creation when "the flag" had been fired upon at Fort Sumter. From the editorial and correspondence columns of, we believe, every paper in the city--possibly enough every paper in the State--there rose a loud, long, and indignant cry. The managers of the theatre were distinctly adjured to dismiss the girl who had insulted a great nation. A prophetically encouraging hint was given to the "hoodlums" of the upper gallery that the gallant fire companies would depute representatives to mob the actress and stop the play by a riot should she dare to desecrate an American stage with her presence--a hint, perhaps, robbed of its fruit by the unlooked-for appearance among "the gods" and conspirators of certain fanatical and armed admirers of the buskined heroine. The affair almost took the dimensions of a Congress of Geneva matter, and the last newspaper "leader" on the subject only appeared on the 18th of July. During this time we are informed (having been all the while in another part of the State) that the actress and her friends remained strictly on the defensive and silent, save that she had, when the "difficulty" began, 183 173 published a card disavowing any intention of insulting the Republic. Thus, after fourteen days of intense excitement among grave leader-writers and the patriots of the shilling gallery, this terrible storm in a tea-pot was hushed. Only that the general elections were approaching--the "political campaign" for which our city editor was "providing"--and that the brethren of the quill had to give their attention to the alarming "character of aspirants for office," our poor little queen of the footlights might have been baited for months, or driven from the city in a garment of tar and feathers, by a mob that "loved the Lord God, and hated King George." Such a petty squabble is surely unworthy the serious attention of a press that aspires above provinciality.

The best newspaper of the State is The Sacramento Record-Union . Its leading articles are to a very creditable extent marked by calmness and breadth of view, while its news in general is fresh and freshly put, yet in a style marked by considerable respect for the genius of our language. It is said to be "the organ" of The Central Pacific Railroad Company. Leaving Sacramento for San Francisco, we find "the organ" of the enemies of 184 174 the company in The Evening Bulletin . This paper, with The Alta and The Examiner seem to make an effort to avoid sensational articles, and they succeed fairly enough when their likes and dislikes are not involved. In the world of avowed "sensationalism," The Chronicle, The Call , and The Post race for the leadership. They are eminently newspapers of "enterprise," especially The Chronicle , and when the pace begins to tell they are apt to become excited, and even irritated, to let down their back hair, and to show more stocking than becomes the truly modest Muse of Journalism. After all these, come an indefinite number of Irish, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, and French "organs"-- Le Courrier Franc¸ais , despite its small constituency and its distance from the Boulevards being gay, readable, and civilised, even during election times.

The most unique and in some respects most interesting of all the San Francisco papers cannot be passed without a special word; it is The News Letter , a satirical paper adored by the Californians, as Febris was worshipped by the Romans--for fear. Its proprietor, and, as is believed, its real and active editor is Mr. Frederick Marriott (an Englishman, said to have been connected long ago 185 175 in London with the founding of The Illustrated London News ) a venerable old gentleman, whose face of extraordinary beauty is always to be seen at mid-day on the sunny side of California Street or of Montgomery Street, gliding about wherever business is busiest, wherever men most resort. He halts slightly on one leg, and is somewhat slow in moving one arm, but he is over sixty years of age, and the wonder is not that he is somewhat stiff in one or two members but that he has either life or limb left, for the calculus has not been invented that can deal with the number and variety of "difficulties" he has survived. Against steel, lead, cane of malacca, and bludgeon of hickory he seems to bear a charmed life. The high gods who made that fair face of his have guarded it a thing of beauty if not exactly a joy for ever--to its enemies. It is difficult to say where in particular its attractiveness lies, or what are its especial characteristics. At moments one should imagine Anacreon had such a face, and again it has certainly a touch of Be´ranger. Skin of dazzling freshness and delicacy; chin and mouth broadly cut but always dimpled and curved, as if suppressing a smile; the brow large and framed with silky hair, that seems not white 186 176 with years but powdered in the fashion of our grandfathers; the eyes limpid, serenely deep as an artesian well that goes down through cool levels, but down to red lava at the centre; the face of a seraph, one dare not say a fallen seraph, but singed slightly, with wings slightly trailing--the consequence of some too reckless charges into the smoke by the side of Michael. In connection with wings, it is to be noted that Mr. Marriott has incorporated an "Aerial Steam Navigation Company," and that he has invented a flying machine of some kind which has not yet been exhibited to the public. In the meantime he is none the less the destroying angel of Californian journalism. His paper is published weekly, and while it is said to be an authority in matters touching "the street" or on 'Change, its real power lies in its satirical innumerable paragraphs relating to society in general and to individuals in particular. No roof is too high or too low for its Asmodeus. Absolutely no creed, positive or negative, no institution, liberal or illiberal, no personage, from the Governor at Sacramento to the crazy beggar known as "Emperor Norton"--none or nothing is exempt from the shafts of this Apollo-Apollyon. He is, a in different and truer 187 177 sense than Sir Walter Scott used the term of himself, "one of the Black Hussars of literature;" he neither takes nor gives quarter. His paper, established now for twenty years, and sold at the high price of old-fashioned times, still lords it over all competitors, seeming to be a kind of mental dram which everyone drinks, no matter how ill he can afford the cost, no matter though it be killing himself by inches. To the reserve of Rabelais it adds the reverence of Heinrich Heine and the mercy of Jonathan Swift. Account for its life and prosperity as you may when we say that its special butt and beˆte noire is republicanism, and the one abomination which it cannot away with is the overlordship of "the demos." And while the State of California (not waiting longer than was absolutely necessary to calculate chances and fix on the probable winner) "went with" the North, and was "strong upon the stronger side," in the late Civil War, The News Letter continued to rain its cynical torment on the principles and principals of the Federalists, till the mob left it without a type to print from or a press to print with. Yet to-day it takes every opportunity to drop its salt into the old wounds, with that diabolic coolness, that supernatural 188 178 cruelty which, unless in moments of desperation, paralyse revenge or even resistance as in the presence of the inflictions of the unseen powers.

Men of all opinions agree that The News Letter has at least occasionally done good service to the State. For example, it is generally acknowledged that the condition of medical education in California, and, indeed, in the United States generally, is very bad. Not only in many places are quacks set upon "an equal rights" basis with regularly qualified graduates of medicine, but the qualification of the graduates is anything but what it should be. Dr. H. C. Wood, in "Lippincott's Magazine," December, 1875, has affirmed that the medical diploma of Harvard University is "the only one issued by any prominent American medical college which is a guarantee that its possessor has been well educated in the science and practice of medicine. The Sacramento Record-Union has also taken up the matter in a spirit of fearless and equitable plain-dealing. But it was reserved for The News Letter to "carry the war into Africa," to attack "Our Quacks" personally, individually by name, by exact address, and where possible, by a short and 189 179 anything but sweet biographical sketch; and to appear in the face of a torrent of lawsuits and assaults to murder, week after week, month after month, with a double column of some two hundred names, enclosed in a black mourning frame, headed by a wood-cut representing a scull and cross-bones, with the title "Our Quacks." These names had tacked on to them such pithy comments as "late hospital steward," "coloured barber," "cobbler," "bar-tender," "rag-gatherer," "jail-bird," "alias Fox," "drifting about." We know of at least one case in which sad injustice was unwittingly done; and, indeed, the whole system of which this is a part would be an intolerable scourge in any community where law was either respectable or respected. But the bar of iron with which it would be brutal to beat a high-bred horse may become a merely mild and necessary corrective when the horn of the rhinoceros is levelled against his keeper. There are evil corners in the newest civilisation, just like those old quarters of London before the days of the Monument, where all manner of plagues fasten and fester; nothing but a great and cruel fire can swiftly obliterate the nuisance and purify the air. The News Letter is 190 180 then to be considered a useful dispensation of Providence.

A motley crowd of estimable scholars, and persons neither scholars nor estimable, and queer characters generally, have drifted together to make up the newspaper writers of California. Sailors who have touched all shores but the Pactolian. Financiers and mathematicians who have been able to calculate all numbers but one--"Of the Golden Number, non dicitur ; I cannot find it this year, calculate how I may," as Maiˆtre Alcofribas sadly expressed it. Soldiers of fortune, grim and gay, who have hunted hogs in India, or Arabs in Algeria, or Apaches in Arizona, and who are now engaged in "sticking" that redoubtable pig--in spearing with a pen " cet animal fe´roce qu'on appelle la pie`ce de cent sous ." Graduates of all universities from Aberdeen to Rome, and graduates of those famous foundations the School of Adversity, the Academy of Audacity. These are as a rule not the men whom Honourable Members find it to their advantage to cane. Large Philistines have again and again brought upon themselves extreme physical torment by attacking some of the least of them. No wonder they are a 191 181 little savage; their hearts harden like their lives. They work much and win little. It is not the pace that kills; it is the pack-saddle; it is to be weighted like a cart-horse, and judged by a "selfmade" public.

The saddest experiences of an editor are in dealing with the helpless misery of those maimed in the struggle who necessarily drift his way; men with temperaments and talents that in a rough provincial-colonial milieu are wholly out of place. It is easy to say, and indeed it must be said, that they are themselves to blame, that they lack energy, common-sense, what not--this is true, platitudinously true--but they are none the less to be pitied a little and helped where one can. It is not always easy to tell whether it is weakness or grand shattered strength that quivers there on the wheel. Neither stark might, nor wily prudence, nor any combination of both avails much under certain conditions not always to be foreseen. Most of the unfortunates belong, as a matter of course, to "the martyrology of mediocrity;" it is their only crown, their only title to a place in our hearts. But every now and then some finer soul is frayed to death in that grinding chaos of rough atoms, and 192 182 one regards such things with more than pity; the note of storm and stress and blind rage sounds almost reasonable here. One feels tempted by proxy to come up smiling no longer to the mark, tempted to forget the grim delicious pleasure of countering the adversary squarely home, tempted to merely throw up the arms and rail in some Prometheus-Manfred fashion. But the thing cannot be helped if people will not be content with callous flesh, but must have something finer, though they know that all life must go on stones and among thorns, they have themselves to blame for it when the blood comes. Yet there are circumstances when this lot is crueller than usual. There are men capable of incredible patience, exertion, and achievement in prospect of a great possible prize, who without that must perish with hardly an effort. When it is a choice--Westminster Abbey or Waterloo Bridge, l'Acade´mie ou la Morgue --they can do much; when there is no prize, when the prospect is the Morgue without the Academy, they can do nothing.

Are the shadows falling too darkly? Is the reader wishing for sunshine? Then follow us a little farther.

193 183

First, let it be remarked that one thumbs in vain over the innumerable books of travel and letters of newspaper correspondents treating of California, for any mark of insight into the local state of literature and science properly so called. When any opinion is given on the subject, it would almost seem as if the authorities were agreed to adopt and paraphrase as suitable in this case, the famous chapter by a certain writer, on the manners and customs of a certain people--"Science they have none, and their literature is beastly." So noisy are all varieties of pseudo-scientific quacks, so wistfully slanderous are certain Yahoo journals--journals always in the market and, their price paid, capable of anything, even of telling the truth--so flaring is all this, that a stranger is liable at first to do the country in general the injustice of supposing that the unsavoury condition of the outside of the cup and platter extends to the inside. Nothing could well be more unjust; modest, laborious, and intelligent workers in several departments of pure literature and science may be found here--"Florentine by birth though not in manners."

Almost in the heart of the city rises a great brick building of five stories, solid and braced 194 184 with iron bars, queerly decorated at the top with fantastic images or gargoyles, that grin down perpetual defiance on the earthquake and the way-faring troll. Just below these gargoyles, we are on the topmost storey in a great room, whose extent gives it the air of being low-ceiled. On either hand long parallels of book-shelves line the walls, and seem to touch each other where in the distance they near the vanishing point--books everywhere, big and little, files of journals in English and Spanish, some sixteen hundred bound volumes of all kinds, in languages varying from Greek to Quiche´. They belong to a studious Californian, Mr. Hubert Bancroft, a bookseller originally, who ten or twelve years ago practically gave up the selling of books for the reading of them, and especially of such as related to the history of the native races of his continent. He became an investigator of American antiquities and American ethnology. He grew more and more interested in this research. Master, happily, of a handsome fortune, he devoted his income to his subject, collecting books personally or by agents, wherever they were to be found--in Madrid, Rome, Leipzig, Paris, London, New York, Mexico, or elsewhere. 195 185 The result is a library of authorities, references, me´moires pour servir , more complete in its special department than any other in existence, as far as our knowledge goes. It has been fortunate in securing many literary windfalls that should be valuable, if only from the point of view of the bibliophile. When the crash of the Empire came in Mexico, a great part of the imperial books and documents were secured by Mr. Bancroft; and at one time or other, revolutions of various kinds have thrown into his hands original and unpublished documents of great value, from the archives of monasteries and governments in most parts of Central America. The Cæsar Augustus of Ame´ricanistes , there went out a decree from him that all the world should be taxed, and it has been done.

Surely if we have dealt sharply with transgressors, we may be allowed to deal lovingly with one whose influence cannot but in some degree neutralise many of the more material and sordid tendencies of the State of his adoption. Mr. Bancroft was born in Ohio; he is a tall, squarely-cut man of thirty-five or forty, as one should judge, but already with the shadow of a student's stoop in the shoulders that support a quiet head, 196 186 with thin refined face, full chin, high nose, full large gray eyes, and longish wavy hair, now almost iron-gray--a brave, patient, hard-reading man, wholly unservile. " Bildung macht frei ."

He is the head of all the work done in that room we have glanced into, and certain younger men are the hands. It was here was written "The Native Races of the Pacific States;" it is here that other and kindred works are preparing, after the fashion to be described by one who has been part of all he saw, and yet who is bound by no other ties than those of friendship. The manner of working was perhaps suggested by that of Humboldt or some other German author, or possibly by that of Mr. Herbert Spencer, or possibly the exigencies of the situation suggested it of themselves. A given division of a given subject coming under consideration, Mr. Bancroft and some one or two in particular of his assistants, set themselves to thoroughly master all that the library contained in that connection. Much of the assistant's time being swallowed up in the search for material, Mr. Bancroft was the freer to dispose of that material as it was brought under his notice, and was thus able to divide his attention between two 197 187 or more subjects and two or more sets of assistants at the same time. He framed the skeleton of every chapter, the assistant filled up the outlines; Mr. Bancroft then moulded the whole after the fashion of his judgment and his art into its final and perfected shape. While this was doing, or at least when the proofs came up from the printer, everyone had a word to say. The proofs went from table to table. That man was happiest and most highly esteemed who could point out most flaws in the work submitted to him, or in his neighbours' criticisms of that work. No pet theory, no doubtful fact, might very easily hope to escape examination. Dark Spanish eyes, Catholic to their last shadow, were strained to detect any sly gesture or tone that might minimise the respect or credit due to the Holy Church. Slowly shaking the Philister out of his long pipe, an ex-prince of the Burschen brought his destructive talent to bear on the matter from rather a different point of view. Was there again too much enthusiasm, too much of the transcendental?--a fair-haired cynic from New England touched the paragraph here and there with the point of his dry humour: it collapsed like a sensitive snail. 198 188 Nothing was taken for granted; evidence was everywhere insisted upon. Quiet speech, few words--chapter and verse of every authority, cited and shown by every advocate--replied to by objectors with a merciless analysis of the conditions under which the authority quoted had produced the said chapter and verse--all this to substantiate the most trivial fact, if disputed. We used to think this was how history should be written. This is not the place not this the pen to speak with any fitness as to the results or quality of the work so done. Nor is it necessary; older and better scholars and less biassed have rendered praise on our part as superfluous as injudicious.

As to the handful of students engaged in this work, their position was somewhat peculiar, isolated as they were by many thousand miles from outer help or sympathy. The mildest popular local theory about them was that they were touched with some harmless craze. They were by no means a Bohemia, at least in any ordinary sense of the word. That would involve, as contrasted with them, a recognised society of solidarity and influence; but such a thing can hardly be said to have existed. We are afraid that these young men were given to 199 189 making a society of themselves--of mutual admiration, possibly--and given to speaking collectively, in a kind of Louis Quartorze style: La socie´te´ c'est moi ! Perhaps their faults were not without provocation: where everybody was everybody's equal and slapped everybody on the back, it was impossible that strangers should not require some time to get their backs and hands familiarised with the new conditions of life. We think, after all, they did their best to meet all real kindness and civility more than half way, and to avoid as far as possible the giving or taking of offence; and the many warm friendships they were happy enough to make are evidence that their good intentions were not on the whole misunderstood. They had a little salon of their own, with its keen glad nights of conversation. There was Mr. Bancroft dropping his hooked words gently, at intervals, till his prey of debate was caught, then dragging it in with a deceitful mixture of meekness and strength. Then there was Mr. Harcourt, an Englishman, as eager as Mr. Bancroft was patient, a very berserkr of argument, flinging himself as with the sound of a war-horn upon his enemy, recoiling, changing his attack, raining his blows upon every limb till 200 190 he found a broken ring in the mail; he was the fire of our councils, the splendour of our festivals, the brother of all of us at our best. And Mr. Oak, most patient, exact, and humorous of students--and all the rest, whom it is so hard to leave without a word, as we must do, not having the capacities of Homer, except in the matter of nodding.

Those were happy days; the disagreeable no doubt constantly presented itself, but it was instantly grappled with, strangled, trodden under foot. Nothing but the pleasant lives in the memory, so long as one is thoroughly in good health. The rest is forgotten, till a day comes when it is nearly impossible to separate the past that was not from the past that was. That beautiful deceitful past! that lied of the future when it was with us, that lies of itself when it is no longer with us--but doubly sweet, because doubly false. For after all there were dark days in it, days of utter lassitude of mind and body, days of intense discouragement, days when the struggle with Dryasdust (and oh, ye pitiful gods! with the Spanish Dryasdust!) seemed too much for mortal man--and worse, there were days when petty jealousies and petty disputes divided the little band 201 191 of brothers. Be it said that they passed quickly, that they occupy too small a visual angle to darken the horizon of the past by even a single streak, and that on the whole it might always have been said of "Bancroft's crowd" as of the very primitive Church: "See how these Christians love one another."

Mr. Harcourt and the present writer were, in addition to their work with Mr. Bancroft, associated as the editors of a magazine, "The Overland Monthly." Of Mr. Harcourt we cannot be trusted to say anything, yet we may be permitted to refer in an unprejudiced way to some of our contributors, certain in advance that they will trust to our discretion and even pardon a possible indiscretion. There are men and women here and there all over California of remarkable mental ability, both of the crude sort and of that developed by education. Not to speak of President Gilman (now of Baltimore), and President Le Comte, and the remaining professors and officers of the Berkeley, or State, University, and the members of the Berkeley Club, and of the Bohemian Club, to whose scholarship and society we owe many a pleasant evening, there are waifs and strays of genius away in rude mining 202 192 villages and lonely ravines who want nothing but opportunity, encouragement, and severe training to make their mark in literature or science. Among these must certainly be ranked Mr. J-- M--, a Scotchman by birth, and a pupil of Hugh Miller, a tall, hazel-haired, blue-eyed man, who spends his years studying geology and natural history on the hills and in the can˜ons of the State, and writes and talks of them with sympathy, knowledge, and a very real and unaffected eloquence. Without praise almost, and without salary, he toils on, supplying the funds necessary to his lonely expeditions by hard work of another kind. His feats of endurance of a merely physical sort are almost incredible; he seems to be on the whole happier when snowed up on a glacier than in walking the street of San Francisco.

There is Mr. J-- R--, an ex-student of the State University, now studying in Germany; his capacities for work, thought, and exact expression are remarkable, considering his youth. There is another very young man, almost a boy, Mr. C-- S--, a poet and the teacher of a village school. This is a hard world for poets everywhere, and especially in California, but this one, if he endures his passion 203 193 well, and reads his eyes out, and works his heart out, may come to something. There is a young girl, Miss E-- F-- D--, a copyist in a lawyer's office, who was a perpetual surprise by the extent of her reading, by her precocious instinct in the delineation of character, and by what is still rarer, a balanced reserve of power in finishing her sketches with the fewest possible touches. We are not given to throwing adjectives round in a reckless way, and we have not faith enough in genius to move a grain of sand as apart from the ceaseless training and effort needed to develop it; but we believe that all the four persons we have mentioned (and one other whom we shall mention immediately) are something more than clever, and that it is from some of them that the next creditableaddition to Californian literature, not historical, must be expected--if any such addition is to be expected during this generation. But they must first comprehend and believe, with all their heart and soul and strength, these warning words of Mr. Browning, which for their sake we copy out at length: Write books, paint pictures, or make music--sinceYour nature leans to such life-exercise!Ay, but such exercise begins too soon,Concludes too late, demands life whole and sole,

204 194

Artistry being battle with the ageIt lives in ! Half life,--silence, while you learnWhat has been done; the other half,--attemptAt speech, amid world's wail of wonderment:"Here's something done was never done before!"To be the very breath that moves the age,Means not to have breath drive you bubble-likeBefore it--but yourself to blow: that's strain;Strain's worry through the life-time, till there's peace;We know where peace expects the artist-soul.

The name we think it necessary to add to the preceding four is that of Mr. John Gally, a Virginian by birth, and a not unsuccessful mine-owner, but who has after all dug more out of books than he has out of Nevada--a man of wonderful insight into character, and of a humour deliciously quaint, but somewhat too fine in the edge to divide the whetstone on which he has to operate. A few paragraphs from his pen, by no means in his best manner, are to be found in a preceding chapter of this work.

We reserve any detailed criticism of the recognised leaders of what may be called the Western School of Writers for one chapter of a possible future work. Exceptional reasons have produced a solidarity in Anglo-American literature, which Anglo-American society has not. This literature as a whole, and in all its modifications, as a product 205 195 and as a power, deserves a serious comparative study from the point of view of the wider world and the older literatures. Many things have tended and still tend to repress it in its higher branches; particularly the fact of having to compete with imported books not paid for, and therefore sold at a price against which the native writer cannot ordinarily strive and live. In the language of The Baltimore Gazette, as quoted with approval by The New York Tribune of September 25th, 1875, the books of the foreign author "are seized upon by publishers and sold all over the United States without giving him (the author) any compensation, and without his being able under the law to obtain any redress. He has no right, copyright or other, in his own production." We have no desire to follow Mr. Charles Reade in the strong language he has been provoked to use in this connection. Publishers are after all only men like the rest of us, and the best of men often yield to the temptation of merging equity in law, especially when their neighbours in business do so, and when it might appear that an act of justice on the part of one would be undone by the rapacity of another. It is not then on the publishers but on such patriots of the Great 206 196 Republic as retain a capacity for blushing that we venture to urge, firstly, the wrongs inflicted by their present system on native authors; and, secondly, the sad statement of Mr. Rufus W. Griswold, that "This legalised piracy, supported by some sordid and base arguments, inspires a prevailing contempt for our plain Republican forms and institutions." We assure these good citizens that, rightly or wrongly, the people of "the effete civilisations" of Europe have some most inveterate prejudices about meum et tuum , quite independent of a policeman round the corner.

To return to Western literature, and dismiss it for the present with a few words. Mr. Bret Harte, Mark Twain (Mr. Clemens), and Mr. Joaquin Miller, are, in three broadly different styles, identified with certain veins of humour and sentiment, in many respects novel and interesting; but these authors used their "Great West" very much as a subject for dissection, or rather vivisection; and, their studies completed, they closed their note-books, wiped their scalpels, and left the dissecting-room. They sought and found their appreciative public, their paying audience, in the eastern United States and in Europe. It is to be presumed their choice 207 197 was not uninfluenced by reasons, and it seems difficult to suggest reasons other than these here suggested. We know that various attempts have been made by Californian journals to connect a certain supposed falling away in the powers of these authors, or of some of them, with their absence from what is called "the scene of their early inspiration." But such a theory is, we venture to affirm, the last needed to account for the phenomenon, if the phenomenon really exists. Upon each of the three writers named it has fallen to walk, under the fiery sun of a sudden popularity; and some of them may have been touched with literary sun-stroke. They may have attempted too much, too often, and their strength may be suffering from excitement and fatigue. This theory seems on the whole more plausible than the theory of change of scene.

What effect the physical climate of California has or may have on literary instincts and literary effort, it would be premature to say or to predict from the present data. Its general pleasant Laodicean equability, summer and winter through, may tend to a monotony of tension unfavourable to that class of poetic mind developed in and fed by the 208 198 fierce extremes of storm and utter calm, of fervent summers and frosts like those of Niflheimr. It is generally agreed, however, that the mildness of the Greek climate had much to do with the "sweet reasonableness" of Hellenic culture, and it is usual to find a more rugged and less artistic spirit in the muses of the Norse zone, while the heavy lilies and languors of the tropics are doubtfully productive of anything spiritually interesting. Indulging in this somewhat fanciful kind of reasoning, one might be even tempted to follow the vaticinal reveries of Mr. Bayard Taylor, and see in vision the Golden State reproducing the glories of Hellas, becoming an alma mater of the nations-- The News Letter condemned for impiety, and Mr. Frederick Marriott "looking towards" his disciples, and pausing, as he lifts his last "cocktail" (with hemlock), to devote his flying machine to æsculapius--Colonel Roach encamped with his entire regiment under the helmet of Leonidas, and combing his long hair straight as he waits the hour of battle--while Phidias, on Telegraph Hill, under the direction of a committee of the Mechanics' Institute, erects an Athena, the staff of whose spear shall be just as many Big Trees jointed 209 199 together as may leave the moon room to pause overhead and shine upon the scene.

As to the effect of the social climate of the State on literary aspiration and effort, little that is favourable can be said for the present, possibly little that is unfavourable should be feared for the future. California the elder is a parvenu , making money, fighting his way into society, having neither time nor taste for studying anything but stock and crop reports, with it may be an occasional work of flagrant humour. It is his heir--once or twice removed perhaps--it is for California the younger, to be a person of education and wear "literary frills." For the present a taste in that direction is simply not understood; though it is tolerated as is the worship of a Chinese Joss. The orthodox deity is one whose rumination is not carried on in his brain, but lower down--a grand calf, before whose golden image lie shattered at once the decalogue of the heart and the decalogue of the head. It was not without a reason in the fitness of things that once on a time the San Francisco mint turned out a number of coins which, by the mistake or by the practical joke of a workman, had an extra letter 210 200 engraved, and wore this inscription: "In G ol d we Trust."

The poetic and spiritual is for the present utterly crushed below the prosaic and material. The highest point which has been reached by the literature which is purely Californian is a "History of Culture," by Mr. John S. Hittell--a writer who is editor of one of the oldest Californian newspapers, who is not only a Californian but a "pioneer," and to whose book on the "Resources of California" we have trusted above all other works on the subject, as being written by a man whom it would be silly even to suspect of minimising either the State with which he is identified, or the democratic institutions of which, in their extremist form, he is the constant advocate. His ideas of "culture" are, perhaps, among the most extraordinary that have ever seen the light of a press not avowedly communistic. As well as we can make out, "culture" is with Mr. Hittell simply "industrial art:" machinery is the master of man; philosophy, art, and science are important mainly as the handmaids of the kitchen and the workshop. This "culture" would have all men levelled to its own stature, and it makes 211 201 its plaint against "the other servitude, perhaps nearly as galling, imposed by the advantages of education and official position . The higher professional men, numbering perhaps one in two thousand in the adult males, have an average income of thirty dollars a day on account of their skill or office; the second class of professional men, numbering perhaps one in two hundred, have an income of ten dollars per day; third-rate professional men and skilful mechanics, perhaps one in forty, get four dollars per day; and the labourers, who are about ninety-eight in one hundred, get two dollars per day in the United States. A professional man of the first class can, with the proceeds of one day's work, pay the wages of fifteen labourers for the same period. There is another class of oppressive servitude--"

In the meantime, a word from this apostle of "culture" on the place he assigns to spiritual genius in his industrial paradise:--"Scotland has taken, perhaps, more pride in Burns than in any other of her children, but his dissipated character unfitted him for any higher position than that of a gauger which he filled. One man like James Watt has more valuable genius, and does more good to humanity 212 202 and more credit to his country, than a score of Burnses;"--and how many Burnses, may we ask, is that other genius worth who made life one long physical delight to the whole clan Campbell, by the discovery of the use of the posts erected by the blessed Duke of Argyle?

"Scientific discovery," concludes our author, "is closely akin to mechanical invention, and both are infinitely beyond the rhetorical compositions of Plato and Bacon in their benefit to mankind."

Mr. Hittell may be right, though to prove it he might do worse than borrow something of the force and grace and correctness of form, at least, which belong to the rhetoric he despises, and though it might be also well for him, before speaking with authority, to dissipate an impression inevitable to one who has read him closely, that Mr. Hittell's ideas on the subject of Burns and Plato and Bacon and "rhetoric" are as vague as the ideas of Bacon and Plato and Burns about Mr. Hittell. In the meantime we are inclined to believe, even setting the divine outside the question, that men become less brutish and more human exactly in proportion as they value the products of the poet's heart and the philosopher's head above the products of 213 203 industrial art," which, multiplied by infinity, can after all never amount to anything more than a warmer back, a quicker foot, a bigger stomach, a bigger eye, and above all a bigger ear. No doubt these are all very valuable in their way, but then a Digger Indian is quite capable of appreciating them fully; it is only as we climb the chain and get away from the "missing link" (who was probably a kind of troll) that a taste is acquired for the pleasures of poetry, and of such things as the rhetorical compositions of Plato and Bacon.

After all it is a choice between this kind of "rhetorical compositions" and that other kind delighted in by our editor of an influential newspaper--a kind that appeals to one knows not what if not to the lowest passions and prejudices of ignorant men--to the passions that burn libraries, destroy monuments, and assassinate hostages. And though we be a despicable creature of "bloated prejudices," though we can lay no claim to the exceeding usefulness and glory of the horny-handed seraphs of the new heaven, yet even on "an equal rights' basis" our opinion should be worth something; and it is that the old-fashioned culture is a better thing for the souls, possibly for the bodies, of men (poor Plato 214 204 could wrestle a little) than the new "culture," even with three dollars a day to every citizen, and "the removal of the other servitude, perhaps nearly as galling, imposed by the advantages of education"--a yoke by-the-bye under which the neck of California, were that neck of pipeclay, is in no present danger of breaking.

215

CHAPTER X.

PRO ARIS ET FOCIS. La envidia de los asnos de la EuropaPor vuestro rebuznar y otras mil prendasFuisteis siempre, lo sois, y en adelanteEspero lo sereis.

Elogio del Rebuzno , ANONYMOUS.

It were better to have no opinion of God at all, than such an opinion as is unworthy of Him; for the one is unbelief, the other is contumely And, as the contumely is greater towards God, so the danger is greater towards men. Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation: all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not: but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men As it addeth deformity to an ape to be so like a man, so the similitude of superstition to religion makes it the more deformed.-- Of Superstition , BACON.

For enthusiasm is little else than superstition put in motion, and is equally founded on a strong conviction of supernatural agency without any just conception of its nature.-- Middle Ages , HALLAM.

A blind propagandism or a secret wretchedness penetrates into countless households, poisoning the peace of families, chilling the mutual confidence of husband and wife, adding immeasurably 216 206 to the difficulties which every searcher into truth has to encounter, and diffusing far and wide intellectual timidity, disingennuousness, and hypocrisy.-- History of European Morals , LECKY.

There is one dangerous science for women--one which let them indeed beware how they profanely touch--that of theology. Strange, and miserably strange, that while they are modest enough to doubt their powers, and pause at the threshold of sciences where every step is demonstrable and sure, they will plunge headlong, and without one thought of incompetency, into that science in which the greatest men have trembled, and the wisest erred. Strange, that they will complacently and pridefully bind up whatever vice or folly there is in them, whatever arrogance, petulance, or blind incomprehensiveness, into one bitter bundle of consecrated myrrh. Strange, in creatures born to be Love visible, that where they can know least, they will condemn first, and think to recommend themselves to their Master by scrambling up the steps of His judgment-throne to divide it with Him. Most strange that they should think they were led by the Spirit of the Comforter into habits of mind which have become in them the unmixed elements of home discomfort; and that they dare to turn the household gods of Christianity into ugly idols of their own--spiritual dolls, for them to dress according to their caprice; and from which their husbands must turn away in grieved contempt, lest they should be shrieked at for breaking them.-- Sesame and Lilies , RUSKIN.

Parler beaucoup et dire peu, en imposer par un maintien grave et avantageux, se de´rober aux regards pe´ne´trans, e´taler a` propos quelques connaissances superficielles, e´chpper aux e´claircissements par un silence de´daig neux, tromper le vulgaire par des proˆneurs ignorans ou inte´resse´s,....en voila` plus qu'il n'en faut pour tromper les femmes et le peuple; et presque tout le monde est ou peuple ou femme.-- Mes Pense´es , LA BEAUMELLE. Præterea sanctum nihil est nec ab inguine tutum:Non matrona laris, non filia virgo....Horum si nihil est, aviam resupinat amici.Scire volunt secreta domus atque inde timeri.

">Sat.III ., JUVENAL.

217 207

Had lights where better eyes were blind,As pigs are said to see the wind.Transformed all wives to Dalilahs,Whose husbands were not for the cause;And turn'd the men to ten-horn'd cattle,Because they went not out to battle.

">Hudibras , SAMUEL BUTLER.

From which account, it is manifest, that the Fanatic Rites of these Bacchanals cannot be imputed to Intoxications by Wine, but must needs have had a deeper Foundation. What this was we may gather large Hints from certain circumstances in the Course of their Mysteries. For, in the first Place, there was, in their Processions, an intire Mixture and Confusion of Sexes.-- Mechanical Operation of the Spirit , SWIFT.

No tengais cuidado, tia: no hablare´ mas que de amores platonicos.

¿Amores que?....

El amor platonico, contesto´ Rafael, es el que se encierra en una mirada, en un suspiro

Es decir, repuso la marquesa, la vanguardia; pero ya sabes que el cuerpo del eje´rcito viene detras.

La Gaviota , FERNAN CABALLERO.

Haussez les mains, Monsieur l'Abbe´!

Sentimental Journey , STERNE. To save a Mayd Saint George the Dragon slew;A pretty tale if all that's told be true;Most say there are no dragons, and 'tis saydThere was no George--pray heaven there was a Mayd!"

ANONYMOUS.

We strike for the altar and the hearth. We fight on the side of all saints against the dragon in his latest avatar; we fight for the church and the family against a form of fanaticism, or of something 218 208 worse, that dares to exalt itself above all we have been used to call God, and to intrude itself into that we have been used to hold sacred.

The good Christian clergyman is a shepherd and no wandering mercenary; he has entered the sheepfold by the door, and not climbed over the fence; he is learned--otherwise without the sanction of a miracle he has no right to offer authoritatively any opinion on any subject on which learned men disagree; he is naturally meek and humble, so much so that he never boasts of it; and, above all, is no busybody in other men's matters or other men's families--no social sneak, no abbe´ of the back-stairs; in brief, there is such a beauty in his decent, quiet, reasonable life as renders unbearable that parody of it set up by the mountebank preacher, the religious quack, the Dr. Cantwell, the Mr. Stiggins, and all the rest of that noisome family.

Among the truest and best of our friends must ever stand the names of the Rev. J. K. McLean, the Rev. Mr. Hamilton, and the Rev. Mr. Moore of Oakland, cultivated, great-hearted, simple, pious gentlemen; it is not with reverence only, but with warm and grateful love, that their memory is here recalled. But they and others will forgive the ingratitude 219 209 which passes over the good in the Californian religious world with the curt but most explicit statement that it exists, and exists to a large extent. For we have a battle to fight in favour of religion against the camp-followers and traitors infesting its tents, which must cut short greetings and embraces. After all, when it is said that a man's ways please the Lord, there is very little more to be said: happy, it has been written, is the nation whose history is uninteresting. The apostles and prophets, even with the advantages under which they wrote, almost always found their eulogies exhaust themselves in a few verses, and were forced to pursue denunciations through innumerable chapters. And we are not sure that there may not have been, even to them, a certain pleasure in the pathless woods of the wicked, a certain lonely rapture at the heart in sweeping like a simoon through the very greenest places of iniquity and hypocrisy. We cannot but think that Job forgot all about Sabean and Chaldean raids, when, beginning with the sarcastic "No doubt ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you," he cut at his insolent "comforters" one after the other; and when at last Bildad, wincing under the pitiless lash, groaned out, "Wherefore 220 210 are we counted as beasts?" no power on earth shall convince us that the grand old patriarch did not lay down his strigil and rub his hands.

Who imagines that Paul any longer felt that "thorn in the flesh" after justifiably taunting Ananias with ignorance? "Thou whited wall" that "sittest there to judge me after the law, and commandest me to be smitten contrary to the law;" then, waiting to have his attention drawn to the astonishing fact that he was reviling a thronedand golden-plated pontiff, he begged his pardon with, in effect, the flattering explanation that he had mistaken him for some third-rate deputy official: "I wist not, brethren, that he was the high priest." Oh Paul!

We devote this chapter to the condemnation of one of the most mischievous developments that religion, falsely so called, has ever taken, now becoming dangerous in the United States. So long as the preachers of this particular school of blind and naked ignorance remain, like the books of M. Jules Verne, "terribly thrilling and absolutely harmless," it continues to be a form of spiritual quackery which neither interests us one way nor the other. But when its esoteric doctrines and the 221 211 results of these doctrines take a practical malarial form, it is time to use a disinfectant. The doctrines alluded to belong, we are happy to say, to no respectable church or sect--they are, in fact, utterly opposed to the sweet reasonableness of any form of real Christianity; and it is generally a characteristic of their preachers that they are unrestrained by the wholesome influence of any form of recognised church government. Essentially ignorant and lawless men, they pretend to be, above all that, the specially called apostles of a faith independent of the conclusions of learned theology--of a Perfection, a Higher Life, a True Inwardness--in which the true outwardness and common morality of the old-fashioned Christianity of Christ has no place, or only a secondary place; and as this cannot be justified by the head, they appeal to the heart-- not to the general human heart, which is "desperately wicked and deceitful" (a thing that has never been "written" of the head), but to their own private heart, which they dare to assert is filled with a special and particular divine presence. Now, perhaps of all forms of tropical lurid conceit there has never been anything to quite equal this: The conceit that an awful, infinite, sublime Spirit--the source, essence, 222 212 and refinement of all immensity, dignity, knowledge, power, and glory--that such a Spirit should be (God forbid that this blasphemy were ours!) the hail-fellow and companion of an impudently vulgar and illiterate person--should be on such terms with him as to be addressed with a free-and-easiness, a profusion of advice and admonition, and loathsome interested servility that would be unbearable from such a source, even to any respectable fellow creature.

Before going farther to discuss the reasonableness of such pretensions, and, above all, their practical results, it will be well to adopt some name by which these religious quacks may be known. We cannot fairly identify them with any recognised sect or church. We cannot say that they are precisely hypocrites or precisely fanatics. The elements are so unpleasantly mixed up in them that Nature cannot stand up and decidedly affirm, This is a fool, or, This is a knave. Our subject is the pharisee, with the open frailness of the publican; he is the publican, with the arrogance and self-satisfaction of the pharisee. We must bring for the occasion a new word into the English language, a word which we hope will not be long 223 213 needed, a word that will not necessarily involve the idea of conscious hypocrisy--a word that will involve the idea of a slightly delirious mystic, with a strong touch of sullen, obstinate, abusive obscurantism. We know no word that goes so far to fulfil all those conditions as the German word Mucker , which we will take the liberty to English for the nonce, and whose historical associations have a certain fleshly tinge which marvellously suits our purpose. The subjugation of women by appeals to sentiment as apart from reason is on the whole the thing most characteristic of, and the thing most rarely absent from, muckerism in all its manifestations.

It is through the woman, by appeals to her loving and noble, but generally less reasonable nature, that the mucker tries to capture the family; and this lust of unlawful, abominable, quasi-ecclesiastical power, in its invasions of the family, has always been more dangerous to mankind than the lust of unlawful directly temporal power; for more or less implicity, and more or less completely, the former always includes the latter. Can any man be familiar with the history of his race in ancient America, Asia, and Europe, 224 214 without feeling, on approaching the mucker subject, some such creeping of the flesh as comes on at the slimy touch of a rattlesnake or a kraken. Of all the means by which the many-headed old serpent succeeds in insinuating himself into the domestic circle, in leaving his trail upon the sacred hearth, the most diabolical, the most subtle, the most fatal, is by the confessional. We do not altogether mean the abuse of a clumsy wooden box, with a subtle man within and a silly woman without; we mean generally any system by which any stranger, on any religious pretence, wins, or is put in a position to win, a dangerous power over any soul, by being allowed to familiarise himself with its secrets and emotions. "Inquiry meeting" is the name for this kind of thing in the latest mucker vocabulary. In such a meeting, often held open as late as midnight, nervous and credulous women are seated in an atmosphere "magnetic with mob madness." To this poisoned atmosphere, where reason is nothing and contagious emotion everything, is joined not only the personal and particular inquisition of a male "inquirer," but a closer physical contact than the dividing partition of the old confessional-box permitted of. 225 215 The divine essences that flared upon the pulpit-platform have reached the dew-point, condensed themselves, and descended upon the devotee in flesh and blood. Sitting side by side, even hand in hand, with condensed glory, how wan to her wane husband, family, children--all this world's vanities! The delirium that fed the rites of Astarte and Dionysius, that corrupted the Christian "love feasts" till they became as intolerable to Papal Rome as their prototypes had been to Pagan Rome--that fever, one and the same at root, but blossoming into pestilent fruits that vary with the age and place--that very miasm makes the midnight air heavy here under the rush of burning gas and the blaring of music, whose pulse and measure are as utterly sensuous and exciting as any to be heard in the dancing-garden or the music-hall. Every mental sense is stupefied, every carnal sense is roused and appealed to, every device of the mesmerist is employed. For they are playing a "Divina Commedia" here, with the heavenly scenes left out; thunder, brazen thunder, the thunder of Salmoneus, rolls on the thick air; lightnings of stage brimstone and lime glare out on the swooning senses. Many a strong man of 226 216 meagre mental development gives way; what is to be hoped for those who are flabby both in brain and brawn? What hope is there of any uneducated or half-educated woman escaping absolute mental paralysis? What hope is there of her being true in heart and soul to the husband who smiles at this tom-foolery, when the officiating mucker tells her, as we have heard him do, that she is "unequally yoked to an unbeliever "--that is to say, an unbeliever in him , in the great Panjandrum quack; but as the devotee believes, and is intended to believe, an unbeliever in God? And this, this abomination of insolence and calumny, some women of nominal decency are not ashamed to bear with--this, which would be an unpardonable insolence coming from persons of approved culture and wisdom--this comes from men who are, for the most part, too ignorant and too contemptible to occupy a respectable place in any servants' hall. These are the "good physicians," who feel at once the spiritual and the natural pulses of their fair patients; who, without the formality of an introduction to their patients, attempt on the first interview to draw out and establish the most intimate, the most 227 217 mysterious, the most sacred confidences on the most delicate and profound of all topics--confidences in which the husband, or father, or brother has no part, in which it is not intended or thought judicious that he should have a part unless he comes to believe--in the mucker. The devotee is to "take leave in mind and sentiment" of "the fearful and unbelieving," of all those that are "without," of all those who are to "have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone" (we are copying word for word from our notes of a mucker meeting); she is to leave father and mother and cleave to her Stiggins. And we speak within our knowledge when we say that, as a result of such blasphemous misapplication of Scripture, as a result of such immoral teaching, a wail goes up in America from thousands of parents and husbands, relegated in their own households to the position of a Merovingian king, while some unctuous stranger is ensconced at the hearth as a maire du palais . The blood boils at the thought of happy homes made blank and bitter--and for whose sake? What have these preaching mountebanks done to merit all this feminine devotion, adulation, 228 218 adoration? Oh Figaro, Figaro! Ils se sont donne´ la peine de renaiˆtre !

It is time we had done with all this. The muckers have no good reason for continuing to exist. We will not humour the itch for notoriety of any one of them by giving his name, nor shall we soil these pages by alluding, except in the most distant manner possible, to any of the--to all Americans--familiar abominations of the spiritual midden on which these quacks live and move and have their being. Fortunately it is not necessary. No special and particular illustration is necessary to support the axiom that ignorance and vulgarity are enough to disqualify any man or body of men for the supreme office of spiritual teacher. We dare to say that nothing but much knowledge and an acquaintance with all approved tests of knowledge can justify anyone in pronouncing the condemnation to all eternity of his fellow-creatures for not believing thus or thus. But a severity of judgment that might suit the mouths of reverent and grave pastors, whose age, whose training, whose position entitle them to respect, becomes, on the boisterous lips of the quack, merely presumption and insolence. It is not necessarily a 229 219 shame for anyone to be ignorant or ill-bred; it is no crime to be born with a brain as protoplasmic as an oyster's, or to have been brought up a boor among boors. It has never pleased the All-Father to make men equal physically or mentally. But it is either a folly or a crime for any man of less than or merely average intelligence and education to use truculent language before women and children as the teacher, the critic, the judge of the whole world, and that above all in matters of simply infinite delicacy, difficulty, and importance. Such arrogance, however it may please the mob, can only be a cause of sorrow to the thoughtful and judicious; for it is an abuse of religion which inevitably tends to degrade and vulgarise every holy place which it invades. Nothing can justify it. Not even what is called success; not even the power of moving, heating, swaying masses of people--of making them "feel good, feel happy, feel converted." All this is no more, and is not generally half so much, as Gautama Buddha, as Mahomet, as Joseph Smith the Mormon, could bring forward in proof of his "divine mission." Si el sabio no aprueba, malo;Si el necio aplaude, peor.

230 220

But there remains the final charge of the Old Guard of muckerism, the Guard that knows how to live with its brains out, but does not know how to surrender: "We are no more unlearned than the apostles, no lower socially than they were, or than the prophets." Now to this line of reasoning there are one or two objections: it wants modesty; in general it wants truth; and in every case it keeps back at least a part of the truth, the particular part that destroys the parallel sought to be established. For the apostles and prophets, as we are informed, did not call and appoint themselves to the offices they held; they rested their claims to authority as teachers where, in such cases as they were not men of commanding natural knowledge, it could only rest--on a supernatural commission. Nor did they expect men to take their simple word for it that such an exceptional and miraculous state of affairs existed; they proceeded to prove it by words and deeds of exceptional and miraculous power, by inhuman gifts of prophecy, of healing, of hurting, and of tongues. They knew that it would be insane to ask reasonable people to believe in a supernatural True Inwardness without the testimony of a supernatural Outwardness. It might be, as Swift 231 221 has noticed, a good beginning in this direction if the muckers could assure us that they have the gift of tongues to the extent of knowing and speaking properly one single language. There are exceptions, but as a general rule they do not so much as know their own tongue--we do not mean in the sense in which it has been said that he who knows but one language knows none, but in the utter sense of stumbling, grammarless vulgarity, and of incapacity to acquire that sense of fitness, of selection, of ear for idiom that a genius, like Bunyan for example, could develop from the study of a single book in the grand style. Yet it is these men, wandering like maniacs among the tombs of murdered orthoepy and syntax, who deliver brawling judgments on the mysteries of a religion whose documents they cannot read, and who can only just read and no more that particular translation of them which has happened to fall into their hands. They dance the clog-dance where scholars fear to tread.

To that great intellectual sphere of Rabelais, that divine sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere, the muckers have given dimensions and a superficies; on this they have drawn a little Arctic Circle, which they call an 232 222 Equatorial. And over the squaring of this circle by the methods of science they are just now sweating drops of blood. When they are in earnest, only a fiend could mock these pale and haggard souls. There is something more ghastly than a dead man; it is the convulsive thing that grabbles in the dirt for life when the brains are out. Oh Yorick! what is a dead ass beside the pathos in the eyes of Issachar as he writhes there in torment between his burdens?

One of our Issachar's burdens is spiritual, the other unfortunately is of the earth earthy, of the very &ggr;&eegr;&sfgr; &ogr;&mgr;&phgr;&agr;&lgr;&ogr;&sfgr;. If it were not for this it would be no part of our business to interfere with him where he is still able to stand upon his feet and exact admiration--no part of our business to whisper among the bruised reeds that the appearance on his head is not a cloven tongue of inspiration but the sort of cloven tongue that adorned the head of Midas--or, worse, that popularly supposed to adorn the temples of a being here unmentionable.

Far, again, be it from us to object to the muckers being in love and pressing their suit in a decent way upon all persons of the other sex whom they may find "willin'" under natural conditions. We might possibly admit that, as a general rule, all 233 223 things are fair in love and war. But even in war there are atrocities not permissible. In war there are sacred a red cross and a white flag; and it is infamous that in love the shadow of the cross of Golgotha should be abused as if it were that of the garden-post of the Lampsakene, and the white robe of the saint made to do duty for the veil of the Prophet of Khorassan. Not even the longest spoon makes it quite safe to sup with the mucker under such circumstances. Madame de Warens and Die Vernon are both represented as singularly clear headed and independent; yet history and the fiction so often truer than history support each other in showing the dangerous power that may be exercised over even such women when not educated--the power that may be so exercised by the most repulsive men--by a successful De Tavel, by an unsuccessful Osbaldiston--if they only appear as moral instructors, and succeed in isolating their pupils and shutting out the light of the profane world. Je ne suis point Tircis;Mais la nuit, dans l'ombre,Je vaux encore mon prix;Et quand il fait sombreLes plus beaux chats sont gris.

On the whole, however, it is not among the 234 224 young that the muckers are the cause of much damage and unhappiness in society. There are ladies of a certain age, without mental resources of any consequence, who have no taste for attending to family cares, who can no longer flirt under secular conditions, who have ceased to resemble the lily in anything save in neither toiling nor spinning. It is these who generally devote themselves to pets of the cat, parrot, poodle, or mucker species, and to such other little manias as, according to Balzac, "offend nobody but God." There seems to lie for these people a marvellous rejuvenating power in the unnatural stimulants of muckerism. Looking on, one is whimsically reminded of the Court of Queen Quintessence, and how wrinkled dames were there made to bloom into a kind of aftermath of beauty, not being distinguishable from maids of sixteen except by their requiring boots a little higher heeled than usual.

If this mania comes also upon the younger fair one, some man or other, her natural guardian, is almost always to blame. Man likes the society of woman; woman likes to deal with man. She prefers to buy even her earthly goods from a shop-man rather than a shop-girl. And the garments of her 235 225 soul she will assuredly also choose by male help. It is for the natural parent, relative, and priest of her family to supply that help. If they do not take the trouble to do so, she will, as a matter of course, wander off to one knows not what spiritual Cheap John, Brummagem-celestial auctioneer. It has been noticed by Jean-Paul Richter that even in play--in parlour-jugglery with cards--a woman, if asked to select a face-card, never selects a queen; "she always chooses the king or the knave." Husband, father, clergyman, see that none of those you love be forced to choose the knave!

But if impudence influenced choice, the knave would never be left unchosen. Somebody asked somebody: "Have you the assurance of faith?" "Sir," was the reply, "I have faith enough for myself, and you have assurance enough for the--for us both." Assurance is the corner-stone of muckerism. It used to be written that to His saints God would give a hidden manna and a white stone, "which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it." But the new evangelists of the Tartuffe-Love lace gospel have altered all that; they know all about the hidden manna. They handle, sell, and warrant it with pert assurance. They belong to an 236 226 Academy of Inscriptions; they dispose of the white stone at a glance. At the close of an "inquiry meeting" they will read off, without hesitating once, all the blacks and whites in the audience, and decide by a show of hands the results and decrees of the councils of eternity. They wish to assist at these by keeping a kind of celestial ballot-box, and voting early and often. One mucker in Egypt and Isis would have needed an iron mask and a suit of plate armour.

It is this radical incapacity for diffidence that leads these people to rush into temptation as if they were above the common frailties of our poor humanity. Now, as a matter of fact, there is no good way of overcoming temptation for any healthy creature but that of keeping out of the way of temptation. "Why hast Thou made me so feeble?" wailed Rousseau; but he was answered in his conscience: "I have made thee too feeble to get out of the pit, because I have made thee strong enough not to fall in." The muckers throw themselves in; they habitually ignore the external restraints and decorum of worldly society. Their way of "gushing" over, and all but embracing each other, even in their sedatest public meetings, reminds one of those 237 227 monks and nuns of the Middle Ages who lived together, not only without sin, as they declared, but without knowing what it was the temptation to sin.

Many good men bear with these things, and with worse, not that they do not know of them, but that they dare not comprehend them. And when one of the muckers is accused of any impropriety, his "brethren" can remove by faith an Alps of evidence, or can eat their way through it with the vinegar of their tears. Their devotion to their criminals is grand, but it is not religion. They skulk behind the bosses of a sacred shield; they abuse the privilege of sanctuary, as the most unworthy have in all ages abused it.

It is this which makes it so difficult and delicate a matter to attack these persons, and yet which makes it absolutely necessary that they should be attacked, at least, if we are still to respect the religion which they profane.

The abundance of the muckers in any place, and the favour in which they are held, will be found on examination a pretty exact inverse test of the morals, manners, and intellect of the locality. We repeat, they are not amenable to the control of 238 228 any respectable church; they are a religious Ishmael, whose every action is a tacit or open insult to the regular clergy; they are a Bohemia, an Adullam, an Alsatia, a The´leàme with the morals of Chaneph. "Wickedest men," thieves, prize-fighters, and scoundrels of every dye are those whom they are accustomed to consecrate and set upon platforms to preach; fellows whose opinion would not be taken on the fate of a dog are encouraged to denounce in brutal slang all those who believe otherwise than they do. If these people make up a church in any sense of the term, then it is of all others that particular church concerning which the proverbial relation of distance and grace is most accurately true. It was from the study of some such church that La Beaumelle drew his, in the main, unjust maxim: "Would you believe in religion?--keep away from its literature. Would you respect religion?--keep away from its preachers." Or, as Friar John feelingly testified concerning the bad clerical birds of Sonnante: "Seeing these diabolical fowls here, we cannot help blaspheming; while away emptying our bottles and pots we do nothing but praise God."

This reminds us that the inexhaustible Rabelais 239 229 has devoted the opening chapters of the fifth book of his delectable work to certain species of the genus mucker under the figure of the evil fowls above referred to by Friar John. These Stymphalian creatures are, as a rule, "birds of passage" our historian tells us; though, like locusts, grasshoppers, and other visitations of providential displeasure, their origin cannot be in all cases accurately assigned either in time or place. In the main, however, they come "part from a marvellously great country called Lackloafland, and part from another country, towards the west, called Loaferloadedland. From these two sources every year flights of these birds take wing, leaving all, father and mother, friends and relatives." Ordinarily, our authority goes on to say, "these waifs and estrays are forced to leave the paternal nest because they are good for nothing--are, in body or mind, indigest, mismade--a useless weight upon the earth." Further, "the greatest numbers reach us from Lackloafland, an immense country. For, the Lackwits inhabiting that place, fearing the sore suasion of hunger, and neither fit nor willing to do anything, nor to labour in any art or trade, nor to become 240 230 faithful servants to respectable people; those also who have been without success in their love affairs, and in business, and who are desperate; those again who have been `wickedest men,' and who have cheated the gallows;--all these flock here. Here they have a career ready for them; here, from being lean as rakes, they become suddenly fat and greasy."

Do they ever return to their own place, to their original estate, to the hedges and ditches where they were laid and hatched? The answer is more than historical, it is prophetic. "In early times very few did so. But latterly, as a consequence of certain eclipses, and by virtue of the celestial constellations, quite a number have spread their wings and departed, to the great relief even of their fellows that remain, whose share of the good things of this life is thus increased. And those that flew away have left their plumage behind, sticking among nettles and thorns."

As birds, of course our muckers sing; but their muse, if muse she may be called, is a somewhat caterwauling goddess, who has tasted neither of the springs of Helicon nor yet of the Quasir mead of Norse poetry; except it be of such drops of 241 231 the latter as Odin, on a memorable occasion, let fall behind him, and which have been ever since the shameful inspiration of poetasters. Brady and Tate were bad enough, but, as compared with certain modern hymnographers, they might be called men of taste and genius. The former were ignoble only in manner; their forced adherence to a great original saved them from being nauseous in matter. Sometimes the hymns of muckerism take the note of the green-sickly cant of a sentimental serving-girl, and again they sound like nothing so much as the bellowing of some fanatical negro flushed with meat and brandy. These villainous verses are to poetry what "the penny awful" is to prose literature.

Despite all that has gone before, it is now to be affirmed that the muckers have in many instances been useful. Is God's hand shortened that it cannot bring good out of evil? Is the Almighty weaker than Samson that He cannot take Him foxes, and send them out two and two, tail to tail, with a fire-brand between two tails? And though we venture to think the position little honourable to the Lord's fire, yet, when we see occasionally the fields of the wicked take flame, we bow as 242 232 before an inscrutable Providence--and loose our watch-dogs.

In this chapter we have set our face like a flint against certain forms of adulterated religion. And what then? Are we enemies of any honest grocer because we denounce a pepper villainous with "devil's dust?" enemies of the apothecary because we denounce a balm, not of Gilead, and whose savour is not improved by the presence of the fly cantharis ? Whom do we offend? We have incurred the reproach of neology by avoiding the use of any sectarian name that might wound the feelings of any respectable body of Christians. We have again and again avoided the use of the word "spade," and veiled in a hint or a quotation some strong truth which might offend the weak brother or sister. Whom, then, do we offend? Who speaks, names and judges himself.

Again, we have nowhere been guilty of the impertinence of writing for the instruction or reproof of women of the first rate, women of common sense, and at least fair education. The writer would need to be a mucker to be silly enough or insolent enough for such an undertaking; it would be to render oneself worthy of taking up a position between that 243 233 pair of too ambitious sentinels who pretended to guard the moon from wolves.

No: but everyone is not fair and wise and pure as you, my sweet lady; there are great, crawling, caterpillar masses of people swarming on this world tree that we inhabit, doomed never to receive wings, doomed to go for ever on their bellies, and at the best never to see farther than the point of the nose, and for the most part seeing nothing, but only feeling. It is upon these in times past that quacks have waxed fat--it is upon these in all time to come that quacks will feed. For, excess of poverty and excess of riches will always exist; and either tends to numb the intellect. And where the intellect sleeps or is not, there the quack is. We cannot abolish him, so careful for some good but mysterious end of her own is Nature of the type; but we can abolish here and there the single life. If this book becomes the bane of any one quack in his capacity of quack, or if it succeeds in even limiting here and there the field of his pasture in America, or if it hinders our English people from opening new fields to him here in politics or in religion, the design of the writer will be fulfilled.

The political quack lives by appeals to all that 244 234 is impatient, ignoble, and anarchical in mankind; the mucker by appeals to all that is self-important, ignorant, fearful, and superstitious, and somewhat, as we have more than hinted, by appeals to what is sensual, orgical, Bacchantic, Panic. If the world had been created neuter, a mucker would have invented sex.

We have done. Unskilled in dealing with theories, unequal to the lofty reaches of the abstract, we have dealt with the concrete, with practice, with results. We have not speculated much about trees; we have handled and tasted certain fruits. To our taste, institutions which systematically and in detail make ignorance insolent, fill meanness with assurance and conceit, and make vulgarity proud of itself, are not good even for those whose faults they truckle to and whose littleness they flatter. We have seen in politics baseness and mediocrity banded together. In science, in literature, the superficialist, the sycophant, and the Yahoo drown the voice of the wise; and a people loving equality are of course forced to have it so. There was but one word wanting--a word to sum up and crown all. It has been at last said. This chapter has called attention to it. The circus-tent 245 235 and the stump proclaim their equality with the pulpit; the graduate of the highways and hedges dictates to the licentiate of the church and to the man of the schools. There was no king, there was no prophet; now there is no priest. Equality, equality everywhere; the troll the equal of the man!

Let us look again at that story in the Norse folklore of "The Giant who had no Heart in his Body." A youth called Boots wished to release certain brethren of his whom this big troll kept in stony thraldom, and to win from his power a princess, whom the brute led a sad life of it. But Boots found it was no use trying to do anything in the giant's own house. Not only had the monster a terrible nose for "the smell of Christian blood," but a most callous hide. And even if it were pierced, what good? He had no heart in his body. Still, even a troll has generally some sensitive point of some kind somewhere. In a moment of weakness this one betrayed himself to the princess: "`Far away in a lake lies an island; on that island stands a church; in that church is a well; in that well swims a duck; in that duck there is an egg; and in that egg there lies my heart--you darling!

246 236

"In the morning early, while it was still gray dawn, the giant strode off to the wood.

"`Yes, now I must set off too,' said Boots, `if I only knew how to find the way.' He took a long, long farewell of the princess."

To-day he stands on an island--possibly the right one. He holds something in his hand--possibly the right egg, the more that it is very thick in the shell. Thick and hard, it hurts his fingers; he cannot hurt it . And yet, and yet--oh, once more, for the sake of your sweet Princess California!--for the sake of your brothers!--squeeze the tyrannous beast, though it be ever so little you can do; one drop of evil life and power wrung from his heart will--

"Well?"

"The printer's devil, sir!"

Brothers, princess, suppose we try Gutenberg's Press?

CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS.